Dollmaker (35 page)

The shrapnel scars were from that other war. They'd been enemies then, in 1914. God did things like that to detectives, this one in particular. Ah yes, of course. Necessity and nearly two years of fighting crime together — arson, murder, extortion and kidnapping, et cetera, et cetera — had welded their partnership so that now, though they were still discovering things about each other, they each knew how the other thought and worked. Hermann was wanting to walk through the woods. He hated death. He was afraid of it always though he'd been a Munich détective long before this lousy war, long before Berlin and his ascendancy to Paris, and had seen lots of similar things. Well, not like this. No, not quite like this.

He was standing among the ferns, reading the woodcraft signs. The big, strong, stumpy fingers were delicately touching a broken leaf as if it was a tripwire or the timer of a bomb he had to defuse.

‘Louis.…'

‘Yes, I know. Follow her trail. See where she came from but don't go too far and
don't
get lost.'

‘Sarlat isn't too far. The Dordogne is close.'

‘Yes, yes, and the woods and valleys are thick and many.'

‘I'll shout.'

‘You do that.'

‘I'll find the railway line and follow it out to the road,
dummkopf.
She must have come along it. She can't have gone far in her bare feet.'

Somewhat chubby, somewhat diffident, the Sûreté's
détective
was broad-shouldered, not tall but not short either, a solid trunk of a man whose dark brown hair was thick and carelessly brushed to the right. Unlike so many of his contemporaries who tarted themselves up in ersatz cloth of human hair or cellulose or in black-market suits and shoes of good quality, Louis depended on things from before the Defeat, from before the Occupation.

The dark brown moustache was thick and wider than the Fuhrer's and had been grown long before that ranting little corporal had ever wet his pants over Czechoslovakia. The bushy eyebrows and large, brown ox-eyes sought Kohler out again.

‘Ah
mon Dieu
, Hermann, why hang around? You know I need to be alone with her. It's always best, isn't that so?'

‘Was she raped?'

‘How could I possibly tell?'

St-Cyr watched as his partner and friend slowly picked his way through the woods until, at last, he had disappeared from view.

‘He desperately needs a holiday,' he said apologetically to the corpse. ‘He's got a new girlfriend in Paris but she's playing hard to get and he hasn't yet introduced us or said much about her. If you ask me, I think he's planning to set up house even though he has a wife back home on her father's farm near Wasserburg, and when he is forced to see someone like yourself, this causes him much concern.'

Though he could not yet prove it, St-Cyr felt the woman had bathed and then had calmly put on the dress. The pale, light brown hair was loose and it must have fallen to her shoulders but was now matted forward over the back of her head and caked with dried blood through which, among the hairs, there were bits of grass and torn wild flowers. Some yellow, some pale blue among the amber strands of what he felt must surely have been her pride and joy.

The killer had even hacked at the back of her neck — had he tried to saw off her head with that thing? Ah
merde, merde
, what the weapon been?

‘Both sharp and ragged but pointed too and blunt also,' he said aloud.

He knew he had to turn her over but had best wait until a photographer could be summoned and then the district coroner. It could and would take ages and time … time was a luxury they did not have.

The Sturmbannführer Walter Boemelburg, Head of the Gestapo in France and Hermann's Chief, had telegraphed to say he wanted to see them immediately on their return to Paris.
Immediately.

A mere stop for boiler water at a small station and they'd been pulled off the train from Bergerac. Two ‘free' détectives on the run back to Paris with nothing else to do but try to read a train novel — a paperback — or chat up some pretty girl. God did things like that — yanked them out of the doldrums and threw them into the woods without even the benefit of a glass of Vichy water. Ah
merde
, this Occupation, this blitzkrieg pursuit of crime and its perpetrators. It was no life for Marianne and the boy. There was never enough to eat in Paris and she was always wanting to take Philippe home to her parents' farm in Brittany. ‘He'll have milk, Jean-Louis, and meat sometimes. He'll have bread and potatoes and be warm in winter. Paris is so lonely.' She had said it with such feeling and so often. ‘I am a stranger. The house, it is too empty.'

This woman would have understood Marianne. Though he felt odd at the thought, instinct told him it was true but had Paris ever figured in the victim's life? That, too, was a thought, and suddenly, though he still wanted to be alone with her, he wanted to be with Hermann.

‘Find the place where she bathed,
mon vieux
,' he whispered. ‘Find her other things but do not touch them until I've had a look.'

The valley was secluded and well wooded, and when he had gone up it a few hundred metres, Kohler heard the waterfall in the distance and then he found the cave. It was high up beneath a thick limestone ledge and from its darkened mouth, the sun-drenched slope below glared with the tumbled grey-white rubble of the ages until this progressed into brush and then into trees. He let his eyes linger on the cave. He couldn't understand why its presence frightened him. Christ, it was just a cave. The Dordogne was riddled with them.

On 12 September 1940, cave paintings far better than any others had been discovered at Lascaux by four boys searching for a lost dog a mère twenty kilometres to the north, which just showed a person what boys could find when hunting for something else. But those paintings were only twenty thousand or so years old, which was long enough to make one wonder why the clergy had taken such an interest in them. Rumour had it that some local abbot was now calling that cave the Sistine Chapel of the Périgord!

Had the abbot found any crosses, any fish symbols among the paintings? A staunch non-believer, not a conscientious doubter like Louis, Kohler had little time or patience for religion, let alone that of the Nazi ideologists who fabricated to suit themselves. But being alone in the shade, and standing on two flat stones in the bed of the nicest stream he had seen in ages, he was deeply troubled by the sight of this cave. He had the sudden thought that he could not possibly know what it might mean to the murder, yet it must mean something. She would have been only too aware of it.

The sound of the waterfall came to him. There was leafy shade along the banks of the stream, now dark and cool, now light and warm. The pungent scent of moss and decaying vegetation reminded him of a graveyard, which was stupid really, but he couldn't shake the thought. It was that kind of place.

The stream-course took a small bend. There were blocks of light grey to dark grey limestone among the trees, and everywhere there was moss growing green on grey and still, so still. Ferns and King Solomon's seal, May lilies after their flowering, bluebells too, probably.

High above the little valley a honey buzzard soared against the sun-hammered sky.

When he found her shoes, he found the blanket she had spread under the arms of a giant chestnut tree. There was a picnic hamper lying broken open, its contents scattered by badgers, the leftovers foraged by mice and squirrels. Her clothes were neatly folded to one side of where the hamper must have once rested. A rough beige skirt, serviceable white blouse, pale yellow cardigan, kerchief, raincoat, knee-length stockings with elastic bands, slip and underwear and sturdy shoes … the handbag in which she had brought the dress she had then put on. The truffle hunter had touched nothing.

A sliver of pre-war soap lay on a modest towel. Beside these, there was a pair of glasses in their leather case, a sandpaper board for the nails, a pair of clippers, and a blue velvet-lined box for a strand of pearls.

From the picnic site beside the stream it was but a short walk through the woods to the waterfall, and along the way, in the dark humus and in clean sand, he found faint traces of her footprints. Bare feet, no other prints but hers. She had stripped off at the blanket and had come this way and then had gone back.

There was a small ledge of limestone, a pavement broken by rectilinear cracks. This ledge led to the base of the waterfall, to large rectangular blocks of limestone that, through time, had collapsed from above. Though the water fell among them, some thoughtful soul, 20,000 years ago perhaps, had cleared a place for bathing.

When he found, in the undergrowth near the blanket, a basket of mushrooms and the worn but razor-sharp paring knife she had used to gather them, he saw she had covered them with a thick layer of once dampened moss. There were puffballs and edible morels — any farmboy, such as he had been, could have identified them. Sweet-chestnut boletus too and parasols, others too. Others.

He removed the moss completely, noting that she had placed a pair of thin cloth work gloves between the mushrooms in a small canvas collecting bag. The gloves were worn through at the thumbs and fingers and stained not by humus as he had thought, but by ochrous fine sand, grey ash and some sort of very black powder.

There were also tiny bits of black flint no longer than a few millimetres at most.

When he opened the collecting bag, he saw very quickly that she had been up to mischief. Death cap and fly agaric lay side by side and there were several specimens of each.

If she had intended to kill someone, she had been prepared to make a damned good job of it. An omelette, monsieur? A little more of the
pâté
or the
champignons à la crème?

The French were always killing themselves with such mistakes — there were always warnings posted in prominent places — but this was intent. Why else would she have gathered them, seeing as she damned well knew her mushrooms?

The identity card in her purse gave the name of Madame Ernestine Fillioux, born 15 March 1896 in the village of Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, upriver a piece.

Her height was 167 centimetres (5′7″).
Hair: light brown; eyes: brown; nose: normal; face: oval; complexion: pale; special signs: small brown mole on the right cheekbone; freckles over the bridge of the nose; a three-centimetre scar on the left forehead.

There were the usual two fingerprints, the thumbs, below the 13-franc stamp, and over these and the signatures of herself and a witness, the stamp of the Commissariat de Police in Périgueux. The thing had only recently been renewed and was dated 17 August 1941.

Her occupation was listed as shopkeeper and postmistress, her marital status as war widow.

Kohler searched the photograph for answers but all he found was a forty-six-year-old woman with a proud chin, rather strongly boned, sharply featured face, good firm lips, steadfast eyes, a high forehead and hair that was pulled back into a chignon which did little but add severity to what might otherwise have been attractiveness.

‘What happened?' he asked. ‘Why the special dress, and why the mushrooms? Why the walk through the woods to that glade when this little valley is so much nicer?'

No matter how hard he tried, he could still see her lying face down in the grass with her arms and legs flung apart and the flies crawling all over her.

Had the blue of them not matched that of her dress?

The seersucker was finely crinkled, the cotton both cool in the heat and so easily crushed it was like a caress. It had the feel of money and class. ‘Paris …' murmured St-Cyr. ‘The rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the avenue de l'Opéra.'

Naked beneath it, she would have felt so very good. Proud of herself, yes — what woman wouldn't have been? He was certain she was from the Dordogne, had felt this all along but could not yet put a finger on the reason. Perhaps Hermann had found something by now.

Gingerly he used a pair of tweezers to pry the collar free of caked blood and read the label with a sigh, ‘Barclay, 18 to 20 avenue de l'Opéra, Paris.'

Barclay's had had shops in Vichy, Nice, Cannes and Deauville, too, before the war but now operated under a name he had deliberately forgotten in protest.

1937 or '38, he thought. By ‘39 tensions would have been too high for such extravagance and it was extravagance, this dress. ‘A hat from Yvette Delort, madame, to please your lover? Was he the one who did this?'

He was certain she had either gone to Paris to buy the dress before the war or had ordered it especially and had waited the days or weeks until it had arrived.

A woman, then, who had known exactly what she had wanted.

She had not been surprised by her assailant and this made her killing and defilement all the more puzzling. She had apparently come to the glade unaware of any danger and had paused at its edge, among the ferns where Hermann had picked up her trail. She had said, ‘——, is it really you?' or perhaps, ‘I am so sorry. Am I a little late? My watch … I must have left it where I bathed.'

She had then gone forward to stand facing her assailant who had come to the glade as they had, from the opposite direction — he was certain of this. She could not have known of his or her intentions since she
had not run
, had not even backed away.

She had stood facing that person, in awe, in tears, perhaps — how could one possibly know now if there had been tears or only soft words of hesitation and relief? She had been struck hard between the eyes. A stone? he wondered. It had split the skin badly. Now stained as if by some horrible accident of birth, the wound's livid dark plum-violet to greenish-yellow putridness marred her brow forever.

She had fallen back, had tried to get up — one hand had perhaps been placed behind her, the other stretched out towards her assailant, he could see it happening so clearly. She had then been struck at least twice more on the head. After this, while still on her back, she had been stabbed repeatedly and slashed with that thing, then flipped over.