The Caves of Périgord (10 page)

“That’s a splendid idea,” said Lydia, trying not to think about the lack of Napoleonic enthusiasts in Britain, or the reluctance of wealthy collectors to visit those remoter parts of Iraq and Central Asia that produced the bulk of her treasures. Quickly, she signed the bill she had charged to her credit card. “That advice is certainly worth a good dinner, even if my company were not paying. Which they are,” she lied. But she let Clothilde pay for the taxi.

“You are being very reasonable about this theft,” Lydia said when they were back at her apartment, sipping the malt scotch that had sat untouched in the cupboard since the end of the affair with David. “In your place, I would have been outraged.”

“Oh, I can be outraged if there is a point to it. But there isn’t,” said Clothilde. “I am fatalist about thefts, ever since I was burgled as a student. They are a fact of life. And if the police find the rock, then all will be well. But I doubt that they will, so we are left with an even deeper mystery. But then we had a mystery to begin with. Where did it come from, where is the cave of its origin, and why this bull, which is almost certainly by the hands of Lascaux, should be the only miniature we know of? That is three big mysteries that already confront us, and now we have a fourth. Who took it and why?”

“That makes five. Add a sixth—where is it now?”

“I assume an art thief who knew what he was doing somehow heard about the find and broke in. If so, he will try to sell it, and we may hear of it that way. Or when he realizes there is no market for these things, he will find a way to accept the reward we have offered. And then we are back where we started, examining the rock for any clues to its provenance. But I shall start on that next week. We have a national laboratory that does computer enhancement, and I already sent them your digital photos. I am almost certain already that this is no modern copy, but that should make sure. And since you photographed the backs and the sides of the rock, we have a chance to narrow down the geology.”

“I wish I shared your confidence. I keep thinking the thief could
simply destroy it. Or we might never hear of it again. Remember that this rock has sat in an Englishman’s home for fifty years, and nobody had the slightest idea that it existed. So presuming it does come from an unknown cave, its secret has been well kept.”

“That is the part of the mystery that intrigues me. It even excites me,” said Clothilde. “This Englishman worked with the Resistance in Périgord. So there are records. We can track down the people he worked with, ask the old men who still survive from those days. There are some friends of my father where I can make a start.”

“Was your father in the Resistance there?”

“Yes. He was shot by the Germans, but some of his old comrades are still alive.”

“I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

Clothilde shrugged and reached into her bag for another cigarette. “I never knew him. He was shot during the Liberation, a few months before I was born. And then my mother married again, after the war, so I had another father, a good man. A teacher, still alive. He and my mother still live in the district, and he writes about local history. He wrote a book that was quite controversial, about the Resistance. These things still matter, in France, to the old men and some of the politicians.”

“It must have made things complicated, when you and Horst were together. His being a German.”

“Not for me. I was born after the Liberation. So was he. These were things other people had done, not us. My adoptive father felt the same way. He liked Horst. But for my mother, it was difficult. And Horst is not very German, if you understand me. He is more like an American, in some ways. He studied in America, you know. He drove a French car, spoke French well—almost as well as he speaks English.”

“I rang him today with the bad news, told him not to bother to come to London because there was nothing to see. He was much more furious than you,” Lydia said. “He said he’d probably come over anyway, to
talk to the owner, see if he could find out any more about where the rock came from.”

“That’s Horst,” Clothilde smiled, rather fondly. “Once he gets his teeth into something, he doesn’t give up easily. Maybe that’s the German in him. Or the scholar. And he’s right, what’s more. The Englishman who first had the rock is the key to this. We assume that he brought it back from the war as a trophy, from the Périgord. So either he found it, or somebody gave it or sold it to him. Your Englishman was no scholar, and his son thinks he was no expert on the caves and the paintings and never showed any more interest in the matter. So it seems logical that he did not find it himself. Somebody local must have helped him or shown him, and then had some very strong reason to keep quiet. And who did he know locally?”

“The Resistance,” said Lydia.

“Exactly. So that is where I shall start. But perhaps you could help, Lydia. There must be records here about his military career, where he served, where he was. Could you find that for me, and the names of any networks that he worked with, any reports that he wrote?”

“Yes, I’d like to do that. There must be records in France, too.”

“There are the
Compagnons de la Résistance
. They are like a club of the old comrades, and they must have archives and memoirs. I can ask them, as the daughter of a Resistance man. Maybe the Communists will have something. My father was with them from before the war. I think he might even have been a party member. A lot of them were, in the Resistance. I will ask my mother, although my stepfather might know more. He will certainly know all about the local records and archives. Then there is a place in Bordeaux, the
Centre Jean Moulin
, which is named after one of the Resistance heroes, the one who was caught and tortured by Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo. You remember the Barbie trial?”

“Vaguely,” said Lydia. “I never had much reason to be interested before. But I think I might be seeing the son again. He asked me to
lunch, and I owe him an explanation about the theft. I can ask him what he knows about his father in the war.” Lydia refilled their glasses, and grinned at Clothilde. “He’s not bad-looking, if you like the military type. Officer and gentleman. No longer young.”

“The military does that to them, after a certain rank. They age years with each promotion. Catch them young, and they can be very exciting. But then they get accustomed to commanding things and become tiresome, unless you want to make the effort. And having taken one look at military wives, I never wanted to join them. Garrison towns and being polite to the general’s wife. Not for me,” she grimaced. “Do you like soldiers?”

“I never came across one before.”

“There is no sign of a man in your apartment,” Clothilde said directly.

“No razors in the bathroom, you mean?” Lydia laughed as she felt herself blushing. “The last time there was a man in my life, he was far too discreet to leave anything like that. He always carried a portable electric razor and a clean shirt.”

“I would not trust that type,” Clothilde sniffed. “Always ready for adventure. And that, in my view, is a woman’s prerogative.”

At the Savoy Grill, which Major Manners said was the only place he really knew for lunch in London apart from his club, Lydia solemnly handed him a company check for ten thousand pounds with her apologies for the loss of his possession.

“That is the value I placed on it. That is what our insurance therefore pays out, or will if they know what’s good for them, even though the rock was not placed in our storeroom,” she said, and sipped her champagne.

“I therefore owe you two thousand pounds,” he said, smiling.
“Under the terms of our agreement.” He was wearing a town suit today, a good one in dark blue, a striped shirt, a tie that looked regimental. His handkerchief was still in his cuff. She could detect no aftershave, which pleased her. There was an awful lot of male cologne in the art world, and she did not care for it.

“No,” she said firmly. “That was contingent on my doing some work that resulted in the sale of your rock, or at least its amicable disposal in a way that left you with no further obligations to France or anyone else. That is hardly the case now,” she said, thinking of the band of journalists and TV cameras thronging the street outside the salesrooms. “But there is one thing that troubles me. You barely mentioned your father’s service in wartime France when we spoke. Now I find that the President of France makes a private visit to his funeral. You must have known France was very important to him.”

“Naturally I did, but not from my father,” Manners said easily. The question did not seem to embarrass him in the least. “His reminiscences were all about the Middle East and North Africa, a bit of India. He hardly spoke of France at all. Nor did we visit it much when I was growing up. It was always Austria or Switzerland for the skiing, and summers in Scotland. He took me fishing, taught me to shoot. That kind of thing. Never much of a one for beaches or casinos. The south of France was never his style.”

“Did he never go back to Périgord?”

“Not that I know. But I can’t say I followed his movements closely,” he said. She did not know him well enough even to guess whether this straightforward, rather bluff manner of the plain-speaking officer and gentleman was real, or just a surface skin he wore, like a uniform. She had never known any soldiers. Perhaps they were all this way; what you saw was what you got. But Manners had a quick mind, possibly even a subtle one. She suspected there was more to him than he wanted to display—at least, she cautioned herself, display to
her
.

“What about Paris?” she asked him. “Catching up with his friend
François Malrand, the rising political star. Did he keep up with his old comrade-in-arms, de Gaulle’s protégé?”

“Maybe he went when I was at school or when he was serving in NATO. I think he was stationed there in some staff job when the HQ was still at Fontainebleau. before de Gaulle kicked them out to Brussels in the 1960s.” He shrugged and fell silent as the waiter came with their smoked salmon. “He went off to the races at Longchamps from time to time, I seem to recall. He won a lot of money once.”

Remember his father, she told herself. There was obviously a lot more to old Colonel Manners than he had ever allowed to meet the eye. Working underground with the French Resistance, staying on the run from the Germans. That must have meant something to do with Intelligence, a skill at keeping secrets. Perhaps his son was the same way, hidden depths.

“Fathers can have a lot of privacy in our kind of family,” he went on. “I was away at school, and he’d retired before I went to Sandhurst. Maybe they sometimes met in London. I wouldn’t know. But that friendship didn’t seem to play a big part in his life. He said nothing when Malrand won the election. I found no letters among his things, and I was as surprised as anyone else when the French ambassador rang to say that the President planned to come to the funeral. I’m slightly surprised you knew. It was kept very quiet.”

“Until the newspapers got hold of it, you mean.”

“Yes, until then.” He ate neatly, she noticed, without paying much attention to the food. Lydia was getting rather tired of foodies; men who made exaggerated talk of sauces and dishes and treated fashionable restaurants as if they were something to do with art.

“Did Malrand come to your house after the funeral?” she asked, making the question casual. She felt uncomfortable, turning the conversation into an interrogation.

“Of course, took a drink, said some gracious things. Stayed about ten minutes. He’d said a few words at the grave, about my father being a great friend of France. That sort of thing. Spoke very good English.”

“Did he look around the house, go to your father’s study? I’m wondering whether he may have seen the rock—I presume it was on display in your father’s room.”

“No, I don’t recall him being anywhere but the hall and the main drawing room. He strolled around the garden with me a bit, saying he remembered it from the war. Apparently he’d been to stay with my father. He spoke about my grandmother and her garden, made me walk him up the drive to the lodge, where she lived when the Americans took over the house.” He put down his knife and fork, finished his champagne.

“But I see what you mean. If my father had picked it up in France, that was the time they were working together in Périgord. He may have known something about it. But if my father was up to no good and pinching bits of France’s glorious heritage, then the President of France would hardly have gone out of his way to honor the memory of someone he suspected as a thief. As for the old man’s study, it was a bit of a mess. Books and maps everywhere. He always had some thought of writing his memoirs. Never did, or at least nothing I ever saw or found beyond some notes. There were maps of the Western Desert all over the place, spread on tables and window ledges. The rock was behind one of them, on a bookcase. But it wasn’t in plain sight, even if Malrand had looked in. He did ask me, though, if my father had ever finished his memoirs. They knew one another well enough for that. The only other sign of his time in France was his copies of Malrand’s books; each signed by the author. I started one of his novels, but couldn’t finish it. Not my kind of thing. But I liked his book about the war in Spain back in the 1930s.