Madrigal (31 page)

‘And?' asked Kohler quietly. Louis sometimes got like this.

‘From across the centuries she cries out to us to see that her heart was broken, that the one who loved her had failed to come to her rescue.'

‘I thought the husband, the de Sinéty family and her own had been forced into ruin?'

‘But would she have been aware of this? A prisoner in the Palais? She hoped and prayed her husband would come, but secretly dreaded he wouldn't and wove that premonition into the brocade.'

‘Only to then find herself before the court.'

‘Just as our Mireille was before her judges, and in the same Palais, Hermann, the same Grand Tinel.'

‘Dédou hadn't shown up but she couldn't have known he'd been arrested. Instead, she must have felt he would weaken and stay away.'

‘And having copied exactly the clothing of this earlier Mireille, had woven that premonition into the brocade she herself would wear.'

‘An
accabussade
,' breathed Kohler sadly as he slid the gear lever into first. ‘Hey,
mon vieux
, I think I can find us one, or at least take us to where it was used and not so long ago.'

They stood alone, the two of them, on either side of the little car, near the flood-damaged northern end of the Îie de la Barthelasse. Hermann had pulled up his coat collar and yanked down the brim of his fedora. His breath billowed in the frozen air through which, and all around them it seemed, came the sound of the river.

‘A gristmill, Louis. Built to receive grain that had been brought downriver by barge during the height of the Babylonian Captivity.'

He sounded sickened by thoughts of what they might find. The mill was, of course, not nearly so old.

There were boulders of several sizes, uprooted trees, pavements of pebbles, washouts, heaps of sand. But among all this debris, the building stood serenely, its two storeys of soft grey-buff stone and steeply pitched, four-cornered roof with attic dormers catching the winter's light. At the innermost, eastern corner there was a round tower whose spiral staircase would access all floors. Well behind them was the farm, with peach, pear and apricot orchards and fields for artichokes, garlic and melons. There had been severe flood damage there as well, but still …‘Our singing master and his associates have an eye for value, Hermann. A real money-earner and a perfect hunting and fishing lodge.'

‘Don't get sentimental. I've heard it all before from you.' Louis was always going on about his retirement.
Merde
! What retirement?

Three rooks took flight and for a moment they watched them. ‘Is it a sign, I wonder?' mused St-Cyr. ‘Are their shadows passing over the mill to give warning to us?'

‘
Verdammt
, idiot, things are too quiet and you know it! Christ, we could be right back in the fourteenth century.'

The weathered shutters were all closed. There'd been no answer at the
mas
, no tenant farmer-cum-custodian in residence; a worry, to be sure.

‘Did they get here before us, Louis? Are they waiting?'

The Hooded Ones.

Beyond the broken forest of poplar, linden and willow, Simondi had laid out a spacious garden through whose grey and vine-tangled broken arbours they had to make their way.

‘A regular trysting place, if ever there was one,' snorted Hermann, having read and seen right through his partner's thoughts.

The tower rose straight up beside him from stone steps that led to the door.

‘It won't be locked,
dummkopf.
'

‘Then let the Sûreté go first, eh? Stay out here and have another cigarette. You still have one, don't you?'

‘You took the last of them. Hey, I'd better come with you, just in case.'

Dished and worn, the stone stairs went up and around to small square windows below the heavily timbered roof, but now there was no longer the sound of the river, now, deep from below them, came a constant sucking noise.

‘The sluicegates withstood the flood and were fortunately closed before it,' offered the Sûreté.

‘End of travelogue, eh?' Hermann had his pistol in hand.

‘I'm only trying to ease your mind.'

‘Then tell me what that other noise is,
mein brillanter französischer Oberdetektiv.
'

They hesitated. They listened hard. Against the sucking noise something was seesawing gently back and forth. A door, a shutter …‘Ah,
merde alors
, Louis!'

‘Don't throw up! Tell yourself you're not going to.
Not
this time.'

‘I'm going to. Sorry.'

‘Go outside! See what you can find but leave this to me!'

Louis was moving now. He wasn't hesitating. At the top of the stairs a door gave into the attic, and all too soon he had disappeared from view.

Kohler could hear him muttering, ‘
Aïoli
, the sauce, the mayonnaise of Provence. Marinated green beans with sliced sweet red peppers, pickled artichoke hearts à
la grecque
, a
chèvre de crottin
the mice have all but devoured, some black olives, a handful of truffles, good ones, too, and a bottle of grappa … The postcards.'

He became very quiet, and Kohler knew his partner must be looking out over the water through the attic portal and down past the hoist beam to where the grain sacks had once been lifted into the loft.

Busying himself, he went below, and when he found the millrace, he found the
accabussade
.

9

The doorway at the base of the mill had all but been choked by cobbles and sand. Beneath its stone arch someone before Hermann had crawled in and had broken through the flood-splintered door but had then carefully replaced the boards.

Immediately inside the cellar there was a drop of about a metre, a crawl space since the flood. Blackened tin lanterns hung from hooks in the worm-eaten timbers. Some of these lanterns were so perforated, they reminded one of vegetable graters, thought St-Cyr. Others were more baroque with many fleurs-de-lis openings.

Gutted of its water wheel years ago, the stone sluice had all but been silted up by the flood. There was barely room to manoeuvre, Hermann's terse, ‘It's over there,' revealing he was imagining the screams Adrienne de Langlade must have given, her cries for mercy and gasps for air. An accident … would Simondi and the others now try to claim this?

Jammed into the corner and all but buried by sand and silt, the rusty flat iron bars and rectangular, open weave of a man-sized oval cage barely protruded. Dried reeds, moss, algae, bits of twigs and leaves were everywhere, as was the stench of rotting fish.

Kohler took down one of the lanterns and, cleaning it of silt, lit the candle. Immediately a much-dappled light fell over the cage to join shafts of daylight that leaked in from around the foundation. Louis crawled into the corner and, after deliberately fingering the bars, quickly thrust an arm in through the weave to recover something.

‘Dried lavender,' he said. ‘A small bouquet left as a memorial to what our Mireille had discovered.'

‘She took one hell of a chance coming out here!'

‘Technically this is not an
accabussade
, Hermann. Those were made of wood.'

Verdammt
! Another lecture. ‘Then what the hell is it, Hen Professor?'

‘The cage in which those who had offended the Papal Court and had remained unrepentant were left until the sun, the wind, the rooks and starvation or thirst had finally finished them. During the Babylonian Captivity this cage would have been suspended from the end of a long pole or tripod that had been mounted atop the Bell Tower of the Palais.'

‘In full view of the citizenry,' muttered Kohler sadly. ‘Instead, as a consolation, they took it down and used it from the Pont Saint-Bénézet with that first Mireille.'

‘But as a threat and a reminder of what was to come should she fail to recant and publicly confess to the harlotry they had accused her of.'

‘And after the dunkings in the river?'

‘She was taken back to the Bell Tower. This thing must then have been mounted up there when the Pope, the cardinals and the Papal Guard had assembled for her final moment.'

‘Dressed in all her finery,' said Kohler, lost to it, ‘she chose to beat them, Louis, and leapt to her death.'

‘Now show me what else you've found,
mon vieux
, and then I'll take you through the suicide of yet another.'

The bedroom, one of several on the second floor, had been rustically furnished with a curtained
lis clos
, writing table, chairs and one of those gargantuan walnut
armoires
so typical of rural Provence. But what struck the eye, thought St-Cyr, as one looked through the glass of the room's carved and ancient door, was the study in oils that hung on the half-timbered wall.

Dressed only in the thin and transparent gossamer of a bath sheath, a girl of nineteen sat with her back turned towards two much older, tonsured men. Her hand was pressed to her chest in apprehension and she was facing the viewer and caught in the act of listening to what was being said about her.

Of the two men, the one who was tempted and tentatively reached out to touch her back was dressed in the scarlet robes of a cardinal; the other, in the simple coarse black cassock of a monk.

‘I'm certain this is Bishop Rivaille's room when on the hunt or out fishing, Louis. That painting's old, by about six hundred years.'

‘The hair is blonde—' began the Sûreté, only to hear Hermann saying, ‘There are ends of rope on the back of this door.'

So there were. Cut short, and braided, they were looped about a coat hook that was of greenish bronze and in the shape of an exquisitely formed mermaid, a
sirène
who rose up from the sea with outstretched arms, a salmon caught in her hands by the gills and tail.

‘Was Adrienne de Langlade first strung up here, Louis? Did Rivaille have her to himself before she was cut down and put into that cage?'

‘Was he in a rage? Was he drunk on absinthe too?'

‘Did he beat her first, eh? Scourge her …'

‘Or flagellate himself with a
martinet
, Hermann, as he stood before her and as has been recorded in Mireille de Sinéty's rebus?'

The girl had been a good four months pregnant. Accepted into the group, she had been living in the Villa Marenzio with the others, but wouldn't have been allowed to continually go on tour, not in her condition, and would have thrown Simondi's plans awry, especially since Genèvieve Ravier was to leave the group. Mireille de Sinéty had been helping the girl to hide things and had written of this in her private ledger. Adrienne had disappeared, had ‘gone to Paris'.

‘Did Rivaille then make mischief with her, Louis? Did he blame her for tempting him?'

‘The hair in that ruby ring …'

‘He must have really worshipped her, until shown what he came to believe she was really like.'

‘He'd have broken his vows. The dream would have been jeopardized …'

‘Did he rape her, damn it?'

‘We shall have to ask him,
mon vieux
, but for now had best get on to other matters. Come and I'll show you what has happened to the monk in that painting.'

The attic was all but barren under a heavily timbered roof but at its northern end, the portal was open.

High above the river the body, dressed simply in a coal-black cassock, swung gently, now turning a little to the left, now turning the other way. Petechiae – blood spots – formed livid blotches on the bald pate. The head was crooked to one side. Rigor had set in. The grizzled, shell-battered face was dark blue in places and puffed. Warts on the prominent nose bulged as did the dark eyes, one of which was still partially closed. Curled-up lips gave a perpetual grimace, the tongue protruding and having all but been bitten through.

A bloodied froth of snot and saliva had drained from the lower corner of the mouth and had frozen fast. He had shat himself and this, too, had been frozen but to his boots.

Brother Matthieu hadn't wasted his time. Having made up his mind to enter the next world, he had found the rope that must have been used to raise and lower the
accabussade
. He had tightened it about his neck and had walked out to the end of the beam, to its hoist pulley, and had simply stepped off.

Cross, rosary,
mégot
tin and wooden-handled Opinel pocket-knife had been laid out for Xavier on a clean white napkin, but the boy hadn't taken the legacy. Instead, Xavier had presented his mentor with the thick twist of Adrienne de Langlade's hair he had taken from her corpse and had no doubt used it as a final warning to blackmail him into killing himself.

This hair was scattered over the montage of well-thumbed postcards that lay near the napkin. There were semen stains on some of them. Old stains, and many of them had been hastily wiped away long ago.

‘One wishes for more time, Hermann,' said St-Cyr, ruefully shaking his head. ‘A good murder investigation should always be like a fine meal, savoured as each course arrives, the mind appreciatively striving to determine precisely what alchemy the chef has used.'

‘How can you talk of food at a time like this? I take it the meeting here was to settle Nino's fate and this other matter. That brother's been dead since yesterday before dusk,
mein Kamerad. A
good twenty hours.'

‘And the dog?'

There was no sign of it. ‘Hey, I'll take a look around while there's still light.'

‘You do that. There's a reedy bay about two hundred metres along the shore. The flood will have buried some things and uncovered others. Look for a place where the dog has been at work.'

‘You're getting to sound like me, you know that, don't you? What about Xavier?'

‘Will be long gone by now, but clearly has much to answer for.'

Kohler snorted and clenched a fist. ‘He'll have been promised his mentor's job. Hell, he'll even have some little unfortunate of his own to boss around and maybe do other things to as well.'