Stonekiller (3 page)

The wines included a fine red Château Bonnecoste and the
vin paille de Beaulieu
, in addition to the champagne. There were glasses, plates, cups and cutlery for two with linen napkins. ‘Fantastic china, Hermann. Old like the pearls. Sévres and quite expensive.'

She had thought of everything, even to uncorking the red to let it breathe and sinking the white in the stream to cool, but had she intended to poison the person she had gone to meet?

‘Or did she intend to kill herself as well, Louis, and take down the two of them?'

‘Or merely use the specimens to show someone else what not to collect?' That, too, was often done.

‘Then why collect so many?'

‘Ah yes, that is a problem most certainly.' The poisonous mushrooms were one thing, however, the work gloves that separated them from the others in her basket, quite another.

Gingerly St-Cyr teased the gloves out and prised them open, showering a little rain of fine yellowish sand and tiny shards of black to dark brown flint. ‘These gloves haven't been used in years,' he said.

‘Then where did she find them?'

‘Or why did she bring them?'

‘That cave?' asked Kohler hesitantly.

‘Perhaps, but then …'

‘There's a black powder, a pigment of some sort.'

‘Manganese dioxide — the mineral, pyrolusite. It's quite common in the Dordogne. The ancients used it to.…'

‘To paint their caves,' breathed Kohler.

Both of them knew they would have to make the climb. The cave was nearly seventy metres above the stream. Sweat blurred the vision and stung the eyes. Twice they had to pause for breath. The talus of angular, slab-like blocks of grey-white limestone was difficult to traverse and blinding in its glare. Impatiently St-Cyr yanked at a collar that was too tight. The button, its thread frayed, popped off and he saw it bounce from a rock, blinked and said, ‘Ah no. It has disappeared.'

Such little losses were devastating these days, thought Kohler. Replacements were so difficult to find. ‘Tough luck. I'll tell Boemelburg you lost it in a whorehouse.'

‘You would. Save it for Pharand.'

‘That little fart? He'd love it' Pharand was Louis's boss, a file-mined, officious, insidiously jealous, territorial twit who was dangerous. Very dangerous. Ah yes. ‘That champagne wasn't such a good idea, Louis. I think I'm feeling dizzy.'

Mopping his brow, the Sûreté's little Frog dropped his suit jacket onto a slab of rock and took time out to use his necktie as a bandanna. There, that is better. Now you also.'

They continued on and up beneath the soaring of the honey buzzard, two fly specks in a bleached and broken land to which scattered scrub, a
maquis
of sorts, gave absolutely no comfort. Had they the vision of the hawk, they would have seen a well-treed plateau on high with an oak and chestnut forest and a stream that flowed to the head of a once much larger valley before leaping off its limestone cap to fall in a spray that glistened in the sunlight. They would have seen the railway line, a little to the south of them as it followed the flats along the north bank of the Dordogne. They would have seen that line turn to the north-west towards Sarlat. There was a road and a viaduct, a railway overpass. They had come in from the west. The woman had come in from the east, gathering her mushrooms until, at last, she had reached the valley and gone up it to the waterfall.

‘Louis, I'm going to have a bathe when we get back down there.'

‘Me also, but first, a moment, please, Hermann, for the quiet contemplation of what is now before us.'

The cave entrance was perhaps four metres wide by two in height but it had, originally, been much larger. In medieval times the cave could quite possibly have been used by shepherds to pen their flocks at night. More recently the layered deposits at its entrance, a hard breccia of broken bones, flints, sand, and rocky debris that had fallen from the roof, had been excavated. These dull reddish to pale yellowish deposits — some with sandy layers and some more bouldery — had a depth of about three metres. Down through the ages rubbish had been piled up at the cave mouth. These deposits had been cut into platform benches about a metre and a half high and perhaps three metres in depth and two in width. A trench ran through them to the darker recesses of the cave.

Spoil from the excavations had been thrown to the right and now lay behind a low retaining wall of dry-stone flags that extended out from the cave mouth and a little along that side of the valley. Rusting sardine cans, some so riddled with holes they must have been left before that other war, lay with shattered bits of wine bottle, nails and other trash. ‘Two-legged badgers,' commented the Sûreté tartly. ‘Artefact plunderers. Why can't people show respect and leave places like this to be studied? A prehistorian dug this excavation, Hermann, but that was years ago. They have even pulled the nails he used to mark the layers!'

Across a cleared span of the original cave floor, there was a ladder leaning against the innermost bench. The floor was littered with broken black flints, yellowish to reddish sand, ashes both grey and black, rock from the roof above, and broken, charred animal bones. Bones everywhere.

In one instant, standing at the entrance, how much history could they see? ‘Perhaps a hundred thousand years, Hermann. Perhaps more. From deep within the Pleistocene Ice Age to the present, from the severe cold of a world gripped by continental glaciation whose ice-front lay to the north near London, Rotterdam, Köln and elsewhere through countless cycles of cold and warm, the not-so-cold and not-so-warm, to what we have today. But always there was life here and a place to live. Sometimes permanently frozen ground and tundra vegetation, sometimes fir forests, grasslands or deciduous trees. Many of the flints show signs of having been worked. The bones … the bones are from animals some of which no longer roam these parts or, in some cases, even exist.'

Kohler stepped into the shade and at once the coolness of the cave beckoned. ‘A broken femur, Louis.'

Wolf, cave bear, Merck's rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, reindeer and wild boar came quickly to mind, a smattering from across the ages.

‘A deer, I think. It's a bit charred,' said Kohler.

‘The red deer, a preferred food, as was the horse of those days, though it looked more like the Mongolian horse of the present or a large and shaggy pony.' Reverently the Sûreté took it from him and ran a finger over its length. ‘Our victim,' he said, and Kohler could detect the sadness in his partner's voice. ‘These three, parallel incisions just above the knuckle.' He held the bone upright with the knuckle down. ‘These are the marks made by a stone chopper as the meat was removed.'

Oh-oh. ‘Was she butchered that way?'

Yes, I think so.'

‘The bone was smashed after a brief roasting, Louis, and … and the marrow sucked out.'

‘But when? Thirty thousand years ago, or one hundred thousand?'

It was only when they began to examine the walls of the innermost benches that they saw that some layers contained worked flints, ashes and bones, while others contained none of these but were of sand that had been blown or washed in or debris that had fallen from the roof of the cave. All of the layers had been cemented by lime that had been deposited from percolating groundwaters.

Beyond the benches, the floor of the cave remained littered with broken bones, flints, ashes, sand and bits of stone but this litter was shallow and lessened as the floor extended into deeper darkness. Lights would be needed to probe it further. Lights and ropes.

The roof was perhaps three or, in places, even four metres high, the walls curved outwards and perhaps ten metres apart. A cave of long but not always continuous habitation then, thought St-Cyr, one that would have formed the home base for several people at a time. Neanderthals first and then, more recently, Cro-Magnons.

They shared a cigarette as they stood in the cool darkness looking out towards the entrance. They began, as they so often did in such instances, a rapid exchange of thoughts. ‘Madame Fillioux leaves Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne by train, Hermann, perhaps four or five days ago. Let us give putrefaction its chance but concede that the heat of summer would have speeded things up.'

‘She gets off at a siding, dressed in everyday clothes and with stout walking shoes, her coat, picnic hamper and basket in hand. She must have been seen by several people yet no one has thought to mention this nor has anyone reported her missing.'

‘Madame Fillioux then walks along the tracks following the departing train but soon turns into the woods and begins to climb. She knows her way — she has done this before many times.'

‘She must have, mustn't she?' The cigarette was passed back.

‘Yes, yes, of course. She collects mushrooms, becomes completely absorbed in the task — ah, some edible morels are deep in the refuse of a rotting stump.'

‘Fly agaric and death cap go into the collecting bag. She feels a sense of what, Louis? Relief at finding them — she'd been so worried there wouldn't be any — guilt, fear, you tell me.'

St-Cyr inhaled deeply. ‘It's too early for such things. She reaches the valley, had stopped collecting at some point distant from it.'

‘She lays things out for the picnic, has a bathe and puts on the dress.'

‘And the pearls. Pearls that are really quite valuable but were ignored by her killer. Hey, it's your turn with the cigarette. Don't take all of it.'

‘I won't. You can trust me. She crosses the stream and follows it downstream a little, Louis, then goes into the woods, leaving the valley, climbing its gentler slope. She passes through the woods and up a little hill, then down into a shallow hollow and through the forest to another hill. There are trees and underbrush all the way until she comes at last to that glade.'

‘To find her assailant waiting for her, Hermann. She pauses. She does not retreat in fear.'

The cigarette was handed back. ‘Did he watch her having a bathe? Did he follow her but reach the glade from the other direction?'

‘Apparently she knows this person and suspects nothing.
Nothing!
She advances towards the assailant, is hit hard and goes down. She is hit again and again, and then … then is crudely butchered with … with one of these, I think, though I cannot yet say for certain nor can I yet fully come to grips with the horror of it.'

Plucking at his partner's sleeve, St-Cyr pulled him forward until they had reached the innermost bench. There he knelt and ran a forefinger over one of the layers of habitation. ‘A stone tool, Hermann. A handaxe, perhaps. Something with both sharp and ragged edges, a point as well but also blunt.'

Kohler swallowed dryly. Champagne always did that to him. Louis found his pocket-knife and, opening it, began to pick at the layer but all he got were little bits of flint, ash and sand.

The cigarette clung to his lower lip until it had burned down to all but nothing and had finally gone out. A half hour of struggling ensued before he had what he wanted. ‘Ah
nom de Dieu, de Dieu
, Hermann, it's magnificent.'

Almond shaped and showing clearly the shallow, conchoidal hollows where the flint had been spalled away when struck hard by a hammer stone, the handaxe was no more than seven centimetres in length, perhaps four or five in width and two or three in thickness.

With it there had lain a smaller flint, much more finely worked and with a convex cutting edge that was serrated. There was also a scraper that had once been used to clean the flesh from animal hides. ‘Pressure flaking,' mused the Sûreté, ‘with a bone or wooden stylus that had first been hardened by fire. This handaxe is far too small for what I want. It's of too recent an origin — perhaps only twenty thousand years. For our murder weapon, we must go back in time to those lower layers where the tools are simpler, the handaxes far chunkier, yet still very effective.'

From the cave entrance they looked down over the valley and off towards the site of the murder. Shadows now cooled the lower slopes. Night was coming but would take its time. At peace with the world and left largely to itself, the little valley exuded only the gentle hush of its waterfall and then the sound of birds awakening after the heat.

Kohler sensed his partner needed this moment. They were standing in the footsteps of ancestors who would have looked out on a quite different valley, yet it was the same. Pristine.

Louis heaved a sigh. Kohler held his breath. It was at times like this that the bond between them only grew stronger, more welcome, more.…

A scream shattered the silence. Long and hard and high pitched, it was ripped right out of the person who uttered it. Again and again it came, shrill as it raced across the trees to them.

For perhaps ten seconds there was a pause. Eyes riveted on the distant spot, their whole attention focused, they waited. Then again it came. Again! Anguish and despair and then … then … ‘
MAMAN! MAMAN! AH NO! NO!
'

They leapt off the edge and went down the talus flinging their arms out for balance, racing … racing … No time … no time … Got to find her. Got to stop her. Got to get her away from that thing. That thing.…

2

D
AWN CAME AT LAST, AND FROM THE RIVER FAR
below the ancient fortified town of Domme, mist in tendrils hugged the lowlands along the Dordogne.

St-Cyr heaved a sigh. The view, among the finest in France, was fantastic, yet try as he did, he could not keep from hearing that poor woman's screams and feel, as he had yesterday, the profoundness of the encompassing silence. Had screams like that echoed in that little valley one hundred thousand years ago?

The mist lay in a whitish-grey gossamer over the deep, dark shadowy blue of the river and the green of ordered fields and poplars. Not a swastika showed, not a Wehrmacht convoy or patrol, not even the open touring car of some SS bigwig or Gestapo ‘trade commissioner'. He was in the Free Zone, in Vichy-controlled territory, yet conditioned by the Occupied Zone in the North, one always had to look for such things, one always had to ask, How long can this last?