The Cyclist (11 page)

Chapter 8

1

He parked his battered car outside the hospital. A tall stone building, it loomed above the wide street, peering down at him. A man on crutches hobbled to the steps through the wide archway of the main entrance and hearing Auguste’s footsteps he looked up. He stumbled and fell; a heap of pain and flailing limbs. Auguste rushed to his assistance but the injured man pushed him away. It was then Auguste noticed the yellow star on the man’s right arm.

‘Please let me help you.’

‘You,’ the man said looking up with narrowed brown eyes, ‘you’ve helped me enough you bastard.’

Auguste stepped back and watched as the man struggled to his feet. He was maybe forty years of age, with black greying hair and a tattered grey jacket. His beret had fallen and Auguste picked it up.

‘Do I know you?’

‘No but maybe you should.’

‘I should?’

‘Your men took my wife and son away and left me here in Bergerac to rot.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I was knocked down by a German car. The driver got out and pulled me into the gutter. When he got back into his car, my wife hammered on the windscreen. She begged for help. I can hear her crying and begging for help even now. The driver got out and took her name. Next day, your men came and took her and my son away. I was in hospital; my son was fourteen. Give me my hat.’

‘I... I... I’m sorry.’

The man stared at him, the hatred in his glance made Auguste shudder.

‘Give me your name and I will try to find out where they are.’

‘For what? So you can send your men for me too?’

‘No,’ Auguste said his voice low almost muttering.

‘Vichy-French. All the same.’

The man spat on the step. The glob of spittle sat there between them, small enough to step over, yet to Auguste as wide and deep as a lake—a lake of utter bitterness. Auguste reflected it was not the quantity of it but the venom with which it was delivered.

‘I will find out where your wife is and she will be returned to you. My men acted under orders, it’s not their fault.’

‘Orders? Orders? A good excuse. If they ordered you to kill us all, would you do it? Would God forgive you? Do we not both believe in the same God? Yahweh? Jehovah? Whatever you want to call Him, is He not our common Lord?’

Auguste was silent. He felt as if the man had thrust a massive weight upon his shoulders and he could feel how they sagged. He wanted to be somewhere else. It was easy to sign an arrest warrant. He was not used to facing the human result of his actions and it came home to him how easy it was to be passive. It was a few simple strokes of the pen. The Germans had told him to arrest these people. They were French, his brothers and sisters, yet he acted against them. He knew now the passivity to which he had become inured made him as guilty of the crimes to come as if he had committed them himself. He was ashamed. The injured Jew had shown him the truth.

He turned away and walked inside, head down, the feeling threatening to overwhelm him. He knew he could do nothing for this man and worse, he should never have offered. It was fruitless. Soon the man would join his family not in a work camp, but in death.

A wide corridor stretched to left and right. The high arched ceiling rose above him and on the walls were paintings, hung in long rows on each side. Auguste turned left and he glanced at a picture. It was a print of a Swedish picture he recognised. Inappropriate as it was, he stopped to look. In the foreground and facing away, stood a naked boy, fists clenched, shivery and intense, poised to jump into a river. Water dripped from the boy’s wet, glistening hair and a sense of excitement leapt from the picture. For Auguste, it was almost as if he was there. Either side of the boy were others watching. He knew its name. It was entitled ‘A Great Place to Bathe’.

Had it not been for the Jew on the stairs he would have smiled. The picture brought back childhood memories of long, hot summers when Pierre and he bathed in the Dordogne, leaping headlong from the rickety wooden platform near Pierre’s parent’s home. He bit his lip and turned, trudging down the corridor towards the mortuary.

At the end of the corridor, opening a heavy wooden door, he descended the stone steps and crossed a small courtyard to the square brick building ahead.

He knocked but there was no answer so he pushed the door open and entered. It was cold inside and he shuddered again but this time with the cold. His boots clacked on a stone floor and pushing open another door, he entered the mortuary theatre.

It was a large airy room. Lecture seats lined the walls and in the centre stood the plinth topped by a porcelain slab. On it lay the butchered remains of the girl he had heard singing—her angelic voice silenced now, her very substance exposed by a cruel cut from chin to pubic bone. As ever, for Auguste, the intolerable aspect of the place was the smell. It had the stench of death and the odour always clung to the nostrils long after leaving. It was a smell of bowels and chemicals; it clung to his clothes, his hair and his soul. He felt like retching but swallowed hard and it passed.

Her abdomen and chest were empty, recalling the flesh and ribs exposed in abattoirs and butcher’s shops but this was human. Human and sacred. A girl. Bernadette. The singer. The student; opened, exposed and examined. Auguste hovered on the edge of running away. It was like some macabre horror story, yet it was his job and the dread of it simply strengthened his resolve to find who had killed her.

Doctor Dubois was there. He stood with his back to Auguste dressed in a long green apron. He turned when he heard the footsteps behind him and Auguste noticed the blood and semisolid material adhering to the doctor’s apron.

‘Ah Auguste, my friend,’ Dubos said. ‘You are just in time. I have more information for you. Are you unwell?’

‘Unwell?’

‘You look a little green.’

Auguste swallowed. He could taste the bitter and sour flavour of his long since swallowed pseudo-coffee.

Dubois chuckled. He said, ‘I suppose you do not come here very often. For me it is an everyday horror. One becomes used to it.’

‘You have more news?’

‘Yes, the girl was killed at around three or four in the morning. She had been raped and strangled. There was semen in the vagina. I may be able to get a blood group from it, but I’m short of chemicals this month. The larynx had been crushed. That in itself is not unusual but there were marks on her buttocks.’

‘Marks?’

‘Yes. Burns. I think whoever did this tortured her before killing her. The burns are a design.’

‘May I see?’

‘It would mean turning the body over and my mortuary assistant has gone home. I can draw it for you.’

Auguste felt dizziness overtaking him. Dubois reached out and held his arm, guiding him to a chair, which stood in the corner.

‘Perhaps we can talk in my office, away from...’ he waved his left arm like showing off the mortuary to a group of students, ‘You will get the report late tomorrow morning.’

Unsteady, Auguste allowed the doctor to support him to the pathologist’s office. The door shut, the smell became attenuated enough for Auguste to feel he was surfacing.

Dubois sat down at his desk and Auguste sat opposite. The doctor found a pen and began drawing. The desk was an old carved affair with a leather top and a telephone stood, black and ancient, on the left corner. He looked at the walls, adorned by charts and anatomical pictures. A bookcase stood gathering dust, propped against the left-hand wall. In a glass case stood specimens, preserved in some cloudy fluid and to Auguste’s relief, the opacity of the fluid obscured the outlines.

‘There,’ said the doctor. He handed his sketch to Auguste who felt as if he was taking some strange and mystical cipher scrawled on a secret parchment.

‘I think you will understand what it means.’

Auguste looked at the symbol. It was a circle with a cross inside.

‘No.’

‘It is a sun-cross.’

‘Well?’

‘You haven’t heard of it?’

‘No.’

‘It dates back to prehistory. Neolithic peoples used this as an emblem and it was used even in the Greek civilisation as a sign of the sun.’

‘So we are no further forward.’

Auguste made to stand.

‘We are, I’m afraid.’

‘How so? She was tortured by an ancient civilisation?’

‘No. It is the original basis of the swastika. It derives from this sign. It appears in far-eastern cultures but the Nazis have adopted it as theirs.’

‘I understand now. We are looking for a Nazi.’

‘Well, probably. It is not a swastika, but a sun-cross; perhaps intended to tease or confuse. It could be anyone wanting to throw blame on the Germans.’

‘They cut this into her flesh?’

‘Yes, it looks like burns. There are also ligature marks on her ankles and wrists and a rag was stuffed into her mouth.’

Auguste stood up. This time he was sure he could escape. He had learned enough for the moment.

‘Undertakers?

‘They are coming the day after tomorrow. I have to put her back together again first and it’s getting late. It won’t matter to her if I do it tomorrow.’

‘Oh yes, I wondered why you telephoned your brother before the post mortem examination.’

‘Telephone? No. I telephoned no one.’

‘Judge Dubois said you telephoned him and told him of the murder.’

‘No, why would I do that?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. If you find anything else, will you let me know?’

‘Tonight, I will find nothing else but a glass of good Bergerac and a glass or two of Calvados. At least the Germans don’t have a taste for it yet.’

They shook hands and Auguste could not recall whether the pathologist had washed his hands or not. It was no use sniffing his fingers since he was unable to rid his nostrils of the mortuary-death-formalin smell.

He would be late getting home and he was tired and hungry. He had to work on the attic wall and he had promised himself a glass of wine before then.

He pondered what he had learned from Dubois. The rape and the strangulation he had known. The sun-cross burn was something else. It could be a red herring but equally it could be a sadistic joke from the killer and he still thought Brunner was involved. He had not read Claude’s report to see whether the neighbours had seen anything.

Tomorrow would do. As Dubois had said, it made no difference to poor Bernadette and he had pressures to preserve the living rather than worry about the dead. He was seeing Arnaud, but he had no idea how he could avoid arresting the members of the Jewish community and he patted the list of names and addresses in his pocket. The Lord would reveal a plan to him. He was sure.

2

The farmhouse kitchen in which Auguste sat was his favourite room in the house. It recalled his memories of his mother Marie. At times, he could almost see her bustling, cooking, baking and squatting to the low oven of the black-lead range. She had never cursed; only remonstrated in gentle tones when she bumped into the garlic hanging from the rack above the kitchen table, the one the copper pans hung from, the ones she spent hours shining. Her ghost haunted the place still he reflected, but he knew these were fanciful thoughts and best kept to himself.

‘Sometimes, Odette, I think I married you for your cassoulet,’ Auguste said.

‘Well you’re lucky there was any left; those two girls could eat for France.’

He spooned more into his mouth and swallowing, he said, ‘Not much meat though.’

‘Ha. Try getting meat now. Everything has gone up in price. I paid a lot for this rabbit. One rabbit for four people.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘François Dufy. He was selling them near the Prefecture in the market square. He was drunk but he is such a nice man even so.’

‘He was in the cells most of this week. His game will be well hung by now.’

‘When will you be finished in the attic?’

‘I have a joist to move then I can start the brickwork. I will make the door too small for an adult; that way, even if they suspect, they cannot get in.’

‘Why would they search the home of the assistant chief of police?’

‘Well maybe not for Jews, but they have already put microphones in my office. Brunner and his men. They pretended it was a security check, looking for a bomb. Édith warned me.’

‘She can be trusted?’

‘I’ve known Édith since I started work at the Prefecture. What, twenty years? I trust her.’

‘I don’t understand what is happening in our world nowadays. You can’t trust anyone anymore.’

Auguste reached for her hand across the kitchen table, the tabletop scored and scratched from long years of use. He smiled.

‘I trust you and it is all that counts,’ she said.

‘Yes. We live in a confused world. A world where young women are murdered and their bodies discarded in the street, and foreign soldiers walk our streets as if they own the place, own us. And worse, we are fettered and bound watching cruelty and injustice everywhere. It is not what I joined the police force for, it is not what I’ve led my life for. And I am partly to blame.’

‘You are not to blame Auguste. It isn’t your fault.’

‘Doing nothing, signing arrest warrants for the Germans, sending my men out to intern innocent people makes me culpable. You know it.’

‘Then make amends. Fight. Do what you can to retrieve your soul Auguste. Is it not so? You cannot spend your life looking back. In any case you did not know.’

‘I could have worked it out. I just didn’t want to believe it.’

She sighed. He stood to leave, but she crossed from the other side of the table and placed her arms around his neck. He kissed her cheek, impatient, wanting to go.

‘I love you still and I know you will fight.’

He looked at her and shrugged. In silence, he left her there. He ascended the stairs and heard the chink of plates and cups as Odette cleared away the remains of their meal.

‘Not enough meat,’ he said to himself.

3

An oil lamp illuminated the attic as Auguste worked. He realised he needed to strengthen the side of the house where he was laying bricks. Removing stones around a joist-end over the main part of the house, he chipped away at the mortar. He rigged ropes to support the joist and using a crowbar, he dislodged the ancient oak baulk.