J. Janes - Stonekiller

Among the broken saplings in the centre of the glade, sunlight trapped the blowflies. Now they rose above the corpse which was still hidden from view, now they settled on it. And in the stillness of an early summer’s afternoon, their sound was constant.

Alarmed, St-Cyr held his breath. Nothing stirred but those damned flies. ‘Hermann, a moment,’ he breathed.

‘Be my guest,’ softly grunted the Bavarian in guttural French that was still improving. ‘She’s all yours.’

‘She?’

‘It’s just a thought. Rape and then silence, eh? That hangdog truffle hunter who reported this should have taken a closer look.’

‘Perhaps he did but was afraid to admit it.’

‘Perhaps that sow he uses to find his truffles stuck her snout into something she shouldn’t have.’

Ah merde , must Hermann? ‘In the Dordogne, as elsewhere, my friend, the fall is the time for truffles. Don’t tempt the pig before the fungus is ripe. That hunter might just have been checking the ground but not with his pig!’

The forest canopy had opened, ferns giving way to saxifrage and vetch whose soft blue and pale purple flowers were tangled among the tall grass, swaths of which had been beaten down. Burdock grew here too, and goldenrod, fly honeysuckle and elder. But everywhere the ferns had crowded closely, holding to the shade of limestone shelves beneath dark humus, holm oak, walnut and chestnut, one of which had fallen many years ago to open up the glade.

St-Cyr stopped suddenly and said, sadly, ‘Ah no.’

Kohler heard the flies as they rose in a dense blue cloud to shimmer in the sunlight and give pause to their egg-laying. The wounds, the lacerations and punctures were all puffed up, dark and oozing. Dried blood was glued to blades of grass and broken wild flowers. The pale and flaccid buttocks were blotched by putrefaction. The stench hit him and he turned suddenly away.

‘ I warned you! ’ hissed St-Cyr. ‘Piss off now. Vite, vite, dummkopf! Go and have a cigarette if you have any left!’

‘I haven’t,’ came the whispered confession. ‘I gave the last of them to that girl I met on the train.’

Ah yes, the one with the nice calves she kept trying to hide. ‘She knew you were Gestapo, idiot. She was terrified.’

‘I told her I was a salesman of polished gemstones and ashtrays from Idar-Oberstein. She was convinced.’

You were old enough to have been her grandfather! Just because there are so few young Frenchmen around doesn’t mean you can take advantage of their absence.’ Furiously a crumpled packet of Gauloises Bleues, the national curse if one could get them – if – was snatched from a slightly ragged jacket pocket and thrust into the Bavarian’s hands.

Shaking, Kohler lit up and inhaled deeply. Retreating quickly across the glade into shade, he shut his eyes and silently cursed the French. Why did they always have to kill each other in such horrible ways?

It was Friday 21 June 1942. Jean-Louis St. Cyr – Louis – the Surete’s Chief Inspector, was now firmly planted just outside the cloud of blowflies. A cinematographer at heart – such a lover of the cinema he would take time out if possible to see again a film he had already seen nine times – Louis would memorize every detail. A gardener, a reader of books when time allowed, he was fifty-one years of age, married and with a little son he seldom saw. The wife, too, and she was pretty and all alone in Paris. A worry, ah yes. Sooner or later there’d be trouble, and who could blame her if she wanted a little something on the side?

Unaware of his partner’s thoughts, St-Cyr let his gaze move slowly over the victim’s back. The dress had been one of her best, if not the best – he was certain of this. It was of a vivid dark blue seersucker, pre-war, and must have been very chic for these parts. It was belted at the waist but the fabric had been torn and cut to shreds. There were no undergarments. The legs were spread and slack and at odd angles – clumsy looking but that was common enough in death. Had she family? he wondered. There’d been no missing-persons report. Not one word, a puzzle.

The wounds were many and, though most were shallow, some were far deeper and had been worked at. The flies descended en masse and began to worry the flesh. Bruises that might have lightened had she lived were everywhere but hard to define due to the discolouration. Often the weapon had struck her bluntly, not breaking the skin until the second or third attempt. Had her killer been unfamiliar with it? Could it have been a jagged stone? Were there still traces of rigor?

He crouched over the corpse. Disturbed, the flies rose up, buzzing unhappily at the intrusion of dispersing hands.

‘Married,’ he said. The wedding band was wide and at least of eighteen carat gold, and it caught the sunlight and glowed warmly from between its puffy edgings. Perhaps some well-off relative had donated the ring – this was often done in the country. Life was closer, more solid, more meaningful than in the large cities where a girl from the country would only feel out of place. But the dress was at odds with the country. It really was. Ripped to shreds as if hated.

The finger was slack. ‘Dead at least three days,’ he murmured. ‘Maybe four or five, Hermann,’ he called out.

‘Four, you idiot! Four! I could have told you that hours ago. I’m going to take a look around. I’m going to leave the details to you.’

‘Good! Look for little things, eh? Things our truffle hunter might not have touched.’

‘Or taken.’

Ah yes. These days, especially, one could never tell what had been removed to be saved for later use or sold on the black market. A lipstick, a compact, a pair of underpants, even a set of keys to a flat someone else would briefly go through.

She had worn matching gloves but these had been taken off and folded neatly over the belt – he could just see them. The belt was tight and the gloves didn’t appear to have been disturbed. Few if any signs of a struggle then – yes, yes, but her strand of pearls had been broken. The pearls were scattered in the grass about her head. Good ones too and old, yes, old.

A woman, then, who had dressed as if to meet someone, a lover perhaps, but had found death instead.

She must have worn a slip, underpants and a brassiere but of these there was still no sign. A disturbing puzzle. Had she taken them off elsewhere and then come on here? Where were her shoes, her hat?

Questions … there were always questions, but he didn’t think she had snatched up the gloves at the last moment. No, they must have been intentional. The dress, the belt, the pearls and the gloves but nothing else.

Instinctively St-Cyr looked up and across the glade, realizing that he was still not alone. Hermann was a big man, a giant with the pugnacious nose, lower jaw and jutting chin of an ageing storm-trooper, though he swore he was but three or was it really four years older than St Cyr. Shrapnel scars glistened about the ragged, dissipated countenance whose puffy eyelids drooped and bagged from faded blue and often expressionless eyes.

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 detective 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.