Martin Walker - The Devil's Cave

‘Do you do it yourself or do you hire specialists?’ he asked.

‘I do it. I had a very wise …’ She paused, as if choosing the next word with care. ‘A very wise guardian who said I would grow too tall to be a dancer, so he made sure I trained as a nurse.’

This time there was a hint of another expression on her face; the faintest tightening of the mouth and a lowering of eyebrows. It passed as quickly as the dappling of sunlight through the hesitant leaves of springtime. She turned, leading the horse back through the clearing to the bridle path that led down to the river. ‘ Au revoir. ’

He wanted to ask her if she still danced and how far she had pursued it, but instead he watched her go, hearing her spurs catch and click, thinking he should have advised her to remove them while she walked through the wood.

Bruno had risen early, fed his chickens and been for a run through the woods behind his home, knowing the paths too well to be distracted by the mists that rose from the river at this time of year. It was at times like this that he most missed Gigi, the way the dog had trotted beside him and then darted away to follow some new scent, before finding his way back to rejoin Bruno for the final sprint along the ridge back to the house. He would have to find another dog. But Gigi had come from a litter of the Mayor’s hunting hound, and she was now too old for breeding. He would wait until he found a puppy from a strain he knew that he could raise and train himself.

He stopped at the newest of the town’s five boulangeries , a place with an artificial windmill that had become popular partly because it was the only bakery with its own car park. The other reason was Louise, the baker’s attractive wife, who pursed her lips to blow Bruno a kiss as she staggered back into the shop carrying a tray filled with fresh loaves. He waved back and stood in line, greeting the others who were waiting, and bought three croissants and a baguette. They were still warm when he parked at Antoine’s camping site where he could smell fresh coffee.

‘Thanks for doing this,’ Bruno said as Antoine pushed a cup of coffee across the bar towards him followed by a jar of apricot jam made by his wife, Josette.

‘He’s looking forward to it,’ Josette said, coming in from the kitchen with butter and hot milk. ‘He always likes doing a trip down the river at the start of the season, to see how the banks and currents have shifted.’

‘And I’m just as curious as you about where our mystery woman could have gone into the river,’ Antoine said, tearing his croissant in half to dip it in his coffee. ‘Any news about her, who she might have been?’

His mouth full of croissant, Bruno shook his head. ‘Still waiting for the autopsy,’ he said, swallowing. ‘By the way, do you remember anything about that bottle in the punt?’

‘Vodka, some Russian writing, can’t say I remember.’ He turned and looked at the bottles lined up on the shelves above his bar. ‘It looked like the Smirnoff I sell.’ Bruno made a mental note to check if the forensic team had followed up.

They loaded a canoe onto the trailer and climbed into the van for the drive upriver to Montignac, nearly thirty kilometres away and the farthest point from which the punt could have drifted in the time the woman had been dead. Antoine reckoned it had been put into the water much closer to St Denis, but it was best to be sure. Bruno assumed that the woman had been alive when she got into the punt and took her lethal cocktail of pills and vodka, so time of death might not be the most reliable guide to her embarkation point.

The morning was still fresh when they donned life jackets and put the canoe into the water, while Josette drove the van back to the campsite. Antoine settled at the stern, sending Bruno to the bow, and baited the row of hooks before fixing his fishing line to a bracket beside him. Then he put an unopened bottle of Bergerac Sec into a string bag, tied the bag to the boat and lowered the wine into the water to keep cool. There was no one else on the river as they paddled downstream, pausing to look at each boathouse and landing stage. Most of them were still padlocked from the winter, and they saw no signs of recent footprints or launchings.

Bruno thought he knew his river reasonably well, but it was the road and pathways he knew far better than this special viewpoint from the water. The trailing fronds of the willows cast a dappled light before being overtaken by the sudden darkness cast from the majestic oaks and chestnut trees. The river could seem black and still as night one moment and as clear as glass the next before frothing into ripples over the sudden shallows. The current was steady, a little slower than walking pace, speeding as the river turned into a curve before slowing into a deceptive stillness that seemed so perfect Bruno hardly wanted to disturb the surface with his paddle. The rhythm of his paddling was almost soporific, and even as he tried to focus on each possible landing, his thoughts kept drifting.

Helping Eugenie and her horse the previous evening had made him late for dinner. He’d been looking forward to it, an invitation to Florence’s apartment beside the college where she now worked. They had been six at table: the headmaster Rollo and his wife Mathilde, Serge the sports teacher and one of the stars of the town’s rugby team, and an unusually subdued Fabiola.

It had been a simple meal. Smoked salmon to begin, roast chicken, a salad with an array of local cheeses followed by an apple tart bought from Fauquet’s. Sensibly, Florence had bought local wines. With the bottle of Pomerol that was Bruno’s contribution and Rollo’s bottle of Chablis, and the table made colourful by the bouquet of daffodils that Fabiola had brought, the evening had been a success.

Bruno had been pleased for Florence. Not only was it her first dinner party in St Denis but in Rollo she was also hosting her boss. Bruno had known Rollo so long it was a mild shock to think of him that way, but Florence had ever so slightly deferred to him and gone out of her way to include his wife, Mathilde, in the conversation. Inevitably, some of the talk had turned to questions of the college: the shortage of teachers prepared to work in rural areas, the lack of jobs for school-leavers, the curriculum changes. Bruno had taken advantage of the theme to ask if Rollo or Serge remembered Francette Junot.

‘She could have been a good athlete, but like a lot of girls she lost interest after reaching puberty,’ Serge had said. Rollo recalled that she’d had a gift for maths, but had never applied herself to schoolwork, as if determined to leave school and start working as soon as she could. The conversation had been about to take another turn when Mathilde said, ‘I didn’t know her well, but she was a deeply unhappy girl.’

Everyone sat up at that point. Mathilde, who worked part-time in a local accountant’s office, was not known for involving herself much in school affairs.

‘A man probably wouldn’t notice, but she never had the right kind of clothes, and the other girls made fun of her. Once I heard them sneer at her for wearing clothes from the Action Catholique , one of the other girls’ cast-offs. Kids can be so cruel at that age. That’s probably why she couldn’t wait to leave school.’

A silence had fallen until Florence said brightly that with her new job, her own days of getting clothes from the charity shop were now in the past. Bruno was relieved that he had remarked on entering how attractive Florence was looking, and had noticed that her blonde hair had been cut and shaped so that it softened her rather long face.

A grunt from Antoine and a sudden flurry of movement at the back of the canoe brought Bruno back to the present. Antoine had a bite. The green hills that rose on each side of the river had begun to give way to cliffs of white chalk and grey stone and the bridge at Thonac was just coming into view. Antoine put down his paddle and pulled in his line. Two small trout were wriggling on his hooks.