Martin Walker - The Devil's Cave

‘Have two days off. Arrive tomorrow with special gift from me and Brigadier. Bisous , Isabelle. xx’

Remembering that emails from Isabelle were like a crossword puzzle with emotions attached, he leaned towards the screen intent on deciphering her meaning. Bisous was at the lowest rung of affection, the literary equivalent of an air kiss. The extra xx gave it a slightly warmer tone, but not enough to persuade him that any advance would be met with Isabelle’s open arms. Tomorrow was tricky, since it had been sent at two minutes after midnight. Did that make it this day or the next? There was no request for him to book a hotel, but that was not necessarily a signal that she’d want to stay with him. There was nothing about trains to be met, nor any time or place for a rendezvous. And what might the special gift be? Since it also came from the Brigadier, her boss, it was hardly personal. It also gave her trip a slightly official flavour. The next test was to draft his reply.

After some moments of slightly edgy reflection, he typed: ‘Wonderful news. Intrigued by gift. Do you arrive 18th or 19th and will you be here in time for dinner? Where shall we meet? Bisous and hugs, Bruno.’

He read it again, pondered the ‘Where shall we meet?’ but decided a little precision was justified after Isabelle’s vagueness, crossed his fingers and hit the Send button just as his desk phone rang and another email pinged into his inbox.

‘Tomorrow being today. On morning train from Austerlitz and on usual mobile number. Warning: a new man in my bedroom but he sleeps on floor. Will msg ETA. Ixx’

She must have sent that before getting his reply. At least he had the right date, and there were no more than four trains from the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris, each arriving in St Denis at very different times. He decided that while he knew he was being teased he couldn’t bear to interpret the phrase about the new sleeping partner. He answered the phone to hear a friend’s excited voice.

‘Bruno, it’s the Baron. Something very urgent has come up, not for the phone. Can you come out to my place? And be discreet, park at the back and bring a civilian jacket.’

The Baron was convinced that Claire at the Mairie ’s reception desk eavesdropped on phone calls, fuelling her taste for town gossip. Bruno had too few secrets to care, and if discretion was required he had his new mobile phone, supplied by the Brigadier during a previous case, that was reputed to be secure against all invasion. He always kept an anonymous dark windcheater in his official van. Checking that he had his notebook, pen, phone and torch, and a set of latex evidence gloves and bags in his pocket, he told Claire he was going on patrol. He used his phone to text Isabelle with the message ‘What time do you arrive?’ and headed down the stairs.

The Baron lived in a chartreuse , the local name for a historic home just one room wide that was too small to be a chateau and too large to be a manor house. His family had owned it for centuries. The rear of the building, which faced away from both the hillside and the river, was an almost solid wall of stone, interspersed with arrow slits for windows and flanked by two formidable towers. Bruno turned into the courtyard to park before the much more welcoming facade. He sat for a moment, enjoying the way the Renaissance builders had softened the look of a fortress with large stone windows, a handsome staircase and a balustraded terrace. The main door, a massive structure of wood reinforced with iron studs and bars, still carried the scorch marks of the Revolution. Having failed to storm it, the local peasantry had vainly attempted to burn the home of the Baron’s ancestor, their feudal oppressor. This same ancestor had gone on to become one of Napoleon’s generals. As a result, the Baron liked to say, the peasants had been taking on rather more than they had bargained for.

The door opened and the Baron came out, car keys jingling in his hand. ‘Got a call from Marcel at the Gouffre,’ he said. ‘There’s been a break-in overnight and he said he wanted both of us there to see it. He sounded worried.’

‘Any details?’ Bruno asked.

The Baron shook his head. ‘He just said he thought there might be a link to that dead woman you pulled out of the river.’ He led the way across the courtyard and over a wide lawn to the barn where he kept his cars. He steered Bruno to the battered old Peugeot rather than his Mercedes, reversed out and set off through the archway into the tiny hamlet that surrounded his home and up the hill.

Part of the wide stretch of land that the Baron owned, the Gouffre de Colombac was one of the largest caves in the region. Unlike the more famous caves such as Lascaux with its prehistoric paintings, this was simply a vast space beneath the earth. Its main chamber was almost spherical, over a hundred metres wide and almost as high. The space was unevenly divided by an underground river that led to an ominously still lake. Bruno had been inside several times for concerts, the musicians performing from the far side of the river and the audience on chairs and benches or perched on the wide stone steps that nature had somehow carved into one wall. He had once paid the entrance fee just to see the place, one of the largest caves in France, and with a dark reputation.

For centuries, the locals had called it the Devil’s Cave, for the puffs of smoke they saw sometimes gusting from a hole in the earth. This phenomenon was now known to be a form of condensation from the micro-climate inside the vast cave rather than smoke from the fires of Hell. The land around it, part of an old pilgrimage route from the shrine of Rocamadour and the Abbey of Cadouin that led to Compostela at the far north-western tip of Spain, had for centuries attracted bands of brigands. They lay in wait to rob ill-guarded pilgrims and tip their bodies down the smoking hole into the gulf below. When the cave had first been opened in the nineteenth century, an intrepid explorer had been winched down on a rope, trying vainly to pierce the darkness with a puny lantern. When he had finally touched bottom, he found he had landed on a great heap of bones, mainly human but also animal, from beasts that had stumbled into the hole.

Now, cleverly lit and with pedal-boats for hire to explore the sunken lake, it was a tourist attraction. As well as the entrance fee, the cafe and souvenir shop and the special concerts, the cave made a steady profit from the stoneware it produced. Rack upon rack of plates, jugs, glasses, vases and every other implement that the managers could think of were left under the places where the water, heavy with particles of limestone, dripped down and slowly calcified the objects beneath. After a year or so in the cave, the items looked as though they had been carved from solid stone, and they were so popular that Marcel could barely keep up with the demand.

Smaller chambers led off from the main space, and the eerie formations of stalagmites and stalactites had been carefully lit to justify the rather fanciful names they had been given, such as the Chapel of Our Lady, after a thick rock that looked like a praying woman in a hood and a long cloak; or Napoleon’s Bedchamber, which resembled a massive four-poster bed with hangings swooping around it and a curious shape that could be interpreted as a giant letter N.

Marcel was the second generation of his family to lease the cave from the Baron, paying him a modest rent and a healthy share of the annual profits. Marcel’s wife and sisters, his sons and cousins all worked in the family business, investing cautiously in improvements. Bruno had heard they were working on a son et lumiere show for summer evenings when no concert was booked.

Marcel greeted them at what he called the stage door, a secondary entrance high enough for the musicians’ trailers and wide enough for the pedal-boats. The public entrance around the corner was deliberately low, narrow and dark, so that the visitor’s eventual sight of the majestic scale of the cave would be all the more impressive. Marcel unlocked the double doors of green metal and pulled down the master switch for the lights. The three men walked down for perhaps fifty metres before reaching the cave itself. They were standing on a balcony carved into the side, with a metal railing to prevent them from falling and a long wide ramp leading down to the floor of the cave. Off to one side a storeroom had been found or perhaps carved from the rock. Bruno could see long rows of folding chairs stacked up inside.