Martin Walker - The Devil's Cave

‘We haven’t opened yet for the season, but we’ve been doing work all winter,’ Marcel said. ‘For the last few days, we’ve been working outside, so the cave has been locked and sealed.’

There was just one other way in, he explained: the route the first explorer had taken. Customers paid extra to be lowered in a small basket operated by a winch. All three entrances had been securely locked, and the only keys were held by Marcel and his family.

‘And by me, one complete set,’ the Baron added.

‘I came in this morning to check the lighting, because the damp can be a problem with the junction boxes, and I knew something was wrong because one of the boats was missing,’ Marcel continued. ‘It must have been taken under that shelf of rock and through the tunnel that leads to Our Lady’s Chapel. That’s the only place where you could hide a boat in here. So I took another boat and went across and then saw what had been done in the chapel. That’s when I called you,’ he said, addressing the Baron.

‘Have you touched anything in there?’ Bruno asked.

Marcel shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly damage — I think it’s worse.’

Down at the lake, Marcel directed them into another boat which he began to pedal across the still, dark waters. Occasional drops of water plopped from the roof above. When one landed on his hand, Bruno could see the tiny flecks of limestone that had come down with the water. Occasional stumps of stone rose from the surface of the lake where the drops had formed over centuries, perhaps over millennia. They ducked their heads as Marcel pedalled under the shelf of stone and they emerged into a long tunnel, lit with an eerie blue light.

He pulled alongside a low stone wharf, where they could climb out and keep their feet dry, and tied up to an iron ring set into the stone. He led the way from the water’s edge into a wider passage where he opened a small plastic junction box and flicked some switches. At once, the sound of Gregorian chant echoed from the stone walls and a clear light gleamed from the end of the tunnel.

Bruno remembered the chapel and the religious music from his previous visit. It had been the largest of the smaller chambers and shaped liked a triangle, roughly ten metres deep and almost as wide at the entrance, narrowing to two metres wide at the far end where the stone Madonna stood. A large but low boulder with a flat top sat on the floor before her and had inevitably been dubbed the altar. Two church candles, an altar cloth and a small crucifix had been placed on it to complete the tableau. The rest of the chamber was empty except for the artful lights. The effect was of the interior of a church, dimly lit by natural sunlight. But on each of the side walls a projector cast an image of a stained-glass rose window which suffused the space with tones of gold, red and blue. Two small spotlights lit the Madonna, clear white from the left and blue from the right.

But now this Madonna was black. The whole stalagmite had been covered in black paint and the two church candles on the altar had been replaced with black ones. A severed goat’s head stood between them, its horns almost touching the candles and its tongue lolling. A cheap metal cup lay on its side beside the goat’s head, wine dregs drying inside, as if some perverted form of communion had taken place. There was a smell of stale tobacco smoke and something different, perhaps incense. An empty bottle of vodka had rolled to one side of the cave. This time Bruno noted that the brand was Smirnoff. And a large pentagram had been scrawled in black paint, the precise size of the projection of the rose window.

‘That’s the window at Chartres they defaced,’ said Marcel. ‘It’s Rouen cathedral on the other side, but for some reason they left it alone. But you can see why I thought of that dead woman, Bruno. I don’t know about Satanism but this is for sure the devil’s work.’

‘And you’ve touched nothing?’ Bruno asked again. Marcel shook his head. Bruno looked at him closely, wondering if this was all some clumsy publicity stunt to take advantage of the media interest in the woman from the river.

Bruno walked across to the altar. It was smeared with dried blood from the goat. A long drop of blood hung from its tongue. It was still sticky, so the goat could not have been killed much before the previous evening. He’d check the local butchers and goat farmers. He turned his attention to the candles. These were different from those he had found in the punt. They were the original white church candles, smeared in black paint. The wax had not been a hospitable surface for the paint, which had run and pooled at the foot of each candle.

‘How old were these candles?’ he asked Marcel.

‘New this year and never lit.’

‘Well, they’ve been lit now. How long would you say they burned for?’

Marcel shrugged. ‘Two or three hours, maybe a bit more.’ Bruno turned to the Madonna. Here the black paint seemed different. It hadn’t run. He leaned forward and sniffed, then put the tip of his little finger against the paint. It was slightly sticky and smelt of turpentine, as if it were oil-based. The paint on the candles looked water-based.

There was a jumble of footprints in the dust before the Madonna and what could have been cigarette or cigar ash at her feet. In the passage outside he found one small cigarette stub, or perhaps the end of a cheroot. It was brown. As he lifted it to his nose in his gloved hand he scented that elusive incense again. He bagged it, and told Marcel to keep the place secure until he could persuade J-J, the chief of detectives for the Departement , to assign his overworked forensic team to the inquiry. He’d have to stress the link to the dead woman, but since that appeared to be a suicide, it wouldn’t be easy. His only other find was a screwed-up piece of coloured paper in the bottom of the beached pedal-boat, which turned out to be a bubblegum wrapping, most likely left by some tourist the previous year. He bagged it anyway, along with the empty vodka bottle.

‘What do you think, Bruno?’ the Baron asked.

‘The most important thing is there’s no dead body.’ He didn’t mention his suspicions about the publicity stunt. The Baron was his friend, but he was also a clever businessman with a financial interest in boosting visits to the cave.

‘As for criminal damage, there’s nothing that a few hours of cleaning can’t fix, so there’s not much of a crime here,’ he continued, leading the way down the passage to the boat. ‘It’s curious and it’s troubling, but it won’t be easy to get the Police National to take much of an interest. Looking at that bubblegum wrapper, I’d have said it was most likely kids larking about, except for the goat’s head and the break-in. Even so, I’d start by asking your own kids if they’re behind this. Do they have access to the keys?’

Marcel looked disappointed, and a little angry. ‘I already asked them before they went to school, and all the keys are accounted for. That’s the first thing I checked.’

‘When are you planning to open?’ Bruno asked him.

‘This weekend.’

‘Well, leave the boat and chapel untouched until we can see if I can interest the forensics guys in this. It might be a day or two.’

When they crossed the lake to the inner shore, the Baron asked Marcel to carry on with his work on the cafe and asked Bruno to stay behind.

‘There’s something you may as well know,’ he said when they were alone. ‘There’s another way in.’

‘And Marcel doesn’t know?’

The Baron shrugged. ‘I never told him but he may have found it. My father showed it to me when I was sixteen. It was something they used in the Resistance, and maybe at other troubled times.’