Martin Walker: The Devil's Cave

As they neared the landing beach, Antoine skilfully steered them across the current and climbed out of the canoe when the bank shelved to guide the punt up onto the sand. The young man in white, his trousers still wet, came down to help him haul it up, but Antoine waved him away. Bruno beached the canoe, climbed out to haul it higher and shook Dr Gelletreau’s hand before the doctor moved across to look into the punt. Antoine had tipped it slightly onto its side to let some of the water out, but small streams were dribbling from cracks in the hull. One large black candle, nearly a metre in length, toppled out of the punt and a second one rolled against the gunwale. Bruno had only ever seen candles that size in church, but never in black. At least he now knew what the stumpy mast had been.

‘How is she? Is she dead?’ the young man from the sports car asked. Bruno recognized him now from the previous year’s tennis tournament when the girls had flocked around him. He had the arrogant good looks of a model in a glossy magazine. He’d played with someone in the men’s doubles, reaching the semi-finals with an aggressive game of serve-and-volley.

‘We’ll wait for the doctor’s verdict,’ Bruno said. ‘Didn’t you hear us yelling at you not to dive in back at the bridge? You must have seen I was a policeman. You might have sunk the boat.’

‘I was only trying to help,’ he said pleasantly, with a slightly mocking tilt to his eyebrow. He had an educated voice, an accent that sounded Parisian and a manner that suggested he was used to getting his way. ‘I thought I could stop it crashing into the bridge.’

‘What brings you to St Denis?’ Bruno asked.

‘We have a business meeting at the Mairie ,’ he said. ‘We were crossing the bridge when the crowd turned up, climbed out and saw her drifting down and I thought I might be able to reach the boat from the other bank. Sorry, I’m Lionel Foucher.’

He put out a hand, and Bruno shook it, turning to look at the young woman sitting in the driving seat of what Bruno now saw was a new-looking Jaguar. She was wearing sunglasses and raised her hand in languid greeting. Bruno suddenly remembered he was wearing only his underpants, shirt and a life jacket. He grinned at her and waved back.

‘That’s Eugenie, my partner,’ said Foucher. ‘Well, you’ve got her safely ashore. We’ll leave you to it.’

‘I’m sure the Mayor won’t mind your wet trousers, not in the circumstances,’ Bruno replied, and turned back to the punt as Foucher climbed into the car and was driven off.

‘No name or markings on the punt,’ said Antoine.

‘I can’t give you much of a time of death,’ said Gelletreau, rising from beside the punt. He had a pair of tweezers in his hand, holding something that looked like a small circle of wet cardboard. He took a plastic bag from his medical case and put the object inside.

‘Water plays the very devil with body temperature and lividity, all the usual signs. No obvious cause of death so we’ll probably need an autopsy. No jewellery and no sign of any belongings so there’s no indication of identity. Some bruising around the vulva and the anus. I’d say she had indulged in some pretty energetic sexual activity before she died, but there are no bruises on the wrists and shoulders so I doubt it was coerced.’

‘So you don’t see it as a suspicious death?’ Bruno asked. The woman’s pubis had been carefully trimmed into the neatest of triangles.

‘Obviously it’s mysterious, but suspicious … I don’t know. That item I put away for the pathologists, I found it inside her vagina. I’ve no idea what it is,’ said Gelletreau. ‘Frankly, looking at the vodka bottle my best guess would be suicide, a very demonstrative way to go for a probably disturbed woman. That in itself would not be unusual. People quite often dress up in strange ways or strip naked to commit suicide. We’ll have to see what the toxicology says but I’d be surprised if they don’t find a lot of alcohol and barbiturates …’ He broke off, muttering ‘That reminds me.’ He bent down to rummage in his medical bag and came out with a shiny metal tool that Bruno recognized from ear examinations.

‘No needle tracks so I rather discounted drugs,’ the doctor said, bending down over the body. But instead of inserting the device into her ear, he poked it up a nostril and squinted inside.

‘Aha,’ he said. He tried but failed to lever his heavy form up again. Bruno gave him a hand and hauled Gelletreau to his feet.

‘Signs of very heavy cocaine use. The septum is almost destroyed,’ he said. ‘A pity. She must have been a good-looking woman. I’d put her age at no more than forty.’

Bruno nodded. There was little sign of wrinkles nor of ageing at her neck. Her legs were long and shapely, with no sag to her thighs or buttocks. Her waist was well defined and the breasts generous.

‘Are those stretch marks signs that she had given birth?’ Bruno asked.

‘I’d say so, but we’ll need the autopsy to be sure.’

United in an unspoken sense of sadness and of waste, the three men fell silent as they gazed down at the body, robbed in death of any sexual allure. But the painted shape on her trunk disturbed Bruno.

‘What about that marking?’ he asked. He could see now that it was no tattoo, more something that had been daubed on her belly, a vaguely familiar shape.

‘It’s a pentagram, some kind of mystic symbol,’ said Gelletreau. ‘And it’s no tattoo, it was drawn with something like a magic marker. It’s waterproof, whatever it was. I don’t know what those two black candles are doing in there. Nor that.’ He pointed to a sodden and shapeless mass in the bottom of the punt.

‘It’s a cockerel,’ said Antoine, poking at it with a stick. ‘And there’s its head, over there at the far end of the punt. Somebody must have cut it off.’

Bruno bent down to look at some charred sticks floating on what little water was left in the boat and sniffed, catching that whiff of paraffin again.

‘Do you think somebody tried to light a fire here?’ he asked. ‘And what’s that dark patch down where the water’s almost gone?’

All three men knelt to peer at the bottom of the punt, just in front of the dead woman’s feet. As the water drained, they saw that the dark patch was simply charred wood and the burning had gone quite deep. There were some more sticks scattered around the bottom of the punt, some of them so thick they were almost logs. Right in the middle of the burnt patch was a long crack where the last of the water was now draining away.

‘Somebody tried to light a fire, but the wood was so old it cracked and water came in and put the fire out,’ Bruno said, thinking aloud. ‘That’s why I smelt paraffin.’

‘Bloody stupid, setting a fire in a wooden boat and not putting a stone or something underneath,’ said Antoine. ‘It was bound to burn through.’

‘Like a Viking funeral that went wrong, only with black candles and a dead cockerel,’ said Gelletreau. ‘Funny stuff, this. I don’t like it at all. The sooner we get a proper autopsy the better.’

Bruno nodded, went back to where he had left his trousers and used his mobile phone to call J-J, the chief of detectives at national police headquarters in Perigueux. He was told to leave a message and then went through to the switchboard to report a mysterious death, adding that the doctor had requested an autopsy. That would mean taking the dead woman to the pathology lab in Bergerac.

‘I’d better wait here,’ he said. ‘You two can go about your business, but thanks to both of you. I’ll come to the medical centre later to pick up a copy of the death certificate if you could leave it at the desk.’

Antoine headed back to his bar and his accounts. Dr Gelletreau turned to his car.