Martin Walker - The Devil's Cave

‘Francette needs your help,’ said Brigitte. ‘She’s scared stiff. Can you take her somewhere safe?’

‘You’ll have to tell me everything, Francette, if I’m going to be able to help,’ he said, taking off his cap and sliding in alongside her.

‘It’s not a story for church,’ she said. Bruno glanced at her mother and raised his eyebrows. She nodded and murmured that Francette had told her everything. Meanwhile Bruno was thinking that his own place was known and so was Pamela’s, where he kept his horse. Too many people knew of his friendship with Stephane and his farm was too near to the Junot place. He called Maurice Soulier, an elderly duck farmer who owed Bruno a favour. It was answered by his wife, Sabine, a motherly soul. Their children had long left home and she agreed at once.

‘Go down behind the altar to the vestry and wait there. I’ll come and fetch you.’

He went back to the Gendarmerie and borrowed the keys to Jules’s private car, a well-maintained Renault Laguna. He drove to Father Sentout’s house, where he borrowed the key to the vestry from his housekeeper. He loaded the two women into the car and followed the back road past the cemetery, taking country lanes to the Soulier farm. Sabine was waiting for them with a pot of coffee and a plate of her home-made madeleines. Her husband came in from the barn to greet them. When Bruno asked for a place where he and the two guests could speak in private, Maurice showed them to the shaded terrace and left them alone. Humming happily to herself, evidently pleased at the thought of guests, Sabine went upstairs to make up the spare bed and lay out towels.

‘I’ve been a fool,’ Francette said dully. ‘It’s my fault that Dad’s dead and now I think Mum’s in danger as well as me.’

‘Start at the beginning,’ Bruno said. ‘What made you leave your job at the supermarket?’

‘I met this guy, a bit older than me but good-looking, you know?’ She described how he’d come to her checkout, chatted a little, and he asked her out. He picked her up after work in his sports car, took her to a dinner in Bergerac and then to a nightclub for dancing before driving her home.

‘He was really sweet, just kissed me on the cheek and asked to see me again. Next time he brought me flowers and he took me to a smart restaurant, white tablecloths and everything. He knew all about wines. Then we went to that big disco in Perigueux that the other girls used to talk about, but I’d never been there.’

Bruno nodded sympathetically, suspecting that he knew already how this would turn out. A girl from a poor home who had never been taken out before was suddenly being treated like a princess. The next date had been a day trip to Bordeaux, where he’d taken her to an expensive hairdresser, bought her new clothes and lingerie that he chose for her, and then to a boutique hotel for the afternoon.

‘Leo was so kind, so sweet,’ she said. Bruno could imagine the contrast between the skilled seduction in the hotel room and the clumsy, insistent fumblings of the boys of her own age from St Denis.

‘Was that his real name?’ he asked. No, she replied, it was her pet name for him. His real name was Lionel.

Then he had taken her to Paris for the weekend, a hotel on the Quai Voltaire with a room overlooking the river. They had smoked a joint of the strongest dope she’d ever had and then made love until it was time to go to the famous Queen disco on the Champs Elysees.

‘There was this long line of people trying to get in, but one look at Leo and they opened the red velvet rope and we went straight in,’ she said, her voice wistful, still conveying her pride in that moment. And even in her low mood, Francette had the physical assurance and poise of a woman now aware of her own allure and sexual power. At the disco, she said, she had tried cocaine for the first time.

They slept until late and then more shopping, until Leo took her to an exclusive party where there was more cocaine and endless champagne. Suddenly people were taking off their clothes and Leo was making love with another woman and a man and it seemed the natural thing to join in. She looked up at Bruno defiantly and said that she’d enjoyed it. Then there had been the week at a villa in St Tropez, more cocaine and more sex parties; in hotel suites and even on a yacht. When Leo offered her a job at the hotel, she’d taken it at once.

Bruno felt a cold anger start to build, deep inside him, at hearing of Foucher’s cynical seduction of an inexperienced young woman, and one whom Bruno still recalled as a little girl.

‘I had no illusions about the job.’ There was a challenge in her voice, but she wouldn’t look at him while she spoke. Her mother sat in silence, listening with her eyes closed, one hand resting on Francette’s forearm. ‘My eyes were wide open and I’d have taken the job even without the thousand euros in cash he gave me. He called it a signing bonus.’

It was one thing having sex with others when she was high and Leo was taking part, but not nearly as much fun when strangers who spoke no French took her off to their rooms at the hotel. It was even worse when one of them was only able to perform when he hit her. Then there were the dressing-up games: doctors and nurses, cops and prisoners, priests and nuns. Sometimes the clients wanted exhibitions, girls with girls, or nuns with nuns, and pulled out their phones to take videos. There were discipline games, when the girls could be spanked. With all the cocaine available, it didn’t seem to matter.

One night, Leo and Beatrice had taken her and some other girls into the Gouffre, dressed them as nuns and filmed them in Our Lady’s Chapel. That was the first time since the initial orgy in Paris that she’d met the man they called the Count.

‘Did you ever see this woman?’ Bruno asked, taking from his breast pocket the photo of Athenais.

Francette nodded. ‘Tina was with us in the cave.’

‘You called her Tina?’ Bruno asked, thinking it was probably as close a nickname as she could get to Athenais.

‘I liked her, she was nice to me after I was hit the first time. Tina really got off on the scene in the cave when Leo dressed up as a priest. But it was the Count that she wanted. Apparently they’d met in New York and they’d had an affair. She told me she was in love with him and he was going to pay for this film project she had about some ancestor who was the mistress of Louis Quatorze. She talked about it all the time, like it was an obsession with her. I remember once she told me she thought was the reincarnation of this Madame de Montespan. She even promised me a part in the movie. But she was going to be the star.’

‘Did she ever talk about love potions?’ Bruno felt a mounting excitement at the realization that Francette’s testimony was breaking open the whole case, along with anger at the way she’d been treated. She was just eighteen. She should be playing doubles at the tennis club, holding hands and locking eyes in a cheap students’ restaurant, not dressing up to thrill ageing customers in the defence industry.

‘You know about the Black Mass?’ she asked, her eyes widening.

He nodded. ‘Was Tina trying to make sure the Count fell in love with her?’

‘It sounds crazy now, but it all made sense then. She told me it was certain to work, that it worked with Louis XIV.’

‘Were you there when she did this?’

‘No, Leo organized it. Tina wanted to do the Black Mass in a real church and there was some family chapel over the river he said they could use. He and Richard took her; he’s the Lebanese guy but he claimed to have been raised as a Christian.’

‘Did you ever see Tina again after that?’

Francette shook her head. ‘They said it hadn’t worked and she’d gone back to Paris. It wasn’t till I came home that Mum told me about the woman in the boat and I knew it had to be Tina. I was getting scared already but that really freaked me. That’s when I said we had to come and see you.’