The Devil's Cave: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 5)

until his betrayal, torture and death, the Centre had assembled the best Resistance archives in France. Bruno knew it to be run by dedicated scholars who were usually at their desks long before the attached museum opened its doors.
    ‘Does the name McPhee mean anything to you, around May or June of 1944, here in the Périgord region?’ he asked the curator after the usual greetings. He offered to spell out the name but the curator interrupted him.
    ‘Of course,’ came the reply. ‘He was one of the Jedburghs and I wrote my thesis on them. It may have been the most famous of them all, since one of his colleagues became a president of France. Have you heard of the Jedburgh teams?’
    Bruno confessed he had not.
    ‘They were teams of three, one Free French officer, one American and one British,’ the curator said. The teams had gone through commando training together, all spoke good French and were parachuted into France in the weeks before D-Day to help train and organize the Resistance and coordinate arms drops. McPhee was an American Captain in the Rangers, an elite unit, and came from an old military family. He had an unusual middle name, Tecumseh, the name of some Indian chief who had fought one of the McPheeancestors. He’d been dropped into the Périgord region early in 1944 and was reported killed in June, although his body was never found. Major Manners, the British officer on the team, had filed a report that McPhee was seen to be killed in the fighting at Terrasson and his body was probably consumed when the town burned.
    ‘He was well remembered by the young
résistants
he trained,’ the curator added. ‘They called him their own Red Indian because he shaved his head in an odd way, leaving a strip of hair down the middle of his scalp.’
    ‘Could he have been in touch with the Red Countess?’ Bruno asked.
    ‘Very much so,’ came the reply. ‘She was a courier with the FTP group he worked with and we have a lot of oral interviews on tape, including hers, which recount how McPhee’s group got food and sometimes shelter at the Red Château.’
    Bruno knew that the FTP, the
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans
, were the Communist wing of the Resistance.
    ‘Do you recall her mentioning McPhee in particular in her interview?’
    ‘Oh, yes, she described him as the bravest man she ever knew, and added he had very progressive views for an American. I think she may have had a bit of a crush on him. She was very young at the time, seventeen or eighteen, I think. What’s this about, Bruno?’
    ‘I’m wondering if McPhee could have been the unknown soldier who fathered her child.’
    There was a silence on the other end of the line before the curator gave a nervous laugh. ‘We’d always rather assumedit was a Frenchman, but I suppose it’s possible. Let me know if you get anywhere with this.’
    ‘One more thing,’ Bruno said. ‘The Countess had a younger sister. Do you have anything about her?’
    ‘She was a half-sister, born after the Countess’s father was widowed and then remarried. The Countess was very insistent that they were only half-sisters and that she deliberately tried to keep her away from Resistance activities, saying she was too young. I don’t think there was any love lost between the two.’
    Bruno closed his phone to see Father Sentout dipping the last of his croissant into his coffee and smiling broadly. ‘An American cuckoo in the nest of one of the oldest families in France.’ He chuckled. ‘War makes for strange bedfellows.’
    ‘So the sister’s son Louis was also illegitimate, conceived at the same time, and also given the name of McPhee,’ Bruno mused, studying the list of baptisms.
    ‘That was something that never came up in any of the anodyne confessions I was occasionally permitted to hear,’ said the priest. But the child was not illegitimate, Father Sentout insisted, since he was later legitimized by her husband, de la Gorce.
    ‘I can imagine the family rows that must have happened when the old Count came home after being released from prisoner-of-war camp to find both his daughters with babies and no husband in sight,’ the priest said.
    ‘And now there are grandchildren,’ said Bruno, ‘including the man we now call the Count. Is that an honorary title?’
    ‘They all are these days, officially. But there are enoughtitles knocking around that family to equip them all. They are descended from Louis XIV, after all, even though it was through a