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

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 Léo 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, Léo and Béatrice 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 Athénaïs.
    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 Athénaïs.
    ‘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 Léo 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, Léo 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 andshe’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.’
    ‘You never saw any newspapers or listened to the TV or radio while you were there at the auberge?’
    ‘Some of the clients had TV in their bedrooms but all they wanted to have on was porn.’
    ‘Did you ever see your dad, or did he get in touch with you?’
    Francette shook her head, and for the first time she took her mother’s hand. Now the story came in fits and starts. With hindsight, she now thought he’d been to the auberge the night after Bruno had brought her father to see her. It had been a doctors and nurses party that night and some of the clients had become frisky over dinner, so the nurses were all topless. There had been some commotion at one of the windows and some shouting. Béatrice had come back and said there’d been an intruder but it was all under control. At the time Francette had thought nothing of it, but looking back that must have been her father.
    ‘That’s why I’m responsible,’ she said, her voice dull. ‘He must have been so worked up after you brought him to see me that he crashed.’
    This was not the time to tell her it had been no crash. ‘Did you know of any other disturbance on the evening of that day I brought him to the auberge to see you? I’m wondering if your dad might have come back.’
    Francette shrugged. ‘Not that I heard of. But there was abig party