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

first,’ he said, stepping briskly inside in a way that made Madame Junot step back. As she moved, she lifted her hand to her side, as if her ribs hurt.
    ‘You’ve been hurt, Madame. What happened?’ He cast an eye around the big kitchen with its stone floor that would be bitterly cold in winter and an original stone sink. There were no taps. Water would have to be pumped up daily from the well outside. The only modern amenities were an electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling and an elderly cooking stove fuelled by bottles of gas.
    ‘I fell down the stairs.’
    ‘The stairs did not blacken your eye. What caused that?’
    She did not answer, but turned back to the stove where a large pot was simmering. She lifted the lid, releasing a scent of duck stock and of garlic, broke two small eggs into the soup and began to stir with an age-blackened wooden spoon.
    ‘Making
tourain
?’ Bruno asked, noticing the bowl filled with evidently stale bread she had placed beside the stove. A classicdish of the Périgord, it was the traditional cheap but filling lunch of the farmers, and simple to make. Based on the stock from the carcass of a duck, some garlic and salt, stale bread and an egg or two, it could be thinned out with water or milk or thickened with more bread or vermicelli. And when the bowl of soup was almost finished, any true Périgourdin would make
chabrol
, pouring in half a glass of red wine to swirl it around the plate, and then lift the bowl to his lips.
    She shrugged, keeping her back to him. She was wearing a wrap-around apron, washed so often that the floral print had faded almost beyond recognition. Underneath she wore sagging woollen stockings and a long pullover that she had knitted herself with wool from their own sheep. There was no sign of a TV, far less a computer. A shelf on the wall opposite the window carried an elderly radio, what looked like a bible, a farmer’s almanac and a battered cookbook. There were no other books in sight, no newspapers or magazines. What a strange childhood Francette must have known, Bruno thought. How could she hope to fit in with school classmates who’d talk of the latest TV shows and pop songs?
    ‘Where’s Francette?’ he asked. ‘I hear she’s left the supermarket, got a new job.’
    Her mother’s back stiffened. ‘Is this what you came to ask?’
    ‘No, I came to ask about your being beaten. We had a complaint, an allegation. Domestic violence is a crime and Louis could go to prison.’ Out of the window, he could see her husband working on an old tractor at the entrance to the barn. ‘I can see from the way you wince that it’s true.’
    ‘No, I fell. I told you.’ Her head down, it was as if she weretalking to the soup she was stirring. Bruno wondered why the house had been built uphill, just above the barn, open to the winter winds, when the barn could have provided shelter. The answer came almost as soon as his mind formed the question: the animals’ waste would have seeped downhill into the home. There were still a couple of farms up in these hills, older than the Junot place, where the animals still lived on the ground floor with the humans above, taking advantage of the warmth from the bodies of the livestock below.
    ‘He used to beat Francette, too, didn’t he?’ Bruno asked. ‘Is that why she left home?’
    Silence from the stove, but her shoulders seemed to sag a little more. Then he saw that the shoulders were shaking and she was trying to damp down some huge, racking sobs. He moved across to stand beside her and looked at her face, tears spilling down her cheeks.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered. ‘Francette could get away. She has her life ahead of her. I have nowhere to go, even if I wanted to.’
    ‘There are places you can go, shelters in Bergerac and Sarlat,’ he said. ‘I can drive you there now.’
    ‘I don’t want to,’ she said firmly, stooping to wipe her eyes on her apron. ‘He isn’t always like this. It’s just that everything has gone wrong, the subsidies and then the sheep dying and the bill from the vet that we can’t pay and now the tractor …’
    ‘This beating has to stop,’ Bruno said. He didn’t know what else he could say and he had the feeling that there wassomething she wasn’t telling him. Not for the first time, he thought how useful it would be to have a policewoman working alongside him.
    ‘Louis is not a bad man,’ she said, standing straight now and more sure of