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

taken advantage of the theme to ask if Rollo or Serge remembered Francette Junot.
    ‘She could have been a good athlete, but like a lot of girls she lost interest after reaching puberty,’ Serge had said. Rollo recalled that she’d had a gift for maths, but had never applied herself to schoolwork, as if determined to leave school and start working as soon as she could. The conversation had been about to take another turn when Mathilde said, ‘I didn’t know her well, but she was a deeply unhappy girl.’
    Everyone sat up at that point. Mathilde, who worked part-time in a local accountant’s office, was not known for involving herself much in school affairs.
    ‘A man probably wouldn’t notice, but she never had the right kind of clothes, and the other girls made fun of her. Once I heard them sneer at her for wearing clothes from the
Action Catholique
, one of the other girls’ cast-offs. Kids can be so cruel at that age. That’s probably why she couldn’t wait to leave school.’
    A silence had fallen until Florence said brightly that with her new job, her own days of getting clothes from the charity shop were now in the past. Bruno was relieved that he had remarked on entering how attractive Florence was looking, and had noticed that her blonde hair had been cut and shaped so that it softened her rather long face.
    A grunt from Antoine and a sudden flurry of movement at the back of the canoe brought Bruno back to the present. Antoine had a bite. The green hills that rose on each side of the river had begun to give way to cliffs of white chalk and grey stone and the bridge at Thonac was just coming into view. Antoine put down his paddle and pulled in his line. Two small trout were wriggling on his hooks.
    ‘That’ll do,’ he said, and pulled a small wooden board and some limes from his bag and took his Laguiole knife from his belt. ‘You keep paddling, Bruno, and we’ll have our
cassecroûte
before you know it.’
    Bruno kept glancing back to watch Antoine gut the fish and put the slim fillets he had carved into a plastic bag. Then he halved the limes and squeezed their juice into the baguntil there was enough to cover the white flesh. He re-baited his hooks and continued to paddle.
    By the time they reached the church of St Léon-sur-Vézère after the first of the long bends, the sun was climbing steadily and Bruno had taken off his shirt. They had looked at three more locked boathouses and some rickety landing-stages with so much moss on them it was plain they had not been used since the previous year. There were two possible sites where the punt could have gone into the river, and Bruno had marked them on his map. Each was a place where canoes were rented out in the summer, and Antoine knew the boatmen and promised to call them and check.
    Just after St Léon the river divided into different channels as it ran between sandbanks covered with pebbles. Antoine beached the canoe on one of these and opened the wine. Bruno halved the baguette as Antoine opened the plastic bag and shared out the strips of fish soaked in lime juice. Bruno relished the sensation, tart but fresh, tasting a thousand times better here on the river with the sounds of water lapping over the shallows.
    ‘My favourite
casse-croûte
,’ said Antoine. ‘And with any luck we’ll fry up fresh trout for lunch. There’s a place I know just downstream by the old monastery that teems with fish. My dad used to tell me it was centuries of the monks’ latrines seeping into the river.’
    ‘Now you tell me,’ Bruno replied, grinning.
    They pushed off and paddled further into the familiar landscape of limestone cliffs and caves. The cliffs towered above them and the erosion of the river over centuries had carveddeep overhangs so that the stone loomed overhead as if ready to topple down upon them. The trees were thick on the inner bank, and without the heat of the sun Bruno shivered in the sudden chill, made all the more eerie by the way the skirls of mist rose from the water.
    Up to his right Bruno now saw emerging high on a cliff a regular formation of stone that looked like the battlements of some giant’s castle. Beneath them ranged a series of cave entrances and then what looked like a gallery carved deep into the rock, the interior lost in shadows.
    ‘This is where they always bite,’ Antoine’s voice broke in. ‘That’s the old monastery up there and the hermits’ cells. Over on the other side you can just see the towers