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

of Château Marzac above the lower ridge …’ He paused. ‘Got one.’
    He pulled in his line to reveal two wriggling trout, each about twenty centimetres long. He detached the hooks and put them in his catch net and dropped it back over the side of the canoe. No sooner had he re-baited his hooks and put the line back into the water than he caught another, and a fourth bit as he began to haul the line back in.
    ‘Told you this was a good spot,’ he said.
    They came to a stretch where the river widened and the sun shone down over a low pebbled island in the middle of the stream. Antoine steered the canoe under some low-hanging boughs that made Bruno duck. Then they were in a small and hidden lagoon with a tiny pebble beach and beside it a tumbledown wooden boathouse.
    ‘
Tiens
,’ said Antoine. ‘The river’s broken through.’ He pointed with his paddle to a spot beneath overhanging treeswhere Bruno could see the flow of the main river coming into the lagoon. He took them close to the point where the river gushed in, less than a metre wide, but he and Bruno had to paddle to hold the canoe steady against the strong current.
    ‘How would the river have done that?’ Bruno asked.
    ‘
Ecrevisses
,’ said Antoine. Crayfish, small freshwater crustaceans that looked like miniature lobsters and tasted even better, had probably nibbled and nibbled away at some long-sunken log that held the dam together even as the river scoured and eroded it from the other side. Then came a strong rain, a flood surge in the river and the dam gave way.
    ‘So if she committed suicide here, she could have expected that her boat would remain inside the lagoon,’ Bruno suggested. ‘She wasn’t to know it was no longer a lagoon, and the new current carried her out to the main stream. Could it have happened like that?’
    ‘Maybe,’ Antoine replied, ‘but only if she wanted to keep her death secret. Remember the
toubib
’s theory? Gelletreau said she might have wanted the world to see her body, to make a big display.’
    Antoine let the current take them back into the middle of the tree-fringed lagoon and steered them to the small beach where they landed and walked up to the old boathouse. There was no padlock on the door, just a simple wooden latch. Inside was the wreck of an old sailboat, big enough for an adult and a child, its mast worm-eaten. To one side was a space with smears in the dust. Old clothes hung on hooks on the wall alongside loops of ropes of different sizes. Hetouched some of the hanging clothes and dust rose, except for one dark garment. He took it from the hook and held it up. It was a robe of some kind with a hood, of coarse wool. It carried a faint scent of something, possibly perfume, possibly the merest hint of woodsmoke. The aroma was elusive, disappearing before Bruno could begin to identify it. But at least it had been used fairly recently.
    ‘I’d say that it was a punt that lay here,’ said Antoine, gesturing at the gap beside the crumbling sailboat. He pointed up to the sagging rafters where two long poles lay across the beams. ‘Those are punt poles.’
    They went outside and looked at the scrape marks from the doors to the water. The earth around them was scuffed, but that could have been the usual markings of ducks, voles and water rats that used the riverbanks.
    ‘A punt could have been launched here, and one was certainly kept there,’ said Antoine. ‘You may have found your spot.’
    The boathouse was part of the land that belonged to the Red Château, Antoine explained, so named because of the owner, the Red Countess. The name rang a very distant bell with Bruno.
    ‘You’re too young to remember,’ Antoine said. ‘But she was famous in her day, an aristocrat in the Communist Party. She was always in the papers, leading demonstrations, making speeches. But the Red Countess was also a celebrity, Cannes film festival and the races at Longchamps, all that sort of thing. Yves Montand was a boyfriend, and Camus before he killed himself. And Malraux, of course.’
    The Red Countess, thought Bruno. It was one of those names you knew you ought to know, from an era just before his own. Somehow it sparked memories of newsreels he’d seen of another, much older France in the 1950s: Jean-Paul Sartre and a huge Communist Party, Piaf at the Olympia and Jacques Brel and smoky nightclubs on the Left Bank. But the name triggered other associations: the
Chant des Partisans
and the parade of the