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

details?’ Bruno asked.
    The Baron shook his head. ‘He just said he thought there might be a link to that dead woman you pulled out of the river.’ He led the way across the courtyard and over a wide lawn to the barn where he kept his cars. He steered Bruno to the battered old Peugeot rather than his Mercedes, reversed out and set off through the archway into the tiny hamlet that surrounded his home and up the hill.
    Part of the wide stretch of land that the Baron owned, the Gouffre de Colombac was one of the largest caves in the region. Unlike the more famous caves such as Lascaux with its prehistoric paintings, this was simply a vast space beneath the earth. Its main chamber was almost spherical, over a hundred metres wide and almost as high. The space was unevenly divided by an underground river that led to an ominously still lake. Bruno had been inside several times for concerts, the musicians performing from the far side of the river and the audience on chairs and benches or perched on the wide stone steps that nature had somehow carved into one wall. He had once paid the entrance fee just to see the place, one of the largest caves in France, and with a dark reputation.
    For centuries, the locals had called it the Devil’s Cave, for the puffs of smoke they saw sometimes gusting from a hole in the earth. This phenomenon was now known to be a form of condensation from the micro-climate inside the vast cave rather than smoke from the fires of Hell. The land around it, part of an old pilgrimage route from the shrine of Rocamadour and the Abbey of Cadouin that led to Compostela at the far north-western tip of Spain, had for centuriesattracted bands of brigands. They lay in wait to rob ill-guarded pilgrims and tip their bodies down the smoking hole into the gulf below. When the cave had first been opened in the nineteenth century, an intrepid explorer had been winched down on a rope, trying vainly to pierce the darkness with a puny lantern. When he had finally touched bottom, he found he had landed on a great heap of bones, mainly human but also animal, from beasts that had stumbled into the hole.
    Now, cleverly lit and with pedal-boats for hire to explore the sunken lake, it was a tourist attraction. As well as the entrance fee, the café and souvenir shop and the special concerts, the cave made a steady profit from the stoneware it produced. Rack upon rack of plates, jugs, glasses, vases and every other implement that the managers could think of were left under the places where the water, heavy with particles of limestone, dripped down and slowly calcified the objects beneath. After a year or so in the cave, the items looked as though they had been carved from solid stone, and they were so popular that Marcel could barely keep up with the demand.
    Smaller chambers led off from the main space, and the eerie formations of stalagmites and stalactites had been carefully lit to justify the rather fanciful names they had been given, such as the Chapel of Our Lady, after a thick rock that looked like a praying woman in a hood and a long cloak; or Napoleon’s Bedchamber, which resembled a massive four-poster bed with hangings swooping around it and a curious shape that could be interpreted as a giant letter N.
    Marcel was the second generation of his family to leasethe cave from the Baron, paying him a modest rent and a healthy share of the annual profits. Marcel’s wife and sisters, his sons and cousins all worked in the family business, investing cautiously in improvements. Bruno had heard they were working on a
son et lumière
show for summer evenings when no concert was booked.
    Marcel greeted them at what he called the stage door, a secondary entrance high enough for the musicians’ trailers and wide enough for the pedal-boats. The public entrance around the corner was deliberately low, narrow and dark, so that the visitor’s eventual sight of the majestic scale of the cave would be all the more impressive. Marcel unlocked the double doors of green metal and pulled down the master switch for the lights. The three men walked down for perhaps fifty metres before reaching the cave itself. They were standing on a balcony carved into the side, with a metal railing to prevent them from falling and a long wide ramp leading down to the floor of the cave. Off to one side a storeroom had been found or perhaps carved from the rock. Bruno could see long rows of folding chairs stacked up inside.
    ‘We haven’t opened yet