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

beautiful woman had died peacefully. Copies would go out to all the
Mairies
, Gendarmeries and municipal police offices in the
Département
, to the fire brigades and medical centres, newspapers and all public offices. Police would be expected to show copies of the photo around the hotels and bars and markets.
    The first of Bruno’s targets was a small restaurant with a wide terrace overlooking the river and rowing boats for hire. It had been closed when Bruno and Antoine had taken the canoe trip. Now it was open, but the owner had never heard of anyone owning a punt. The second target was a holiday home, still locked and with all the shutters closed. Dead leaves from the previous autumn were still piled up by the double doors of the boathouse. The windows were thick with dust, but Bruno was able to force the doors apart enough to see that the only contents were two rotting canoes. The third was a small manor house with a stream that flowed into the river. There was no boathouse, but Bruno asked the elderlycouple inside if he might check the small garage which was close to the stream. It was already open and contained only their Mercedes, with scant room even for that.
    ‘That leaves the Red Château, the one I’ve been looking forward to,’ said Isabelle. She had printed out the reference in
Mérimée
, the historic monuments website of the Ministry of Culture, and read aloud the details. The castle was first mentioned in archives in the eleventh century, and had changed hands several times before being destroyed in the Hundred Years War. It was completely rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century after the English had been expelled. For fear they might return it had retained the look of a fortress, until softened by some Renaissance windows in the next century. The northern wing, with an open gallery leading into the courtyard and a separate private chapel, dated from the seventeenth century. The whole building had been restored by a local architect in the 1850s.
    ‘Like most of these old places, it’s been turned into a company, a
Société Civile Immobilière
, to avoid inheritance taxes,’ Bruno said. Taxes to the local commune were paid by the company and the voters’ roll for the Commune listed the only full-time residents as two sisters, Hortense and Héloïse.
    ‘Hortense was the famous one, the Red Countess,’ said J-J. ‘I can’t say I ever heard of the other one. She’ll be at least eighty by now.’
    ‘There’s some confusion over her date of birth,’ said Bruno, who had been doing some research by computer. ‘She told different people different things, but the citation when she was made a
Compagnon de la Résistance
said she began workingas a courier at the age of fifteen, even before the Germans took over the Vichy zone in 1942. So she must have been born between 1925 and 1928.’
    ‘She was a
Compagnon
?’ said Isabelle.’That’s impressive. They didn’t make many of those.’
    ‘Just over a thousand, and De Gaulle himself had to approve every one,’ Bruno said. ‘Another sixty-two thousand got the
Médaille de la Résistance
. Not many, in a nation of fifty million. But she earned it. Not just a courier, she organized parachute drops and hid guns and took part in some of the battles after the Liberation.’
    ‘Wasn’t there something about an illegitimate child?’ J-J asked.
    ‘She gave birth to a daughter in early 1945,’ Bruno replied. ‘The father had been a Resistance fighter who was killed, and she never identified him. She just called him her own unknown soldier of the Liberation.’
    ‘If this château is the best bet for your mystery woman, we’d better tread carefully,’ J-J said. ‘Elderly woman, war heroine, aristocrat …’
    ‘And don’t forget member in good standing of the Communist Party, holder of the Red Partisan medal and Order of the Patriotic War, first class, awarded and pinned onto her proud chest by Stalin himself in the Kremlin,’ said Bruno. ‘There’s a lot about her on the internet.’
    ‘Quite a woman,’ said Isabelle, as they turned into the long avenue of poplar trees that led down the gravel drive. ‘And quite a château.’
    Two round towers of grey-gold stone, only partly softenedby ivy and topped by conical roofs of black slate, guarded an entrance from which the gates had been removed. The towers were magnificent relics, but far too large for the shrunken château that huddled beneath them. The whole structure seemed