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

said smoothly. ‘You understand that we have to write them in advance, and apparently she’s very ill, bedridden up at the Red Château.’
    ‘
Putain
,’ said Montsouris, wiping his face with a beefy hand. ‘I still think of her as young, but you’re right. She’ll be in her eighties by now. It’ll be a sad day when she goes.’
    ‘So how do you remember her?’ Gilles asked.
    ‘It was May 1968, and I was fifteen, looking forward to leaving school and joining my dad on the railways.’ Montsouris took a long sip of his Ricard. His father was a militant, he explained, a lifelong member of the Communist Party and on the executive committee of the CGT union. When he went up to help organize the general strike he took his son with him, believing that it was the hour of the revolution come at last.
    ‘My dad and I were together with the students on the Left Bank on the Friday night, helping to build barricades on the Rue St Jacques, when they sent the CRS bastards in with tear gas,’ he said. The
Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité
were the feared and ruthless riot police. He and his father had found a small bulldozer on a building site and used it to shovel heaps of sand and bricks to stiffen the barricades. The general strike was on the Monday and it was later that week when the two of them went to the big Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt in the Paris suburbs with its forty thousand workers.
    ‘That was when I saw her. My dad was going to be speaking so I was right up there by the stage and this elegant woman, dressed up to the nines and with her daughter beside her,gave the best speech I ever heard,’ he recounted. ‘I’ll never forget it. Forty thousand people and you could have heard a pin drop.
    ‘She was our heroine,’ he said. She had spoken of her time in the Resistance and how it had been the workers and the Party who led it and how they’d been betrayed after 1945. She introduced her daughter, who was a student at the Sorbonne, and said the workers ought to be ashamed to leave the students to face the French riot police alone.
    ‘This was our moment, she said, our 1789, our chance to overthrow a corrupt and rotten system, our chance to storm the Bastille …’
    Heads were turning in the café and Ivan poked his head around the kitchen door as Montsouris’s voice rose and tears shone in his eyes as he recalled a scene four decades in the past.
    ‘That was the only time you saw the Red Countess?’ Gilles asked gently.
    Montsouris ignored the question. ‘I’d have died for her,’ he said, rose and stomped away, leaving half a glass of Ricard behind him.
    ‘I never heard that story before,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m glad I did.’ He sank his beer, shook hands and got up to leave, checking his watch. Hector and Balzac were waiting.
    ‘The girl in Santa Barbara,’ said Gilles, waving away the coins Bruno was fishing from his pocket. ‘Turns out she’s in college in Montreal. We’re flying a guy in from New York.’
    Bruno nodded an acknowledgement as he left. If he had a murder, or even two, he had no obvious motive for eitherone. He had some proof and plenty of suspects but no chain of logic to bind them together into any kind of coherent explanation for the deaths of Athénaïs and Junot, let alone connect them. If Athénaïs had not committed suicide, had she been a willing participant in some Satanist ceremony that had somehow led to her death? Or had the whole scene in the boat been concocted to cover up her murder?
    He stopped in his tracks just before he reached his van. If the scene had been concocted, how had they obtained the candles? He opened his notebook and thumbed back to the notes he’d taken at the supermarket when first looking for Francette when he’d been given the names of the main distributors of candles. Gallotin was the name of the theatrical costumiers and suppliers in Paris, one of the few places that stocked the big black candles that had been in the punt. Then he leafed forward to the pages of notes he had taken from the family bible in the library of the Red Château. When he’d looked at the unopened mail on the table in the great hall he’d scribbled the words
‘envelope, count, Gallotin, Paris’
. He recalled the envelope. It had one of those transparent windows that usually signalled a bill.
    As he climbed into his van and set off for Pamela’s house his phone vibrated. He took it from the pouch to glance at the screen, saw it was