Murder on the Clifftops Page 8

  Melissa stopped short, uncertain what to do. Perhaps he had stepped behind a tree to relieve himself. If she went on, there might be an embarrassing confrontation. She stood for several seconds, fingering her camera, staring up at the trees, glancing down the path and listening for the sound of trampling in the undergrowth that would herald Fernand’s return to his task. Nothing. No human movement. Apart from bird calls, the rustling of leaves in the wind and the faint sound of rushing water in the distance, there was silence.

  Turning, she found Fernand at her side, as if he had risen out of the earth. She gave a startled gasp; he laid a warning finger on his lips and put a hand on her arm.

  ‘Were you seen? Were you followed?’ he asked in a whisper.

  Melissa shook her head, suppressing a smile. ‘No,’ she whispered back.

  ‘Are you sure?’ His grip tightened a shade.

  Melissa glanced down at the powerful fingers with the powdering of sawdust round the nails and then up into the fierce black eyes, and her heart began to thump. No need to be scared, just play along with him, she told herself. As long as he believes you’re on his side while he acts out his fantasy, he won’t harm you. But if he gets it into his head that you’re a spy. . . .

  She glanced back down the path and then leaned forward so that her lips almost touched his ear. ‘I took every precaution . . . I saw no one.’

  ‘It is well.’ He thought for a moment, then tugged at her arm. ‘We must take no risks . . . let us go to the refuge. If anyone should come, we shall hear them, but they will never find us. Tread quietly!’

  Before Melissa realised what was happening, he had led her off the path and in among the trees. He moved lightly over the rough ground, dodging round bushes, avoiding every loose stone and broken twig. Melissa recalled Juliette’s words: ‘He could slip through the forest as silently as a cat.’ Hardly aware of what she was doing, she tried to do the same, thankful that her shoes had soft soles.

  Soon there were no more trees and the sound of tumbling water grew louder. A wooden rail at waist height barred their way; they must be very close to the edge of the cliff. Fernand let go of Melissa’s hand, vaulted over the rail and beckoned urgently to her to follow.

  It was her opportunity to escape from this crazy and possibly dangerous game of let’s pretend. But even as the idea occurred to her, she dismissed it; from the athletic way Fernand had cleared the rail it was likely that his legs were as strong and muscular as his sinewy arms and he would probably catch her long before she reached the house. Her flight would have convinced him that she was on her way to betray him and who knew what it would enter his confused mind to do to her? Without a word, she clambered over the rail, rather awkwardly because of the camera dangling from her wrist.

  Now the sound of the river seemed to come from beneath their feet. They must be almost at the edge of the cliff. She remembered Alain Gebrec’s warning that parts of it were unstable; a vision of the shattered body of Wolfgang Klein swam before her eyes, her stomach contracted and her legs turned to cotton wool. When, without warning, Fernand dropped on to all fours beside a huge outcrop of bare rock, she all but fell on top of him. He glanced back as if looking for signs of pursuit.

  ‘We must move quickly now, before we are seen,’ he whispered and began to crawl forward round the rock. His head and shoulders disappeared; only his backside and his long legs in the coarse blue trousers were visible. Melissa felt a wild desire to laugh at the thought of herself, a sane Englishwoman in her forties, playing a sort of eighteenth-century game of cops and robbers with a simple-minded Frenchman suffering from delusions. It was utterly ludicrous. It scared her to death.

  Fernand had completely vanished, giving her a second chance to escape, yet, almost without hesitation, she began to follow. She felt certain that he intended her no harm and her fear began to recede, its place taken by a surge of excitement and anticipation. She was being led to a place that many people had heard about, but only a handful of desperate, hunted souls had actually seen.

  Reaching the point where Fernand had disappeared, she crawled round the angle of rock. Before her was a narrow ledge, scarcely more than a metre wide. On the left was the overhanging face of the cliff, beneath which it would be impossible to stand upright. On the right was a sheer drop into nothing.

  ‘Don’t look down. Come to me!’

  Almost transfixed with terror, Melissa dragged her eyes from the edge. Fernand was crouched in a cleft in the rock, a little above her and less than three metres away. Her entire body was shaking, yet the sight of his brown arm reaching out towards her and the confident ring in his voice gave her courage. She began inching towards him, hugging the face of the cliff, praying that the rock beneath her would hold. She almost wept with relief as his strong fingers closed round her hand and guided her to the safety of a broad platform of stone, where at last it was possible to stand upright. He bowed ceremonially and gestured into the black cavern behind them.

  ‘Welcome to the secret refuge!’ he said proudly.

  Seven

  A few years previously, Melissa had been in the Cévennes on a motoring holiday with her parents-in-law. Margaret and Arthur Craig were, strictly speaking, her parents-out-of-law, since their son, Guy, had died in a car accident without even knowing that she was pregnant, let alone considering marriage. Distraught with grief and shock, rejected by her own mother and father, Melissa had been taken by the warmhearted Craigs into their own home; the small matter of illegitimacy had been discreetly dealt with by a statutory change of name and a wedding-ring, and the bereaved parents had found consolation for the loss of their only child in caring for his son.

  It was during that holiday that the notion had first come to Melissa of setting a novel in the region. They had been visiting Trabuc and their guide had made reference to the use of the famous grottoes as a meeting-place by the Camisards. At the time, the term meant nothing to her, but she had been intrigued, read the references to the religious wars in the regional guide-book and mentally filed the information for future use.

  The grottoes themselves she had found disappointing. She had been reminded of a school outing, with the guide leading the party in a crocodile down man-made stairways protected by iron railings, stopping every few yards to bombard his audience with statistics or manipulate the complex lighting and communication system. There had been high spots, of course – particularly the grand couloir, with its subterranean lake and its vast stalactites overhanging the uncannily still green water – but the presence of so much technology and the chattering tourists had the effect of reducing a natural wonder to the level of a modern theme park.

  She recalled trying to imagine the feelings of the fugitives in those far-off times as they waited – perhaps round a guttering lamp, perhaps in total darkness – while a rapacious enemy combed the countryside above their heads, thirsty for blood. For once, her imagination had failed her, stifled by the chorus of predictable questions, the exclamations of wonder and admiration, the admonitions of anxious parents to over-venturesome children.

  Now, standing beside Fernand in the mouth of a gash in the cliff, with the river raging beneath their feet and an ink-dark cavern ahead, she experienced a tingle of awe and anticipation that swept away the fear and the vertigo.

  ‘Wait here a moment!’ Fernand disappeared into the cave; an instant later there was a click and a powerful torch drove a beam into the darkness. Slowly, it moved upwards among jagged folds of rock hanging like petrified curtains above their heads; it swung to the right and travelled downwards, glistening on a myriad crystalline particles in the rock face; it moved across to the left and traced a black line where the stone floor ended abruptly just short of the far wall.

  ‘Never go over there,’ warned Fernand. ‘That way, it is death!’ Like a pebble in a well-shaft, the words fell into the void and then came rushing back from invisible walls, echoing above the roar of the water: ‘it is death . . . is death . . . is death!’

  Meli
ssa closed her eyes and swallowed the knot in her throat.

  ‘I’ll remember,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Come!’ He moved forward, shining the torch ahead of them.

  Glancing over her shoulder, Melissa saw that the entrance had already shrunk to a slit. With an effort, she drove from her mind the thought of the return journey, filling it instead with the experience of the moment, absorbing the sights, the impressions and sensations, storing them in her brain, wishing she had a notebook with her so that she could record them in all their vividness and immediacy.

  Fernand stopped and set the torch upright on a ledge. There was a scraping sound, the flare of a match and a whiff of paraffin, then the soft yellow light of a storm lantern replaced the harsh electric beam.

  ‘Now, we can penetrate to the refuge itself!’ His voice was hushed, almost reverent. Melissa felt as if she were about to enter a church.

  They moved beneath an archway of stalactites. There were no corresponding accretions on the floor, no moisture dripped from overhead. Aeons ago, the waters must have taken a different path and the men who discovered the cave had chipped away the stalagmites to make a passage into the gallery beyond, the gallery where Melissa and Fernand now stood.

  She stared incredulously about her. The place was furnished; there were chairs, a deal table, a couple of mattresses. There was even a worn rug spread on the uneven stones and a heap of blankets and pillows.

  For a full minute, neither of them spoke. The sound of the water had become muted; like background music, it receded from consciousness, becoming almost a part of the stillness and the silence.

  Fernand set his lantern on the table and indicated one of the chairs. ‘Will you sit down, Madame?’ He might have been receiving her in the best parlour on a Sunday afternoon. Facing him across the bleached wooden plank, Melissa became aware of an extraordinary change in his manner. His dark eyes no longer burned with fanaticism, nor were they watchful or mistrustful, but warm, friendly, almost humorous. ‘I regret, I cannot offer any refreshment, Madame,’ he said with a smile. ‘I was not expecting a visitor!’

  ‘Please, don’t apologise,’ she murmured, wondering if this was another phase of the game, yet sensing that it was not. Her pulse rate had slowed to somewhere near normal; she sat back in the creaking wooden chair in a deliberate effort to appear relaxed, and returned his smile. ‘I would never have believed such a place existed,’ she continued, glancing round the cave. ‘When was it discovered?’

  ‘It has been known to our people for centuries. The Camisards took refuge here from the Catholic armies . . . and the Maquis used it as a hiding place for their weapons during the Occupation.’

  ‘And the Germans never found it?’

  ‘Never. Sometimes, when the Gestapo came in search of one of our refugees, the men of the Maquis were able to conceal him here until the danger was past.’

  ‘Your refugees?’ Melissa remembered what Rose had said. ‘Do you mean foreigners?’

  ‘But yes. Before the war, they came from many lands to escape from the Nazis – Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, even some Germans who were against Hitler. Many went to Paris to find work, but after the fall of France they began making their way to the cities of the south, where they could live in safety. But, in 1942, the Wermacht moved into the whole of our country and things changed.’

  ‘And the refugees fled to the mountains?’

  ‘Not at first. At first, things were not so bad. The Germans were more interested at that time in hunting Communists, but later came the Gestapo and then things became much more dangerous. It was then that the city pastors began asking their brethren in the mountain villages to organise sanctuary for the refugees. We gave them food and shelter, and in return they worked on our farms, helped tend the flocks, bring in the harvest . . .’

  ‘You mean, they lived here openly? Didn’t anyone inform on them?’

  Fernand drew himself erect in his chair and lifted his head.

  ‘That is not our way,’ he said simply. ‘The people of the Cévennes have always given refuge to the oppressed.’

  ‘And they lived here in safety throughout the war?’

  ‘Alas, not always in safety. Among the so-called refugees, there were spies sent by the Germans. One such betrayed some of our best men.’

  A shadow fell over his face and he became silent, as if at some disturbing memory. Recalling the tragedy of which Juliette had spoken and which had had such a devastating effect on his mind, Melissa felt uneasy. She sensed that it might take but a tiny jolt to send him back into his fantasy world. She glanced at her watch; already it was well past four and Iris would be expecting her at five.

  ‘Perhaps . . .’ she began, but Fernand was speaking again. It was as if she was no longer there; his eyes were unfocused and his voice expressionless.

  ‘Many died because of his treachery, some of them his own countrymen . . . and Roland . . . Roland!’ His voice broke and a spasm of pain contorted his face.

  Overwhelmed with compassion, Melissa put out a hand and laid it on his arm. A single tear fell on it before he regained control and said with quiet pride, ‘The traitor escaped our justice, but our refuge remained a secret.’

  ‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ she said. ‘I feel very privileged.’

  ‘I bring you because I know you to be one of us.’

  The final words, and something in the tone of his voice, sent a chill up Melissa’s spine. Up to now she had been so enthralled by the adventure that, despite being clad in only a cotton shirt and slacks, she had hardly noticed the cold. She shivered and rubbed her arms, trying to conceal her rising agitation.

  Fernand stood up. ‘Forgive me, Madame. I regret, the central heating does not work!’ He was back in the present, outwardly rational, with a flash of wry humour. ‘We must return.’

  He picked up the lantern and led the way. When they reached the next chamber he extinguished it and exchanged it for the torch. In silence, they made their way back to where the sunlight pierced the cliff. The cleft in the rock made a dramatic framework to the distant mountains, reminding Melissa of her initial reason for this expedition. She glanced at the automatic camera attached to her wrist; all this time she had been clutching it without giving it a thought.

  Leaving the torch on its ledge, Fernand moved towards the entrance and then stopped, half-turned and gestured to the far wall and the sinister shadow that marked the emptiness below.

  ‘Remember my warning, if you should ever have need to return here.’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ faltered Melissa, aware once more of the sound of the river echoing round the cavern. Her head swam; she shut her eyes and pressed herself against the wall, fighting to steady herself for the return trip, struggling to contain an urge to vomit.

  When she opened her eyes, Fernand had gone. She peered out and saw him crawling on hands and knees along the ledge. It took more courage than she knew she possessed to follow him. With clenched teeth, keeping her head low and her eyes half-closed, she hugged the cliff-face and inched her way along. Her outstretched hand disturbed a fragment of loose rock, sending it tumbling over the precipice; for one hideous moment she fancied the entire ledge was on the move and about to hurl her into the chasm. When at last she was able to stand upright in safety, her knees buckled and her body was drenched with sweat.

  She heard the distant sound of the tractor starting up, which meant that Fernand had no intention of waiting for her. It was no matter; she knew the way back. She stopped for a moment to brush the dust from her hands and clothes and set off back to the house. It was a quarter to five when she reached it.

  There was still no sign of the others. Melissa slipped indoors to wash her face and hands; it was important to appear normal, as any hint of agitation would be pounced on by Iris and lead to a cross-examination. She went back to the car, put away the camera, fetched her book and settled in a chair by the pool to wait. A few minutes later she heard the tractor clattering into the yar
d. Through the archway she saw Fernand jump down, open the door of the shed, then climb up again and drive in. She wondered if he would tell Juliette of their visit to the refuge. Perhaps the memory was already buried in some corner of his mind.

  She began idly turning the pages of the book. Moments later a shadow fell across it. Philippe Bonard was standing beside her.

  ‘You permit?’ He gestured toward an empty chair.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He pulled the chair round to face hers and sat down.

  It was easy to see why Iris found the man so attractive. He had a magnetic quality which would have drawn attention even without the good looks, the hand-made clothes and impeccable grooming. It was impossible not to respond to his smile.

  ‘Where are your students?’ she asked. ‘Surely you haven’t deserted them?’

  ‘By no means. They are in the library, preparing for tomorrow’s exercise.’

  ‘What exercise is that?’

  ‘I have made arrangements with certain people in the neighbourhood – a pastor, a doctor, business people, a local historian and so on – to receive my students from time to time and talk about their work. It helps to give my students’ – he reiterated the words with an almost fatherly affection – ‘an insight into the minds, the outlook, the culture of the French people . . . and, of course, it provides excellent opportunities for them to improve their French.’ Hands and shoulders swam to and fro, emphasising each point.

  ‘I’m sure it’s very useful experience,’ said Melissa politely.

  ‘It is a good principle, you know,’ Bonard continued, warming to his theme, ‘especially for mature students, to leave the classroom and work in the environment.’ His eyes shone with the enthusiasm of a man who has found his vocation. ‘Your good friend Iris, she shares my philosophy. Each day, she takes her class out of doors to experience Nature and learn from her wisdom. Today, for example, they are down by the river, observing the wildlife, the vegetation, the reflections in the water.’ He sat back in his chair, beaming with pride as he added, ‘The pure water of our French rivers is unsurpassed in the entire world!’