He murmured on about the attractions and dangers to be experienced in the Provençal hills but Jacquemin was no longer listening.

‘Aristide!’ The Commissaire finally called a halt to the monologue. ‘My friend, Aristide! You have been good to me … no, no! Hundreds would have resented my presence on their patch and attempted even to foul up the case. But you—you have been efficiency itself with nothing in view but the common cause. Look—you must let me, in some small way, repay you.’ He brandished the notebook under the Inspector’s nose and in one dramatic gesture tore out the pencilled sheet. ‘I relieve you of this piece of idiocy! It’s the least I can do. I’ll attend and report back. This place is on my way north. Look—give me a car and a driver from the Brigade and we’ll set off into the hinterland. There’s bound to be a hostelry of some sort in the village—I don’t mind slumming it. I’ll poke about in the rubble, declare the destruction to be the result of a narrowly focused freak earthquake and send the driver straight back to you with a report when he’s dropped me off at the railway station in Avignon. Let me ease your burden as you have eased mine, though to this very small degree.’

The men regarded each other dewy-eyed, exclaimed with mutual delight, protested and conceded and called for cognac.

The Commissaire’s mind was already devising the wording of three telegrams. The phrases were grave and regretful: unavoidably detained … case of international concern … reciprocity of fraternal assistance an imperative … Monique (and her mother), Rachel, Adèle—they could all make what they liked of it.

The Inspector was asking himself how on earth he’d managed to pull it off so easily. Should he warn them up there at the château? No! Let the buggers find out for themselves!

Chapter Nine

At the moment the two French policemen were settling their new-found agreement and their delicious fish lunch with a brandy, Joe, in the chapel, was working hard not to throw up his rabbit stew into some available urn.

The tiny body was hanging by the neck. Dead for some days, it was already being consumed by wriggling maggots of various kinds and giving off a revolting odour. Joe took a pencil from his pocket and poked at it. It gave signs of spongy resistance and was not yet dried out. A fly buzzed bad-temperedly from the throat and Joe swatted it away in disgust. Where in hell did they come from, these lousy flesh-eaters? He answered his own question: beetles and flies in the ancient woodwork aplenty no doubt. Some might well have been carried into the building in the animal’s own fur.

And what was the significance? ‘A message’, de Pacy had hinted.

What was one dead creature dangling from a vandalized tomb trying to tell him? What had it said to de Pacy?

Joe was seized for a moment by a healthy rush of indignation and an urge to laugh at his ludicrous situation. His last case in London had involved multiple corpses, eviscerations, and disposal of limbs and heads in packing cases left at St Pancras station. It had involved the talents of the clever men who worked with test tubes, swabs, microscopes and Bunsen burners to establish blood groups and identify fingerprints. He heard himself gleefully recounting his exploits in France to his friend, Chief Inspector Ralph Cottingham, on his return to London: ‘Equipped only with a pencil, I examined the entrails of a rabbit for a clue as to who’d smashed up a statue …’ The story would grow in absurdity as he told it.

He remembered with a flash of guilt the statement he’d been provoked into making after lunch. ‘They start with small animals … work their way up to children and weaker members of society’ or some such guff he’d spouted.

And here was stage one, as predicted.

Or was it? Might it be no more than just—a message? De Pacy had clearly interpreted it as such. Joe couldn’t leave the chapel and meet the steward’s quizzical eye still unaware.

He stared on at the pathetic form willing it to speak. Hanging up in pairs outside a game butcher’s shop, he’d have admired rabbits. He’d have known just which ones to choose. Served up to him in a dish with one of Madame Dalbert’s wonderful sauces, he’d have scoffed the lot and dabbed up the juices with a hunk of bread. And complimented the cook. So why was he finding this one little corpse so sinister?

Sinister. There flashed into his mind a woodcut he’d studied with horror when he was a boy. He’d no idea what his age had been at the time but he had certainly been too young to be exposed to such a graphic image. Not exposed exactly! His own cunning and curiosity had led him to the discovery and he’d never confided it to anyone. Left alone with a head cold while on holiday with his London uncles one day, he’d gone along to the library to entertain himself and had straightaway headed for the section his uncles had banned him from approaching. He knew where the key was and in minutes had unlocked the bookcase and wedged the library door in case Simmons should come and thoughtfully offer him a glass of honey and lemon.

And there they were, to be pored over at his leisure: German, French and Italian publications with copious illustrations of naked ladies. And just the kind he liked. Large-breasted, long-legged beauties, sometimes goddesses, always smiling a welcome. He had imagined himself a Paris, Prince of Troy, in possession of a golden apple and, in order to give his illicit scrutiny a more acceptable motive, decided he was going to be the ultimate judge, making, in a classically acceptable manner, the award to the one who he decided was the most lovely. He unwrapped a disc of Sharpe’s Toffee, popped it into his mouth and smoothed out the shiny gold wrapper. He folded it with his thumbnail into the shape of a crown and decided he’d leave it, as his prize, marking the page of the winner. So far Botticelli’s Roman goddess Flora was in the lead. She had all her clothes on but he liked her naughty face. She looked straight out at him from the book, golden and lovely and about to tell him a joke or throw him a flower. But, strangely, he could never remember who had received the Sandilands Prize for Pulchritude.

It had been a drawing of the most revolting woman he had ever set eyes on that had stayed with him over the years. Lucky it didn’t ruin him for life, he sometimes thought.

The book had been an Italian publication. Heavy red leather and gold lettering. The pages had a rich waxy feel to them as he turned them slowly. Italian beauties of the thirteenth century onwards had delighted him one after the other, until he came upon her. ‘Luxuria’ was her name. A drawing by Pisanello from the fifteenth century. She had everything that ought to have been alluring: youth, a smile, a distant expression of satisfied pleasure, an abundance of golden hair that waved its way like a cloak right down to her bottom. Her only jewellery was a chain about her left ankle. But she was skinny. Her flesh was wasted and her elbow bones poked through the skin. Her knee caps were prominent as was a bone on her right buttock. Joe had turned the book this way and that, using all his scant knowledge of female anatomy to decide huffily that the artist had never seen a naked woman before. Surely? Women didn’t have bones in that place. And the breasts? A pair of small Scottish baps too widely spaced. The belly was all wrong too. Distended. The poor lady clearly had some kind of disease. He’d seen sheep out on the hill with the same symptoms.

Before turning on in disgust his eye had been caught by the animal crouching at Luxuria’s right foot.

The painter reinstated himself somewhat in Joe’s estimation by the quality of his portrayal of the rabbit. Joe knew about rabbits. He’d shot, skinned and jointed many a one ready for the pot and appreciated them in all their forms. So what was this witch-like hag doing alongside a perfectly drawn rabbit? Curiosity always won through with Joe and, sighing, he went to fetch an Italian dictionary to decipher the script that accompanied the strange picture. Half an hour later he had it.