Skeleton dance

Chapter 2

The Peyraud "vegetable garden" was scarcely large enough to hold the four men, one woman, and one dog that stood in it. Lucien Anatole Joly, inspecteur principal of the Police Nationale's Directorate of Judicial Police, Department of Dordogne, had been looking steadily at Marielle for some time without speaking.

"You are telling me, then," he said without expression, "that since the matter has been in your charge, no action has been taken other than to observe the animal? For three days?"

He wasn't really surprised. He had had dealings with Marielle before: a puffed-up functionary better suited to have been the village postmaster, where he could have known everybody's business even better, and without having to exert himself.

Under his stiff, blue uniform collar the back of Marielle's neck burned, but he wasn't about to let this bloodless dandy in his fine Paris suit get on his nerves, especially not in front of Noyon and that old crank, Peyraud. He smiled knowledgeably at Joly, colleague to colleague. "Well, it's not as if the bones were going to go bad in three days, you know, inspector."

"The bones?" Joly replied without returning the smile. "No, the bones won't have been harmed by the passage of a few days. The site from which they come, however, is a different matter. Three days, we may add, during which an active and inquisitive dog has been permitted-encouraged-to disturb the scene to its heart's content."

The aggravatingly superior tone was too much for Marielle. "And you would have done it differently, inspector?"

Joly, his head tipped back, eyed the shorter, stubbier Marielle down his nose. The man was forever arguing, forever questioning. In themselves, these were commendable traits in Joly's eyes, but only when they went along with listening and learning, which Marielle, for all his quibbling, rarely did.

"To begin with," Joly said crisply, "I would not have permitted the animal to continue to disrupt the site," he said.

"Very true," old Peyraud contributed from the sidelines. "There you have it. Not permit the animal to continue to disrupt the site." He scratched at the gray stubble on his jaw.

Marielle threw him a scalding glance but addressed Joly. "Oh? And how then would you propose to find this 'site'?"

"Yes, that's the question, isn't it?" Joly said, speaking mostly to himself. There wasn't any point, and certainly no pleasure, in quarreling with Marielle. "What is the dog's name?" he asked Peyraud.

"He doesn't have a name."

"Sometimes we call him Toutou," offered Madame Peyraud.

Joly turned to the dog and bent from the waist so that his hands were on his knees. "Come here, Toutou, come on now." Smiling, he held out one hand.

To Marielle's amazement, the cur came, sniffing at the inspector's fingers. Did it think it was going to get its bones back? Ha, good luck to it. When Joly scratched it behind a fleabitten ear, the dog licked his wrist. Well, they said Hitler had gotten along with dogs too.

"Now, Toutou," Joly said, his tone friendlier than the one he'd been using with Marielle, "now, old fellow, we'll need to find out where you've been getting those bones. Are you going to help us?"

Toutou grinned and wagged his tail.

"Good dog." Joly straightened up. "You won't mind," he said to Peyraud, "if these gentlemen and I take Toutou out for an hour and look about the countryside? You have something we can use as a leash, perhaps?"

Marielle stifled his irritation. How like Joly that was. That smug assumption that the great and wise inspecteur principal could accomplish in an hour or two what the poor, benighted police force of Les Eyzies couldn't manage in three days

"Any particular direction you'd care to go in, Inspector?" he asked lightly as Joly was knotting a length of rope around the dog's collar.

"I was hoping you might help me with that, Marielle."

"I? If I knew-"

"The wind, does it usually come from this direction?"

Marielle gawked at him. "What?"

Peyraud cut in. "Yes, almost always from the northeast. It rides up the valley."

"Well, then, Marielle," said Joly, "I suggest we stroll northeast with a good hold on Toutou, permit him to follow his nose, and see what we find."

"Now that's a good idea!" cried Officer Noyon, who instantly made himself as small as possible.

"All set, Toutou?" Joly asked, coiling the end of the seven-foot rope around his hand. "Lead away, then."

It was as if the dog had been waiting all along to be asked. Straining at the rope, his narrow red tongue lolling between stretched black lips, he led the three men along the sloping shelf at the base of the limestone cliffs that backed up against the village, into a copse of stunted oak and juniper and out again, still skirting the undulating, cave-riddled foot of the cliffs as they curved into the forest, away from the village and the river. Never once did he stop to mark a bush, investigate an intriguing hole, or chase a rabbit, real or imaginary. Without deviating he led them to a fall of jumbled boulders that had dropped away from the face of the overhanging cliffs not so many years before-one could still look up and see the whitish patch near the top from which a vast block of the limestone had sheared off and slid down to fracture into huge pieces below.

Once there, the eager Toutou dragged them among the rocks, then sidled into a narrow crevice that had been invisible until they were almost on it. Pulling the panting, excited dog back and keeping it still with a handhold on the collar of rope around its neck Joly squatted on his haunches to peer into the opening. The crevice was an irregular, waist-high space between the base of the concave wall of the cliff and the lower part of one of the big boulders that leaned against it, forming a constricted corridor, narrowing toward the top, about four meters long and less than a meter high. At the far end, dim and shadowed, was what appeared to be a shallow, low-ceilinged cave in the base of the cliff; what the locals called an abri -the sort of place that little boys were forever stumbling into and turning up one prehistoric find or another, bringing real and would-be archaeologists out in droves.

Just over his shoulder Marielle laughed aloud. "It's an abri. Those bones are ten thousand years old. We've been on a wild goose chase, looking for what's left of some stone-age man, what do you think of that?"

It was clear that the prefect regarded this as a personal victory. In the rear, the dutiful Noyon chuckled wanly.

"We'll see soon enough," Joly said. "I'll go first." He handed the rope to Noyon. "Officer, you stay here with the dog."

"It's the story of my life," Noyon murmured.

With a resigned glance, first at the dirt floor of the crevice and then at his crisply creased trousers-what immutable law was it that ordained that he would have to be wearing the new suit from Arnys today?-Joly settled to his knees and began to crawl through the corridor. Behind him, the amazed, deeply offended Toutou yapped loudly away.

"Marielle," Joly called back as he neared the end, "it gets quite narrow in here. If it's too difficult-"

"Don't worry about me, I can make it fine," Marielle snapped, and by dint of a few contortions, a torn epaulet, and an iron determination not to be outdone, he did.

By the time he reached the cave, Joly was sitting on a rounded boulder near the entrance, trying to make sense of the jumbled bones and disturbed earth around him. Obviously, the body had originally been buried in the center of the space, where some of it-the pelvis, the lower part of the vertebral column, and at least one of the upper leg bones were still partially interred. As for the rest-as much as was still there-it was clear that Toutou had been busy, and probably some of his friends as well. Dozens of bones had been wrenched out of the ground and scattered around the cave. There were a shoulder blade and some hand and foot bones in a little heap at the rear, a rib practically at the inspector's feet, vertebrae here and there, and half of an upside-down human jawbone near the cave entrance. All had been heavily gnawed, with edges and bone-ends virtually chewed away. Many, if not most, of the bones were missing altogether; possibly they were in the cardboard box at the Les Eyzies mairie, courtesy of Toutou.

Marielle, on his hands and knees, emerged huffing and red-faced from the crevice into the abri. "Ha," he said jovially, getting to his feet, "what do we have here?"

Joly held up his hand. "Stop there, please. We don't wish to disturb the site any further until it's been processed."

Marielle smiled at him. "Inspector, I hope you won't think it impertinent of me," he said, "but I find myself wondering what process you are referring to. This is a Cro-Magnon abri, many thousands of years old. I assure you, I'm familiar with these things. You see those bits of flint scattered about? They are tool flakes."

"I believe so, yes."

"And the black deposits up there? The result of centuries of fires."

"Yes, I thought as much."

"The cave opening, as you observe, is oriented toward the south to take advantage of the sun, as was typical of the Stone Age; the rock fall which now blocks it is clearly recent. And this-" he gestured at the skeleton. "-is without doubt a Cro-Magnon burial."

"There I have to disagree. I'm afraid we have a homicide investigation on our hands."

"If so, I fear the perpetrator may be somewhat beyond our reach by now."

Joly was astonished. Was the man capable of humor then? "No, I don't think so. I believe this is a recent burial."

"Recent!" Marielle shook his head. "Everything here bespeaks antiquity. Believe me, I've studied these things. Observe the placement of the body, the flexed position, the orientation relative to the cave opening. Observe the fact that the skeleton is without any sign of clothing. Observe-"

"I'm not a student of these things myself, Marielle," Joly said shortly, standing up and coming within a couple of inches of striking his head on the stony roof. The smug and gassy Marielle had finally gotten his goat, as he usually managed to do after an hour or so. "Do you suppose that's why I wasn't aware that the Cro-Magnon people went in for dentistry?"

"Dentistry?…?" Marielle took a harder look at the broken jawbone, where he was dismayed to see the dull sheen of a gold crown on one of the rear teeth. He felt himself flush, hoping that Joly couldn't see it in the dimness of the cave. "It's, ah, possible that I was mistaken about the age…"

"Highly possible, I should say. Now then, Marielle-"

"But on the other hand," the stung Marielle interrupted, "with all due respect, it seems possible that you are mistaken as to the immediate need for a homicide investigation. Where is the evidence of a crime? Many people-villagers, campers, tourists-explore these caves. People have died in them before. They slip and fall, they are crushed by loosened rocks, they die of natural causes-"

Joly looked at him, only barely managing to keep from shaking his head at the man's never-ending obtuseness.

"And do they bury themselves as well?" he asked.