Stonekiller Read Online Free PDF Page A

still very effective.’
    From the cave entrance they looked down over the valley and off towards the site of the murder. Shadows now cooled the lower slopes. Night was coming but would take its time. At peace with the world and left largely to itself, the little valley exuded only the gentle hush of its waterfall and then the sound of birds awakening after the heat.
    Kohler sensed his partner needed this moment. They were standing in the footsteps of ancestors who would have looked out on a quite different valley, yet it was the same. Pristine.
    Louis heaved a sigh. Kohler held his breath. It was at times like this that the bond between them only grew stronger, more welcome, more.…
    A scream shattered the silence. Long and hard and high pitched, it was ripped right out of the person who uttered it. Again and again it came, shrill as it raced across the trees to them.
    For perhaps ten seconds there was a pause. Eyes riveted on the distant spot, their whole attention focused, they waited. Then again it came. Again! Anguish and despair and then … then … ‘ MAMAN! MAMAN! AH NO! NO! ’
    They leapt off the edge and went down the talus flinging their arms out for balance, racing … racing … No time … no time … Got to find her. Got to stop her. Got to get her away from that thing. That thing.…

2
    D AWN CAME AT LAST, AND FROM THE RIVER FAR below the ancient fortified town of Domme, mist in tendrils hugged the lowlands along the Dordogne.
    St-Cyr heaved a sigh. The view, among the finest in France, was fantastic, yet try as he did, he could not keep from hearing that poor woman’s screams and feel, as he had yesterday, the profoundness of the encompassing silence. Had screams like that echoed in that little valley one hundred thousand years ago?
    The mist lay in a whitish-grey gossamer over the deep, dark shadowy blue of the river and the green of ordered fields and poplars. Not a swastika showed, not a Wehrmacht convoy or patrol, not even the open touring car of some SS bigwig or Gestapo ‘trade commissioner’. He was in the Free Zone, in Vichy-controlled territory, yet conditioned by the Occupied Zone in the North, one always had to look for such things, one always had to ask, How long can this last?
    In the distance, the same bare escarpment rocks as those beneath his shoes boldly faced the sun to glow a soft yellow-grey under forest cover. Behind them, the wooded hills, valleys and plateaus of the Périgord Noir continued on to Sarlat and eastwards to the site of the murder and well beyond. Mist would cloak that little valley too, even as at the dawn of prehistory.
    They had found the victim’s daughter on her knees hugging herself and rocking back and forth in grief beside that corpse. They had dragged her from it even as she had fought with them to be left alone until, in compassion only, he had clipped her under the chin and into oblivion.
    Juliette Jouvet née Fillioux, born Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, 3 April 1914, age now twenty-eight, and only child of the victim. Married and with two children of her own, a boy of seven years and a girl of five. A schoolteacher. Husband, a former colleague and now a disabled veteran of the Russian Campaign, one of the LVF, the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme. A sworn enemy of Russia and a member of the PPF, the Parti Populaire Français, violently anti-Communist, anti-de Gaulle, anti-Jewish, anti-everything including the police, and now … why now a very bitter man. Ah yes. The war in Russia had not been kind. Few acknowledged the bravery of the wreckage that had retumed. Most simply ignored him and felt uncomfortable in his presence.
    Jouvet had not been co-operative nor had there been one word or gesture of compassion for his wife.
    Sedated by the cognac Hermann had forced her to drink and had found God knows where, the woman had slept. Sour on vin ordinaire , the husband had retreated