"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.