‘Gott mit Uns, eh?’ he chuckled gently. It was written on every Wehrmacht belt buckle.
‘She will have gone to the salon de beauté first, monsieur, and then to the brasserie.’
‘It’s near the passerelle, isn’t it?’
The iron footbridge that crossed over to the Île de la Cité. The Germans had ordered it thrown up in 1941 to replace the bridge that had been knocked down by a disgruntled barge in 1939.
‘Oui. The salon and brasserie are very close to each other and to it. First the one and then the other, the place of the Alsatian.’
‘And no ration tickets, eh?’
‘None. It is also as God wishes, is it not?’
There was even the innocence of wonder in her deep brown eyes, but concierges seldom offered information and this one had.
Kohler hated to spoil the fun but returned to face her as a Gestapo would. ‘Ihre Papiere, bitte, Frau …’
‘Jouvand. Jeanette-Noëlle, age forty-five.’
Tonelessly she gave her address and position, et cetera, but it didn’t take him a minute to find what he wanted, and when he drew out the slim, bright red- and green-covered little book from under Paris-Soir, where she had hidden it, she shuddered.
‘Relax,’ he said in French. ‘Forget I ever saw it. Look, you’ve a nice coal fire in that furnace of yours. Why not go down to it and do us both a favour?’
Dear God forgive her, thought Madame Jouvand, for being so stupid as to have accepted that little book in the street when it was passed to her.
‘Poésie et vérité,’ said Kohler. Poem and truth.
Paul Éluard’s poems were Verboten but were being published and distributed by the Résistance.
‘I will do so immediately, monsieur.’
‘Bon. And now that we’re friends, I can ask you anything I want about Herr Schlacht and that wife of his, and you’ll be sure to answer without telling anyone else you did. Right?’
Ah merde! ‘Yes. Yes, of course. It shall be as you wish.’
The grainy photo in the dossier was of Angèle-Marie de Bonnevies in 1912. Staring blankly at the camera, the fifteen-year-old clutched the bundle of her clothes tightly to her chest, had just been showered and admitted, was still wet. The hair, worn no longer then than now, was parted in the middle and had been combed flat to cling behind her ears and drip. There wasn’t a frown, a tear — not one hint of anything.
‘Empty … her expression is exactly as it is as she looks at us now,’ said St-Cyr sadly. ‘It’s as if she can never forget.’
Lemoine turned up a companion photo. ‘The father blamed her,’ he said. ‘A walking stick.’
She’d been severely beaten. There were welts, bruises and inflamed cuts across her back, buttocks and thighs; rain after rain of blows. Her arms and shoulders had suffered. The calves, the ankles, the heels … ‘Is there no hope for her?’
‘There is always hope. Why else would we struggle?’
From the wash-house, she had led them to the rue de la pâtisserie and then up staircase after staircase and through common wards which seemed to stretch on for ever.
There were two tall French windows behind the heavy blackout curtains that hung in the centre of each of the outer walls, the corner room having lots of light during the day. The floor was of bare planks, except for a colourful carpet of woven rags. A rescued Louis XIV settee had lost all upholstery but that on the seat and needed repainting and regilding. A worm-eaten narrow table, with a mottled grey marble top, held the grey-stone bust of an unhappy saint; an armoire with mirrored doors, her clothing. A chipped, yellow-and-white-enamelled sink on feet, served both as private bath and basin.
An unpainted, tin, hospital table-cum-bedside-cabinet held Bible, rosary, lamp, tin carafe of water and one tin cup. There were books with leather bindings but could she even read them for any length of time and make sense of them? There were several Jumeau, Bru and Kaestner dolls with feathered chapeaux and long, flowing gowns of dark blue, emerald green, deep red and gold velvet. Silk and satin, too, with rings, necklaces, pins, bracelets and cameos. Dolls with rouged cheeks, painted lips and long dark or blonde lashes. Had she given them names?
‘My piano,’ she said, at last losing that blankness of expression and indicating the upright. ‘It whispers. It tells me it wants to be tuned, that its strings are hurting. Are you here to paint the room? You did once.’
A metronome had been silenced long ago by the removal of its arm. There were thin stacks of frayed sheet music — waltzes, he supposed, and sonatas. There were cobwebs, too, and flaking varnish, split cabinet wood, and lifting or missing ivories to match the broken plaster of the walls where large gaps exposed the stones.
‘Her brother makes this possible,’ confided Lemoine, discreetly taking the dossier from him. ‘Humour her, Inspector. Sit down and tamper with the keys. She’ll soon pass on to other thoughts.’
‘The brother’s dead.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I meant what I said.’
Lemoine heaved a contemplative sigh. ‘I felt you must have a good reason for coming. She’ll have heard us, by the way, and is very conscious of everything that goes on around her. How did it happen?’
‘Poison,’ she said to herself. ‘You will also be poisoned, Angèle-Marie. I won’t. I drank the roasted barley-and-acorn coffee they have to serve us in this place. I was a squirrel.’
‘Later … I’ll tell you later,’ confided St-Cyr.
Clothing lay drying over a small wooden rack, but the room was damp and cold. She hung the dress with the other things and, finding a nightgown in the armoire, modestly turned her back to them and got ready for bed. Fought with the voices she heard; refused to respond to them; said earnestly, ‘I won’t! I mustn’t! Not now.’ And then, ‘He’s dead. I’m free and can no longer hate him. He hated you. He really did!’
‘Angèle-Marie, you know that’s simply not true,’ said Lemoine. ‘Your brother loved you. He’ll be sadly missed.’
‘His honey is sweet,’ she said and smiled and arched her eyebrows questioningly before again speaking to herself. ‘You tasted it, you little fool. I had to! I begged you not to, Angèle-Marie. He said I had to. He did. He really did! Poison … it was poison. Honey …’
‘Touch the damned keys, Inspector! Play something. Anything!’ whispered Lemoine urgently.
The piano was not the euphonium that he had played in the police band and still practised when time allowed, which was never, thought St-Cyr, but he did know the keys and with effort, picked out Au Clair de la Lune.
Entranced, Angèle-Marie sat down on the settee, then got up quickly to pull an all-but-threadbare Louis XIV armchair over to the piano. ‘Please,’ she said, and nodded at the keyboard. ‘Already it sounds better. As if it wants to be healed.’
‘Find out for me if she had any other visitors last Thursday,’ he sang out, the deep baritone of his voice delighting her.
‘She’ll not be fooled, Inspector. I warned you.’
‘Agreed. But please call downstairs to the desk. There is an intercom in each of the wards. Choose the closest.’
‘There is no need. She had a violent attack early on that afternoon. It took us ages to calm her down.’
‘An attack?’
‘The keys,’ pleaded Lemoine.
‘The keys,’ whispered Angèle-Marie.
‘Please double-check for me,’ sang out the Sûreté.
Il Pleut Bergère — It’s Raining Shepherdess — followed and then, though the piano was desperately in need of tuning, St-Cyr thought he’d try Sur le Pont d’Avignon only to be reminded of Hermann and the agony of their last investigation and to strike up Les Beaux Messieurs.