‘He did bring me honey,’ she said earnestly and then, sharply, ‘He wasn’t supposed to, Angèle-Marie. I told you not to taste it. I did!’
‘Honey …?’ asked St-Cyr. Lemoine had left the room.
She indicated he was to search for something and watched intently while he did. Five minutes passed, perhaps a few more. Baffled, he stood before her and the smile she gave was one of absolute delight.
‘The curtains,’ she whispered and nodded excitedly towards them. ‘Flowers. Stones. Undervest and drawers. Hands, Angèle-Marie. I warned you. Cheese!’
Lying on the floor, and well hidden behind the black-out curtains, was a wooden honey-dipper. ‘Bees,’ she said. ‘You heard the bees, Angèle-Marie. They were in the walls. No they weren’t! Yes they were. Those were mice, idiot! Mice don’t live in solid stones. BEES, ANGÈLE-MARIE! BEES …’
Ah Nom de Jèsus-Christ, what was happening to her?
Lemoine tore back into the room. ‘Inspector, what the hell did you say to her?’
The woman was on her knees by the bed holding her hands tightly over her ears and crying. The sound of bees was clearly all around her. From every wall, the floor and ceiling, too. Tearing her hair, she began to moan, to rock back and forth and then to shriek, ‘DON’T DO IT TO ME! PLEASE DON’T! I’M A GOOD GIRL. I’M NOT A QUEEN … A queen,’ she sobbed.
Holding her tightly, Lemoine indicated the dipper and demanded to know how she had come by it.
‘The brother, apparently.’
‘Inspector, that’s impossible. He wouldn’t have, and in any case, I was certain we had taken that wretched thing from her in the concourse last Thursday. Angèle-Marie, I’m sorry but your visitor must leave immediately. Get out, Inspector. Out, damn you!’
‘No! No! But you want him to go, Angèle? He was going to poison you. Drink … I must not drink the liquid. You did! You did!’
‘What liquid?’ snapped the Sûreté. The woman sucked in a breath and glared at him through her tears.
‘A bottle of Amaretto. After we’d got her calmed down and thought she was well enough to see her brother, some fool must have momentarily set it near her during visiting hours.’
‘And did she drink from this bottle as she claims? Well, did she?’
‘The brother caught her doing so and, in a rage, took it away with him.’
Nothing could have been wrong with it then, said St-Cyr to his other self when alone and out in the corridor. Only later could the poison have been added, but de Bonnevies, believing the liqueur was perfectly safe, had thought no more about it and must have tossed off a stiff shot — Dutch courage perhaps — only to then, in panic, blame his wife for having tampered with it. But for this to be so, he reasoned with his other self, the bottle must have been left alone in the study and Madame de Bonnevies must have had a chance to get at it. Honey … someone among the crowd of visitors on that afternoon had earlier given Angèle-Marie a taste of honey.
De Bonnevies had gone to the brothel. That evening he had left the outer gate to the apiary unlocked and that to the garden also. He had an address he was to give to the Society, had settled on the names of the four who had violated his sister.
‘A woman …,’ he said, he and his other self churning things over. ‘The visit that evening would be difficult, hence the stiff shot from the bottle.’
The French windows to the study and garden had been locked — madame had had to break the glass to get in, or had she simply lied? To hide what, then? he asked his other self and, after holding a breath, finally answered, ‘The identity of the visitor she knew only too well would come calling.
‘Frau Uma Schlacht.’
5
The flat at 28 quai d’Orléans had once been the property of a retired antiques dealer, felt Kohler. In the grand salon the floral trim of the panelling exuded that warm, soft glow of gilding that had been applied a good one hundred years ago. Portraits were of counts and countesses who had lived well before the Revolution. But in amongst this feast of ormolu, oil paint and Baccarat, of gilded, silk-covered Louis XIV and XV armchairs, were the bits and pieces of their new owners.
‘Madame collects,’ quavered the bonne à tout faire timidly.
The girl, a brunette of medium height in a neatly pressed uniform, was all of sixteen and still terrified of him. Mariette Durand, he reminded himself, so caught up in things he couldn’t yet quite comprehend them. ‘Porcelains from the 1920s,’ he went on. ‘Mein Gott, cheap figurines of bathing beauties.’
Some naked, most not, they were everywhere, even on the mantelpiece against a gorgeous ormolu clock whose figurine depicted Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. They were between mounted Imari vases. Green, red, or navy-blue bathing suits on some of them, and all poised as if for a plunge, or simply lounging about on bits of coral, on red lobsters, or sunning themselves flat on the sand. Figurines from ten to fifteen centimetres in length. No chips, no cracks that he could see.
‘Madame swims,’ offered the girl, as if an explanation for such a strange passion was needed. ‘Every day she goes to the Lutétia pool.’
One of the sweat-relieving havens of the Occupier. ‘Even when it’s open to others and not nur für Deutsche?’
And only for Germans.‘Oui.She … she says it is good for the figure.’
‘And she’s conscious of that?’
‘Very.’
One had best prise off the shoes — it was that kind of carpet. An exquisite white porcelain, Sevres damsel with harp sans clothes but with open cloak in a stiff breeze, caused him to pause. One arm was uplifted, that breast higher than the other; one foot placed back, the girl proudly dancing into the wind, while at the feet of this little goddess of perfection lay a Russian table whose marquetry would have made Louis’s Gabrielle green with envy. Yet here, too, there was a clutter of the flea-market gleanings of Frau Schlacht.
‘They … they help her to think of home,’ offered the girl.
‘And Herr Schlacht — are they here to help him think of her?’
The girl sucked in a breath and fought for the correct words. ‘She … she hopes so. During the early twenties she was a bathing beauty. Her father ran a concession at Wannsee, one of the pleasure lakes and suburbs to the north of Berlin. Bier, Wurst und Schnitzel, with ices and soda drinks. That is where Herr Schlacht first met her.’
‘A romance made of all the good things, eh?’
The detective moved on through the flat. He wished, perhaps, that others he knew could also see it. Quite obviously the owner had left Paris during the exodus of June 1940 and hadn’t returned, thereby forfeiting all right to the flat and its contents. Those, too, of his safety deposit boxes and bank accounts.
There were music boxes — girlhood things Frau Schlacht must have once admired and now found possible to buy in quantity, thought Kohler. There was even a mechanical bank — man and his best friend, which when fed a sou, danced around to a scratchy tune. ‘Nothing but the best,’ he snorted.
‘Every Saturday she visits Saint-Ouen to spend the morning among the stalls. They remind her of home, I think. I … I have to accompany her because of the language, you understand. Madame can’t speak a word of French.’
Or won’t, like so many of the Occupier. ‘And Switzerland — does she take you there when she visits it for her husband?’ It was just a shot in the dark. Well, not really, but what the hell, one never knew …
‘Four times a year. At … at every quarter. Herr Schlacht has relatives who are old and … and in need of comfort.’