‘I was desperate,’ cried out one from the safety of distance. ‘I begged.’
‘I needed to be warm,’ shrilled another.
‘Grigou!’ Cheapskate! ‘Trou de cul! ’ Asshole! ‘I hope when we next meet you are stretched out in that place on a slab!’
‘Gripped by your lover, eh? Another bum-fucker like yourself!’
‘Pédé! Salut, my fine monsieur. We’re going to find a flic and tell him you’re one of those. He’ll fix you. He’ll run you in and beat the shit out of you!’
Merde, the young these days. No parental guidance, no soap either, with which to wash out their mouths! Prostitution was now such a problem, bilingual licences had even been issued to more than six thousand of those who regularly plied the streets but did not work in any of the one hundred and forty legalized brothels. At least this way they were forced into regular medical checkups. But syphilis was still rampant, gonorrhoea a plague, illegitimate births too many, though seldom spoken of until that day of retribution came as surely it would, although sadly for them.
They’d have their heads shaved, these ‘submissive girls’, so, too, the ‘honest’ women who had found another, or others, among the Occupier while their husbands languished behind barbed wire or lay beneath the clay.
The morgue was dimly lit. ‘St-Cyr, Sûreté, to view the corpse of Alexandre de Bonnevies of the Impasse de champ de parc de Charonne.’
‘They said you’d come.’
It would be best to simply raise the eyebrows.
‘Monsieur le préfet, and the sous-préfet of the quartier Charonne,’ acknowledged the attendant.
‘Did they ask for Dr Tremblay, or tell you to wait and let me do the asking?’
‘Dr Arnaud has already performed the autopsy. The heart, the lungs, the liver, spleen and all the rest, including the stomach and its contents.’
‘Arnaud is a fool and careless, and is aware that I am fully cognizant of his failings. I want Tremblay. They know it and you will now get him here immediately!’
‘Tremblay. It shall be as you wish. I can only try.’
‘But first, mon ami, you will roll out the corpse and put it in a quiet place. I want no noise, no ears but those of the dead and my own, so please don’t get any smart-assed ideas, and forget all about what the préfet told you to do.’
This one ‘talked’ to the dead. ‘Préfet Talbotte will be disappointed.’
‘Let him be. If he’s happy, there will only be trouble for others. Myself, yourself, who knows? So it is always best not to hear. Then … why then you can claim you know nothing and I will be certain you do and not come after you.’
The sheet drawn fully back, St-Cyr let his gaze move slowly over the victim. If anything, the skin’s pale blackberry hue had increased. There was still rigor, still the smell of bitter almonds.
De Bonnevies had been wounded three times in the Great War — shrapnel or machine-gun fire had torn a deep gouge across the left thigh. The bullet from a Mauser rifle, a sniper, perhaps, had hit him just below the right shoulder. It would have lifted him off his feet and thrown him back.
Barbed wire and metal splinters had ripped their way across and into his chest, the wire probably whipping about as a result of exploding shells and de Bonnevies lucky not to have lost half his face and sight. Otherwise the corpse was what one would have expected of a fifty-eight-year-old who was tall, of medium build.
Drawing the sheet back up to the chest, he said apologetically, ‘It can’t be pleasant for you to lie here like this, but there are things we have to discuss and it is best I get to know you as well as I can.’
According to the wife, death had occurred between 8:30 and 10 p.m. Thursday, 28 January. It was now nearly 8 p.m. Saturday.
‘You were a man who loved his little sister, monsieur. You had made a tragic request of her in the summer of 1912, for which you have suffered ever since and now … why now, for all we yet know, this same request, and your desire to settle accounts at any price, may well have led to your death.
‘Madame de Bonnevies would certainly not have appreciated the news of Angèle-Marie’s anticipated visits and your plans to have her again living in the house. But did you tell her of them?’
He would pause to walk back and forth a little, gesturing now and then, thought St-Cyr. ‘Knowing what we do so far of your relationship with your wife, monsieur, I have to doubt you confided in her. But if aware of the planned visits, and in despair, could she really have tried to poison you in the way that you so obviously thought? Would she have known enough about your beekeeping?
‘Bien sûr, it’s possible, but I have to say no. And if not to her, then to whom? You see, you had shaved. You had unlocked the outer gate and that of the garden. You must have been expecting a visitor, a woman. Frau Uma Schlacht, I believe.’
Bending over the corpse, he examined the cheeks closely, the throat also, ignoring its crudely stitched incision and the stench.
There were two small nicks on the left side of the neck, just under the jaw. ‘A straight razor was used, and you were a man who would not have used a dull one. Were you nervous?’ he asked.
Water was dripping somewhere and he turned suddenly at its intrusion. The attendant, in a bloodstained smock, was standing in a far corner, beyond the rows of pallets. ‘Beat it,’ said the Sûreté. There was no need to shout. ‘Sounds echo here,’ he said apologetically to the corpse, and then again, ‘Were you nervous?’
There was a scrape on the right side of the chin. ‘A lack of lather?’ he asked. ‘No hot water?’
De Bonnevies had got dressed as if to go out to a meeting of the Society. ‘You were nervous, weren’t you,’ said St-Cyr, ‘and now I am quite sure of it.’
Frau Schlacht, coming to the house, would most certainly have caused this, but had she really done so and why?
It was an uncomfortable thought, but had he missed anything here?
Pausing, he threaded his way among the Occupation’s fresh take of corpses and demanded the beekeeper’s clothing from the disgruntled attendant. A vacant pallet was sought, the Chief Inspector taking time out from his conversations with the dead to examine each item thoroughly.
‘I told you to leave me alone with him. I meant it,’ he said, not raising his voice.
Sand had been used on the shirt collar during its laundering. Vichy advised its Occupation-weary citizens to do such a thing instead of lamenting the lack of laundry soap. The finer the better, and voilà, the sweat stains could be erased with a little patient scrubbing. A market had even developed for the stuff. ‘Clean, washed sand, Monsieur de Bonnevies but, I’m afraid, a shirt that was quickly laundered and not rinsed sufficiently.’
Gently tapping the shirt collar over a slip of notepaper, he collected the sand. Had the daughter picked it up on one of her foraging trips? he wondered. ‘It’s not from around here,’ he said. ‘The local sand has tiny filings of iron which are rusty, if they’ve been in the river long enough and there was oxygen available. Grey or black otherwise, and with organic matter even after washing.’
This sand was clean, very fine, and of white quartz with only a few grains of naturally occurring black magnetite and ruby-red garnet.
And the girl had had freshly laundered undergarments in her suitcase of trade goods and these had been washed with the aid of the same sand.
‘Danielle has the perfect alibi,’ he muttered, still not looking up. ‘Not only was she not in the city, she simply couldn’t have poisoned you, and I’m convinced of this, so please don’t trouble yourself unduly.’
And the son of that bitch my wife? the victim seemed to demand. What of Étienne, eh? Oflag 17A, mais certainement, but she was trying her utmost to secure his release.