She sighed and murmured in her sleep, and turned on to her other side. He wanted to switch on the torch to see the faces in the photographs on the bureau and those that hung on the walls and were on her writing table.
Had she, unlike the husband, only those of the son; he only those of the daughter? The girl, Danielle, had had plenty of both herself and her brother in her room, and of happier times. A country house, a weekend retreat before the war. The boy lithe and handsome and laughing, with an arm draped fondly across his mother’s shoulders, both in their swimsuits.
When he ran his fingers over what he knew to be a foundation sheet of wax for the combs in the hives — the bees built on these — Kohler felt each hexagonal indentation, the design covering the whole of the sheet. She’d been making a candle, but had left this off.
Gently he eased open the drawer of her writing table and began to explore its contents. He looked towards the bed; he put his back to her and, wrapping a hand over the end of the torch, let only a sliver of light escape.
There was a photograph of her son in uniform and taken before the Defeat. Clipped to it was a menu from Maxim’s, no less, and at the bottom of this someone had scribbled 100,000 francs. The going rate. Half down, half on arrival.
Searching for a cheque stub, a bank passbook — something to indicate monies had been paid out — he found none, simply a small oval badge in silver with the letters F.M. — Förderndes Mitglied — the runic double ‘S’ and the swastika.
Sickened by its implications, Kohler silently closed the drawer and returned to the foot of her bed. Again he listened to her breathing until satisfied she hadn’t awakened.
Quietly he left the room, locking the door behind him while leaving the key in the lock on her side.
‘Louis …’
Hermann had returned to the study. ‘A moment, mon vieux.’
Louis was bent over the beekeeper’s microscope. He had taken off the battered brown fedora that had seen such rough handling in Avignon. The shabby overcoat with its threadbare collar had been flung open — had he been tucking things into his jacket and waistcoat pockets, wondered Kohler and answered, Probably.
A fisherman at heart, though that pastime was forbidden and subject to forced labour or imprisonment, Louis was not tall or short, but something in between and still a trifle portly in spite of the extreme shortages. A muse, a reader of books in winter when he could get the time, which was seldom, he had the brown oxeyes of the French, the wide forehead of the police academy’s boxing champ and flic he’d once been. The hair was thick and dark brown, and carelessly brushed to the right. The eyebrows were bushy, the nose that, too, of a boxer. The lips were broad and determined, the moustache thicker and wider than the little corporal’s and grown long before that ranting maniac had ever come to power.
‘Talbotte was here, yesterday at noon,’ said Kohler.
The préfet of Paris, on Friday. ‘I could have told you as much. I recognized his footprints in the snow. Flat and expensive leather shoes, not those of a real cop nor the soles of wood most of us have to wear these days. Now, please, I’ve the corpse of a bee before me and it’s not one of our beekeeper’s.’
A half-open matchbox held several said corpses. The broad and somewhat rounded shoulders of the Sûreté hunched closer to the instrument. A meaty, no-nonsense thumb was jerked up and behind to indicate a framed collection under glass on the wall nearest the desk. ‘The varieties and their clans, Hermann. The offspring of their unfettered inbreeding.’
Each bee in the collection of nearly two hundred had been stabbed with a tiny silver pin. ‘Apis mellifera carnica …’ began Kohler, trying not to think of the corpse on the floor. ‘Apis mellifera caucasia …’
‘The Carniolan and Caucasian bees,’ said St-Cyr, not looking up from the microscope, ‘and beside them, the dark German bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, and the golden-banded Apis mellifera ligustica, the Italian bee.’
‘You’re learning,’ quipped his partner. De Bonnevies, like many French beekeepers, had kept Italians primarily because they were gentle and productive, while the Germans, as with their human counterparts, thought Kohler wryly, had strong tendencies towards aggression.
‘So, what’s the verdict, Chief?’
‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees. Our beekeeper had collected some of the diseased corpses and was proving his diagnosis.’
‘Only to be poisoned by a remedy for them. Fumigation with …’
‘Yes, yes. Here our beekeeper has cut off the head and forelegs, then has used a needle to expose the tracheae which bear the characteristically brownish stains caused by the mite.’
‘You’ve been reading his reference books.’
‘It’s not a simple murder, Hermann,’ sighed St-Cyr, as if warming to the thought of a long and complicated investigation.
‘That of the bee or of the human?’
‘Both! Now listen, forget about the colour of the fingernails and the rigor — forget all such things. Take a look around you, eh? The well-ordered, well-loved shelves of a dedicated scientist. Two microscopes, Hermann, and good ones. The watercolours of flowers, the oils — the catalogue he kept of pollen in bottles, of honey, too, and its many varieties.’
The sketches, painstakingly executed, of dissected workers, drones and queens. All sacrificed, thought Kohler, to the greater good of others. ‘So, why hasn’t Talbotte got his boys working on the case?’ he asked.
Charonne, like all of Paris and the Île de France, was the préfet’s beat; theirs the rest of the country. ‘And préfets tend to stick together,’ said St-Cyr, leaving the microscope to pick up the trend of thought.
Both knew that word of what had happened in Avignon must have been passed on ahead of them. Those in power so seldom liked being challenged and did tend to stick together.
‘Perhaps Talbotte doesn’t want to dirty his hands with this, Hermann, for fear ours won’t be dirtied enough.’
‘And von Schaumburg has asked for us,’ said Kohler, not liking it.
Caught between the Occupier’s opposing factions, they had simply had to tough it out. But these days events were piling up and everyone was uneasy.
And suspicious too.
‘Death occurred sometime between eight thirty and ten p.m. on Thursday,’ said Kohler. He’d save the worst until the last. ‘The couple weren’t getting on, Louis, and didn’t sleep together, but …’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t see her as having tried to poison him. I really can’t.’
Hermann always had a soft spot for the pretty ones. ‘But she may well have laced that bottle,’ chided St-Cyr gently and led him patiently through how the killing had come about. ‘She’d have felt he wouldn’t have taken more than a sip, Hermann. His every reaction would have been known to her. The instant suspicion, the anger, the race to check the tin — a woman can’t have lived with a man for more than twenty-two years and not have known about such things.’
‘The son …’
‘What about the son? Well, come on, damn it, tell me.’
‘F.M.’
Out in the garden, not a sound came up from the city at nearly 5 a.m. Far beyond the Bois de Boulogne, far over England and freedom, a shooting star streaked long and hard and cleanly until snuffed out.
Up from the ground came the terrible dampness and the cold.
‘F.M., Hermann. What, please, have the Honorary Members of the SS to do with this little murder which was not murder at all, simply the attempted variety, if what we have seen of it so far is true.’
‘It could so easily have been a black-market mistake, idiot. How else these days is one to find the smell or taste of bitter almonds?’