Kohler found the last of the cigarettes he had taken from Madame Chevreul’s case and, lighting it, took two drags before gently placing it between Becky’s quivering lips. ‘Not too much,’ he said softly, gently lifting her chin to give her a smile. ‘The others need a little. It’s always good to share.’
Jill looked at him; he looked at her, he to ask and she to answer straight enough. ‘Oui, I translated that note for Caroline. Look, I didn’t know whom she was hoping to meet or who had arranged it, but when she begged me to put it into Deutsch, I did. “Bitte sagen Sie dem Kommandanten, dass es kein Unfall war. Ich sah wie es passierte und wer es war.”’
Please tell the Kommandant that was no accident. I saw it happen and know who did it.
Becky dried her eyes and wiped her nose with the back of a hand. ‘I really only wanted to help her the night Mary-Lynn was killed, Inspector. She was very upset about something and had been coughing and wheezing like crazy. I felt she’d die if I didn’t. She couldn’t find her cigarettes, had panicked. I grabbed her in the dark and said I’d help. I found the light switch and turned the room light on.’
‘Madame’s bed was empty, was it?’
‘I. . I think so. The cigarettes weren’t anywhere near where they should have been. Jill found them on that thing we call a coffee table. Marni had been looking too. Caroline. . Caroline knew she was being punished by that woman behind that damned screen.’
‘Garce! Masturbator! The widow, the wrist, eh? I heard you earlier that night! I did. I really did!’ yelled Madame de Vernon.
Ach, mein Gott, did the hatred run so deep?
‘Were you really listening, madame?’ asked Jill. ‘Did she make you envious, our Becky, you whose life has been so dry you would leave that bed of yours to try to kill Caroline only to make a terrible mistake?’
‘Fucking bitch, you’ll get yours, too. The settling of accounts!’
All this time Brother Étienne had been urging calm, but at last he said, ‘Irène, what did you do with those missing datura seeds? Come, come. I gave you three of those capsules. Oh for sure, you were in the hospital being attended to. I have my sources and know you were, but you could easily have returned without the others in this room knowing. You would have had the times they’d be away, the daily round of things that always have to be done. The roster.’
This was hotly denied, but it was Jill who said, ‘This room of ours is often empty, except for her, Inspector.’
And wasn’t dénonciation a favourite French pastime? ‘Hand it over, madame. Save yourself a lot of grief.’
‘And someone else-is that what you think, Inspector?’
‘I’m waiting.’
‘Then wait, for I haven’t stolen it from myself.’
Stubborn. . Ach, the woman was pure poison and should have been the one to have fallen. ‘Come on, you three. Let’s find us a quiet corner in that dining room that’s never used.’
Except for lineups. ‘I have to lug the hot water,’ said Jill. ‘There’s always one hell of a crowd and I’m late enough as it is.’
‘I’ve got to see if there’s any mail,’ said Marni Huntington, who all this time had continued to rub the back of Becky Torrence’s neck only to pause as something had been said that had struck her, the three of them in this room by then that night. The three of them, then Caroline coming back to find her cigarettes.
‘And I’m supposed to be waiting outside Herr Weber’s office,’ said Becky. ‘Am I for it this time?’
Hermann was deep in conversation. Tense, subdued, and not liking their being kept from things, Jill Faber, Marni Huntington, and Becky Torrence sat across the table from him, Brother Étienne’s cloak to one side.
‘The Senegalese, Louis,’ he said, but nothing else.
Out in the cold, on the terrace of the Hôtel Grand, the lineups were long. Breath billowed, feet were stamped, cigarettes cupped for their meagre warmth. Interspersed, in small groups or as singles, the British and Americans each muttered and bitched just as others did in Paris and Lyon or outside the shops of any other city, town, or village, but here. . here where there had been the shops of the elegant-of Hermès, Molinard, Coty, Boucheron, and Cartier, of Elizabeth Arden, too, and Barclay-there were now root vegetables and dried herbs, an occasional very worried rabbit, a solitary hen, and pieces of another.
Rope-soled sandals were on offer, with canvas-repaired leather shoes whose laces were of dyed Red Cross parcel string waiting for the owners to pick them up if they had the cash or something with which to barter. Buttons, pins, some even rusty, were with thread and needles and the unravelled, rewound wool from worn-out sweaters and skirts. Much of it had been gleaned, no doubt, from Vittel’s citizenry, either by purchase beforehand or placed on consignment. Squares and lengths of cloth were in another shop; in yet another, the flea-market leftovers of a nation down on its luck and desperate for cash since potatoes alone were at 600 francs per kilo if available on the black market.
But women did love to shop. Even without the wherewithal, they could still peruse, and it did alleviate the boredom, yet all who looked at him as he threaded his way among them seemed to say, ‘How could you people do this to us,’ and then. . then, ‘It wasn’t me, damn you, but am I next?’
‘Where can I find the Senegalese, mademoiselle?’ he asked. She had the look of the embittered.
‘Behind the church. They did it, didn’t they? Those bastard blacks took turns while one of them held her down.’
‘Then they stabbed her to death to shut her up,’ said another.
‘They’re sex-starved,’ yet another went on, suddenly turning on him. ‘They’re not allowed to use the brothel that’s reserved for the guards, so they keep an eye out and try to buy it if they can.’
‘The officers go into town, Inspector,’ said another.
‘Caroline begged those blacks not to rape her, Inspector, but they couldn’t wait, could they? What they had thought for sale wasn’t, so they took it anyway.’
‘She didn’t scream because she couldn’t.’
‘Soap,’ said one in another line. ‘She had a bar of Lifebuoy to sell or trade, but they shoved it into her mouth.’
‘Chocolate,’ said another. ‘Hershey’s Milk. Two bars.’
‘A fortune they didn’t even think to steal when they were done with her.’
‘They’ll be shot if caught, so you and that partner of yours had better watch your backs.’
‘Cracker Jack Nut Candy Popcorn,’ said yet another. ‘Garden seeds. Packets and packets of them.’
‘She must really have wanted something from them but they couldn’t have understood her French-was that how it was, Chief Inspector?’
Her brown eyes had the look of the disgusted. ‘Your name, please?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘Madame Élaine de Charbonneau, formerly of Paris Mondiale Radio, but originally from Hartford, Connecticut. A Vassar graduate, not that it matters here, and with a doctorate in Elizabethan Literature from Cambridge. My husband was killed during the Blitzkrieg, the Ardennes breakthrough. Where were you when that was happening?’
Running away with all the others? — so many still had to ask it. ‘Madame, I’m sorry you lost your husband.’
‘Are you?’
The firewood compound was well behind the church and separated from it by a treed area, the barbed wire of the fence running along the rue Charles Garnier, that of the architect of the Paris Opéra. A habitué of Vittel, Garnier had brought everything together here in 1884 and had built the original casino and its theatre, for he had designed the one at Monaco. Out went the old baths, in came those with their wonderful mosaics of tile and walls of white marble. Byzantine, oh for sure, but of Caracalla too, Vittel was then very much on the map as one of the preferred destinations of la haute et grande bourgeoisie urbaine.