Which was to say nothing about Thomas’s having worked in the lab right next to her office, thought Kohler, but he’d leave it for now. ‘Continue, I’m listening.’
‘There are twelve of us in that cage we call home and our combine, Inspector-well, eleven now, until a replacement is found-but all of us had a hand in deciding …’
‘Who best to help those naive young ladies, eh?’ interjected Herr Kohler with all that this could imply about escape committees and other mischief for which a spell of Straf or a Natzweiler-Struthof hanging would be the reward. He had definitely found the cutthroat.
‘There is no escape from this place, Inspector. We simply took a vote on who was to work with them.’
‘No abstentions, no hard feelings?’
Like why should Eugene have been included when he already had such a cosy place in which to work and two-yes, two girls to talk to every day as well as the Fraulein Schrijen?
‘None. We’re one happy family because we have to be.’
And wasn’t that twice at least that the assistant machinist had emphasized how well they’d got on? Best, then, not to mention the carpenters’ nails and all the other things that had been accumulated to smuggle in here, best to say nothing yet of that cutthroat and the trinitrophenol, or of the colonel’s also having been evasive. ‘Enjoy the last of the cigar, then drop it in the soup. I’ll be in touch.’
‘You do that, Inspector. We wouldn’t want to upset the Lagerfeldwebel any more than is necessary, but please remind him that I was ordered to come in here by a member of his Fuhrer’s Gestapo and dared not refuse.’
Were all Bretons so gabby? Louis’s second wife had been a Breton, but Louis wasn’t here to be reminded and definitely wasn’t going to like what was bothering his partner. Lowe Schrijen had been right. Caroff and the others must have all agreed on what to say and that could only mean they really had been up to something more than handfuls of carpenter’s nails and a few buttons but why, then, was Rasche being so evasive?
The aroma of the colonel’s pipe tobacco seemed suddenly, thought Victoria, to fill the Stube, bringing warnings of its own the chief inspector could not realize. She had smelled it strongly on Renee many times. It had been soaked right through that lovely short-sleeved voile print Renee had worn out to the carnival on the twentieth of last August in the heat, the seams of its right sleeve and shoulder having been torn, the padding loose, and two of its rose-coloured buttons missing.
Dieu merci, there had been no customers in the shop. Colonel Rasche had simply dropped Renee off and she had run in here, run fast, the smell of that tobacco in her hair, her lovely hair. Spicy, plummy, sickeningly sweet and even more disconcerting than now because she herself hadn’t known if Renee had said things she shouldn’t have to the colonel.
Doucement, she said silently to herself. Go easy. Don’t weaken. Sophie has left you to deal with this one.
Waving out the match he had used to light that pipe of his, the chief inspector studied her through the smoke. ‘The Fraulein Ekkehard,’ he began, ‘I see that you’ve a telephone. Did she call to tell you she was on her way out to the carnival instead of your friend?’
‘She said that she didn’t mind going instead of Sophie. For her it was an unexpected opportunity not only to get out of the office but to be by herself. She loved to explore the carnival, was always delighted when she found something. A playbill that hadn’t been picked to pieces by the local children, a ticket to the Ferris wheel or …’
‘One of these?’ he asked, dangling the droplet earring while watching her closely, too closely.
‘Where … where did you find that, Inspector? In our biscuit tin?’
‘A fake,’ he said, capturing it in a pugilistic fist.
Some explanation had best be given. ‘Renee had been searching for its mate. She was like that. Everyone will tell you this. Once she had found one of a pair, she had to find the other. I tried to tell her that we would never find it. Mein Gott, the size of that place alone defied us, not just the children who foraged constantly. We’d enough pieces and weren’t going to use such costumes anyway, but still she kept it and others in mind. “Where there’s hope, there’s always a chance,” she would say. If that is the mate, Renee would have cried for joy and clapped her hands like a ten-year-old then rushed to tell us all about it.’
He was not going to let her know where it had been found, nor was he going to ask how well or often she or Renee or Sophie had got on with the local children. Instead, he asked, ‘When and where did the two of you first meet?’ as if it had far more bearing on what had happened than that earring or the children, or the grief one had to conquer, the fear.
‘On the ski slopes to the west of town in January of ’41. I’d just come back from Munich and had gone there for a few days while the authorities searched through the deeds to this place, searched through everything, I guess, though the police don’t tell people that, do they, and often it’s done so well one doesn’t even realize they’ve been in.’
If she had hoped to unsettled him, she had failed but had made certain he understood the shop and the house had been thoroughly searched more than once with nothing incriminating having been found.
‘Renee came out to ski, late on a Saturday afternoon with Colonel Rasche, though he didn’t and one had to wonder, I must admit, why he had chosen to come along. The ride, I suppose, as a little treat. We fell on one of the slopes and had a good laugh, and that is how we met. Sunday, 5 January 1941, at about 4.00 p.m. the old time and just as the light was fading.’
The old time and Colonel Rasche having stayed the night and all that might or might not mean. ‘But you must have known who she was.’
‘Of course I knew. Kolmar is not so big now, especially not with a third of its citizens having left. Everyone knows what the Kommandant looks like because everyone has to. Renee often took my papers in to him to be signed and stamped, so of course it was only natural I knew who she was beforehand.’
The Ausweise and safe-conducts, the Geleitbriefe this one would have needed on the last Friday of every month.
‘Ach, I admit I was lonely, Inspector. Terribly worried and desperately in need of a friend. Mother was in Besancon then, in the internment camp-all those women, the old, the young, the middle-aged, their teenaged daughters also, and younger children. No heat in that bitter winter, no running water or toilet facilities other than a latrine trench?-a terrible, terrible time for them and one from which she suffered greatly and still does. In March of ’41 they were moved to Vittel, those with little children being finally allowed to go home. For the life of me, though, I still cannot understand what threat a sixty-five-year-old widow poses to the Reich, a nurse who came here before the Great War, got caught up in it, was married to an Alsatian, had me, lost her husband to an artillery barrage, ran a bookshop only to foolishly include among her keepsakes her British passport, not out of loyalty but sentiment, for she had no family left in Britain, none at all.’
She paused as if she had said too much, which she had, of course, had he not been a patriot himself, thought St-Cyr. She swallowed hard and then, still with an edge, said, ‘And myself, you’re wondering? I’d just lost my teaching certificate. I was a very good teacher who had been judged no longer fit to teach.’
The copy of the Munchner Neueste Nachrichten was dated Thursday, 19 December 1940. The photo showed a group of about fifty students, all of them Alsatian schoolteachers of varying ages from twenty to well past sixty.
‘I was the only one who failed simply because of mother’s being in the internment camp. Herr Ludin, the principal of that so-called school in Munich they sent us to for indoctrination, wouldn’t listen, though I pleaded with him to let me continue teaching. I’d students who loved me, who then came to despise me for no other reason. I’d neighbours with whom I had always shared things but who would share no more. Understandably I am still bitter.’