She’d have played in the courtyard all by herself perhaps, been very busy in her own little world of make-believe.
When he saw the rustic birdhouse hanging on the wall not two metres from the courtyard door, he knew he had found her secret place. It was just large enough for a small purse – not a regular handbag, ah no. She’d not have carried one on such occasions.
Kohler watched as Louis lifted one half of the hinged roof of the birdhouse.
The purse was of dark blue, very soft and well-tanned leather. Not deerskin or cowhide but snakeskin. Anaconda perhaps. The photograph was good, the head and shoulders face on. The hair was black, but then that would have been necessary.
‘Christabelle Audit, Hermann. Number ten rue Benard, apartment six. Here are her residence permit and ID, a few of this week’s yellow ration tickets in case she got hungry and went into a cafe. A lipstick, compact, pair of tweezers, eyelash brush and small bottle of black dye, no label, a few francs and sous, two safety pins, six hairpins, a handkerchief and two keys.’
‘Which one?’
‘Both are of brass and much worn. Take your pick. Neither may fit.’
‘I’ll try them both just in case.’
St-Cyr let him go ahead. It was always best this way. The present owner or occupant might now be at home and wondering just exactly what the hell the two of them were up to.
But had the sense of something wrong emanated from the girl’s simply having left her purse and identification here, or from something inside the house?
One thing was certain. The girl had lived in Montparnasse, not all that far from the girlfriend of Georges the baker. A widow, just as Georges had said he was a widower. The same cemetery, the same purchased stones, the same empty graves, the bodies of their loved ones elsewhere.
He’d have to talk to this Marianne St-Jacques alone just in case the Resistance was involved. He owed that to Hermann, one could only ask so much.
And he remembered then that other young girl from that other case and how her lips had been pressed against his own.
That house, too, had been in Montparnasse. Where was she now? In Dachau or Mauthausen? Ah yes.
‘It’s this one, Louis. Our girl had a key to the front door.’
Toadstools, peonies and the ripening green heads of waving poppies covered the fabric of the chaise longue. The designs were at once bold; the colours of mauve, blue, yellow, red and green subdued yet vibrant.
The chaise was against a wall. There were two throw cushions propped against the corner so that the bather might well have stretched out after a bath or before it to read, meditate or simply relax.
The floor was bare, but there was a dressing-screen, one of those Art Nouveau pieces fashionable around the turn of the century. Nothing expensive – something picked up in one of the fleas or at auction. It had been painted a beigy-cream to match the background of the spread on the chaise. Blue irises had been sketched on its panels.
St-Cyr breathed in deeply. The irises were exceptional.
Storklike ibis waded among the marshes of the Nile on the exposed side of the bathtub. There was a rectangular, bevelled mirror without a frame above the bronze taps and shower head with its coiled brass tube.
The mirror was large enough to see the top half of oneself when standing in the tub. But that hadn’t been enough for the former mistress of Number 23 the rue Polonceau. Ah no. With outspread, batlike wings, a Bird of Death clung to the top of the mirror to stare back at whoever thought to examine themselves in that glass, reminding all that age soon overtakes.
There were tulip lamps on either side of the mirror above the sink, which stood against the far wall between the end of the tub and the cushions on that chaise. Everywhere there was Art Nouveau – songbirds on the walls, a bronze soap dish in the shape of an outstretched lily pad.
For some time now Hermann and he had been moving quietly about the house, and always there was this sense of its being a time capsule. Used but then not used continuously, not any more. Not since perhaps before the Great War.
And like the rest of the house so, too, this bathroom. Things picked up for a song and tastefully done over – artistically, yes. She’d had a fabulous sense of colour and design. A bird entrapped by marriage? he wondered.
Quite obviously there was a housekeeper who came in to dust and air the place. Yet there was this sense of its not just being left unused but left that way on purpose.
Behind the dressing-screen there was a small stool and a table with an oval mirror. Shelves of books were ranked on either side and above the table; no space was wasted. Proust, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant … books on existentialism, the roots of Symbolism and its art.
Books on flowers. Sketches of them. The sketch, in charcoal, of a young woman in her early twenties lying naked on that chaise.
An arm supported her head. She’d lovely legs, a lovely figure, and she looked up at the viewer quite boldly, as if to challenge that person into embarrassment or the honesty of carnal lust.
He knew she’d done the sketch herself, just as he knew that though the house would have been in her husband’s name, it had been hers to decorate in the style of her choosing.
A dark-haired woman with a penetratingly frank gaze. Had the eyes been violet? he wondered.
A pearl-handled mirror, comb and brush set lay to one side of a dressing-table that had been painted an antique white with gold threads in Celtic swirls and spirals. Two snakes faced each other with fangs bared and bodies entwined. She’d have sat here looking at herself even as her elbows had rested on the snakes she’d drawn and painted so well.
There was a box of face-powder, some rouge, tints to accent eyes and lashes, all these things from at least thirty years ago.
Gingerly he drew open the middle drawer of the dressing-table. There were the usual things of that period. Buttonhooks, corset stays that had been removed in anger perhaps, or in freedom’s relish. Some hatpins, a cushion for them in the shape of a pomegranate. Calling-cards embossed with the motif of a hand-painted peacock fanning its tail. Letters in gold, and others in silver.
Michele-Louise Prevost, and underneath this, in brackets, as if it had been important but not the most critical thing in her life, Mme Charles Audit.
A lipstick, very new and incongruous because it shouldn’t have been there at all, lay next to the lock, in the centre of the front of the drawer. Pre-war and of very good quality.
There was also a crystal vial of scent, half full. Had it been forgotten by the owner of the lipstick?
The perfume was the same as the one Christabelle Audit had worn and he thought then that the girl had come in here, not to leave her lipstick, ah no, but to ‘borrow’ some of the forgotten perfume. But why should she do such a thing? To remind her Monsieur Antoine of this other woman, the owner of the lipstick? To hope he’d notice, eh?
Christabelle Audit; Christiane Baudelaire.
In a far corner of the drawer, wrapped in thin tissue, was a small, dried contraceptive sponge attached to its thin length of thread.
A handkerchief smelled faintly of the scent, and he thought then that the owner of the lipstick had left these four items here quite recently. And he wondered who that person could have been and if the vial of perfume had really been hers?
Unfortunately, though of silk, there were no monogrammed initials on the handkerchief, but he thought that it had been made in Lyon.