Lagace’s face fell. ‘The one who came to choose the hostages.’
‘It’s his little joke on me. Don’t worry. I told him you had the job and he just made certain that you did.’
‘But it will take at least another sack of flour and the gas to heat the ovens?’
So much for a baker’s sense of humour. There were two chairs pulled up to the front of one of the ovens. He seemed turned to stone. ‘I knew it was too good to be true. Now they’ll come for me and that will be the end of it.’
Had he no thoughts for Marianne St-Jacques, his girlfriend?
‘What is it that you want of me, Inspector?’
‘Merely your silence.’
‘My silence?’ Ah Mon Dieu, the grave! The one from the Gestapo had left the Surete to give the coup de grace!
‘First, the villa at Number twenty-three.’
‘That place?’ he shrilled.
St-Cyr nodded. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. No one comes and no one goes. It must be leased to the Boches – ah, excuse me, Inspector. Those two old ladies, they’ve got me rattled. The Germans. The Nazis.’
‘Was there a housekeeper?’
‘Madame Gilbert, a widow. She was one of the hostages taken to the Cherche-Midi. We have only found this out last night, quite late.’
St-Cyr said ‘I see,’ but wondered, After curfew? The Resistance, eh? and wanted to add, You should not have been so careless, idiot!
Boemelburg could not have known of the housekeeper but, then, Walter hadn’t chosen all of the hostages himself. She could have been taken away on purpose.
‘Anything else?’ he asked.
There’d be more and more questions now. Lies would have to pile upon lies. ‘Occasionally there are guests but myself, I have never seen anyone go into or out of that place in years.’
‘What sort of guests?’
‘Germans. Who else?’
Hermann would find out the rest. ‘How’s Marianne bearing up?’
‘Fine. She’s fine. I’ve told her not to come near here until … until things have cooled down.’
You’re a damned fool, he wanted so much to say but knew he couldn’t. ‘She’ll be expecting a visit from me, will she?’
‘Yes, yes, she’ll be expecting that.’
‘You must have talked to Madame Gilbert several times, Georges. Surely the villa at Number twenty-three would have come up in your conversations?’
‘Never. That one knows her duty is to the hand that pays her.’
Fair enough. ‘Now tell me about the two sisters. Who did they think might have killed that girl?’
‘Captain Dupuis. The one who has lost a leg.’
‘Why him?’
‘How should I know? Inspector -’
‘Yes, yes, I know you have six hundred sticks of bread to bake. Good luck. I’ll be in touch.’
‘I still meant the thanks I said when you first came into the shop, only now I’m not so sure it was such a good idea for you to have saved me.’
‘Don’t worry. Just do as the Gestapo Chief has asked and keep the army happy. They’ll love your bread and soon you’ll be able to skim off a little to augment everyone else’s rations. Sturmbannfuhrer Boemelburg will know I have suggested this but do it anyway.’
Both old ladies were still on the street. The younger one clutched the arm of the older one. The bread was gripped between them and both had canes no one would dare to argue with.
The sitting-room was small and from another time, with faded wine-red velvet, yellowed lace and flowered chintzes that spoke not just of passing fancy but of missed careers, failed attempts and partial successes.
Four cat baskets lay about: one on the floor by the end of the plush but faded blue sofa, another on the carpet in front of the tiny stove, a third up by a vase of dried asters in the curtained window, the last under a chair.
There was only one cat, and this was asleep in the middle of the sofa. But had there once been four cats or had that cat but four places in which to sleep? And if the former, which of the sisters had killed the others and hidden the truth? One could not afford to keep four cats these days – four roasts, four nourishing stews that could, if stretched, last at least three days apiece.
St-Cyr decided it would have to have been the older sister, Rose-Eva, who took care of such things. The younger one was too delicate, too timid. That one had been the orchestra tor of the chintzes. The room bore the stamp of a spark caught in mid-flight on a cool summer’s evening some fifty or sixty years ago.
He accepted the tiny glass of ‘juice’, a loganberry cordial perhaps, but set it aside out of politeness as one would and should. The French didn’t readily invite people into their homes – the Sarete had special privileges they could invoke and did – but always, as with all others, there was this formal offering of the ‘juice’.
One seldom drank it and when one did, the regrets inevitably followed.
‘Mademoiselle Rose-Eva Gagnon, permit me, please, to ask again who you and your sister think is the killer of that girl and why you feel so certain of this?’
‘If you’d been doing your job …’
‘Mademoiselle, I assure you I am and was, but I make no apologies for the overwork, the lack of sleep and the pitifully low wages.’
She tossed her head but was too polite to think or say, Suck lemons! monsieur. ‘We told them. We pleaded with them, but they would not listen.’
‘He’d done it before, you see,’ offered the quiet meekness of the younger sister, sitting bolt upright to one side of the cat while her sister sat on the other side of it.
Was she protecting the cat, that last vestige of sensibility, from the older sister?
‘Who had “done it before”?’ he asked politely.
‘The Captain, the man without the leg.’
‘Captain Alphonse Dupuis,’ whispered the younger sister. ‘Me, I have had the …’
‘Jeanne, that is enough! Don’t start again.’
Chastized, the younger sister timidly reached out to the cat only to withdraw her trembling hand, knowing the gesture would bring rebuke.
‘What my sister wishes to say, Inspector, is that on the evening of the day before the Defeat, there was a similar murder in our quartier. A young girl – Jeanne, stop it immediately, do you hear?’
The cat slept on as the hand desperately stole its way across the blue velvet of the cushion in spite of the warning.
Rose-Eva sensed the need in her young sister and, in a rare moment of resigned weakness, said, ‘Oh it’s all right. Go on, you silly thing. Take Muffti into your lap. Just don’t become too attached to him.’
‘I won’t! I won’t even touch him!’
Again they were at an impasse. ‘This other murder …?’ he hazarded.
‘In the courtyard of the house next to that wretched draper’s shop on the Pas-Leon, not a stone’s throw from the Church of Saint Bernard.’
‘It’s not a “wretched” shop,’ whispered Jeanne. ‘Anyway, it was closed and I only went there after my prayers to remember a little.’
‘Ladies, please! I want to help. It’s my job.’
‘We’re trying to tell you. She’s trying,’ said the younger one in a rare moment of defiance.
‘Perhaps it is yourself who should be telling me,’ soothed St-Cyr, throwing up a cautionary hand to silence the older sister.
Jeanne Gagnon composed herself. ‘Very well, it is I who shall say it.’
The other one held her breath but gave him the sabre of dark-blue eyes that had lost none of their will to fight.
‘I went to church to pray for the deliverance of the city and of France in her hour of need. So few were there, monsieur. Empty – I have never known the streets or the church to be so empty.’
‘Everyone had fled the city,’ said Rose-Eva. ‘I was ill in bed, a bad fall -’
‘You had drunk too much, Rose. The Inspector will know this. The Defeat, if nothing else, has cured you of your affliction because now it is rationed, if one can get it! So, where was I? Yes … yes … Father Eugene and Father David were both at the church – they’d been on call all the time. It’s a priest’s duty, isn’t it?