The old priest grinned with relish at the thought. Belligerently the back teeth were ground. ‘If he ever shows his face around here, send him down to see me, eh? I’ll teach him not to rob the parish poor-box. I’ll teach him not to steal my wine and silver.’
I’ll teach him. Yes, yes I will, as God is my witness.
God and the Devil.
6
The dream was different, the dream was very real. Another nightmare! Incongruously the carousel had been transported to what must be Devil’s Island. The galloping stallions slavered. The ducks cried out for water. The heat sucked the moisture from their wild dark eyes, deadening them to wicked slits as the thing came round … round, the animals all going up and down, faster, faster, the music jarring, jarring … A girl in a cage of bright-red iron and gold wire, a laughing girl who took the money in, the money. Naked … naked, so young and beautiful and lying on her back. An arm unfolding, the slender legs parting, she taking her breasts in her hands to wet their nipples with her fingers. Nipples … nipples … A panda – why a panda? The thing chasing the girl … The thing rising and falling … Slow … too slow … The girl … the girl …
St-Cyr awoke in a panic. Ah, Mon Dieu, must he have constant nightmares about this case? They were in a terrible fix. The rue Lauriston … the avenue Foch … the Abwehr … Gabrielle Arcuri and Giselle le Roy … Hermann … ah yes.
Christabelle Audit’s mother had died at the age of fifteen while giving birth to the child. Antoine Audit and Michele-Louise Prevost had raised the girl until the age of six. Then Charles Audit had returned to take her from them. He’d bought the carousel for her – bribery, had it been bribery?
Ah merde! The Ile du Diable. Two square kilometres of barren rock and scrub and more than a thousand convicts. Nothing but the hardest of them and the immenseness of trackless jungle lying across but a few kilometres of ocean.
The coast of French Guiana would have beckoned with the lure of a naked harlot who carried syphilis and cried out as a leper, ‘You can’t! You mustn’t! There is no escape from here. Absolutely none!’
He wet his lips. ‘The villa,’ he said. ‘It all began at the villa so long ago. A touch of lemon grass, a whisper of rosemary, a suggestion of coumarin.’
Had the panda really been about to rape that girl, or had his subconscious been trying to tell him something?
Swallowing with difficulty, St-Cyr lay back as the whisper of her perfume mingled with the heady scent of Cream of the Walnut in his mind.
Christabelle Audit had shaved her underarms and had dyed her hair, but why? To please her grandfather, or to please his brother, or to hide herself from one or both of them, or neither, but someone else?
She’d lived at Number 10 rue Benard, apartment six.
Fumbling for his cigarettes, he took one and lit it, let the darkness of the bedroom he’d once shared with Marianne close about him.
To go from shoes to utter desolation to a carousel and a granddaughter one loved so much one put her in a little red-and-gold cage to take the tickets as the thing went round, was something. A cage within a cage, the canary singing its lungs out in competition or chorus with the calliope.
M Charles Audit and his granddaughter. Around those two elements the carousel had revolved, the years from 1926 until the day of the Defeat seeing the girl grow into womanhood.
Then the carousel is sold – quickly, decisively. Charles Audit goes where? To Number 10 rue Benard, apartment six, in Montparnasse?
Perhaps, but then …
A year later the granddaughter has good false papers in the name of Christiane Baudelaire, a name she must have chosen herself but one so close to what a criminal might choose, it has to make one wonder. Change it only a little, eh? That way if someone calls out to you or questions you, the name is almost as natural as your own and causes no difficulty. Ah yes. A criminal.
She meets M Antoine – was it really her grandfather’s brother? A man of some fifty-six to sixty years of age from Perigord, a bourgeois who brings her gifts of pate and liqueur from one of his businesses. Presents which she leaves outside the door to Captain Alphonse Dupuis’ room as if, though in need of money and food, she still cannot bear to bring herself to touch them.
For nearly a year she meets with this M Antoine once or twice a week in that room, always at about the same time, between 8 and 9 p.m. The Captain Dupuis is driven crazy with thoughts of her naked body and what the two of them must be doing in there.
She has been taking pieces of her grandmother’s jewellery from the Villa Audit on the rue Polonceau and selling them in the flea markets, or trying to.
Then she is killed – forced to strip naked before her killer. Why?
She knew him. She expected help to come from M Antoine, who’d left a note for her but she hadn’t picked it up. Did Dupuis take it, read it and put it back? The envelope had been unsealed.
And why should M Antoine know what to do? Had he training in such things?
She’d taken off her clothing garment by garment in the hope that help would soon come.
Then she’d been killed – garrotted, savagely raped, a virgin all this time – and left to lie on the floor with thirty forged Roman gold coins scattered about her body and no answers. Only a warning that this detective from the Surete had instantly taken to have been left for himself. Ah yes.
Did the killer throw the coins or did someone else? Lafont perhaps? Nicole de Rainvelle or Pierre Bonny? They’d visited the scene of the crime, they’d photographed the body. Any one of them could have placed that coin on her forehead.
Talbotte had washed his hands of the affair. Boemelburg, Oberg and Knochen had insisted on Hermann and himself. Lafont and Bonny had offered help, he himself suffering the humiliation of having to go before them or else.
All of them believed there were real gold coins to be had, loot in plenty.
Find the forger, find the loot. Never mind the killings.
And two and a half years before these killings, another young girl, another strangulation, rape and withdrawal during ejaculation. Mila Zavitz.
Two heavy suitcases. M Charles Audit.
He’d been sent to Devil’s Island in 1905 at the age of thirty. This meant that he was now sixty-seven years old, still spry perhaps, tough perhaps, and well able at sixty-five to carry two heavy suitcases if he’d wanted to.
But he’d left them hidden in the courtyard beside a draper’s shop that was not very far at all from the place where Schraum had been shot, and not very far either from the Church of Saint Bernard.
Antoine Audit was seven years younger than his brother. In 1905 he would have been twenty-three years old and now he was sixty.
And Michele-Louise Prevost? he asked, flicking ashes into the darkness. The sketch of herself on that chaise had shown her to have been about twenty or twenty-two. The same age as the granddaughter.
But if twenty-two in 1905 when Charles was sent away, then forty-three in 1926 when he came back to buy the carousel, and now fifty-nine years old if still alive.
A woman of great determination, one so skilled she could copy the works of others far better than they could have done themselves.
Prevost … Prevost … It didn’t ring any bells in the male-dominated art world he knew. And certainly to make it as an artist was still exceedingly difficult for a woman. The copying could simply have been an act of rebellion.
Four killings all linked to the villa on the rue Polonceau or not linked to it at all. Each one done by the same person, or by separate individuals, or two by one, three by one … It was just guessing, but …