‘Did Rejean really kill this … this mackerel?’
‘Like I just said, I don’t know. Let them think he did. For now that’s good enough. Don’t panic, eh? Just try to keep calm. I think we’ve made a tiny breakthrough. We’ve let Brandl’s side know that we’ll play by their rules.’
‘But you won’t.’
‘Not really. No. That’s half the fun of it, but it’s also what they’ll be expecting.’
The sounds of charcoal being scraped on drawing-paper came up to St-Cyr, here a cough, there a muted exclamation that served only to emphasize the intensity with which the various pieces of work were being executed.
The studio, one of several in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was cold and poorly lit. From the observers’ balcony he had the best of views. He’d been to the hospital, had had his hand stitched, had had a little something to eat.
Among the students there were several Germans on leave, corporals, sergeants, even a lieutenant or two. The Kriegsmarine, the Luftwaffe, the Wehrmacht, all dedicated to improving their talent.
The French students were a mixed bag, some old enough to be grandfathers, others young enough to have been their grandchildren. There was a noticeable lack of young men, painful because the war had stripped the youth of France of them.
Marianne St-Jacques sat on a chaise longue on a small dais in the midst of the students. There was a white woollen blanket under her. The ankles were crossed. One arm rested casually over the back of the chaise; the other hand held a red silk rose.
This she was smelling.
St-Cyr looked down on her as that God of his looked down on him and the dice of fate were thrown in the back alley of life.
The urge to photograph her was overpowering. The cinematographer had to start the cameras but he took the film back to the rue Polonceau, to the morning after they had found the body of Christabelle Audit. 0500 hours and darkness, the end of the curfew.
And he heard this girl saying to Georges Lagace, the baker, ‘Until tomorrow, my love, I die with waiting and hunger.’
She was not overly pretty or striking in any particular way but had many positive anatomical attributes. The brown hair was thick and cut short, bobbed in waves and curls with one pronounced wave over the right side of the brow. The legs were not too long or too slender, a girl of perhaps some fifty or so kilograms with small but nicely shaped breasts, the nipples turned slightly outwards. A slim waist, good hips that would grow bigger with time – in many ways a lot like Christabelle Audit. Very positive, very proud shoulders, high collar-bones, a slim neck and sharply jutting chin, a chin of character. Ah yes, this one would not take no for an answer.
The face was on the narrow side and very much of the middle class but with suggestions, in the sharpness of the features, of misadventure among her ancestors with the aristocracy.
The rose was tickling her nose. The cold made her shiver until at last she saw him looking at her and came to look up at him.
So many seconds ticked by, the drawing mistress, a woman in her mid-fifties, said, ‘Oh, all right. Take another break. This lack of heat! If any of you could assist, it would be most helpful.’
They were there to draw, not to arrange for coal to bypass the authorities who had none to give unless they got something in return.
The girl’s voice came softly up to him. ‘It’s all right, madame. I will continue to sit.’
St-Cyr began to study her as the cinematographer would, dredging character, motive and action from her very pores.
The thighs were not heavy – a girl who walked a lot and rode her bicycle. A girl who had once been married, so Georges had said, and who had purchased a tombstone in the cemetery of Montparnasse to mark what had to be an empty grave.
They’d met by accident in that cemetery. Love takes all angles, but had it been love, eh?
He didn’t think so.
Her knees were dimpled. She’d a small scrape on the inside of the right calf – an episode with the bicycle perhaps.
There was a small brown mole to the left of her navel and near the hip. No stretch marks that he could see. Had she wanted children only to find the war had interfered with that dream? He thought not – not yet in any case. Not with this one.
The pubic hairs were curly but there, was not the breadth and thickness of hair Christabelle Audit had dyed black.
The left breast seemed as if in need of suckling, for its nipple had stiffened under observation from the balcony’s brass viewing telescope which stood on a little tripod by the railing.
The lips were wide and sensuous when in repose but tight now in the grim realization of what must surely lie before her.
‘Monsieur, do you mind?’
It was the drawing mistress. They must get all types coming in here. ‘Ah, pardon, madame. Forgive me. I was but thinking of Renoir.’
The girl’s eyebrows were thick and pleasing but would cause concern as she grew older. The frown that furrowed her clear wide brow was earnestness itself. At twenty-eight, a girl could still frown like that.
‘If you do not desist, monsieur, I shall have to ask you to leave the studio at once!’
‘Forgive me, please. I will cease in a moment.’
He had to have one last look and began it at her ankles, running it up the length of her until he found the rose and found Marianne St-Jacques looking at him. Her eyes were of a greeny-brown with amber flecks, and they did not waver as she held her breath.
They were good eyes, lovely eyes, but he could not help but see them as in death.
The mannequin’s dressing-room had a tiny stove and she saw no reason to wrap herself in anything.
‘What is it you want with me, Inspector?’
‘Merely a few questions.’
‘Are they about that girl who was murdered?’
St-Cyr took out his pipe and tobacco pouch. What would the cinematographer have done? Asked her to put something on, or merely told her, Yes, yes, that’s what it’s all about?
He helped her to feed some of the fist-sized balls of dried papier mache into the stove and stood beside her as she warmed her hands.
She couldn’t look at him now, knew he’d find out the truth, but when his voice came, it was gentle. ‘Mademoiselle, what is it you are trying so valiantly to hide from me? A chance encounter with that murdered girl, a few words passed in haste, in the darkness after curfew? Come, come, I know she was an artist’s model, a student here. You met, you talked, you shared your meagre lunches, and if I am not mistaken, you have never had a husband to bury under a “purchased” stone in the cemetery of Montparnasse.’
She clasped her shoulders. She wouldn’t look at him. The stove … the stove … she must concentrate on it.
He struck a match and she shuddered, gripping her shoulders more tightly. ‘Please, it is essential that you tell me everything and quickly. Your life is in danger. This …’ he thrust his bandaged hand in front of her – blood had seeped through, ‘is but an example of what they can and will do to you. Now come, please come, I am not a lover of the Nazis, Marianne. You can and must trust me.’
It had hurt to use her name. It brought back memories of his wife and son …
Her shoulders were unclasped. ‘Please, your nakedness won’t deter me from asking you the things I must in order to save your life.’
‘How did she die?’
Her breasts were firm, the skin clear. Her underarms had not been shaved or clipped.
‘How did she die, damn you!’ cried the girl.
He would give her a whisper, though it would distress him to deal with her in such a manner. ‘Terribly.’
She burst into tears and he hated himself for having had to do it, but …
Her nose was quickly wiped with the back of a hand, her eyes with the fingers. ‘It’s true I knew her a little, but we were not working together on anything.’