Freisen was trying to signal the woman to get her to ask for a break, but she was having none of it. Too worried to even look up.
‘I heard shouting, Inspector, as you well know from our previous session. An altercation in French. Then the sound of iron hitting iron — yes, the switch-bar. Now I remember it. The bar must have been flung aside in disgust at what he had done.’
‘The pianist?’
‘Who else?’
Kohler looked at each of them in turn. ‘Who else? Yes, of course. The person who was either sitting on the railway bed between the rails or standing. The person who dropped the doll, perhaps just as that switch-bar came down, Captain. The person who must have been between you and the victim if what you say is true. The person who then stepped on the shopkeeper’s glasses.’
‘Please, I … I must go to the toilet, yes? A moment.’
Kohler threw out a hand and gripped her by the wrist. ‘Sit down. Hold on. I’m not quite finished.’
‘This meeting is concluded,’ snapped Freisen, getting to his feet. ‘We’re late as it is, Fräulein Krüger. The reception, yes? and then the party for the Kapitän Hahn and his crew or had you forgotten?’
The submarine that had returned to base this morning.
‘No one leaves,’ said Kohler. ‘Not yet. If you do, Herr Freisen, I will ask your secretary here to telex my objections to Gestapo Mueller in Berlin.’
Freisen didn’t like it. ‘Very well. Elizabeth, you may leave us. I’ll take over the notes.’
‘It … it is all right. I can wait.’
Knees pressed together now, was that it? snorted Kohler inwardly. Well, prepare yourself, Liebchen. Hang on.
He dragged out the small black notebook he liked to use on such occasions and flipped it open. ‘Apparently early on the afternoon in question, the Unteroffizier Jacob Dorst and the Feldwebel Helmut Ruediger gave a lift to Lorient and well beyond it out of courtesy to a pretty Frenchwoman in her late thirties with dark brown almost black hair underneath her kerchief and dark hazel eyes. She had a bicycle with Wehrmacht issue tyres and she was in a hurry.’
Involuntarily Elizabeth Krüger gripped her stomach. Freisen remained in the background silently watching the Dollmaker who hadn’t moved a hair and hadn’t liked that little bit about the free tyres with, no doubt, the healthy inner tubes.
‘There was a packet of American cigarettes in that railway shed, Captain. A woman’s crumpled handkerchief had been shoved well down in the straw. You and Yvon Charbonneau’s wife are, to put it discreetly, on very intimate terms. On more than one occasion the pianist’s daughter saw you with her stepmother on the beach.’
‘Walking. Just talking. There is no harm in that.’
Was Kaestner so cool he could treat it all as if waiting for a convoy to pass on either side of him before opening fire? ‘Yes, but you also came to stay the night, Captain, when Angélique Charbonneau’s father was away’ — it was just a shot in the dark. ‘The child apparently wanders but not in her sleep. From what my partner could gather, the kid is a regular one hundred per cent night owl and we both know kids of that age have ears.’
Anger flared so suddenly, Kohler was taken aback. ‘Kerjean is crazy. He has put this … this idiocy into your heads! Did she see us making love?’ The Dollmaker slammed a hand down hard on the table. ‘Of course she didn’t because it never happened! We’d have been speaking Deutsch anyway and that, my fine imbecile from the Gestapo, Angélique does not understand. Not yet anyway. Christ, the interfering bastard! And he calls himself a Préfet!’
Calmness would be best. ‘Then why the cigarettes and the handkerchief in that shed?’
‘Why indeed? Yvon left his bicycle there and yes, I might have left a package of cigarettes or some tobacco for him now and then as a gesture of kindness, but not there, Inspector. Never there. Hélène and I never used that shed or any other. Never once. The child is lying and so is Préfet Kerjean.’
A shoe tipped over and Kohler felt it do so as a tender reassuring foot was stretched out to touch the Captain’s leg. She’d stay in this … this pigeon-hole with him all night if she could. The constant racket and the stench of sardines wouldn’t matter a damn to her. Nothing would. Not even the presence of Baumann and the others or their relief.
‘So, okay you weren’t having an affair but she still came to see you that afternoon or to …’
Kaestner didn’t smile. Every particle of him was focused on the target. ‘Or to stop her husband from killing the shopkeeper, Herr Kohler? Is that how it was?’
Ach! The bastard had him by the balls. ‘The doll?’ bleated Kohler. ‘Where would it have come from?’
‘The shop. Someone must have either left it in trade or simply forgotten it. Le Trocquer never buys — at least, he never did if he could avoid it.’
‘In trade for what?’
‘Some of his rubbish. A sweet dish, an ashtray — who’s to say, Inspector? It was …’
‘The morning of the murder or the day before it, Captain?’
‘I really wouldn’t know. How could I? I was in Paris, or on my way back and then out to the clay pits.’
A Steiner or a Bru doll but most probably a Jumeau. Louis might have something more on what had gone on in that shop but Louis had yet to show up. Verdammt! Where is he? wondered Kohler. ‘Why did you choose le Trocquer as a partner?’
‘Our cook found him for me. The men went there to buy things to send home to their girlfriends and families. The dolls do sell but only at certain times of the year.’
‘And at other times?’
Kohler was like a heavily laden ship that simply would not go down. Not yet. ‘A few here and there. Surprisingly le Trocquer did have good contacts — people he hadn’t yet tried to cheat. An uncle, due soon to retire, is part owner of the faience works we use and want to purchase and improve. There are also his wife’s sister and brother. One has a shop in Quimper and the other in Quimperle. That wife of his comes from a long line of shopkeepers. Little people but effective when one needs them. Most of the dolls stay in Paris at the Galeries Lafayette, two very exclusive shops on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and another on the Place Vendome, near the Ritz. I didn’t trust everything to him, Inspector. I’m not so foolish.’
‘And the money you left with him?’
‘He said he needed time and I gave it to him. I had every reason to believe and still do, as did he himself, that his daughter Paulette had either stolen it or had had a hand in its stealing but that the money would soon be recovered in total.’
An optimist to say the least! ‘And you know of no reason why the pianist might have wanted to kill him?’
‘Only that Yvon feels very threatened when one of his discoveries appears to be intruded upon by others before he has finished excavating the thing.’
But not by you yourself, eh? thought Kohler. Is that how it was? ‘And the Préfet?’ he asked, closing the notebook.
There was a brief smile of admission. ‘No reason whatsoever. My God, a Chief of Police? Don’t be an idiot.’
You bastard, thought Kohler, sizing him up. You’ve already accused Kerjean once. You get me to think it was the pianist, then you throw the blame right back on to the Préfet by telling me you had no reason to accuse him even though Kerjean obviously thought you had.
‘This session is concluded. I’ll want a copy of your telex to the Admiral, Fräulein Krüger. See that it is delivered to my hotel along with the first one and make goddamned sure both are in a sealed envelope. I don’t want Madame Quévillon having a read. I don’t want her steaming the envelope open either.’
*
The fish stew — or was it the soup? — was cold and not very good. The dining-room at the Hotel Mégalithe was lighted only by one parsimonious candle stub. Every sound was magnified — the creaking of the damned floorboards, the sighing of timbers, a clogged drain that sucked hollowly at its fuzzy plug and gulped to the building of a sou’wester. Christ! were they now to have four days of solid rain?