Half-way up the cliff, he had to stop. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the strength. Hermann, damn you, help me!’
A pair of green-glass candlesticks appeared before him in colour, the shattered face of a doll.
The Parian head of Angélique Charbonneau loomed suddenly and he saw it with a clarity that shocked because the head was so perfect, so exquisitely sculpted. ‘But there are no arms or legs?’ he said, now greatly troubled. ‘There is no torso?’
The child knew more than anyone. The child held secrets of her own.
Her hand stretched out to him. Desperately its fingers tried to grasp his own as he strained to reach them and only then wondered how this could possibly be.
‘Inspector, it’s Hélène Charbonneau. Have you seen my husband?’
‘My father.’
‘Not since he tried to kill me.’
‘You’d be dead then,’ swore the child. ‘He’d have smashed your head open like a buttered egg but he didn’t, did he?’
‘No … ah, no, I guess he didn’t.’
‘But he could have if he had wanted to.’
‘Just help me up. We can discuss it later.’
7
Sparks danced up from the driftwood logs in the fireplace, and when she turned to stand beside where the Chief Inspector St-Cyr lay asleep on the old brown leather sofa in her father’s study, Angélique Charbonneau’s shadow fell over him. And she wondered at the casting of shadows among all the things her father had collected, and she raised both arms and stretched up on tiptoes in her nightdress like a spectre.
The Chief Inspector snored sometimes, but not too loudly. She nudged his shoulder more sharply this time, more bravely.
‘Asleep and dead to the world,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t need to worry about him any more tonight.’
Passing by the cluttered billiard table, she saw that shadows from the fire flickered hauntingly over the skulls and bones. ‘Father’s out there somewhere,’ she whispered sadly to a skull whose clenched teeth and hollow eyes grinned and stared back at her. Light … it was so amazingly light without its flesh. ‘Musty too,’ she said, sniffing delicately at it. ‘And porous but not like the feel of broken bisque. Much coarser.’
Raising the skull high above her as a druid would, she turned so that its shadow was thrown with her own across all the bones and things and finally on to the wall.
‘My father is hiding the briefcase he found on the railway tracks,’ she whispered to the skull. ‘Having buried it once, he has taken it to a place where no one will ever find it.’
Late in the day, Préfet Kerjean had come to the house looking for the Chief Inspector, wanting to talk to him in private, to explain perhaps and to plead for help, who’s to say? Together, he and the stepmother and herself had driven to the aerodrome near the clay pits and had left the car on a lonely road. With the Préfet in the lead, they had walked across the moor and along the railway tracks past a shed the murderess had refused to look at, past the place of the killing which had made the murderess cringe.
‘By accident or by some trick of the standing stones, we heard the Chief Inspector crying out to his partner and friend. Brought back to the house and given brandy and soup, he has had the huge bath in the kitchen and afterwards, though very sleepy, has washed his clothes in that same bathwater and hung them up above the stove to dry. His shoes also, and his overcoat, but not his fedora, alas, for this has been irretrievably lost.’
‘Offered a bedroom, he has refused and has chosen instead, this study.’
She killed the skull’s fleshless cheek and set it soundlessly among its fellows. ‘The Chief Inspector is waiting for my father to return. He is going to confront him with assaulting a police officer and with attempted murder. She is beside herself with worry and despair and cannot forgive herself but can only wring her hands and pace the floor or lie weeping the cold tears of remorse in her cold bed.’
Préfet Kerjean had not stayed to talk to the Chief Inspector after all. Indeed, he had left in such a hurry. But had he gone, as he had said he would, in search of her father? The alignments at Kerzerho crossed the main road not five kilometres from the house. The Dolmen of Crucuno, said to be the finest in the Morbihan, was nearer Plouharnel and the Quiberon Peninsula. The alignments at Saint-Barbé were even a little closer than this.
At each of these prehistoric sites the briefcase could be hidden.
But had Préfet Kerjean really gone in search of her father, or had he gone to Quiberon itself and the shop of Monsieur le Trocquer, the shop of the daughter and her mother?
Yes, he had been very worried and not without good reason, for he had been seen through the telescope of truth, seen talking on the beach last summer to Madame Charbonneau, and many times since then. Talking very seriously about things only they thought they knew.
The sardiniers and a son who, with his comrades, would at last escape to England if not first discovered and killed. Their families too.
When she had reached the top of the stairs and, without the aid of a light, had crossed the attic, Angélique touched the cold brass tube of the telescope and remembered another warm day last summer in early August, not a stormy night like this. The Captain had returned.
She had been half hidden by the marram grass and pine needles, and by the edge of the bluff and some rocks so that only her chest and middle had shown while the Kapitän zur See Kaestner had stood facing her.
He had laughed. He had said something and had smiled. He had reached out to her and … and had touched her pure white blouse, had plucked at a button.
She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t even objected and when her breasts had spilled into the sunlight, she had let him kiss them.
‘You shouldn’t have let him do that to you,’ whispered Angélique spitefully. ‘You should have stopped him long before this. Did you really think my father wouldn’t discover your treachery? I didn’t need to tell him, madame. He saw it in your eyes, in the way you could not look at him. He saw it, too, from up here — oh yes he did on other occasions. There were many of these liaisons sexuelles weren’t there?
‘I found him watching you. I heard him crying but even then I did not go to him. Poor father, poor rejected pianist, poor symphony.’
Raindrops were being killed against the spyglass window. Now a sudden gust, a blast of gunfire from the rain-Messerschmitts, now a pause while the raindrop-blood ran down the glass and cannon-breakers pounded the beach where she and the Captain had lain together.
Only their bare feet had been seen and watched from up here that time. Her feet had been spread widely. The heels had dug deeply into the soft, clean sand, digging deeper and deeper and deeper, the toes stiff and upright, his toes dug into the sand … the sand …
‘I mustn’t tell the Chief Inspector what I did on the day before the murder. I mustn’t!’ she blurted.
When St-Cyr found the child in the attic, Angélique was quietly playing with her dolls. Dolls that Kaestner had made but others as well. Lots of them.
The Bar of the Mermaid’s Three Sisters was packed. The telegraphist’s silk-stockinged knees were really very nice, and when she sat primly subdued and worried on her bar stool facing him, Kohler was tempted.
‘Another beer?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I’ll drown if I do.’ Longingly she looked across the crowded dance floor towards the stage and the Dollmaker’s wind-up Victrola with its lovely stack of records. Everyone took a turn; everyone got a chance.
Teutonic, bare-breasted, blue-eyed and blonde-haired mermaids in a turquoise sea of their own formed a backdrop to this icon of heroism and daring. Neptune blew on a conch among the jade-green, trailing weeds while wrapping an arm about a slender waist. Was he calling others to supper? Giant clams, still in their closed shells, were being held aloft to the gods of gluttony by the mermaids. Fish tails and dolphins swam about or wiggled from the prongs of Herr Neptune’s fork. His muscles bulged.