There was still no sign of Hermann and the Préfet. Though the Bavarian was easy-going and no man’s fool, still it was sometimes a problem for others to accept their having to work together. Kerjean could well have thought it best to keep things close until he could speak privately with the Sûreté.
Again St-Cyr looked along the track into the night but saw only the flickering of the light. In spite of the war and animosities that were only natural, Hermann and he had got on splendidly. Well, most of the time, and had done so since the fall of 1940. A trick of fate God had played on him. A friend among the enemy! God often did things like that to his little detective. ‘So, what have we here, then?’ he asked, throwing a look up into the heavens. No answer would be forthcoming. There never was. God wanted detectives to think for themselves.
‘Did you confront this visitor?’ he asked the shopkeeper. ‘Did you challenge him or her, and force them to retreat from you in horror?
‘Or did this visitor kill you and then retreat in horror at what they had done only to return for a cautious look and to inadvertently step on your glasses? And why, please, did you remove them? You were holding them in your left hand when struck, is that not so?’
Retrieving the lantern, he again located the place where the killer had stood to deliver the blow. It had been a ruthless, downward swing of the switch-bar with both hands no doubt and the weight so totally behind it, the shock had driven the toes of the killer well into the gravel. Craters of several centimetres’ depth marked the places where the shoes or boots had been planted. Kerjean should have noted this too, yet had chosen to say nothing of it.
An open and shut case. One U-boat captain. Must things always be so difficult?
When the Préfet and Hermann finally arrived, he had them place extra lanterns round the bend. Lit up, there was no dispute. ‘The shopkeeper, the Captain and at least one other person,’ he said gruffly.
‘There, what did I tell you, Préfet?’ enthused Kohler. ‘It’s not for nothing that Louis was chosen to work with me. Right, Louis? Boemelburg knew him from before the war. The IKPK, the International Police Organization.’*
‘Yes, yes,’ said Kerjean testily, ‘but I still say the Captain killed that one.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Louis — Kohler held his breath and waited for the oft-pronounced disclaimer — ‘but perhaps not, Préfet. For now the Kapitän Kaestner can keep. The time of killing, please?’
Ah merde, thought the Préfet. Now it’s serious. ‘At dusk, or just before it.’
The ox-eyes of the Sûreté swept emptily over him. ‘And when did the watchman see the Captain leaving the pits? Remind me, please.’
One would have to face it. ‘At 3.20 in the afternoon, the old time, as I have said.’
‘Perhaps an hour before dusk and almost exactly twelve hours before reporting the crime.’
Light from one of the lanterns etched Kerjean’s shadowed cheeks and watchful gaze. ‘Who was this other person, Préfet?’ asked Louis severely.
The one called Kohler was now out of sight behind himself. To shrug would be stupid, thought Kerjean, but he would do so anyway. ‘I do not know. I only got here this afternoon, Jean-Louis. I have barely had time to find accommodation for you and your colleague.’
‘My partner and my friend.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do!’
‘Good. Then if you have no more need of me, Chief Inspector, I will see if I can find the coroner and a photographer.’
‘Good! That is exactly what we need and the next time you lead us to a murder, Préfet, be so kind as to use the most direct route. I think you will find your car is much closer and the walk across the moor, though edifying, an utter waste of our time.’
Normally the diplomat even in the toughest of situations, Louis had let things get the better of him. Kerjean merely nodded curtly then turned abruptly away to vanish into the moor.
‘Louis, who the hell is he trying to protect?’ hissed Kohler, not liking it one bit.
‘I don’t know, my old one. I wish I did. We worked together on several things before the Defeat of 1940. Always I have found him absolutely forthright and efficient but then, ah what can I say, I did not have a partner such as yourself.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. We will find things out now because he has made it imperative!’
‘6,000,000 francs are missing.’
‘Six?’
Kohler quickly told him that the Captain had entrusted the shopkeeper with so much. They set to work, were very thorough. Some fifty metres beyond the fragments, Kohler found where the Captain had swung his satchel of clay aside. The bag was still there on the edge of the embankment. ‘We walked right past it, Louis. Kerjean said nothing of it.’
‘Yes, but from here, Hermann, could the Captain not have left the tracks to strike overland to the site of the murder?’
It was all so dark but for the lanterns. Dark and eerie. The wind wouldn’t stop. There was the feel of rain in the air. They found a boot print, a smear of the white clay and then another and another, then no more of them. ‘Did he kill the shopkeeper, Louis? Is that what Kerjean wanted us to see? He and that watchman spoke Breton. I couldn’t understand a word but am certain the bastard could speak French as well as I can.’
Which was pretty good for one of the Occupiers, most of whom couldn’t understand more than a few words and couldn’t have cared less, since the French willingly ran things for them. But, then, Hermann had been a prisoner of that other war from 1916 until its Armistice and had used the opportunity to learn a cultured language. Which was entirely to his credit and fortunate, since that was the way one found things out. Well, sometimes. Besides, how else was he to have conversed with his little Giselle and his Oona?
‘Hey, if it makes you feel any better, I can’t understand Breton either,’ confessed St-Cyr.
‘Even though Marianne was one of them?’ Uncomfortably Kohler offered a cigarette. ‘Sorry, Louis. I shouldn’t have reminded you, should I?’
‘Of my dead wife? My second wife?’ retorted St-Cyr. ‘She never spoke Breton at home, even to our son, since to do so would have been to admit of that shameful ignorance the rest of France have tarred such people with. Which reminds me, if I can do so, I had best pay her parents a visit.’
‘They’ll only blame you and you know it. Why punish yourself?’ The Resistance in Paris had accused Louis of being a collaborator — still did for that matter — and had left a bomb for him which his wife and little son had inadvertently tripped a month ago almost to the day. She’d been coming home to him from the arms of her German lover who’d been sent to the Russian Front. The woman unrepentant, no doubt. Still defiantly independent and proud of it, as most Bretons were. ‘Look, I really am sorry I mentioned it,’ said Kohler.
‘So am I.’
‘Why didn’t the Captain return for his satchel?’
‘Perhaps he was too shaken and forgot it,’ offered the Sûreté.
‘Then Kerjean really did leave it there for us to find.’
‘Perhaps.’
They worked in silence, each taking a side of the tracks and retracing their steps to the fragments and beyond them to the Captain’s collecting bag.
‘An ammunition satchel,’ grunted Kohler, looking down at the thing. ‘Regulation issue. Kriegsmarine blue. Stores must be tolerant of heroes. Quite obviously he saw something up ahead and eased this thing aside.’
‘Yes, but what did he see? A broken doll on the tracks? The visitor sitting there or standing? Or both the doll and that person?’
‘Whatever it was, it caused him to make a little detour.’
‘And that detour could just as easily pin the murder on him.’
It was only as they retraced their steps and searched along the tracks well past the body, that they came upon an abandoned shed and found in the scant gravel nearby, the marks of a bicycle’s tyres.