A pretty thing in her black leather skirt and turtle-neck sweater … he still had her shoes in his pockets and idly he drew them out only to realize what an idiot he was to even have them anywhere near himself if she was dead. If.
The Gestapo would only seize on them and have him arrested for her murder no matter the evidence. The men of U-297 would all swear he had been after the girl. Louis would not be able to save him, not this time.
‘Don’t get yourself in such a panic,’ he said.
The stage curtains were open and bunched at the sides. Carefully he set the shoes out of sight then sighed and said, ‘I’m going to have to do it. Louis isn’t with me.’
The door to the toilets was stained and cold. Of cheap wood and flaking, greasy white paint, it yielded all too easily for comfort. The sour stench of splashed urine, bad drains and cheap perfume rushed at him. There were no stalls, just an L-shape to the room with the men’s urinal trough to the right, the sink down at the bend and …
When he found her right at the back of the room, Paulette le Trocquer was slumped and kneeling with her head over one of the toilets. Her knees were apart, the toes that had fought so hard for purchase and escape were slack against the hard, wet floor. Her skirt lay two metres from her next to the wall beside the sink, the slip and underpants and stockings were scattered in the slime. The turtle-neck sweater — soaked right through by the rain — had been pushed up to her armpits. Hairs stuck out from beneath it. Her brassière strap had been cut and now its ends hung loosely at the sides, the skin so bluish white and grey and cold, he had to force himself not to turn away.
How many had gone at her? he wondered sadly. Had they made her drink brandy and beer, a half-and-half on top of wine — was that why the toilet? Had they even bothered? One girl and six or eight men. Death’s-head for sure. The boy Erich Fromm and others. ‘Yes, others,’ he said. ‘They’d have held her,’ and reaching down into the toilet, gently lifted her head by the hair thinking to pull her out only to realize he had better not.
‘Louis … Louis … ah nom de Dieu, mon vieux, why aren’t you with me?’
Bruises marked those places she had struck — the outer thighs, the buttocks and knees also.
Others marred the back of her neck — thumb-marks, fingermarks as she had been shoved face down and held, not throttled. She had thrashed her legs and had tried so hard to stop it from happening. An hour … had she been dead an hour?
When he saw himself in the fog of a cracked and peeling minor, Kohler was taken aback. He could still feel her hair and how cold it had been. He knew he must not touch her again yet he wanted to cover her. She looked so forlorn and lonely in that mirror, a kid … just a kid.
Outside, in the rain, it was still dark. His two sons were dead at Stalingrad and suddenly he wanted to be with them at home in better times, but the girl was dead and so was her mother.
It was nearly thirty kilometres to the house by the sea and when he reached it in darkness still, no amount of banging at the front door could arouse the occupants. ‘Louis,’ he cried out. ‘Louis, it’s me.’
The wind took his words and flung them up at the eaves and into the hammering rain.
9
The beam of the torch flashed round at timbered posts and scattered straw. The shed beside the railway spur was empty. There was no sign of the child nor of Yvon Charbonneau. Kerjean was grim and gave the shrug of a policeman thwarted by the odds and fate.
‘Hélène, I am so sorry. A night like this … I had hoped at least for Yvon. The alignment, the clay pits, the treasures he uncovered when digging up the briefcase … I had thought he might have returned since he was not at any of the other places.’
He shook the water from his cap and cape and shone the torch momentarily up into St-Cyr’s eyes. ‘Ah, pardon,’ he said. ‘A bitch of a night, eh, Jean-Louis? At this time of year one tries to force the dawn but the sun remains in bed for as long as it wishes.’
It was now 6.30 a.m. Berlin Time, 5.30 the old time and still two and a half hours before there would be light enough to dispense with torches. When Kerjean, in the little Renault the Germans had allowed him to keep, had picked them up at the house, there had been no chance to let Hermann know that, contrary to all protestations, the Préfet had headed for Lorient and this shed, discounting entirely that the Sûreté had advised most strongly a visit to Quiberon. No chance, either, to tell Hermann that someone else could well have seen the murder or committed it. Someone from U-297’s crew perhaps … Merde, this case, he said to himself. One must go so carefully, especially when unarmed and without back-up.
Kerjean forced a smile that was both awkward and uncertain. ‘Still we are together, eh? I’m glad I did not stay in Vannes to rest up as your partner insisted, but turned around when I got there and came straight back. Angélique will be all right, Hélène. Come now, you must not worry. Herr Kaestner …’
‘He’s desperate, Victor. He’ll do something. He has to,’ she said.
‘Now listen, the less he does, the better off he is. A man like that, he is like the cobra in the basket, isn’t that so? One goes carefully past or does not move at all but never … never, Hélène, does one allow the hypnotism of the self, eh? Never.’
‘Victor, a moment, please,’ cautioned St-Cyr. ‘Is Herr Kaestner aware that you borrowed the money to allow your son and several others to escape?’
‘Hélène …?’ managed Kerjean, startled. All the fears of just what such a thing would mean were in the look he gave her.
‘I had to tell him, Victor. I had no other choice.’
‘Herr Kaestner cannot possibly know, Jean-Louis. No one knew but myself and …’
‘And who, Victor? Who?’
Ah damn Doenitz for demanding that a detective be sent from Paris. Any other would have suited but no, it had to be Jean-Louis and his friend.
‘All right, so I put the squeeze on that shopkeeper. That doesn’t mean I killed him.’
‘I didn’t say you did. I asked who else might know you had borrowed the money.’
‘Only Hélène, my son and his friends, and … and perhaps Paulette — that girl, Jean-Louis. What am I to do, eh? Run while I can? Hélène, did you not think of the consequences? Did you not consider my family, myself, the others … others whom I must protect?’
He had said too much and apologized. ‘Paulette and … perhaps her mother, Jean-Louis. I … I really do not know. It was a dilemma for me. So much money was required. A fortune. I could not let my son and his comrades be taken. As it was, things were difficult enough. That cave in which they hid. The Côte Sauvage … Few knew of it but …’ He shrugged to indicate the futility of it all. ‘… but I could never be certain they would not be discovered. I had to feed them and keep them quiet. They could not show their faces — strangers still stand out in little places like Quiberon. All through the summer I sweated and the only thing that kept me going, apart from the hope of seeing my son safely away, was you, Hélène, and the walks we had, the friendship of two lost souls from such totally different backgrounds.’
There was little they could do and oh for sure it really was one hell of a dilemma. Hélène Charbonneau reached out to the Préfet and, startled by her gesture, Kerjean gently took her bandaged hand in his. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I had hoped and prayed you and your little family would be safe and that someday soon, Yvon and you … well, madame, you know how I felt. I … I hated seeing Herr Kaestner take advantage of you but …’ He shrugged again. ‘… neither of us could object.’
‘But did Herr Kaestner realize this?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Please, I must slip right into his mind so as to think like him. He knew of the telescope, Victor — Angélique would have shown it to him. He’d have looked through it on several occasions.’