Celine Dupuis had obviously read the note and had carefully returned it to its place before shoving the box well out of sight.
Hermann was thumping a book he’d taken from the pile she’d been reading when time allowed …
‘La Cuisiniere Bourgeoise et Economique, Louis. Well thumbed, somewhat tattered and probably published in 1890.’
The charming housewife on the cover wore a long, striped white and red dress, with white apron and frilly cap, but was holding a bloodied butcher’s knife that was far more than needed to decapitate the chicken she’d just finished plucking for the steaming pot on the stove behind her.
‘But why learn to cook, Louis, unless you plan to leave here or at least to leave the profession you’re in?’
The wicker hamper at the woman’s feet had spilled a rush of vegetables on to the floor. Pots hung in the background; pots that now would have been commandeered for scrap metals!
‘Do you really need the reminder, eh? You know damned well people go to the films to watch the feasting, and that they read cookbooks that are centuries old just to taste the food they can only dream about.’
She hadn’t heated the leftovers of some ‘coffee’ in a pot on the simple electric ring that served for all cooking. There were three carrots in the little larder, a thin slice of questionable cheese, a bit of bread — the grey ‘National’ everyone hated — two onions, a few cloves of garlic and some cubes of Viandox, a beef tea that was all but absent from the shops. Little else.
Her underwear, beyond a couple of pairs of pre-war silk, was nothing special, thought Kohler. Manufactured lace on the brassieres, a pair of black, meshed stockings she’d rolled up and had set aside to try to mend, a few slips and half-slips …
‘Blouses, Hermann. Part of a costume, perhaps. The uniform of a troupe. Look for ones with cheap, mother-of-pearl cufflinks that may have been left in. Her killer might have been a colleague.’
Kohler went quickly through the contents of the armoire. Evening dresses, halter-necked and off-the-shoulder ones, a couple of suits with trousers, a few skirts …
The flat box of pre-war cardboard, a gift, was lined with tissue paper, the halter-necked dress of a soft, silvery silk over which were panels of see-through, vertically pleated strands, each about three millimetres apart and five centimetres long, separated by horizontal panels of scalloped, sequined lace. A long strand of blue sapphires lay atop the dress. A fortune.
‘The earrings, Louis. Were they to have been worn with this?’
‘The shoes … There are leather high heels to match.’
‘She’d have looked fabulous in them.’
‘No attempt has been made to steal the sapphires.’
‘Then were these left for us to find along with the love letters?’
‘The perfume, Hermann. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s the same as our sculptress wore. It’s Shalimar, one of Guerlain’s, and was a smash hit in 1925. Sandalwood, bergamot and jasmine, absolute rose and iris, but vanilla also and that is what set it off to create the sensation it did at the International Exhibition in the Grand Palais. Our victim was wearing it when killed. This cheap little phial was on her dressing table.’
‘And a hugely expensive dress from the twenties,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Did de Fleury give it to her, and if so, why the hell didn’t he tell her to wear it?’
‘You’re forgetting the sapphires.’
‘And that she must have put the earrings on after de Fleury had let her out at the hotel.’
‘But were the necklace, the dress and the earrings all from the same person?’
‘Blue eyes and fabulous blue stones, Louis. Nice and dark.’
The strand was dangled. ‘Surely no resistant worth his salt would have left these when funds are so desperately needed by them?’
‘And the ID, Chief?’
‘Could well have been left by a resistant, yes.’
A tail feather from a male hen harrier had been used as a quill in an unsuccessful attempt at writing a postcard to the daughter. That of a pigeon had proved little better but the victim was, she had stated, ‘planning next to use those of the quail, the merlin and guinea fowl or even one from a peacock’.
The postcard was a photo of the Marechal in uniform with the words of the song every schoolchild in the country had to sing each day during opening exercises. Marechal, nous voila! Devant toi, le saveur de la France. Marshal, here we are before you, France’s saviour. Nous jurons, nous, les gars, De servir et de suivre tes pars. We, your ‘boys’, swear to serve you and follow in your footsteps. For Petain is France and France is Petain!
And weren’t they all now worried that the Resistance, the ‘terrorists’ or some other unknown would bousiller les gars? Smash the boys, bump them off?
Changed to the boulevard Etats-Unis after the Second World War.
Now the rue Braque.
3
The morgue was nowhere near the Hotel du Parc, and certainly not within easy ‘walking’ distance, swore Kohler silently. Well to the south of the old town, it was near the river and above the marshy flats into which the town’s septic bed drained. A cruel breeze, out of the west, stirred the frozen reeds, bringing a thin dusting of snow and the stench. Over the snow-covered hills beyond the river, the light was like gunmetal, the frost so hard that the branches of the trees would snap and creak — had it been like that at Stalingrad when his boys had died? he wondered. Of course it had. Woodsmoke would rise, marking the site of a camp fire — Jurgen and Hans would have known this only too well by then and would have agreed that, huddled over cold ashes, any maquisards out there would freeze to death rather than show themselves.
War was like that, like Christ on a platter in cold storage.
‘Look, I know this won’t sound right,’ said Bousquet, cupping his hands as he lit the last of their cigarettes, the three of them standing but a few steps from the car whose engine idled, Georges, the driver, still behind the wheel and minding his own business because he’d been told to. ‘The second victim … Camille Lefebvre. She and I … An evening or two. Ah! it was nothing, I tell you. A chance meeting at a local inn well before last Christmas, a small gathering, a few friends. Who would have thought anything would have developed? Certainly I didn’t.’
‘Married?’ snapped Kohler.
‘The daughter of an officer, one of the recently disbanded Army of the Armistice.’
Demobilized 21 November of last year.
‘I was careful. So very careful. One has to be in a little place like this and with a position such as mine.’
‘We’re waiting,’ sighed Louis, impatiently flicking his cigarette away and not bothering even to save it for his little tin. ‘You’ve not answered my partner’s question.’
These two would think the worst but would have to be told. ‘We had agreed to meet downriver at one of the cabins the open-air cafes let to people in summer. Swimming, boating, water-cycling and sunbathing, that sort of thing, but closed in winter.’