‘Except that you’ve a year-long lease on this one,’ muttered Kohler. It was just a shot in the dark but …
‘I hardly ever have the time to go there. Friends use it, my wife and family in summer when they come for a little visit.’
‘Hermann, ask him what he told those who needed to know where he’d be?’
‘En route to Paris. There were three rooms. Not big, quite small. She got up during the night. Perhaps she had to take a pee, perhaps she heard a shutter banging — one was loose. I awoke when I heard her struggling. I reached under the pillows for my gun and called out that I was armed. There … there was still a good fire in the kitchen stove, light from its firebox and from her torch which had fallen. She … she was lying in a heap on the floor, twitching. Her robe was open, the back door swinging in towards me. I fired into the night. Twice, I think. Maybe three times.’
‘The date and time?’ grumbled Louis.
‘7 January, a Thursday at … at about 2.45 a.m.’
‘A Friday?’
‘Yes … Yes, it was Friday by then.’
‘Knifed, garrotted — what, exactly, Secretaire?’ demanded Louis, using that Surete voice of his.
‘Garrotted, the wire still embedded in her throat.’
‘And blood all over the place,’ sighed Kohler. ‘The jugular, the carotid artery …’ They’d seen it all in Avignon ten days ago. One of a group of madrigal singers, the Palais des Papes …
‘Her pessary had fallen out. I reached to pick it up but … but hesitated because I felt whoever had killed her would come back to finish the job.’
‘Footprints, Secretaire? Two sets or one? A man and a woman or only …’
‘Jean-Louis, that is all in the report but, yes, I think now that there could well have been two of them.’
Confusion, then, and doubt, the prints not clear. ‘And were you the target or was she?’
‘Merde alors, why would anyone have wanted to kill her? I was the target. Me! And now Georges is always kept near and always ready, and I am more than convinced of the danger, but at the time was far too concerned with …’
‘With saving your own ass and buggering off,’ sighed Kohler. Mein Gott, were they all the same? De Fleury and now Bousquet.
‘Be reasonable, eh? I had to leave her. I had no other choice. Paris … I had to be in Paris by four that afternoon.’
‘To meet with Oberg and others of the SS, and Gestapo Boemelburg?’ demanded Louis.
‘Marseille … Since you appear to think you know everything about the destruction of the Old Port, you will understand why I had to leave her.’
‘Threw the pessary into the stove, did you?’ quipped Hermann.
‘Yes. I … I gathered up all evidence of my having been with her. I’d often let others use the cabin. Sous-prefet Robert was well aware of this since he and his family had stayed there for a week this past summer. Camille had come on skis. There was really nothing to link me with her.’
‘And Menetrel, was he told in confidence?’ demanded Louis.
‘Don’t be absurd! Of course, if I had felt for a moment they would make an attempt on the Marechal, I’d have spoken up. That private army of the doctor’s is supposed to keep our Head of State as secure as a termite’s ass in a beehive but obviously didn’t. And that, messieurs, is why you’re here.’
Grey in the light, the river looked muddy where the ice had failed to form due to heat from the septic outfall. A lone hawk, a male hen harrier perhaps, thought St-Cyr only to mutter absently, ‘They migrate don’t they?’
‘What?’ yelped Bousquet, flinging his cigarette down.
The hawk was indicated.
‘Idiot, it’s searching for mice and voles.’
And waiting to have its tail feathers plucked for quills? wondered Kohler. Merde, what were they to do? ‘Where was your driver, Secretaire?’
‘Downriver at a small hotel. He was to collect me well before dawn and did so. No one was to have known I’d be there. No one.’
‘But someone obviously did,’ grumbled Louis, giving that Surete nod his partner would understand only too well.
‘And now you’ll have to be charged with withholding evidence,’ sighed Kohler. Oberg would hit the roof and threaten piano wire! Boemelburg would simply carry through his threat to send Louis to the salt mines of Silesia and himself to man a machine-gun on the Russian Front!
‘But I haven’t withheld it, have I?’ said Bousquet. ‘I’ve come clean.’
‘Then join us in the morgue, Secretaire,’ said Louis with all the acid he could summon. ‘Tell us who and where her husband is. Flesh out the little details while we examine the corpses.’
‘Hermann, a quiet word.’
They drew away from the counter, Bousquet offering the attendant behind it a cigarette and trying to exchange pleasantries so as to cover his being here with two detectives from Paris.
‘There’s no need for you to see them,’ said Louis, those big brown ox-eyes of his moist with concern. ‘Get Georges to drop you off at the Hotel du Parc. Pump him dry and find out what really went on the night of that little rendezvous, then talk to the switchboard operator that Menetrel will probably have dismissed. Dry her tears. She may be a bank.’
‘Bousquet won’t tell you everything.’
‘Of course not. None of them will, but Premier Laval would most certainly have been aware of this and may well have sicked Menetrel on to the switchboard girl not only to get rid of him but to let us know we ought to talk to her.’
The French … Mein Gott, the wiliness of their peasants! Laval had grown up as one of them and was known to make much of it. ‘Or to those at the PTT?’
The main exchange. Hermann was learning. ‘Those too. Apart from the plentiful hotels, and the lack of a prominent politician who might not have agreed with them but would have demanded a powerful position, the Government came here because the town possessed a modern telephone exchange and calls could be made to New York, London or anywhere else, even Berlin.’
‘Enjoy yourself.’
Stark under lights that must be far brighter than needed, the victims lay side by side. The white shrouds had been drawn fully back … The skin of each was so pale and waxy-looking — blue and cold, especially in the lips and fingernails, livid elsewhere in blotches, the autopsy incision of the one crudely stitched up from her black-haired pubes to her throat …
‘That … that is Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux, the first of them. Found in the Grand etablissement thermal. Drowned,’ managed Bousquet only to hear St-Cyr calmly saying, ‘Take a moment, Secretaire. Calm yourself.’
The thermal baths …
‘Unmarried — divorced when still quite young; nineteen, I think. A nurse with her own practice. Age thirty-two or three. Alain Andre Richard, our Minister of Supplies and Rationing, was quite infatuated with her.’
‘And you, Secretaire? Were you as “infatuated” with Madame Lefebvre?’
Whose throat was greenish-yellow and tinged with coppery blue in places and still depressed on either side of where the wire had cut through, the flesh gaping … Flecks of dark blood beneath the skin — showers of them, the smell of her …
‘Don’t!’ said St-Cyr. ‘Come away, Secretaire. Away! A brandy! A glass of water!’ he called out to one of the attendants.
‘Brandy?’ came the echoing response. ‘He asks for a marc, Hernand.’
‘Then get it from the safe, idiot. Hurry!’ said Hernand, the boss perhaps.
‘Merci,’ gasped Bousquet when it had arrived and been downed — three fingers at least and rough. ‘Another. And another. Now leave us and close the door. This is a private matter. Speak of it to anyone and you’ll be planting corpses in Russia for our friends.’
The door closed. ‘Sacre nom de nom, forgive me,’ said Bousquet, looking at Camille’s corpse whose nipples had collapsed and were tinged with bluish green and yellow, and whose breasts were slack and marred by livid blotches, no longer warmly being kissed or suckled as she cried out in ecstasy and begged, ‘In, Rene. In and deep. I have to have you in me!’