‘But what I can’t understand is why, if you were expecting him to give you a lift to the train on Saturday — and you were, I think — he left a note on Friday that implies he would meet you in Paris and not here first.
‘Two visits, then, to this hotel, mademoiselle, the first not on Friday as the note claims but on Saturday. He knew you were worried about the abortion, knew you might not join him, so he told his driver to wait and came up here to this room, but what did he find?’
He would let her consider this, thought St-Cyr. He would pocket the snapshot of the four victims on the terrace of that inn and the one of her with the riding crop. ‘Did he find you, not in bed as you’d hoped, but crammed into that armoire? Is that not why he wrote Friday’s note and then … yes, then returned on Tuesday to leave the other as proof positive that he hadn’t been here on Saturday. Old Rigaud, the concierge, could well not have noticed that Friday’s note had been hurriedly left on Saturday.
‘The train took him to Paris, mademoiselle, but had he discovered why you couldn’t join him?’
I was cold, she seemed to say. So cold in bed, but I wanted Gaetan to make love to me. I needed that reassurance, Inspector.
‘You had left the door unlocked. He was early — too early for the Paris train, but you said “Entrez” anyway when he knocked, only it wasn’t him,’ said St-Cyr, his voice gentle as he crouched to look closely at her. ‘Did you know your killer or killers, Mademoiselle Trudel? There is no sign of a struggle — of course things could have been tidied, but I doubt this. You didn’t scramble out of bed to try to escape, didn’t scream — although others would have been awakened and would have rushed to your assistance. Had you drifted off? Had someone intercepted you as you carried that bottle of Chomel from the Hall des Sources? Did they demand you tell them where the key to the Hall was kept? Had they known then that Celine Dupuis, your friend, would pay the Marechal a visit?
‘Did they know your lover would pick you up on his way to the train and was their intervention the reason you decided not to go home?’
As the sous-directeur’s shorthand typist, it would have been reasonable for her to accompany Deschambeault to Paris to cover whatever meeting he had to attend. ‘But he was worried you would bolt for home. He had to be certain you would take that train, mademoiselle, and so had told you he would be giving you a lift to the station.’
Again the killer or killers hadn’t chosen the logical target, but had left, in the rats, every indication that he, she or they would now do so.
There were 25,000 francs in the Paris handbag — more than a year’s wages for a girl like this — all in brand-new notes with Vichy’s Labourage et paturage sont les deux namelles de la France on the reverse. Ploughing and grazing are the two udders of France. ‘Merde alors, some ploughing, some grazing, eh?’ And no thought of theft on the part of her killer or killers, just as with their next victim.
An embossed, gold-lettered card allowed entrance to the Cercle Europeen, that supper club of the elite on the Champs-Elysees, which was owned and operated by Edouard Chaux of Lido fame.
Anyone who was anyone sought membership to the Cercle but only a select few gained it.
‘And vans from the Bank of France were hauling things other than banknotes. Gaetan Deschambeault’s vans.’
A gold cigarette case from Cartier, at 23 place Vendome, held only Chesterfields, the case filled in preparation for the trip. No megot tin accompanied it — either she would have had no reason to scrounge while in Paris, or hadn’t wanted others to see her doing so.
The tin was in her day-to-day hangbag and had once contained small, pearl-shaped bonbons, Anis de l’Abbaye de Flavigny; the illustration on its lid was of a shepherd and his girl at a well.
‘Dijon,’ he said, and taking out his own tin, which was far more worn than hers and one of several he used, confided, ‘We share this love, mademoiselle. A tin that harkens back to a quieter, gentler time.’
Humbled by the coincidence, he prised off the lid of her tin to reveal six half-smoked cigarettes. ‘A Balto, two Gauloises bleues, and three Wills Gold Flake — British,’ he muttered. ‘But why, please, did the girl you were talking to smoke only half of each of the last three cigarettes? Nervous … was she nervous? Was it yourself and Friday night here in your room and alone? Alone, I think, with your thoughts.’
The lipstick on the cigarette butts had been thickly applied. When touched, a little of it remained on his fingertip, a sure indication of how cheap and ersatz things were these days. ‘But you wear none, mademoiselle, and would not have applied it so heavily, not if about to kiss a lover who demanded discretion.’
Turning from her, he began again to look about the room, saw the records she had brought from Paris on previous trips. One sleeve was empty. No portable gramophone was in evidence, but a cleared space, square and empty, had remained.
‘“Sans Toi”,’ he muttered as he read the sleeve’s label and, looking uncertainly at the door, said, ‘Ah mon Dieu, Hermann, be careful. I heard that song being played as I came up here.’
There were sixty-seven rooms in the bloody hotel, five of them kept as spares in case needed by visiting secretaries, accountants, pimps, card-sharks, assorted bagmen and hangers-on. Of the sixty-two registered residents, fully half had been here since the Defeat.
It would be a detective’s nightmare to sort it all out, but as if this was not enough, the conservatory had been and still was used as a general overflow and dosshouse. Beds everywhere under the blue-washed, sticking-papered glass, clothing here and there, scant food on makeshift shelves, in trunks, on suitcases and in boxes. Hotplates warm, thin soup in a pot. A crust of the grey National, a half-eaten clove of garlic.
‘And not one of these unregistered visitors,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Have they all vanished?’
The ‘room’ smelled of sweat, no wash-water and mould.
‘Three males, two females,’ he said, ‘and the hotel, having learned by its bush telegraph of the murder and the presence of two decidedly interested detectives, has emptied itself.’
Ach! what was he to do? Go back up to Louis who would still be ‘talking’ to that poor thing, or try to find someone?
Rigaud was reading Proust! Closeted in his loge, the concierge was taking time out in a tattered club chair.
‘Run the lift up and down for me,’ said Kohler. ‘Create a diversion. Do it twice.’
‘The electricity … The shortages, monsieur.’
‘Fuck the shortages. Just do it or I’ll have Herr Gessler and his boys turn the hotel upside down and tumble everyone out in the cold.’
‘It’s freezing in here anyways. Besides, most are away at work. Only the entertainers, the hat-check girls, night waiters, croupiers, telephone and telegraph operators and the sick are in their rooms, or were. After all, isn’t the flu season upon us?’
A wise one to whom the offer of a cigarette, had he any to give, would only have been accepted but ‘for later’.
The Gestapo is harried, thought Rigaud, but heard the voice of his mother saying, Daniel, have courage. This one and his kind are living like God in France, therefore you must show the muscle! Only then will he and his little Surete collabo gumshoe realize that the hotel is indeed empty except for the corpse they have found.
Maman had always had something to say about everything. ‘Corpses should be removed immediately, Inspector,’ he said testily. ‘It’s unsanitary to leave them for so long. The room is needed also.’
‘Nom de Dieu, don’t you listen? Stop at each floor. Open and close the cage door and don’t bother to tell me you haven’t an operator’s licence or that you’re not paid to run that thing!’