‘Though my grandfather shared his love of birds with me, Inspectors,’ said Hebert, ‘the taxidermy that so impresses was not his either, but that of the man to whom I owe all I know of the wild. Our head gamekeeper, long since deceased. Aurele Mandrin.’ Again his gaze was averted.
In 1754 Mandrin, since elevated to a folk hero, had been a smuggler from Dauphine, so the choice of name, beyond that of pure inspiration, was perhaps appropriate, thought St-Cyr.
‘That room was always mine, Inspectors. I loved it as a boy and still do. The predatory instinct in their eyes is everywhere, especially when one looks out and up from that bed. One can’t help but come to admire it, to want it too, and yet … and yet, there is also that immense sense of freedom and joy that the power of flight must …’
‘You let my husband use that room with that woman of his!’ spat Sandrine.
Stung by this, Hebert tossed his head back but said nothing for a moment, then coldly, ‘Madame, was he not the predator, she the quarry? In any case, I had no say whatsoever in the matter. As you well know, this chateau and its remaining sixty hectares, which had been in my family since before the Ducs de Bourbon were betrayed by their constable in 1527, were lost to others, due to bankruptcy. Your husband could well have chosen any room he wished, or was it that Mademoiselle Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux wanted to bring out the predator in him and loved to be hunted?’
Oh-oh, thought Kohler, only to hear the woman shriek, ‘Maudit salaud, how dare you?’
The custodian waved an indifferent hand. ‘Ah, I dare because for me there is nothing left but that. Albert, are we ready?’
‘Monsieur …’ interjected Louis.
‘Fornicateur, don’t deny it!’ shouted Sandrine. ‘we know everything that went on in this place!’
‘Soixante-neuf, madame?’ taunted Hebert. ‘Les grands spectacles? La fellation, le sadomasochisme et le fetichisme?’
‘Orgies!’ she shrilled, rocketing into the kitchen to take up one of the bowls and dash it on the floor. ‘Rapist! We know you regularly kept a concubine in that room of yours, sometimes two and three of them to fly, eh? Fly while you and others took them, eh? In the ass, in the mouth, seldom where it’s natural. Salut, mon brave.’ She gave him the thumb. ‘This one has a reputation, Inspectors, for both arranging the liaisons sexuelles of others and for often participating in them!’
‘And your poor Madame Deschambeault, that sexually repressed neurotic, what of her son, madame?’ shot back Hebert from behind his chopping block. ‘A son whose taste runs to schoolgirls in uniform who must be held down? Has he got his eye on Monique de Fleury, eh, or need we ask?’
‘Blanche … Blanche has told us everything, monsieur.’
Oh-oh again, thought Kohler.
‘Vermine!’ hissed Hebert, turning on Blanche. ‘Was it you who unlocked the doors and let those bitches in? An informer, is that it, eh? Well, is that how it was, Blanche? Did you think it would help your cause with that father of yours? Inspectors, this one and that brother of hers want what’s rightfully theirs. To think that I offered them help, that I considered myself their friend and in no way asked anything for myself!’
He paused a moment, then said, ‘Albert, les oiseaux, mon vieux. We can deal with this lacheuse later.’ This rat who has betrayed us.
‘Monsieur, your birds can wait. While we have you gathered, we will settle a few things,’ said Louis.
‘Or call in Herr Gessler and his boys if needed,’ said Hermann. ‘Not that we want to, but if we have to, we will.’
‘Then please don’t forget that the chateau and grounds are an embassy, and that its employees, myself included, have diplomatic immunity.’
‘But not from me, mon fin,’ said Kohler. ‘Not from me.’
The tension in the kitchen had become unbearable. Ines warned herself to be calm, to ignore the covert looks, the suspicion — even the outright hatred between Sandrine Richard and Charles-Frederic Hebert — and to think clearly … always clearly, but Albert was sitting so close to her, his right leg was deliberately pressed hard against her and he didn’t move, wouldn’t move, and was making her feel so uneasy. Did he sense she was an enemy? Did he somehow intuitively know she was a danger? What danger, please?
How could he? she asked. The butcher’s knife lay on the table next to his thick, stubby fingers. Hebert had noticed this, too. Hebert who’d known Blanche and Paul’s father …
‘Mademoiselle Charpentier,’ said the Chief Inspector St-Cyr, ‘I asked you a question.’
Madame Richard was watching her closely. Was the woman afraid the truth would come out, that she, the wife, had killed Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux in a fit of jealous rage as sworn?
Blanche Varollier was watching her, too, but Monsieur Hebert had now quickly averted his eyes. Again Ines heard St-Cyr ask his question — the letters that Lucie had carried to Paris for Celine, had they been posted to the studio on the rue du Douanier? To her studio.
One must either lie or confess, said Ines to herself, but to lie skilfully, one must impart elements of truth.
Mentally she crossed herself, kissed her fingertips as if the rosary was in her hands, and said silently, Bless me, Father, for I am afraid.
‘Celine and I grew up together, Inspectors. She in that fine house of her parents on place Lucien-Herr and the rue Lhomond, myself with my uncle and aunt in a fourth-floor flat on the rue Tournefort. We met one day quite by … Well, it wasn’t by accident.’ Could she manage a faint smile of memory? she asked herself and, more confidently when that was done, said, ‘I’d planned to have my path cross hers, she mine, as it turned out, so when we bumped into each other, it was as if by accident, yet both of us knew we would.’
‘You were lonely,’ said Herr Kohler — was he always so sensitive? she wondered. ‘You’d lost your father and then your mother. It was as if they’d abandoned you.’
‘Yes … Yes, that’s exactly how I felt as a child. Was it so wrong of me?’
‘Mademoiselle,’ said St-Cyr harshly, ‘you are attempting to conceal things we need to know! Did you receive letters from Celine Dupuis that had been illegally carried across the Demarcation Line by Lucie Trudel?’
For which the penalty would be prison or transportation into forced labour. ‘Yes. Yes, I did, Monsieur l’Inspecteur Principal. Celine was afraid.’
‘Of what?’ asked Herr Kohler, the sensitivity still there.
Blanche and Sandrine were again intently watching her, Hebert chancing a glance, Albert so still that she could feel the continued pressure and warmth of his leg. ‘Of being killed — what else?’ she heard herself hotly demand. ‘I … I don’t know what she and the other victims were involved in. Really, I don’t. She … she did say she had to do things for les Allemands that she didn’t want to, and that …’ Now calm yourself, ma chere, she warned herself. Look at each of them as they sit around this lovely old table. ‘That someone important had found out about what they’d had to do and, not liking it, had … had then had each of them killed — “removed” was the word she used. But I haven’t got the letters, so can’t prove this, since they made their little fires in my studio stove as soon as they’d been read.’
Herr Kohler scribbled something on a page of his notebook and thrust it across the table to that partner of his. Panic made the creamy skin of Blanche’s cheeks become paler as the blood drained, but what had the Hauptmann Detektiv Inspektor Kohler just written to cause the girl such distress? wondered Ines. Was it: They were all informants, Louis, but did Menetrel order their removal? Menetrel, Mademoiselle Blanche Olivier? An eminence grise and confident of the Marechal’s? A hater of les Allemands and lover of Vichy?