Dark eyes, swift to all meaning, detective or otherwise, took in Blanche Varollier and Ines Charpentier, for they’d come to watch from a distance, with Albert Grenier between them. Albert, who was terrified and in tears, of course, but for his own good necessarily out of commission, his wrists bound by the shame of Kripo bracelets he could not remove.
Sandrine Richard and Charles-Frederic Hebert were also attentive, the two sworn enemies unaware they stood shoulder to shoulder in that side entrance to the kitchens. But one must say something.
‘Premier …’ began St-Cyr, the gangsters moving discreetly away to allow privacy as commanded.
‘Inspector, surely that …’ Laval indicated Albert. ‘That can’t be our killer?’
‘He’s a part of it,’ grunted Hermann. ‘He tried to kill the sculptress with this.’
‘Pah!’ snorted Laval, impatiently tossing his fedora-ed head in acknowledgement of the almost brand-new Laguiole of Noelle Olivier. ‘The doctor vets every visitor his God on earth receives and is most fastidious about it. Surely Mademoiselle Charpentier poses no threat to the great one, or are we to hire Albert to head up security?’
‘Premier, the body of Celine Dupuis …’ hazarded Louis.
‘Inspectors, the boy loves the Marechal as he would a grandfather who dotes on a little grandson. Certainly Petain fails to acknowledge his existence, but Albert’s loyalty never wavers, not even when the great one’s autograph has to be purloined by other means, namely the Marechal’s batman!’
‘Premier, you went to have a look at Madame Dupuis after the doctor had pronounced her dead.’
‘My button … You found its backing! Certainly I have a stock of them, a few extras, but they’re impossible to buy these days. I’m always misplacing them. Merci.’
Louis’s fist was tightly closed and snatched away, the words spoken, though Kohler knew them by heart. ‘That is evidence, Premier. Your unauthorized visit to the corpse?’
‘And before the local gendarmes could even get a look at it? Menetrel, mon cher detective. Menetrel makes a great thing of his medical expertise. Electrical shock treatments for the Marechal, daily massages, injections of ephedrine, it’s rumoured, and it is not all beyond that charlatan, but even I, a simple peasant, have doubts. I had to decide for myself. Was it yet another killing — the third of those girls — or a planned campaign of terror?’
‘But … but, Monsieur le Premier, by not informing us of your visit and by leaving this little memento, you have caused us to believe that a woman might have killed Celine Dupuis! Two assailants, not one, as has been indicated by the sketchy police reports of the other killings. Merde alors, how could you have done this to us?’
Hermann let him have it flatly. ‘They were all informants.’
‘For Herr Abetz and Company?’ asked Laval swiftly, his dark eyes narrowing. ‘Then let me tell you why I’m not surprised. Vichy’s like a sieve, Inspectors, the Hotel du Parc its main orifice and Menetrel its incompetent dyke-plugger who runs from hole to hole with cork and hammer. But that’s not why I came to find you both. Are the boys next, as they are given to believe?’
‘And yourself and the Marechal?’ asked Louis.
The fag end was plucked from that lip and flung away. ‘Petain doesn’t count. Only a fool would make a martyr of him. The terrorists, the resistants, if you wish, are too well versed in the national psyche for that. As a people, we love our martyrs, so we’re stuck with that reedy skeleton, and until the coming of the Divine Reaper he has taken to praying to, he’ll go on playing Gilbert and Sullivan and other operetta recordings in that “bedroom” of his, and if I have to hear the HMS Pinafore again while trying to write letters or decide something crucial, I swear to God I’ll smash his machine! The boys?’ he asked calmly. Les gars.
Richard, Bousquet, Deschambeault and de Fleury. Hermann indicated that for the moment he would leave that one to his partner and Chief. ‘I don’t think so, Premier,’ said Louis guardedly. ‘Though Herr Kohler and I are badly in need of a chance to compare notes, everything we’ve uncovered so far indicates exactly the opposite. Whoever killed them did so because of what they’d become.’
‘Lovers and informants. The wives, then, or the doctor, who is not above murder, I must say, but … but come. Before we decide, let me show you both why I’ve left a perfectly good lunch to find you. Real,’ he called out to one of the durs. ‘Take Herr Kohler’s vehicle and follow. Tell the others to pile into it. Albert in the back seat with Mademoiselle Varollier. The sculptress in front, but keep an eye on her and your weapons.’
‘Monsieur le Premier,’ called out Ines, ‘would it be possible for me to go with Madame Richard?’
Laval looked to each of them, Hermann giving him a nod.
‘Then it’s settled. Madame Richard and Mademoiselle Charpentier to join us as we view the latest artwork.’
LAVAL AU POTEAU! ‘Laval up against the post’ had been plastered in huge, dripping, now-frozen black letters over the wall of Charmeil’s eighteenth-century school. Above the Premier’s name, and just beneath the tops of its letters, were two side by side and freshly mounted posters. BEKANNTMACHUNG — Official Notice — as if any of the kids or their parents could read Deutschl snorted Kohler to himself. AVIS. Notice APPREHENDES. Apprehended. PEINE DE MORT. Penalty of death. FUSILLES. Shot. Ah, Christ! Paul Panton, Edgar Guerledan, Francine Aubret and Marcel Boulanger. Kids, just kids.
‘Herr Gessler’s quick off the mark, isn’t he? Ages eighteen to twenty. Fools!’ swore Laval, indicating the names of the dead and angrily finding himself another cigarette to light hurriedly.
Everyone had got out of the cars, Mademoiselle Charpentier sickened by the notices, thought St-Cyr. Beyond them, and the letters, its whitewash faded by the years of the Occupation so that the wall became a mirror of the times, were the words that had been written in despair by retreating soldiers in early June 1940, not realizing then that the Government would soon be installed in Vichy. QUI NOUS A TRAHIS? Who has betrayed us?
No one had apparently thought to enquire about, the bicycle that leaned against the wall. A sturdy, pre-war Majestic, its worn seat rested against the edge of the stripped-away stucco. Below it, the bare lava-stone blocks had been scratched by centuries of schoolboys and girls who had wished to leave their little mementos to posterity. A woman’s bike, then, said St-Cyr to himself. Tallish, long-legged and long-armed.
The faded wicker carrier basket was frayed to twigs around its edges and held an all but empty, two-litre tin of coal-black paint and a ten-centimetre-wide brush that must date from 1930 and had been used many times to whitewash the inside of a cowshed. A good farm, then, and well above the usual, but perhaps this was the very brush the soldiers had found to use?
‘There are also these, Inspectors,’ said the Auvergnat, giving a quick wave of salutation to schoolchildren who had found the view from the classroom windows more interesting than their lessons.
Cartoons had been cut from a magazine and a newspaper.
‘Both date from 30 October 1940,’ said Laval. ‘Punch Magazine and the Daily Mirror. I had them checked.’
The first portrayed him as the Great Laval in white bow tie, black waistcoat and tails and juggling swastikas, holding a Francisque rolling pin with rubber spikes like those guaranteed to remove excess fat, and bottles of his very own Vichy water, one of which had shattered at his feet.