The second clipping, that of the newspaper, depicted the Premier as a hideously grinning, squat and moustachioed bullfrog cradling a bouquet of chrysanthemums — the press’s funereal choice had been perfect! — as he came courting to knock at a door whose emblem was a large black swastika.
‘Vichy is Vichy, Inspectors. There is no other place like it in the world. There never will be nor can be, and I am at the centre of it. Inheritor of the decisions of others, cementer of bargains that are seldom adhered to. Reviled, hated, ridiculed by an ever-growing number, ah oui, but to be ill thought of and yet useful is better than to be ill thought of and useless. That bicycle must have been stolen; God knows where the artist found the paint. Footprints indicated the general direction of retreat but the children soon put paid to them, though they did establish the time of the atrocity, since the paint they touched on first inspection was then not frozen.’
‘It doesn’t belong to one of the teachers, does it?’ asked Kohler of the bike.
‘Merde alors, you sound like the great one! Is pedantic logic always foremost in the mind of detectives too? Come, there’s more to see.’
‘A moment,’ cautioned Louis. ‘The clippings, Premier?’
‘Slid in an envelope under the door to my office at the Hotel du Parc late last night or early this morning.’
‘In spite of the Garde Mobile’s redoubled presence?’
‘Perhaps because of it. The doctor is, of course, in a rage and once more Henri-Claude Ferbrave has been threatened with immediate dismissal. Derelict. Spending too much time with the horizontales of that maison de tolerance he favours. Menetrel, in spite of the coarseness of his tongue, is very much a prude and family man, and is offended by the unbridled appetite of his chief lieutenant. The Hotel is, I’m afraid, abuzz.’
Workmen, among them the elder Grenier, were busily erasing the damage with scrapers, wire brushes and kerosene. Spectators stood about, lots of them. Passers-by paused. A Wehrmacht lorry dropped off a squad of burly Felgendarmen, the military police.
The Hotel du Parc and Hall des Sources had also been decorated.
COURAGE ON LES AURA faced Petain’s office and balcony, from where the Marechal could be seen sadly gazing down at words he’d spoken to the troops at Verdun in 1917: Take heart, we’ll get them.
BOUSILLER LES GARS! Smash — bump off — the boys! had been splashed directly below him on the ground-floor wall of the hotel, between its sticking-papered and blue-washed windows. And then, as if to rub it in, the artist had used one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s innocent campaign slogans for children. LUTTEZ CONTRE LES DORYPHORES! Fight against the potato beetle. Children all over rural France had been excused from classes, armed with bottles of water and, accompanied by their teachers, encouraged to swarm into the potato fields each summer to catch, drown and squash this pest. But now, of course, Doryphores also meant the Boche and everyone knew it!
‘Premier, the Hall, I think,’ said Louis determinedly.
‘I can tell you little.’
‘Sometimes even a little is enough.’
‘Are the boys next, now that you’ve seen the slogans for yourselves?’ Laval was clearly worried but calm.
‘Let us reserve judgement, Premier. Let us adopt one of yours and the Marechal’s very first policies with the Occupier in 1940, that of attentisme.’
‘Wait-and-see has never been my way, Inspector, but had you the opportunity then, what would you have done?’
‘Exactly the same thing. You … we … had no other choice.’
‘Then let us go in and settle this little matter before Herr Gessler and his gang of thugs trample everything.’
‘And the thugs you, yourself, employ?’
‘Are Menetrel’s men, the very ones who were among those who arrested me on 13 December 1940 after my first term here. Menetrel, of course, begged Petain to have them assassinate me, but Herr Abetz intervened. Now I employ them. That, too, is of Vichy. I insisted they guard me. One has to do things like that when one is Premier. Every day that they are with me they must worry about being killed in an assassination attempt that has not been of their own making, but also … Ah oui, mes chers detectives, they and that little doctor of ours are forced to realize not only the opportunity they missed but the mistake they would have made! Now, of course, if they were to kill me, they’d have no one.’
Merde alors, the wily peasant at heart! ‘And Bousquet and the others?’ asked St-Cyr — Hermann would leave him to deal with Laval.
‘Are worth saving if for no other reason than to hold together what’s left and prevent anarchy. No scandal is going to erupt out of what they’ve been up to. Shocking as it was, and a severe embarrassment to my Government, that little business venture of theirs has been stopped. You, in turn, will find the murderer or murderers of those girls and then quietly leave.’
‘And if it’s more than that?’
‘The Resistance? We’ll deal with it.’
‘And if it’s one or more of the boys?’
‘Then he or they will be dealt with.’
‘And if it’s the wives?’
‘Those too.’
‘And if it’s the doctor?’
Laval grinned.
‘Personally I would like nothing better than to present to the Marechal the proces-verbal his eminence grise had to sign under the stern gazes of a Surete and a Kripo that I, myself, had requested. What better an example of mutual cooperation between our two nations than for the General, the Vainqueur de Verdun, to acknowledge that our two police forces, united in the battle against common crime, have found my Flykiller? Of course, the lance corporal with the Iron Cross Second and First Class would appreciate it too. Even Herr Hitler has, I’m sure if one searched desperately enough for it, a certain sense of humour.’
From inside the Hall des Sources, where she stood next to frozen Kentia palms and near-dead, pollarded lime trees, Ines could see the workmen quite clearly as they scraped away the COURAGE ON LES AURA. Like blue-clad flies in winter, they were pinned to the tall, arched windows from whose delicate friezes long icicles hung, and where sheets of discoloured ice had lain beneath the artist’s brush, those segments of the letters rapidly vanished.
Beyond the workmen who faced her, others across the street at the Hotel du Parc had their backs to her, and wasn’t that also like Vichy? she asked herself. To confront, to shun, to erase the truth and turn the back on so many?
Laval, St-Cyr and Kohler had gone over to the Buvette du Chomel, to where Celine had been finally cornered and slain, but had she known her killer or killers? How had she got away from the one, only to then be trapped by the other? What words had been said? Last words …
Sandrine Richard stood near the entrance, perhaps not wishing to come closer for fear of betraying herself. And Blanche? asked Ines. Blanche was halfway between herself and the others but had found that she, too, could approach no closer.
Voices echoed. The detectives made no attempt to hide their questions or the answers given. Perhaps they did this to taunt her and the others, perhaps it was simply for expedience. Laval’s description of the corpse fitted Menetrel’s — St-Cyr acknowledged this. The Premier had, on crouching to examine the body, lost a button from one of his shoes and, having heard it clatter away, had searched for and found it, only to then find that its backing had slipped out and been lost.
Her hair had been gone through. Had he opened her nightgown? St-Cyr had asked — one of its ties had been snapped. ‘No had been the answer.’
‘Yet you moved her legs and hips,’ St-Cyr had challenged.