‘Those damned girlfriends were like flies,’ spat Laval. ‘Always buzzing about their men and threatening to spoil things for us. I was all but certain they were informants and have now been proven correct!’
They sat alone, those two detectives, in the Chante Clair Restaurant where the ladies, the creme de la creme of Vichy, wore fashion’s latest whim, the colourful turban. The wives were at afternoon tea and gossip, the sound of their voices suddenly rising to a shrillness that frightened before dropping to a whisper that only served to increase anxiety.
Sandrine Richard had curtly been given permission to join Madame Petain and Elisabeth de Fleury, their heads close in urgent conference. Blanche, alone and looking lost, sat at a table beneath the stained-glass lights of tall, streaked windows that overlooked the snow-dusted statuary of the inner courtyard. And I? mused Ines. I, instinctively not wishing to sit with Blanche, nor she with me, sit alone, having just learned that Albert has been released into his father’s recognizance.
St-Cyr had agreed to do this, perhaps out of kindness, but had he also wanted to see what would happen? she wondered.
Kohler, in defiance of the hour, the head chef and the kitchen staff, had loudly ordered pea soup with ham, sausages and sauerkraut, and ‘good German beer’; a pastis for his friend and partner. ‘A double.’
Since he sat with his back to her, she could only clearly see St-Cyr who, from time to time, an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth or in a fist, would look across the crowded dining room to see her sitting primly beneath one of the wall mirrors, her back to that very wall, knowing she couldn’t possibly overhear them now or see what lay before them. That tin-plated little post, Inspector? Laval au poteau? Had it been a coincidence, post and post? Would Monsieur le Premier wonder if it had meaning and make a hurried visit to his clairvoyant, Madame Ribot, of the Hotel Ruhl, at 15 boulevard de l’Hotel de Ville, to ask her advice?
Would he believe what the cards, the stars, the moon and conjunctions said?
‘Hermann, our sculptress is still without her precious valise. Just what the hell is she really doing here?’
‘Blanche asked the same thing.’
‘Ah oui. She makes Albert edgy and now she’s got me edgy too.’
The understatement of the year! ‘Relax. Eat up.’
‘And try to concentrate? Merde, I’ve no appetite. How can I when I know Herr Gessler must be watching the clock — our clock — and counting off the minutes? If he gets his hands on that one …’ he indicated the sculptress, ‘neither of us will be able to save her.’
Stripped naked, shrieked at constantly, her head shoved repeatedly under water in the bathtub those bastards were fond of using, she’d be strung up and further clubbed with rubber truncheons if she didn’t tell them what they wanted, or thrown to the swill-soaked floor to be kicked by hobnailed boots until dead.
‘Please don’t let us forget that, Hermann.’
‘You know I won’t. How could I? It applies also to Blanche and that brother of hers as well as to Albert and others, especially Olivier and his Edith.’
‘Olivier,’ said Louis, opening Noelle’s knife. Quickly arranging. the items and ignoring the food, he set the V for Victory beneath the knife; the earrings, laudanum bottle and billets doux to the left; the button-post to the right and isolated for the moment.
‘One killing is a drowning, quick and easy, and no one sees it as murder, Hermann, until much later. The next is a garrotting, embellished only in that the wire, similar to that which Albert Grenier uses, is found embedded in the victim’s throat. The third killing is further embellished by a riding crop, dead rats, a corpse that is hidden in an armoire, as if a child, a young man, a naughty boy, had done it.’
‘Albert again.’
‘Only with the fourth killing, as we now know, do we see further embellishment. A cigar band, cigar ashes, a knife with a past; earrings and perfume of the same; but since we may no longer be dealing with two assailants, a man and woman, we had best go carefully over things.’
Steam rose from the waiting soup. ‘Blanche claims that Edith told her and her brother that Petain met their mother in the Hall the day Noelle took her life, Louis.’
‘Then everything with this fourth killing is to point to Olivier as the killer.’
The soup would still be too hot in any case and Louis was trying hard to face up to the worst of this affair.
‘A body is found by Albert just after curfew, and at 7.32 a.m. Menetrel pronounces Madame Dupuis dead, Hermann.’
‘Laval fails to mention the V for Victory, as does Menetrel, but was it there at 7.32 or is it left afterwards, but before Laval’s arrival?’
Sadly it was a good question, for if it was present overnight, the Resistance could well have killed Madame Dupuis; if not, then the matchstick could either have been left just before or after Menetrel’s viewing the corpse, either as a further warning to les gars or, if left by someone other than a resistant, to implicate them. ‘Left there overnight, perhaps,’ said St-Cyr, not liking it but motioning to Hermann to eat. ‘Crush up some bread. Here, let me do it for you.’
‘You know I can do that for myself!’
‘Yes! but I want the sculptress to see that we look after each other.’
‘A Resistance killing,’ muttered Kohler. Louis had seen that their discussing it couldn’t be avoided, but had the civil war begun? They did tend to leave other tokens of their presence, not just painted slogans. ‘But why, then, did Menetrel fail to mention it?’
That, too, was a good question. ‘Fear perhaps. Also a need to first find answers for himself. Remember, please, with what we are dealing.’
‘An eminence grise who’s accustomed to holding things close and is fiercely competitive, Louis, but let’s set that one aside for the moment, eh? It would still have been dark at 7.32 Berlin Time. The police hadn’t yet been notified. Albert would have had to give the doctor his torch or lantern.’
The sun not up for an hour. ‘Darkness, then, and yes, someone who could come and go at will and with no one the wiser, but with less than twenty minutes in which to complete the task, since Laval was there at near to eight.’
‘Someone who has an ear glued so closely to the ground that he, she or they would know beforehand what’s to happen,’ said Kohler.
‘They’d have had to know Laval would leave his office. It’s too tight a timing, Hermann. The V for Victory was left when she was killed.’
‘Or afterwards but before her body was first discovered.’
‘The girl is killed, the knife removed and dropped into a portable toilet, one that Albert is sure to investigate. But why remove it in the first place if one wishes to focus attention on Olivier? Just what the hell is really going on, Hermann? Love letters are left for us to find? Sapphires that the Resistance should, by rights, have stolen? Press clippings for Laval?’
‘An identity card.’
‘Charles-Frederic Hebert knew only of the earrings and the perfume, but was taken aback when he learned of the dress.’
‘As was Blanche Varollier.’
‘Light would have been needed if one was to duck into the Hall after the killing and Menetrel’s visit to the corpse. Light and then darkness, Hermann. Night blindness. Olivier told me he suffered from it. Ten minutes were required for his eyes to adjust. He knew Celine Dupuis. The girl had asked him to write to Mademoiselle Charpentier and send the letter with Lucie Trudel …’
Kohler set his soup spoon down and sighed. ‘He’d have walked behind Celine along that corridor in the hotel, would have let her lead the way to freedom — was that what he told her, Louis? That the FTP had organized an escape for her? No struggle, the girl not trying to get away until in the Hall.’