And smell their cases before throwing back the covers to examine the sheets of an unmade bed? ‘You had a key, did you?’
‘No! I …’
‘She paid the concierge two hundred francs, Inspector,’ said Sandrine Richard, taking out a cigarette only to remember suddenly, at a look from Madame Petain, that she shouldn’t have. ‘We often did this, she and I, if you must know. Eugenie also, for proof. Solid proof!’
Fresh tears wet Elisabeth de Fleury’s cheeks. Madame Richard reached across the table to take her by the hands, scattering shreds of tobacco, for she’d unconsciously crushed the cigarette.
‘Can’t you see how upset she is?’ spat Madame Petain, having seen that this Surete had taken note of the spilled tobacco. ‘Aren’t the photographs sufficient for you, Inspector? Must you have all the details, coarse as they are?’
‘Everything,’ he said.
‘Merde, how can you be so insensitive? A man whose first wife left him with an empty house … the house of his mother, I understand, the second wife running off with the Hauptmann Steiner, only to be blown to pieces by a Resistance bomb on her reluctant return to that same house? Her child as well!’
Ah! what could one say? ‘We police are seldom sensitive, Madame la Marechale. It’s part of the job. The victims, the blood, the oedematous fluid and aborted foetuses … Always a certain detachment is necessary, but they don’t teach this at the Academy, of course, and wisely, I think, as it might dissuade some from taking up the profession.’
‘Touche, eh? You didn’t even know of that room, did you?’
‘We’re learning.’
‘Then listen, Inspector. Though the doctor is certainly no friend of mine, he will tell you Elisabeth did awaken him that evening at about 2 a.m., and if you. press him, I’m sure he will confess to having made a little joke of it. The first words uttered to her by that jackal were that if she desired extramarital sex, she must come to his office during the day, never to his home!’
One had best let that pass. ‘And this room at the Hotel Ruhl, madame. How long have you ladies known of it?’
‘Since early last summer. Since Sandrine and then Elisabeth found the courage to admit their suspicions were more than justified. It was Sandrine who first saw her husband leaving that place just before that nurse of his, he going to the right, she to the left.’
Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux.
Would it hurt to volunteer a little without first consulting madame? wondered Elisabeth. ‘It’s an old place, Inspector, whose rooms are mostly taken by long-term residents who are not well off.’
‘A few of the rooms are reserved for visiting civil servants whose positions demand little better,’ said Madame Petain tartly. ‘Gaetan-Baptiste Deschambeault found it for them.’
Julienne’s husband, Lucie’s lover …
‘That grigou would have made certain the bank covered the cost, Inspector,’ shot Sandrine Richard.
‘Grigou, madame?’
Visibly flustered — realizing she had inadvertently said something she shouldn’t have — she managed a brief and self-conscious grin. ‘A nickname he uses with his wife and family when they demand too much.’
Had she read the notes Deschambeault and Celine had left for Lucie? he wondered. Had these three ‘ladies’ murdered that poor girl, the others also, or hired someone to do it? ‘Is the hotel a maison de passe?’ he asked.
‘Haven’t we just said it was used for that purpose?’ spat Madame Petain.
‘Committee members know the hotel well,’ he muttered, jotting it down in front of them. ‘And at the Grand etablissement thermal, Madame la Marechale?’
This one was trouble. Vipere that he was, the little doctor had been correct about that! ‘Mademoiselle Mailloux couldn’t resist letting us know she and Alain Andre often shared a bath.’
The three exchanged glances, Sandrine Richard taking up the thread of it. ‘About three months before she was drowned, that woman entered our steam room as if by mistake, Inspector. No towel, le costume d’Eve complet and flaunting herself in front of me and my friends. I … I was so taken aback, I didn’t know what to do. Eugenie calmly told her to leave.’
‘Calmly?’
The Inspector had put his question to Elisabeth and was again holding up the hand of justice to prevent interference.
‘She … she shrieked at her to leave,’ confessed Madame de Fleury. ‘Mademoiselle Mailloux blanched and muttered, “Sorry”.’
‘What, exactly, was shrieked?’
That we’d kill her if she didn’t go? ‘I … I can’t recall the precise words. “Get out!” I think.’
‘But she lost her smile, lost composure, was frightened and turned abruptly away? Apologized?’
‘There was not time for that, but as to the rest, yes.’
‘Three months …’ he muttered.
‘Prior to 9 December, Inspector. I didn’t kill her. I swear it!’ said Madame Richard.
Elisabeth de Fleury quickly took her by the hands to anxiously say, ‘We’re in the restaurant. Others will hear you!’
‘The 9th of September,’ he said. ‘One always has to jot these little details down.’
‘The 10th,’ grated Madame Petain. Others were trying hard to listen but not let on! ‘Thursday afternoons are always our times at the thermal palace. First the steam and then the baths, the hot and then the cold, and then the douche to tighten up the pores. Mademoiselle Mailloux really did want to embarrass Sandrine in front of us, Inspector. That tart was shameful and totally without conscience.’
‘And like Noelle Olivier, Madame la Marechale?’
To say, How. dare you, would be of little use. ‘Eventually you had to get at that, didn’t you, Inspector? The knife, the earrings — even the perfume that bitch wore? Well, listen closely then, mon pauvre Surete. The Marechal and I have always had two places of residence. His and mine. It’s very discreet and convenient, and he has always made certain of this. In Paris, after our marriage in September of 1920, he rented and furnished two flats at 6 and 8 square de Latour-Maubourg — you know the Left Bank well, I’m sure — and then … then in the house at numero 8 when a suitable one became available for me. Here, too, in the Hotel du Parc, myself in the Majestic. Bien sur, in our marriage we live apart and together, my being invited only to some of the many dinner parties and functions he attends; he and his current mistress, if he has one, to others. That’s how it has always been with us.’
‘Madame, I merely …’
‘Did you think to insult me so as to let my anger give you an advantage? Did you think I wasn’t aware of Madame Olivier’s infatuation or that of the countless others Henri Philippe has had? In June 1920, not three months before our wedding — the banns had been announced well ahead of time, let me assure you! — he took up with Marie-Louise Regad, an old flame who had recently been made a widow. Then just a few months after our wedding, it was Madame Jacqueline de Castex, another widow and old flame whose daughter and her husband now live in the Hotel du Parc to constantly remind me of that affair and to whom he regularly makes visits, not me. Never me! The Marechal has a reputation for going after the married ones, hasn’t he, even to chasing myself, and widows especially! But … but I must tell you.’ She would pause now to catch a breath and hold it, Eugenie said to herself. ‘No other woman in France can lick the back of her husband’s head every time she mails a postcard to the north, or a letter in the south. Moi-meme, seulement, Inspector.’
Only myself. ‘Did all, or any of you, pay to have those girls killed?’
‘And not kill them ourselves — is this the reason you sigh? Really, Inspector, that is so typically male-chauvinistic of you! Not capable of killing to save our marriages? Not able to vote, of course, nor to open a bank account without one’s husband’s or father’s permission? That, too, is only understandable in such a male-dominated society, though one has to wonder about it when so many of our men are either dead or in prisoner-of-war camps. But women are allowed to go out to work and each day eight million of us do. More than in any other country in Europe, even now during this dreadful conflict. And of course, when they get home, there are always the meals, the washing, the cleaning, the children, the endless queues for food …’