Built on the right bank of the Nonette and surrounded by a plain that was bordered by forests now shrouded in snow, Senlis was about fifty kilometres to the north-north-east beyond Paris. It was a quiet provincial town whose soft grey limestone walls and substantial houses had lasting charm. But it was from this southernmost apex that the triangle known as the Devastated Region began.
To the north, at Peronne in 1917, the British had found on the blackened shell of the mairie a signboard left by the Kaiser’s retreating army. Nicht argern, nur wundern. Do not be enraged, only wonder.
The devastation had been deliberate and terrible. Thousands and thousands of fruit trees had been hacked off at exactly waist height and felled so that their crowns all pointed with mathematical preciseness along the path of the retreating army.
The same had happened to the poplars and buttonwoods which had once beautified the lanes and roads. From Senlis to Saint Quentin in the north and to Albert in the west, had been affected but in reality the ruination of that war had been much greater. About fourteen hundred villages and towns had all but been obliterated.
And in Senlis? It had been occupied from 2 September 1914 until the eleventh, during the initial push to the Marne. Here the invader had trodden relatively lightly, one might suppose, looting, burning and destroying all but four of the houses along the fabled rue du la Republique. Its mayor and six others had been executed, but fortunately much of the town had been spared.
During the retreat, all wells and springs had been polluted with the carcasses of dead animals and latrine excrement, the farm buildings either burned or blown up and the roads dynamited.
‘It’s a wonder you speak to me at all,’ muttered Kohler, still behind the wheel.
‘Ah! it wasn’t of your doing.’ Hermann had been taken prisoner in 1916.
‘Right after the Armistice we were marched north and through Jussy, Louis. Not a Kaiser’s shell or one of yours had hit it but not a wall, a bush, flower or blade of grass had been left. Hell, it was only a little place. Why’d they do a thing like that?’
Hermann must have seen the remains of the orchards, the farmboy in him overwhelmed. ‘In war all things are possible. Come on, let’s find the house of Monsieur Jacqmain’s mother. Let’s not dwell on ancient history.’
‘It was only twenty-five years ago and now we’re right back in the shit again.’
The grey-stone house, with mullioned windows and white trim, was just off the rue de la Treille in the oldest part of town. Built largely in the eighteenth century, it was part seventeenth-century priory, part thirteenth-century chapel, and the two long storeys of it exuded tranquillity, substance and stability. But it was from the back that the treasure of the house was best seen even in winter. Here ivy-covered, high and ancient walls enclosed a large garden with sturdy walnut trees and several venerable apple trees. The remains of the chapel were at the rear of the house where moss-covered stone steps led steeply up from beneath the apple bows, a good six metres to the top of the Gallo-Roman wall that had once surrounded the town.
‘Silvanectum, Hermann. Home of the Silvanectes. There were once twenty-eight towers along this wall, but now only sixteen are left.’
Trying to momentarily forget their problems, Louis added, ‘If ever I could move out of that house of my mother’s, this is what I would aspire to.’
Kohler had heard it all before. The little retirement with government pension, the farm in Provence where vegetables might be harvested if sufficient water could possibly be secured; the orchard in Normandy not ravaged by cutworms, blight, frost, starlings, war or thieves, namely tax collectors. ‘It doesn’t look as if there’s anyone around.’
They descended the steps. Louis slipped and nearly went down. Kohler cursed the impulse that had led them to explore the place from such an entrance. At the back door, repeated banging brought no answer. All the curtains were drawn. ‘Merde, what now?’ muttered Louis.
‘We open it up. We have to. Look, for all we know Boemelburg and Herr Max could have had everyone arrested and be only waiting for us to return to Paris.’
‘Idiot, they’d have stopped us on the road. You’re forgetting the controls.’
Kohler tried to force the lock. ‘Messieurs …’
The voice had about it a breathless urgency. At the far corner of the garden, a top step was hesitantly negotiated by a wooden-clogged, tall, thin woman in black with a shopping hamper. A hand was thrown up. They held their breaths. ‘Madame Jacqmain is in her grave these fifteen days,’ she cried out. ‘The Mademoiselle has gone to Paris. You … why would such as you demand such as this effort from one such as myself?’
They recrossed the garden at a run and when these two from Paris who had come in the shiny black car that had been left outside the mairie and Kommandantur stood below her on the steps, Madame Augustine Moreel faced them from above, thus blocking their way and putting even the giant at a disadvantage. ‘Messieurs, must I notify the prefet himself? You were tampering with the locks.’
A Belgian, a Walloon … ‘Madame, could we not discuss things on more stable ground?’
Suspicion raked him. ‘Please state your business.’
Her purse was black and gripped as a weapon. ‘Surete and Kripo. He’s the Surete, I’m the …’
Her grey-blue eyes flashed impatience. ‘What’s the son done this time? Violated another poor young thing? Flayed her to satiate his base desires and then wept on his knees before that portrait of his dear mother, a saint?’
They waited. They swallowed this outburst, these two detectives who clung to the icy ascent beneath her.
‘Well?’ she demanded.
Louis was about to say, A few small questions. Kohler shushed him by gripping him by the elbow and nearly sending the two of them to the bottom. ‘You mentioned a mademoiselle, madame?’
‘Perhaps I did.’
‘There were two ladies who came from Paris. Did they have a suitcase with them?’ tried Louis.
‘When, exactly, did they come?’ she asked.
‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ managed Kohler.
‘A suitcase,’ she said, the breath held back. ‘Travellers always have such things.’
Merde! they were getting nowhere. ‘Madame, please step aside and accompany us into the house.’
‘I’ll do no such thing. Madame trusted me implicitly and carried her confidence in that trust to her grave.’
A treasure, then, if the key to part this one’s lips could ever be found. ‘The two who came here, did they take Monsieur Jacqmain’s daughter to Paris with them?’ It was a complete shot in the dark.
‘Sylvianne was beside herself with grief, monsieur. The child has lived all her tender life with the grandmother she adored. They were the greatest of companions. No matter was too difficult for either to accomplish for the other. Reading, sketching, piano lessons … Night after night exquisite concerts, the singing … Though she’s only twelve years old, the daughter has the sound of angels in her voice and fingers, but also the great goodness of God in her heart, thanks be to Him who has made us all in spite of accidents of birth.’
‘You must be freezing,’ said Kohler. ‘Here, let’s go round and into the house by its proper entrance. It was stupid of us to have come this way. Undignified of police officers.’
Suspicion registered but she held her tongue. An eighteenth-century iron railing ran atop the wall. There were the usual ‘tourists’ about, members, also, of the Wehrmacht’s local detachment, but the lack of schoolboys throwing snowballs at schoolgirls reminded one that the light of day was, alas, fast fading. Soon the kids would be let out of school.
‘Messieurs, why have you come?’
It was Louis who said, ‘He has killed himself.’