‘Ludo, how could you? Ah Jesus, Jesus …’ The woman fell to her knees and pounded the rocks with her fists. Kohler leapt to drag her up. She fought to destroy herself, to end the one thing her lover had made possible above all else.
Her knuckles were bleeding badly. ‘Idiot!’ shouted Kohler angrily. ‘Why did you have to do that?’
She spat in his face and shrieked at him, ‘Because I killed her! Because I was the one who knew about the escapers! It was me who took them to the villa in Le Cannet. Me, Inspector. I moved them from the cottage.’
Such an outburst did not go unnoticed. Buemondi wet his breeches; Delphane levelled his pistol at her but still had not pulled the trigger …
Kohler did the only thing possible. He flung the woman at the bastard’s feet and shouted, ‘Go on and kill her then! Be a coward to save your miserable ass.’
It was Munk who took the Mauser from Delphane and gave him back Louis’s revolver. ‘Now go up on the hill and sort it all out. Take Kohler with you. We will wait one hour and then the executions will begin at ten-minute intervals.’
Kohler thought of his two sons encircled with the whole of the Sixth Army by the Russians at Stalingrad. Savagery could only be met with savagery. What mercy could the boys possibly expect?
He thought of Gerda and the farm he’d hardly seen since the spring of 1939, of picking wild flowers by a reedy pond and bathing naked with the boys while she laughed yet worried they’d get pneumonia.
He thought of Louis up there among the ruins and of the dogs they’d be certain to unleash. ‘Give me something,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me to go in there barehanded.’
Have some compassion where none could be expected? Borel warned himself not to intervene, that by the very act of doing so, he would place himself among the first to be executed.
Even so, when the Gestapo Munk turned aside to speak to the SS major and his lieutenants, he nudged the Bavarian’s arm. ‘Take this,’ he whispered urgently. ‘It is of the opium poppy and the hot red peppers. I made it up for Mademoiselle Viviane’s escapers but she would not allow me the opportunity to give it to them. She was afraid, monsieur, that if it was found in their possession, I would suffer for something I had had nothing to do with.’
The glass-stoppered bottle was cold and Kohler warmed it with a hand as he slid it away in a pocket. ‘Thanks,’ he said as the truth of what the herbalist had just said hit him. ‘Have courage.’
‘Please, monsieur. If you value life, value silence. My eldest son, he is among them.’
‘The maquis?’
‘Monsieur, that word must never pass my lips. My son is a good boy. When he found the escapers lost and wandering about our hills with one of their number badly wounded, he did what had to be done.’
‘He brought them to the cottage under cover of darkness,’ sighed Kohler grimly. ‘Then he left them there for Jean-Paul Delphane, the one they’d said would take them on through to Spain and freedom.’
‘Marcus. His code name was Marcus. No one could have known the German security forces had begun to question the Inspector’s moves, monsieur. Nor could anyone have known for sure that he would then turn on them to save himself.’
‘Try to get them to keep the dogs here and I’ll see what I can do. Look after the weaver. She’s going to need all your efforts for the little time that’s left.’
St-Cyr bit off a breath. It was uncanny how well the girl knew the ruins. She did not hide so much as lead him into positions from which, unseen, she could observe him. And the sunlight from the east was always behind her, dazzling and painful, red-orange and full of fire.
A clump of snow fell suddenly from a rock. He wet his lips in doubt and fear. For some time now he’d felt there was a pattern to the places she led him. Time seemed suspended though time they did not have. Down a darkened ramp, blocked by rubble at its ends, in shadow still, there was an open doorway to one side, and it was colder there than when in the sun. ‘Mademoiselle …’ he began again, knowing she would answer only when it suited her, knowing, too, that Jean-Paul, he would understand this and try to use it.
Suffused with soft light from a portal high in its eastern wall, the stable was littered with goat droppings and he knew at once, the girl and Bebert Peretti had often met here to share their humble lives.
Fresh straw had been put down in one corner. There was a simple wooden bench for the milking, the blackened remains of a fire, a tin can for boiling water and a shared cup.
At first he didn’t notice the lifted stones in the floor right at the corner, nor the small heap of rubble that was to one side of them.
Throwing an anxious glance over a shoulder, St-Cyr crouched, then got down on his hands and knees as he saw the trowel she had used. Ah Nom de Dieu, among the shards of Roman glass there was a small, pale green beaker. A magnificent thing with Greek letters and designs around the rim. She had brushed it off.
‘“Drink and live for ever,”’ he said, swallowing tightly as he saw those two girls in happier times, heard their excited cries, their shouts and earnest whispers as they dug for treasures like this. ‘Fourth or fifth century AD,’ he said sadly. ‘A town, a fortress destroyed – when, when?’ he asked. ‘Now a village is to have its turn and these ruins, they are to receive another pounding. Mademoiselle Josianne-Michele,’ he called out. ‘You alone can save the village, and me, I think you are wise enough to have perceived this.’
‘“Drink and live for ever,”’ she said, but from where he could not discover. ‘I didn’t kill her. It was an accident.’
She was already moving away from him. ‘Your voice …’ he said, startled. ‘Mademoiselle Josette-Louise, listen to me!’
‘She said I was diseased, Inspector! That I had this terrible, terrible affliction and that I wasn’t ever going to get better!’
‘Mademoiselle … Jean-Paul Delphane, he is …’
No one would believe her! ‘It was an accident, Inspector! How can you think anything else?’
Merde, where was she? Up above him or to one side? ‘Mademoiselle Josette-Louise, what are you doing here? Only a moment ago I was talking to your sister.’
‘She’s a liar! Epilepsy is not contagious. It was an accident, Inspector. An accident!’
‘Which Monsieur Borel saw only too clearly,’ he said, sadly muttering it to himself as the past overwhelmed the present, suspending it in that ether called time. Two girls of twelve, the one with epilepsy and subject to terrible fits she could not control or understand; the other trying to cope with the sister she had once known. These ruins; those happy times before.
Abruptly he left the stable, carrying the beaker clenched in a fist. When he came to the portal at the end of a long and confining passage, she was not there to face him with the sun behind her. Puzzled, he looked down at the wide stone sill upon which Josianne-Michele must have sat, and saw the shard of glass and the perfume vial he had left elsewhere for her at dawn. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he hazarded, not turning from the mountains and the sun in the east lest she fire that thing at him. ‘Mademoiselle Josette-Louise, you and your sister had fought over something. Did she threaten to give you the incurable disease you said she had? Did she then make you so angry that, in a fit of rage, you pushed her?’
‘I … I grabbed her, Inspector. I did not mean her to fall. I was only going to tease her but … but she screamed and Ludo … Ludo saw it all from below. Mother … mother made him bury her and say nothing of it. She took away his water rights but told him he could have them back once she was satisfied he’d obeyed.’