‘And then?’
‘By then she had read the news reports of the scandal and had received a letter from the caretaker of her chalet. Apparently the new lodger would reveal himself to no one and lived on nothing but milk and the Paris newspapers.’
‘The cow-juice was for the ulcers, eh?’
‘Stavisky got wind that things were closing in fast and moved to the villa near Chamonix but failed to take on the guise of a skier and that, my friend, is where I first met Inspector Jean-Paul Delphane of the Deuxieme Bureau.’
‘The man from Bayonne.’
‘Once head altar boy of the Notre Dame in Paris, Hermann. But a stone’s throw from the Prefecture of Police and the Palais de Justice.’
‘Old friends? Old school chums?’
‘Connections, Hermann. Like Stavisky, Monsieur Jean-Paul was and still is a man with friends in very high places, but unlike him, he was and is of the Establishment. A man who, no doubt, still believes God is on his side and that he is among God’s chosen few. I tried to convince Pharand that the Inspector, he was the one who had silenced the swindler, but I did not know then of my departmental head’s association with him.’
‘Fellow choirboys?’
‘Among other things, the Action Francaise.’
‘The Royalists of the extreme Right? The Monarchists?’
‘Their terrorist offshoot, the Comite Secret d’Action – the Cagoule, Hermann. The Hooded Ones. Murder, rape, arson and anarchy. They wanted the defeat of the Third Republic and were glad of it!’
‘Shit! Shall we put her on ice, then?’
‘But of course. Exactly as she is. I want to remind her killer of what he has done not just to her, Hermann, but to that daughter who cannot help herself.’
The Cagoule, the Hooded Ones. But how had Delphane gained access to that locked room, how had he vanished into thin air at the moment of the shot?
One bullet from a revolver, blood and brains mingling grey and red, the swindler twitching. ‘A doctor … get a doctor!’ someone had shouted. ‘Hurry! Hurry! There may yet be time to save him.’
The villa had been spacious – sumptuous among brooding spruce, with snowclad mountains towering high above, and darkly stained beams to welcome one in. Richly woven rugs and tapestries – gorgeous things had been everywhere but done by whom – whom, Jean-Louis? demanded the cinematographer of himself but could not answer. Whole blendings of vivid colours. Prussian blues, burnt siennas, golds and crimson reds. Impressionistic, yes; cubist, yes, but earthy too, and wild. The smell of the wool; that of a cigarillo, the tobacco Dutch and very good – yes, yes … The scent, too, of a woman’s perfume, of lily-of-the-valley and lavender … A mirror … a face in a mirror .. and then … then, pine ash smouldering in the hearth beneath charred papers – records, heaps of records. Ah no!
A revolver lying a short distance from the swindler. A Lebel just like his own …
A glass of milk. A last cigarette. The smell of wet leather and saddle soap that had somehow failed to do its job of waterproofing.
‘A suicide, Louis. We will leave it at that,’ Pharand had said.
Now a woman on a hillside, a pawn ticket and memories that simply would not go away.
St-Cyr eased himself out of the hearse. Kohler’s buzzsaw continued, and when the Surete was outside and had his feet firmly on the ground, he paused to take a look at his partner but saw himself superimposed on the other due to his reflection in the window.
Aged beyond his years, as Hermann was becoming, though Hermann was the older by three years and therefore could use age if necessary to settle an argument when all else failed.
The scar would fade in time. St-Cyr hesitantly touched his own left cheek and watched with cinematographic fascination how the gesture appeared as if touching the Bavarian’s cheek. One ragged, inflamed scar against another. The back of his own hand. The dark of night in Paris … Paris. An assassin’s knife. That last case. A carousel …
They had come through so much together. Always the tightwire, always the knife-edge. Would either of them survive the war? Would he have to kill Hermann in self-defence some day, or would Hermann have to kill him?
‘We both know this war cannot last for ever, my old one,’ he said, the frost coming on his breath to momentarily fog the glass and cloud the mirror of it. ‘That little derailment outside Lyon – I saw the look on your face, Hermann. The panic, yes. You knew it was but the beginning of the end.’
He turned quickly away at the thought. Hands jammed deeply into his overcoat pockets, he was soon looking down at the body. Nothing had disturbed it during the last of the night and if one could but awaken her, he felt certain she would look not at him but at the sun.
He heard her say, ‘The sea, it is over there, beyond those hills.’
St-Cyr took out the pawn ticket, number P-9377482, but did not ask himself anything, only gazed at it and at the body.
Then he crouched and began that most patient of studies.
The crevice was mossy in its deepest shade but the moss was bone dry as was everything else in these hills. Kohler thought of snakes and hazarded a few cautious probes with a forked stick.
Satisfied, he lay flat on the bare limestone and reached well into the crevice to retrieve the figure.
It was superb, a carving no more than eight centimetres in height – one of a creche. Dropped perhaps? he asked, or left on purpose, but if so, then why here, why so out of sight?
The exactness was so absolute that he had no question as to the identity. Ludo Borel stared at him from behind the highly polished surface of the holm oak. Oiled and rubbed again and again. ‘The herbalist,’ he said, looking off downhill across the ruin of that sparsely clad hillside to where Louis was still patiently communing with the victim.
Olive trees, grey in the valley, stood among cypresses whose tall, dark green spines appeared almost ornamental.
The wind was still a bitch.
Puzzled as to why the figure should have been dropped or left here, he looked uphill towards the village and saw at once that beyond its broken rampart, beyond the heart of the old town with its jumble of burnt-orange roofs and grey stone walls – perched right up there for all to see, were the brilliant ruins of a citadel. Saracen perhaps? he asked. Jesus, the view from up there must really be something.
Left to the rooks and to the wind, the ruins held the village crowded close as though in fear of the centuries.
A precipice more than thirty metres in depth fell to the uppermost part of the village. He picked out the church, then the spill of narrow lanes that led down to the fountain in the square – some square …
He found the village school by its gathering of children and heard, though he could not possibly have done so, their excited chattering.
Which one of them had lost the carving? The boy, Bebert Peretti? Had he left it here on purpose? Hadn’t the hearse-driver said the Borels and the Perettis weren’t on speaking terms? Two centuries of that?
A feeble attempt, then, to plant the seeds of suspicion in our minds? he wondered. Then why plant it so well only a Munich detective and, too long before that, a farmboy like Bebert himself would ever find it?
Kohler pocketed the thing and, in looking for more, came upon a small clot of wool caught on a bit of thornbush. Russet homespun – he held it up to the sun and let the light shine through it as if it were a woman’s hair.
Or a shepherd’s cloak, but if so, why of such a colour?
The girl? he asked and thought he had the answer since the Abbe Roussel had said, ‘She often walks in the fields and is at peace with God when not demented by her frenzy.’
The girl could have placed the carving here for some quite other reason.
Or someone could have put it here for her to find, he said, seeing in his imagination, as Louis would, the girl both coming secretly downhill to leave the figure or walking back uphill to find it.