Ah nom de Dieu. ‘Who, madame?’ asked Louis.
She raked them with a savage look. ‘He took it, didn’t he?’
Her virginity. ‘No. No, she remained pure to the last.’
‘Ah grâce à Dieu.’ The bosom was hastily crossed, the fingertips kissed and then the black beads of an ancient rosary were sought and also kissed.
‘Who?’ repeated St-Cyr.
They had both crowded into her loge. ‘I …’ She threw them a tortured look. ‘I … I don’t know. I spoke out of grief. You … you can see how distressed I am.’
Kohler sighed and then said, ‘Withholding information is a criminal offence. We’ll have to see that she’s charged, Louis. Otherwise she’ll only set a bad example.’
‘Dédou Favre. The one who is wanted by the authorities so much that Monsieur le Préfet has the house watched constantly.’
‘Her lover, Louis. The boy the bishop was trying to get her to give up. The Kommandant spoke of him. De Passe told me he had agreed to look the other way while Rivaille worked on her.’
A ‘terrorist’. One of the maquis. ‘And you think he killed her, madame?’ asked Louis pleasantly.
‘She said he would misunderstand and that for him, it would be enough.’
‘Misunderstand what?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘The attentions of others. Those of the madrigal singers of Monsieur Simondi, and of that one aussi. What they want, they take. A girl’s virtue is nothing to such as them, and she was totally aware of this. “Dédou will be insanely jealous,” she said. “He will think that in joining the group I’ve succumbed, that even I can be led astray in order to advance my career.”’
And in Avignon such jealousy was cause enough for murder. History was replete with the evidence.
‘Inspector, that was one of the reasons she wouldn’t leave this house to take up the lodgings Bishop Rivaille had arranged for her. She also said, “Here I keep my independence. Here I can stand on the side of what is right as I reach out to clasp the true hand of God.” Every day, on waking, she would make that little vow to herself as she gazed up at the Palais. A saint.’
The German lit a cigarette for her and left her two others for later. ‘Thérese?’ he asked. His voice was gentle for one so formidable and with the mark of a terrible scar down the left cheek — how had he got it? she wondered.
‘Barbed wire,’ lied Kohler. ‘The Great War. My partner and I were enemies then, but we’re friends now.’
The other scars from that war were much older, except for the graze across his brow which was still very fresh. ‘Thérèse hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, nor will she listen to me, messieurs. Please do what you can for her. Mademoiselle de Sinéty would wish this of us all.’
‘Won’t the sisters take her in?’ asked St-Cyr, only to see the woman’s expression tighten and to hear her rasp, ‘The sisters? You mustn’t ask them to do that. Not until you’ve brought the one who did this terrible thing to justice.’
‘But … but you’ve just told us Dédou Favre must have killed her in a jealous rage.’
She gave him a piercing look. ‘One can still be wrong, is that not so, Inspector? And if I am wrong, why then it would have to have been someone else.’
Pure logic. ‘But the sisters?’ snorted Kohler in disbelief.
‘Have among them, messieurs, the disease of those who are capable, especially if they believe it is God’s work.’
‘Did Sister Marie-Madeleine come here often?’ asked St-Cyr.
Had this one from the Sûreté seen it too, the bond between Mireille and her friend? ‘Often enough and not always with one of the other sisters, though it is their rule to go two by two when escaping the tight embrace of their walls.’
Thérèse Godard was about fifteen years old — thin, frail, not healthy-looking at all. ‘Tuberculosis …?’ breathed Kohler — the door had been left open.
‘The flu …’ cautioned Louis, perturbed that God should do such a thing to them at a time like this.
She was shivering, was sitting at a cutting table, staring emptily at an upturned pair of dove-grey woollen gloves whose fingers, especially in these days of so little fuel, had been cut away at the first joint.
Gently Kohler spoke her name. She tossed her head. ‘Mireille …?’ she managed, only to see the two of them and to turn swiftly away.
The auburn hair, once curled, was unkempt. ‘I’ll take her downstairs to madame, Louis. See what you can make of this clutter.’
‘It is not clutter!’ blurted the girl angrily. ‘Everything is in its place just as we kept it. They came. They searched. They did that to her privacy but I … I have put things back exactly as we kept them.’
Ah merde …‘De Passe, Louis?’
‘The police,’ she managed.
Kohler dug into a pocket and dragged out the wrist-watch he had found in the victim’s purse. ‘Was this hers?’
The girl buried her face in her employer’s gloves and wept.
‘Sorry … Look, I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘Please forgive me.’
‘Xavier gave that to her. She needed a watch and he … he said he could get her one.’
The shepherd boy.
The rooms — there were two of them — opened into each other through double doors that had been permanently flung wide. In a far corner, a spiral staircase led up to the tower.
Rescued, pieced together, were the stone fragments of letters which had once been a part of the coat of arms. ‘De Sinéty …’ exhaled St-Cyr. The time, the diligence needed to gather and fit the artefacts together said much about the victim. A scattered collection of pieces, obviously uncovered from courtyard and cellar excavations, yielded a bent and much corroded ducat, the remains of an ancient pair of shears, those also of fourteenth-century clothing pins and clasps, and those of what must have been the original keys to the house.
Two silver thimbles, one crushed flat, the other crumpled, had been cleaned but were still black.
The pattern on them matched that of the thimbles in the motif on the sides of the pomander.
There was cloth in plenty, either folded neatly on the workroom shelves or in bolts and remnants, and he had to ask, How had she come by it? and had to answer, ‘The Church, the bishop and the nuns — wealth that has been stored for centuries.’ And then, fingering satin, silk and velvet, ‘The drapes, bed linens and clothing from abandoned villas. Wrist-watches, too, no doubt.’
Those of the wealthy who could get out before the Free Zone had been occupied had had to leave virtually everything behind. Now most of these places had been taken over by the Occupier and his friends, if in convenient locations and ‘suitable’; if not, they had remained empty. A ready source of fabrics especially for a group of singers to collect when on tour.
The cutting table yielded patterns, fabric shears, scissors, thread, thimbles, needles and detailed sketches of the costumes she was making. There were hundreds of notations with arrows to each seam and tuck. A collection of volumes on Renaissance painting offered ready comparisons.
An order book would hold the dates, customers, projects and fees charged. Alain de Passe would have looked through it but in search of what? he asked himself.
A recent page had been torn out. A fragment remained, and from this, there were two letters in pencil. Ai… Aix? he asked himself. The tour the group were to make? Had Simondi demanded different costumes for every tour? Had the girl written down his needs? Then why tear the page out?
Unfortunately several other pages had been removed and these went right back to the beginning, nearly four years ago. But why hadn’t de Passe simply taken the book and destroyed it? Thérèse Godard would have told them of it, yes, of course, but had it been left as a warning to watch out and tread lightly?