Two things were immediately clear: the singing master was a demanding, cheap son of a bitch — an astute businessman, the Kommandant had said. And Mireille de Sinéty had felt it necessary to keep hidden a far more detailed copy of her ledger.
They’d been watching her, and she had damned well known it.
Xavier had brought her gifts from his father’s farm, and things he had stolen when the group had broken into abandoned villas. Someone else — he didn’t think it could have been the shepherd boy — had paid her in, or given her, the tins of sardines. And yet again, someone had done so with the items from Hédiard’s, but at intervals.
Up in the tower, Louis was lost in thought, puzzling over something on the girl’s dressing table and sucking on a pipe he had forgotten to light.
Fingering a cheap, ersatz pewter crucifix and a rosary of black Bakelite beads, the Sûreté said, ‘This medallion, Hermann. The image of the Holy Mother has been so poorly stamped, the second impression blurs the first.’
Yet their victim had been a perfectionist, a lover of the past, her family once of the lesser nobility.
The items were next to her hairbrush and comb as if, in a final gesture, it had been they to which she had turned before leaving for the Palais. A pair of scissors lay on top of a four-centimetre-long lock of her hair …
‘A label provides the source of the religious bric-a-brac, which has only just recently been purchased from Les Fleurs du Petit Enfant,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s on the rue de Mons not far from the Palais and the Cathedral, but what does a shop which sells religious motifs of the worst kind have to do with this?’
Of postcard size, but definitely not a postcard, the black-and-white photographic print was of a young woman’s naked breasts. No shoulders, arms or waist were visible, no name either. Instead, one end of a curl of their owner’s hair had been glued to the lower right corner of the card so that the hair could be fingered while gazing raptly at the breasts.
The card had been hidden behind the backing of a gaudily framed sketch of the Petit Jésus, complete with phosphorescent halo and angels in the sky.
The hair was distinctly reddish, a pronounced strawberry blonde and soft, but with a sheen like burnished copper in strong sunlight. There were scattered freckles on the breasts. The skin was very white — ‘creamy’, a fétichiste de cheveux might have whispered during his orgy of gawking and self-masturbation. The nipples had been stiffened, probably at the photographer’s insistence and simply by their owner having first wetted her fingers. Chorus girls did this as a matter of routine at the Lido and other such places, so much so that in winter they were always bitching about their being chapped.
‘The Silver Swan …’ hazarded Kohler, indicating the post-card.
‘“When death approached unlocked her silent throat,”’ said Louis, comparing the hair with the loose strands Mireille de Sinéty had cut from herself and had left for them or others to find.
‘De Passe must have seen the hair she left but not the photograph, Louis.’
‘But did he leave it for us to find as a warning to us, or not think it important?’
Kohler indicated the card. ‘Is this the reason she was silenced? Is the fétichiste the bishop?’
It had to be faced. ‘He practises flagellation, Hermann. He’s one of the Pénitents Noirs. I’m not sure that such a practice is common to them now, but there was also the enseigne of a martinet on her belt.’
‘And wouldn’t you know it, eh? The sins of the flesh needing to be scourged.’
‘Whoever tidied up after the murder took the time to cut off a lock of our victim’s hair.’
‘To go with a photograph of her breasts — is that it, eh? Is that why she cut this off herself?’
‘Calm down. We must think as she would have had us think.’
‘The Church, you idiot! The préfet and his warning!’
Early in the afternoon long shadows were cast by the Palais, and the town, with its ramparts seen from the tower room, held narrow streets, some of which already appeared as if at dusk, such was the flatness of the sun’s trajectory in winter.
The clouds had vanished; the mistral still blew every bit as fiercely.
‘Monsieur le Préfet said I was to keep silent,’ confessed Thérèse Godard faintly. ‘He told me that if I did not wish to embarrass myself, I should remember that silence protected a girl’s honour.’
The son of a bitch!
‘We’ll protect you,’ said the one called Kohler but she knew this could never be and said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like here! They have their ways. People like me are nothing to them. Nothing, do you understand?’
‘Who do you mean?’ urged St-Cyr.
‘Them! I …’ The girl shrugged and wiped her eyes with her fingertips.
‘Listen to me, mademoiselle …’
‘Go easy, Louis. She’s really upset.’
‘And so will we be, mon ami, if there are more killings!’
‘More killings …?’ shrilled Thérèse. ‘Myself and Sister Marie-Madeleine, perhaps?’
Louis calmed his voice. ‘Please, mademoiselle, you are our closest link. You owe it to her to tell us everything you know of what happened.’
‘So as to empty my head before I am drowned in the river, monsieur? Drowned in an accabussade?’
Ah nom de Dieu, what the hell was this? wondered St-Cyr. Six hundred years ago husbands, masters and fathers could deal with recalcitrant and errant females in their charge by locking them into a wooden cage which was then repeatedly and publicly dunked in the river like a crayfish trap.
‘An accabussade?’ he asked.
‘I … I didn’t mean to say that. It … it was only because of Mireille’s telling me what had happened to the other Mireille, the one she was named after.’
There, she had told them, but they would never understand. How could they?
In a whisper, she said, ‘Sister Marie-Madeleine knows far more about it than I do. She … she came here late on the night before Mireille was murdered. They spoke quietly. I know they must have talked of this other Mireille, of what it must mean, but I … I do not know what they said up here in the tower — how could I? I sleep downstairs under one of the tables. Mireille let me do that. Mireille was my friend, my best friend!’
It was Louis who asked of Xavier. Still choked up, she blurted, ‘Before the sister left, and still well before dawn, he … he brought us things from the farm. He’d been away for the harvest. He always goes home for it. A week, ten days …’ She ran a hand through her hair in anguish and wiped her nose on a sleeve. ‘The bishop … he has to let him. It’s part of the agreement the Church made with Xavier’s father. In return, the monseigneur sends a car to … to collect the olive oil and … and other things.’
‘Verdammt, Louis, that little son of a bitch was here in Avignon before the murder. He’s been here since then and didn’t run away at news of it!’
Thérèse wanted to ask who had lied to him but knew she was too afraid, and to hide her fear, tried to straighten her dress. ‘Mireille was “special” to Xavier. He was always dropping in, often using the excuse of things he and the others had found. Cloth, fabulous dresses, skirts and silk blouses, waistcoats of gold lame, buttons and thread — we had to take these things for the costumes. We had to! This time more food from les Baux, but fish he had caught in the river, hares and rabbits too, sometimes. Once a grive — did you find it, messieurs?’ she asked and hastily wiped her eyes with the hem of her dress.