‘Tell us,’ urged Kohler gently.
He had such nice eyes, this detective, but such terrible scars. ‘Let me go downstairs and get it,’ she said.
Louis nodded and Kohler went with her. The cigar box, one among several that were used to store buttons, held a mummified thrush.
Hastily the girl crossed herself and said, ‘It was shot by the monseigneur. Xavier was positive of this and laughed when he presented it to Mireille last year in late November, but by then it had been dead for about a month. Yes, a month at least.’
Thrushes were tasty, thought St-Cyr. Not gutted, they were hung and allowed to rot and then were roasted on a spit so that the juices from their entrails could rain on to the backs of their fellows. Before the war, those who could hunt them had taken hundreds in a single day’s shooting. The best time was in the autumn and at dawn, just as the birds were feeding and preoccupied. ‘But why would she have wanted this in the first place?’ he asked.
He was genuinely puzzled. Dear God forgive and protect her, then, for telling him. ‘She … she said she had to see what His Eminence could kill with such impunity no remorse was felt, only joy. She …’
They waited for her to continue. Finally the one called Kohler asked, ‘Who accompanies the bishop when he’s out hunting?’
Her heart sank, and she could feel it doing so. ‘The Kommandant, the préfet, Maître Simondi and … and others. The Chief Magistrate. Lots of others, for the bishop and Maître Simondi, they … they know many important people. All are friends and business associates. Isn’t that the way of things among such people?’
‘What about Xavier?’ asked the one from the Sûreté.
‘Xavier?’ she squeaked. ‘The dogs are in his care. He’s very good with them and … and knows exactly where each one is at … at all times.’
Kohler resisted the temptation to show her the dochette. There’d be time enough to settle that little matter. ‘After Xavier left the house on Monday well before dawn, what did your friend and mistress do?’
There had been two of the hooded, ankle-length cassocks to finish. Hideous things they had hated having to make, but Préfet de Passe had warned her not to mention them …‘She worked all day on her costume. Everything had to be absolutely perfect. Late in the afternoon she must have gone to the bains-douches municipaux, at the other end of the street.’
The public bathhouse. ‘She didn’t practise?’ asked Kohler gently.
‘I … I don’t think so. I was away and didn’t get back from the mas near Saint-Michel-de-Frigolet until well after dark. By then Mireille was … was all but ready.’
‘You went to see her mother?’ asked the one from the Sûreté.
‘Who issued your laissez-passer?’ asked the other one.
The two of them were crowding her again and she wanted to cry out, Please leave before it’s too late for me! She wanted to weep in despair and clench her fists. ‘The Kommandant himself, and yes, I went to see Madame de Sinéty. Mireille … Mireille wanted me to take a letter to a friend.’
‘What friend?’ breathed the Sûreté softly.
They wouldn’t leave things alone now! ‘Dédou Favre, the boy she loved.’
‘And did he love her in return?’ asked the Sûreté.
Would they arrest her for delivering the letter? ‘He doubted her. He always felt she might give him up to … to the authorities.’
‘In order to advance her career?’ asked Kohler. ‘Hey, don’t worry about your having broken the law.’
‘Then yes, but you … you have to know Dédou to understand. He’s terribly afraid of what they’ll do to him if he’s caught. It’s only natural because he’s on the run and in hiding.’ There, she had told them. That, too.
‘And did you deliver this letter to him personally?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘No! I … I couldn’t find him so I left it in the mill, in a special place he would know of. He and Mireille had used it lots of times. The stones … a crack between the stones.’
When the detectives were gone from the house, she went down into the workrooms to search for the hooded shrouds — she could call those hateful things nothing else. They were not grey or black. They were of coarse white woollen cloth and when, at last, she had found them — rolled up with her mattress, her paillasse! — their empty eyesockets stared accusingly up at her, she realizing then that Monsieur le Préfet hadn’t taken them as he should have but had left them here for her as a further warning.
‘La Cagoule,’ she wept and, flinging them from her, stood among the silks and satins, the patterns of the past, with head bowed.
It was Madame Guillaumet, the concierge, who, coming upon her like this and seeing the hooded shrouds on the floor at the girl’s feet, said, ‘Thérèse, what have you to do with those?’
They sat in the Renault, staring bleakly out at the wind-ravaged rue du Rempart du Rhone. Each waited for the other to speak, until Kohler could stand it no longer. ‘La Cagoule, Louis. Two of their outfits were rolled up in that kid’s straw mattress but I didn’t let on I’d found them.’
‘De Passe?’ asked St-Cyr emptily.
‘It has to have been him. No wonder she was afraid.’
‘She spoke of being put into an accabussade …’
‘That little bit of history can’t apply to the present, can it?’
Hermann was really worried, but it had to be said, ‘Our victim must have been aware of those cassocks.’
‘An order, Louis, but it’s not even mentioned in the book she kept to herself.’
‘Ah mon Dieu, Hermann, what had she discovered?’
Unbidden, Kohler hauled out his cigarettes and offered one, only to see Louis shake his head and find pipe and tobacco pouch.
Not until the pipe was going to his satisfaction did the Sûreté say, ‘De Passe agrees to turn aside while Rivaille works on our victim to see if he can’t convince her to betray her boyfriend — let us put it no other way.’
‘The bishop lends her things and sends the sisters to watch over her corpse in an attempt to retrieve at least two of the items before we take too great an interest in them.’
‘A ruby ring,’ said Louis, ‘and a pendant box. One of the thorns supposedly from Christ’s crown.’
‘The elder of the nuns succeeds with the ring, but not with the box. The younger one is marked down by her as knowing too much.’
‘That sister was a close friend of our victim. They spoke in private on the night before the murder.’
‘Did Sister Agnès realize this at the morgue, Louis?’
‘I’m certain of it, but … ah merde alors, we must think as Mademoiselle de Sinéty would have had us think!’
‘Then start by telling me are you certain it was the bishop himself who loaned her all those trinkets?’
‘Simondi?’
‘We’ll have to ask him.’
‘But must proceed carefully, since the Cagoule may well be involved,’ mused St-Cyr.
‘Both Rivaille and de Passe are members of the Black Penitents.’
‘Our singing master may also be one of them.’
‘But is Simondi the leader of the local Cagoule, Louis? Is de Passe or Bishop Rivaille?’
The Hooded Ones. The action squads of the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire, a fanatical far-right political organization of the 1930s that had dedicated itself to the overthrow of the Third Republic by any means. In Nice, in 1938, cagoulards had murdered the Rosselli brothers, two prominent anti-fascists Mussolini had wanted eliminated.
In return for the favour, a substantial shipment of small arms had crossed into France from Italy only to be intercepted by agents of the Deuxième Bureau.