‘Since well before the Defeat.’
‘Yes. It’s been good. Secure, if you know what I mean. My parents live in the north, in Beauvais. I’d no one. César, he … he gave me both a family and a purpose to my life.’
‘A sense of order, a regimen and a job, eh? A good roof over your head, three square meals and a fire. The clothes on your back, especially those.’
Does he take them off me — is this what you’re wondering? she wanted to ask but calmly said, ‘A sense of being. A place, a profession. We’re all professionals, Inspector. Please don’t think otherwise. What we do, we do as one because that’s the way it has to be.’
Genèvieve Ravier’s expressions could be hawkish, warm, coy, intensely interested, concerned, flirtatious or tender and innocent of all wrongdoing.
‘You wear no jewellery …’ he hazarded, and she could see that the closeness of her was disturbing him in more ways than one.
‘Why don’t you have a cigarette?’ she asked softly. ‘It will help, I think.’
Verdammt! The girl was electric. ‘Please just answer.’
He fidgeted. He looked her up and down and then fully met the frankness of her gaze. ‘Did Mireille wear lots of little things?’ she asked.
He waited. She would have to tell him and would therefore be firm about it. ‘To be complete, we should each have worn such things during every concert but you see, the Church, though its collections are very good, no longer possesses enough, and even the private collection of His Eminence Bishop Rivaille is …’ She shrugged. ‘Insufficient. Mireille was a perfectionist, Inspector. That was a part of her problem. Always she would insist; always the monseigneur or César would say it just wasn’t possible and she would “sigheth oh so gently, then …”’
‘Okay, okay, I get the point. Bishop Rivaille was the source of the trinkets your costumière wore to her death.’
‘The rings and … and other things but.’ Again he would have to be told. ‘But not all of them.’
Herr Kohler’s sigh was one of exasperation and she could see that he was distressed at the thought of others having loaned Mireille things. ‘She knew people who were well versed in the past, Inspector. Some she could count as friends; others still as enemies but only because of what had happened to her family during the Babylonian Captivity. Once tainted, always tainted, is this not so? And there are whispers even in a little place like Avignon and especially under les Allemands, though they do not encourage such things as whispers, do they?’
Merde, but she was really something. ‘Would one of these other custodians of bric-a-brac have sat in judgement of her on Monday night?’
Herr Kohler’s eyes had emptied themselves of all feeling. Suddenly she wanted to get up, to stretch her legs, but knew his knees were deliberately touching hers for just such a signal. ‘I really wouldn’t know, Inspector. Mireille kept things to herself — that was a part of our problem with her. She had secrets she shared with no one, whereas we of the singers have none any more.’
‘Where were you on Monday night?’
‘Here with the others. Ask any of them. All will tell you the same thing. We are our own alibi, Inspector, or had you not thought of this? Christiane will only echo my words, as she often does in part song.’
The cote-hardie was of an emerald green velvet whose sheen rippled softly as Christiane Bissert moved about her bedroom. The bodice was of white silk with gold piping and brocade, and was crisscrossed by lacing that extended from the belted slender waist to the gently curving neckline.
Beneath the cote-hardie, the gown was of burnt sienna with the faint imprints of halved pomegranates, and as with the victim, thought St-Cyr, jagged cuts from the hem upwards for about thirty centimetres revealed tantalizing triangular wedges of the gown.
With the raven curls and the dark, now uncertain eyes, the girl was an enigma. She had said so little since coming to her room it was as though, once its door had been closed behind her, she had lost all confidence and had become another person.
He said how lovely the room was.
‘A fire? Would you like one?’ she asked hesitantly.
The bed was that of a Provençal bride, its coverlet white and trimmed with white lace. A simple wooden crucifix was attached to the wall above the ornately carved headboard. A small, stiff leather suitcase lay under carefully folded slips, silk stockings and underwear. There were three perfume vials as well, and he wondered if she had just received the largesse.
‘Gina looks after us. Gina picks up,’ she said, searching desperately for the right words. ‘That suitcase is mine. She uses it to keep our laundry separate.’
And the perfume? he wanted to ask but let the matter rest — she could see him thinking this and cursed herself for not having put the things away and stuffed the suitcase under the bed.
On a round, marble-topped table by the windows, there was a vase of dried flowers and a half-empty bottle of Campari amid a clutter of books, some of which were still tied in their bundles.
He picked up the bottle, and with a sinking feeling in her heart, she knew he would miss nothing.
‘César loves his apéritif. Would you like some?’ she asked and saw those priest’s eyes of his looking at her.
‘That would be nice,’ he said. ‘Please. Allow me.’
He gave her time. He let her take a sip to recall the cafe this morning. Then he said, ‘I understand his wife is an absinthe drinker.’
Ah maudit, Madame Emphoux, that bitch! ‘It’s only talk. Absinthe is no longer legal so how, please, could this be possible?’
Among the books were several of Simenon’s train novels, inexpensive paperbacks, but also hardbound first editions of Gone With the Wind and The Sun Also Rises.
Her dressing table doubled as a writing desk, and on this, among the tidy clutter, were a Parker fountain pen with a verd antique finish, and monogrammed notepaper that didn’t bear her initials.
Next to these items there was a beautifully engraved gold compact with the linked gold chain of the belle époque, complete with diamonds and the enamelled portrait of a reclining nude on a bed of flowers amid a deep blue background.
‘Tiffany and Company,’ he said of the compact, completely ignoring the matter of the absinthe. ‘1900 or thereabouts. It even has a little compartment to hold a lady’s dance cards.’
‘I love it.’
‘Whose was it, please?’
Ah damn him! ‘My grandmother’s.’
A lie. ‘Bon, so …’ He tossed off his Campari and said, ‘A few small questions. Nothing difficult, I assure you.’
She, too, tossed off her drink, grimaced at its bitterness and, sitting on the edge of her bed, glanced briefly at the light of day and waited. ‘I’m ready, Inspector.’
She looked so fragile. A classic Midi beauty. ‘Let’s begin with Xavier,’ he said, coming to stand next to those same windows and to gaze out of them as she had.
‘Xavier?’ she asked.
‘He was in Avignon well before dawn on Monday.’
Her voice must sound innocent of all wrongdoing and with just a touch of apprehension. ‘The monseigneur sent the car for him, as … as he does every year at the close of each harvest. The oil, the wine and olives — garlic, too, and honey. Many things are loaded into the car. Perhaps … perhaps there wasn’t room for Xavier and that … that’s why he came back early.’
Thérèse Godard had said as much, but would this one now begin to tell him the truth? wondered St-Cyr.
The Inspector had taken out his pipe and tobacco — he sensed that she was really apprehensive at this activity, for it signified hours of questions and that he had all the necessary time to spare.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked.
‘No. César doesn’t wish us to smoke — the voice, you understand — but he doesn’t prevent us from allowing others to do so in … in our presence.’