‘You lot got her drunk,’ said Kohler. ‘Was it on absinthe?’
None of them answered. All were panicking and wondering how the hell he’d come by the photos. ‘In these you can see that her knees are stained by lavender and soil, as are the palms of her hands and her seat,’ he said and pointed this out to them.
The day had been very hot. Round and round they had spun her, each of them looking up into the sun, recalled Christiane. They had all laughed. Adrienne had done so, too, and had stumbled when they had let go of her. She really had fallen several times, and then … then had passed out.
Herr Kohler set something in front of her, and when Christiane looked down at it, she saw that it was the postcard that had been made from the negative Norman had sold to the Petit Enfant. Clamping her eyes shut at the thought of what must now happen to them, she felt the detective take her by the hand. He pressed her fingers against the hair … the hair … It had been so soft — hot in the midday sun. Guy had laughed. Genèvieve had urged them all to help. They had turned the girl over but how had the Inspector come by the photographs? Norman had kept them. Norman …
‘Who raped her?’ asked Kohler gently. ‘Please don’t lie to me, Mademoiselle Bissert. That girl was at least four months pregnant when she drowned in October of last year, a good two or three weeks before November’s flooding freed up her body.’
The singer and the song … A life so suddenly gone. ‘Xavier. We … we didn’t know what he was doing to her. I swear it!’
‘Until it was too late,’ said the tenor.
‘Too late,’ echoed the baritone.
‘We had gone up to the mas,’ said Spaggiari.
‘The mas,’ said someone.
‘The sun,’ said someone else.
‘Hot … it was so hot,’ said Christiane in despair.
‘Absinthe isn’t very kind, Inspector,’ said Genèvieve. ‘It can make some crazy, others numb to what is happening to them.’
Rose madder, saffron yellow, thought St-Cyr. Dark forest green and cocoa brown, the white of crocheted stockings and the undersheath a well-bred girl of nineteen would have worn six hundred years ago. The fine, soft suede of her belt, the girdle that had been worn low off the hip and had held so many things. Tiny silver bells, a dirk, a purse, a pair of scissors, a sewing kit. The enseignes, cabochons and talismans … the rebus, the riddle she had presented.
‘Venetian velvet, Flemish linen. Silk that is so soft and supple it’s cool to the touch but once radiated the warmth of her body, Inspector,’ said Frau von Mahler earnestly, her dark blue eyes never leaving him. ‘Go on, take up a handful of the remnants she gave me. Bitte, mein lieber französischer Oberdetektiv. Breathe in the scent of her, of me! A soothing lotion, a balm she made for my skin, from an ancient recipe.’
Shredded strips of fabric, all of them taken from those the girl had used in her costume, filled the large white porcelain bowl the woman held. They’d been sprinkled liberally with honey water. The Greeks had favoured its use, and the ancient Egyptians before them, probably. Honey, coriander, nutmeg and cloves, gum benzoin, vanilla pods, storax and dried lemon rind — all had been mixed and ground in a mortar, after which, in the early Renaissance, a litre or so of fine cognac or brandy had been added. Two or three days, the mixture had been allowed to steep. Then rosewater and orange blossom water had been joined with ground musk and ambergris and the whole concoction placed in a matrass, a glass flask with a long neck, and heated gently for three days and nights before cooling and bottling.
‘Frau von Mahler,’ said St-Cyr, still holding the fistful of remnants he had brought to his nose.
‘Please! Let us speak en français. Let me show you how well she was teaching me. So many things. All gone now. Gone, do you understand?’
He waited for her to set the bowl aside but she refused to relinquish it to Marie-Madeleine and remained sitting with it in her lap. A woman of perhaps twenty-seven. It was so hard to tell. Once tall and flaxen-haired, now thin and stooped and …
‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘You see, I … I’ve very few friends and she became my dearest one. Ah! it’s strange, I know. A foreigner, a Boche, one of the Occupier, but you see, Inspector, Mireille was above all that. She knew I needed help and that my children shouldn’t suffer from the loneliness their mother had imposed upon them because of … because of this.’
The reddened scars that were threaded, stippled and bulged with newly grown and still-growing whitish tissue on her neck and her face, the skin grafts that had been painfully undergone and still would have to be. The terrible loss of so much of her lovely hair.
‘My chest. My thighs. These arms of mine,’ she said. ‘When you’re engulfed in flames, Inspector, you can never forget your screams. I think I must have rolled about in the street but have no memory of it. Someone — I still don’t know who — threw a blanket over me and smothered my little fire. But by then, of course, I’d torn off my clothes, and perhaps that one act saved me from being even more severely burned but, again, this I can’t recall doing.’
Avignon’s petite pomme frite. Had she learned of Xavier’s having called her that, and the others too, he wondered. How hateful of them, if so.
‘Mireille knew things, Inspector. Things someone couldn’t have her saying.’
‘Bishop Rivaille?’ he asked, only to see her draw in a breath.
She plucked at the remnants. ‘Rivaille … He proclaims we’re at the dawn of a new Renaissance and says the past must be purged, the slate wiped clean. But I wonder which slate he means. That of the Babylonian Captivity, or that of last Monday night at ten fifty.’
There were no tears. These had all been shed, or perhaps it was that she could no longer physically cry. Grief was registered in once fair cheeks.
‘Did he tell you that the first Mireille fell to her death of her own accord from the Bell Tower of the Palais where she had been taken as seamstress to his Holiness? Did he tell you how they had taken her from the Palais to the Pont Saint Bénézet, there to publicly strip her naked and lock her into an accabussadd The Pontiff, the cardinals, magistrates, captains and Papal Guard?’
The Chief Inspector St-Cyr waited for more of the truth. ‘Most of the city turned out for the spectacle,’ she said. ‘You see, the girl was being punished for harlotry, it was falsely claimed, and once back in the Palais, having been nearly drowned, she then clothed herself again in all her finery. And in despair of what they had done to her good name and to that of her family and her husband, threw herself to her death, or was pushed.’
Marie-Madeleine hastily crossed herself and, not taking her gaze from him, said softly, ‘She had refused absolutely to consort with the cardinal who had wanted her, and for this, was put on trial first and then … then punished.’
‘The pomander,’ said St-Cyr and, taking it out, held it in a fist. ‘Gripped just as she must have done and then again by our Mireille last Monday night.’
‘It’s filled with ambergris that is very old,’ said Frau von Mahler. ‘The notaire public, Albert Renaud, loaned it to her. He has extensive collections, and among the artefacts are many that once belonged to this other Mireille and to the de Sinéty family.’
‘The third judge,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Brother Matthieu suggested the possibility; Bishop Rivaille confirmed it.’
The Inspector looked at Marie-Madeleine when he said this. Suddenly the girl blurted, ‘The postcards, the hair. The shop of the Petit Enfant …’
‘And another girl, madame. Another murder.’