‘The boy is usually here,’ said Vernet, not liking it. ‘Liline …’
He went over to an armoire to search it. He opened another in the narrow hallway and went through to the kitchen to stand in its emptiness and say, ‘They’ve left. They’ve cleared out. The boy is a homosexual she had befriended. He was afraid of the Relève, of what our friends are going to do in February. Turn it into the Service de Travail Obligatoire, the forced labour in the Reich. She must have told him his name was bound to come up, so he buggered off.’
‘And the girl, monsieur?’
‘Liline must have gone with him. His rucksack, it’s missing. Look, he was too timid for his own good. Though she didn’t live here, she was always having to put the muscle into him. They’ll have gone south like so many these days. He’ll try to join the maquis of the Auvergne perhaps. Liline has relatives in Clermont-Ferrand.’
Ah yes, the maquis was growing and its young and not so young men were living in the wilds as fugitives, supplied by some and hated by others. A Resistance without arms unless stolen from the Occupier. But what about suitable laissez-passer, eh, and was Vernet so desperate he would fabricate? ‘Monsieur, if the boy was in danger of this … this new Service, surely with your contacts you could have found a way of keeping him in Paris?’
‘Don’t be silly. I was fucking Liline. Would you have had me broadcast that little piece of information by placing his name on one of my lists of those who are to remain in France?’
The SS and the Gestapo would have known of the affair in any case and perhaps that, really, was why he had done nothing.
‘Now we had best find Nénette, Inspector, or is it that you still want more from me about this?’
‘No. For the moment we have sufficient, but I must ask, is Madame Vernet aware Mademoiselle Chambert is your mistress?’
‘Bernadette? Of course not.’
‘And Mademoiselle Chambert, monsieur, what of her? Did she come to you willingly or did you-’
‘How dare you?’
‘I dare because I have at the moment two lives to concern me. That of your mistress and that of your niece.’
Kohler followed Madame Vernet into the child’s room, which was in a far corner of the house next to the staircase to the servants’ quarters and the kitchens. He noted the amber and gold dragonflies on the stained-glass shade of the lamp she had switched on, the porcelain frog below it with walking stick, orange waistcoat, silk scarf and cream knitted trousers and silver-buckled shoes.
Above the mantelpiece there was a Meissen clock in white and gilded porcelain with a turbaned potentate riding atop the clock face, which rested on the back of an elephant. The bed was superb, a Louis XV canopied affair whose gold brocade rose to ostrich plumes at all four corners.
‘This was her room. Nénette loved it. She used to say having privacy was next to being with God.’
There were more tears, more tearing of the hair and tugging at the laces across the chest of her nightdress. It was bad enough her niece being murdered by the Sandman, but to have her husband fooling around right under her nose was too much. Ah yes.
She broke down completely and he let her weep in a chair, didn’t give her another thought. Christ, what had the kid discovered? A map of the city gave the locations of every one of the killings. Press clippings had been pinned to it. The tenement in Aubervilliers, the one near the Terrot bicycle works in Suresnes, the murders in les Halles and in the Notre-Dame …
Even the Jardin d’Acclimatation had been noted. This one is next. Sunday afternoon, 10 January. I am certain of it.
Bang on. Ah merde …
A Louis-Philippe secrétaire held pigeonholes and drawers the kid had stuffed and locked, some of them. School exercise books-French composition, Latin, Greek, religious studies, the catechism, et cetera, et cetera, and then … then, as he flipped quickly through them, a scribbled note. Sister Céline hates us. We are the cabbages she feeds to her pigs after first giving them the names of each of us. We are her droppings.
Trash overflowed the child’s waste-paper basket. Things picked up in the gutters and on the métro filled several drawers. Where … where the hell to begin?
Using her letter-opener, he jammed it into the gap near the lock of the pencil drawer and snapped the blade in haste.
The pocket-knife the Kaiser had given him and countless others in 1914 did the task and the drawer popped open. No pencils. A simple crucifix of black wrought iron with the Christ pinned up by nails stared back at him, looking so like the top of a coffin, nestled as it was in that long, thin drawer, he had to wonder at the careful placing of it. The thing was heavy and about eight centimetres in length by four in width at the arms. Beside it there was a Number Four knitting needle of grey steel, flexible and yet stiff.
He sucked in a breath. He felt the tremors within himself, heard the sobbing of Madame Vernet behind him.
Louis, he said to himself of the knitting needle. Louis, I think I need you here.
‘Madame,’ he said.
Tears streaked her cheeks. Blood ran from reopened scratches he was certain the poodle had never inflicted. ‘Madame, would your niece have sought refuge with the sisters?’
‘Sought refuge …? But she’s dead? He killed her. He used one of those to …’
She threw up, coughed, bent double and vomited again before hurrying from the room to stagger in the hall and turn. ‘Dead … She is dead, isn’t she? It was her, wasn’t it?’
Ah merde … Sadly he shook his head and watched as she crumpled to the floor. Out like a light.
3
Two hours before dawn they shared a cigarette in the darkness of the Bois de Boulogne while they waited to make their first report to von Schaumburg. The clay-pigeon shoot was just to their left, the riding stables were very near.
‘Louis, this thing, it looks worse and worse. We’re to believe this latest killing was the work of the Sandman, but was it? Those two girls knew Nénette would be followed. They planned what they did.’
Hermann was really worried. ‘Andrée Noireau was to have left the city on Thursday … Madame Vernet has said she believed the child had done so, but was that woman deliberately taken in by her niece?’
‘She must have been. She fainted at the news Nénette hadn’t been killed. She expected the child to have been alone.’
‘And Vernet claims his wife didn’t know of the affair he was having …’
Kohler took the cigarette from him. ‘But she must have, since she told me the boy at the flat could not have been having sex with Mademoiselle Chambert.’
It would have to be asked. ‘Has the student-sculptress really gone south to take that boy to the Auvergne?’
‘Or did she leave, as I think she did, to have an abortion while the other two were in the Bois, and if so, where the hell is she now?’
Oh-oh. Ah, it was not good and there was so little time. They had to find the heiress and quickly, they had to find this other girl, this ‘companion’, but what, please, would they find? More corpses, the clothing not just …
‘Louis, that kid even stated, “This one is next. Sunday afternoon.” She wrote it on that bulletin board she keeps in her room. She’s got all the locations of the Sandman’s killings marked.’
‘Yet the crucifix and the knitting needle, they are locked away?’
‘From prying eyes. The aunt’s, if you ask me.’
‘A Sister Céline …’
‘That nun can’t possible be the Sandman. Hey, she doesn’t have the necessary physical equipment, idiot! Verdammt, use your head. We’re going to really need it this time!’