‘Sit down, madame. Just a few questions to start your day off. See that they’re answered truthfully. Otherwise you’ll spoil mine. Right?’
Yvette Grégoire crossed herself and wet her hairy lips in uncertainty. He was formidable, this one. Had she the courage to face up to him? ‘The magistrate’s order, monsieur.’ She snapped her ringless fingers. ‘Vite, vite.’ Hurry, hurry.
Hers had been a life of strife, penury and little joy, but he couldn’t let sympathy interfere. ‘You should have been a magistrate yourself, madame, but don’t be silly.’ He leaned a hand on a well-padded shoulder. ‘Sit down. It may be the last time you ever do.’
Kohler found two U-boat cigarettes and lit up, then placed one between her lips. ‘Now start talking. The girl in this photograph came here yesterday.’
Quickly her chest was crossed, her eyes refusing to avert themselves but staring up at him as if he had just come back from the dead.
‘Look, my partner’s difficult, madame. He has a thing about hatchet abortions. You may pray if you like, but if that girl is dead from shock or anything else, he’ll be demanding the guillotine for you.’
‘I did not see anything! I was taken to the public baths.’
This was a new one. ‘Explain yourself.’
Gestapo … he’s Gestapo, she cried inwardly and winced. ‘Once a month, on a Sunday, it is my practice to wash and tidy myself.’
He grinned but it was not a nice grin. He reached for her register and began to peruse it.
‘Monsieur …’
‘It’s Inspector. You stink too much to have just had a bath, and don’t try to tell me it’s the fault of a miserable cube of that gravelly ersatz “National Soap” they make out of ground horse chestnuts and lye.’
‘Inspector, the … the regular tenant was away in the north on business, so I … I have rented the room briefly to … to a Madame Proulx. A very suitable tenant. No trouble. Very quiet. A sweet lady in her middle years, a professional woman. Her …’ He was still not listening. Did he always doubt? ‘Her brother came to see her yesterday, and … and together they left the premises at …’ She indicated the register. ‘At four-thirty in the … the afternoon. Her … her son had been taken ill.’
‘The brother came.’
‘Yes. A priest. A man of the cloth.’
‘His age?’
‘About sixty perhaps. The sad blue eyes, the greying temples, the high forehead and …’
Kohler flicked ash from the cigarette he had given her. ‘Tell me something, Madame …? Grégoire, wasn’t it? Yes, yes, that was it. I never forget a name and it’s on your licence right up there.’
He ripped the licence down and stuffed it into a pocket, thus putting her right out of business until she could get another. ‘Now look, I told you not to lie to me, so how is it that you know they left when you’ve just said you were at the public baths?’
‘Because I had returned before then. It does not take an old woman hours to have a bath, only the half-hour, since one has to pay for it and one is not allowed to have company even though one might still desire such a thing now and then.’
A tough one. ‘And the girl?’ he asked.
Dear Jesus save her now. ‘Still in … in the room. That … that one, she has not come out. “She’s resting,” the good father said. “Resting.”’
A priest … a black over coat … and a maker of little angels.
Alone, St-Cyr clenched a fist. Noise from the docks filtered into the shabby room on whose plain iron bed and rumpled sheets Liline Chambert lay with fists tightly clenched on her upper chest. The woollen dress and cotton slip were hiked just above her middle, the underpants were nowhere to be seen. Her black lisle-stockinged legs were spread slackly, revealing a slash of dark brown pubic hair and a large stain. And damn Maréchal Pétain and his bigoted, hypocritical government in Vichy that allowed things like this to happen so that the youth of the country could be replaced no matter the cost.
A squeeze-bulb syringe and nozzle long enough to penetrate the cervix lay with dirty rubber tubing on the floor beside two chipped enamel bowls of soapy, filthy water.
The abortion had failed. Air had entered her bloodstream to block its circulation, causing instantaneous death. One moment the girl had been alive and apprehensively feeling that thing going inside her as she lay anxiously praying with her knees up and spread, her shoes still on; the next, her slender frame had jolted as she had been flung back to grip her fists and gasp and stare at the ceiling.
Lying on a cloth, and unused, were long, pliable steel needles and a catheter in case the syringe’s douche hadn’t worked and the foetal sac had needed to be punctured and drained. Sepsis and gangrene would have been assured, a terribly painful death.
When Hermann tapped on the door, he wasn’t allowed to enter. ‘Vernet should be forced to see this,’ grunted St-Cyr grimly. ‘Call the sous-préfet and tell him the fingerprint boys and a photographer are necessary, also the stretcher-bearers. We’ll put her on ice with the other one and let Belligueux have a go at her.’
‘And Nénette Vernet?’
Hermann was visibly shaken, but it would do no good to avoid the truth. ‘Is now without friends or parents and all alone if still alive.’
‘Then I’ll put a first call in to the industrialist and we’ll have the bastard over for a little chat.’
‘He can refuse to come.’
‘I’ll let Old Shatter Hand do the telling.’ Messy … why must things always be so messy? Verdammt!
Sitting with the dead was always troubling, only the more so if young. She’d been an attractive girl, Liline Chambert, not beautiful, but with that blush youth so often wears so as to successfully find a mate and reproduce the species in love and honour. A sculptress, a student … Was this why the child had had the Faber pencil case in her pocket and the tube of Mummy Brown?
With difficulty St-Cyr found the items. The tin pencil case had seen years of use, but the child and her little friend would both have admired the picture of jousting knights on horseback and in colour. The red knight’s lance was true and strong and outlasting all battles, an A. W. Faber Castell HB from Bavaria, the firm established in 1761. The white knight’s lance had snapped in half, a not uncommon thing with cheap pencils, and now he was about to fall from his mount, stabbed right in the chest. There was a distant castle on a hill in the background.
He uncrumpled the tube of paint-the girls would have been fascinated by it. Without breaking the rigor, he could not examine her fingernails but wondered if there would be traces of the paint.
Suddenly he said aloud, ‘Where are your underpants? It is a puzzle, for a girl such as yourself would not have gone without them. Not to here, not to any place, and they would have been freshly laundered and ironed as well.’
Though he searched the room as best he could without disturbing things, he could not see them. They’d been taken-he was certain of it. An interrupted attempt at tidying up, he wondered, or simply to either reuse or sell on the black market? Underwear was constantly in demand-after every film performance the usherettes in the cinemas collected the forgotten or misplaced underpants of those females who could find no other suitable place in which to make love. Needless to say, the boyfriends kept theirs on. Women had all the hard luck. Illegitimate babies were an ever-increasing aspect of the Occupation the Germans patently ignored, yet syphilis they dreaded and it, too, was rampant.
Nothing else had been taken. Not her gloves, her beret, her scarf or overcoat, all of which were of good quality and would have fetched far better prices.
Impulsively he yanked the dusty drapes aside to let in the cold grey light of day and stare emptily down at the Seine and ask, ‘Did Vernet force his attentions on you-is that why you didn’t go to him for help-help that would have saved your life? And what, please, of Madame Vernet? Surely she must have known or suspected what was going on?’