The industrialist should have taken precautions. It was a logical assumption, but he knew beyond doubt Vernet would have done no such thing. Too arrogant, too wealthy-why spoil the fun when you’ve got a naked eighteen-year-old girl in your lap? So many of the wealthy played around, their affairs were legend.
There were no bruises on her inner thighs, no love bites though he hated the necessity of looking and apologized. No scratches, no signs of resistance or passion. Had she simply let Vernet do it to her in that room at the head of the stairs or in the flat he had rented for her friend?
And where, really, was that boy, that fellow student? Probably vanished into thin air like so many these days.
Von Schaumburg would hit the roof. Criminal abortions, sex out of wedlock … A boyfriend who was a homosexual-that, too, would cause trouble.
Liline Chambert’s identity papers gave her age as nineteen years seven months, a home address in Orléans, where the Vernet interests manufactured farm machinery, tractors and gasoline engines. It was a good place for an accountant to reside, especially if one’s trusted employer was to assist in a daughter’s education.
She hadn’t even cried out as she had died. She had just been hit by the shock; a waste, a crime, a shame, a tragedy. There was no law that would blame Vernet. All would blame the girl. It simply was not fair.
‘Where is Nénette?’ he asked her gently. ‘Has this business here or these things in my pockets any connection with your visit to the belfries of the Notre-Dame and the Sandman, and if we should be so fortunate as to find her alive, will she then lead us to him before it is too late for her, even though he may not have killed her friend? Or will the killer of that friend also hunt her down and kill her to protect himself?’
Only then did he take out the toy giraffe to stand beside the girl, looking down at it. A crèche …
‘Louis …?’
‘Ah! Hermann.’
‘The kid still hasn’t come home. Vernet’s gone to Rouen. Bomb damage last night. One of his factories. A necessary trip perhaps, or simply stalling for time.’
‘Stalling, I think.’
‘I’ll tell the boys in blue to come up, shall I?’
‘Yes, yes, but none of their lewd remarks. The photographs first, then the fingerprints. The others can wait in the corridor until everything else has been done. We’ve got to find the heiress, Hermann. Everything depends on her now.’
A kid at large in a city where virtually everyone had to walk or ride their bicycles or take the métro or the autobus au gazogène to get from place to place and it was still far too easy to hide even with all the watching that was going on. ‘We’ll try the convent school first, and then the ancien Cimetière de Neuilly. She has to be somewhere.’
But where? ‘The salon de thé in the children’s restaurant but at between three-thirty and four,’ said Louis, a hope, a prayer if all else failed.
Kohler hated to tell him. ‘You’re forgetting she hasn’t any money.’
‘And you’re forgetting her little friend could well have brought along a change purse of her own. This the Mother Superior may be able to confirm.’
‘Or Sister Céline, the one the kid said hated her students. “We are the cabbages she feeds to her pigs after first giving them the names of each of us. We are her droppings.”’
‘Optare, optari.’
The voices of twenty-two uniformed girls in dark-blue tunics and white middies, and ranging from nine to twelve years of age, rose in unison. ‘To desire, to be desired.’
‘Optavisse, optatus esse,’ announced Sister Céline from behind the Iectem, tall and straight and determined to drill the students even though most were in tears and ashen at the brutal loss of one or perhaps even two of their classmates.
‘To have desired, to have been desired.’
‘Optaturus esse, optatum iri.’
‘To be going to desire, to be going to be desired.’
‘Optat!’ said the sister sharply, causing them all to lower their eyes and voices in modesty.
‘He desires, he is desiring.’
‘Optabit!’
‘He … he … he will desire, Sister. He … he will be desiring.’
There were more tears, more burying of the faces in the arms and gnashing of teeth. Ah Gott im Himmel, stormed Kohler inwardly, how could she do it to them? Were they all little sluts to her?
‘Easy, mon vieux,’ cautioned St-Cyr, and softly closing the door of the classroom, left them both with a lasting image of Sister Céline, one that was haunted by tragedy, gaunt and raw and full of anger, the woman not unhandsome but street-wise, they thought, and ever watchful. A woman in her mid-thirties whose every look and gesture reeked of punishment to be meted out for sins imagined and otherwise.
The firm round chin and not unsensuous lips had only added to the fierceness of a straight and defiant nose, high and prominent cheekbones and wide-set deep brown eyes under brows that in another would have been an asset.
Kohler could imagine her blowing cigarette smoke through both nostrils as she had read the signs while still going on with her class and had sized the two of them up as if they were sailors in place Pigalle: five francs in exchange for ten minutes, or a couple of cigarettes, such was the scarcity of tobacco.
Not a sound was heard from beyond the door that had opened to put them so close to the sister she could not have avoided looking sideways at them in stark assessment.
‘Inspectors, please,’ whispered the little nun who had met them at the gate and had let them into God’s sanctuary, she too upset and unsettled to object when they had asked to be conducted here without permission.
‘Now you may take us to the Mother Superior,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Please leave this matter for me to explain. There will be no problem and you need say nothing of it, since I doubt very much if Sister Céline will mention it.’
‘Then you do not know her, Inspector!’ blurted the nun, swiftly crossing herself and begging God’s forgiveness under her breath as she hurried away and they were forced to follow.
But once outdoors, and under a colonnaded walkway, she paused and, with eyes downcast, confessed. ‘Sister Céline has not had an easy life, Inspectors. Her younger sister, Violette, is a woman of the streets, une fille de joie-a paillasse, a mattress, in the brothel of the rue Chabanais. Sister Céline is wise in the ways of sin and is only trying to warn our girls to be wary of it.’
‘And the Mother Superior, Sister, does she agree with the warnings being given?’
‘No. The … the two of them do constant battle over it. Innocence against reality, ethereal love against life’s harshest truths.’
From one stone gateway to another, the inner courtyard of the convent school and Church of Our Lady of Divine Humility and Obedience held a world within its walls, a formal garden and potager of utter peace and contemplation. Now that the snow had been swept, sparrows fed on thin crumbs at the feet of the statues of the Christ and the Blessed Virgin, and in the hush of the garden, whose every branch and line of stone was defined, their tiny voices were muted.
Alone and with her back to them, the Mother Superior stood out so sharply in black she was set in memory against the grey of sky and spiked-iron walls and the whiteness of the snow.
‘Reverend Mother …’ hazarded the sister. ‘Forgive me for disturbing your meditations, but two detectives are here to see you.’
‘Detectives?’ she asked without turning.
‘Yes, Mother. I’ve told them Nénette Vernet did not come to school this morning as she should have.’