‘I hate guys like you,’ breathed Kohler, knowing they must have pawed Giselle and terrified her. Raising a cautioning finger to the others, he said, ‘You move and I’ll kill him and claim it was self-defence.’
Several teeth had been chipped, but the neck of the bottle hadn’t been broken. Kohler set it aside. ‘Now talk, my friend. Everything. Where she is and who he is. Don’t stop until I tell you.’
‘BÂTARD, I TELL YOU NOTHING!’ shrieked Morelle, trying to get free.
‘A loudmouth,’ sighed Kohler. ‘Hey, you-yes, you with the gold scarf around your pretty neck and the eyelashes that are about to fall off. Hand me a lump of sugar from the floor and we’ll open his purse.’
The sugar … Morelle heard its cone being smashed on the zinc beside his head and then the pieces being picked over for the sharpest edge. ‘His … his name is Father Eugène Debauve.’
There was a nod. ‘Now his real name.’
Ah nom de Jésus-Christ! must this one gut him in front of the others? ‘Father Eugène Debauville.’
A wise choice. ‘Defrocked for what reason?’
The head was quickly shaken. Snot was flung until … ‘All right. Please let me up.’
‘Not until I hear it.’
Then die, flic. Die! ‘No one knows. No one says, but …’ The sugar pierced his skin. Blood began to trickle. ‘But I …’
Morelle panicked as he realized his wife would have nothing more to do with him if she found out he had ratted on his own, but the slash down the Bavarian’s cheek mirrored what was about to happen to him. ‘I … I think it must have had to do with children, with … Yes, schoolgirls! because he … he is so good with them. They cry every time.’
There wasn’t a sound or a movement from the mourners at this little wake, only the endless flapping of the draught plate in the stove’s chimney.
‘Schoolgirls where?’
Ah, Christ! if Debauve ever found out-which he would-the priest would kill him. ‘A convent school near Troyes. That … that is where his family has had property for centuries and that is where it … it must first have happened.’
Schoolgirls … Had the heiress been on to the Sandman after all? ‘And does he like to knit?’
‘Knit? He likes to threaten, and when they are on their knees, he … he has a special way with them.’
The sugar nicked the bridge of Morelle’s prominent nose and he knew then that Kohler was about to split it in half and mark him for life. ‘They … they will have gone to the Saint-Roch. He … he has the keys from the old days at the seminary, you understand. The keys to several churches. Since it is a Monday evening, that place will be closed and it is the closest.’
‘What did you do to Giselle?’
Morelle told him. Kohler sighed and left the sugar balanced on the bastard’s nose, saying, ‘Hey, you touch her again and I’ll find you.’
Louis … Where the hell was Louis?
‘She loved that soup,’ confessed Léon Kalfou, a towel with ice clamped to the back of his head. ‘She always maintained she could die for it.’
A beautifully bright, golden soup that had once been the favourite of Queen Marguerite de Valois. ‘The child has chosen wisely,’ said St-Cyr, finishing yet another plate and wiping it clean with bread. They were sitting at a table in the kitchens. The chef was so very near to tears his puffy eyelids bagged with moisture, making pools of the sad brown eyes. Large ears and still-reddened cheeks made him look like something flushed from the forest during the hunt, blinking still in dismay as the truth of being caught kept dawning on him.
The narrow cheeks and chin, a much-furrowed brow, ginger moustache and thinning sandy hair did nothing to dispel the image. A bachelor who would time the cooling of the soup and worry so much about its getting cold he would hurry out with another plate before needed. How long had he kept it up? Since darkness had fallen.
One must be gentle. ‘Monsieur, the child was, I understand, quite prepared to run away?’
‘Why must you ask it of me, Inspector? I am only the chef. I know nothing.’
‘Now, please, we have to start somewhere. The soup is as good a place as any. You spent the better part of the day preparing it You were worried. You felt she would not come inside. Out in the folly you said that it was safe for her to come in and that no one was going to murder her. Those are strong words to a detective.’
It would do no good to avoid the matter, but why was the monsieur not here to do his own answering, why not the madame, eh? demanded Kalfou angrily of himself. ‘Mademoiselle Nénette, she … she missed her mother and father, that is all. She felt her place was no longer in this house. Ah! a romantic-her passion for the soup is evidence enough. A voyou, a brigand of the forest-they had crazy notions, those two girls. Both wanted to escape and take control of their lives. Absolute freedom from here and from school.’
‘Yet she delays their escape. She waits and then begins to track the Sandman,’ said St-Cyr, lost in thought. ‘She feels the police, they are not doing their job. She is a pack rat, a magpie. She picks things up, and among the litter in her pockets mere are things that may suggest she really does know who the Sandman is. It’s a puzzle.’
‘It’s no puzzle at all, Inspector,’ seethed the housekeeper, finding them alone and deep in conference. ‘That child needs to be horsewhipped. Behaving like this? Lying? Stealing? Preparing to run away? Claiming she knows who that … that murderer of young girls is and yet … yet refusing to tell us until the préfet has been summoned? Of course the monsieur could not agree. It was a foolishness.’
Realizing she had said too much or had said it too forcefully, the housekeeper irritably folded her arms across her chest and stood there glowering at them. The smoke from a hastily lighted cigarette trailed up. ‘Well, what is it?’ she demanded. ‘Aren’t you going to question me first?’
In-house protocol had been breached, but that wasn’t the reason for her anger, and the cigarette she had lighted before entering the kitchen so as to calm herself was a failure. ‘I would never have got past you, madame. In any case, circumstance’-he indicated the chef’s cold compress-‘dictated otherwise.’
Ah, damn him. ‘I’ll report this, monsieur le chef. I shall have to.’ Irritably she took a puff on her cigarette before refolding her arms. The grey-blue woollen suit and soft mauve blouse suited the wavy, dark auburn hair and blue eyes, the pale cheeks and lipstick, but there was also that deliberate touch of not over-dressing for fear of offending. Had she been a widow when hired by the child’s father, the widow of one of the men under his command in the last war? he wondered and thought it likely. Duties first, then, as a secretary perhaps, and later as housekeeper, a not unhappy fate but perhaps unwelcome.
‘Inspector, where is she? Please tell us.’
‘We do not yet know, Madame …?’
‘Therrien. Isabelle.’
‘Madame, please take us back to yesterday morning. Nénette went out early to walk the dog.’
‘It was something I told her she had to do since the Reverend Mother had recommended it, but the child was not to leave the garden. That was forbidden, not that she paid such orders any mind. Not any more.’
‘But did she meet Andrée Noireau, and did Andrée then spend the morning hiding in the garden folly waiting until the two of them could visit the Jardin d’Acclimatation alone?’
Alone and without Liline who was to have accompanied Nénette …
The woman glanced at the chef, for support, perhaps, and forgiveness. She wouldn’t be reporting any insubordination, was really very worried and had spoken angrily out of concern.
‘Nénette took the longest time, and when she came back, it was without the dog. I asked her where it was, and she said it had run off. “There are females in heat. You can’t stop him when he gets a whiff of that. Don’t you know anything?” she said and pouted. Ah! so much had been going on. The murders, the claims of knowing who had done them, I … I let the matter pass. I didn’t give a damn about that silly dog. None of us did.’