Quicksand, were they stepping into it? ‘Now tell me why not this “captain’s” own Legion d’honneur ribbon?’
‘Because I’m all but certain I’ve encountered the owner of it in Noelle Jourdan’s papa, but for now the judge’s flat, Hermann. Let’s stick to that.’
‘Two assailants, one of whom must have been to the flat often enough since he was tidy even after what they’d done. When he went through her handbag, but didn’t take it, he spilled cigar ash and took time out to try to wipe it away but failed entirely to find her wedding ring. I did.’
Ah grace a Dieu, this was definitely the old Hermann. ‘Do you want me to have a look at the flat? We’re pressed for time as it is.’
‘Aren’t we always?’
This, too, was the old Hermann, hedging his bets but still, one had best be cautious. ‘Wait for me. Have a stroll. It’ll do you good. That sun should be with us for a while.’
‘Then let’s hope Giselle is alive and looking at it and that Oona doesn’t try to join her children by throwing herself in front of a train.’
‘Oona didn’t say that. She’s far too level-headed.’
‘Well, maybe she is, but I thought it and that’s enough for me.’
‘St-Cyr, Surete, to see the passage de l’Hirondelle victim. Hurry.’
‘There’s no hurry where that one’s going.’
‘Is it that you fancy working in the salt mines of Silesia? That is where Gestapo Boemelburg usually threatens to send me if I don’t work fast enough. Ah! I’m late as it is for our meeting. Merde! Shall I tell him you delayed me and that, as a result, I might get lonely unless I had some company?’
‘It is this way, Inspector.’
‘It’s Chief Inspector, and I know the way.’
‘Clothing-do you want to look at it first?’
‘Was any of it taken?’
‘Scattered, I think. No boots or shoes. No ID, no handbag either, or jewellery of any kind.’
It had been raining hard in the late afternoon. Though darker in the passage, there would still have been sufficient daylight. Giselle would have known of the route as a short cut through to place Saint-Michel from the rue Git-le-Coeur. Rapes, muggings, murders, births, deaths from old age, the plague or other natural causes-sex by the moment and paid for or not-the passage had seen them all and yes, her native instinct would have caused her to dart into it, though it was also one that could easily have been blocked off at its other end. Trapped, she would have had to turn to face her assailants.
Giselle’s dark-blue woollen overcoat, with its broad 1930s lapels and flaps over the pockets, had been thin and a little threadbare. Hermann would never use his position as one of the Occupier to better the state of his household or himself. Stubborn … mon Dieu, he could be stubborn.
Folded, the coat had lost four of its buttons and had obviously been torn open. The soft grey tartan scarf that had set off the colour of her eyes was wet and cold, the grey-blue knitted mittens also. The angora cloche she had been particularly fond of was drenched and filthy.
A girl with short, straight, jet-black hair, half Greek, half Midi-French.
‘Is there nothing else?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Time of death?’
‘Late yesterday afternoon probably.’
Friday. ‘Found when?’
‘At just after eight last night, the new time. Someone tripped over her.’
‘Who?’
‘It doesn’t say.’
‘Witnesses?’
‘None.’
‘Examining flic?’
A name was given but it meant nothing. Paris’s police force had expanded so much and now there were also ‘auxiliary police’ and ‘order police,’ neither of which needed the full qualifications of the first.
‘Leave me. If Herr Kohler comes looking for me, don’t let him in. If you do, I’ll hound you until you die.’
Mud-grey to brown, the river moved swiftly. Upstream there were no barges; downstream it was the same. Der Fuhrer, in his wisdom, had had them all taken in the early autumn of 1940 for the invasion of England that had never happened. Now, of course, they lay rotting in the north, cluttering up the harbours unless dragged away and beached or sent to Belgium and elsewhere, and the citizen-coal that should have come to Paris, didn’t. Even the compressed dust of its poorest briquettes.
Louis wouldn’t be able to identify Giselle, not if they’d done what they had to the police academy victim. She’d a thumbprint-sized mole in the small of her back he wouldn’t know of, a blemish she had constantly worried about.
‘Giselle,’ he said, looking off across place Mazas to the morgue. Louis was taking far too long and that could only mean …
Irritably he lit another cigarette only to fling it away. This war, this lousy Occupation, the terrible loneliness and the shortages that should never have happened, the runaway inflation, too, all of which could and did put decent mothers and wives or fiancees down on their hands and knees or backs and made others hate them.
And if it isn’t Giselle, the detective in him had to ask, then have the bastards got her?
Telephone calls were always listened to by others, but … ‘Allo? Oui, oui, c’est moi, St-Cyr. Once pierced but definitely closed up? The Madame Van der Lynn was certain of this?’
She was. ‘Ah, bon. Merci.’
Replacing the receiver was not difficult, tearing his gaze from it somewhat harder. The call to the commissariat of the quartier du Gros-Caillou had been by far the hardest he had ever had to make, the waiting for its return a positive agony.
They had sent one of their staff to the residence of Madame Adrienne Guillaumet, there not being a telephone in that building, up-market though the district was.
‘Please tell Coroner Tremblay that he’s to look for the marks of hobnails and to compare the passage de l’Hirondelle’s victim with that of the police academy killing. No one else is to examine either victim, is that clear?’
‘No one. Do you want to see the loose dental fillings?’
It would be best to shake the head. ‘Put what clothing was found with her out of sight in the lockup and don’t release it to anyone other than Coroner Tremblay or myself. Not to Herr Kohler, you understand. Definitely not to him.’
Fifty francs were found in a wallet that had been mended with fishing line, the cash a sacrifice, but would it help to cement the bargain? These days one had to pay for everything.
Hermann had been impatiently waiting but had best be steadied. ‘Not her,’ said St-Cyr, taking him by the arm. ‘This one had pierced earlobes. Age perhaps twenty. Jet-black hair, what was left of it. Now listen, Giselle may have gone to ground.’
‘Not taken? Not abducted and held in reserve?’
He was really rattled. ‘This one was wearing Giselle’s overcoat, cloche, scarf and mittens.’
‘And they followed the wrong one?’
‘They must have.’
‘Then they made a mistake and it went harder on the girl they caught?’
‘Harder, yes.’
‘Rage?’
‘Uncontrolled. Hermann, the sooner we meet with Walter, the sooner we can get back to work.’
‘You leave Denise Rouget to me, then, Louis, and that mother of hers.’
‘Walter, mon vieux, but first a little stop en route. Now give me one of those cigarettes. It’s not like me to steal things. Usually you are the one who does.’
‘Not Giselle …’
‘Hermann, Oona will have understood this from what was relayed.’
‘She and the children won’t go out, will they, or open the door to anyone but us or Giselle?’
‘That, too, was relayed.’
‘Then I’ll drive. We’ll get there faster.’