She shrugged. She said bitterly, ‘I suppose he could have. I’ve never seen her since. I don’t even know where she is. I don’t! I wish I did but,’ again she shrugged, ‘wishes are for fools.’
‘Mademoiselle, the Paris house of Monsieur Vergès … could Luc Tonnerre have known it well?’ asked Louis, keeping up the pressure.
‘The girls …? Is that where they were taken?’ she asked. It was. She could see this in the look he gave. ‘We all knew it well, Inspector. Gaetan, Luc, myself and others. Those were very happy times. Well, mostly they were.’
‘The paintings … Can you tell us anything about them?’
What did the question stem from? she wondered. ‘Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, a Dürer, a Cranach—Vermeer. I remember there were two small sketches. Heads. Lovely things. They were in the study.’
‘Impressionists, too?’
‘Yes. Monsieur Vergès loved to collect beautiful things, Inspector, as did his father and grandfather before him. I … I was one of them—everyone used to say this, but for his son. I … I accepted it as his way of saying he was happy for Gaetan and myself and very pleased.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Louis.
Was it safer ground for her? she wondered. ‘Some lovely marble sculptures and bronzes. A fifteenth-century Eve that was absolutely adorable and had longer hair than mine. Two Gobelin tapestries that were exquisite, Savonnerie carpets … Inspector, why are you asking? Has something happened to Monsieur Vergès? If so, Gaetan … what’s to become of him?’
‘This we don’t know yet, mademoiselle. The Impressionist paintings …? Manet perhaps?’
‘A lovely study of a young mother and daughter. The mother is waiting for the train to bring the father home and sits with her back to the iron rails of the fence, while the daughter in a white halter dress with a soft blue bow clings to it and looks towards the locomotive where only a cloud of steam can be seen.’
‘Any others? Choose any one.’
He was so intent. ‘A woman, a girl with … with her breasts and shoulders bared but wearing a hat in which are tucked some red flowers. There was also a study of Renoir’s, a young woman reading a book.’
It was enough and when she heard him say, ‘Bon,’ she could not help but sigh with relief. The whole interview could not have taken any more than fifteen or twenty minutes. They had come all the way from Paris and must be very anxious.
‘I feel quite empty,’ she said and tried to shyly smile.
It was Louis who said, ‘Not quite, mademoiselle. Are you absolutely certain the child was Gaetan Vergès’s?’
Ah no … ‘Inspector, if you are implying that I slept with both of them, then you are very wrong.’
He would take a breath and hold it. He would simply say quite firmly, ‘I wasn’t.’
Could it really be important? Was he so insensitive? ‘Then I must admit she wasn’t Gaetan’s and I must ask that you keep this to yourselves. Now you know everything, Inspector St-Cyr, and you leave me nothing for myself.’
‘Nothing but the blessings of relief at having told another, mademoiselle, and perhaps helped to save this one.’
From his jacket pocket he took a simple pencil sketch, very finely but quickly executed. ‘That is Joanne Labelle,’ he said, ‘and the boy who drew it is now dead because he did something for the daughter you gave to the Sisters in the early summer of 1917.’
Must he take from her everything? ‘In June, Inspector. The … the 12th, not three days after she was born and I had begun to love her. Luc Tonnerre had a way with him. He … he was very handsome and debonair. He and I … Well, what can I say? But he was no match for Gaetan whom I came, in my months of trial and secrecy, to love with all my heart and soul. Of course I cheated Gaetan and must live with myself always for such foolishness and cruelty, and perhaps he would have discovered the child some day, but had things been different for us, Gaetan would have forgiven me and taken her to his heart. That is the kind of man he was, the man I knew.’
‘Whereas Tonnerre would only …’ said Louis.
Why must he force her to say it? ‘Would only hate me.’
* * *
‘Louis, how the hell did you know she was lying about the child?’
‘She answered too readily, Hermann. She didn’t deny its existence which she could so easily have done. Remember, she had promised herself to Vergès. If the child had been his, it should have bound her to him no matter what, and it hadn’t done so.’
‘She would have been too ashamed of herself to tell us.’
‘Precisely! But Tonnerre must have known of the child. When our mannequin rejected Gaetan Vergès, she rejected him even more so. Hence the letters of hatred and then the acid.’
Louis gestured with a hand. ‘You have no doubts?’ asked Kohler.
‘None. A crime of passion from a man who, though he didn’t truly love her, had been rejected for another, only to have her reject the two of them.’
‘Then that’s a good enough reason for Gaetan Vergès to hate the very sight and thought of girls who look like her and want to become mannequins.’
‘Ah, yes, I’m afraid it is, Hermann, and we shall have to ask him.’
Kohler thought to let it be—Louis was apprehensive enough about what they might find at the Château, but … ‘She said Tonnerre liked the young ones, Louis. She said it as if a woman betrayed.’
St-Cyr fought down his doubts about what must have become of Joanne. ‘She was once probably very much in love with Tonnerre—did the two of them play around in that house when the son’s back was turned?’
The happy times … ‘Played loose and easy and took a few photographs, eh?’
‘Perhaps. It’s just a thought. Somehow there must be a reason for those sequences, Hermann. A start at least’
‘That war was hell, Louis. It did things to normally decent men.’
‘Yes, hell.’
‘Are you still certain someone could have waited upstairs in the attic rooms until the last of the photos had been taken?’
Must Hermann ask it? ‘Not certain, ah, no. It’s only a possibility. But if a drooler, then … why then, was each girl forced into having …’
Poor Louis couldn’t bring himself to say it. All choked up, thought Kohler, cursing the case and the stresses it caused.
Both were exhausted and for a long time they didn’t speak. The Citroën held the road beautifully. The countryside to the north of Dijon passed rapidly behind them. Town after town, village after village all seen in winter from an empty road upon which there was not even a Wehrmacht convoy.
Joanne … thought St-Cyr with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Château des belles fleurs bleues was well to the south of Provins. For too long they had been feeling their way closer to the Seine. There had been ploughed fields, then scrub pasture that had been let go. Then woods and finally a broken signboard, a mere grey-weathered arrow and this road, this lost track of icy solitude among tall and crowding hornbeams whose smooth, blue-grey bark was forbidding in the late afternoon light … ‘Ah merde alors, Hermann. There are the gates at last.’
Shit!
Two giant beeches stood on either side of a high iron gate that had defied all entry for years. Nothing special. No coat of arms. Just matching curls of ironwork above.
‘Have we been led up a blind alley?’ breathed Kohler, cursing their luck. The snow was perhaps eight to ten centimetres thick and undisturbed. The road beneath it had been full of pot-holes and large boulders. Not an easy drive, though he knew the aching in him stemmed, not from the hours behind the wheel, but from thoughts of Joanne and what they might well find.
At last the Citroën stopped and, to the cooling of its engine, came the quiet of the forest and then the musical tinkling of tiny birds and still-falling sheaths of ice from branches stirred by the softness of a wind. A thaw. One of those freaks of nature that, in the dead of winter, turned the land briefly to spring and misery.
Paris wo
uld soon be awash and shrouded in fog. Then it would freeze.
Kohler got out and eased his cramped muscles and back. The newish padlock and chain were heavy, the propriéte privée défense d’entrer notice all too clear.
Louis couldn’t keep the uneasiness from his voice. ‘Is the son really an ether-drinker? Is it that his affliction is so bad, Hermann, even here he has had to be hidden?’
Uncomfortable at the thought, they approached the gate and looked through its bars to yet a further extension of the lane and, as yet, no sight of the Château.
‘We may have to spend the night,’ cursed Kohler exasperatedly. ‘This fucking lock hasn’t been opened in years, Louis. What the hell’s been going on?’
‘Is there a road around the gate? I seem to remember we passed one.’
‘We’d have to back out. We’re going to have to anyway.’
‘Let’s leave the car and climb over. The foot-gate will also be locked.’
It was, though here the original lock was still in use and the key, no doubt, hanging in the kitchen perhaps or in the caretaker’s cottage.
About a kilometre of lane led between giant sycamores whose spatulated bark formed a stark camouflage against the snow-covered lawns and formal gardens that had been let go. Branches that had fallen had simply not been cleared.
The ‘Château’ was a large manor house of buff-grey sandstone with a blue slate roof and turret, high-peaked dormer windows in its attic, and shuttered french windows below at the front, no shutters at the sides.
‘The drapes are all drawn, Louis. The house has been simply closed and left. Our Monsieur Vergès must have gone south.’
‘Or into the grave. Ah nom de Dieu, what are we to make of it, eh? It has an uncomfortable feeling, mon vieux. I’ve seen too many places like this and found too many old people in them, with all the jewellery and silver missing.’
‘You’re full of surprises. Why not retire and write a book about it, eh? My Life as a Detective!’
‘Please don’t joke. It isn’t helping.’
‘Then quit talking about bludgeoned old people!’
They tried the front door, the side door—found all were locked and no answer came to persistent ringing of the bell-pull.
The house was of a ground floor, one storey and then the attic but above this last, the single turret rose another storey so as to provide a good view of the grounds. Had it ever been a happy house? wondered St-Cyr. Built perhaps as early as 1725 and well before the Revolution, it had been occupied, no doubt, by the same family ever since. ‘It’s a typical maison de maître, Hermann. The family mansion or master’s house of what was once a working farm.’
From a walled potager of perhaps a hectare, they stood looking at the place wondering what to do. The house appeared to be empty and unfeeling. No smoke issued from its chimneys. The silence was uncomfortable. There were no footprints but their own.
‘Well, do we break in or not, Louis? I vote we do.’
The walls of the kitchen garden were tall and had been built to withstand the centuries. Mottled by slabs of pale brown sandstone, they rose to steeply pitched roofs that were flagged with coarse slate. Trellises clung to the walls—beans, roses, hops … ‘Everything needed to sustain life would have been grown here, Hermann.’
‘Look, you’re no goddamned farmer, so stop kidding yourself and gassing on about cabbages. Hey, my fine-tuned ear, I hear no chickens or pigs. Where the hell are the old man and his son?’
‘And Joanne, if indeed she is here?’
Louis was staring emptily at the house that rose to its tower just beyond the wall of the kitchen garden. The stables were behind the house and an attached wing of it. To the left, and beyond, there were more tall trees—a long line of lindens, so a drainage ditch over there, thought Kohler. A woods to the very left, extending to the bank of the Seine and the carpet of violets in spring.
‘I’m going in, Louis, are you?’
‘Yes. Before it gets too dark for us to find what we must find.’
‘There’s no sign of the lorries from Dallaire and Sons.’
Was it the offer of hope? ‘Not yet, but there may be.’
Merde, he was taking it hard! ‘Mademoiselle de Brisson didn’t ask Paul Meunier to forge transit papers for two loads of furniture, Louis. The boy would have told me if she had.’
‘Certainly. But our droolers, Hermann? What of them?’
Dear God, if You’re really up there, hide the truth from him, begged Kohler.
When they found the lorries in an open-ended, timbered bam the size of a medieval market hall, they knew the worst.
‘Dédé,’ blurted Louis. ‘What am I to say to him, Hermann?’
‘Just let me have a look, eh? Stand back. That’s an order.’
‘From my big Bavarian brother who hasn’t the stomach for it? Don’t be an imbecile, Hermann. This is my case, my task. Me, I brought you into it on your holiday!’
Verdammt, he’d be crying in a minute! ‘Joanne may not be in either lorry. Maybe she got away?’
Were all Bavarians so sentimental?
The roof-timbers towered above them. The vacant nests of summer’s swallows were grey below with splattered droppings. Light filtered in through the gaping doorways.
So, we have trouble to face, said St-Cyr grimly to himself. Let me find Joanne and then her killers.
They opened the rear doors of both lorries and stood before the tangled contents of Louis XVI armchairs—superb pieces in giltwood and dark green velvet upholstery—a Régence sofa that was covered with exquisite needlepoint, lamps, tables … a Louis XV bergère in antique brocatelle silk, twin tabourets …
Everything had been hastily crammed into the lorries. Just to climb over the obstacle course would take hours. Arms, legs, shelves, mirrors, crates of crystal and porcelain wrapped in towels, sheets and drapes that had been ripped apart in haste. Clothing too.
Only by standing well back was it possible to see if anything had been disturbed on arrival.
‘There,’ said St-Cyr. ‘That dining-room table. Some of the things on top of it have been pushed aside.’
Squeezing himself into the lorry, Louis somehow managed to work his way towards the front until he reached the other end of the table. ‘A chest, Hermann,’ he called out, looking down over the edge. ‘It’s open.’
‘Is she …?’
There was a grunt, grim with determination. ‘No. No, she isn’t here. There’s vomit, there’s hair—lots of hair.’
‘Christ!’
‘There are some short lengths of cord. They’ve been cut with a very sharp knife.’
Deftly Kohler hoisted himself up into the lorry. Shoving things aside, he clambered awkwardly forward until he reached Louis.
The chest was just big enough for the girl to have been folded into it with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around the lower part of her legs, wrists tied to the ankles. ‘Ether?’ he asked sharply.
The outline of her nestled body still lay deeply in the hair of not only herself but the other victims. No clump was more than three or four centimetres long. ‘Each girl was forced to kneel beside this chest, Hermann, and while they cut off her hair, she had that of the others to look at.’
‘The bastards, Louis! Ether?’ he asked.
‘Most probably. Even so, she would have lost consciousness for only from two to ten minutes.’
‘Unless they forced her to drink it. Then she would have been out for an hour or two, maybe more.’
Much safer as an anaesthetic than chloroform when inhaled, ether did have its unpleasant side. Instant vomiting on regaining consciousness. When drunk, its burning taste tightened the tongue and throat, giving a tingling sensation while suffusing the body with warmth and producing feelings of extreme excitement, joyfulness and elation, then deep intoxication.
‘Does it heighten sexual arousal and make one uninhibited?’ hazarded Kohler uncomfortably.
‘Were they in the habit of feeding
it to their victims so as to gain their co-operation?’ demanded St-Cyr, the catch all too evident in his throat. ‘Ah, I do not know, mon vieux. It’s fortunate they didn’t gag her. She’d have choked and drowned.’
There was so much hair in the bottom of the chest …
‘Is it that they wanted to keep her alive for more of their fun?’ asked Louis.
‘The house,’ said Kohler.
‘The torches … We left them in the car. Ah, damn!’
‘There’ll be candles—a lantern. Me first, you second and that really is an order.’
‘Ah, no, Hermann. For Dédé and for Joanne, it must be me who finds her. Me!’
Kohler knew he was going to have to watch over him. ‘Then we go together, eh? Side by side.’
‘Until the doorway or the staircase becomes too small for both, Hermann. Then I go on alone because this is a matter between my friends, my God, the killers and myself.’
7
THE SIDE DOOR FINALLY GAVE A LITTLE. Assaulted by a stench of rotting food, St-Cyr threw back his head and gagged. ‘The kitchen, Hermann! Ah nom de Jésus-Christ, give me room!’
The stench was fruity, pungent, deep and stinging. Of green beef, high fish, eggs, chicken guts and a black sop of once-wet mushrooms that had oozed from their canvas collecting bag to web the tiled floor around it.
‘Louis, what the hell has happened?’
‘A moment.’ The Sûreté’s hard-soled brown brogue hit the plain plank door. Crashing against something, the door wedged itself on a faience shard the shape of a half-moon. A soupière— Nevers, thought St-Cyr, giving the tureen’s provenance and seeing it once lovingly placed in the centre of a table ringed by straight-backed open chairs, all in that plain but beautiful style of the provinces.
The kitchen was a shambles. No shelf or cupboard was full or even half-empty. Everything lay about or on the floor. The old, black-iron stove and row of brick ovens held copper pots and pans once used, then bashed in or turned upside down in rage, their contents burnt to tar and dusty cinders grey with age.
There was garbage everywhere. Bags and pails overflowed. Filthy tea towels and washcloths lay crumpled on the floor, on the stone drainboard beside the sink, or clung tenaciously to the pump handle, a wallpeg, or the edge of a side table and chair.
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