When he rang the bell there was silence. When he rapped on the window of the door, he widened a crack that had been there for ages.
At last a figure appeared behind the wreath, a blurred shadow in black wool with a slim waist, flared hips and a left hand whose fingernails had just been painted.
‘Monsieur?’
The sill was warped. The door came unstuck … ‘Pardon, madame. I am the …’
‘It’s Mademoiselle Paulette, monsieur. My father …’
The door began to close. ‘A moment, please!’ He leaned on it. ‘I am the Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté Nationale. A few questions to help us with the investigation. Nothing difficult. I promise.’
‘The Sûreté? Was he so important? I … I never knew. He … he never said. What’s he done then, eh? Come, come, Monsieur le Sûreté, let us have the evidence of it!’
‘Nothing that we know of but it’s interesting his family should think he had been up to something.’
‘I didn’t steal the money!’
‘Then you have nothing to worry about. Now, please, a few questions, that’s all.’ He’d leave the money for a little.
The shop was musty and cramped and not very tidy either. One by one the girl switched on a scattering of table lamps and the light within a tiny carousel which soon began to rotate with the convection and threw its shadows over an array of seated dolls who all seemed to be watching the proceedings intently from their shelf. Exquisite clothing on them. Perfect in every way and far, far better than anything else in the place.
‘Mademoiselle Paulette, may I …?’ He took out his pipe and tobacco pouch, having opened his overcoat, and she saw that he was about fifty or so years of age and that he wore a light brown suede vest whose buttons looked as if ready to burst. An old vest, and much loved.
‘Mademoiselle Paulette, on the day your father was killed – please, I am sorry to have to mention it but …’
She trailed a fingertip across the glass countertop through the beads of summer and gave him such a disconcerting look, he was forced to rephrase his question. So, that was good, she thought, and she had put him on the defensive. It was marvellous what one could do to men if one was pretty.
‘When did your father leave the shop to find the Captain Kaestner? It’s a long way to the clay pits, mademoiselle. One has to ask how he managed to get there.’
She would smile softly at this teddy bear of a detective and she would gaze frankly at him and choose her words most carefully. Yes, that would be best. ‘My father left the shop at just before noon, Inspector, so as to catch the autobus au gazogène to Lorient. He said he had business to attend to and that I was to mind the shop and see to mother. She’s ill. She’s been ill for years. She’s in a wheelchair and can’t get about. Someone always has to take care of her.’
As you should – he wanted so much to say, to chastise the impish look in those china blue eyes, to wipe the smart-assed cheekiness away. ‘Don’t play with me, mademoiselle,’ he said severely.
‘I’m not. He told me not to pay any attention to Préfet Kerjean, if that one should return.’
‘Pardon?’
Was the detective so caught off guard? ‘They had an argument, Inspector. Lots of shouting. The Préfet was very angry and threatened my father with all sorts of things including …’ She paused to search him out and touch the beads again. ‘… including the asking of the tax officials to look into his accounts.’
Ah merde, the money …? Had she been ten leagues ahead of him? ‘They argued?’
‘Violently. Several things were broken. Mother heard them shouting and very nearly came down the stairs in her wheelchair. The brakes are broken.’
‘And yourself?’
‘I heard them too.’
The girl was no more than twenty years of age. The black woollen dress clung provocatively to every feature even though she was in mourning.
There was a Peter Pan collar of white cotton with a bit of pale blue embroidery. Nothing special. Practice needlework perhaps for a girl who obviously would care little about such skills.
‘Exactly what did they argue about?’ he asked cautiously.
Again she would gaze frankly at him. Again she would run her fingertip through the beads, touching them one by one as if they were those of a fecundity meter. ‘Madame Charbonneau,’ she said and shrugged. ‘That’s all we heard.’
‘Madame Charbonneau?’
Was it so puzzling? ‘Yes. The big house that overlooks the sea near Kerouriec. She’s a friend of the Captain’s. Well, he … he fancies her but she’s married and has a little girl.’
The urge to shake some manners into this … this budding fille de joie was almost too much to bear for St-Cyr. Sporting herself like this when she should be …
‘Are you certain that is all you overheard?’ he asked harshly.
Her answer must be modest – shy like a schoolgirl whom a priest was instructing. ‘She’s a friend of the Préfet’s too, Inspector. A good friend, if you know what I mean.’
The bitch! ‘So, they argued. Where were you? In the shop, outside or upstairs?’
‘I was in the cellar at the back. That’s where he puts me from time to time. At least, that is where he used to put me but no more, I guess. Is he really dead?’
‘Very much so.’
‘Good! Then as soon as mother goes I can begin to have a life of my own. Aren’t you going to light your pipe?’
Ah Nom de Dieu, de Dieu, he thought, this one, like so many Breton girls he had come across over the years in Paris, was heading straight for the streets. ‘Yes, I will light my pipe and stay awhile, I think, and you will answer my questions both truthfully and succinctly since my partner is from the Gestapo and no doubt now on his way to find us.’
‘The Gestapo …?’
‘Yes!’
The Mégalithe was just that, thought Kohler grimly. A great barn of a place. Stone Age in its outlook and with glass display cases in the upstairs hall, of all places. Stone axes, flint arrowheads, shards of primitive pottery and a couple of skulls whose teeth, due to the coarse diet of rock-ground wild grains and chewing leather, were blackened stumps. Ugh!
‘Look, Madame Quévillon, I’m asking you once again. Give us something else. My partner had his honeymoon in Quiberon. His wife’s dead. Let him at least have a …’
‘All rooms overlooking the sea are reserved.’
‘But you have no guests?’
‘You are our guests.’
Ah Gott im Himmel … ‘But … surely we could have a couple of rooms with a glimpse of the sea? What could be nicer?’
She would look at this one from the Gestapo, noting the dissipation of sagging jowls, puffy eyelids and faded blue, unfeeling eyes, the long scar on the cheek, of course, and the graze across the forehead – had it been from a bullet? she wondered and decided that this must be so. A hard man, hard-living. A womanizer and fond of drink and tobacco as well. ‘It is the threat of spying, Inspector. The Admiral Doenitz has ordered that all rooms overlooking the sea be closed and placed off limits.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, the damned U-boats don’t even use those waters out there. They approach the base well to the west of the peninsula. There are far too many islands, too many shoals.’
‘That does not matter and please do not raise your voice at me. The ordinance is for all hotels and places with rooms for rent and it has been in effect now for the past year and a half.’
Kohler let a sigh escape. ‘But you have no guests other than ourselves?’
‘That, too, does not matter. The Admiral believes perhaps – who is to say with such a one? – that there are those among us who give the British very up-to-date news of the comings and goings of his submarines.’
‘By clandestine wireless?’
‘Or by fishing boat. Some leave and fail to return.’
‘In those crappy little sardiniers and under sail?’
‘That is what I have just said.�
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‘To England?’
‘Ah, now, that is another matter and of this I would know nothing.’
‘Spying … But we’re on Herr Doenitz’s side? Louis …?’
‘Your associate is French and a Parisian, is he not?’
‘From Belleville, yes, but he loves the sea, madame. At least a few oysters, a bottle of …’
She drew herself up. ‘I have already discussed the impossibility of such things with him.’
‘Then tell me where Doenitz beds down his U-boat crews between operations?’
‘The Hotel of the Sunbathing Mermaid. It is on the boulevard Chanard overlooking the beach. Their shutters are all open, of course.’
‘And the Captain? Where is he being held?’
‘At the jail – yes, even here in such a place as this, in summers we found the need for one. It is on the rue de la Côte-Sauvage, not far from the Port Maria and right between the sardine canneries.’
The stench must really be something. ‘If Louis comes back, tell him I went to see the Captain.’
‘Of course. And which of you will be paying, monsieur?’
Were all Bretons so practical? ‘Neither of us. You’re to bill the Admiral and that’s an order right from the top, from Gestapo Mueller in Berlin.’
God curse the Nazis. ‘You could telephone your friend?’
Was it a crack in her armour at last? ‘It might disturb him. He gets miserable when interrupted. I want him happy, madame. He works much better and … why, then our stays are so much shorter.’
She knew he would be grinning like a wolf. She listened as he left the hotel by the front door and only then did she hastily cross herself and find in the skulls of others a quiet moment of contemplation. Everyone knew things had not been right in the household of Monsieur le Trocquer. Several would most certainly have wanted that one dead. He had not been a nice man. Uncouth, a drinker, a visitor of certain houses whose women should be driven into the streets and sent to prison. Why even at the best of times, he had resented the shop of his dear wife and she, poor thing, was now in such constant pain from a crippling arthritis of the hips, she could no longer walk and must leave her chair only for her bed.
‘That daughter …’ began Madame Quevillon. ‘That Paulette … What will she do without the father to put her in her place?’
Everyone said the Kapitän Kaestner’s money was missing. 6,000,000 of the new francs. A fortune.
‘That girl will vanish,’ she said on seeing Ginette le Gonidec come up the stairs to find her. A good girl, Ginette, one given to much piety and very dutiful. ‘That Paulette will take the money and disappear or someone will think she has it and kill her when she fails to tell them where it is. Then that person or persons will hide that body she loves to sport so much, and those two from Paris can look all they want but they will never find her. Not in a place like this.’
Not along the Cote Sauvage where the cliffs held caves no one could see from above. Not with the tides in the Baie de Quiberon either, or the salt marshes and tidal flats of the Golfe du Morbihan or the presence of bogs no one chooses to enter. Not with the passage graves of such as these, she said, looking at the skulls. Yes, there were so many secret places none of which would be known to those two from Paris or many others for that matter.
*
St-Cyr could hear the mother complaining upstairs as the daughter got her ready to receive him. He thought to leave it and concentrate on the daughter and the money – after all, was it right to disturb the woman so soon after the death of her husband? She wasn’t going anywhere, was trapped. He thought to call an apology up the stairs, then thought better of it.
The trap door to the cellar was behind the counter, under a frayed runner the cat must often use at night. The staircase was steep, the timbers low. Boxes, bales, old trunks and suitcases were crammed with things the shop might or might not sell.
Picking his way through the rubbish, he passed the coal bin and noted that it was empty, most probably not entirely due to the rationing but from sheer parsimony. Though coal was exceedingly difficult to obtain, there ought to have been a little driftwood. There had been perfectly suitable pieces on some of the beaches Marianne and he had visited on that last day when her stomach had settled a little and the blotchy attack of hives and the temperature had abated somewhat.
Right at the back there was a small, dark storeroom, quite empty and without an electric bulb in its overhead socket. High on the wall there was a ringbolt and from this dangled a length of rope.
‘Jésus, merde alors!’ he sighed. ‘Le Trocquer tied her up, then left her in the dark to punish her.’
There was no stick with which to beat the daughter, only that rope. No gag. No chair or stool of any kind, and the rope not long enough for her to have sat on the floor. ‘The bastard,’ he said and knew then that the daughter had had every reason to have wanted her father dead.
‘Does she have a bicycle?’ he wondered. ‘Did she go after him?’ She could have hitched a ride with the Germans perhaps. They’d be going to and from the base several times a day. Pretty girls were always in demand. She could have taken another autobus. He must find the schedule. ‘Lorient,’ he said, ‘and then the road out to the airfield and from there across the moor to that shed and then along the tracks, or perhaps she simply followed the tracks right from the city?’
But had she done so?
Reaching up, he touched the knot in the ringbolt and let his fingers trail down the rope. The things one discovered about others. Death often hid so little.
Then he went upstairs to the shop to find the dolls all looking at him with widened eyes of blue or brown, and long dark lashes or blonde ones. Their cheeks were touched with the pink flush of health, their lips were so beautifully red.
‘Fashion dolls,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Exquisite needlework. Everything perfect. Some with many skirts and billowing evening gowns, others in capes or simply dresses.’
The colours of the fabrics glowed with quality in spite of the severe shortages. Cashmere and lamb’s wool, silk, satin and cotton, with lace petticoats beneath and, he thought, everything precisely in order. Everything exactly as it should be, ‘because that is the kind of man the Captain is.’
‘Inspector …?’
‘Ah! Pardon me. I was entranced by the Captain’s dolls.’
She would give him a coy look and delicately brush a curl away from her ear. ‘So was my father.’ She threw the fullness of her china blue eyes at him. ‘Entranced – fascinated and so eager, for you see, Inspector, the Captain modelled his dolls after people he knew.’
Merde …
She gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘Oh for sure he dressed them up. What man wouldn’t enjoy such a thing? Some ladies in Paris make the clothes for him. They’re very good and quite expensive, isn’t that so?’
What was the girl driving at? he wondered. ‘Exquisite,’ he said warily. She grinned but then grew serious and went over to take down two of the dolls.
‘But the faces, Inspector, the figures, they are from memory. His two sisters.’ She held the dolls up. ‘His mother and his aunts when they were young ladies, his cousins, a lover or two or perhaps those were just girls he desired but could never possess. Yes, that is how it must have been, for he would not otherwise have made them into dolls.’
She turned and, stretching on tiptoes, replaced the dolls and tidied their dresses. Then she stood there looking at him across a clutter of pressed glass and paste. ‘Others too, from around here. Yes, of course they must not be forgotten. But if you ask me, Inspector, it’s a queer enough thing for a man to want to make dolls, let alone to make them of people he knows, especially if they are from around here and can be identified by others.’
Ah Nom de Dieu, what had they found themselves in this time?
‘The men from the U-boats and the other Germans come here to buy things, Inspector. Sometimes one of the dolls if … if they think it will amuse their fellow crew members to un
dress it on a long voyage or they have children or girlfriends at home.’
The girl went on, this time shamelessly tracing a fingertip over a suggestive vase of pale yellowish-green Depression glass and not looking at him. ‘Me he would not use as a model, though I offered the use of myself many times. He said he understood me only too well and that the expression on the doll’s face would betray my innermost thoughts and that …’ She paused to suck in a breath and look frankly at him. ‘… and that he wanted no more trouble with my father since he already had enough of that.’
The missing money – was this what she meant? – or did she go with men from the Captain’s crew? he wondered. Had she thought it best to hint at this since he’d find out soon enough? ‘Your mother, mademoiselle. We had best not keep her waiting.’
How cautious of him!
Half-way up the stairs, she turned so swiftly at some thought, they all but collided and he felt her sudden breath on his brow and pulled an accidental hand from her hip. ‘Please try not to upset her, Inspector. Right now she is beside herself with worry about the future and very depressed.’
Their eyes met. St-Cyr searched hers deeply, asking himself, Why is it you think it so necessary to tell me this?
Then they went on up the rest of the stairs and into the flat.
Kohler was taken aback. The gendarmerie, a skinny, two-storeyed affair of soot-encrusted grey granite block, was squeezed between two rusty, corrugated-iron sardine canneries that stank to high heaven of fish boiled in their own oil. The din was unbelievable. Legions of young girls and older women, some wearing the stovepipe coifs or others of starched white lace, worked, sang, gossiped and threw curious glances at him through the wide-open double doors.
He thought to light a cigarette but found he had none and wondered why, if Doenitz valued the hero of U-297 so highly, he had allowed him to be incarcerated in such a place? Surely house-arrest at one of the Ubootsweiden, the U-boat ‘pastures’, the rest centres in the countryside, would have suited better? The Captain could not help but have a constant headache. Whistle blasts would wake the dead and if not the whistles, the wooden clogs of two hundred hurrying females every change of shift.
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