Still she did not say a thing. He hated himself for depriving her of a most necessary meal. He wanted to cry out, I’m on your side. Why will you not please go in?
But she was not there and again, after much searching, he had to stand among the columns, though still asking, Are you with him? Has he now killed you? The one who murdered your little friend?
From the house a brief glimmer of light came, and then, among the ornamental box and yew, the darkened silhouette of a figure hurrying out with yet another plate of soup.
‘Nénette? Petite, you must come in, isn’t that so? We’re waiting for you. Liline, Nénette. Liline, she has not returned. Has something happened to her? Is this why you won’t come in?’
Soup plates were exchanged and only as this was done did the chef discover the first one had been drained and wiped clean with every last crumb of the bread.
‘Nénette,’ he said firmly. ‘Your aunt has still not returned from the hairdresser’s and another visit to that clairvoyant of hers. It’s safe, little one. Your uncle, he stays in Rouen.’
The chef waited for her to answer. Perhaps he sensed he was not alone, perhaps the cold simply made him irritable. ‘You always had a mind of your own,’ he hissed. ‘Ah! it’s not good for girls to be like that. Can you not think of us? No, not you, eh? In spite of the mother who gave birth to you in my kitchen—I still hear her cries—you are not a Vernet like her or your father. You are more like the monsieur, I think. Now come down from there at once. Attend to me, Nénette. This is a craziness that must stop. I, Léon Kalfou, am your godfather. Me, petite! No one is going to murder you when we who love you are there to keep you safe.’
No one. Ah merde … “Monsieur …”
The plate shattered. The chef shrilled, ‘Sadique, I am going to telephone the police!’ He bolted from the folly only to slip on the steps and leave blood in the snow as he lay there not even moaning.
A scarf was sacrificed, the man propped up and gently brought to. ‘A moment, monsieur,’ said the Sûreté, ‘and I will assist you to the house.’
More matches were struck and it was then that St-Cyr saw the error of his ways. Inside the folly, just under its roof, there was a gallery, and when he had climbed to it, he found a blue overcoat, a hand-me-down of Liline Chambert’s perhaps, its lining ripped open and crudely restitched in several places after first having been thoroughly stuffed with dried oak leaves for insulation.
There were sealskin boots and mittens, a hat, too, and extra scarves, even blankets, and all he could think of now was had he driven that child out into the Bois on a night like this? Had she been up here at all since the murders of her friends, had she even returned? Or after the chase in the Bois today, had there been only a death similar to that of her little friend?
The coat would be very warm and snug. He must remember her invention. These days one never knew what one might need. But when had she done it? Well before the murder—last Thursday or Friday perhaps, or even before that, in the late fall when dry leaves were possible and best collected?
The late fall. All things must have been prepared then for a long stay in the cold, a plan that predated the Sandman’s murders by at least several weeks.
But not, he thought, that of the placing of the crèche in Sister Céline’s classroom and the stealing of the toy giraffe and then the baby elephant. Nénette had taken the one, Andrée the other, on a dare, to be later exchanged as a bond of solidarity.
When he found another old overcoat also stuffed with leaves and rolled up under a stone bench, he knew the truth. Both of the girls had planned to leave the convent school and the house and take to the wilds.
Voyous, street urchins—runaways in a land that had no use for them and was under an Occupier who fiercely demanded that all such types be cleansed from the streets and sent by rail to unspoken destinations.
The Brasserie de Tout Bonheur was full but there was no sign of Giselle. The Café of the Turning Hour held only watchful sharks bent on sucking their girls in to rip them off and keep them on their backs until their days as charladies came.
Kohler hounded the darkened streets and cursed the black-out that, if he used the unblinkered torch in his pocket, would see the gendarmes pounce and scream and pound him into oblivion. Merde! Where was Giselle?
Panic struck. He had let Violette Belanger’s pimp get his talons into Giselle. One question of hers would lead to another until the bastard needed to know just why he was wanted by this detective.
So, he’d take her to a quiet place. He’d lead her on until she had no more to give …
A ‘priest’.
Knowing that he had no other choice, he returned to the Café of the Turning Hour to wipe the zinc with the fist of Madame Morelle’s husband and let the others slip away or crowd round with knives drawn.
‘Now I’ll ask you one more time. Where did he take her?’
Two more girls came in looking for their pimps only to find the place draughty. Morelle didn’t budge. The Savoyard must have come from a long line of hill climbers. The bulging dark brown eyes held the fierce hatred of a Corsican, and Kohler wondered if this, too, was not a part of his ancestry.
One of the girls, her back to the wall, sucked in a breath, and he knew then that trouble was about to break out.
Morelle’s nose ran freely, dampening the bushy grey handle-bars and webbing the hairs.
Ignoring it, the patron still waited. Vache! Cow! he shrilled silently. Cop!
‘Giselle,’ breathed Kohler and in that moment realized yet again that the kid really meant something to him, that life could never be the same without her and that Wasserburg and Gerda and the farm at home were now far behind him.
There’d be a butcher’s knife under the zinc counter or a leather sock filled with lead, but they wouldn’t want to cut him up or kill him here for fear of being accused of terrorism.
No, they’d knocked him out and drop him in the Seine. They’d have to.
He released the hand. He grinned and patted the shirt front, said, ‘Why not be reasonable? She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know this part of town. Give her a break. It wasn’t her fault.’
‘And Violette?’ hissed Morelle. ‘Will she also get a break?’
A real crowd pleaser. ‘Of course. Hey, I just asked her a few simple questions. My partner and me—he’s the one out on the street with the boys in blue and the panier à salade—we’re working on the Sandman thing. I thought Violette might have been able to help us.’
This one needed a shovel to finish digging his grave. ‘Violette? But … but, monsieur, is the sadist her maquereau, do you think?’ fluted Morelle, feeling firmly in charge, ‘or is it a man of the cloth perhaps?’
It was now or never. ‘Both pimp and priest.’
Death swiftly entered Morelle’s eyes. Now it was there and now it was gone. As the zinc was wiped with the patron, glasses shattered, shrieks tore the air, the sharks tumbling back or lunging only to stop.
Kohler held the bastard’s head bent back over the far end of the bar, strangling him until the Savoyard was plum-red in the face and choking.
Flat on his back with the neck of an upturned pastis bottle jammed into his mouth, Morelle could not talk but only swallow.
‘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.’
‘BTARD, 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 smas
hed 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.’
‘She had tied it to a tree in the Bois, hoping it would be stolen and eaten, Inspector,’ confessed Leon Kalfou. ‘I know—at least, I think I do—because she had often asked me for recipes. “How would one cook a dog, Kalfou?” she would say. “By roasting it on a spit? By boiling until tender or by braising?” I … I think even then, and it’s a long time ago, she had planned to trap and eat dogs in the wild if necessary.’
But was it that she wanted to make sure the dog would not follow them and that if they did make their getaway, food would be at hand? A dog. The dog, Pompon.
He would have to go carefully. ‘When, exactly, did these questions of sustenance begin?’
Again they exchanged glance
s, the housekeeper urging caution with a slight lift of her left hand.
The chef shrugged. ‘Three weeks, a month ago perhaps. Yes, yes, now I remember. She asked if dogmeat would do for a Christmas feast. Roasted and basted with a sauce of apples, pears and ground chestnuts for sweetening. That child has a vivid imagination, Inspector. I would not, if I were you, place too much emphasis on whatever you have found in her coat pockets.’
‘I won’t. Now I want the precise time, monsieur. Was it not early last November perhaps that the question of eating dog-meat began?’
Again a cautionary hand was raised slightly but he was ready for it and stood up abruptly. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘your answer, madame.’
‘In … in the first week of November. Liline … Liline had been ill. I …’
‘The girl was pregnant, madame. Nénette must have realized it or at least have felt that something terrible had happened to Liline. She may have heard the girl crying in her room and gone in to her. It was then that the questions of dogmeat and other things began.’
Madame Therrien quickly crossed herself. ‘How did you know?’
Was it time to tell them about the death of Liline? he wondered and decided that it would have to wait a little longer. ‘I guessed, that is all. With crime one so often depends on intuition. Monsieur Vernet has been carrying on an affair with Mademoiselle Chambert and has confessed to this. For myself, I am surprised a man of his intelligence and position would not at least have taken precautions, but then …’
‘Then what?’ snapped the housekeeper irritably.
The chef swallowed his tears.
‘Ah, it’s nothing,’ said the Sûreté, shrugging the matter off. ‘I was only wondering why that child is afraid to come home.’
And there it is, thought Isabelle Therrien sadly. A child whose dear friend is made pregnant by her father’s brother, and whose other dear friend had been all but totally rejected by parents who had preferred to ski alone, and is now dead.
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