‘And the ID, Chief?’
‘Could well have been left by a résistant, yes.’
A tail feather from a male hen harrier had been used as a quill in an unsuccessful attempt at writing a postcard to the daughter. That of a pigeon had proved little better but the victim was, she had stated, ‘planning next to use those of the quail, the merlin and guinea fowl or even one from a peacock’.
The postcard was a photo of the Maréchal in uniform with the words of the song every schoolchild in the country had to sing each day during opening exercises. Maréchal, nous voilà! Devant toi, le saveur de la France. Marshal, here we are before you, France’s saviour. Nous jurons, nous, les gars, De servir et de suivre tes pars. We, your ‘boys’, swear to serve you and follow in your footsteps. For Pétain is France and France is Pétain!
And weren’t they all now worried that the Resistance, the ‘terrorists’ or some other unknown would bousiller les gars? Smash the boys, bump them off?
*
Changed to the boulevard États-Unis after the Second World War.
*
Now the rue Braque.
3
The morgue was nowhere near the Hotel du Parc, and certainly not within easy ‘walking’ distance, swore Kohler silently. Well to the south of the old town, it was near the river and above the marshy flats into which the town’s septic bed drained. A cruel breeze, out of the west, stirred the frozen reeds, bringing a thin dusting of snow and the stench. Over the snow-covered hills beyond the river, the light was like gunmetal, the frost so hard that the branches of the trees would snap and creak – had it been like that at Stalingrad when his boys had died? he wondered. Of course it had. Woodsmoke would rise, marking the site of a camp fire – Jurgen and Hans would have known this only too well by then and would have agreed that, huddled over cold ashes, any maquisards out there would freeze to death rather than show themselves.
War was like that, like Christ on a platter in cold storage.
‘Look, I know this won’t sound right,’ said Bousquet, cupping his hands as he lit the last of their cigarettes, the three of them standing but a few steps from the car whose engine idled, Georges, the driver, still behind the wheel and minding his own business because he’d been told to. ‘The second victim … Camille Lefèbvre. She and I … An evening or two. Ah! it was nothing, I tell you. A chance meeting at a local inn well before last Christmas, a small gathering, a few friends. Who would have thought anything would have developed? Certainly I didn’t.’
‘Married?’ snapped Kohler.
‘The daughter of an officer, one of the recently disbanded Army of the Armistice.’
Demobilized 21 November of last year.
‘I was careful. So very careful. One has to be in a little place like this and with a position such as mine.’
‘We’re waiting,’ sighed Louis, impatiently flicking his cigarette away and not bothering even to save it for his little tin. ‘You’ve not answered my partner’s question.’
These two would think the worst but would have to be told. ‘We had agreed to meet downriver at one of the cabins the open-air cafés let to people in summer. Swimming, boating, water-cycling and sunbathing, that sort of thing, but closed in winter.’
‘Except that you’ve a year-long lease on this one,’ muttered Kohler. It was just a shot in the dark but …
‘I hardly ever have the time to go there. Friends use it, my wife and family in summer when they come for a little visit.’
‘Hermann, ask him what he told those who needed to know where he’d be?’
‘En route to Paris. There were three rooms. Not big, quite small. She got up during the night. Perhaps she had to take a pee, perhaps she heard a shutter banging – one was loose. I awoke when I heard her struggling. I reached under the pillows for my gun and called out that I was armed. There … there was still a good fire in the kitchen stove, light from its firebox and from her torch which had fallen. She … she was lying in a heap on the floor, twitching. Her robe was open, the back door swinging in towards me. I fired into the night. Twice, I think. Maybe three times.’
‘The date and time?’ grumbled Louis.
‘7 January, a Thursday at … at about 2.45 a.m.’
‘A Friday?’
‘Yes … Yes, it was Friday by then.’
‘Knifed, garrotted – what, exactly, Secrétaire?’ demanded Louis, using that Sûreté voice of his.
‘Garrotted, the wire still embedded in her throat.’
‘And blood all over the place,’ sighed Kohler. ‘The jugular, the carotid artery …’ They’d seen it all in Avignon ten days ago. One of a group of madrigal singers, the Palais des Papes …
‘Her pessary had fallen out. I reached to pick it up but … but hesitated because I felt whoever had killed her would come back to finish the job.’
‘Footprints, Secrétaire? Two sets or one? A man and a woman or only …’
‘Jean-Louis, that is all in the report but, yes, I think now that there could well have been two of them.’
Confusion, then, and doubt, the prints not clear. ‘And were you the target or was she?’
‘Merde alors, why would anyone have wanted to kill her? I was the target. Me! And now Georges is always kept near and always ready, and I am more than convinced of the danger, but at the time was far too concerned with …’
‘With saving your own ass and buggering off,’ sighed Kohler. Mein Gott, were they all the same? De Fleury and now Bousquet.
‘Be reasonable, eh? I had to leave her. I had no other choice. Paris … I had to be in Paris by four that afternoon.’
‘To meet with Oberg and others of the SS, and Gestapo Boemelburg?’ demanded Louis.
‘Marseille … Since you appear to think you know everything about the destruction of the Old Port, you will understand why I had to leave her.’
‘Threw the pessary into the stove, did you?’ quipped Hermann.
‘Yes. I … I gathered up all evidence of my having been with her. I’d often let others use the cabin. Sous-préfet Robert was well aware of this since he and his family had stayed there for a week this past summer. Camille had come on skis. There was really nothing to link me with her.’
‘And Ménétrel, was he told in confidence?’ demanded Louis.
‘Don’t be absurd! Of course, if I had felt for a moment they would make an attempt on the Maréchal, I’d have spoken up. That private army of the doctor’s is supposed to keep our Head of State as secure as a termite’s ass in a beehive but obviously didn’t. And that, messieurs, is why you’re here.’
Grey in the light, the river looked muddy where the ice had failed to form due to heat from the septic outfall. A lone hawk, a male hen harrier perhaps, thought St-Cyr only to mutter absently, ‘They migrate don’t they?’
‘What?’ yelped Bousquet, flinging his cigarette down.
The hawk was indicated.
‘Idiot, it’s searching for mice and voles.’
And waiting to have its tail feathers plucked for quills? wondered Kohler. Merde, what were they to do? ‘Where was your driver, Secrétaire?’
‘Downriver at a small hotel. He was to collect me well before dawn and did so. No one was to have known I’d be there. No one.’
‘But someone obviously did,’ grumbled Louis, giving that Sûreté nod his partner would understand only too well.
‘And now you’ll have to be charged with withholding evidence,’ sighed Kohler. Oberg would hit the roof and threaten piano wire! Boemelburg would simply carry through his threat to send Louis to the salt mines of Silesia and himself to man a machine-gun on the Russian Front!
‘But I haven’t withheld it, have I?’ said Bousquet. ‘I’ve come clean.’
‘Then join us in the morgue, Secrétaire,’ said Louis with all the acid he could summon. ‘Tell us who and where her husband is. Flesh out the little details while we examine the corpses.’
‘Hermann, a quiet word.’
They drew away from
the counter, Bousquet offering the attendant behind it a cigarette and trying to exchange pleasantries so as to cover his being here with two detectives from Paris.
‘There’s no need for you to see them,’ said Louis, those big brown ox-eyes of his moist with concern. ‘Get Georges to drop you off at the Hotel du Parc. Pump him dry and find out what really went on the night of that little rendezvous, then talk to the switchboard operator that Ménétrel will probably have dismissed. Dry her tears. She may be a bank.’
‘Bousquet won’t tell you everything.’
‘Of course not. None of them will, but Premier Laval would most certainly have been aware of this and may well have sicked Ménétrel on to the switchboard girl not only to get rid of him but to let us know we ought to talk to her.’
The French … Mein Gott, the wiliness of their peasants! Laval had grown up as one of them and was known to make much of it. ‘Or to those at the PTT?’
The main exchange. Hermann was learning. ‘Those too. Apart from the plentiful hotels, and the lack of a prominent politician who might not have agreed with them but would have demanded a powerful position, the Government came here because the town possessed a modern telephone exchange and calls could be made to New York, London or anywhere else, even Berlin.’
‘Enjoy yourself.’
Stark under lights that must be far brighter than needed, the victims lay side by side. The white shrouds had been drawn fully back … The skin of each was so pale and waxy-looking – blue and cold, especially in the lips and fingernails, livid elsewhere in blotches, the autopsy incision of the one crudely stitched up from her black-haired pubes to her throat …
‘That … that is Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux, the first of them. Found in the Grand établissement thermal. Drowned,’ managed Bousquet only to hear St-Cyr calmly saying, ‘Take a moment, Secrétaire. Calm yourself.’
The thermal baths …
‘Unmarried – divorced when still quite young; nineteen, I think. A nurse with her own practice. Age thirty-two or three. Alain André Richard, our Minister of Supplies and Rationing, was quite infatuated with her.’
‘And you, Secrétaire? Were you as “infatuated” with Madame Lefèbvre?’
Whose throat was greenish-yellow and tinged with coppery blue in places and still depressed on either side of where the wire had cut through, the flesh gaping … Flecks of dark blood beneath the skin – showers of them, the smell of her …
‘Don’t!’ said St-Cyr. ‘Come away, Secrétaire. Away! A brandy! A glass of water!’ he called out to one of the attendants.
‘Brandy?’ came the echoing response. ‘He asks for a marc, Hérnand.’
‘Then get it from the safe, idiot. Hurry!’ said Hérnand, the boss perhaps.
‘Merci,’ gasped Bousquet when it had arrived and been downed – three fingers at least and rough. ‘Another. And another. Now leave us and close the door. This is a private matter. Speak of it to anyone and you’ll be planting corpses in Russia for our friends.’
The door closed. ‘Sacré nom de nom, forgive me,’ said Bousquet, looking at Camille’s corpse whose nipples had collapsed and were tinged with bluish green and yellow, and whose breasts were slack and marred by livid blotches, no longer warmly being kissed or suckled as she cried out in ecstasy and begged, ‘In, René. In and deep. I have to have you in me!’
‘Tell me about her, Secrétaire. Tell me everything you know. Don’t hold back. Hermann and I will only find out, and the sooner we have everything, the sooner we will have her killer or killers.’
The auburn hair was thick but because she’d been hosed down and it had been so cold in here, the hair was slicked and matted and had lost its permanent wave. ‘Her eyes …’
‘They’ve sunk a little into their sockets. A film of mucus and dead cells forms over the cornea – it’s normal with exposure to air after a few hours. Dust collects on it and the surface of the cornea soon becomes brownish and wrinkled. Again, that is normal.’
‘She had beautiful eyes.’
‘Then imagine them as they once were and tell me about her. You loved her?’
‘A little. I’d have been a fool not to have. She was a teacher – it’s all in the report. Her husband, a captain, is a guest of our friends. She missed him terribly, this I know, for she’d often say his name when we made love. I think she needed to be held. The old man, her father, was always bitching about his son-in-law’s cowardice, always complaining that the boy had taken his daughter away from him and then had shirked his duty. Herr Gessler has his gestapiste’s eye on him. One can’t go around this town continually griping about cowardice in the face of our friends. It doesn’t do any of us any good.’
‘A teacher,’ said St-Cyr of the victim. One had to bring Bousquet back on track.
‘Nervous – she greedily smoked cigarettes when she could get them, which lately was often enough because I always took her some and the old man was always asking her how she’d come by them.’
Women weren’t allowed the tobacco ration which, if available, had been cut in half from two packets, each of twenty, and one of loose tobacco a month. Resented when caught smoking, they had to suffer the censure of most men and so tended to smoke in private or among trusted friends and relatives.
‘That father of hers caught her often,’ muttered Bousquet. ‘“He thinks I’m selling myself for tobacco,” she once said and laughed at the idiocy of it.’
The secrétaire was taking things harder than had been expected. ‘Did she know either of the others?’
‘Madame Dupuis taught ballet, but whether or not at Camille’s school I simply don’t know. But I will quietly make inquiries. They weren’t friends. At least, Camille never mentioned her. Perhaps just casual acquaintances – the usual sort of thing one finds among the staff of such institutions. Madame Dupuis would only have been there part-time in any case, so it’s possible but not probable they were friends.’
‘And the other victim? A nurse, you said.’
‘Mademoiselle Mailloux worked part-time at a private clinic, but I don’t think any dancers went to its doctor simply because the cures he offers must be the usual for this place.’
Tired livers, flagging libidos, et cetera. ‘But the school …? Would she have done part-time nursing there?’
‘Links … you look for links when the only one is that all were killed as another was about to die?’
‘Yet all three of these attempted assassinations failed and you’ve yet to tell me how Mademoiselle Mailloux was drowned. Was she sharing a bath with the Minister of Supplies and Rationing? Did he, too, avoid the scandal and simply bugger off?’
‘Don’t. Please don’t. It’s painful enough that you’ve forced me to see them, Camille especially.’
A cigarette was found and, once lighted, was passed to Bousquet. The pipe was packed, the pouch emptied to its last grain.
‘I’ll tell Ministre Richard that he has to be completely open with you, Jean-Louis. That little affair of his had been going on for some time and he’d not been as discreet as one would have liked. Marie-Jacqueline would come to his office when she was out on a call and it was near to lunch or the cinq à sept. Everyone knew he was fucking her. One saw it in the looks they exchanged and in the lightness of her step, the mischief in her candid dark eyes, the toss of her head – ah! so many signals. That one was a real filly and didn’t give a damn if everyone knew what was going on. Indeed, I think she revelled in it. After all, he’s quite well off and powerful. A real catch.’
‘They shared a bath?’
‘They drank champagne.’
‘The water was quite hot? A private cubicle, a “discreet” attendant, money in a palm and the couple left alone?’ Five to seven were the usual hours for such little liaisons.
‘The autopsy will show that she had consumed at least three-fifths of the bottle of Bollinger Cuvée Spéciale that was found with her. The lights went out. Richard went to see what was the matter – another of the power failures we�
�re all plagued with these days. He called out to the attendant – at least, he will swear to this but isn’t sure how far along the corridor he went. Then he felt his way back to the tub, thinking nothing more of her silence than that she must simply be wanting to relax. They touched hands. The toes of her right foot came between his thighs to play with him. He was certain she was alive until the lights finally came on again.’
‘But was he the target? Come, come, Secrétaire, if what you have just said is true, he wasn’t.’
‘But he must have been.’
Alone, St-Cyr replaced the shrouds, gently tucking each under a chin. ‘Forgive me, please, for uncovering you all like that. I had to shock the Secrétaire into yielding more than he wanted, but have failed. Now I need your hopes and desires, your strengths and weaknesses – everything including fast friends and enemies, and yet … and yet we have so little time.’
All had either just had sex before they’d been killed, or had been about to, and only in the case of Madame Dupuis would it not have been with a man she regularly kept company with. But had she really loved Honoré de Fleury?
Ménétrel had made the couple an offer they couldn’t refuse.
She was blonde, blue-eyed, and had been born on 10 April 1915. ‘And therefore a couple of months short of your twenty-eighth birthday. When asked how and when you first met Monsieur de Fleury, Secrétaire Général Bousquet could not recall his ever having enquired of such a thing. Nor could he say with any certainty how long the affair had been going on, only that de Fleury had been careful – “discreet” was the word he used.
‘Camille Lefebvre née Roux,’ he said, turning to her and noting how her expression so vastly differed from that of the latest victim. ‘Death by knifing brings sudden shock and disbelief, while that of garrotting brings panic and terror. Your identity card states you’ve brown hair and brown eyes, but really your hair is that lovely chestnut shade many men admire, and your eyes were of a soft, warm brown with flecks of green, or so our Secrétaire maintains. But here, too, his memory is surprisingly unclear. Perhaps the two of you met at the races, or was it at the tennis or swimming club? Sunshine and long, hot days in any case, so last summer but late, he felt, in August. You introduced yourself to him – he is positive about this and says he wasn’t looking for an affair and is quite happily married and content. You asked if he could possibly give you a lift home but he has no further recollection of that first meeting. Was it late at night and did he initiate things, as I suspect? You’re beautiful and young – your husband has been locked up since the summer of 1940. Did Rene Bousquet consider you vulnerable? Remember, please, that he’s incredibly handsome, outgoing and self-confident, is only thirty-three and parks his wife and family in Paris for the schooling of their children.
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