The key was found in the top drawer of the sideboard. Briefly their fingers touched and just as briefly warmth came back into the detective’s gaze. ‘Merci,’ he said.
‘Your French is good,’ she countered only to hear him reply, ‘I learned it as a guest of your country in 1916. I was one of the lucky ones and have always been grateful for the holiday. Now the French is useful.’
I’m sure it is, she wanted so much to add in High German because his would definitely be Low, but didn’t.
‘Did you see or hear anyone go into or out of Céline’s room on Tuesday?’ he asked.
‘Only myself. To … to feed and water Michel and give him a bit of daylight and company.’
‘And on Wednesday?’
How sharp his voice was. ‘Wednesday …? Paul … Paul, didn’t you say you’d heard someone up there?’
‘The Secrétaire Général de Police and Dr Ménétrel, idiot. Why ask when you know?’
‘He reads every day at this hour, Inspector. It’s his only form of relaxation. Please forgive his appalling lack of manners.’
‘Blanche, just tell him!’
‘Twice we heard someone on the stairs, Inspector. At first I thought it was Céline and that she must have stayed overnight at a friend’s to avoid being out during the curfew, but those steps faded away. Later the Secrétaire did come, as Paul has said, and with the doctor.’
First visit: the identity card. Had Herr Kohler scribbled this? wondered Blanche, or had he written: Killer ducked into room before Camille’s lover and Pétain’s éminence grise?
‘And today?’ he asked sharply.
‘Once. Before … before you and … the other one came here.’
Before our first visit to the hotel – did he write that? wondered Blanche.
‘How long have the two of you lived here in the hotel?’
‘Since the beginning’
‘Jobs?’
How brutal of him! ‘Translator, and croupier, though the casino is open only on weekends, with a consequent loss of promised wages which has, I am afraid, made my brother somewhat bitter.’
‘Blanche!’
‘Paul, we should be thankful for what is ours. Others have it far worse!’
Nom de Dieu, they were a pair. ‘Do you know Albert Grenier, the groundskeeper?’
‘Everyone knows Albert, Inspector,’ said Paul spitefully. ‘The fool makes a point of saying hello even when not wanted.’
‘To those who like him, and to those who don’t,’ confessed the sister. ‘Paul, you mustn’t think Albert stupid. He’s really very intelligent, just a little awkward perhaps, but in his own way he’s himself. That is more than one can say for a lot of the others in this town, Inspector.’
Again the sister realized she had said too much. ‘Who did the birds?’ Kohler asked, indicating the stuffed one.
‘I did,’ she quickly admitted. ‘I had such plans when a child, didn’t I, Paul? But as you can see, my talent was sadly lacking. Céline loved birds – live ones. They were free to fly, she used to say when thinking of Annette and building dreams for when the two of them would be together again. She wanted me to give her one of the tail feathers from each of those. Paul wanted her to take the birds and be done with my memory of them, but she wouldn’t do that and … and never brought the matter up again.’
‘A quail,’ muttered Herr Kohler, flipping back through his notebook. ‘A male hen harrier …’
‘A merlin, a peacock … Céline was going to try to write to her daughter using a tail feather from each. That way her words would appear as though they’d flown to Annette and every time the girl visited the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, she’d think of her mother. Your coffee is getting cold, Inspector. Don’t you like it?’
‘Can’t you see you’ve prattled on so hard he’s been too busy?’
‘Paul, please. I want to help.’
‘Then why not tell him where Céline would have got the tail feathers! Go on, idiot. Can’t you see that’s what he’s fishing for and he’ll soon find out anyway?’
Ach! had the sister been trying to avoid doing so?
‘Herr Abetz, your ambassador in Paris, keeps a château nearby, Inspector,’ said Blanche. ‘Its … its custodian and former owner tends the birds he once collected.’
There, she said sadly to herself, now he’s writing that down too. A château, his expression grim at the thought of Herr Abetz being even remotely connected to the killings. In a way she felt sorry for Herr Kohler, sorry for herself and Paul too, of course.
A mist of fear and anxiety was in the detective’s eyes when he looked up at her to ask, ‘Just how the hell did Madame Dupuis get to visit our Otto’s birds?’
Paul should have kept quiet. ‘The parties,’ she said not daring to look at Herr Kohler. ‘The dances and nights of games and … and other things.’
‘And your brother and you, Mademoiselle Varollier? Did the two of you also attend these evenings out?’
These orgies, was this what Herr Kohler thought? To deny it would be foolish; to admit it, suicidal. Why did Paul have to force the issue? To get everything out in the open and over with in spite of what might happen to them? To get back at her, his sister, his twin?
‘Occasionally, Inspector, but … but not in some time. Wasn’t it well before Christmas when we were last there, Paul?’ she asked acidly. ‘My brother to deal the cards or tend the roulette wheel, myself to translate when necessary.’
Speaks Deutsch fluently – was this what Herr Kohler now scribbled? wondered Blanche, but when he looked across the table at her, it was to ask, ‘Who else was there?’
Had Paul wanted this to come out too? ‘Céline and … and others.’
‘Lucie Trudel? That is her portable gramophone on the bureau next to your brother’s chair, isn’t it? When was the last time you saw her? You first, Monsieur Varollier, then you, Mademoiselle Blanche.’
Ah Sainte Mère! Herr Kohler had led them into believing he hadn’t noticed the record on its turntable, hadn’t thought it important. He had laid a little souricière for them.
A mousetrap.
*
The blood-and vomit-stained sock that had been crammed into Lucie Trudel’s mouth and then taken from it had been thrown behind her killer or killers and had landed under her bed.
Lying flat on the floor, St-Cyr reached for it with the tweezers. He’d have to bag it but bags were in too short a supply even for murder investigations and Stores were obstinate. ‘A leaflet, then,’ he grunted. ‘Two perhaps, and tightly folded over. Idiot, the ink will run. Everything these days is made not to last!’
The sock had been hand-knitted in four-ply white wool with a cable pattern above the ankle. He was certain it matched the other one he’d found. It, and this other one, had been mended not once but twice by the look of them. Both were definitely from the thirties, from when she’d have been eighteen or nineteen. Treasured because Maman or Grand-mere had knitted them. Used and mended until they unravelled during the Occupation to be used elsewhere.
‘You came from a good home, didn’t you,’ he said, looking across the room at her. ‘But they wouldn’t have thought well of your returning with child and unmarried. Was that why the indecision, or did someone really interrupt your early-morning walk from the Hall des Sources and demand the location of that key?’
She couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak, yet he felt she would have liked to have said, Papa was very ill. They had trouble enough at home.
‘Was he dying?’ he asked gently. The leaflets in the inner pocket of his overcoat had been dropped by the RAF on a night-bombing raid over the U-boat pens at Lorient on the Breton coast. ‘Target missed and town hit,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘My partner and I were lucky not to have left the living. I seldom empty these pockets,’ he apologized. ‘We were there at the beginning of January. A dollmaker, a U-boat captain who wanted to revive his grandfather’s business of making beautiful dolls, the Royal Kaestners. Another difficul
t murder investigation. We always seem to get them. Well?’ he asked suddenly.
Dying, she seemed to say of her father. I was torn between murdering my unborn child and returning home for a last visit perhaps, and … and the funeral.
‘And the interruption?’
The location of the key to the Hall, but why, she seemed to insist, would he, she or they have needed to ask me when so many others knew Albert?
‘A warning then. Was that it, eh, or did your killer simply follow you back to this hotel?’
Two black leather thongs, each about a half-metre in length, were neatly coiled among the things in her Paris suitcase, and he had to ask himself, Had the riding crop also been packed? Had that been why her killer or killers had fitted it into her hand after they’d killed her?
Deschambeault had shed no tears, had expressed anger, yes, but not really remorse and regret at her killing. More a concern for himself, a curiosity and a thinly disguised sense of relief.
‘Did you beat him during sex? Was he of that nature or did he beat you? Please forgive me for asking, mademoiselle, but it’s necessary. Pain does, with some, increase pleasure; with others it’s essential.’
She wouldn’t have answered, would have ducked her eyes in shame, or would she? Accustomed to coming across all manner of perversions, he filed the thought away and again took to examining the contents of her bed.
The rats had all been caught in traps but not the usual, he felt.
There were, in so far as he could see, no broken backs or broken necks and legs, nor was there any sign of the froth that poison often brought. Instead of this last, or a spring-loaded trap whose bar would snap down when the bait was taken, a wire snare had been used.
‘Coroner Laloux will confirm this,’ he said. ‘Rats are very intelligent and not easily tricked. Each family quickly becomes aware of the consequences of poisoned bait and avoids it like the plague. Those spring-loaded traps are often of no use either. Bacon, cheese, bread soaked in wine or soup – whatever I used, even securely tying the bait to its little pan with thread, they would leave the trap set sans its little reward and the thread still perfectly in place. Wire cage traps, though expensive, are better. Of course I shot some, but with this bunch I think snares were used. The bait put in a difficult and out of the way place, the rat curious, then growing a little bolder until jerking frantically.
‘But our killer or killers have been careless, mademoiselle. If not the trapper, then he, she or they both know someone who is good at his business, even to determining the sex of those he has caught. The livers are also missing. Tasty, no doubt, though I haven’t yet had to dine on them, nor has my partner. At least, not knowingly.’
Still the hotel was silent. It was uncanny how news of their continued presence must constantly be telegraphed from room to room and past those that were unoccupied.
Deschambeault had left his cigar band on her bedside table next to the bottle of the Chomel. ‘An El Rey del Mundo, mademoiselle,’ he said, carefully flattening it. ‘A Choix Supreme perhaps? Taste is everything to those who can afford to cultivate it. Taste in cigars and in mistresses. Salut. The band is glued to the cigar. Once plain, and used to prevent the fingertips from becoming strained with nicotine, the bands soon acquired great diversity of design. Gold coins to wrap themselves around Albert Grenier’s finger. Does Albert know you were stopped on your way here? If so, then he’s in even more danger than I had first thought.’
But had the cigar band from the Hall des Sources been left for them to find, or simply removed as this one had been by an automatic response of long custom and only when heat from the lighted cigar had softened the adhesive?
The laissez-passer she had been given by the sous-directeur had indeed been countersigned by Fernand de Brinon whose signature appeared beneath that of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and its stamp. ‘Deschambeault’s wife is a neurotic, is she?’ he asked, desperately wanting answers. ‘Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux must have known her from the clinic of …’ He flipped through his little black book. ‘Dr Raoul Normand. Céline Dupuis left a message for you: “Lucie, please come back soon. We have to talk. It’s urgent.”
‘Talk about what, mademoiselle? About jealous wives wanting revenge or about vans from the Bank of France being used to haul cigars and other luxuries from Paris so that your lover and those of the others could enjoy the high life while the rest of us knuckle under? Or was it this?’ He indicated the laissez-passer. ‘They’re so very hard to come by unless you know the right people. You see, it’s rumoured Monsieur de Brinon, our delegate in Paris, sells them. Secrétaire-Général Bousquet is patently aware of this and afraid I am too. A little under-the-table business that’s probably not so little. Certainly such things,’ he said and shrugged, ‘are never recorded and thus the income is never taxed.
‘You ran with the pack. You all did, for various reasons no doubt. And now … now have paid for it while we must find your killer or killers but protect those we would most like to see taught a damned good lesson!
‘L’Humanité,’ he went on. ‘It’s only natural that I should dread what could well happen to me. Questioned first, and not kindly! Then up against the post, Mademoiselle Trudel, or with the necktie.
‘Hermann … Hermann, why the hell are you being so quiet?’ he asked.
Sans toi, she seemed to say. Sans toi. And when the voice of Lucienne Boyer filtered down the corridors and stairs, a wild moment of panic rushed through him and he heard himself blurting, ‘Hermann … Hermann, are you all right?’ Had they killed him? Were the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans really behind this thing, this so-called plot to bousiller les gars? The FTP had formed a secret murder squad in the winter of 1941-42 and it was still very active, still selecting its targets and not at random!
Softly closing and locking the door to her room, he started out, knowing only as that sincere and lovely voice permeated every part of his being that others also listened and waited. Bousquet, on making his deal with Oberg and Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris, had said the French had better become accustomed to ‘a police force that intervenes ruthlessly’. Parisians and all others would be in for ‘a shock at the sight of it’.
Of an all-too-willing collaboration, of often violent arrest for little or no reason, of brutality, cruelty and theft being carried out by ordinary gendarmes, les flics of cities like Paris and Lyons, but even in some little villages by their trusted gardes champêtres. The French Gestapo also, and now, too, the Milice who were to enforce the Service de Travail Obligatoire, the compulsory labour service that would send thousands to the Reich. And yes, too, the Bidder Unit, and the Intervention-Referat.
People had good reason to be very angry. A lot of people.
Putting the Lebel on full cock, he started up the stairs, listening always to that voice, thinking of it, of dancing cheek to cheek with his first wife. They’d been so in love, but the long absences, she never knowing if and when he’d return, had intruded just as they had with the second wife, with Marianne. And now there was Gabrielle who would sing that song as well or even better, but to 800 of the Wehrmacht’s servicemen on leave at the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre, and to those in the front lines and barracks, for her voice was carried by German wireless to men on both sides of this lousy war.
Gabrielle Arcuri who was of the Resistance, her group so tiny she, too, could well be in danger from the mistakes and reprisals of other résistants.
‘It’s the shits, isn’t it?’ he said softly, as if to Hermann. ‘While you want the quiet life with Giselle tending a bar in that little place you’re always saying you’ll buy on the Costa del Sol, and Oona keeping house for you and looking after Giselle’s and your babies – you know I’ve warned you it will never work – I want to go fishing with Gabi and her son on the Loire in summer. Yet here we are and no one except Premier Laval – I repeat no one but him, mon vieux – wants us to be anywhere near here.’
The song came to its end. A big man, a giant with strong, capable han
ds and thick fingers whose nails were closely trimmed, Herr Kohler used great sensitivity to lift the armature with its needle from the recording. Does he defuse bombs? wondered Blanche. Bombs that are meant to kill the unsuspecting?
Paul was suffering under the detective’s gaze and nervously waited, but Herr Kohler deliberately didn’t switch off the gramophone. He would let it unwind itself.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You say that the last time you saw Lucie Trudel you met her quite by accident Friday evening at just after seven, the new time. You were on your way to the casino, she was returning here to the hotel. You asked if you could borrow the record and the machine.’
‘That is correct,’ said Paul, the turntable going round and round. Chéri, be careful, begged Blanche silently, only to hear him saying, ‘Look, Inspector, I was a little early for work and knew how much my sister loved that recording, so thought to surprise her and walked back here with Lucie.’
‘The sleeve … There’s no sleeve,’ said Herr Kohler.
‘Of course there isn’t!’
Paul would use sarcasm!
‘The record was on the turntable. That is why we don’t have its sleeve!’
Idiot … Did Paul want to say, Idiot?
‘Where had she been?’ asked Herr Kohler.
‘At work, where else?’ Paul would snap back answers and think he was in control. You’re not, my darling. Not with this one. The machine was still winding down, still making its little grinding sounds that went on and on and seemed to fill the room. The room …
‘What street were you on?’
‘Street?’ yelped Paul. ‘Why, in the Park.’
‘Near the Hall des Sources?’
‘Yes. She … she had just come out of the Hôtel du Parc.’
‘From work?’
‘Isn’t that what I said?’
‘The offices of the Bank of France aren’t there, mon fin. Try the Carlton.’
‘She had delivered some papers,’ said Paul calmly, now very much the dealer of vingt-et-un who knows the deck in his hand is thin of fives and tens and therefore vastly in his favour.
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