‘Sixteen rue des Trois-Pilats. It’s near the villa Simondi uses for his students. If the meals aren’t to your taste, try La Fourchette in the rue Racine or the Auberge Julius Pallière on the place de I’Horloge. Acclimatize yourselves. Get to know the city and get to the bottom of this thing. The faster the better.’
Von Mahler was in his early forties, but was the expression always so severe, the frown so constant? The dark brown hair was crinkly and cut short. The wide-set eyes under knitted brows were iron-grey, the lips firm in resolve and slightly turned down at their corners as if to silently cry out, Don’t you dare involve me.
He’d probably been an academic in civilian life, an economist in the military until the war had torn him from his desk. Good at polo and the steeplechase – he had that look about him. He’d have got to know the powers that be among the French in Avignon and the Vaucluse. He’d have made a point of that. ‘Herr Oberst, what can you tell me about the night of the murder?’
‘What have the others told you?’
No cigarettes were in evidence, no ashtrays either. ‘The others?’ asked Kohler.
‘Rivaille, de Passe and Simondi.’
‘Very little, and I’ve yet to speak to the singing master.’
‘Then you’d better. It was Simondi’s idea to hold yet another of his infernal auditions. I refused to sit in on it. I’m not competent to judge such things. To me Mireille was an absolutely beautiful musician. Pure magic. A natural.’
‘This audition, Colonel. If you refused …’
‘I did.’
‘Then who took your place?’
‘I’ve no idea. Simondi may, for all I’m aware, have cancelled it yet failed to notify Mireille.’
There it was again. Not Mademoiselle de Sinéty or even the girl, but Mireille, one of the family. ‘The concierge says no audition was planned.’
‘Then it had been cancelled.’
‘Could she have gone there to meet someone?’
‘I’d spoken to her about the boy she was infatuated with. I’d told her it was foolish of her to even think of him and that she had best, for all our sakes and particularly that of herself, keep her distance.’
One of the maquis, then, as de Passe had said. ‘And how did she greet this advice?’
‘With fortitude and with that inherent practicality both my wife and I found so engaging. She wasn’t ordinary, Inspector. She was extraordinarily gifted and, in another age, would have been the daughter of a nobleman, the wife of a king.’
Subconsciously a fist had been clenched. Irritably a hand was now passed over the crinkly hair to hide the fact, thought Kohler wryly.
‘She was extremely well versed in the city’s past and very much wanted others to see it as she did. Heroic in spite of the pit of sin, the “sewer” of Petrarch.’
Von Mahler hadn’t demanded to know if he and Louis had discovered anything. Instead, he had avoided asking. ‘Colonel, in the course of our enquiries might we talk to your wife?’
Verdammt! The insolence of the police. Could Kohler not take the hint? ‘Absolutely not. There’s no need. You’d only upset her and I can’t have that.’
‘But an independent view? A German view? The girl may have confided things or let something slip.’
‘Ingrid sees no one but the staff and myself, and that, my dear Hauptmann Detektiv Inspektor, is an order.’
Okay, okay. ‘Then can you tell us anything you think might be useful, apart, that is, from questioning Bishop Rivaille, the préfet and the singing master?’
Would Kohler now leave things well enough alone? ‘Just start with Simondi. He’s a superb musician in his own right.’
‘He owns a cinema.’
The concierge of the Palais must have informed Kohler of this. ‘He owns several – both here and in Orange, Aries and Aix. In smaller centres too. He operates theatres as well and has additional properties either under option or outright ownership. He’s a very astute businessman, Inspector, but music, not money, is the guiding passion of his life.’
‘A hobby,’ muttered Kohler. And among the petite bourgeoisie? Merde, did the Colonel take this Kripo for an idiot?
A faint grin wouldn’t be remiss, thought von Mahler. ‘Far more than a hobby. He’s extremely gifted and therefore intense when it comes to his music. Mireille was very loyal to her teacher and grateful for his help. “He believes in me,” she would say to my wife. “He says I’m almost there.”’
And kept on the hook, was that it, eh, but for what purpose? ‘So, an audition was planned for the night of Monday 25 January. You were asked to sit in as the third judge but refused. Concierge Biron attended your soldaten-kino to take in a screening of The Grapes of Wrath and didn’t check through the Palais, as the bishop always insisted, until well after twenty-two hundred hours, after which, Colonel, he went to notify Brother Matthieu and then Bishop Rivaille but could locate neither of them.’
‘And why was that?’
A coldness had entered von Mahler’s voice, a stiffness. Had it been a warning to push this particular part of the matter no further? wondered Kohler, not liking the thought. ‘No reasons were given, Herr Oberst.’ This was a lie, of course. Rivaille had been at a dinner party to discuss the concert the madrigal singers were to give, and then the tour. Aix, Marseille, Toulon and Aries had been mentioned by Salvatore Biron. But a dinner party with whom? The Colonel and his wife – was that it, eh?
‘Then is there anything else I can do for you at present?’ asked von Mahler. ‘I’ve a busy afternoon ahead and must check in on my wife and children before we head out into the hills.’
After Banditen? Un ratissage? wondered Kohler. A ‘raking’ of the countryside – Kommandants didn’t usually do such things, but he had mentioned the boy the victim had been infatuated with. ‘I can’t think of anything, Herr Oberst. Both my partner and I appreciate the help.’
A hand was extended, the typical salute, Heil Hitler and the crashing of jackbooted heels, not given, the lie of not thinking of anything to ask accepted.
The Balance Quartier, lying between the Palais and the river, was desperately in need of renovation. Shoulder-to-shoulder slum houses of two and three storeys surrounded once lovely inner courtyards. The years of siege, the visitations of the plague – wars, fires and utter poverty – had left many of them ramshackle and ready to be torn down.
Though Sister Agnès had roundly condemned it, Number 63 rue du Rempart du Rhône was better than most and had, at the rear of the house, a square tower that rose a storey above the other two so that its windows overlooked both the river to the west and the courtyard and the Palais to the east.
‘Our victim chose well, Hermann,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Plaster over the holes, replace the shutters, fix the chimneys and roof tiles and voilá, you will have the fourteenth-century villa of a merchant, the scant remains of whose coat of arms suggest an importer of cloth.’
Carriage entrances were to the left and right – great, solid, weathered oaken doors with rusty driftpins. All windows at ground level were tightly shuttered, though some of the slats had disappeared. On the floor above, some windows had closed curtains. In others, these had been drawn aside. In one, there were pots of herbs and green onions the frost had killed. In another, a caged rabbit was trying not to think of things as it awaited the stew pot.
The concierge, grey and toothless, her hair pinned in a tight chignon, was in tears. ‘Inspectors!’ she wailed. ‘Who would do such a thing?’
A tattered black lace shawl was pulled tightly about the tiny shoulders. More tears fell and then she said accusingly, ‘What is Thérèse to do?’
‘Thérèse?’
‘Oui. Her assistant. The girl can’t sew without her fingers being guided. Mon Dieu, how could she carry on such work? A girl with a dead mother and a father who has fortunately been absent all her life except for the moment of conception? Mademoiselle Mireille was teaching her. Painstakingly, I must add!’
Tears were abruptly wiped away but then, of a
sudden, the woman turned aside and broke down completely. ‘Forgive me,’ she blurted. ‘The child was like a daughter. Her throat slashed! Ah let me get my hands on his filthy throat. I will wring his neck like a chicken’s!’
A doubter of all such outbursts, Kohler looked up at the ceiling to where flaking paint and ancient wallpaper threatened to join the plaster as it caved. ‘The key, Louis. Ask her for it.’
‘Thérèse is up there waiting for her to return, monsieur!. Always I’ve seen the way he has secretly watched the tower room from the ramparts. Always he has stood clothed in darkness while he planned to steal her little capital.’
Ah nom de Dieu. ‘Who, madame?’ asked Louis.
She raked them with a savage look. ‘He took it, didn’t he?’
Her virginity. ‘No. No, she remained pure to the last.’
‘Ah grâce à Dieu.’ The bosom was hastily crossed, the fingertips kissed and then the black beads of an ancient rosary were sought and also kissed.
‘Who?’ repeated St-Cyr.
They had both crowded into her loge. ‘I …’ She threw them a tortured look. ‘I … I don’t know. I spoke out of grief. You … you can see how distressed I am.’
Kohler sighed and then said, ‘Withholding information is a criminal offence. We’ll have to see that she’s charged, Louis. Otherwise she’ll only set a bad example.’
‘Dédou Favre. The one who is wanted by the authorities so much that Monsieur le Préfet has the house watched constantly.’
‘Her lover, Louis. The boy the bishop was trying to get her to give up. The Kommandant spoke of him. De Passe told me he had agreed to look the other way while Rivaille worked on her.’
A ‘terrorist’. One of the maquis. ‘And you think he killed her, madame?’ asked Louis pleasantly.
‘She said he would misunderstand and that for him, it would be enough.’
‘Misunderstand what?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘The attentions of others. Those of the madrigal singers of Monsieur Simondi, and of that one aussi. What they want, they take. A girl’s virtue is nothing to such as them, and she was totally aware of this. “Dédou will be insanely jealous,” she said. “He will think that in joining the group I’ve succumbed, that even I can be led astray in order to advance my career.”’
And in Avignon such jealousy was cause enough for murder. History was replete with the evidence.
‘Inspector, that was one of the reasons she wouldn’t leave this house to take up the lodgings Bishop Rivaille had arranged for her. She also said, “Here I keep my independence. Here I can stand on the side of what is right as I reach out to clasp the true hand of God.” Every day, on waking, she would make that little vow to herself as she gazed up at the Palais. A saint.’
The German lit a cigarette for her and left her two others for later. ‘Thérese?’ he asked. His voice was gentle for one so formidable and with the mark of a terrible scar down the left cheek – how had he got it? she wondered.
‘Barbed wire,’ lied Kohler. ‘The Great War. My partner and I were enemies then, but we’re friends now.’
The other scars from that war were much older, except for the graze across his brow which was still very fresh. ‘Thérèse hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, nor will she listen to me, messieurs. Please do what you can for her. Mademoiselle de Sinéty would wish this of us all.’
‘Won’t the sisters take her in?’ asked St-Cyr, only to see the woman’s expression tighten and to hear her rasp, ‘The sisters? You mustn’t ask them to do that. Not until you’ve brought the one who did this terrible thing to justice.’
‘But … but you’ve just told us Dédou Favre must have killed her in a jealous rage.’
She gave him a piercing look. ‘One can still be wrong, is that not so, Inspector? And if I am wrong, why then it would have to have been someone else.’
Pure logic. ‘But the sisters?’ snorted Kohler in disbelief.
‘Have among them, messieurs, the disease of those who are capable, especially if they believe it is God’s work.’
‘Did Sister Marie-Madeleine come here often?’ asked St-Cyr.
Had this one from the Sûreté seen it too, the bond between Mireille and her friend? ‘Often enough and not always with one of the other sisters, though it is their rule to go two by two when escaping the tight embrace of their walls.’
Thérèse Godard was about fifteen years old – thin, frail, not healthy-looking at all. ‘Tuberculosis …?’ breathed Kohler – the door had been left open.
‘The flu …’ cautioned Louis, perturbed that God should do such a thing to them at a time like this.
She was shivering, was sitting at a cutting table, staring emptily at an upturned pair of dove-grey woollen gloves whose fingers, especially in these days of so little fuel, had been cut away at the first joint.
Gently Kohler spoke her name. She tossed her head. ‘Mireille …?’ she managed, only to see the two of them and to turn swiftly away.
The auburn hair, once curled, was unkempt. ‘I’ll take her downstairs to madame, Louis. See what you can make of this clutter.’
‘It is not clutter!’ blurted the girl angrily. ‘Everything is in its place just as we kept it. They came. They searched. They did that to her privacy but I … I have put things back exactly as we kept them.’
Ah merde …‘De Passe, Louis?’
‘The police,’ she managed.
Kohler dug into a pocket and dragged out the wrist-watch he had found in the victim’s purse. ‘Was this hers?’
The girl buried her face in her employer’s gloves and wept.
‘Sorry … Look, I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘Please forgive me.’
‘Xavier gave that to her. She needed a watch and he … he said he could get her one.’
The shepherd boy.
The rooms – there were two of them – opened into each other through double doors that had been permanently flung wide. In a far corner, a spiral staircase led up to the tower.
Rescued, pieced together, were the stone fragments of letters which had once been a part of the coat of arms. ‘De Sinéty …’ exhaled St-Cyr. The time, the diligence needed to gather and fit the artefacts together said much about the victim. A scattered collection of pieces, obviously uncovered from courtyard and cellar excavations, yielded a bent and much corroded ducat, the remains of an ancient pair of shears, those also of fourteenth-century clothing pins and clasps, and those of what must have been the original keys to the house.
Two silver thimbles, one crushed flat, the other crumpled, had been cleaned but were still black.
The pattern on them matched that of the thimbles in the motif on the sides of the pomander.
There was cloth in plenty, either folded neatly on the workroom shelves or in bolts and remnants, and he had to ask, How had she come by it? and had to answer, ‘The Church, the bishop and the nuns – wealth that has been stored for centuries.’ And then, fingering satin, silk and velvet, ‘The drapes, bed linens and clothing from abandoned villas. Wrist-watches, too, no doubt.’
Those of the wealthy who could get out before the Free Zone had been occupied had had to leave virtually everything behind. Now most of these places had been taken over by the Occupier and his friends, if in convenient locations and ‘suitable’; if not, they had remained empty. A ready source of fabrics especially for a group of singers to collect when on tour.
The cutting table yielded patterns, fabric shears, scissors, thread, thimbles, needles and detailed sketches of the costumes she was making. There were hundreds of notations with arrows to each seam and tuck. A collection of volumes on Renaissance painting offered ready comparisons.
An order book would hold the dates, customers, projects and fees charged. Alain de Passe would have looked through it but in search of what? he asked himself.
A recent page had been torn out. A fragment remained, and from this, there were two letters in pencil. Ai… Aix? he asked himself. The tour the group were to make? Had Sim
ondi demanded different costumes for every tour? Had the girl written down his needs? Then why tear the page out?
Unfortunately several other pages had been removed and these went right back to the beginning, nearly four years ago. But why hadn’t de Passe simply taken the book and destroyed it? Thérèse Godard would have told them of it, yes, of course, but had it been left as a warning to watch out and tread lightly?
‘Ah merde, Avignon,’ muttered St-Cyr, not liking things at all.
A narrow cabinet held spools of thread, including that of gold and silver. There were buttons, ribbons, bodice laces, boxes of pins, rolls of basting tape, et cetera.
When he went up into the tower, he saw at once that the pomander was a replica of the Palais’s Bell Tower, that it must, indeed, date from the mid-fourteenth century, and he had to ask, How had she come by such a valuable thing?
Her lute was a treasure, too, not nearly so old as to have come from those times, but old and beautifully kept. A relative? he wondered. A legacy?
There were letters that had been written in Latin, in the French of the North, and in the langue d’oc of those days. Treasures, too, and many of them bore the signatures of the de Sinéty family and of another Mireille. Her namesake.
On the table she had used as a desk, there were recipes for beauty oils and creams, and these had been noted down from references no longer in evidence but attributed to this other Mireille.
Stanzas, verses and lines were from poems and madrigals.
My love for my mistress is so gentle,
I serve her so timidly, am so humble,
I do not even tell her of my longing,
Bernard de Ventadour had been among the leading troubadors of the third quarter of the twelfth century. The passage, more of which appeared, was from The Timid Wooing. ‘His style of poetry,’ she had noted, ‘is very firmly elemental and of les provençaux.’
De Ventadour had been a baker’s son who had risen to sing at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. After the age of the troubadors had come that of the motet, and then the madrigal.
A leather-bound volume, the Musica Transalpina, of 1588 and borrowed from whom, he wondered, held a collection of madrigals, written in Italian but with their English translations, too, and many of these pieces had been composed by Luca Marenzio. Unbidden, the face of Christiane Bissert as she had entered the cafe this morning came to him. The Villa Marenzio. I await your questions, she had written, with a heart that is open.
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