And they had another murder to attend to. Never time to live a normal life but then … why, then, she told herself, things were just not normal anyway.
‘Take care,’ she whispered and quickly squeezed his hand.
People didn’t hear Hermann when he didn’t want them to. He left the house as silently as he had come and she knew then that he hadn’t wanted to awaken Giselle, but had wanted to be alone with her.
‘He’s worried,’ she said softly. ‘Intuitively he knows there can only be trouble with this murder.’
Taking a spoon, she dug it into the pail of wax to taste the honey, to hold it in her mouth and cry.
‘Louis, the Milice were after Oona.’
‘When?’ Oona’s papers weren’t good. ‘Well, when?’ demanded St-Cyr. ‘Please don’t spare me.’
‘While we were on the train between Lyon and here.’
That explosion? wondered St-Cyr, alarmed. These days such things could well be the work of others but attributed to the Résistance so as to hide the fact. That way the SS, the Gestapo and their associates could settle nuisances such as honest, hardworking detectives, without being blamed.
These days, too, things were very complicated. The Milice were Vichy’s newest police force – paramilitary but yet to receive their weapons, since Vichy had none to give and no such authority. Primarily their duties were to give the appearance of the government’s actively suppressing the black market. They were also to search out and arrest evaders of the forced labour draft, the hated Service du Travail Obligatoire and two or even three years of indenture in the Reich. But they had still other unspecified duties and powers of arrest and interrogation that suggested a branch of the SS.
‘They couldn’t have heard of what happened in Avignon, not yet,’ muttered Kohler, trying to light a cigarette but suddenly finding his fingers too cold.
As in Avignon, so, too, in Fontainebleau Forest and with other crimes, the finger of truth had been pointed by them and not appreciated. And, yes, Hermann wore the scars of such honesty. But in Avignon there had been the Cagoule, the action squad of a fanatical far-right political organization of the 1930s, the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire.
That organization had been dedicated to the overthrow of the Third Republic by any means. Murder, arson … the dynamiting, on the night of 2 October 1941, of six synagogues in Paris in a show of mutual support for the Nazis, but were they now free to do as they pleased with a certain two detectives?
‘In revenge for what happened in Avignon,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Word could so easily have rushed on ahead of us.’
‘Then was Oona stopped in the street as a threat to us to leave things alone or else taste what’s to come?’
Hermann was thinking of von Schaumburg’s warning. He was letting his thoughts run through the many twisted threads of the tapestry Paris and the country had become under the Occupation. Each thread was so often knotted to another it could and did, when yanked, yank on still other threads and on their guts.
‘All things are possible, Louis. That’s what worries me.’
The Milice were not the Cagoule, but those same political leanings, those same sympathies were shared. And Boemelburg, as Head of the Gestapo in France, was one of the major thread-pullers and could well have given the Milice a little tug just to warn Hermann and himself to behave.
And yes, of course, one of the first things the SS and the Gestapo had done after the Defeat was to empty the jails of their most hardened criminals and put those types to work for them.
‘Fighting common crime brings no pleasure these days,’ sighed St-Cyr. ‘Let’s go and have a talk with our beekeeper. Maybe he can shed a little light on things.’
Louis always ‘talked’ to the victims, no matter how grisly the murder.
Under the blue light from Hermann’s torch, the tiny bodies were seen to be scattered everywhere in the snow. All were frozen and curled up. No longer did the cluster of each hive, that winter ball of ten thousand or so bees, shake their wings and jerk their bodies to keep the queen and themselves warm. No longer did each cluster move slowly about the frames feeding on the honey they had stored for the winter and the beekeeper, being wise and kind, had left for their wellbeing. Someone had broken into each of the hives – all thirty of them – and had stolen a good deal of what remained of the winter stores.
‘About twenty kilos to the hive at the start of each winter, in eight or ten frames,’ said Kohler. ‘Jésus, merde alors,. Louis, whoever did it had no thought for tomorrow.’
‘Just as in Peyrane, eh?’
‘Not quite. Here they left the cluster. In Peyrane they took it and squashed it along with everything else.’
The apiary was in one of those surprising little oases of nature that were often found in Paris: a field of a few hectares that was surrounded, St-Cyr knew, by a high stone wall. Cut off, isolated and quiet, it was right on top of one of the city’s smaller reservoirs and not a stone’s throw from the Père Lachaise.
‘At five degrees of frost the poor little buggers didn’t have a chance, Louis. Ten thousand times thirty equals three hundred thousand little murders.’
Using the wooden-handled pocket-knife the Kaiser had given him and countless others in the spring of 1914, Kohler scraped away the worker bees, stabbed at a large fat one in the centre of the cluster and said, ‘That little darling was their queen. Not a virgin, not this one. Two years old, I’ll bet, since that’s the most productive age to successfully overwinter a hive. They’re Italians, by the way. Banded yellow over the abdomen and with hairs that are fawn-coloured. Gentle, too, and prolific breeders just like their namesakes.’
‘I never knew you were so well versed about bees.’
‘There’s plenty you don’t know! This cluster had lots of honey and pollen to feed on.’
He pointed cells out, pricking some and scraping the wax cappings away. A maze of cells, a warren of them.
Indicating a poorly defined thumbprint, he said, ‘Whoever robbed the hives wore gloves and was afraid of bees. They could so easily have scraped the cluster away and taken everything.’
Instead, they had left perhaps a good three kilos of honey in each hive.
Kohler switched off his torch and for a moment the star-filled sky came down to them, the air cold and clear. No hint of smoke or car exhaust in a city of nearly two and a half million. Paris had the most fantastically clear sunrises and sunsets these days, the most beautiful views over its pewter and copper-green roofs.
In ’39 there had been 350,000 private automobiles and traffic jams like no others; in July of 1940 there had been, and now were, no more than 4,500 cars and most of those were driven by the Occupier. Sixty thousand cubic metres of gasoline had been required per month before the Defeat; now all that was allowed was 650 cubic metres. Thirteen hundred of the city’s buses had disappeared from the streets and virtually all of the lorries.
Now the city ran on bicycles or on two feet, and when it shut down like this at midnight, it didn’t open up again until 5 a.m. Berlin Time, 4 a.m. the old time in winter and hell for those who had to get up and go to work.
‘So when were the hives robbed and by whom, Chief?’
Hermann was below him in rank. Sometimes he would use this accolade to prod his partner; sometimes, when others were present, to let them know he was subordinate to a Frenchman.
‘Footprints,’ sighed St-Cyr.
‘I was wondering if you’d noticed them. The préfet’s boys and those of the commissariat on the rue des Orteaux, which isn’t far, is it, but did they have to trample everything and visit every hive?’
‘A woman, I think.’
‘Madame de Bonnevies?’
‘Or another, but the matter can be left for now. Why not go and have a talk with the grieving widow? Let me take care of the rest.’
The corpse. ‘Are you sure?’
Having seen too much of it, Hermann hated the sight of death. ‘Positive. Fortunately the study is separa
ted from the rest of the house and this kept the fumes from it, but it’s interesting, is it not, that the woman didn’t spend much time in there after she discovered what had happened? We could so easily have had two corpses on our hands. Use the front entrance; leave me to go in by the back. I want time alone and undisturbed with him, Hermann. I need to think and want Madame out of the way and distracted.’
‘And the daughter?’
‘It would be best if she were to come upon us by surprise, but then these days anything is possible, and a daughter who is absent without a laissez-passer and a sauf-conduit will have to be questioned about what she missed.’
About the missing permit and safe-conduct pass or the murder? wondered Kohler but let him have the last word, for Louis was in his element.
‘Madame …’ hazarded Kohler on entering the salon.
The woman didn’t look up or turn from the stone-cold hearth. ‘Oui. What is it, Inspector?’
‘A few small questions. Nothing difficult.’
His voice was gentle but this grated on her nerves, though she told herself he was only trying to be kind. She heard him sit in one of the other armchairs, knew he would have noticed there wasn’t a speck of dust in the room and that she must have an obsession about cleanliness. Would he smell the eau de Javel, she wondered, or just the lavender water she used when wiping down afterwards?
The Javel, she said to herself. He has the sound and manner of it.
‘Your husband, madame. I gather he spent all his time with his bees.’
And didn’t go out to work like normal husbands with responsibilities? ‘Ours was old money, Inspector. My money.’
Under Napoleonic Law a husband had control of his wife’s money and property and could do as he pleased, even to gambling the lot away.
Kohler found his cigarettes and offered one, only to see her vehemently shake her head and hear her saying, ‘I haven’t since the Defeat. Women aren’t allowed a tobacco ration, isn’t that so? He … my husband refused to share even his cigarette butts and delighted in my anguish as he lit up.’
‘I take it, then, that you weren’t getting on?’
‘Not getting on? We hardly spoke.’
‘Then is there anything you can tell me that might help us?’
She pulled the bulky white dressing gown more tightly about herself and thrust her hands deeply into its pockets, still hadn’t looked at him. A woman with very dark brown, almost black hair, cut short, kept straight, and worn with a bit of a fringe whose carelessness suggested an irritable, hasty brush with a hand.
‘He wouldn’t have taken that stuff by mistake, Inspector, not of his own accord.’
In tears, she faced him now, was angry and afraid and didn’t really know what to make of things, thought Kohler. Was still in shock, was very much the Parisienne, but not of the quartier Charonne. Definitely of the Sorbonne and probably of the quartier Palais-Royal or some other up-market district. Of medium height and slender—weren’t so many women slender these days? – she had a sharply defined face with high and prominent cheekbones, skin that was very fair, a jutting defiant chin, dark brown eyes, good brows, lips, a nice nose, nice ears, throat and all the rest probably.
The hair was thick, and as he looked her over and she fought to return his scrutiny, her right hand nervously tried to brush the fringe from her brow.
‘Your daughter, madame …’
‘Danielle, yes. Something … something must have happened to her. The Gestapo, the Service d’Ordre …’
The Vichy goons, the Milice.
‘A control … Was she stopped and taken into custody, Inspector, or did they just “requisition” her bicycle again and force her to walk home?’
Hastily she wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand and snapped, ‘Well?’
The daughter, like so many these days, had gone out into the countryside to search for food, but that had been on Thursday, well before dawn, well before the murder. ‘Look, we don’t know yet what, if anything, has happened to her. We’ll find out. Don’t worry, please. She’s probably okay.’
The Inspector had been writing notes in his little black book. A big man, broad shouldered and comfortable with himself even though there was a savage scar down his left cheek; others, too …
When he didn’t look up at her but let her continue to look at him, she told herself he could know nothing and she was not to worry.
It was small comfort. And what about Danielle? she demanded of herself while waiting for his questions. Danielle who had never been the first-born, always the second and had therefore become so defiantly independent and competent. But … but these days, even those qualities could go against a person if arrested.
‘The timing, madame?’ he said, and she realized he was using the notebook to avoid looking at her so as to gain her confidence.
‘Last night … Well, Thursday night, at … at about ten o’clock the new time. Berlin Time. My husband … he hadn’t left that study of his, that “laboratory” as he loved to call it. When I went to knock on the door, he … he didn’t answer.’
‘And the door?’
‘Was locked as usual. Mon Dieu, he could have been up to anything in there and I’d not have known, but always with him it was his bees.’
‘You went in by the garden?’
‘I went outside, yes, and around to that field.’
‘You took the footpath that leads down from the cul-de-sac, the impasse, here to the gate that’s off the rue des Pyrénées?’
‘Yes. From there a lane leads to it.’
‘The apiary your husband leases from the city?’
‘Yes! And … and then I came in through the garden.’
‘The gate to that field’s kept locked but you’ve got a key?’
‘No I don’t have. It … it wasn’t locked, nor was the one to the garden.’
‘Could anyone else have come in that way?’
‘The thief, the destroyer of the hives?’
‘You noticed in passing that they’d been robbed?’
‘Not then, no, but …’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t really know when that happened. Yesterday – on Friday, probably, and after … after one of the neighbours had discovered he’d been murdered and would no longer have need of the hives.’
Kohler scribbled: Hives not robbed night of murder but next day (?) Neighbours a problem. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked, not looking up.
‘Whoever delivered that little gift he drank from, the seller of it perhaps? Yes!’
‘Do you mean your husband left those two gates unlocked because he was expecting someone?’
‘I … I don’t know. How could I have?’
‘Okay, okay, calm down. So you found a brick in the garden and broke a pane of glass in one of the doors.’
‘I had to. He … he did not answer me.’
‘And you found him lying on the floor, dead?’
‘Merde alors, must I shout the obvious to you? The fumes alone were enough!’ she shrilled and gripped her head in anguish, shut her eyes and wept – let him see her like this. Ashamed, terrified, completely exposed and totally unable to control herself.
Kohler lit a cigarette and forced it between her trembling lips. ‘Merci,’ she gasped and inhaled deeply. Calmed a little, she tossed her head back, but gave him a hard look to warn him off, thinking he was getting too close. Still fighting for control, she turned her back on him.
‘I choked. I ran back outside and tried to think. He … he hadn’t been dead for long, Inspector, because we’d spoken through that damned door of his at about seven thirty, or was it eight thirty? I … I can’t remember. I’m so confused. Eight thirty … yes, it was eight thirty. He hadn’t wanted to eat what little I had prepared. Soup … endless days of soup. A few cooked carrots. A little endive … No wine. We’d run out and you can’t buy any, can you? Not here. Not in Charonne anyway, and one must shop at those places where one is known, isn’t that so?’
Everyone was bitching about
the shopkeepers, many of whom abused their positions and lorded it over their customers, selling a little to their favourites and nothing to the rest.
Kohler told her to sit down.
‘And freeze?’ she snapped. ‘Forgive me. I’m … I’m just not myself,’ but thought he would only wonder if this really was herself. Shattered and unable to think, and so afraid.
Instinctively the woman’s fingers sought the gilt-bronze sculpture of a naked young man which stood, perhaps some thirty centimetres high, on a glass and bronze table in front of the fireplace. There was a vase of long-stemmed red silk roses beside it and, as he watched, she fingered the sculpture’s shoulders, arms and thighs, couldn’t seem to stop herself and trembled at the touch.
Complete in every detail, handsome and virile, the sculpture was one of a pair but its mate, a girl of fifteen or sixteen, stood not on the table but up above it and dead centre on the white mantelpiece of fluted wood, and before its mirror. The girl’s right foot was down a step from the other foot on her pedestal, her torso turned towards the viewer, her head away and to the right.
Tiny acanthus leaves made a delicate tracery of chained ovals on the flat frame of the mirror that was as wide as the mantel. Two life-sized white marble faces, those of a boy and a girl, flanked the statue, looking out into the room.
‘My son … our son, did these,’ she said as if afraid of sounding foolish. ‘Étienne … Étienne is in one of your prisoner-of-war camps.’
Along with one and a half million other Frenchmen, but they aren’t my camps, thought Kohler and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry to hear that. You obviously need him with you.’
‘I’ve always “needed” him, Inspector. Always.’
But not the daughter? Then why put her sculpture up there front and centre and with her gorgeous backside reflected in the mirror? The father? he asked himself. Had de Bonnevies insisted on her placing it there?
The chairs, the sofa and chaise all matched the mantelpiece with white and fluted wooden frames and the clean, sharp lines of the late 1920s. Moderne, then, or post-moderne, and all covered in a cocoa-brown fabric that was almost silvery in the lamplight. Italian silk velvet, he told himself, and very expensive even then. Had the furniture been a wedding gift from her father, he wondered and thought it probable.
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