Beekeeper
Page 46
‘Like songs, sex and using vans that belong to the Bank of France?’
‘Chez Crusoe, and if you ask me, mein Kammerad der Kriminalpolizei, I think our groundskeeper’s son must have watched a good deal more than those vans.’
They’d have to talk to Albert, have to get him alone and go to work on him, but gently. ‘Merde, we’re going to be run off our feet, Hermann. Is that what Bousquet wants? To keep us so busy we can’t possibly uncover the truth? And Ménétrel … What of the doctor? What, please, was his part in all of this?’
‘That driver of Bousquet’s refused to cough up, Louis. I tried. I used every threat in the book, but our Georges’s mouth has been zipped so tightly, you could put a bullet in his brain and get more.’
‘A cabin,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘A small hotel downriver of it, to which Bousquet’s driver conveniently goes to stay the night.’
‘And a local inn to which some of the girls go after work.’
‘And where one of them meets that same secrétaire général to bum a lift home in the small hours – is that how it really was?’
Kohler opened the other tin only to find an almost identical selection, but here there were also two carefully flattened cigar bands: another Choix Supreme perhaps, and a Romeo y Julieta, both bright red and with gold coins on either side of the brand name.
‘Our nurse must have known Albert, Louis.’
‘She had a private practice. Was he one of her patients?’
‘Was she accustomed to caring for the girls at Camille Lefèbvre’s school?’
‘Where Céline Dupuis may have taught ballet part-time?’
‘A bird lover, Louis. One who wore diamonds she tried her damnedest to hide.’
‘But hadn’t worn the dress, the shoes or this because she couldn’t have had them.’
The beads of a very wealthy flapper.
‘Which, by rights, should have been stolen from her room,’ breathed Kohler. ‘The Hotel d’Allier, mon vieux. I think we’d better hear what our shorthand typist has to say if alive and still at home.’
The Hôtel d’Allier rose up from behind its iron fence, grey and slate-roofed against an even greyer sky. Shutters open, others closed.
In the foyer, a simple bell and desk stood before dark, wooden pigeon-holes with their infrequent messages. Keys absent or left on the run, others long forgotten. Maybe sixty or seventy rooms …
The head-and-shoulders portrait of Pétain in uniform, looking sternly down from the papered wall, was crooked.
‘St-Cyr, Sûreté. Mademoiselle Lucie Trudel, and hurry.’
‘Hurry?’ yelped the ancient concierge, having ducked behind the desk. ‘The police are always in a hurry, no more now than before. Nor have they changed their coats or their politics, only the weight of their truncheons.’ Cloves of garlic spilled from his left hand. ‘My lunch,’ he hissed. ‘There’s no bread.’
‘Kohler, mon fin. Gestapo, Paris-Central.’
‘Concierge Rigaud, it’s a matter of some importance,’ tried Louis.
‘My soup, is that not important? This place. The constant comings and goings and no one signing in or out, eh? What’s it this time? Drugs? Syphilis? Or did she have something worse? Is that why she had to go home? Well, is it?’ he shrilled.
Sacré nom de nom, a tough one! ‘Did she really go home?’ bleated St-Cyr.
‘Three messages now and not collected. Aren’t they evidence enough?’
Rigaud, for all his years and apparent frailty, was fiercely protective of his territory but the snap of Hermann’s fingers broke the air. Swiftly handed over, the slender slips of paper were quickly scanned and pocketed.
‘She was rounded up, wasn’t she?’ rasped the concierge, biting back on his gums, then clucking his tongue for good measure. ‘Grabbed off the street and hustled to the commissariat. Forced to strip for the doctor to have a look and a swab, eh? They’re disgusting, the girls these days. Dropping their underwear whenever they get itchy. No morals. No sense of decency. These old ears of mine don’t want to listen but cry when they hear the goings on!’
Venereal diseases had become so rampant in Paris that the Occupier had insisted the flics routinely round up for medical checks whatever females were available, not just the filles de joie.
‘Yes, yes,’ sighed Louis. ‘The key, monsieur. Room 4-17.’ He pointed to the empty pigeon-hole.
‘She left very early on Saturday and has not returned,’ said Rigaud spitefully.
‘Stay here. If we need you, we’ll get you. Louis, it’s this way. I’m not taking that lift or any other.’
Caught once by the hanging thread of a broken cable, Hermann had a thing about lifts. Old or from the late thirties, repaired and constantly serviced or otherwise, it simply didn’t matter.
‘The exercise will do you good,’ he said, only to gasp in pain on the stairs and grab his left knee. ‘Ach!’ he shrieked. ‘Scheisse!’
He sat down hard. Pain blurred his eyes and twisted the whip scar on his cheek. ‘Go ahead,’ he managed. ‘I’ll join you in a minute. It’s nothing.’
‘Nothing? Remind me to fix that poultice for you tonight.’
‘Who sleeps? Not us. Now beat it. Fourth floor at the back, since Céline’s room in the attic was number 3 and at the front. Oh, here. You’d better take these.’
The messages.
Friday, 29 January
Chérie, je t’aime, toujours je t’aime. You know I want only what is best for you. Paris, chérie. Paris tomorrow. Though we won’t be able to travel together, I promise I’ll be with you when we get there.
It was signed: Ton petit grigou. Your little penny-pincher.
Saturday, 30 January
Lucie, please come back soon. We have to talk. It’s urgent.
Céline
Tuesday, 2 February
Chérie, I needed you. Every day without your warm embrace was a day of constant despair. Paris no longer held its magic and now I find that you went home in spite of our having discussed things and agreed.
This final note was unsigned but was obviously from her penny-pincher. Merde, were they to have yet another killing, wondered St-Cyr, or had it already happened?
As before, the stairs and corridors were narrow and poorly lit. Noises carried. Though most of the rooms would be unoccupied at this time of day, cooking was in progress somewhere, a gramophone was playing – Lucienne Boyer singing ‘Sans Toi’, Without You …
The room was not at the back of the hotel as Hermann had thought, but at the front, though here the blackout curtains were still drawn, the bed mounded with covers. Slacks, a woollen pullover, a blouse, brassiere and underpants lay in a heap beside it. One sock, her shoes, her overcoat, ah Jésus … Jésus … The pale blue glass bottle of water was on the bedside table. Woven wicker where the hands would hold it. The Buvette de Chomel … the Chomel …
Switching on the overhead light, he hesitated, asked silently, Was she smothered – is that how it was done?
The smell … always there was that clinging, throat-clawing sweetness Hermann now found so terrifying.
Flinging back the covers, St-Cyr sucked in a ragged breath and held it, forced himself to look closely as, grey and bloated, cut open, festering and crawling with maggots, five dead rats lay belly up, their entrails trailing.
‘Trapped … They were first trapped,’ he heard himself muttering and wondered where her corpse must be. Her corpse …
‘On Saturday,’ he said, his voice stiff with control, ‘30 January. Almost six days now, but was Bousquet supposed to find these?’ he asked when Hermann hobbled into the room to swear under his breath.
‘Where’s the girl, Louis?’
‘Don’t open that armoire. Let me.’
Dresses had been flung aside, others had fallen from their hangers. A brown velvet hacking jacket, a paisley silk cravat and brown whipcord riding breeches covered her. A slip, a half-slip, then a pair of lace-trimmed underpants, silk and expensive, were hooked over the end
of the riding crop in her hand.
The cheeks were ashen to a contused greyish purple; her eyes were closed, sprays of petechiae dusting the lids, the bridge of her nose and forehead. Effluent and bloodstained oedematous fluid and froth had erupted and then oozed from her nostrils and mouth. There were blotches. The stench was terrible.
‘Smothered,’ he said softly. ‘Held down under a pillow on the bed, Hermann, then carried here while unconscious to be crammed into a corner and finished off, the other sock no doubt jammed into her mouth. She’s lost the child. About three months, I think. Laloux will be more precise. Aborted foetuses are a speciality with him, among other things.’
She had also voided herself.
‘These rats are all males,’ managed Kohler. ‘Why only those, unless they’re the next to get it?’
‘De Fleury, Bousquet, Richard, this one’s “lover”, and Pétain, eh?’ snapped St-Cyr.
‘Mademoiselle Trudel was to have left for Clermont-Ferrand, Louis. There’s a third-class ticket on the floor with her clothes.’
‘Yet she changed her mind.’
‘Was agitated. Didn’t pick up Friday’s message. Went out very early Saturday morning to meet Albert and get that bottle. Forgot her hat and mittens. Must have been freezing, yet walked all the way there and back in the dark.’
‘Then took off her clothes and climbed into bed.’
‘To freeze and wait for her lover?’ hazarded Kohler.
‘Who was to have checked in with her before the couple made their separate ways to catch the train to Paris, or to give her a lift to it, eh?’
‘She’s scribbled two items on a bedside note. A seven with a plus and minus sign and then a half-hour for the train to Clermont Ferrand, and an eight with the same for the early train to Paris, kidding herself that they still run so closely on time.’
‘A grigou.’
‘One of les gars, mon enfant.’ One of the boys.
Buy Flykiller Now!
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2001 by J. Robert Janes
Cover Design by Linda McCarthy
978-1-4532-5187-4
This edition published in 2012 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
THE ST-CYR AND KOHLER SERIES
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of
publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia