‘A selflessness unknown to most, especially at a time like this, when everyone’s killing everyone.’
And a warm brother? Hermann had asked the new Kommandant who had answered, “That is putting it politely.”
Having been a prisoner of war, Kohler was impressed. Madame Chevreul didn’t live in just one room but in a third-storey suite that, beyond the floor-to-ceiling drapes, must overlook the Parc Thermal from the Hôtel Grand’s western corner. Léa Monnier guarded the entrance, but so too did the cook and the maid who also occupied that first room, Madame the third and most spacious, and with a reception room between and another beyond, this last door being closed. And locked? he had to wonder, ignoring her and going over to try it. Locked tight, all right, but probably only because she had the present company.
Under blankets and a coverlet most would have sold their souls for, she was propped up with feather pillows in a four-poster that must have cost a fortune. The powder-blue dressing gown had been newly laundered, pressed, and thoroughly dried, a miracle in itself. The fair, shoulder-length hair had been brushed to a sheen by the maid. Pensively the dark-blue eyes took him in with a mixture of disdain and indignation.
‘Really, Herr Kohler, I must object. Such impertinence at such an unmentionable hour does not become you, nor the cause you pursue. I never rise before ten. To do so would be uncivilized.’
‘Detectives have to get up earlier.’
Was the belligerence deliberate? she wondered. He had had to wait a good twenty minutes and now stood impatiently on the carpet before her and not a centimetre closer to the foot of the bed than the two metres Léa had insisted on.
‘To what do I owe this visit? A few small questions, is it? Nothing difficult, or have you a better line of balderdash than that partner of yours?’
‘Louis hasn’t been here, has he?’
Ah, mon Dieu, she had caught him out. ‘Moves quickly, does he, your partner? Oh, please don’t look so unsettled, you foolish, foolish man. He hasn’t. News simply travels, but I do expect a visit from him, though at a more civilized hour. It would be unseemly of either of you to ignore me. Rumour is rife enough as it is. Will you take tea?
‘Léa. . . Léa, dearest, would you oblige?
‘Sugar, Inspector? Milk, is it?’
‘Black is fine.’
And still impatient. ‘Sit over there in my chaise longue where I can see you. Were there daylight, a little sun, though fledgling at this time of year, might have warmed you further than the fires in my stoves. I’ve three of those. Smoke if you wish. You’ll find cigarettes in my case on the dressing table. I don’t indulge until noon. It’s best to build up one’s ability to resist temptation, I think.’
He ignored the put-down and immediately found her cigarette case. Anxiously lighting one, he let her see him in the table’s mirrors, but didn’t turn to face her. Instead, he ran that gaze of his over everything, knowing that his looking so closely was bound to unsettle her.
‘They’ve said things, haven’t they, some of those in the dining room?’ she asked, a modest quaver betraying her feelings.
Still he didn’t answer, and neither did he turn to face her. ‘Art Deco silver frames, you ask of the photos, Inspector? Childhood friends—sisters, even? An estate in Kent, perhaps? A millpond where three young women, each with all the joys and sorrows of their tender lives still ahead of them, are in a rowboat, me at the tiller, age twenty-three, if you must know. Rebecca Thompson is in the bow and dangles fingers into the water looking as if she wants to strip off all the finery society insists on and take the plunge. Judith Merrill is at the oars and about to do just that. Guests. . . were they guests of mine, you wonder, or was I the guest? How deep is a past you cannot yet know nor ever fathom?’
Her voice had risen to an edge that, ignoring her further, would only sharpen. The cigarette case was, of course, from Van Cleef & Arpels, the jewellery the same as Louis and he had noticed Léa Monnier wearing when at the head of that mob in the foyer of the Vittel-Palace late the day before, but had Madame known her henchwoman had borrowed it, and why leave it lying about like this when they both knew things were being stolen?
The tea was brought in a willow-ware cup and saucer, Herr Kohler giving Léa the coldness of a once-over.
‘What mob?’ he asked her.
‘Tut-tut, Inspector. Léa is to leave us now. Ours is to be an interview in the privacy of my room. Having insisted upon it, I think it best you deal only with me for the moment.
‘Léa, dearest, I’ll ring when I’ve finished with him.’
There wasn’t a speck of jewellery on Léa Monnier, the grey house dress similar to that of a Blitzmädel but without the flashes. Retreating, she shut them in.
‘The Old Bailey?’ asked Herr Kohler, cigarette in hand and cup and saucer clumsily balanced. Unfortunately he would pursue his questions as a dog does buried bones. In this he was no different from St-Cyr except, perhaps, for the degree and manner of persistence. ‘The Old Bailey, you ask? Léa chose duty to king and country over prison, that is true. Léa Easton then, Inspector. Abused as a child—taught the harsh lessons of a male-dominated world at a very early age, I suspect, though would never ask. Couldn’t even vote, though too young at the time, and of course women didn’t have the vote anyway. Arrested due entirely to a mistake, she having become caught up in some street demonstration and carried along into the truncheons of a battalion of mounted police. She had, I believe, chosen a most unfortunate moment to go on an errand for the mistress of the house in which she was employed as kitchen help, hence her arrest—was this what they told you, those who would whisper vindictiveness out of envy?’
He didn’t answer, knowing this would only upset her all the more, but waited, his tea still untouched. Datura . . . Was it that he actually thought Léa had those missing seeds and would poison him here?
‘Léa does have her enemies, Inspector, and they, poor souls, will say the most uninformed of things.’
Cigarette ash was tapped into his saucer—would he drown the butt in the tea or pinch it out and put it away in the little tin most carried whether they used tobacco or not?
He would drown it, she thought, and leave it for Léa to find, but was there not something to overcome the impasse between them? ‘Life hasn’t been easy here, Inspector. I do miss my lovely home and the Percherons we bred. They’re the most noble of creatures. Do you know of them? You must. There are pictures on my bureau. Please look at them. I’ve no secrets.’
Ach, and get the hell away from her dressing table, was that it?
‘My husband loved the breed and knew our stables so well he could walk there unaided. Understandably he was very distressed by all we had had to let go to the war—we only had two mares and one stallion left by 1919. Gun carriages and supply wagons took the others instead of the plow and cart. Isn’t it a downright disgrace the idiocy you men will get up to? Come, come, you knew that war. Fighting over virtually nothing? Killing? Destroying so much? Had even one woman had the vote, none of it would have happened. No sons would have been lost, not the millions and millions; no lovers, either, or our beautiful Percherons.’
Votes for women, and how the hell did she know he must have experienced that other war? Kessler, the former Kommandant, was that it? A last parting word from him, or Weber but the information via Berlin?
The stallions in the photos were magnificent dappled greys, the mares too, and of at least seventeen hands. Big, heavy, strong, docile, and intelligent, the ploughman’s constant friend, the artilleryman’s Kamerad. ‘I knew them on the farm and at the front. None are better.’
But did he think it a matter of mere coincidence or divine predestination that he might well, as an artillery officer in that other war, have used Percherons from the Château de Mon Plaisir? ‘When this war is over, Inspector, you must pay me a visit. Indeed, I insist.’
‘I’d have to bring Louis.’
Ah, merde, he had gone right back to the dressing table but what,
please, was he searching for? Intimacy? Understanding? Doubt still crowding all else? ‘Is it all a con, Inspector? Is that what you’re still thinking?’
The hairbrush, mirror, and powder case were of enamelled silver and decorated with naked goddesses—Cérès among them? he must wonder.
The accessories were of Baccarat. Perfume in one crystal phial, oil in another, the portrait photo of Rebecca Thompson—that of a slim, dark-eyed beauty also of twenty-three and looking defiantly into the lens as she stood straight, though turned all but sideways to the viewer, hands folded demurely in front and below the waist, eye shadow deepening the depth of her look. A woman with a mind of her own, Inspector? Is that what you’re thinking, or simply, as most men would, are you wondering what it would be like to have sexual intercourse with her? The fucking, I think you would call it.
The empty perfume bottle in Caroline Lacy’s pocket had been by Guerlain, remembered Kohler, a 1925 Exposition presentation, Baccarat having made the bottle in an Art Deco style, and much favoured by this one, but he’d leave it until Louis and he had had a chance to talk things over. Judith Merrill, in the other portrait photo, was the oldest and maybe six years senior. ‘Élizabeth what?’ he asked of her own maiden name, not turning.
Unfortunately such things couldn’t be avoided. ‘Chevreul née Beacham. Inspector, those photographs are from a long time ago and have no bearing whatsoever on the tragedies here. They are but fond memories of a past I still treasure.’
But there were none of her family and only two of the husband—one as a boy of eighteen driving a piebald mare and cart, and the other as the blind French soldier he had become. ‘Did you spend time in the Old Bailey yourself?’
He was watching her too closely in the mirrors, but had he seen her tremble? ‘Was that what they whispered? Well, was it?’
He nodded. Without asking permission, he helped himself to another of her cigarettes. ‘And from truck driver to ambulance driver, for Léa was but a step?’ he asked, waving out the match and leaving it on her dressing table.
In another day, at another time, she would have turned her back on him! ‘Léa and I met time and again throughout that war, Inspector, for she tirelessly brought wounded to the various stations where I was on duty, including the ward where in July of 1916 I first met my André. War smashes social conventions, isn’t that so? War collapses time and brings the distant into instant contact with the result that associations unheard of before suddenly become the norm.’
‘And then?’ he asked, still unwilling to leave the matter.
‘An exploding artillery shell destroyed her ambulance, killing all five of the wounded and the orderly she had in the back. Sent to Paris to recover in the early autumn of 1917, she met Claude Monnier at one of the canteens. Abruptly we lost contact but war came again in 1939 and. . . ’
Had he anticipated this too? ‘We didn’t meet until 3 December, 1940, when we were rounded up and sent first to Besançon. Terrible. . . the conditions there were shameful. Léa. . . Léa looked after me when I came down with flu and then pneumonia. I “owe” her, Inspector, as our boys used to say of one another—yourselves, too, I suspect.’
He still hadn’t touched his tea but had set it on her dressing table. ‘Madame de Vernon?’ he suddenly asked.
Was this safer ground or a minefield? ‘Irène de Vernon soon discovered that Caroline Lacy and Jennifer Hamilton wanted to become sitters. She wouldn’t reveal why she objected so vehemently. Caroline didn’t understand her, she said, and was being wayward. I was to refuse all further approaches. At first an offer of payment in postdated cheques was made—forged, I concluded, on Mademoiselle Lacy’s account at the Morgan Bank in Paris. When I refused, as I should have, she then threatened me. Violent. . . Ah, mon Dieu, even Léa was afraid of what that woman might do.’
‘And must have, is that it?’
‘Inspector, please!’
‘Yet you finally agreed to let Caroline become a sitter.’
‘Only if Jennifer Hamilton would wait outside the Pavillon de Cérès to accompany the girl safely back to her room, if such an exception to the curfew could have been made. If not, they would have had to stay the rest of the night, which would have been fine by them. They were lovers, Inspector. Everyone knew it, for they hid nothing. Their love was pure, but Madame de Vernon spat on it and hated that Hamilton girl.’
‘Lovers. . . Why didn’t you inform my partner and me of this when we first spoke?’
‘I. . . I didn’t think it appropriate—polite, damn you!’
‘And earlier, when asked what Caroline was to have brought along, you told my partner that it was only what that girl desperately wanted to know.’
Men. . . Why must they be such irritating pigs! ‘The wording of our invitations is always couched in ambiguity, but I’m sure that partner of yours will have discovered what it was the girl was to have brought. A photo of Madame’s former villa in Provence. Caroline Lacy wanted me to ask Cérès to contact Monsieur de Vernon. She was determined to find out what had really happened to him. Madame had been left a widow but the leaving needed explanation. I agreed, finally, to take the girl as a sitter but, of course, that became impossible, last night’s séance having been held without her.’
And we’ll never know the answer, was that it, wondered Kohler, or was Madame de Vernon now to be blackmailed with it and the murder? ‘Things have been stolen. Did you suspect either Caroline Lacy or Jennifer Hamilton? They were here often enough—seven times, I understand.’
One would have to try. ‘But not here, Inspector. In there,’ she said, pointing to the room whose door he knew was locked. ‘Neither would have had an opportunity, since there is an entrance off the corridor. Léa showed them in. I came through from here. They held hands as they sat before me on the divan. Always the hands. Caroline needed constant reassurance; Jennifer perhaps just as much, for she’s a strange one. Outwardly very confident, then suddenly inward and introverted.’
‘And with Nora Arnarson?’
‘The mistake I made was to let that girl accompany Mary-Lynn Allan. With Caroline, I decided once was enough. Belief is in the believer, not in the skeptic.’
‘Vocal was she, our Nora?’
‘Very.’
‘And was this Jennifer Hamilton also a skeptic?’
‘Again I must ask, is it that you think it all a con, or am I truly opening doors for those who seek a peace of mind and happiness far beyond anything they’ve known? Yours is not just an inquiry into two unfortunate deaths. Whether you wish it or not, my very being as a medium has been put on trial. All are watching and waiting for the outcome.’
‘What did you really lose?’
‘My talisman—is this what they whispered, those dreadful harpies who gossip at every opportunity? What I lost was an empty perfume bottle of no consequence. A piece of trash, nothing else.’
‘Describe it for me.’
‘I have already forgotten any details of it. You’ve recently lost two sons in the Battle for Stalingrad. If you would like to become a sitter, I could ask Cérès to contact them.’
‘If that was an offer of peace, forget it. I haven’t anything tangible of them, not even a photo. Nothing.’
‘But yourself. Cérès will understand and accept.’
‘And my aura?’ he asked.
How dare he? ‘Mary-Lynn’s was vibrant. Electrified by danger. Yours. . . well, if you must know, is even more vibrant and not unlike that of the aurora borealis at its greatest excitation.’
‘Good, then tell me, what’s in that other room?’
The bell was rung, Léa entering to clear away as the cook brought in Madame’s soft-boiled egg, toast made from white bread, and a conserve, the maid her café au lait. Somehow Louis and he were going to have to turn this house of dreams inside out. And yes, he had just heard another bell ring, if only for tea.
Though the darkness still intruded, St-Cyr could see that the forehead was high and broad, the hairline well rec
eded, the goatee a prominent ear-to-ear fringe that set off what might have been a wrestler’s build, but apart from the smells of various herbs, the cowshed and all, eau de cologne wafted pungently. Startled by it, he had to wonder if Brother Étienne had deliberately drenched the cloak or if it was but the norm.
‘Chief Inspector,’ came the booming from the depths, ‘how good of you to come out to meet me. An extra pair of hands, is it? Ah, bon, take these and I will get my box.’
The burlap sacks were thrust into the sûreté’s hands and weighed far more than thought, the patois that of the Vosges.
‘Indoors, Inspector. Vite, vite. We mustn’t let you catch cold. I’ve enough to treat as it is.’
Was concern to be masked by bluster and humour, or were these but a defence behind which to hide nervousness?
The snow was brushed off, the heavy homespun cloak unhooked, the shout he gave echoing up from the foyer to staircases and railings that were crowded.
‘Mes chères amies, your melancholy is with me. Our Caroline? Give me but a moment with the chief inspector and I am totally yours until noon.
‘It is this way, Inspector. The consulting room I never use except to leave my things. Merde, what a trip. Ice on the road, my Angèle slipping so many times I had to lead that wonderful creature down the hills at the pace of the snail. A Percheron. One of Madame Chevreul’s, we are certain. Absolument.’
The door was closed.
‘Now, what can this humble servant do for you? A few small questions—Ah, oui, oui, I think that you have those. Begin please.’
The cloak was thrown off, the soutane just as heavy, of a dark-brown homespun, its many pockets bulging but having far fewer of the odours, especially that of the cologne.
The overboots, high and enviously dry and warm, were unlaced and removed, the big toes wiggled beneath heavy woollen socks.
‘I make this trip as often as possible but believe Untersturmführer Weber is determined to put an end to my visits, hence my having come today and brought more than usual.’
Bellringer Page 14