Yet their victim had been a perfectionist, a lover of the past, her family once of the lesser nobility.
The items were next to her hairbrush and comb as if, in a final gesture, it had been they to which she had turned before leaving for the Palais. A pair of scissors lay on top of a four-centimetre-long lock of her hair …
‘A label provides the source of the religious bric-a-brac, which has only just recently been purchased from Les Fleurs du Petit Enfant,’ said St-Cyr. ‘It’s on the rue de Mons not far from the Palais and the Cathedral, but what does a shop which sells religious motifs of the worst kind have to do with this?’
Of postcard size, but definitely not a postcard, the black-and-white photographic print was of a young woman’s naked breasts. No shoulders, arms or waist were visible, no name either. Instead, one end of a curl of their owner’s hair had been glued to the lower right corner of the card so that the hair could be fingered while gazing raptly at the breasts.
The card had been hidden behind the backing of a gaudily framed sketch of the Petit Jésus, complete with phosphorescent halo and angels in the sky.
The hair was distinctly reddish, a pronounced strawberry blonde and soft, but with a sheen like burnished copper in strong sunlight. There were scattered freckles on the breasts. The skin was very white – ‘creamy’, a fétichiste de cheveux might have whispered during his orgy of gawking and self-masturbation. The nipples had been stiffened, probably at the photographer’s insistence and simply by their owner having first wetted her fingers. Chorus girls did this as a matter of routine at the Lido and other such places, so much so that in winter they were always bitching about their being chapped.
‘The Silver Swan …’ hazarded Kohler, indicating the post-card.
‘“When death approached unlocked her silent throat,”’ said Louis, comparing the hair with the loose strands Mireille de Sinéty had cut from herself and had left for them or others to find.
‘De Passe must have seen the hair she left but not the photograph, Louis.’
‘But did he leave it for us to find as a warning to us, or not think it important?’
Kohler indicated the card. ‘Is this the reason she was silenced? Is the fétichiste the bishop?’
It had to be faced. ‘He practises flagellation, Hermann. He’s one of the Pénitents Noirs. I’m not sure that such a practice is common to them now, but there was also the enseigne of a martinet on her belt.’
‘And wouldn’t you know it, eh? The sins of the flesh needing to be scourged.’
‘Whoever tidied up after the murder took the time to cut off a lock of our victim’s hair.’
‘To go with a photograph of her breasts – is that it, eh? Is that why she cut this off herself?’
‘Calm down. We must think as she would have had us think.’
‘The Church, you idiot! The préfet and his warning!’
Early in the afternoon long shadows were cast by the Palais, and the town, with its ramparts seen from the tower room, held narrow streets, some of which already appeared as if at dusk, such was the flatness of the sun’s trajectory in winter.
The clouds had vanished; the mistral still blew every bit as fiercely.
‘Monsieur le Préfet said I was to keep silent,’ confessed Thérèse Godard faintly. ‘He told me that if I did not wish to embarrass myself, I should remember that silence protected a girl’s honour.’
The son of a bitch!
‘We’ll protect you,’ said the one called Kohler but she knew this could never be and said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like here! They have their ways. People like me are nothing to them. Nothing, do you understand?’
‘Who do you mean?’ urged St-Cyr.
‘Them! I …’ The girl shrugged and wiped her eyes with her fingertips.
‘Listen to me, mademoiselle …’
‘Go easy, Louis. She’s really upset.’
‘And so will we be, mon ami, if there are more killings!’
‘More killings …?’ shrilled Thérèse. ‘Myself and Sister Marie-Madeleine, perhaps?’
Louis calmed his voice. ‘Please, mademoiselle, you are our closest link. You owe it to her to tell us everything you know of what happened.’
‘So as to empty my head before I am drowned in the river, monsieur? Drowned in an accabussade?’
Ah nom de Dieu, what the hell was this? wondered St-Cyr. Six hundred years ago husbands, masters and fathers could deal with recalcitrant and errant females in their charge by locking them into a wooden cage which was then repeatedly and publicly dunked in the river like a crayfish trap.
‘An accabussade?’ he asked.
‘I … I didn’t mean to say that. It … it was only because of Mireille’s telling me what had happened to the other Mireille, the one she was named after.’
There, she had told them, but they would never understand. How could they?
In a whisper, she said, ‘Sister Marie-Madeleine knows far more about it than I do. She … she came here late on the night before Mireille was murdered. They spoke quietly. I know they must have talked of this other Mireille, of what it must mean, but I … I do not know what they said up here in the tower – how could I? I sleep downstairs under one of the tables. Mireille let me do that. Mireille was my friend, my best friend!’
It was Louis who asked of Xavier. Still choked up, she blurted, ‘Before the sister left, and still well before dawn, he … he brought us things from the farm. He’d been away for the harvest. He always goes home for it. A week, ten days …’ She ran a hand through her hair in anguish and wiped her nose on a sleeve. ‘The bishop … he has to let him. It’s part of the agreement the Church made with Xavier’s father. In return, the monseigneur sends a car to … to collect the olive oil and … and other things.’
‘Verdammt, Louis, that little son of a bitch was here in Avignon before the murder. He’s been here since then and didn’t run away at news of it!’
Thérèse wanted to ask who had lied to him but knew she was too afraid, and to hide her fear, tried to straighten her dress. ‘Mireille was “special” to Xavier. He was always dropping in, often using the excuse of things he and the others had found. Cloth, fabulous dresses, skirts and silk blouses, waistcoats of gold lame, buttons and thread – we had to take these things for the costumes. We had to! This time more food from les Baux, but fish he had caught in the river, hares and rabbits too, sometimes. Once a grive – did you find it, messieurs?’ she asked and hastily wiped her eyes with the hem of her dress.
‘Tell us,’ urged Kohler gently.
He had such nice eyes, this detective, but such terrible scars. ‘Let me go downstairs and get it,’ she said.
Louis nodded and Kohler went with her. The cigar box, one among several that were used to store buttons, held a mummified thrush.
Hastily the girl crossed herself and said, ‘It was shot by the monseigneur. Xavier was positive of this and laughed when he presented it to Mireille last year in late November, but by then it had been dead for about a month. Yes, a month at least.’
Thrushes were tasty, thought St-Cyr. Not gutted, they were hung and allowed to rot and then were roasted on a spit so that the juices from their entrails could rain on to the backs of their fellows. Before the war, those who could hunt them had taken hundreds in a single day’s shooting. The best time was in the autumn and at dawn, just as the birds were feeding and preoccupied. ‘But why would she have wanted this in the first place?’ he asked.
He was genuinely puzzled. Dear God forgive and protect her, then, for telling him. ‘She … she said she had to see what His Eminence could kill with such impunity no remorse was felt, only joy. She …’
They waited for her to continue. Finally the one called Kohler asked, ‘Who accompanies the bishop when he’s out hunting?’
Her heart sank, and she could feel it doing so. ‘The Kommandant, the préfet, Maître Simondi and … and others. The Chief Magistrate. Lots of others, for the bishop and Maître Simondi, they …
they know many important people. All are friends and business associates. Isn’t that the way of things among such people?’
‘What about Xavier?’ asked the one from the Sûreté.
‘Xavier?’ she squeaked. ‘The dogs are in his care. He’s very good with them and … and knows exactly where each one is at … at all times.’
Kohler resisted the temptation to show her the dochette. There’d be time enough to settle that little matter. ‘After Xavier left the house on Monday well before dawn, what did your friend and mistress do?’
There had been two of the hooded, ankle-length cassocks to finish. Hideous things they had hated having to make, but Préfet de Passe had warned her not to mention them …‘She worked all day on her costume. Everything had to be absolutely perfect. Late in the afternoon she must have gone to the bains-douches municipaux, at the other end of the street.’
The public bathhouse. ‘She didn’t practise?’ asked Kohler gently.
‘I … I don’t think so. I was away and didn’t get back from the mas near Saint-Michel-de-Frigolet until well after dark. By then Mireille was … was all but ready.’
‘You went to see her mother?’ asked the one from the Sûreté.
‘Who issued your laissez-passer?’ asked the other one.
The two of them were crowding her again and she wanted to cry out, Please leave before it’s too late for me! She wanted to weep in despair and clench her fists. ‘The Kommandant himself, and yes, I went to see Madame de Sinéty. Mireille … Mireille wanted me to take a letter to a friend.’
‘What friend?’ breathed the Sûreté softly.
They wouldn’t leave things alone now! ‘Dédou Favre, the boy she loved.’
‘And did he love her in return?’ asked the Sûreté.
Would they arrest her for delivering the letter? ‘He doubted her. He always felt she might give him up to … to the authorities.’
‘In order to advance her career?’ asked Kohler. ‘Hey, don’t worry about your having broken the law.’
‘Then yes, but you … you have to know Dédou to understand. He’s terribly afraid of what they’ll do to him if he’s caught. It’s only natural because he’s on the run and in hiding.’ There, she had told them. That, too.
‘And did you deliver this letter to him personally?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘No! I … I couldn’t find him so I left it in the mill, in a special place he would know of. He and Mireille had used it lots of times. The stones … a crack between the stones.’
When the detectives were gone from the house, she went down into the workrooms to search for the hooded shrouds – she could call those hateful things nothing else. They were not grey or black. They were of coarse white woollen cloth and when, at last, she had found them – rolled up with her mattress, her paillasse! – their empty eyesockets stared accusingly up at her, she realizing then that Monsieur le Préfet hadn’t taken them as he should have but had left them here for her as a further warning.
‘La Cagoule,’ she wept and, flinging them from her, stood among the silks and satins, the patterns of the past, with head bowed.
It was Madame Guillaumet, the concierge, who, coming upon her like this and seeing the hooded shrouds on the floor at the girl’s feet, said, ‘Thérèse, what have you to do with those?’
They sat in the Renault, staring bleakly out at the wind-ravaged rue du Rempart du Rhone. Each waited for the other to speak, until Kohler could stand it no longer. ‘La Cagoule, Louis. Two of their outfits were rolled up in that kid’s straw mattress but I didn’t let on I’d found them.’
‘De Passe?’ asked St-Cyr emptily.
‘It has to have been him. No wonder she was afraid.’
‘She spoke of being put into an accabussade …’
‘That little bit of history can’t apply to the present, can it?’
Hermann was really worried, but it had to be said, ‘Our victim must have been aware of those cassocks.’
‘An order, Louis, but it’s not even mentioned in the book she kept to herself.’
‘Ah mon Dieu, Hermann, what had she discovered?’
Unbidden, Kohler hauled out his cigarettes and offered one, only to see Louis shake his head and find pipe and tobacco pouch.
Not until the pipe was going to his satisfaction did the Sûreté say, ‘De Passe agrees to turn aside while Rivaille works on our victim to see if he can’t convince her to betray her boyfriend – let us put it no other way.’
‘The bishop lends her things and sends the sisters to watch over her corpse in an attempt to retrieve at least two of the items before we take too great an interest in them.’
‘A ruby ring,’ said Louis, ‘and a pendant box. One of the thorns supposedly from Christ’s crown.’
‘The elder of the nuns succeeds with the ring, but not with the box. The younger one is marked down by her as knowing too much.’
‘That sister was a close friend of our victim. They spoke in private on the night before the murder.’
‘Did Sister Agnès realize this at the morgue, Louis?’
‘I’m certain of it, but … ah merde alors, we must think as Mademoiselle de Sinéty would have had us think!’
‘Then start by telling me are you certain it was the bishop himself who loaned her all those trinkets?’
‘Simondi?’
‘We’ll have to ask him.’
‘But must proceed carefully, since the Cagoule may well be involved,’ mused St-Cyr.
‘Both Rivaille and de Passe are members of the Black Penitents.’
‘Our singing master may also be one of them.’
‘But is Simondi the leader of the local Cagoule, Louis? Is de Passe or Bishop Rivaille?’
The Hooded Ones. The action squads of the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire, a fanatical far-right political organization of the 1930s that had dedicated itself to the overthrow of the Third Republic by any means. In Nice, in 1938, cagoulards had murdered the Rosselli brothers, two prominent anti-fascists Mussolini had wanted eliminated.
In return for the favour, a substantial shipment of small arms had crossed into France from Italy only to be intercepted by agents of the Deuxième Bureau.
The leaders of the CSAR had been arrested. They’d been brought to trial in July of ’38 but the war had soon intervened.
‘End of story,’ said Kohler, picking up the thread of Louis’s thoughts, ‘but sadly not so, eh?’
‘No, not.’
On the night of 2/3 October 1941, perhaps as Bishop Rivaille was looking forward to a morning’s shooting courtesy of the Kommandant’s ignoring the ordinance against hunting and possessing guns of any kind, cagoulards in Paris had dynamited seven synagogues in a show of solidarity with Nazi policies against the Jews.
‘And now?’ asked Louis, lost to it and still staring at the street. ‘Now Ovid Peretti has twice made a point of warning me to watch our backs, and the bishop dreams of returning the Papacy to Avignon.’
‘It all has to mean she was killed because she damn well knew too much,’ swore Kohler.
‘But what, Hermann? That is the question.’
They began to look through the order books, comparing the one she had kept privately with that from which de Passe had torn so many pages. ‘All references to Simondi’s post-dated cheques have been removed,’ said Louis. ‘Some of these have even put payment off by as much as six months and yet all are for the most insignificant of sums.’
‘Overextended, is he?’ snorted Kohler. ‘He owns several cinemas and theatres but loves music more than money, or so von Mahler took pains to claim.’
‘But is Simondi alone in owning them or merely the front man?’
In several places where the pages had been removed, the complete copy revealed she had used alchemical glyphs for the signs of the zodiac as a shorthand for the names of her customers and had paired these with measurements and other notations for each costume. Where more than one customer had been born under the same sign, sh
e had used a vertical line, placed on one side of the glyph or on the other, to distinguish them. ‘But again, Hermann, why would the préfet remove such pages unless he had been warned by Bishop Rivaille that she had left the riddle of it all on her belt?’
A rebus … the talismans, enseignes and cabochons, the signs of the zodiac themselves …‘Salvatore Biron is adamant there wasn’t an audition, Louis, but there was one. He was delayed and claims to have come upon the body seconds after the killing, only to hear a sigh that clearly couldn’t have been hers.’
‘But was it the killer’s or that of someone else – a witness perhaps?’
‘And why didn’t he run into whoever had tidied up?’
‘A lock of her hair was cut off and that would have taken time …’
‘And now we have similar locks from her dressing table and from a strawberry blonde, and this last is glued to a photo.’
‘Mireille de Sinéty wears ancient keys that can’t have been of any use to her, Hermann. She takes rooms in the ancestral home, gathers artefacts from the same, clasps a pomander that is as old as the Palais and modelled after its Bell Tower.’
‘Has a namesake from those times.’
‘Has recipes and letters that can be attributed to this other Mireille. Merde, mon vieux, why can I not recall more of the very early Renaissance? Did my professors at the lycée freeze their minds into accepting rigid dates – Early, Middle and Late, and never mind that such dates are normally far from perfect, and that the Renaissance began much earlier here and in Italy?’
‘But we have her record book, Louis, and we now know how she used the glyphs. Hey, that’s progress. Cheer up.’
‘We still don’t know which glyph represents which name.’
‘Was Dédou the Archer?’ asked Kohler.
‘Was the bishop the Goat, the Scorpion or the Cancer?’
‘Xavier must have tidied up, Louis. I’m certain of it.’
One of the bishop’s hounds had been with the boy and must have come into the Palais with him, said St-Cyr to himself. She had known the dog and had removed its little bell so as to prevent its sound from giving away her position, but had broken a fingernail in the process …
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