Son of a bitch, he had the answer! Not the murderer or murderess yet, ah no, it was too early for that. But the answer all the same.
The kaleidoscope had made its first complete turning. A pattern had unfolded.
7
Far below the intense blue of the sky, fresh snow blanketed the ground. It sharpened the contrast of orange-tiled roofs in their jumble against the bleached grey-white of the ruined fortress perched on the summit.
St-Cyr stood alone on that hillside. Frost was in the air. Smoke trailed thinly from the village. Goats foraged amid snow-dusted clumps of mimosa and juniper. Grey-green, the scattered ilex and olive gave to the landscape some semblance of the once luxurious forest that had stood here in ancient times. Solitary pines cast long shadows as if that same forest had now all but been forgotten.
Dédou Fratani had brought them in the hearse. Now the girl, Josette-Louise and Hermann waited in the cottage below.
He tried to put himself into the shoes of that girl’s mother. A birthday – she’d been exactly fifty-two years old. Some sixty metres from her, the assailant had held the crossbow. They’d exchanged a few words. The woman had extended the pawn ticket. Viviane, I’ve always loved you. Viviane, forgive me, please. Viviane, you don’t understand. I was helping the Resistance.
Or had it been: Mother, why couldn’t you have helped me? Mother, you knew I was down and out. Mother, I tried to sell my body in the streets of Paris but could not find the courage.
Viviane sent you money, Josette. Viviane saved you from that, though she disobeyed me.
No, no, he cautioned. It’s not Josette-Louise up there on that snow-covered rock where Hermann found the santon. It’s Josianne-Michèle.
He heard the wheels of the morning’s express to Lyon as if they were still beneath them. He saw the girl, Josette-Louise, asleep before him on the opposite seat. He felt himself slipping inside her head to explore the caverns and tunnelled passageways of her mind.
My father never loved me, he said. Josianne-Michèle has always been his favourite. Mother has rejected me and now … now after all the years of my absence, I must come home to face her burial and my sister with my failure.
Josette-Louise Buemondi had not drifted off to sleep easily. Instead, she had fought it long and hard. Exhaustion had ringed the dark eyes. Alone with Hermann and himself, she had stared out of the compartment windows and said so little.
She had dreaded coming home but had also feared their scrutiny and had fought sleep until only it had offered welcome respite.
Josette-Louise Buemondi. The same pale lustre to the skin, that same slender neck and gauntness, that same little brown mole high on the right cheek-bone, the same slight laziness in the right eye.
Hermann had put his coat over her and had lifted her feet up on to the seat. She had sighed – had been so deeply unconscious of them, her fleeting smile had given but a glimpse of happier times.
‘Louis … Louis, the girl’s vomiting.’
‘Wha …? Ah, Hermann. What is it?’
‘The kid’s sick. It must have been that lousy ham we had in Lyon. Ersatz like all the rest of it.’
‘Or fear. Is it not dread, Hermann, at meeting the sister of her childhood?’
Kohler broke off a bit of thyme and began to chew it. He, too, looked uphill to the ruins beyond the village. ‘Two sisters, two partings of the ways, the one to hell and the other to heaven, Louis. Fear knows no equal to the loneliness of a small village when all the doors are closed and eyes watch everything you do. I’d best get the herbalist. He’ll be able to give her something to settle that stomach.’
‘Ah yes, the herbalist. Is it that Josette-Louise believes that one will help her and therefore has brought the vomiting upon herself?’
‘You’re too suspicious. Give the kid a break eh? She’s had a rough time of it, Louis.’
Was Hermann getting soft in his old age? ‘Suspicion is midwife to detection. It is the umbilical cord of answers.’
‘And Delphane? What about our friend?’
‘He is absent as are the villagers from this hillside. Fear is at once their enemy, Hermann, and their only friend.’
Muttering, ‘You’re too deep for me,’ Kohler raised a tired hand in half-salute and pushed on up the hill. He knew that Louis would watch him until the ramparts had cut him off from view. He knew all about the threat of the maquis in those hills, of what it could only mean for both of them.
An end to their partnership; a return to hatred because only then can wars be won and enemies conquered.
He reached the spot where the crossbow had been fired and paused before turning to look back at his partner and friend.
Then he raised his arms and bent them as if aiming that same bow at Louis.
Shabby and diffident, an old trilby tilted back to expose the broad, bland brow, Monsieur Ox-Eyes and Bushy Moustache looked up at him.
Frost hung in the air they breathed. Louis extended his right hand and shook it a little as though holding the pawn ticket out and pleading with him to understand that justice must always be done no matter the consequences or opposition.
‘She didn’t do it, Louis. That kid from Paris hasn’t got it in her.’
The air burst with a puff of vapour as the words chased up to him, but Kohler knew them anyway, had already said them to himself and aloud, ‘Perhaps, but then … then …’ Mais alors … alors …
Lonely on that snow-covered hillside, Hermann was etched in relief, sharpened by the sunlight that, as with the pines, cast a long shadow from him. The air, though crisp, was pungent with the mingled perfume of sage and thyme. New leaves protruded from beneath the clumps of snow. ‘A pattern set is a pattern fixed in memory,’ said St-Cyr, but to himself.
When he turned to walk down to the cottage, the weaver stopped and she, too, stood out on that hillside for God to mock. She wore the russet cloak with hood thrown back. She looked up at him and then beyond to Hermann’s fast-dwindling figure.
He said, ‘Mademoiselle Darnot, where is the other sister, please? Our cable specifically asked that you both be here.’ In mirror after mirror he saw those same dark grey-blue eyes ache with anguish and fear. Flashing at him through the semi-darkness of some stairwell; gazing up at him through the sterile brightness of some clinic.
‘Did you have to bring her?’ demanded the weaver harshly. ‘Are you now satisfied?’
‘Mademoiselle, I asked you a question. Please, it is your duty to answer truthfully even though such answers may be used against you.’
‘Josianne-Michèle has gone into the mountains, Inspector. I could not stop her.’
‘And Jean-Paul Delphane, Mademoiselle Viviane? Where, please, is he?’
She shook her head and did not come closer. Perhaps five metres still separated them. ‘I … I don’t know, Inspector.’
Again he saw that look in her eyes. Ah, it was of such tragedy, such anguish, she lay broken at his feet.
‘You know, don’t you,’ she said at last.
That boyhood intuition had served him well. ‘Yes … yes, I know,’ he said.
Hands in the pockets of her cloak, the weaver tightly shrugged. ‘Josianne-Michèle needed help, Inspector – qualified doctors and psychiatrists. Against Anne-Marie’s wishes I took the girl to Chamonix, yes, and we were there when … when the financier killed himself in my father’s villa.’
‘Josianne-Michèle?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. The girls were sixteen at the time. Anne-Marie was at her wits’ end. Carlo would do nothing. I thought … That is, I … I interfered, if you want the truth. I came down here and together, Josianne and I went to Chamonix to see an old friend of my father’s.’
‘You told no one? Not her mother or her father?’
‘Neither of them knew.’
‘But Carlo Buemondi has told my partner that he demanded the girl be brought back here?’
‘Yes, yes, Carlo said the treatments weren’t working and he wanted his little pigeon ba
ck. The man’s a bastard, Inspector. You saw how she bit your friend. Carlo raped her repeatedly.’
‘His own daughter? His little Josianne …?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t let it happen any longer but … but Anne-Marie made me bring her back.’
‘Knowing what he was doing to the girl? Please, mademoiselle, the time for family secrets is past.’
He’d find out anyway; he had that look about him. ‘Josianne-Michèle had tried to kill herself, Inspector. Not once or twice, but several times. It’s true the treatments weren’t working.’
‘Is it also true that your lover and friend, Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi, asked you to take her daughter to Chamonix?’
‘Yes, yes, it’s true.’ Ah merde! He’d discover the truth and all would be lost. ‘We’d been there for nearly four months and … and nothing seemed to be working. Josianne-Michèle herself begged me to bring her home even though she knew exactly what awaited her.’
‘Was she in love with the herbalist’s eldest son even then?’
There was a nod, the woman brushing a booted foot over the snow to clear a small patch. ‘If love can have its roots in loneliness then, yes. Everyone up there in that village, Inspector, was only too well aware of what Carlo had been doing to the girl. You see, they had the aftereffects to contend with, isn’t that correct? Madame Peretti, that blind woman who sees everything, has the memory of that child’s screams on her conscience.’
‘And now?’ he asked, longing for his pipe and quiet contemplation.
‘Now she waits like all the rest of them to see what you and your friend will do.’
‘And the Nazis.’
‘Yes, yes, and them.’
‘What happened at the villa near Chamonix, mademoiselle?’
He was so intent, she’d have to tell him something. ‘My father telephoned from London to say that the villa was urgently needed by a friend and that I should leave the key with our gardener and caretaker. Josianne-Michèle was at the clinic – about three kilometres away, in the town. I packed our things and did exactly as my father asked. It was me you saw sitting in that waiting-room when the nurse came to ask you what was the matter.’
‘I’d fallen. I’d hit myself. There was blood on the back of my head.’
She held her breath. Puzzled, then baffled by something, he asked, ‘But why that clinic, mademoiselle? Why did I go there and not to a pharmacy or the hospital?’
When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘I was looking for you, wasn’t I?’
Her lungs filled, her chest rose. She turned away and he saw her shoulders slump in defeat as she looked downhill towards the cottage, hidden in its little valley.
‘Not me, Inspector. Jean-Paul Delphane. You were after that one and you had followed him to the clinic because he had come to find me.’
‘After the death of the financier?’
It was no use. Things could not be hidden from him for long. ‘Yes … yes, after Stavisky’s death.’
‘But you were in that villa before it, mademoiselle? Me, I remember seeing you in a stairwell. Your eyes … you were hiding among some things. You were holding your breath.’
‘Just as I am now?’
‘Yes … yes, exactly!’
‘Then my back must have been turned to you, Inspector, and you could not possibly have seen my eyes.’
‘There was a mirror on the wall in front of me, mademoiselle, and you were behind me. The staircase rose above you. There were some hangings – it is, and was, all in semi-darkness, a sliver of light, a triangle of it, the frame of the mind rapidly opening as the cinematographer’s aperture does in shade, only to close down as I moved away from you and more light entered the stairwell.’
Ah damn, he had seen her. She must walk away from him, walk right back into the present and go down to Josette-Louise. She must cradle that poor child in her arms as she had so often before, and weep over the death of Anne-Marie.
My lover, she said, but only to herself. My heart and my life.
*
Kohler didn’t like it. The village was too still. Beyond the rampart gate, that ugly warren of narrow, twisting streets boxed him in. Shuttered windows looked down with suspicion and alarm. Snow clung tenaciously to mossy crevices and ledges. Ivy climbed yellowish-grey walls but there was little of it. A tendril strained to reach a shutter three floors up in brilliant sunlight. The pale ochrous paint of the shutters was peeling.
He knew he was being watched; knew then with absolute certainty the village was united in its silence and afraid.
Winding steps led steeply to another street just visible. No one had bothered to sweep the snow from their doorsteps. There were few footprints, but one set led from house to house and at each door, a new set of prints appeared to follow those of the others. Dédou Fratani, hearse-driver, village cop and general handyman when not flogging stuff on the black market, had been busy but had said nothing of it when he’d picked them up at the station in Cannes.
Since dawn the men of the village had been waiting for Louis and himself. They’d be at the café or up at the church. The Abbé Roussel would urge caution and counsel silence.
The bastards must be only too well aware of the maquis in the hills. The Gestapo Munk would hold them responsible and if not that one, then Jean-Paul Delphane.
Kohler began to hunt for the herbalist’s shop only to find himself drawn deeper and deeper into the web of interconnecting streets. They’d view him as at one with Munk; as far as they were concerned, one Gestapo was as bad as another.
Water ran from a tap at a plain stone fountain in a tiny square of no name. Ice rimmed its basin. Footprints led up to it, then went away. The sound of the water was everywhere in the stillness of the square. Directly above him, the sky was still so very blue, though the afternoon was getting on.
Snow clung to eaves where orange-red tiles jutted out.
The water was ice cold. He wet his throat and looked around at closed shutters. An iron-grilled, ground-floor window sought him out. Beyond its bars and glass and lace curtains, an old woman in black and wearing a shawl crossed herself when he noticed her.
You are of the Gestapo, monsieur, he heard her saying to herself. You are as the bell that tolls before death comes.
Several archways of stone provided walkways from house to house above the street. Steps led down into cellars, while the street itself went uphill under the arches. Jesus it was narrow – dished so as to carry the run-off, and cobbled. Globular terracotta urns held grape and trumpet vines that twisted up the railing of a rickety set of nearby stairs.
There were gas lanterns the black-out didn’t allow – no time to even give them a wash of blue paint. The Occupation of the south had been too rapid. Now the villagers simply didn’t bother to light their lamps. Ah yes.
Figs and cacti grew in other urns, olive trees from some, herbs in still others and winter lettuces the cold snap had finished.
When he found the shop, it was beneath an archway, half hidden at a corner where the steps led down and up, and the street was no wider than any of the others.
The door was not locked. At once that pungent, dusty smell of ground, powdered herbs and spices met his nostrils. There were liquorice and ginseng roots, dried sponges, glass-stoppered apothecary jars, all with Latin labels. Hieracium pilosella L COMPOSITAE (Mouse-ear Hawk-weed), Hyoscyamus niger L SOLONACEAE (Henbane, a sedative and antispasmodic but also quite poisonous), Iris germanica var. florentina Dykes IRIDACEAE (Orris, the Florentineiris, causes vomiting and may be violently purgative if taken from fresh root-stock). The violet smell was powerful.
There were sacks and bins of dried herbs and flower petals for pot-pourri, a small desk-cum-work table with brass weigh-scale, one chair and beams in the ceiling that must have been three or four hundred years old.
A pictorial chart gave the names of perhaps sixty local herbs and other useful plants. Another gave human organs with their various complaints and treatments. For colds, teas of hyssop and wh
ite horehound; bayberry and ginger; or liquorice, elder, meadow sweet, violet and garlic.
There was no sign of Ludo Borel but on the dispensing table there was one bottle of pale grey-green dust. Papaver somniferum L PAPAVERACEAE, the opium poppy, the ground leaves and white flowers probably. Not as narcotic as the milky sap but used in teas and poultices all the same.
Again he had to ask that question that had been bothering him ever since they’d come on the case. Was Borel treating Josianne-Michèle? Now he had to ask, Had she really gone into the mountains?
Behind the shop was one long room devoted to storage and the drying of the herbs. Bunch after bunch of fennel, sage, thyme and rosemary, among others, hung from the rafters. There were burlap sacks and wicker panniers of rosehips, others of pungent juniper berries, a much-worn chopping block and small machete – a wicked thing in the right fist. Honed sharp and centuries old.
Even an idiot could see that the Borels had been in business for generations.
There was a grinding mill with nests of screens to sieve out particles of the appropriate size and return the rest to the mill. There was a distillation unit – oil of eucalyptus, essence of lavender. Roasted barley and acorns were ready to be ground into ersatz coffee; metre-long bunches of soapwort for making soap.
Kohler wished his partner was with him. It was eerie, it was uncomfortable. All warehouses had this feel when no one was around.
Tiny pre-war bottles were stored in pre-war boxes and there were hundreds of them. Borel had bought with an eye to the future.
Going quickly back through to the shop, he paused to scan the shelves of tiny bottles, read: oil of anise; oil of savin; oil of the white opium poppy …
Borel didn’t fool around. He had something for everything. Lungwort, henbane and mandrake.
There were even plant dyes and lots of them. Madder and cosmos, walnut and indigo. Goldenrod too.
Out on the street there was still no sign of anyone. As he climbed to the church, he found the village closing in on him. It seemed to say, You are an outsider; you are not wanted here. Beware!
Kaleidoscope Page 18