9

The wind swept the granules of snow past those carefully planted boots, bringing with it, St-Cyr noted, the tired pungency of stale cigarette smoke. Long-moist, a stained fag end clung to the Premier’s fleshy lower lip, the bushy black moustache half hiding it, the bull neck scarfless.

Dark eyes, swift to all meaning, detective or otherwise, took in Blanche Varollier and Inès Charpentier, for they’d come to watch from a distance, with Albert Grenier between them. Albert, who was terrified and in tears, of course, but for his own good necessarily out of commission, his wrists bound by the shame of Kripo bracelets he could not remove.

Sandrine Richard and Charles-Frédéric Hébert were also attentive, the two sworn enemies unaware they stood shoulder to shoulder in that side entrance to the kitchens. But one must say something.

‘Premier …’ began St-Cyr, the gangsters moving discreetly away to allow privacy as commanded.

‘Inspector, surely that …’ Laval indicated Albert. ‘That can’t be our killer?’

‘He’s a part of it,’ grunted Hermann. ‘He tried to kill the sculptress with this.’

‘Pah!’ snorted Laval, impatiently tossing his fedora-ed head in acknowledgement of the almost brand-new Laguiole of Noëlle Olivier. ‘The doctor vets every visitor his God on earth receives and is most fastidious about it. Surely Mademoiselle Charpentier poses no threat to the great one, or are we to hire Albert to head up security?’

‘Premier, the body of Céline Dupuis …’ hazarded Louis.

‘Inspectors, the boy loves the Maréchal as he would a grandfather who dotes on a little grandson. Certainly Pétain fails to acknowledge his existence, but Albert’s loyalty never wavers, not even when the great one’s autograph has to be purloined by other means, namely the Maréchal’s batman!’

‘Premier, you went to have a look at Madame Dupuis after the doctor had pronounced her dead.’

‘My button … You found its backing! Certainly I have a stock of them, a few extras, but they’re impossible to buy these days. I’m always misplacing them. Merci.’

Louis’s fist was tightly closed and snatched away, the words spoken, though Kohler knew them by heart. ‘That is evidence, Premier. Your unauthorized visit to the corpse?’

‘And before the local gendarmes could even get a look at it? Ménétrel, mon cher détective. Ménétrel makes a great thing of his medical expertise. Electrical shock treatments for the Maréchal, daily massages, injections of ephedrine, it’s rumoured, and it is not all beyond that charlatan, but even I, a simple peasant, have doubts. I had to decide for myself. Was it yet another killing – the third of those girls – or a planned campaign of terror?’

‘But … but, Monsieur le Premier, by not informing us of your visit and by leaving this little memento, you have caused us to believe that a woman might have killed Céline Dupuis! Two assailants, not one, as has been indicated by the sketchy police reports of the other killings. Merde alors, how could you have done this to us?’

Hermann let him have it flatly. ‘They were all informants.’

‘For Herr Abetz and Company?’ asked Laval swiftly, his dark eyes narrowing. ‘Then let me tell you why I’m not surprised. Vichy’s like a sieve, Inspectors, the Hôtel du Parc its main orifice and Ménétrel its incompetent dyke-plugger who runs from hole to hole with cork and hammer. But that’s not why I came to find you both. Are the boys next, as they are given to believe?’

‘And yourself and the Maréchal?’ asked Louis.

The fag end was plucked from that lip and flung away. ‘Pétain doesn’t count. Only a fool would make a martyr of him. The terrorists, the résistants, if you wish, are too well versed in the national psyche for that. As a people, we love our martyrs, so we’re stuck with that reedy skeleton, and until the coming of the Divine Reaper he has taken to praying to, he’ll go on playing Gilbert and Sullivan and other operetta recordings in that “bedroom” of his, and if I have to hear the HMS Pinafore again while trying to write letters or decide something crucial, I swear to God I’ll smash his machine! The boys?’ he asked calmly. Les gars.

Richard, Bousquet, Deschambeault and de Fleury. Hermann indicated that for the moment he would leave that one to his partner and Chief. ‘I don’t think so, Premier,’ said Louis guardedly. ‘Though Herr Kohler and I are badly in need of a chance to compare notes, everything we’ve uncovered so far indicates exactly the opposite. Whoever killed them did so because of what they’d become.’

‘Lovers and informants. The wives, then, or the doctor, who is not above murder, I must say, but … but come. Before we decide, let me show you both why I’ve left a perfectly good lunch to find you. Réal,’ he called out to one of the durs. ‘Take Herr Kohler’s vehicle and follow. Tell the others to pile into it. Albert in the back seat with Mademoiselle Varollier. The sculptress in front, but keep an eye on her and your weapons.’

‘Monsieur le Premier,’ called out Inès, ‘would it be possible for me to go with Madame Richard?’

Laval looked to each of them, Hermann giving him a nod.

‘Then it’s settled. Madame Richard and Mademoiselle Charpentier to join us as we view the latest artwork.’

LAVAL AU POTEAU! ‘Laval up against the post’ had been plastered in huge, dripping, now-frozen black letters over the wall of Charmeil’s eighteenth-century school. Above the Premier’s name, and just beneath the tops of its letters, were two side by side and freshly mounted posters. BEKANNTMACHUNG – Official Notice – as if any of the kids or their parents could read Deutschl snorted Kohler to himself. AVIS. Notice APPRÉHENDÉS. Apprehended. PEINE DE MORT. Penalty of death. FUSILLÉS. Shot. Ah, Christ! Paul Panton, Edgar Guerledan, Francine Aubret and Marcel Boulanger. Kids, just kids.

‘Herr Gessler’s quick off the mark, isn’t he? Ages eighteen to twenty. Fools!’ swore Laval, indicating the names of the dead and angrily finding himself another cigarette to light hurriedly.

Everyone had got out of the cars, Mademoiselle Charpentier sickened by the notices, thought St-Cyr. Beyond them, and the letters, its whitewash faded by the years of the Occupation so that the wall became a mirror of the times, were the words that had been written in despair by retreating soldiers in early June 1940, not realizing then that the Government would soon be installed in Vichy. QUI NOUS A TRAHIS? Who has betrayed us?

No one had apparently thought to enquire about, the bicycle that leaned against the wall. A sturdy, pre-war Majestic, its worn seat rested against the edge of the stripped-away stucco. Below it, the bare lava-stone blocks had been scratched by centuries of schoolboys and girls who had wished to leave their little mementos to posterity. A woman’s bike, then, said St-Cyr to himself. Tallish, long-legged and long-armed.

The faded wicker carrier basket was frayed to twigs around its edges and held an all but empty, two-litre tin of coal-black paint and a ten-centimetre-wide brush that must date from 1930 and had been used many times to whitewash the inside of a cowshed. A good farm, then, and well above the usual, but perhaps this was the very brush the soldiers had found to use?

‘There are also these, Inspectors,’ said the Auvergnat, giving a quick wave of salutation to schoolchildren who had found the view from the classroom windows more interesting than their lessons.

Cartoons had been cut from a magazine and a newspaper.

‘Both date from 30 October 1940,’ said Laval. ‘Punch Magazine and the Daily Mirror. I had them checked.’

The first portrayed him as the Great Laval in white bow tie, black waistcoat and tails and juggling swastikas, holding a Francisque rolling pin with rubber spikes like those guaranteed to remove excess fat, and bottles of his very own Vichy water, one of which had shattered at his feet.

The second clipping, that of the newspaper, depicted the Premier as a hideously grinning, squat and moustachioed bullfrog cradling a bouquet of chrysanthemums – the press’s funereal choice had been perfect! – as he came courting to knock at a door whose emblem was a large black swastika.

‘Vichy is Vichy, Inspectors. There is no other place like it in the world. There never will be nor can be, and I am at the centre of it. Inheritor of the decisions of others, cementer of bargains that are seldom adhered to. Reviled, hated, ridiculed by an ever-growing number, ah oui, but to be ill thought of and yet useful is better than to be ill thought of and useless. That bicycle must have been stolen; God knows where the artist found the paint. Footprints indicated the général direction of retreat but the children soon put paid to them, though they did establish the time of the atrocity, since the paint they touched on first inspection was then not frozen.’

‘It doesn’t belong to one of the teachers, does it?’ asked Kohler of the bike.

‘Merde alors, you sound like the great one! Is pedantic logic always foremost in the mind of detectives too? Come, there’s more to see.’

‘A moment,’ cautioned Louis. ‘The clippings, Premier?’

‘Slid in an envelope under the door to my office at the Hôtel du Parc late last night or early this morning.’

‘In spite of the Garde Mobile’s redoubled presence?’

‘Perhaps because of it. The doctor is, of course, in a rage and once more Henri-Claude Ferbrave has been threatened with immediate dismissal. Derelict. Spending too much time with the horizontales of that maison de tolérance he favours. Ménétrel, in spite of the coarseness of his tongue, is very much a prude and family man, and is offended by the unbridled appetite of his chief lieutenant. The Hôtel is, I’m afraid, abuzz.’

Workmen, among them the elder Grenier, were busily erasing the damage with scrapers, wire brushes and kerosene. Spectators stood about, lots of them. Passers-by paused. A Wehrmacht lorry dropped off a squad of burly Felgendarmen, the military police.

The Hôtel du Parc and Hall des Sources had also been decorated.

COURAGE ON LES AURA faced Pétain’s office and balcony, from where the Maréchal could be seen sadly gazing down at words he’d spoken to the troops at Verdun in 1917: Take heart, we’ll get them.

BOUSILLER LES GARS! Smash – bump off – the boys! had been splashed directly below him on the ground-floor wall of the hotel, between its sticking-papered and blue-washed windows. And then, as if to rub it in, the artist had used one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s innocent campaign slogans for children. LUTTEZ CONTRE LES DORYPHORES! Fight against the potato beetle. Children all over rural France had been excused from classes, armed with bottles of water and, accompanied by their teachers, encouraged to swarm into the potato fields each summer to catch, drown and squash this pest. But now, of course, Doryphores also meant the Boche and everyone knew it!

‘Premier, the Hall, I think,’ said Louis determinedly.

‘I can tell you little.’

‘Sometimes even a little is enough.’

‘Are the boys next, now that you’ve seen the slogans for yourselves?’ Laval was clearly worried but calm.

‘Let us reserve judgement, Premier. Let us adopt one of yours and the Maréchal’s very first policies with the Occupier in 1940, that of attentisme.’

‘Wait-and-see has never been my way, Inspector, but had you the opportunity then, what would you have done?’

‘Exactly the same thing. You … we … had no other choice.’

‘Then let us go in and settle this little matter before Herr Gessler and his gang of thugs trample everything.’

‘And the thugs you, yourself, employ?’

‘Are Ménétrel’s men, the very ones who were among those who arrested me on 13 December 1940 after my first term here. Ménétrel, of course, begged Pétain to have them assassinate me, but Herr Abetz intervened. Now I employ them. That, too, is of Vichy. I insisted they guard me. One has to do things like that when one is Premier. Every day that they are with me they must worry about being killed in an assassination attempt that has not been of their own making, but also … Ah oui, mes chers détectives, they and that little doctor of ours are forced to realize not only the opportunity they missed but the mistake they would have made! Now, of course, if they were to kill me, they’d have no one.’

Merde alors, the wily peasant at heart! ‘And Bousquet and the others?’ asked St-Cyr – Hermann would leave him to deal with Laval.

‘Are worth saving if for no other reason than to hold together what’s left and prevent anarchy. No scandal is going to erupt out of what they’ve been up to. Shocking as it was, and a severe embarrassment to my Government, that little business venture of theirs has been stopped. You, in turn, will find the murderer or murderers of those girls and then quietly leave.’

‘And if it’s more than that?’

‘The Résistance? We’ll deal with it.’

‘And if it’s one or more of the boys?’

‘Then he or they will be dealt with.’

‘And if it’s the wives?’

‘Those too.’

‘And if it’s the doctor?’

Laval grinned.

‘Personally I would like nothing better than to present to the Maréchal the procés-verbal his éminence grise had to sign under the stern gazes of a Sûreté and a Kripo that I, myself, had requested. What better an example of mutual cooperation between our two nations than for the Général, the Vainqueur de Verdun, to acknowledge that our two police forces, united in the battle against common crime, have found my Flykiller? Of course, the lance corporal with the Iron Cross Second and First Class would appreciate it too. Even Herr Hitler has, I’m sure if one searched desperately enough for it, a certain sense of humour.’

From inside the Hall des Sources, where she stood next to frozen Kentia palms and near-dead, pollarded lime trees, Inès could see the workmen quite clearly as they scraped away the COURAGE ON LES AURA. Like blue-clad flies in winter, they were pinned to the tall, arched windows from whose delicate friezes long icicles hung, and where sheets of discoloured ice had lain beneath the artist’s brush, those segments of the letters rapidly vanished.

Beyond the workmen who faced her, others across the street at the Hôtel du Parc had their backs to her, and wasn’t that also like Vichy? she asked herself. To confront, to shun, to erase the truth and turn the back on so many?

Laval, St-Cyr and Kohler had gone over to the Buvette du Chomel, to where Céline had been finally cornered and slain, but had she known her killer or killers? How had she got away from the one, only to then be trapped by the other? What words had been said? Last words …

Sandrine Richard stood near the entrance, perhaps not wishing to come closer for fear of betraying herself. And Blanche? asked Inès. Blanche was halfway between herself and the others but had found that she, too, could approach no closer.

Voices echoed. The detectives made no attempt to hide their questions or the answers given. Perhaps they did this to taunt her and the others, perhaps it was simply for expedience. Laval’s description of the corpse fitted Ménétrel’s – St-Cyr acknowledged this. The Premier had, on crouching to examine the body, lost a button from one of his shoes and, having heard it clatter away, had searched for and found it, only to then find that its backing had slipped out and been lost.

Her hair had been gone through. Had he opened her nightgown? St-Cyr had asked – one of its ties had been snapped. ‘No had been the answer.’

‘Yet you moved her legs and hips,’ St-Cyr had challenged.

‘I had to,’ Monsieur le Premier had answered, lighting a fresh cigarette and erupting in a hacking cough.

‘Why didn’t you tell others of this?’ Herr Kohler had demanded. ‘Ménétrel, certainly the investigating police?’

‘I didn’t want the doctor knowing I was concerned enough to have come in here to see her for myself. Convinced that it could well be a threat to Richard and the others, I personally telexed Gestapo Boemelburg requesting assistance and then telephoned him. Boemelburg agreed to my request and I told Secrétaire Général Bousquet that even though he was opposed to my choice of you both, he was to work closely with you.’

‘They’ve all tried to cover things up!’ said St-Cyr.

‘They had much to hide,’ countered the Premier.

‘Then what, please, other than another victim, another of your flies, convinced you of the threat?’

‘Yes, what?’ Inès heard Herr Kohler ask, and then …

Then from Laval, ‘There was a burnt matchstick, broken and left in the sign of a V.’

‘Ah merde, Hermann, now he tells us!’

‘And I ask again, Inspectors,’ replied Monsieur Laval calmly, ‘is it a campaign of terror that now threatens us?’

And never mind the victims!

‘Where is it, please, this matchstick?’ demanded St-Cyr, clearly very upset with him.

‘I removed it. I felt I had to. I didn’t want to compound the matter until we had further information.’

‘Did you tell anyone of it?’ the Sûreté demanded archly.

‘None.’

‘And yet Ménétrel made no mention of it, Hermann. Why, please, did he not think that necessary?’

‘Security,’ snapped Laval. ‘Ménétrel is terrified our friends will move in en masse and kick his precious Garde out!’

And that, too, was of Vichy, thought Inès, holding her breath and waiting for their answer.

‘A Garde who are excused their duties …’ muttered St-Cyr.

‘Who miss an early-morning postman they should have caught, Louis,’ said Herr Kohler – referring to the press clippings Laval had shown them.

‘A Flykiller or killers who can come and go at will, Hermann, and know beforehand exactly what the boys are planning.’

‘Premier,’ said Herr Kohler, obviously not liking this new piece of evidence one bit, ‘how was it found?’

‘Placed on the back of the right hand that clasped her breast. Here … here, I have it in my pocket. A sharp splinter underlines the burned half of the V when the match is opened.’

A pair of earrings, a knife from the past and a touch of perfume, a cigar band, the tin-plated post from a small, mother of pearl button, and a V for Victory, for that is what the match had meant: such little symbols, this one taken from the now-familiar gesture of the British Prime Minister, were increasingly to be found.

‘The Résistance, Louis,’ grated Herr Kohler. Mon Dieu, he could put such feeling into those few words! thought Inès.

‘Or the killer or killers wish us to blame them, Hermann,’ cautioned his partner and friend.

‘So as to unleash a campaign of terror which has now already started?’ scoffed Kohler, referring to the ratissage the Sonderkom mando were conducting.

‘Premier, the doctor pronounced her dead at 7.32 a.m. on Wednesday,’ said St-Cyr. ‘At what time did you step in here?’

‘At just before eight. The police hadn’t yet been notified. The door was open. Staff were hurrying past to their offices. I simply ducked in unnoticed.’

‘Having learned of the killing how?’ asked the Sûreté.

‘One overhears everything in that Hotel,’ snorted Laval. ‘Ménétrel was in a frightful turmoil, claiming he’d been betrayed and that there’d been a flagrant breach of security. Ferbrave was, of course, to blame and had been dismissed, but it wasn’t the first time our ranting doctor had made that little threat, so I paid it no mind and simply went to see for myself.’

‘Your footprints in the snow must have been noticed by the police,’ said St-Cyr, ‘yet none were mentioned in the report?’

‘Clearly I had no reason to kill her and was above suspicion. I’d been at home, at my chateau in Châteldon, and could prove it. I simply pointed out my footprints to the sous-préfet when he and his men were deciding which prints might be useful.’

‘Among those that hadn’t been trampled?’ asked St-Cyr as if stung by such incompetence on the part of the local police.

‘We were, I’m afraid, all caught by surprise.’

‘Yet all of you knew of the little visit she was to pay the Maréchal,’ said Kohler.

‘I didn’t. I hadn’t the slightest inkling of it.’

‘Even though one can overhear everything in that hotel?’ he demanded.

‘Even then.’

‘Nor did I,’ said Sandrine Richard. ‘How could I have?’

‘But Mademoiselle Blanche and her brother knew of it, Louis.’

‘Yes! Yes, a thousand times,’ cried Blanche, ‘but we didn’t kill her, I swear it! We took the earrings and a little of mother’s perfume in a phial I had brought along but only because Dr Ménétrel had demanded this.’

‘And when did you leave them with him, mademoiselle?’ asked Louis.

‘On Monday afternoon, late.’

‘And the knife?’ asked Herr Kohler, quickly leaving the buvette to stand before her.

‘Was lying on the chair in her room, with the laudanum bottle.’

‘This one?’ asked St-Cyr, showing the bottle as he joined his partner.

‘Yes!’ Blanche’s voice quavered. ‘My father had brought it home with the clothes Mother had left on the Pont Barrage the day she drowned herself. It was, I think, the last time he ever set eyes on that room of hers. A broken man.’

‘And neither you nor your brother touched this knife?’ asked St-Cyr, the bottle in one hand, the weapon in the other.

‘Paul … Paul did open it on our first visit. Edith … Edith was so upset, he … my brother put it back.’

‘With the blade open or closed?’ he asked.

‘Would it really matter?’ she yelped. ‘We didn’t take it! We’re not killers. At first we only wanted what was rightfully ours, and then … then we agreed to do what was asked simply to protect Paul from the forced labour.’

Head bowed in despair, Blanche clenched her fists at her sides. ‘Please, you must believe me. If Papa would have listened to us, Paul and I would have gone straight to him, but we knew he wouldn’t. When we first went to her, Edith had told us it would be useless to try.’

It was Herr Kohler who gently asked, ‘Could Mademoiselle Pascal have noticed you’d taken the earrings and come after them?’

‘To the Hotel d’Allier?’ blurted Blanche. ‘It’s … it’s possible, yes.’

‘And the love letters?’ demanded St-Cyr.

‘Were any of them taken?’ she asked, caught suddenly by surprise.

‘Please just answer.’

‘Then no! Edith … Edith would have noticed right away if we’d so much as touched them. She goes into that room every day to finger Mother’s things as if in doubt, in hope. I know she’s read those letters often, know she sleeps in Mother’s bed. Why … why does she do such things if not demented?’

‘The dress, mademoiselle, and the strand of sapphires?’ he asked.

‘Dress? Which dress, please?’

‘Left in Madame Dupuis’s room after the killing,’ said Louis gruffly, the sternness of his Sûreté gaze not leaving her. She tried hard to meet it and finally succeeded.

‘One that we would find and not Bousquet,’ said Kohler, watching her intently.

‘Who had earlier been left Céline’s identity card,’ breathed St-Cyr.

‘As a warning from the Resistance, Louis. A warning!’

‘Premier, although you’ve already given us a reason, why, please, did that telex you sent to Paris really use the name Flykiller?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘Those damned girlfriends were like flies,’ spat Laval. ‘Always buzzing about their men and threatening to spoil things for us. I was all but certain they were informants and have now been proven correct!’

They sat alone, those two detectives, in the Chante Clair Restaurant where the ladies, the crème de la crème of Vichy, wore fashion’s latest whim, the colourful turban. The wives were at afternoon tea and gossip, the sound of their voices suddenly rising to a shrillness that frightened before dropping to a whisper that only served to increase anxiety.

Sandrine Richard had curtly been given permission to join Madame Pétain and Élisabeth de Fleury, their heads close in urgent conference. Blanche, alone and looking lost, sat at a table beneath the stained-glass lights of tall, streaked windows that overlooked the snow-dusted statuary of the inner courtyard. And I? mused Inès. I, instinctively not wishing to sit with Blanche, nor she with me, sit alone, having just learned that Albert has been released into his father’s recognizance.

St-Cyr had agreed to do this, perhaps out of kindness, but had he also wanted to see what would happen? she wondered.

Kohler, in defiance of the hour, the head chef and the kitchen staff, had loudly ordered pea soup with ham, sausages and sauerkraut, and ‘good German beer’; a pastis for his friend and partner. ‘A double.’

Since he sat with his back to her, she could only clearly see St-Cyr who, from time to time, an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth or in a fist, would look across the crowded dining room to see her sitting primly beneath one of the wall mirrors, her back to that very wall, knowing she couldn’t possibly overhear them now or see what lay before them. That tin-plated little post, Inspector? Laval au poteau? Had it been a coincidence, post and post? Would Monsieur le Premier wonder if it had meaning and make a hurried visit to his clairvoyant, Madame Ribot, of the Hotel Ruhl, at 15 boulevard de l’Hôtel de Ville, to ask her advice?

Would he believe what the cards, the stars, the moon and conjunctions said?

‘Hermann, our sculptress is still without her precious valise. Just what the hell is she really doing here?’

‘Blanche asked the same thing.’

‘Ah oui. She makes Albert edgy and now she’s got me edgy too.’

The understatement of the year! ‘Relax. Eat up.’

‘And try to concentrate? Merde, I’ve no appetite. How can I when I know Herr Gessler must be watching the clock – our clock – and counting off the minutes? If he gets his hands on that one …’ he indicated the sculptress, ‘neither of us will be able to save her.’

Stripped naked, shrieked at constantly, her head shoved repeatedly under water in the bathtub those bastards were fond of using, she’d be strung up and further clubbed with rubber truncheons if she didn’t tell them what they wanted, or thrown to the swill-soaked floor to be kicked by hobnailed boots until dead.

‘Please don’t let us forget that, Hermann.’

‘You know I won’t. How could I? It applies also to Blanche and that brother of hers as well as to Albert and others, especially Olivier and his Edith.’

‘Olivier,’ said Louis, opening Noëlle’s knife. Quickly arranging. the items and ignoring the food, he set the V for Victory beneath the knife; the earrings, laudanum bottle and billets doux to the left; the button-post to the right and isolated for the moment.

‘One killing is a drowning, quick and easy, and no one sees it as murder, Hermann, until much later. The next is a garrotting, embellished only in that the wire, similar to that which Albert Grenier uses, is found embedded in the victim’s throat. The third killing is further embellished by a riding crop, dead rats, a corpse that is hidden in an armoire, as if a child, a young man, a naughty boy, had done it.’

‘Albert again.’

‘Only with the fourth killing, as we now know, do we see further embellishment. A cigar band, cigar ashes, a knife with a past; earrings and perfume of the same; but since we may no longer be dealing with two assailants, a man and woman, we had best go carefully over things.’

Steam rose from the waiting soup. ‘Blanche claims that Edith told her and her brother that Pétain met their mother in the Hall the day Noëlle took her life, Louis.’

‘Then everything with this fourth killing is to point to Olivier as the killer.’

The soup would still be too hot in any case and Louis was trying hard to face up to the worst of this affair.

‘A body is found by Albert just after curfew, and at 7.32 a.m. Ménétrel pronounces Madame Dupuis dead, Hermann.’

‘Laval fails to mention the V for Victory, as does Ménétrel, but was it there at 7.32 or is it left afterwards, but before Laval’s arrival?’

Sadly it was a good question, for if it was present overnight, the Resistance could well have killed Madame Dupuis; if not, then the matchstick could either have been left just before or after Ménétrel’s viewing the corpse, either as a further warning to les gars or, if left by someone other than a résistant, to implicate them. ‘Left there overnight, perhaps,’ said St-Cyr, not liking it but motioning to Hermann to eat. ‘Crush up some bread. Here, let me do it for you.’

‘You know I can do that for myself!’

‘Yes! but I want the sculptress to see that we look after each other.’

‘A Résistance killing,’ muttered Kohler. Louis had seen that their discussing it couldn’t be avoided, but had the civil war begun? They did tend to leave other tokens of their presence, not just painted slogans. ‘But why, then, did Ménétrel fail to mention it?’

That, too, was a good question. ‘Fear perhaps. Also a need to first find answers for himself. Remember, please, with what we are dealing.’

‘An éminence grise who’s accustomed to holding things close and is fiercely competitive, Louis, but let’s set that one aside for the moment, eh? It would still have been dark at 7.32 Berlin Time. The police hadn’t yet been notified. Albert would have had to give the doctor his torch or lantern.’

The sun not up for an hour. ‘Darkness, then, and yes, someone who could come and go at will and with no one the wiser, but with less than twenty minutes in which to complete the task, since Laval was there at near to eight.’

‘Someone who has an ear glued so closely to the ground that he, she or they would know beforehand what’s to happen,’ said Kohler.

‘They’d have had to know Laval would leave his office. It’s too tight a timing, Hermann. The V for Victory was left when she was killed.’

‘Or afterwards but before her body was first discovered.’

‘The girl is killed, the knife removed and dropped into a portable toilet, one that Albert is sure to investigate. But why remove it in the first place if one wishes to focus attention on Olivier? Just what the hell is really going on, Hermann? Love letters are left for us to find? Sapphires that the Résistance should, by rights, have stolen? Press clippings for Laval?’

‘An identity card.’

‘Charles-Frédéric Hébert knew only of the earrings and the perfume, but was taken aback when he learned of the dress.’

‘As was Blanche Varollier.’

‘Light would have been needed if one was to duck into the Hall after the killing and Ménétrel’s visit to the corpse. Light and then darkness, Hermann. Night blindness. Olivier told me he suffered from it. Ten minutes were required for his eyes to adjust. He knew Céline Dupuis. The girl had asked him to write to Mademoiselle Charpentier and send the letter with Lucie Trudel …’

Kohler set his soup spoon down and sighed. ‘He’d have walked behind Céline along that corridor in the hotel, would have let her lead the way to freedom – was that what he told her, Louis? That the FTP had organized an escape for her? No struggle, the girl not trying to get away until in the Hall.’

‘Only to then be killed.’

‘Having tried her damnedest to remove and hide the earrings.’

Herr Kohler methodically added more bread to his soup and stirred it in. He was not happy, thought Inès, was disgruntled.

‘Could Céline have been trying to protect Blanche and Paul, Louis? She must have known they’d taken the earrings for Ménétrel, would have known de Fleury had been given them and had been told to tell her to wear them.’

‘Mademoiselle Charpentier was her friend and confidante, Hermann. She would have wanted to protect Olivier if only to protect the sculptress.’

‘Then Olivier didn’t walk her to her death – is that what you’re saying?’

The Sûreté’s plate of soup was offered and accepted, Herr Kohler’s empty one set aside.

‘Not at all. What I am saying is that, by openly confiding that he suffered from night blindness, was Monsieur Olivier attempting to convince us that he couldn’t possibly have done it? Ten minutes, Hermann. They walk from light into darkness and Céline escapes when they reach the Hall. She goes to ground having realized it and he …’

‘Holds the doors shut while the other one – Edith – hunts her down and kills her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she knew too much, had become a danger to them.’

Their sausage and sauerkraut arrived. More beer, more pastis and bread were called for, noted Inès, the two of them digging in as if at a last meal. Some cheese and even a few of the petits fours the ladies were enjoying were also requested. The noise of the dining room was seemingly everywhere, yet they ignored it totally.

‘Even if Olivier did send messages for Inès Charpentier to deliver to the FTP in Paris, Hermann – and I’m not suggesting he didn’t, given the opportunity, or denying that the girl would probably have willingly agreed to carry them – Lucie Trudel would not have been aware of them. Olivier’s no fool. After that first letter of his to Mademoiselle Charpentier, all others would have been enclosed in the envelopes from Madame Dupuis. He’d have insisted on it.’

Herr Kohler gestured with his fork, stabbing it towards his partner to emphasize the point, but what point? wondered Inès, still unable to take her eyes from their table.

‘Lucie could have opened one and read it, Louis, and if so, and if he’d learned of it, as he surely would have, Olivier would have gladly smothered her.’

‘I found no such letter in her room.’

‘Precisely! It had been removed because it had to be!’

‘And when she came downstairs to fetch a candle for that room of Noëlle Olivier’s,’ muttered St-Cyr, ‘Edith Pascal realized Olivier had confided to me that he was the FTP’s district leader, and had called him a fool. The night blindness would cover him for the death of Mademoiselle Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux, Hermann – an unlighted Grande établissement thermal, in a few minutes which were certainly not enough time for the blindness to clear. It would also suit with the death of Camille Lefébvre since how could one so afflicted readily escape into darkness as our Secrétaire général fired at him?’

‘But Lucie would have gone from darkness outside into light,’ said Hermann, cutting off another piece of sausage and then heaping his fork also with sauerkraut.

‘But … but you’re forgetting that her killer would have had to step into darkness to escape.’

Herr Kohler took a pull at his beer and then put two sausages on his partner’s plate, some ham, too, thought Inès, and potatoes, gesturing that St-Cyr absolutely must eat.

‘Now what about the husbands, Louis? Each of them had a great deal to lose and Ménétrel would certainly have put it to them in no uncertain terms that their girlfriends were informants.’

Good for Hermann.

‘Create the myth of a Resistance threat, Louis, by leaving that little V for Victory. Get the Garde to paint a few slogans, et cetera, and use it all not only to get rid of the traitors, for that is what the doctor would have thought of those girls, but to emphasize the need for increased security before that responsibility is taken from him.’

‘Find someone everyone knows about. A recluse,’ muttered Louis. ‘A cuckold, Hermann. One who must hate Pétain with a passion.’

‘But do they suspect he’s of the FTP? Could they? If he does suspect it, the doctor would damned well make certain Vichy took care of its own. He’d not want Gessler knowing that the resident recluse had had his ear so close to the ground that he’d found out everything ahead of time and had made a mockery of the Government.’

‘But does Olivier have that ear, mon vieux? Bien sûr, he implied he was well informed and couldn’t reveal his sources, but …’

‘Ménétrel could damned well have left that little V for Victory, Louis, knowing Laval would be certain to have a look at the corpse and become convinced of the campaign of terror.’

The doctor would have too. Ah merde, it didn’t bear thinking about, but had they stepped into a power struggle, each side now desperately making its countermoves – the rats, the corpse; the corpse, the knife and then the identity card, and then … then the dress and sapphire beads, the love letters, too, not only to complete the costume and the legend of the unfaithful wife but to emphasize the guilty husband?

Except that Hébert, and presumably Ménétrel, had not known the dress and necklace had been left in Céline Dupuis’s room. The love letters too … Had they been left, then, by Olivier or Edith Pascal?

‘Admit it, we need answers, Louis.’

A curt nod was given to indicate the occupants of a nearby table, Inès noted and again held her breath.

‘From that one in particular, mon vieux. The one in the vermilion suit, the Indian brass and pearl necklace and the North African turban. That thing on her head is from Morocco, isn’t it? My eyes … The lack of vitamin A …’

And Auguste-Alphonse Olivier, the years 1924 and ’25 when the Victor of Verdun had been married to that one for four and then five years. ‘Wounded … Nom de Jésus Christ, Louis, that hatchet wouldn’t just have threatened Pétain with his service revolver for fooling around on her, she’d have shot his balls off!’

‘Ah oui, certainement, but remember, please, that Ménétrel warned us to leave her out of things.’

‘Then go and talk to her and let’s hope he’s not been scheming and dreaming behind our backs.’

They were still at their table, St-Cyr now standing and about to leave to talk to Madame Pétain. ‘Inspectors, excuse me a moment, please. There … there is something I must tell you,’ said Inès. She would have to endure their suspicious gazes, she must! ‘The vomit Albert found in that toilet. It … it was mine, I think.’

‘Nom de Jésus Christ, Hermann, what the hell is it with Vichy? Does it bring out the liar, the arch-schemer, the thief, corrupter, cheat and killer in everyone we meet? Mademoiselle.’ Louis calmed himself. ‘Please explain yourself.’

‘Yesterday morning, after Dr Ménétrel had come to find you in the foyer of the Hôtel du Parc, but before I went to see Céline’s body for myself and Herr Kohler was surprised to find me in the Hall, I was so upset I … I had to throw up. Albert must have seen me dash into that outdoor toilet. The men were clearing the snow. Has he confused me with her killer and is this why he feels I’m such a threat? It must be. It must!’

‘She did look like death warmed over, Louis. I thought … Ah! that the iron man and his flash were what had made her so pale.’

‘And sickly? Talk to her, then, Hermann. Try to force yourself to wring every last drop of juice out of this grape, but if she lies, give her a pair of bracelets to wear and throw the key away! You are not leaving us, mademoiselle. From now until the close of this investigation, you are staying with us!’

‘That might not be possible, Louis.’

‘Possible or not, she has just given us information we should have had long ago!’

‘I didn’t kill her. I can have had nothing to do with any of the killings.’

‘But for some as yet unknown reason, mademoiselle, Albert Grenier has come to consider you a threat.’

‘Yes, but he’s confused. The knife dropped in there after her killing, the vomit only yesterday – you yourselves and your questions … questions are always very difficult for one such as he is. The portrait mask … Perhaps I shouldn’t have shown it to him. Maybe he has confused it with death. I … I don’t know. Really, I don’t.’

The kid was desperate. ‘Louis, for her to have come forward like this took courage. Go and talk to the ladies. Leave this one to me.’

‘With pleasure!’

The tightly bound, Moorish turban, a lamé of irregular patches of ochreous silk on a crimson background with thin, interlaced black lines, had flashes of silver everywhere. Beneath it, the wrinkled, well-powdered brow was further creased by a ruthlessly plucked and defiantly raised eyebrow, the expression accusative, the nose prominent, the lips wide, grimly pursed and turned down in distaste, the wrinkled upper lip, jaw and jowls fierce, the broad shoulders squared.

Formidable, thought St-Cyr, as he introduced himself, but then … then one of Houbigant’s scents delicately emanated from her. A woman of great taste …

‘Well?’ demanded Madame la Maréchale. ‘Why have you released the one and not arrested the other?’ At sixty-six years of age, Eugénie Hardon-Pétain could still defy time, but this one, he felt, would fight it to the end. Large teardrops of pearl, ruby and brass, one on either side and curving inwardly, flanked the many strands as if the necklace was a breastplate of office and she the female counterpart of the Wehrmacht’s Kettehhunde.

‘Albert Grenier is constantly confused, madame, and for some reason feels the sculptress is a threat to your husband. But since she is to remain with my partner and me at all times, and his father is looking after him, the boy is no longer a threat.’

‘And the other?’ she demanded fiercely.

It would be best to appear simple-minded. ‘Who?’

‘Nom de Dieu, are we to expect this from a chief inspector with an enviable reputation? Enviable, I say, if one is not guilty! Hébert, of course. That fornicateur deliberately introduced those girls to Bousquet and the other. He made certain they were tempted!’

‘The girls or the boys, madame?’

Ménétrel had been in a rage when he had learned of this one and his partner coming to Vichy; Bousquet hadn’t liked it either, but the Jamaick had insisted on it. St-Cyr and Kohler and no others! ‘You know very well whom I mean, and if you so much as breathe a word of what was to have gone on in that room of my husband’s, I will personally see that you are not just stripped of your rank, but are court-martialled and shot. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Abundantly, Madame la Maréchale. A few …’

‘Questions? Inspector, for your information, neither of these two ladies were anywhere near those girls when each of them was killed. I should think you would have discovered this by now!’

‘Then let me just jot that down. Ah yes, here it is. Friday 7 January at about 2.45 a.m.’

‘Camille Lefèbvre …’ hazarded Sandrine Richard, as the three of them swiftly exchanged glances. Bousquet’s woman of course.

Visibly withdrawn and obviously finding it hard to come forward, Élisabeth de Fleury said quietly, ‘One of my sons was ill, Inspector, and had a very high temperature. The flu – we all worry so much about it, for when it arrives it spreads like wildfire throughout the hotel and everyone can hear its first coughs and sneezes. I …’ She looked to Madame Pétain for guidance.

The rock curtly nodded.

‘I hurried along the hall to Dr Ménétrel’s suite in my nightdress and awakened him. He gave me a few of the aspirins he keeps in a special store and advised the damp cloths and a cold sponging, but … but it wasn’t until nearly noon the next day that … that my little Louis let the crisis pass and slept soundly. He’s only ten years old and looks so like his papa, I … Naturally I had moved the other two children out of the room and had let them sleep in my bed, daughter and son together, you understand, but only during such an emergency.’

Merde alors, and not like Blanche and Paul Varollier, eh? ‘And your husband, Madame de Fleury?’

Downcast, her sky-blue eyes rapidly moistened until two single tears were squeezed. ‘Had not come home,’ she whispered, her fists desperately clenching.

‘Didn’t he have to go into the office that morning? A Friday, madame? It wasn’t a day off, was it?’

How harsh his voice was, but her look must be frank, Madame Pétain had warned. You must face the Chief Inspector and answer truthfully as if your life was nothing more than an open book, ma chère. A little book, of course, and one not read even by your husband! ‘It would be best, Inspector, if you were to ask him where he was that night.’

‘He was with that woman of his, Inspector,’ charged Madame Pétain. ‘Céline Dupuis, a widow, yes! First at Chez Crusoe and then … then, mon pauvre détective, in a hotel room those men had rented for just such a purpose.’

And damn Bousquet and the others for not having told them of it! ‘The Hotel d’Allier?’ he bleated.

‘Pah! And advertise their identities like that? Isn’t an element of secrecy necessary with such as they? An overcrowded hotel like the Allier would not have been suitable. People coming and going at all times. Friends knocking at the door or, as is usual, I understand, in that place, simply barging in.’

And never mind Lucie Trudel lying naked in hopes Deschambeault would come to her the morning she was smothered!

‘The Hotel Ruhl, Inspector,’ said Sandrine Richard. A fresh packet of cigarettes lay in front of her but none had been taken since Madame Pétain did not use tobacco. ‘Room 3-17. An old bed with a sagging mattress that reeks of stale urine, a plain washbasin, second-hand water pitcher, mirror whose backing is clouded, thin towels … Always there are the hand towels and the notices, now in Deutsch, too, warning of unsafe sex!’

‘Near the lift? Was the room near it?’ he heard himself asking. They were all watching him closely. Élisabeth de Fleury moved her cup and saucer from in front of her, the teaspoon telegraphing a nervousness that alarmed the others.

‘Next to the service staircase,’ she said, not averting her gaze though she must have wanted to. A rather pleasant-looking, very pale and fair-haired woman in her early forties. ‘Inspector, I … I know this only because I had to see where my husband and Madame Dupuis had been meeting.’

‘And you’re certain he spent the night of 6–7 January with the dancer?’

Ballet instructress, piano player, cabaret singer and whore. Honoré would have his alibi, and she herself? she asked, and answered, I will have mine. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m absolutely certain.’

Ah damn the woman! ‘Then please explain how you know this.’ He held up a hand. ‘Neither of you ladies are to answer for her.’ Hermann … why the hell hadn’t Hermann come to listen in and help? The sculptress, he reminded himself. Inès Charpentier is with him. The table was directly behind and he couldn’t, daren’t turn to throw a pleading glance that way. Merde!

‘I …’ began Madame de Fleury only to hesitate.

‘Madame, one of your sons was gravely ill. You were at his bedside. You couldn’t have left him until what? Well after noon that Friday? You were exhausted, hadn’t slept, were sick with worry …’

‘All right! All right! I asked my daughter, Monique, to stay home from school while I went to that hotel to … to touch the pillows!’

And smell their cases before throwing back the covers to examine the sheets of an unmade bed? ‘You had a key, did you?’

‘No! I …’

‘She paid the concierge two hundred francs, Inspector,’ said Sandrine Richard, taking out a cigarette only to remember suddenly, at a look from Madame Pétain, that she shouldn’t have. ‘We often did this, she and I, if you must know. Eugénie also, for proof. Solid proof!’

Fresh tears wet Elisabeth de Fleury’s cheeks. Madame Richard reached across the table to take her by the hands, scattering shreds of tobacco, for she’d unconsciously crushed the cigarette.

‘Can’t you see how upset she is?’ spat Madame Pétain, having seen that this Sûreté had taken note of the spilled tobacco. ‘Aren’t the photographs sufficient for you, Inspector? Must you have all the details, coarse as they are?’

‘Everything,’ he said.

‘Merde, how can you be so insensitive? A man whose first wife left him with an empty house … the house of his mother, I understand, the second wife running off with the Hauptmann Steiner, only to be blown to pieces by a Resistance bomb on her reluctant return to that same house? Her child as well!’

Ah! what could one say? ‘We police are seldom sensitive, Madame la Maréchale. It’s part of the job. The victims, the blood, the oedematous fluid and aborted foetuses … Always a certain detachment is necessary, but they don’t teach this at the Academy, of course, and wisely, I think, as it might dissuade some from taking up the profession.’

‘Touché, eh? You didn’t even know of that room, did you?’

‘We’re learning.’

‘Then listen, Inspector. Though the doctor is certainly no friend of mine, he will tell you Elisabeth did awaken him that evening at about 2 a.m., and if you. press him, I’m sure he will confess to having made a little joke of it. The first words uttered to her by that jackal were that if she desired extramarital sex, she must come to his office during the day, never to his home!’

One had best let that pass. ‘And this room at the Hotel Ruhl, madame. How long have you ladies known of it?’

‘Since early last summer. Since Sandrine and then Élisabeth found the courage to admit their suspicions were more than justified. It was Sandrine who first saw her husband leaving that place just before that nurse of his, he going to the right, she to the left.’

Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux.

Would it hurt to volunteer a little without first consulting madame? wondered Élisabeth. ‘It’s an old place, Inspector, whose rooms are mostly taken by long-term residents who are not well off.’

‘A few of the rooms are reserved for visiting civil servants whose positions demand little better,’ said Madame Pétain tartly. ‘Gaëtan-Baptiste Deschambeault found it for them.’

Julienne’s husband, Lucie’s lover …

‘That grigou would have made certain the bank covered the cost, Inspector,’ shot Sandrine Richard.

‘Grigou, madame?’

Visibly flustered – realizing she had inadvertently said something she shouldn’t have – she managed a brief and self-conscious grin. ‘A nickname he uses with his wife and family when they demand too much.’

Had she read the notes Deschambeault and Céline had left for Lucie? he wondered. Had these three ‘ladies’ murdered that poor girl, the others also, or hired someone to do it? ‘Is the hotel a maison de passe?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t we just said it was used for that purpose?’ spat Madame Pétain.

‘Committee members know the hotel well,’ he muttered, jotting it down in front of them. ‘And at the Grand établissement thermal, Madame la Maréchale?’

This one was trouble. Vipère that he was, the little doctor had been correct about that! ‘Mademoiselle Mailloux couldn’t resist letting us know she and Alain André often shared a bath.’

The three exchanged glances, Sandrine Richard taking up the thread of it. ‘About three months before she was drowned, that woman entered our steam room as if by mistake, Inspector. No towel, le costume d’Ève complet and flaunting herself in front of me and my friends. I … I was so taken aback, I didn’t know what to do. Eugenie calmly told her to leave.’

‘Calmly?’

The Inspector had put his question to Elisabeth and was again holding up the hand of justice to prevent interference.

‘She … she shrieked at her to leave,’ confessed Madame de Fleury. ‘Mademoiselle Mailloux blanched and muttered, “Sorry”.’

‘What, exactly, was shrieked?’

That we’d kill her if she didn’t go? ‘I … I can’t recall the precise words. “Get out!” I think.’

‘But she lost her smile, lost composure, was frightened and turned abruptly away? Apologized?’

‘There was not time for that, but as to the rest, yes.’

‘Three months …’ he muttered.

‘Prior to 9 December, Inspector. I didn’t kill her. I swear it!’ said Madame Richard.

Élisabeth de Fleury quickly took her by the hands to anxiously say, ‘We’re in the restaurant. Others will hear you!’

‘The 9th of September,’ he said. ‘One always has to jot these little details down.’

‘The 10th,’ grated Madame Pétain. Others were trying hard to listen but not let on! ‘Thursday afternoons are always our times at the thermal palace. First the steam and then the baths, the hot and then the cold, and then the douche to tighten up the pores. Mademoiselle Mailloux really did want to embarrass Sandrine in front of us, Inspector. That tart was shameful and totally without conscience.’

‘And like Noëlle Olivier, Madame la Maréchale?’

To say, How. dare you, would be of little use. ‘Eventually you had to get at that, didn’t you, Inspector? The knife, the earrings – even the perfume that bitch wore? Well, listen closely then, mon pauvre Sûreté. The Maréchal and I have always had two places of residence. His and mine. It’s very discreet and convenient, and he has always made certain of this. In Paris, after our marriage in September of 1920, he rented and furnished two flats at 6 and 8 square de Latour-Maubourg – you know the Left Bank well, I’m sure – and then … then in the house at numéro 8 when a suitable one became available for me. Here, too, in the Hotel du Parc, myself in the Majestic. Bien sûr, in our marriage we live apart and together, my being invited only to some of the many dinner parties and functions he attends; he and his current mistress, if he has one, to others. That’s how it has always been with us.’

‘Madame, I merely …’

‘Did you think to insult me so as to let my anger give you an advantage? Did you think I wasn’t aware of Madame Olivier’s infatuation or that of the countless others Henri Philippe has had? In June 1920, not three months before our wedding – the banns had been announced well ahead of time, let me assure you! – he took up with Marie-Louise Regad, an old flame who had recently been made a widow. Then just a few months after our wedding, it was Madame Jacqueline de Castex, another widow and old flame whose daughter and her husband now live in the Hôtel du Parc to constantly remind me of that affair and to whom he regularly makes visits, not me. Never me! The Maréchal has a reputation for going after the married ones, hasn’t he, even to chasing myself, and widows especially! But … but I must tell you.’ She would pause now to catch a breath and hold it, Eugenie said to herself. ‘No other woman in France can lick the back of her husband’s head every time she mails a postcard to the north, or a letter in the south. Moi-même, seulement, Inspector.’

Only myself. ‘Did all, or any of you, pay to have those girls killed?’

‘And not kill them ourselves – is this the reason you sigh? Really, Inspector, that is so typically male-chauvinistic of you! Not capable of killing to save our marriages? Not able to vote, of course, nor to open a bank account without one’s husband’s or father’s permission? That, too, is only understandable in such a male-dominated society, though one has to wonder about it when so many of our men are either dead or in prisoner-of-war camps. But women are allowed to go out to work and each day eight million of us do. More than in any other country in Europe, even now during this dreadful conflict. And of course, when they get home, there are always the meals, the washing, the cleaning, the children, the endless queues for food …’

‘Madame, please just answer the question!’

‘And not complain about the disgraceful conditions in this and the other hotels to which we have been assigned? Cooking on a single hotplate? Washing the clothes, the sheets and blankets in a hand sink if one is lucky? The tisane of linden blossom here, an occasional meal, but endless days of drudgery in overcrowded quarters, and on top of all of this, we are expected to ignore the philandering!’

‘Madame, the question.’

‘First, the billets doux that old fool wrote to Céline Dupuis.’ Her fingers snapped!

‘There were others he wrote to Noëlle Olivier,’ cautioned St-Cyr.

Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Is it that you wish to strike a bargain?’

‘It could be arranged. A small fire.’

‘Then listen closely once again. Ménétrel found out those girls were informants for les Allemands. Though he has swelled far beyond the mediocre capacity of his head, even I would never underestimate his loyalty to my husband. He’d have definitely had those girls singled out and killed, both to teach them a lesson and to set one for others, and to remove the breach of security they represented.’

‘And even though you must hate him for what he did to you with Noëlle, Charles-Frédéric Hébert would have been the one to do it for him?’

‘Yes!’

‘The Hôtel Ruhl, then. Would the doctor have been aware of Room 3-17?’

No glances were exchanged. Madame Pétain noticed a pulled thread in the tablecloth and plucked fastidiously at it.

‘Sandrine and Élisabeth haven’t had to watch that place in some time, Inspector. Even when they did, their surveillance was limited to those occasions when they felt certain something must be going on, often during the cinq à sept. Fortunately there is a café just across the boulevard de l’Hôtel de Ville, one not much frequented by those of the Government.’

‘Seedy?’

‘A little.’

‘Madame, these two would have stood out like sore thumbs. Yourself also!’

‘Certainly, but the patron is a very understanding man, a White Russian who is married to a Jewess. Ménétrel, to his shame I must say, is our most violent anti-Semite, so you see he could not possibly have been aware of our having used that café unless …’

Merde, what the hell were the three of them after now?

‘Albert Grenier,’ said Élisabeth de Fleury softly. ‘On several occasions I saw Albert going into or coming from that hotel, and often just after Madame Dupuis had left it.’

The resident rat-catcher …

‘And once, Elisabeth, someone else,’ prompted Sandrine.

‘Ah oui. His mother. At least, at first that is who I thought it was, but then Madame la Maréchale corrected me.’

‘Edith Pascal,’ sighed St-Cyr, for Edith obtained newspapers from Albert. Sacré nom de nom, must he feel so completely out of his depth with these three?

It was Madame Pétain who said, ‘Albert would have told his grand-uncle of that room, Inspector.’

‘And Charles-Frédéric Hébert would have told Dr Ménétrel,’ said Sandrine Richard, ‘but more recently, I think, and just before the killings started.’

This thing goes round and round, Hermann would have said.

‘Inspector,’ confided Madame Pétain, her forearms now resting on the table, ‘Charles-Frédéric is indebted to the doctor for the position he holds at that château of Herr Abetz’s and for the dreams he harbours of its return. Hébert must have known those girls were informants. Once the doctor had learned of their betraying the country, he would not have let that one forget it.’

‘So Hébert and Albert killed them?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And when, please, Madame de Fleury, did you first see Albert and Mademoiselle Pascal going into that hotel?’

‘First?’ she bleated.

‘First,’ he said.

‘Last August. The 16th, a Sunday afternoon. Honoré and I were to have taken the children to the town’s swimming pool in the Allier, but … but at the last moment, my husband said he had to go in to work and that I should take them myself. “The children mustn’t be disappointed,” he said. “Here, let me give you a little something for their ices.”’

The bastard. Saccharin and ersatz flavours, and well before the raid when photos were taken at the château.

The sculptress had had some soup and a few of the egg-salad sandwiches from one of the trolleys and was now on her first cup of tea – ‘Real tea,’ she had exclaimed, ‘and petits fours like Céline and I used to buy from Monsieur Bibeau’s pâtisserie in the rue Mouffetard.’

Kohler knew he shouldn’t have let her enjoy herself. He hadn’t put the squeeze on her all the while Louis had been at that other table – still was, for that matter – though they desperately needed answers from her, if for no other reason than her own safety. Yet he couldn’t ask if she’d delivered messages in Paris for Olivier – that would be far too risky for Louis and himself, should Gessler get his hands on her. Somehow he had to go around that one and yet prise what he could from her about it.

‘You get sick a lot, don’t you? First in that snow-bound toilet and then in the sacristy.’

Flustered – caught out as if having taken something she shouldn’t have – Inès reluctantly set aside the half-eaten little wedge of Genoese sponge cake, with its filling of butter cream, glaze of apricot jam and coating of white icing. The meringues had looked so heavenly, the miniature éclairs also, but had Herr Kohler fed her simply to loosen her tongue?

‘My stomach hasn’t been right since the Defeat, Inspector. The constant diet of vegetables is impossible. Carrots always; rillettes and chops of rutabaga when I can’t stand the taste and woody texture of swedes and know the hospitals are full of appendicitis cases and other bowel complaints. The “rabbit stew” in the little restaurant I sometimes go to only tells me Monsieur Lapin has leaped the casserole and made good his escape, leaving mystery meat behind. The grey National causes gas and diarrhoea, and I can understand fully the concern of the doctors. I once dissolved some of that bread in a bowl of water to see what rose to the top and sank to the bottom, and have ever since wished I hadn’t. What one doesn’t know is often better than what one does, n’est-ce pas? Sawdust, little bits of straw, the wings and carapaces of beetles or weevils perhaps, fibres of some kind – cotton, I think, but hemp also from the grain bags – and a slimy coagulation of grey-green to black particles that are greasy and not of pepper.’

Rat shit but merde alors, hadn’t she unwound her tongue about it! ‘And at the bottom?’ he asked.

‘Sand-sized grit and larger particles from the grinding stones. That is what gave me the toothache I complained of and still have. A hairline crack, I think, in an old filling.’

‘And oil of bitter almonds instead of cloves …’

Had he not believed her? ‘Yes. Cheated twice. First by the Government adding weight with sand, and then by the salaud I had to deal with on the marché noir. He swore it was oil of cloves and I … I was stupid enough to have trusted him.’

Dentists seldom could offer anaesthetic. These days everyone was avoiding the drill, even Louis. ‘Albert didn’t just reject you. At the Jockey Club he tried to stick as close to you as possible and then, at the chateau, tried to kill you. Any ideas?’

‘None. I know it looks bad and, believe me, I’m trying hard to understand and forgive him.’

Her tea was getting cold. ‘Then start by telling me why that one is also wary of you.’

‘Blanche …?’ Did Herr Kohler suspect Monsieur Olivier had warned her about them, that Blanche and her brother had forced Edith Pascal to let them into his house? ‘Perhaps it is that she’s afraid of what Céline might have told me in the letters Lucie brought.’

‘That she and her brother live alone and share the same bed?’

Incest … was this what Herr Kohler wanted her to say? ‘That Blanche and Paul, being all but identical twins, are very close and that she worries constantly about his health and looks after him as a mother would.’

‘And doesn’t wonder what Céline told you of Olivier, or that one of himself, or even whether the two of you have met since you arrived in Vichy?’

So there it was: Olivier. ‘We haven’t met. I want to but … but there hasn’t been time yet.’ A lie of course, but would Herr Kohler accept it?

‘Too busy following us around, eh? What about Edith, then? Have you met her?’

She must force herself to gaze frankly at him. ‘Neither one nor the other, Inspector, and as for my “following” you and the Chief Inspector around, it is, as I’ve said, only because I’m waiting to get on with the job the Musée sent me to do and because I want, also, to find out who killed my friend.’

‘Lucie doesn’t seem to matter much to you.’

‘Yet we met in Paris and so I should be concerned? Mon Dieu, I am, but naturally more about Céline.’

Pas mal, pas mal. Not bad for an answer. ‘That wax portrait in your case …’

‘Needs only a touch-up, yes. If okayed by Monsieur le Maréchal and Dr Ménétrel, I may, I suppose, need do nothing further.’

Honesty at last, was that it? ‘Then you’re not here for as long as it takes.’

‘Well, in a way I am. Of course, I should have told you it was all but complete. I … I had thought to but … but wanted to give myself time to find out what I could about Céline’s murder.’

‘And you’re certain you’ve never met or spoken to Olivier? You wouldn’t have used the telephone to contact him? Few do these days if they can avoid it and there isn’t one in that house of his in any case, is there?’

‘I … I wouldn’t know. He … he did write to me once, as I’ve said, Inspector, and Céline did know he was my father’s compagnon d’armes.’

‘Verdammt! I knew I’d forgotten something.’

Taking three snapshots from a jacket pocket, he looked at her and then at each of them. ‘This one, I think,’ he said. ‘But first, admit that you knew Olivier had been forced by Pétain into giving the firing squad its orders.’

After the Battle of Chemin des Dames … after the mutiny that followed in May 1917. She mustn’t let her eyes moisten, must gaze steadily at him and say clearly, ‘That just can’t be true, Inspector. Monsieur Olivier would have told me of it in his letter and begged my forgiveness. Instead, he wrote only of what a fine comrade Papa was, how brave and kind and honest, and how he had spoken constantly of me, the child he was never to see.’

The photo showed them playing chess in the trenches, and for a moment Inès couldn’t stop her eyes from smarting, her fingers from trembling. ‘Could you let me have this?’ she asked, her voice unfortunately faint. ‘I … I haven’t many, and none like it.’

Jesus, merde alors, just what the hell was she hiding? ‘Later, when we’ve our killer or killers.’ The photos of Noëlle Olivier as a cabaret dancer and with a grey gelding just like the one Lucie had kept were hardly noticed. ‘Now let me have that handbag of yours Albert was so interested in.’

‘You’ve already seen its contents. Would you scatter them in front of all these ladies and treat me as a common criminal, Inspector, when I’m most definitely not? Believe me, there’s nothing but the usual. A lipstick I seldom use because of the ersatz things they put in it. The key to my studio. My papers, I assure you, are fully in order. There are some tissues, a pencil and paper to sketch with if I wish …’

‘The phial of perfume. Let’s start with that.’

The Shalimar … ‘My aunt loved that scent.’

‘And so did the Maréchal who gave it to Noëlle Olivier and insisted she wear it.’

‘As did Céline and myself. A coincidence.’

‘And nothing else, eh?’ he snorted with disbelief.

Though he didn’t dump her bag out on the table, Herr Kohler found the phial and, unscrewing its cap, brought it to his nose, holding it there until satisfied. ‘Now tell me why the one with the almond oil isn’t here?’

But is it with the portrait mask, the blocks of beeswax and sculpting tools? Sticking plasters, too, and iodine with which to patch up battered detectives … ‘I simply tried the oil, Inspector, and finding it wasn’t what it was supposed to have been, put it in my case with my other first-aid supplies.’

‘Having spilled a touch of it?’

‘Yes, unfortunately, since I could, quite possibly, have used it for baking if … if I could have somehow managed to find the flour.’

‘Then tell me why that one has just brought your valise into the restaurant?’

Her back had been to them, but now the sculptress turned as she hesitantly got to her feet to look towards the entrance.

From her solitude next to the windows, Blanche Varollier had done the same thing.

Inès’s hand was limp. The kid didn’t even tremble. Too frightened and with good reason, thought Kohler, having stepped close to her.

Without a fedora, but with briefcase crammed under one arm and valise gripped in the other hand, Gessler stood with Herr Jännicke just inside the entrance, potted Kentia palms in dark blue jardinieres to their left and right, the ex-shoemaker short, broad-shouldered and bull-necked, the top button of the lead-grey overcoat undone; the other one tall, and with his black overcoat all buttoned up, the scarf loose, the black homburg in hand, his thick black hair receding and combed straight back off the high, wide brow.

Gessler’s expression was grim and sour, for he’d not liked the sight of all these ladies indulging themselves so frivolously when there was a war on, and for him there had always been a class war, ever since the days of the Blood Purge.

The big ears stood out, the eyes squinted with distaste, slanting downward to the left and right of a nose that had, no doubt, been bloodied by barrel staves more than once for the sake of the Party.

His tie was crooked; Herr Jännicke’s was perfect. Gessler’s moustache was grey, not brown like the Führer’s, so he hadn’t dyed it like many did. The face was grey too, and wide, the close-cropped Fritz haircut all but reaching to Herr Jännicke’s right shoulder.

‘You let me handle this,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Don’t you dare disgrace me.’

‘My valise …’ It was all the kid could manage, for the two had now set out to join them. Gessler knocked against anyone who happened to be in the way. The gossip died as arrest seemed imminent until silence swelled to fill the void and all other motion had ceased.

Louis hadn’t got to his feet. Louis knew his revolver was in his overcoat pocket here at this table.

Heels didn’t clash, salutes were not given. The valise was set on the table, smashing things and causing the sculptress’s teacup to tip. Milk and cold tea flooded into the tablecloth.

They didn’t shout, didn’t shriek. They simply blocked any exit, Herr Gessler speaking rapidly in Deutsch, Inès trying desperately to fight down her sickness and pick out a word or two of meaning. Berlin … Kohler’s reputation as a … Slacker? she wondered, watching each of them closely, trying hard not to bolt and run but to remain still so as to fathom what was happening to her … to her!

‘Dieser Fliegentöter, Kohler. Ich warte schon …’ I’ve been waiting … For your report? Four murders and you arrest an Idiot and then let him go? ‘Was ist mit ihn los, Herr Jännicke?’ What is it with him?

‘Herr Oberstleutnant, I can explain.’

‘Verfluchte Kripo, Verfluchte Franzosen …’ Cursed Kripo, cursed French … ‘ Vermehrende Idioten.’ Breeding idiots … ‘Alle Halbheit ist taub, Kohler.’ Half-measures are no measures. He can’t be ‘dieser Fliegentöter. The Flykiller. But better in ‘den Zelleri’, than free.

‘Jawohl, Herr Oberst.’

‘Gut,’ but you’ll … not find him in the cellars of the Hôtel du Parc … ‘Dieser Handkoffer, Kohler,’ this case … was open. That father of his can’t … can’t find him either. Ah no!

‘Bitte, Fräulein, go through your case. Damage, theft … we must know of this.’

Her valise … She must empty it for them … ‘Oui, monsieur. I … I had forgotten Albert’s father was looking after it for me.’

Kohler translated what she’d said. Gessler lit a cigarette and offered one to Herr Jännicke. The kid lifted out the tray … The phial of almond oil now held only dregs, just dregs. Had Albert sampled it? he wondered. Wet … the tray was wet and reeked of bitter almond. The mask, swaddled in its white linen cloths, stared up at them.

She nodded. Faintly she said in French, ‘Nothing has been taken or damaged. Albert must simply have wanted another look at the portrait and … and accidentally emptied the phial when putting it back.’

Herr Kohler translated.

‘Then please be more careful in future.’

‘Bernard … Bernard,’ sang out Madame Pétain as Dr Ménétrel came into the restaurant on the run only to stop dead at the sight of Gessler and Jännicke. ‘Bernard, the Chief Inspector St-Cyr was just telling us of Paris. Not a word about those dreadful murders or your part in them.’

Stung by her words, furious with her and with them, no doubt, the portly doctor turned on his heels, collared the maître d’ and bent his ear before retreating to the lobby and the Hôtel du Parc.

It was the maître d’ who, on coming to their table, quietly confided, ‘Mademoiselle, the doctor wishes you to present your portrait to the Maréchal for his appraisal tomorrow morning at 9.50.’

‘Where?’ she asked, her voice far from strong.

‘Why here, of course. Behind that.’

The screen that kept the great one from prying eyes while he ate.

‘Right after his breakfast briefing. A few minutes can be spared, mademoiselle. No more.’

A few minutes … ‘Yes. Why, yes, of course. I understand perfectly. Merci.’