10

As the dining room was cleared, the detectives again sat alone at their table. Blanche had remained at hers, Sandrine at Madame Pétain’s. And I? mused Inès silently. I sit to the far side looking beyond hurrying waiters and across vacated tables to Herr Kohler, and he at me. Kripo that he was, Kohler had realized exactly how terrified of arrest and torture she’d been. He had watched her closely as she’d taken the valise with her and had set it carefully on the floor at her feet. He’d known she’d been silently repeating Aves; had known she had all but run from Gessler and the other one.

Madame Pétain and Madame de Fleury had gone to dress for the trip the detectives had insisted on to the clinic of Dr Normand and his patient, Julienne Deschambeault. Sandrine Richard would drive the two ladies to the clinic. And I? Inès demanded and answered, I must go in either car. And Blanche? she wondered. Would Blanche come with them or …

Herr Kohler nodded at her. ‘Gessler’s just given us a reminder, Louis. Having sealed the town off and put the Sonderkommando to work scouring the countryside, he and Herr Jännicke will quietly let us do the job here. If we foul up, we’ll get the blame; if we succeed, he’ll take the credit.’

‘Merde, this investigation, Hermann. Vichy is like a Pandora’s box and Chinese puzzle all in one. Every time we lift a lid, there’s another waiting!’

Tobacco was needed; crumbs from the meal were carelessly scattered on the tablecloth. Did they have the bits and pieces arranged before them again? wondered Inès. Would St-Cyr insist on the plodding, methodical approach in spite of the need for haste?

Would Herr Kohler’s impatience get the better of them both?

When it was time to leave, they refused to let her travel with Madame Richard and the others. Though it couldn’t be so very dark outside the Hotel Majestic, due to the snow cover, everything was jet black to her. No details at all, no silhouettes. Just nothing but an empty, empty darkness, she wanting desperately to reach out and feel her way yet knowing she mustn’t, that she must hide the blindness from them at all cost.

Suddenly she went down hard at an unseen step, Herr Kohler grabbing her. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry so much. You’re not under arrest.’

Arrest? Ah, Sainte Mère, why had he to say it? No lights were on that she could see but she knew there must be the blue-blinkered torches of pedestrians, those of the tail lights and headlamps of vélos, vélo-taxis and horse-drawn carriages. Wasn’t that a cyclist she heard call out a warning?

They crossed some pavement, went out on to a road, reached a car, any car – their car – she clutching her valise and handbag tightly and telling herself it’s a two-door Peugeot. The back seat … You’ll have to squeeze into it …

‘A moment, mademoiselle,’ said St-Cyr, the door opening at last …

Now put the valise in carefully ahead of you, Inès told herself. That’s it, ma chère. You’re doing fine. Now follow it. Say something. Anything to hide your blindness. ‘It must be late. People are hurrying home.’

Still there were none of the firefly lights as there were in Paris every time she’d had to go out at night and had had to wait, leaning against a wall or lamp-post, until her eyes had adjusted and her terror had abated with relief at the sight of them and their owners’ silhouettes.

‘You must drink bilberry tisanes,’ Monsieur Olivier had said well before dawn yesterday when she had arrived in Vichy, he having come to meet her at a café near the railway station. ‘Vitamin A, mademoiselle. Too many are suffering from its lack, not here, though. Here, in Vichy, the problem hasn’t surfaced because we’ve only had a full blackout since 11 November. Before that, every second street-lamp was always lit.’

He’d been able to see perfectly when walking from a lighted room into darkness, she abysmally not at all.

When the car pulled over, Inès felt they must be near the main casino, which was at the far end of the Parc des Sources. St-Cyr got out; Kohler lit a cigarette, then offered her one, only to say, ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot. You don’t use them, do you?’

‘Is there some trouble?’ she asked, turning to look behind them but knowing she still couldn’t see a thing.

‘Trouble? Louis is just telling them we’ve had a change of plan.’

She blinked. She would concentrate hard on where she felt his cigarette must be, but each time she had experienced night blindness, it had taken a little longer for her eyes to adjust, each time it had become more terrifying. To not have one’s sight, to be totally blind and a courier, a résistante …

Quickly the kid crossed herself and kissed her fingertips, had forgotten to wear her gloves.

‘They’re not happy,’ grunted St-Cyr on returning, abruptly yanking his side door closed. ‘A visit to the morgue will do them good, Herman!’

The morgue … Ah Jésus, cher Jésus, Céline, what have you got me into?

The lights were blinding. Always, too, it was like this when coming straight from darkness into strong light, the pain suddenly searing.

‘You should have told me of this!’ Olivier had said of her night blindness. He’d not been happy to have discovered it, had hauled her up sharply and had said harshly, ‘You can’t see, can you?’

They’d been on the street, had just left the café and its crowd of railway workers …

The morgue was cold and brightly lit, the stench of disinfectant, attendant cigarette smoke, blood and rotting corpses, formaldehyde and bad drains causing her stomach to tightly knot.

Madame Pétain took a firm grip on her. Blanche and Sandrine Richard were behind them.

‘This way, ladies,’ said St-Cyr, as if enjoying the discomfort he was causing. ‘We will only be a moment but the visit is necessary. Either we have one killer or two, and Dr Laloux may, perhaps, now be able to enlighten us.’

‘Laloux …’ muttered Madame Pétain. ‘Isn’t he the socialist Henri Philippe put on trial at Riom in the spring of ’41 with Daladier, Blum and the others of the Front Populaire? You’ll get nothing useful from him, Inspector. No matter what the courts decided, people like that are parasites.’

‘Doryphores, madame?’

‘Précisément!’

‘Then you’d best meet him.’

Élisabeth de Fleury had stayed in the outer office with Herr Kohler, Inès told herself. They went along a corridor, a steel door was opened, the sound of it echoing, the air now much, much colder, the stench sharper. Water … water was running. A tap? she wondered.

The sound of it was silenced at the sight of them. Hands were now be being dried – coroner’s hands.

‘Mademoiselle, you don’t look well,’ hazarded Madame Pétain. ‘Inspector, surely it’s not necessary for this one to join us? Here, let me take your case.’

Smile faintly, Inès told herself, say, ‘Merci, Madame la Maréchale, it’s most kind of you.’

‘Get her a chair, imbétile!’ said the woman to the attendant. ‘A chair! Surely you know what that is?’

‘There are none,’ the man replied. ‘No one ever sits in here.’

‘I’m all right really. I … I’ve already seen Céline.’

Her left hand was quickly guided to a railing of some sort, her fingers instinctively wrapping themselves around it.

‘Merci, madame,’ she heard herself say again as the sound of metal rollers grew louder and one drawer was opened, then another, another and another.

‘Draw back the shrouds,’ said St-Cyr.

‘Fully?’ yelped the attendant.

‘Merde alors, had I not wanted this, I’d not have asked for it, monsieur, and if you smirk again at these ladies, you can kiss your job and pension goodbye!’

Although they were still clear enough, the images were blurred by her tears, Inès knew. Madame Pétain had left her at some distance, standing beside an empty pallet. The large hats she and Madame Richard wore were of felt and widely brimmed, Madame la Maréchale’s with a silvery pin and of a striking blue to match the woollen overcoat, scarf and gloves, the back straight, the woman tall; Sandrine Richard’s chapeau had a wide band and was charcoal grey, the overcoat the same.

Blanche stood alone, a little apart from them. Her back, too, was straight, her head held high but not proud, for apprehension was in her look, despair also.

‘The rats, Jean-Louis,’ said a scruffy-bearded, grey little man with wire-rimmed spectacles whose right lens was broken. A man who’d been in prison, Inès told herself. ‘One can always tell with them,’ Olivier had said.

Hurriedly the coroner threw Madame Pétain a glance but otherwise ignored her.

‘The rats,’ said St-Cyr, ‘five of which were found in this one’s bed.’

Their putrid little corpses lay belly up and split open, the mush of entrails puddled. Madame Pétain was curious, seeming to tower over St-Cyr and the coroner; Madame Richard stood back a little and tense, so very tense, not at the sight of those little corpses, ah no, Inès told herself, but in expectation of what the coroner might have to say about their butchering.

‘Snared, Jean-Louis, by one who is very skilful at such things. Two of them finished off with a stick of some sort.’

‘The leg of a kitchen chair,’ acknowledged St-Cyr. ‘And the others?’ he asked, raptly leaning over them himself in spite of the stench.

‘Death by strangulation in their snares, the time at least a good twenty-four hours before that of the victim.’

‘And then?’

‘All of them more recently butchered with one of these, I think. The blade has a deep nick in it – one that hasn’t yet been ground out and is burred. As it cut towards the scrotum, it caught on the penile bone and tissues and ripped the genitals out of three of them. A hasty butchering. One that took, I would estimate, no more than three or four minutes. The blade was then wiped on the sheets, tearing the cloth as well.’

Coroner Laloux took from his smock a worn, black-handled Opinel pocket-knife, its blade more robust than that of a Laguiole, somewhat shorter, too, and wider, not nearly so graceful or piercing a weapon, though a knife that sickened all the same, if not more …

‘Albert Grenier uses a butcher’s knife,’ Inès heard herself blurt. ‘Albert doesn’t have a knife like that, but …’ She caught herself and turned away, saying silently to herself, But I know who does. I do!

‘As to whether a man or a woman, Jean-Louis, I can but say that whoever it was knew anatomy well enough.’

The sex and the livers … Sandrine Richard hadn’t moved in all this time. Lips parted in apprehension, her gaze was fixed on the little gap between St-Cyr and Madame Pétain and her cheeks were drained of colour. She was swallowing hard, and one could imagine her thinking, Gaëtan-Baptiste killed his mistress, Honoré his, and Alain Andre his. Or did she simply think, St-Cyr knew who had done it?

But could he?

They moved to the victims, Blanche trailing them, herself staying put because Céline had been so beautiful, so full of hope and yet … and yet so worried.

Scared shitless – why can’t you admit it? Inès asked herself harshly, only to hear St-Cyr saying to Madame Richard, ‘Madame, please take a good look at this one and tell me if you killed her?’

Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux …

Revolting to look at, putrefaction’s suppuratingly livid encrustations of bluish green to yellow and blue-black blotches were everywhere on her legs, mons and stomach, her breasts, shoulders, throat and face. A network of veins, dark plum-blue to black, ran beneath an opalescent to translucent skin. The brow was high and wide, the skin like wax where not yet discoloured, the chin narrow, the nose sharp, the stench terrible.

Discharge webbed an unplugged nostril, the cotton wool having fallen out.

‘There are bruises, Jean-Louis, and scratches,’ said Laloux. ‘Though drunk on champagne, Mademoiselle Mailloux fought hard and her killer must surely have borne evidence of the struggle.’

‘Scratches?’ demanded Madame Pétain.

Dr Laloux did not look at her. ‘Though mostly removed during the initial autopsy and not saved or detailed sufficiently, some scrapings of the assailant’s skin were left.’

‘How can you be sure It was a male?’ Madame Pétain asked.

‘I can’t, nor can I say it was from a female, madame, but …’

‘Hair … the colour of the killer’s hair?’ she demanded. Sandrine Richard winced, St-Cyr noticing the exchange as he noticed everything.

‘Hairs would, I feel, have been present, madame. At least one or two, but whatever evidence was present has since been removed.’

And lost, but deliberately: was that what he implied? wondered Inès. It must be, for Laloux was not at all content.

Blanche couldn’t take her gaze from the corpse. Revulsion, fear … ah, so many emotions were registered in her expression, thought Inès, having at last joined their little group.

The Sûreté’s voice was harsh. ‘Sandrine Richard, I ask you now in front of these witnesses, did your husband, Alain André Richard, bear any such scratches on the evening of 9 December last or in the days following?’

They would have all but healed and vanished by now …

‘Since we were no longer sleeping together, Inspector, I noticed none.’

A cold answer.

‘And you yourself?’ he asked.

Madame Pétain caught a breath and held it.

‘Have a conscience that is clear.’

‘The other victims, then,’ he said, swiftly turning to the coroner and obviously furious with Madame Richard’s response.

‘With this one, the same wire, as you noted before,’ said Laloux, ‘the assailant at least of medium height and perhaps a little taller.’

‘Then not Albert Grenier, Louis,’ said Herr Kohler, having reluctantly joined them.

Laloux acknowledged the contribution. ‘With this next one, perhaps the assailant who drowned the first victim, smothered the third. There is that same sense of downward force, that same weight, that same ruthless determination.’

‘A professional?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘Why then the necessity of finishing her off in an armoire? Surely if that were so, the killer would have completed his task in the bed.’

Not a professional then, though the killer had wanted it to look as if Albert Grenier had done it.

‘And with the most recent killing?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Was the lifting on the haft of the knife simply due to jealousy?’

Laloux removed his glasses, for Madame la Maréchale’s jealousy had been implied. ‘Or hatred, or both, but desperation, I think, Jean-Louis.’

‘Male or female?’

Blanche had turned away, was fighting for composure, thought Inès, as Coroner Laloux said, ‘I’ve puzzled over this and wish I could be more precise but there is no clear evidence. The same person may have killed all of them, but then, each could also have been killed by a different assailant.’

‘Surely the garrotting of Camille Lefébvre took strength?’

‘But that of a man – is this what you mean? Really, Jean-Louis, are women not as strong as men? Many of them most certainly are.’

A man, said Inès sadly to herself and wept inwardly for Céline who had trusted him as she had. That Opinel, Inspectors. Monsieur Olivier has one. I’ve seen it, for my valise had a rope tied round it when I left the train and this he cut while we were in the café, a place where only those he was certain of would be present.

Two of them had looked her over as she’d shown him the portrait mask of Pétain. Two of them.

The Clinique du Dr Raoul Normand was on the rue Hubert Colombier in the old part of town. St-Cyr knew this well enough but with no lights, street names would be impossible and he had used, Inès surmised, the silhouette of the nearby Église Saint-Blaise against the night sky for guidance. ‘Part fifteenth century, part 1930s, Hermann,’ he had said, no doubt peering out his side windscreen. ‘The latter with magnificent art deco mosaics and stained glass.’

And a black Virgin, Inès said to herself. The Notre-Dame-des-Malades to which I have, during my brief visit, already prayed. The Madonna is surrounded by the commemorative plaques of the faithful, each of which attested to her having answered their prayers and cured them of their afflictions, but could the Virgin ever cure Vichy of what ailed it?

Monsieur Olivier had told her to meet him there after the Maréchal’s viewing of the wax portrait. ‘But I don’t yet know when that will be,’ she had said and he … he had answered, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll know.’

As he had known everything? she wondered. When Céline would go to Pétain, when Lucie would leave for Clermont-Ferrand or Paris … Paris. And the portrait mask? Tomorrow, monsieur? At 9.50 a.m. and just after the Maréchal’s breakfast briefing? How, please, could he have known of this so far ahead of time?. And why was she to meet him? More messages to deliver in Paris, but now … now with Lucie dead, there could no longer be a way for him to get them to her, unless … unless he was counting on her to take them across the Demarcation Line.

Two knives: the Laguiole of the wife who had killed herself in despair on 18 November 1925, at the age of thirty-four, and the cold and worn Opinel of his own pocket.

Had he killed Céline? Had he killed them all?

The clinic, a manor house, was not of the new-Gothic, Flemish style, nor was it neo-Venetian or neoclassical as some buildings in Vichy were, thought St-Cyr, but was, in itself too, superbly of the fin de siède, of art nouveau and of old money. Lots of it.

Lustrous curves and flowing lines were in the mahogany panelling, banisters and mouldings. Tall corridors opened upwards to floral; stained-glass lights which gave the sense of being in a verdant, year-round garden. Kentias, in cylindrical jardinieres, glazed white and blue, lined the walls at intervals. Stylish red, morocco-covered, cushioned benches allowed for rest and patient reflection. Water played musically in the distance. A mosaic of soft blue lilies, submerged in the white of the tiles, was underfoot, each flower revealing a yellow-dusted stamen that opened into a gorgeous naked nymph whose arms were thrown wide in rapture. Youth, health and beauty were everywhere, especially in the painting of nereids au bain above the doorway at the far end of the corridor, where limpid-eyed girls stood in foam-flecked shallows splashing a buck-naked Nereus, as dolphins swam and seashells basked.

The grey-skirted, trimly aproned little maid of twenty with the clear complexion, brown eyes and chestnut hair, paused. ‘Messieurs et mesdames,’ she announced hesitantly. ‘It is this way, please. The doctor awaits.’

‘And is expecting us?’ asked Kohler from behind the ladies.

‘As he expects all who come here, monsieur.’

‘Foie, diabète et estomac, Hermann,’ grunted St-Cyr. Liver, diabetes and stomach problems. ‘Gout, too, and obesity. It’s all in the mind. You need the cure, you want the cure and voilà, you take it and feel better.’

‘Having paid a fortune! Louis!’

Vénus et Diane stood on either side of the doorway in their gilded birthday suits, life-sized and all the rest. The lighting became softer, the corridor turning as the playful sound of water increased and one saw, as if looking down through a leafy tunnel between full-frontal nudes of a teenaged boy and girl whose arms were languidly raised to pick dream-fruit perhaps, others bathing in a secluded forest pond. Some were half-undressed, most were naked, some were submerged right up to their pretty necks. The farthest bather wore a gossamer sheath that clung to her in the most favourable of places.

‘I like it, Louis. Maybe my knee would too.’

‘And that aching shoulder you forgot to tell me about?’

‘Quit worrying so much. I’ll be there when you need me.’

‘It’s the needing I’m worrying about.’

They were moving quickly now. A spacious lounge held a bar, billiard and card tables, armchairs and kaftan-clad, felt-slippered curistes, among them the greying local Kommandant and others of the Occupier. Too many of the others …

‘Ignore them!’ hissed Kohler as men, women, young boys and girls watched their progress, the conversation falling off. No sign of Pétain, though. None of Ménétrel either.

The room, the examining office-cum-dispensary, was a clutter. Weighing scales for the patients to step on, others for preparing their prescriptions. Pharmaceutical jars of herbs, bottles of the various Vichy waters, the Célestins, Hôpital, Dome and Boussange among them. The bank of wooden filing drawers must hold each patient’s card and record of progress; carved models of hands and feet would be used for arthritic enlightenment, gout too. Even an array of the regulation, measured glasses stood sentinel with a graduated cylinder.

A wall mirror, astutely positioned on the left of the desk, would reflect each curiste’s towel or sheath-draped figure for lessons in obesity that permitted few secrets.

A little man, grey, balding and sharply goateed, with necktie, shirt, waistcoat and suit under a white smock, Dr Raoul Normand was pushing seventy. He scribbled hard, the gold-rimmed pince-nez balanced on the bridge of a slender nose. Another prescription. Thirty cubic centimetres of the Chomel … le gymnase, la hydrothérapie et les inhalations de gaz …

‘Doctor, some visitors,’ whispered the maid, having timidly approached the desk.

‘A moment, my child. Will you see that Herr Schröder follows my orders strictly? Positively no alcohol for five days. We must convince him of this.’ He fretted. ‘Zaunerstollen … what is this, please?’ he asked, consulting the request sheet he’d been given by his latest curiste.

‘A nougat,’ offered Kohler, the others standing aside. ‘Ground hazelnuts and almonds, with grated chocolate, butter, cream and crumbled bits of Oblaten.’

‘And what is that? snapped the doctor, irritably fussing with the sheet of notepaper.

‘Round wafers filled with buttered, ground almonds and sugar.’

‘Merde, how in heaven’s name is his liver to possibly continue? Twenty-five cubic centimetres of the Chomel, Babette, three times the half-day. The tisanes of rose-hip, elderflower and lime at all other times. Absolutely no pâté, pork, goose or anything but the fish steamed and the vegetables unbuttered. No coffee or tea. I must insist. Fifteen cubic centimetres of the Grande Grille first thing on waking and another fifteen on retiring, but to be gently sipped so as not to shock the system. If he complains, don’t listen; if he threatens, please tell him that though I dislike admitting failure, I will have to ask the Kommandant to consider sending him to Baden-Baden where they do have these … these …’

‘Zaunerstollen,’ said Kohler.

‘Merci.’

‘Bad Homburg might be better. It’s just outside of Frankfurt am Main.’

‘Hermann, please!’

Louis knew that the SS had taken over the Rothschild spa there and had coupled it with one of their Lebensborn, their life fountains, where blonde, blue-eyed, voluptous Rheinmädchen were brought in to couple with the elite and produce pure Aryan cannon fodder.

‘And the Frau Schröder, Docteur?’ interjected the maid.

The little man looked up and removed his pince-nez. ‘Is to understand that our latest synthetic-rubber baron’s liver is in a state of crisis. The hot and cold baths for her, seven minutes at a time and alternating for the full hour. The steam afterwards, and after that, the full body scrape and message complet, to be followed by the warm effervescent bath with the rose petals and the cure de silence for at least another hour. A little wine with her dinner – one glass … Ah! perhaps two, but positively no sugar, fat or starch. If she accuses us of being concentration camp warders, apologize but make sure you emphasize that we’ve never heard of such places. Now … Ah! Madame la Maréchale, excusez-moi. Messieurs, Mesdames Richard et de Fleury, what a pleasant surprise. Mademoiselles,’ he acknowledged Blanche and Inès. ‘Please forgive the small delay. We are, I’m afraid, short-staffed and totally overloaded. What can I do for you?’

If not a cure, thought Kohler, then at least the negatives of certain photographs.

‘Madame Deschambeault,’ said Louis. ‘A few small questions. Nothing difficult and don’t say it’s impossible.’

Communication between the two detectives had been by a look so slight that none but herself could have noticed it, felt Inès. They were ushered out of the doctor’s office and the door was then locked behind them. St-Cyr, Madame Pétain and the other two ladies had gone off with a disgruntled Dr Normand to visit Madame Deschambeault.

Herr Kohler had stayed behind and had told Blanche and herself to find a bench in the corridor nearby.

Blanche sat silently beside her, a Kentia to her right; the girl’s reflection clear in the mirror opposite, Blanche pale and withdrawn and terribly worried. Everything would now be decided on the outcome of this murder investigation. Her brother’s future, her own, their claim to what they felt was rightfully theirs. Herr Kohler could hardly wait to get rid of them. No sooner had they turned their backs on him than he’d have been at that lock.

He would be in the consulting room now, hurriedly going through the files, and would find that Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux had assisted in the treatment of Madame Deschambeault until that one had learned of who she was: the mistress of Alain Andre Richard, the husband of a dear, dear friend.

He would find that, as Céline had written in one of her letters, Marie-Jacqueline had also attended to Albert Grenier’s sore back and shoulder – his ‘spine’ – at his house or in the groundskeeper’s little ‘nest’, out of the goodness of her heart, and that Albert had loved her for it as he had loved the others.

He would soon know, if he and St-Cyr didn’t already know, that Dr Ménétrel received regular reports from Dr Normand on the progress of Madame Deschambeault and that everything that poor woman had said while under treatment had not only been written down, but repeated. He would see that Sandrine Richard hadn’t just threatened to kill Marie-Jacqueline at the château, but that she had also done so here, early last summer, on 12 June, the day after Marie-Jacqueline had, on leaving the Hôtel Ruhl, noticed in a café across the street two very well-dressed ladies who were, she had concluded, watching that entrance for just such a departure as her own.

Madame Richard and Madame de Fleury. But would Herr Kohler realize that Marie-Jacqueline had also looked at that file?

Kohler couldn’t believe what he was reading. Here, line by line, were the exact details, barring the rats, of how they had found Lucie Trudel.

Speaks of smothering her husband’s lover in the girl’s bed, Normand had written well before any of the murders.

Wants her corpse naked so that he can see what she’s really like with that riding crop in her hand. Patient is severely paranoid and terrified of losing her own sizeable fortune, her status also, and husband. Claims the girl will use pregnancy as a means of trapping Gaëtan-Baptiste into marriage. Claims he’s fool enough to think such a thing possible but will ensure it by demanding that the courts declare her insane and grant the divorce.

Continues to view the hydrothérapie sauvage froid as a punishment for her failure as a wife. While under this treatment, often tears the sheath from herself and begs the attendant to use more force. The breasts, the mons and buttocks, she defiantly standing to face the hose until driven to cower, shivering, in a corner on her hands and knees.

Is, frankly, a very sexually repressed and mentally disturbed woman. A danger to herself let alone Mlle Trudel, the husband’s mistress and personal shorthand typist.

There was more, lots more … Pages of it.

10 November 1942: Has confided that Mme Richard will definitely ‘take care’ of Mlle Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux; that ‘someone’ will do the same with Camille Lefébvre on payment of a large sum by Mme Richard, but that Mlles Trudel and Dupuis will be taken care of by Sandrine Richard and herself, Élisabeth de Fleury knowing of it and having agreed, but lacking the courage to ‘participate’.

The woman had, apparently, been absent from the clinic on Thursday, 28 January, and hadn’t returned until 3 February, the day after the most recent murder.

She’d also been absent at the times of the first two killings but was it all hogwash? Had Ménétrel told the doctor what to write?

The paper was crisp, the penmanship precise but there were no faded places over the almost two years the bugger had been treating Julienne Deschambeault.

Fountain pens always run dry and have to be refilled or dipped, and each time that happens, the likelihood of leaving a blot or at least a misplaced period spells it out.

Other files, chosen at random, verified that Normand had. written the file at a sitting and not on different dates as it implied.

In the corner next to the wall mirror, and buried under clutter, there was a small, turn-of-the-century cast-iron safe. Frantically Kohler searched the desk but Normand wasn’t the type to have written the combination down on the back of the wife’s photo or tucked beneath a corner of the blotter. He’d have kept it safely in his waistcoat pocket or wallet, though if either were misplaced …? An overworked, understaffed practitioner of la médecine thermale with added sidelines in forgery and herbalism?

Jars and jars of rose petals, spruce needles, juniper berries, et cetera, were ranked on the shelves above, their Gothic-script labels bordered by gold leaf and each of them bearing the Latin name … Vitex agnus-castus L. Verbenaceae … Monk’s pepper. Zanthoxylum americanum Mill. Rutaceae … Toothache Tree. Mein Gott, the bark had been used by the Red Indians of the Americas!

Turning the jar, lifting the lid to first tentatively smell the contents and then shake out a little on to a sheet of paper for the sculptress, he saw the combination written in time-faded ink on the underside of the label.

2-27 left, 1-4 right, 17 left, 9 right, 3 left.

Julienne Deschambeault’s file was there at the top of the heap. Like doctors the world over, Normand had thought it best to keep a little insurance.

*

Stark in a white-collared, beige house dress with crocheted shawl tight about thin shoulders, Julienne Deschambeault stood as if trapped before drawn blackout curtain’s, her expression that of a woman of fifty-five who was haunted by guilt and fear.

Clearly distraught, she’d been pacing endlessly back and forth in her room. The Thonet chaise longue and matching wicker armchair had been shoved aside. On the small, round wicker table with its lace cloth, the glass beside the measured bottle of the Chomel had fallen over to roll about as the table had been hurriedly lifted aside.

‘Eugénie, why have I been locked into my room? Why am I not allowed to leave if I so choose?’ she shrilled.

‘It’s for your own good,’ said Dr Normand ingratiatingly. ‘The Chief Inspector merely wishes …’

‘A Sûreté?’ she yelped, the ribbed and knitted gloves rolled down below the wrists, the hands clasped tightly and pressed hard against the bony chest and just beneath the angular chin.

‘The negatives,’ said St-Cyr.

Her hazel eyes were quick to register suspicion.

‘You can’t have them. I haven’t got them!’

The shoulder-length, auburn hair was awry and framed the haggard countenance of one whose crisis was definitely of the nerves and whose lips were parted in despair.

‘My dear,’ interceded Madame Pétain, ‘we have had to agree to turn them over.’

‘Gaëtan has forbidden me to do so!’

‘Gaëtan …?’ blurted Madame la Maréchale, throwing Sandrine Richard a glance of alarm.

‘Madame, was he here?’ demanded St-Cyr.

‘Here?’ the woman asked, tossing back her hair. ‘He never comes here. He telephoned.’

‘Inspector …’ began Normand.

The room was rebounding with their voices. ‘A moment, Doctor. Madame, when, exactly, did your husband call you?’

Had the Inspector discovered the truth? Had he? wondered Julienne. ‘Late this afternoon. He said that if I would agree not to give up the negatives but to turn them over to him, he would see that I received the very best of legal defences and would want for nothing.’

Ah merde alors …

‘He accused you of killing Lucie Trudel, didn’t he?’ asked Élisabeth de Fleury, aghast at the implications of what must have happened. ‘He told you in complete detail how it was done.’

‘I wanted her dead! I wanted her smothered!’

‘But you didn’t do it, did you?’ implored Madame Pétain.

Swiftly the woman looked to Sandrine Richard. ‘The negatives, Julienne,’ said that one firmly. ‘Don’t say anything. Just give them up.’

Beseechingly the gloved hands went out to her. ‘She lost the child, Sandrine. She spilled her baby into the armoire.’

‘Please, it’s best you do exactly as I’ve said!’ implored Sandrine.

‘My dear …’ attempted Madame Pétain.

The woman tore her hair. ‘It would have been a son, Eugenie! An heir. I couldn’t have that happen, could I? She had to be stopped!’

‘Inspector, this isn’t right,’ seethed Madame Pétain. ‘You can see the state she’s in. That … that husband of hers would call to accuse her!’

Élisabeth de Fleury had stepped from the group to comfort Madame Deschambeault, and hold the woman in a tight embrace.

‘The courts will be lenient,’ offered Raoul Normand blandly. ‘The judges are always very understanding in such cases.’

Madame Pétain and Sandrine Richard exchanged glances of alarm.

‘Madame Deschambeault,’ said St-Cyr, ‘who told your husband that you would have the negatives?’

Again glances were exchanged. Madame de Fleury released Madame Deschambeault who, looking to Madame Richard, said, ‘Sandrine, forgive me, but he said that it was Alain André who had told him. They met and they talked. An urgent conference. Honoré was with them, Élisabeth, and … and Secrétaire Général Bousquet.’

The four of them. ‘Then tell us, please,’ sighed St-Cyr, ‘what was on Lucie Trudel’s night-table?’

Once more the woman looked to Sandrine Richard for advice, then flicked an apologetic glance at Élisabeth de Fleury. ‘The Chomel, as I have it here on my own table.’

‘And the rats?’ he asked.

‘Rats?’ she bleated, throwing questioning looks at each of the other three. ‘What rats?’

Something would have to be said, thought Eugénie Pétain. ‘Inspector, Julienne did want to smother Lucie Trudel. Sandrine was determined to drown Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux and to pay Henri-Claude Ferbrave to garrotte Camille Lefèbvre, since Monsieur Bousquet’s wife was not among us.’

‘And God forgive me,’ said Elisabeth de Fleury, ‘I wanted desperately to stab Céline Dupuis in the heart.’

‘We spoke of it often, Inspector,’ confessed Madame Pétain, ‘both here when visiting Julienne, and at our committee meetings in my flat, when Julienne was free to join us and when she has not, but I swear to you none of these ladies would have done as they’d said. It was all talk, but didn’t it help them to cope with what was happening to them? Didn ‘t I know exactly how each of them felt? How hurt and utterly betrayed, how insanely jealous, how totally exposed to the ridicule of others and to financial ruin?’

‘We also talked on the telephone when in need,’ said Elisabeth de Fleury. ‘No matter what hour of night or day, Madame la Maréchale was always there to patiently listen and stand by each of us, but as to our carrying out such threats … Would that we had had the courage.’

‘Inspector, let the courts decide,’ advised Dr Normand. ‘Your task is simply to take down their procès-verbaux and then to leave it all up to the examining magistrate.’

‘It’s good of you to remind me, Doctor, but …’

‘Good Gott im Himmel, Louis, haven’t I told you time and again it’s the paperwork that counts?’ stormed Kohler as he barged into the room, a file folder in each hand. ‘Papers … papers, Chief. Always get the record down straight, even if you have to write it out twice, eh, Doc, and even if at one of those times it is dictated to you by another doctor?’

‘My safe … You …’ blurted Normand.

‘Had no right?’ shot Kohler, towering over him. ‘A member of the Geheime Stattspolizei, mein lieber Doktor? You’re the one who has no rights.’

Kripo bracelets came out to be clapped round Normand’s wrists, the doctor slumping into the wicker chair.

‘A glass of the Chomel for this one, ladies, and then the hydrothérapie sauvage and a few shots of the électrothérapie. Book him, Louis. Complicity to murder, and forgery. This son of a bitch must have known those girls were to be killed. He tried to lay the blame on these ladies.’

‘For Ménétrel?’

‘And the husbands, this one’s in particular!’

Gaëtan-Baptiste Deschambeault. ‘Perhaps, Hermann, or Charles-Frédéric Hébert, but …’

‘No buts, Louis.’

‘The Hôtel Ruhl, Inspectors. Room 3-17,’ said Inès faintly from the doorway, sickened by the prospect of what was to come. ‘Then you will have seen everything, I think.’

They sat a moment in the car, these two detectives, outside the Hôtel Ruhl. The boulevard de l’Hôtel de Ville, the town, the river and the hills would be in darkness, Inès knew, though she couldn’t see a thing. St-Cyr had withdrawn into his thoughts, Kohler too. Both knew that word would get out of what had happened at the clinic. Ménétrel would be bound to hear of it and soon, too soon. Ménétrel.

St-Cyr had taken the negatives that Madame Deschambeault and the others had hidden in one of the tubular posts of her bed. Kohler had entrusted Dr Normand to Madame Pétain and had given her the key to his handcuffs. And Blanche? Inès asked herself. Blanche had been so distressed at not being allowed to accompany them that tears had wet her pale cheeks. ‘Paul couldn’t have taken that knife from Mother’s room,’ she had sworn. ‘He’d not have done something like that without telling me!’

‘Not even to buy his freedom from the STO?’ St-Cyr had demanded, not sparing her.

‘Edith,’ she had blurted. ‘Edith did it. She despises the Maréchal and blames him for everything. She hates women who betray their soldier husbands and their country, as Camille did, those who get pregnant like Lucie did, and Mother, too. Céline … Céline played the cabaret, Mother also. Albert … Albert can and does do anything Edith wants.’

‘Such as trying to kill this one?’ Herr Kohler had asked, indicating Inès.

‘Such as putting things in Céline’s room for you to find. Things only Edith could have given him.’

‘And the attempt on Mademoiselle Charpentier?’ he had asked.

Blanche had hesitated. ‘Yes, but … but Albert is also impulsive and often can’t see the consequences of what he does.’

‘Like walking Céline to the Hall des Sources and then holding its doors shut on her?’ Herr Kohler had said.

‘A game,’ Blanche had wept. ‘Albert would have thought it a game!’

They had demanded to know how Mademoiselle Pascal could possibly have known Céline was to have gone to Pétain’s room and at what time, but Blanche had had no answer for this. ‘Her brother took the knife, Hermann,’ St Cyr had flatly said, ‘but what I want to know are her thoughts on Charles-Frédéric Hébert. Isn’t he the one you’re really so afraid of, Mademoiselle Blanche?’

‘Yes. Yes, he is.’

‘St-Cyr’s a patriot,’ Monsieur Olivier had confided when he’d met her at that café near the railway station, Inès told herself. ‘Kohler’s a conscientious doubter of Nazi invincibility, but you must never forget that he’s one of them, one of les autres.’ The others.

Sickened by what she knew of the rats that had been left in Lucie’s bed, Inès asked herself again if she should tell St-Cyr and Kohler of it. Could she break the vow she’d made to herself?

A match was struck, she taking in a sharp breath as the flame burst before her, causing her to blink hard in panic only to realize the two detectives were sharing a cigarette.

‘Hermann, Mademoiselle Charpentier had best be left with the concierge.’

The words were out before she could stop herself. ‘Please don’t! Please take me up to that room. My eyes will be fine if there are lights on in there.’

‘Your eyes … What is this, please?’ asked St-Cyr. Had he turned to look at her?

‘Night blindness,’ she confessed.

They didn’t say a thing. The cigarette was passed over, looks exchanged most probably, but still she couldn’t see them and they must now know of this.

‘Louis, leave her with me, then,’ sighed Kohler.

‘And Monsieur Olivier, mademoiselle?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Does he, too, suffer from this little affliction of yours?’

‘Monsieur Olivier …’ What was this he was saying? ‘I … I wouldn’t know, Inspector. How could I possibly?’

It was his turn to sigh and he did so deeply and with evident regret. ‘Then why, please, has he claimed it and why have you kept it from us?’

Olivier, she said to herself. Olivier lied about it! ‘Shame … Fear. Have you never walked the streets of Paris after dark and not been able to see, Inspector? One is jostled, one constantly bumps into people and is shoved away or sworn at, handled, too, once the person realizes you’re a woman, and not just by the men! My handbag, my papers, I …’ Ah Sainte Mère, Sainte Mère!

St-Cyr must have leaned over the back of the front seat to get closer to her, for she felt a breeze as if he’d waved a hand before her eyes.

‘And once again, mademoiselle, you have a ready answer,’ he said, ‘but if you know anything at all that is useful, now is long past the time to have divulged it.’

When she said nothing, he turned back. ‘Hermann, see that she leaves that valise of hers with the concierge. Then it’ll be one less thing to get in the way.’

I will never leave it now, Inspector, she silently vowed. They checked their weapons, and she could hear St-Cyr flick open the cylinder of his Lebel, Kohler removing the clip from his pistol and jammed it back in with the heel of a hand to then retract and release the slide.

Both weapons would be left at half-cock.

‘Ménétrel wanted them dead, Louis. He told the boys to do it or else.’

‘Or Charles-Frédéric Hébert, but then … Ah mais alors, alors, Hermann, our killer or killers knew everything that would happen and were ahead of us at every step of the way. Ahead of Ménétrel, ahead of Bousquet and even Laval – they’d have had to have been, n’est-ce pas?’

The telex to Boemelburg, the identity card, the dress and the billets doux, that copy of L’Humanité that had been left on the stairs for Louis to find, the Resistance graffiti also.

‘Surely for all those things to have happened, every scrap of information would have had to have been funnelled into one location, collated, plotted and used,’ said St-Cyr.

Herr Kohler started the car and they drove the short distance around the corner to pause outside the old PTT, to gaze at it through the frost-covered windows, to get out and stand in the cold street and to stare at its darkened silhouette.

‘The room, Hermann, and then the source, I think,’ said St-Cyr.

‘I warned you, Louis. I told you, you shouldn’t have let him go.’

And me? wondered Inès. Am I to be victim number five? Betrayed just as Céline was; killed just as she and Lucie and the others? Removed to silence; left secure?

*

At a glance, Kohler took in the dimly lit foyer that was such a sugar cake of dusty ornament, and had once been the watering place and campground of kings, counts and visiting courtesans. Gilded putti clamoured for seashells or shot arrows from above draperies and columns of variegated marble. Bathing sirens soared to a well-muscled Neptune who stood with trident upheld and a dolphin curled about bare toes, atop a tiered heap of drained Vicenza stone, where buxom mermaids cradled once-spouting cornucopia. The vault of the ceiling rose through several storeys of railed galleries to cavorting bathers among still more horns of plenty.

‘It is, and must once have been, stupendous, Hermann,’ exclaimed St-Cyr in awe of what they found themselves in, for the wives and Madame Pétain had given no such indication. ‘Magnificent, mon vieux. Neo-baroque, 1870 at least, and a national treasure.’

As if that were all they had to worry about! snorted Kohler inwardly. Everywhere there were bas-reliefs of bathers, of amphorae, fruit, helmets, horns, shields, masks and lutes; everywhere the health-giving powers of taking the waters, but all gone dry. ‘Just where the hell is the réceptionniste, Louis? The concierge, if it’s another dosshouse!’

‘Mademoiselle, wait by the desk.’

‘Don’t leave me!’ shrilled Inès.

‘Louis, stay with her. I’ll find him.’

It didn’t take long. ‘The salaud was on the telephone to Ménétrel,’ shouted Kohler. ‘We’ve trouble, Louis, but this one has lost his tongue!’

Dragged from the switchboard’s little room, thrust up against the Carrara marble desk where half-sized copies of Carrier Belleuse’s La Source emptied amorini from the shoulder while supporting the rest of the structure, the concierge threw a terrified glance at each of them, then apprehensively wet his lips and let his faded grey eyes settle doubtfully on herself, Inès noted. He was hoping for sympathy no doubt.

‘Verfluchte Franzosen!’ shrieked Kohler. ‘Ein Gestapo Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter, Dummkopf Schnell! Schnell!’ Hurry! Hurry! ‘Open up that can of worms of yours and spill out everything the doctor said!’

The echoes came. The echoes rebounded. Hermann was really very good at this play-acting of his when necessary, but something would have to be said. ‘Herr Hauptmann der Geheime Stattspolizist, please go easy on him. He’s too old to be shoved around like that and can’t understand a word you’re saying.’

‘Comfort from a Sûreté, eh? Then you shoot him and we’ll claim he tried to escape and died of a heart attack!’

Herzlähmung – would they really do so? panicked Inès. Cardiac arrest was a favourite excuse of the Gestapo of the rue des Saussaies, the SS of the avenue Foch, and the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. ‘Monsieur, these two …’ she blurted. ‘They’re in a terrible hurry.’

The doctor hadn’t mentioned a valise-carrying girl. ‘I’ll lose my job. I’ll not be able to find work, not at my age!’

‘Fuck your age!’ railed Herr Kohler, jamming the muzzle of his pistol into him.

‘Ménétrel … The doctor, he has telephoned in great urgency to … Ah sacré nom de nom, must you force me to say what I’ve been forbidden? You … you had no right to arrest Dr Normand and steal his file on Madame Deschambeault. You have now initiated a national crisis that Dr Ménétrel will be forced to deal with.’

‘Angry was he?’ breathed Kohler.

‘Furious.’

‘And demanding that we return the file and stop everything immediately?’ he asked.

‘Most certainly.’

‘Gut!’

Herr Kohler snatched the key from among a scattering of others and headed for the stairs, bypassing the bronze birdcage of a dubious lift. Out of the shadows, a life-sized Cupid and Psyche adorned the first landing, a copy of the Louvre’s shy and lovely Bather, by Falconet, the second, the figure caught gracefully looking down at the water while timidly dipping an exploratory toe.

A copy of Paju’s Psyche decorated the third landing; a superb Venus stood beside a mural of voluptuous women taking the cure. One suckled a child, another raised her measured glass in salute, a third gazed raptly into a Cupid-held mirror as satyrs picked fruit and hair was combed, but all were as if removed, as if suppressed by the faded light the Occupation demanded.

‘Room 3-17 must be at the far end of the gallery, Louis.’

How haunting the sculptures were, but could she remember their locations? wondered Inès. Could she find her way in the dark if necessary?

‘Ménétrel will call out the troops, Louis. If not the Garde Mobile and Henri-Claude Ferbrave, then the local Milice!’

The formation of France’s newest militia had been announced by Pétain not long ago right here in Vichy but already they were old acquaintances. ‘Stay close, mademoiselle. It seems that we’ve ruffled more than the feathers of a few stuffed birds.’

Caught in a large cheval mirror, the sculptress appeared pale and shaken at the sight of the room, which was, of course, nothing like the wives and Madame Pétain had indicated.

Instead of a bed that squeaked when used and stank of stale piss, one could see at a glance, St-Cyr told himself, that this canopied masterpiece was simply unmade, its sheets, blankets and spread thrown back but of excellent quality, if of that other time and a touch worn.

There was no second-hand water pitcher, but an unblemished Sevres jug; a copper bath that gleamed even in the faded electric light; a large, handsome marble sink with gilded bronze and porcelain taps, the hot and the cold; even the luxury of a bar of soap that could be left lying around; and plenty of towels, most certainly not thin, for one could hardly have worn them out.

Cold ashes lay in the grate, ample charcoal and wood indicating that a welcome fire could always be lit. The regulation notice as to safe and unsafe sex had, of course, had to be posted just inside the door, he noted, but here violets, dried long ago, had been woven round it, probably by Mademoiselle Marie-Jacqueline.

The carpet was an Aubusson. The armoires, desk and chairs were Marjorelle and nothing to be sneezed at, even if not neo-baroque but most certainly of the turn of the century.

‘Louis, I’d best check the street.’

‘You won’t see anything,’ yelped Inès. ‘They’ll not let you.’

‘It’s what I’ll hear that counts.’

Herr Kohler left them, left the door wide open. Again Inès took in the bed, again she told herself Céline couldn’t have had time to make it, for that had been the rule. After each visit, each of them had tidied up.

Tuesday … last Tuesday afternoon, she said, 2 February, lying naked there in the arms of Honoré de Fleury. Céline whose laughter had been so gentle and yet full of warmth and excitement. Céline whose smile had always been so encompassing.

‘There’s … there’s a ballet shoe under that chair, Inspector,’ she heard herself saying. ‘A practice slipper.’

And we are alone at last, mademoiselle, but you haven’t yet decided if you should tell me all you know. ‘It’s the other shoe that puzzles me,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Don’t ballet teachers who have to rush off early in the morning throw their things into a bag of some sort? Her handbag hasn’t turned up, yet her ID has.’

‘The bag, it … it was of a soft brown suede, a rucksack I bought her before the Defeat.’

‘Before the death of her husband?’

And attempted suicide? ‘Yes. Well before that. She was so happy, so full of life. Annette had just been born. On my way to see them at the Hôpital Cochin, I came across it in the window of a second-hand shop on the rue Mouffetard and knew she’d have the baby to carry and everything else, so would need something easy to handle.’

‘You were still living at the home of your aunt and uncle then?’

‘They … they had passed away. I …’

‘Had you the studio then, the job at the Musée Grévin?’

‘Yes! The … the student who had owned the rucksack had been on holiday in Switzerland but had run out of money. Please … please don’t look at me like that in the mirror, Inspector. I … I can’t tell you. I mustn’t!’

Sconces on either side of the mirror held candles whose soft light would have bathed Céline’s reflection …

The Chief Inspector went straight to the chair and bent to pick up the shoe. He would come to her now, this Sûreté, and would place it in her hand – she knew this, knew, too, that the tears couldn’t be stopped.

‘I loved her as one does a sister. I had no one else. No one, damn you!’

‘On arrival here in Vichy, mademoiselle, you met with Auguste-Alphonse Olivier. You’d been couriering messages for him in Paris. Perhaps he’d a snapshot of you that Mademoiselle Dupuis had given him, but she felt the perfume necessary as well – a little password, n’est-ce pas, and had asked you to wear it.’

Her head was bowed; the faded pink satin slipper, with its tightly wound ties, was in both hands; the finely curving lashes were wet.

‘He discovered you couldn’t see when going from a lighted room into darkness. He warned you not to tell us of your night blindness so that he could use it. You were to watch what you said to us and what you did, but you began to look for things yourself. ‘Why was this, please?’

The Inspector was still looking at her reflection in the mirror, a glass in front of which Céline would have stood to be admired, made love to, fucked! ‘He … he was upset with me for not having told him of my night blindness. When … when I asked where Céline was, for she, not him, was to have met me at the train, he … he said he didn’t know.’

Yet he must have. ‘You then found out and threw up before seeing her for yourself.’

Ever so slightly she nodded.

‘He didn’t want you coming to this hotel, did he?’

‘It … it was not even mentioned.’

The delicately boned chin and lower jaw were still determined. The sea-green eyes avoided him. ‘Then can you think why Monsieur Olivier would have warned me to stay away from it and threatened me if I didn’t?’

‘Monsieur Laval’s clairvoyant … You asked him about her?’

‘I did.’

‘Then perhaps it is that you should ask her yourself, Inspector?’

‘Shall I leave you here, then, while I do?’ he said angrily.

‘Céline was silenced; Lucie also, Inspector.’

‘And the others?’

‘Most probably.’

‘But she tried to protect him? She tried to hide the earrings?’

Was it that this Sûreté did not want to believe the truth? ‘Monsieur Olivier took her from the Hôtel du Parc and she went willingly with him, Inspector. She tried to remove and hide the earrings both to protect Blanche and Paul – she must have known they’d taken them – and to let you and Herr Kohler know who had betrayed her.’

‘He’d have taken them, then, would he?’

‘Yes. Yes, I tell myself that must have been so.’

‘But he didn’t, mademoiselle. Had Monsieur Olivier seen even one of his wife’s earrings, he’d have removed it and left us to find the other, or come back himself to search it out.’

‘Then why didn’t her killer take it?’

‘Because, I think, the assailant wanted us to find it. That is certainly why the cigar band was left, but to point us towards Albert Grenier and the past.’

An earring had been loosened … ‘And Edith Pascal?’

‘Would not have left any of it, for she would not have wanted to implicate in any way the man she loved.’

‘A résistant.’

A grâce à Dieu, the girl had broken at last. ‘You were his courier in Paris. Please, mademoiselle, you can trust both Hermann and myself. Monsieur Olivier told me he was district leader of the FTP. Hermann knows of this also.’

‘Then you will know, as I do, that Monsieur Olivier has people at his command. The slogans we saw on those walls, the warning Monsieur Bousquet was given …’

Mademoiselle Dupuis’s carte d’identité. ‘The civil war the boys speak of.’

‘Has started.’

As he listened to the street, listened to the town, Kohler hoped Louis could prise what was needed from the sculptress before it was too late. At the very edges of the pollarded, tree-lined boulevard de l’Hôtel de Ville, the shadows were deeper, the darkness complete in places, thinner where the stumpy, naked branches reached out to the snow-covered road. Two vélo-taxis struggled towards him. A few pedestrians were about but none of the town’s autobuses aux gazogène, for those would have stopped running at 7 p.m. as they had done even before the Defeat. Like towns and villages all over France, Vichy shut down hard and early for most people, even with the presence of the Government.

Far in the distance, a Wehrmacht motorcycle patrol let the world know it was busy. Out of the darkness urgent voices came.

‘Chéri, I forgot the blankets.’

‘Merde, Heloïse, you know how cold it is in that flat of theirs. Now we’ll have to keep our overcoats on and play cards in mittens!’

Parsimoniously the light from the blue-blinkered torch was rationed. Now on, now off, the husband smoking an American cigarette, the tobacco mild, totally foreign, raising hackles only to have them die as the couple hurried past, not even realizing he was standing in the shadows. Shivering. Not wanting, at the moment, to think about Giselle and Oona and Paris, for people there said exactly the same things, and if one stayed out beyond the curfew, one stayed put until 5 a.m. or else!

Giselle, he knew, often went round the corner to see her friends and former colleagues at the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton. Hadn’t he leased the flat on the rue Suger just so that she could do that and not feel lonely when he was away?

Oona would have gone after her by now. Oona never said a thing about Giselle’s little visits. Close … those two had become really close.

‘But their living with me can’t go on,’ he said aloud and to himself but softly. ‘Louis and I’ve crossed too many. One of these days we’ll all be taking a train east to nowhere unless I can get them out of France and to safety. Louis, too, and Gabrielle.’

As if to mock him and the night and Vichy, and the Occupier, some son of a bitch put his wireless set next to an open window and cranked the volume up.

‘Ici londres … ici londres … des français parlent des fran-çais …’

‘Jésus merde alors, idiot, have some sense!’

‘Radio-paris ment.’ Radio-Paris lies …

Kohler fired two shots harmlessly into the night sky above him. Kids … it was probably just that couple’s kids!

Immediately the waveband was switched to ‘Lily Marlene’* and he heard the voice of Louis’s chanteuse reaching out to the boys on both sides of this lousy war.

‘Gabi …’ he said, swallowing with difficulty at the thought. Some stopped on their way to listen. Others hesitated. One even began to hum along with her.

A last glance up the street revealed that a van – perhaps an armoured one – had drawn to a stop some distance away.

When he looked back down the boulevard towards the rue du Pont, he thought he could detect another one but they made no sound; he hadn’t even heard them. Like soldiers everywhere in this bitter winter, he’d been sucked right in by that voice.

Madame Ribot occupied a suite on the same floor as Room 3-17, but much closer to the lift, noted St-Cyr, the brass nameplate giving: PALMS READ, FORTUNES TOLD. ALL WHO ENTER LEAVE ENLIGHTENED.

Readings were at twenty francs, the Tarot at forty, and under a loosened strip of sticking plaster whose inked UNAVAILABLE had smudged, TEA LEAVES FIFTY FRANCS INCLUDING THE PRICE OF THE TEA.

The hours were from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m., THE TUESDAY, THE THURSDAY, AND THE SATURDAY ONLY. AT ALL OTHER TIMES CONSULTATIONS ARE AS WHEN NECESSARY, THE RATE BEING TWO HUNDRED FRANCS, NOT NEGOTIABLE.

A Louis XV sofa wore its original, ribbed green velvet upholstery; the dented cushions their rescued remnants of tapestry, frayed and with pinfeathers protruding. No two pieces of furniture matched. The sconces were neither art nouveau nor neo-baroque but a mixture of art deco and the fourteenth siécle, he felt. Everything looked as if it had been left by others in payment or as legacies too bulky to be moved in haste from rooms that had had to be vacated, or simply forgotten. Yet, in total, there was the atmosphere, if musty, of something grand and worldly, of ages and lives past, of refinement and fortune, good or bad.

A scratchy gramophone recording gave a lusty chorus from an operetta. The Apollo in Paris, 1912, he thought. Le Soldat de Chocolat, by Oscar Straus. A favourite of Pétain’s? he wondered. The green-shaded, Empire desk lamp in the consulting room-cum-study, with its zodiacal charts and those of the palm, was of the thirties, the desk itself utilitarian but of an indeterminate origin, for it could hardly be seen under the clutter.

Like the half-filled, two-litre, hand-blown wine bottle at her left elbow, Madame Ribot was an ample woman whose watery blue eyes matched the tint of the bottle above the deep red of its Chanturgue and her rouged cheeks. The frizzy mop of grey hair was thick and wiry, the neck of the bottle not straight but suffering from arthritis, too, and bent towards the woman, its distractedly replaced cork loose and tilted the opposite way.

Her glass had been drained some time ago.

‘Madame Ribot …’ hesitated the petite bonne à tout faire.

‘Fingerprints,’ muttered the woman irritably. ‘Why does Monsieur le Premier insist on emphasizing their importance when it is the hands that can tell us so much more?’

The shoulders were rounded under the tartan blanket that some Scot must have left behind at some hotel …

‘Love, lust, jealousy and murder, even assassination,’ she said, still not looking up. ‘Lisette, ma chère, you’re such a delightfully dutiful creature, a treasure to a stubborn old woman such as myself, but I am conscious of the presence of these visitors. Now you must ask them to wait a little longer. Please stop the music. I thought it would help, but it has not done so at all. Indeed, it is a frightful racket to a woman who dotes on Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Brahms and Chopin!’

‘Monsieur … Mademoiselle …’ blurted the girl to Inès and St-Cyr. ‘Madame, she is working on an urgent matter for Monsieur le Premier.’

‘The fingerprints?’ shot St-Cyr, but no answer was given. Inked palm prints – done by rolling the hand with black ink and then gently pressing it flat on tracing paper, after which the hand and paper were held up to work the ink in carefully and the paper then slowly peeled off – had been positioned on a makeshift light-table of frosted white glass. Bent over this table, the woman used a hand-held magnifier, instead of the spectacles that dangled against the tartan folds.

‘Monsieur Laval has again telephoned to ask if an assassination is in the offing. Four times today, no less,’ said Madame Ribot, still studying the prints. ‘Progress reports, of course, were given.’

‘And the fingerprints he was concerned about?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘The police photographer’s efforts have yielded nothing so far. Not from the envelope in which press clippings were slid under the door, not from the Hall des Sources either, nor from the Hotel d’Allier and the rooms of these two.’

She lifted away the handprints she’d been studying and replaced them with two sets. ‘These, Inspector, are Lucie Trudel’s, and these, Céline Dupuis’s.’

Ghost-like – as if the dead, in terror, were pressing their hands to the underside of a window, with them trapped inside and drowning, thought Inès – the prints cried out to them.

‘Céline was an Aries; Lucie a Virgo,’ said Madame Ribot, conscious of the sculptress’s pallor and wondering if she could convince the girl to allow prints of her own hands to be taken. ‘Camille Lefèbvre was an Aquarian, Marie-Jacqueline a …’

Firmness would be best. ‘But you weren’t examining any of those when we came in here,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Please replace the ones you were studying.’

This was the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté whom Monsieur Laval had requested from Paris. ‘Very well, as you wish.’

A suitcase, set to one side on the day of the Defeat, its brass studs and corners scoured by years of travel, bore once-colourful, now tattered and long-faded labels: The Peter’s-Bad Hotel um Hirsch, at Baden-Baden … The Splendide, at Evian-les-Bains … The Nassauer Hof, at Wiesbaden … The Hotel les Bains, at Spa, in Belgium … The Grand, at the Montecatini Terme in Tuscany …

Not for a moment would this one have entertained the thought of taking less expensive lodgings and surreptitiously acquiring the stickers. She had gone from one to the other during each season for years and had stayed at nothing but the finest hotels.

‘Two prints, the left hands first, Inspector. Monsieur le Maréchal would most certainly not have allowed me to take one had Noëlle Olivier not begged him to join her for a reading on my return in the early autumn of 1924. I saw suicide even then, but could not bring myself to warn her and have chastised myself ever since.’

‘And the other print?’

‘Is Monsieur le Premier’s, whose excellent wine, so generously given, and whose wood and coal keep these old bones warm because he is genuinely concerned with my well-being.’ There, that ought to stop him from questioning her about having them! ‘A Taurus,’ she said of Pétain, ‘and a Cancer; the one ruled by Venus, the other by the Moon. The one an Earth Hand, the other, a Water Hand, but there are many complexities with both and I cannot convince myself that the analysis is wrong. Regrettably I must disagree with what Herr Kohler and yourself have told the Premier, Inspector, for I feel assassination is a very distinct possibility. Though I seldom use Belot, I have consulted his sixteenth-century work on palmistry and its relationship to the signs of the zodiac. Between the line of Life and that of Fate, and just near the latter’s juncture with the Line of Head, there is a region where, if the fine lines criss-cross many times and the Line of Life is broken, one can, after consulting the zodiac, deduce assassination. The analysis is not much used, if at all today, and has been widely discredited, but it does reinforce the others I’ve made, and when one seeks answers for such a man as the Premier, at a time of such crisis, one leaves no stone unturned.’

Hermann should have heard her but where was he? Why hadn’t he rejoined them? Trouble …? Had there been trouble?

‘I have, of course, also used Belot’s analysis of the first joint of the middle finger and have found there morte en prison both for Monsieur le Premier and le Maréchal. Contradictions … There are always those. In life one tries. Isn’t that all one can do?’

She was genuinely upset. Part Gypsy, part Jewish, part Russian or Hungarian – the possibilities were limitless, the roots deep – she had probably not left the hotel in all the years of the Occupation. ‘Madame, the fingerprints?’ he said gently, having suppressed the impatience he felt.

Must the police always be so stubborn? wondered Madame Ribot. ‘As I have told Monsieur le Premier many times, Inspector, both here and over the telephone, each of those girls came to me. After their little moments in Room 3-17, they would often feel the need, the one believing herself deliciously wicked and triumphantly so, another guilty for having betrayed her husband and wanting to know if he would discover what she’d been up to, the third simply naive enough to have hoped marriage possible. And the fourth, you ask?’ She would pause now, she told herself. ‘A réaliste who came to believe her life and that of Lucie Trudel were in grave danger.’

‘You saw her on Tuesday, between five and seven in the afternoon,’ said Inès, finding the words hard. ‘You warned her to be careful.’

‘My dear, I told her death was imminent. Here … There it is. Mon Dieu, mademoiselle, see for yourself. Your hand, a forefinger, s’il vous plaît! Press it to the glass, to this area, to just beyond the Mount of the Moon and nearest the break in the Line of Fate. Death by one’s enemies!’

Céline would have had to have bared the scars of her attempted suicide in order for Madame Ribot to have made the prints …

The Inspector was going through those prints that had been set aside. ‘No names,’ he grumbled. ‘How, please, do you identify them’

‘By memory,’ breathed the woman, watching him closely. There must have been thousands and thousands of such prints, thought Inès, and surely no human being could ever have remembered them all?

‘Come, come, Madame, you always make two sets,’ he said. ‘The one, when dry, goes into the file with the name written below each hand; the other you use when writing up or giving your analysis. Then those, too, are kept. A truly professional clairvoyant such as yourself would not do otherwise.’

This was no ordinary Sûreté. ‘That is correct. An attic room holds the legacy of the years, this office the most recent, but it is not from among any of those cabinets that you will find the ones you seek.’

‘Monsieur Laval wouldn’t have telephoned you so many times today, Madame, unless he was worried, and not simply about himself and his Government. The iron man’s fingerprint sweeps haven’t yielded anything useful because the commissariat de police hasn’t anything on file with which to compare them!’

‘Only the thumbprints each of us must leave in order to obtain our cartes d’identité, and those prints were, alas, not clear.’

‘When did he last telephone?’

‘Not two hours ago.’

‘While we were at the clinic …’ managed Inès.

‘Four murders, Inspector, and in the autumn of 1925, one woman and three of her lovers juxtaposed here on this glass. Noëlle Olivier was a Gemini and possessed of an Air Hand, which is usual for such a one; August-Alphonse a Capricorn and …’

‘And Charles-Frédéric Hébert?’ he demanded.

‘Noëlle brought each of them to me for a reading, yes.’

‘What about Edith Pascal and Albert Grenier?’ bleated Inès, sickened by what was happening and wondering why Herr Kohler hadn’t rejoined them.

It was St-Cyr who snapped, ‘The files on Olivier and Hébert, Madame. All prints. You have no choice and must shout it out to anyone who comes for them that I have taken them.’ Hermann … Where the hell was Hermann?

Madame Ribot did as asked. Two files … only two, Inès told herself, giving a last glance at the light-table, at Céline’s prints and those of Lucie.

Olivier, she said silently. It was Olivier and he’ll have Edith Pascal with him and she’ll have Albert, who has already tried to kill me, not because I’m a threat to the Maréchal or ever was, though Mademoiselle Pascal must have convinced him of this, but because I know too much.

The letter boxes of the FTP in Paris … the messages I had to deliver for him but worst of all, who he, himself, is, their Vichy leader.

Auguste-Alphonse Olivier.

*	This is the title of the French version; the one translated into English for the British troops is ‘Lilli Marlene’; the German, the original, ‘Lili Marleen’.