The Charpentier woman still lived in the green house at the end of the town of Savoie St Juste. She was a plump little creature who ran a laundry. According to the police sergeant Pel questioned first, she rarely spoke to people and apparently didn’t wish to.
‘Why should I?’ she said when Pel visited her. ‘That was a difficult time and it’s best forgotten. We had a weight on our shoulders, a terror of the future, the constant worry about food, and the fear of being deported.’
Pel nodded. Even now he could recall how nobody had dared to do the things they wanted, nursing hatreds and fears, mistrusting people who seemed better off than they were themselves, despising the black marketeers yet, at the same time, having to accept that they were necessary. It had seemed as if the whole of France had lived in slow motion. It had been the darkest, emptiest, most anguished hour in the history of France.
‘They shaved my head,’ Denise Charpentier said. ‘They cut off my hair and tattooed me.’
Pel looked up. ‘A tattoo?’ he asked, his interest caught at once. Would it match the one in the jar in Leguyader’s laboratory?
‘Can I see this tattoo?’ he asked.
She gave him a bitter look. ‘No, you can’t,’ she snapped. ‘And there are two of them. Swastikas. One on each breast.’
The reply shook Pel and he went on uncertainly. ‘You’d been –’ he paused, and ended with a rush ‘ – friendly with the Germans?’
‘With one of them.’ The angry look deepened. Her husband had been murdered, she considered, by French politicians of the Third Republic who had sent him off to war half-trained and ill-equipped. He had been called up in September 1939, and by June 1940, he was dead. But she hadn’t become friendly with the Germans because of that.
‘Then why did they tattoo you, Madame?’
‘That was when Hannes came.’
‘Hannes?’
‘That’s what I called him. He said it was his name. We fell in love. He was good-looking and needed mothering.’
‘Mothering?’ It didn’t sound like Geistardt. ‘Please go on, Madame.’
She sighed and shrugged. ‘He was a weak sort of man. Perhaps that’s why I liked him. He wasn’t like the other Germans. They were all arrogant and expected the girls to fall for them merely because they were conquerors. They never understood the hatred. It always puzzled them. He was different. He understood.’
This was a view of Geistardt Pel hadn’t expected. But it took all sorts, and criminals, murderers and torturers often had some hidden depths.
She gave another sigh. ‘He said it was because he’d fallen foul of the police in Koblenz when he was young.’
It was because of this that he’d grown bitter, she went on. All he’d done was steal a few vegetables when he’d been working in a warehouse between sessions at the Polytechnic. He’d been a student then and needed the money to live on. He’d considered the middlemen were making too much profit and, thinking he should have a little, too, had slipped an occasional crate to one side to be sold privately.
The old, old story, Pel thought. It was always somebody else’s fault.
‘Have you ever seen him since the war, Madame?’
She gave him a wary look. A few times, she admitted. The last time about a fortnight ago.
Pel began to feel that at last they were really getting somewhere. The false starts and the false trails they’d pursued seemed to have come to an end at last.
‘Were you intimate with him, Madame?’
She gave him another sharp look. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only as a girl.’
Then, she’d just been married and enjoyed what happened between a man and a woman. When her husband had been killed, sometimes she had cried herself to sleep for want of a man. Pel made no comment and she went on angrily.
‘It didn’t last long. Then he left the village. He was posted to Ste Monique. To the Château de Mougy.’
It had pleased him, she went on, because he thought it gave him an opportunity for promotion. ‘He was only here for a few months,’ she ended, ‘but it was enough for me to have my head shaved.’
Pel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Do people here remember you?’ he asked.
She shrugged. A few, she admitted. But she had let the house and gone to Paris to work. When the people she let it to had died, she came back. She had never asked for friendship, and she had never forgotten what had been done to her.
‘I only came back,’ she ended, ‘because my son had qualified and left home.’
‘There was a son?’
‘Yes. He was a good boy. He’s thirty-five now and in Argentina. I’m waiting for him to send for me.’
‘Does he know his father was a German?’
She shrugged. ‘I never told him. He thinks his father was killed in the invasion. He thinks he was one of de Gaulle’s men.’
‘Did his father know he had a son?’
‘Not then. Later.’
‘When later?’
‘This year. He was driving to the south and he came through here. He saw me in the garden. I told him then.’
‘Did he suggest marriage?’
‘No. There was a woman in Germany and I didn’t love him any more. Too many years had gone by.’
‘Why did he come, Madame? To see you?’
She stared at her fingers then she gave a sigh. ‘No. I didn’t even have that pleasure. He was going to Orgny, that’s all. He was doing some business. Some property or something.’
‘Who with?’
‘A Monsieur Piot, he said. He wanted to buy some land.’
‘Bussy-la-Fontaine’s forest land. Was he interested in forestry? Was he an expert at it?’
‘No. He didn’t seem to do anything special. He just said he thought it would be very profitable.’
Pel took out a copy of the map of Bussy-la-Fontaine Darcy had obtained from Dôle.
‘Ever seen that before?’ he asked.
She glanced at it. ‘No. Should I have done?’
‘It’s a map of Bussy-la-Fontaine. It’s marked, you’ll notice, with crosses, and there are comments in German.’
She looked puzzled, and Pel went on briskly. ‘I think – or shall we say your German friend thought – that it indicates the whereabouts of the de Mougy plate. You’ve heard of that, of course?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think your friend had one of these. Did he ever show it to you?’
‘No.’ She looked puzzled.
‘Did he say he’d come and see you again?’
She hesitated then she nodded. ‘Yes. In a day or two, he said. I was pleased. I was flattered that he wanted to. He gave me some money. Quite a lot because he didn’t seem poor.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t honest money. I don’t know, but it pleased me that he wished to give it to me. I looked forward to seeing him again.’
‘But he never came?’
‘No.’
Pel studied his notebook. ‘Was he involved in the theft at Baron de Mougy’s place during the war?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know.’
‘Did he mention it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could he have done it?’
‘Well, he wasn’t entirely honest. I knew that.’
Pel shifted in his seat. ‘Not entirely honest’ were hardly the words for Geistardt. Geistardt was not only a swindler, he was a murderer, even a torturer. Perhaps she’d never realised just what he was because she’d been only just out of childhood at the time.
He paused. ‘Did he have a bullet wound in his calf, Madame?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Yes. Right calf. Somebody waylaid the truck he was on in 1943 and he was wounded. It wasn’t much.’
‘And a tattoo?’ Pel touched his right forearm. ‘Here?’
‘Yes. It was a regimental badge with his number. He tried to get rid of it with pumice stone. People used it to get their hands clean in those days and he always used to carry a piece in his pocket and work at it as we talked.’
Pel produced a photograph. ‘Would that be how you remember it, Madame?’
She stared at it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s how it looked. There was more of it then, of course.’ She looked at Pel, with agony in her eyes. ‘He’s the man they found in the forest, isn’t he?’
Pel sighed. ‘I’m afraid he is, Madame. Would you still have a photo?’
She fished in a drawer and produced a faded picture of a young German soldier in his shirt sleeves with his arm round a girl. The girl was slim and fair and bore no resemblance to Madame Charpentier, but the man could well have been the victim at the calvary.
‘That is you, Madame?’
‘Yes. And that’s Hannes.’
‘Heinz Geistardt?’
‘No. Hannes Gestert?’
‘Geistardt, Madame,’ Pel said. ‘Heinz Geistardt. Same man, I think. An officer in the SS.’
She stared. ‘Then you can think again,’ she said sharply. ‘I wouldn’t have been seen dead with one of them. Hannes was never in the SS. He wasn’t even a Nazi. He despised them. He despised them all. From Hitler downwards. Because of the hatred they’d brought on Germany. He used to say it would take a dozen generations to break down what they’d built up. He’d never have joined the SS. He was in a sicherungsbataillon. He was an engineer and not even an officer.’