2

Alone once more, St-Cyr again surveyed the study. He was grateful for the silence, for the opportunity, but were there things he had missed?

De Bonnevies had had a real love of bees. Pollen, sealed in 100cc jars, formed a collection as eclectic as the directory of his clients. Several of the samples were from prewar Poland; others from Russia. Italy was represented, Belgium, Holland – England, Wales and Scotland. Shades of yellow mostly; those of green, too, and orange and purple but muted, the tiny, microscopic grains being packed together by each forager to form granules from about two to three millimetres in diameter and irregularly rounded. All would possess the scent of the blossom most prevalent. Lavender, clover, linden, pear or apple. When mixed with nectar or honey, and stored in the cells, the pollen would form the beebread Hermann had mentioned.

Elsewhere in the study, filing cabinets held correspondence that, before the war, had gone on at a pace. America, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India … Wherever bees were kept, de Bonnevies had sought answers or given advice. An address to which he had been making last-minute revisions was entitled: ‘WILL NO ONE SPEAK FOR THE BEES OF RUSSIA? Reliable estimates tell us that over one half of all Russian honey bees have already perished. When will this madness stop?’

And never mind the human casualties at Stalingrad. A brave man to have thought to speak out like this. Foolish, too.

Folding the address – planning to read it later – St-Cyr tucked it away in a pocket. The desk was functional, not big or wide, but with a rampart of pigeon-holes that would take much time to go through. Could they be left for the moment? he wondered.

Something … was there still something in plain sight that he was missing?

Pens lay on the desk with a spare pair of glasses. Snapshots covered a tackboard on the wall behind. The daughter was attractive in her own right: not too pretty but secure enough in that department. There were lots of photos of her, but none of the son. ‘And why not?’ he asked. ‘Surely a few of the boy in uniform to remind the father of him?’

There weren’t any in the drawers or even in the pigeon-holes, many of which contained letters of one sort and another.

The Amaretto bottle had probably once held gin, not olive oil or wine. The new label had been stained by the contents when the bottle had been quickly set down. Of brown sticking-paper, its bold black letters had been crudely executed. An associate, perhaps, or a client – one of the less fortunate. Or had the bottle really been purchased from a black-market supplier and was that all there was to it? Death by mistake.

Then there would surely have been other poisonings. But would the préfet and his men make Hermann and himself aware of them? Not likely.

Though their visit could only have been brief due to the fumes, Talbotte hadn’t taken the beekeeper’s directory of clients, and neither had the sous-préfet of the local commissariat. A puzzle unless it had been left as a warning.

When Juliette de Bonnevies came downstairs, she found the Chief Inspector sitting in Alexandre’s chair quietly perusing the directory, and she couldn’t help but ask herself, How could he be so calm with that lying so near?

Alexandre hadn’t been covered. Retreating, she went softly upstairs to find a bed sheet in the walnut armoire, the one from Aix that her mother had treasured, as had she and Étienne who had often, as a boy, hidden in it.

In play, never in fear of me, only of Alexandre, she told herself and touched the compartment where he had curled himself in with his bony knees pressing against his chin.

‘Mon cher,’ she whispered. ‘Mon petit, I mustn’t cry, must I? He’s gone now, Étienne. Gone.’

Everything would pass to Danielle – she knew this, knew that Alexandre would have left her son nothing in his will. Nothing of hers. But it would take time to settle things, and there would have to be a funeral.

Knowing she couldn’t face one, she took a moment to steady herself, then blurted softly, ‘Maybe they will let you come home for it. Home, Étienne.’

Compassion? Had the Occupier any? she demanded bitterly, and using a corner of the sheet, dried her eyes.

In the study, she said nothing, only covered the corpse and then stood waiting patiently.

He’d let her wait, thought St-Cyr.

Every detail was there, she told herself, in that little book Alexandre insisted on keeping. The names, the clients, the people who kept bees for him too. The out-apiaries … The Inspector seemed glued to the precisely crisp, neat handwriting. He’d see that keeping the directory had begun long before the war. In October of 1921, Inspector? she silently demanded. The 31st to be precise. The day he brought me here to this house of his mother and its awful furniture that my father soon rectified.

He’d see that there were actors, doctors, lawyers, but among those less fortunate, Madame Roulleau, the concierge who kept bees for him on the roof of her apartment house and had done so for all those years and even some that had not been recorded. Mme de Longueville, too, and Monsieur Durand.

He’d see that there were socialites, politicians and businessmen, and now German generals and others of the Occupier, and that Alexandre had had access to the grand salons of the elite. He’d see that they had all trusted him with their little secrets.

‘Madame, you will forgive me, but I’m puzzled.’

‘Puzzled?’ she heard herself yelp.

‘Yes. Did you, perhaps, remove this little book from the desk and then replace it?’

How could he have guessed? ‘I …’

The woman swallowed. Flustered and defenceless, she fought to answer but couldn’t. ‘You see, madame, in spite of the need for haste to avoid the fumes, Préfet Talbotte should, by rights, have taken it. A first police procedure is to seize all such records in case they should yield the identity of the killer.’

‘I … I did remove it, yes, for safety’s sake, you understand. But—’

‘But felt it best to replace it after the préfet and sous-préfet had departed?’

She knew he was going to force her to answer yes, and wondered why it was so necessary for him to humiliate her like this. Her cheeks felt hot.

Abruptly pulling the white woollen robe more tightly about herself, Juliette folded her arms defiantly across her chest and answered, ‘One does things in the instant of such a discovery, Inspector, that one later feels differently about and rectifies.’

Instinct had driven her to protect something in the directory, but he’d not mention this, not yet, nor that she must have known of the danger and had ducked into and out of the study to get it. ‘Then can you tell me anything about these people?’

Anything at all, or nothing. ‘It’s been a long time …’ she hazarded. ‘He kept things to himself.’

‘You didn’t help him in his work? A wife …’

Had the crisis passed? she wondered and felt herself beginning to relax. Unfolding her arms, she said, ‘At first, yes, but then … why then Étienne came into this world and, with the house to look after and Madame de Bonnevies, I had little time to spare. She was ill and confined to her bed. I—’

‘You did not have une bonne à tout faire?’ A maid of all work.

‘My husband and his mother thought it too expensive, too “ostentatious” of me.’

The Inspector would leave that titbit for now, she knew, but would come back to it like a vulture.

‘Did he like Amaretto?’

Was it safer ground? ‘Not that I knew, but what you mean to ask, Inspector, is did he go out of his way to buy that bottle or did someone give it to him?’

‘You’ve been thinking it over.’

Ah merde, he didn’t miss a thing! ‘The café on the rue Saint-Blaise is a possibility and just down from the church. He always went there for a marc or a glass or the vin ordinaire, but not on the no-alcohol days, of course. Sometimes an eau de vie de poir ou de pêche from one of the little orchards in Montreuil – he rented out hives to them and still does. Well, not any more, I guess. Perhaps that’s why there are so many in the apiary. He must have been overwintering some of them here and would have set them out again in the spring.’

And you really have thought things over, madame, he said to himself. You’ve planned your strategy and want, I think, to lead me away from too close a perusal of this little book.

‘A vineyard, an orchard – pear and peach brandies or the plain and rough,’ said the Inspector, and she heard herself saying yes too quickly, and felt her heart sink at being caught out so easily.

‘The vineyard is in Saint-Fargeau. It’s not far and … and is not very big, but before the war, the … the wine was exceptional, the brandy passable.’

Did the Inspector know it well? she wondered. Did he, perhaps, live nearby? Again her heart sank, then again and deeper as she heard him say, ‘The rue Laurence-Savart. My mother’s house also.’

‘Was she old and ill, too?’ she heard herself asking and knew he could be cruel for he did not answer.

‘Your partner …?’ she asked.

‘Has gone to interview one of the names on this list your husband had written for Friday’s deliveries and consultations.’

‘List … what list? I saw no …’ Ah SainteMère, he had got the better of her again!

‘It was in your husband’s jacket pocket,’ he confessed. ‘Now, if it’s not too much trouble, might we have a look at your son’s room?’

‘My son’s …? Inspector, you’ve no right. Étienne can’t have had anything to do with this. He doesn’t even know of it and won’t for weeks and weeks, if then!’

She had broken into tears and he hated himself for doing it to her but had had to. ‘Do letters take so long to reach him?’ he asked.

The hint of kindness in his voice only grated. ‘Months, sometimes. My son was being held at Stablack but then they moved him to Elsterhorst and now he’s at Oflag 17A. It’s … it’s somewhere in what was formerly Austria, I think.’

Officers’ Lager 17A. ‘Did your son help his father, madame?’

‘With the bees …?’

She had blanched and now realized this. Angrily she brushed the fringe from her brow and glared at him before stammering, ‘I … I don’t know why you should need to ask such a thing? I really don’t!’

‘Then let us take a look at his room. He can’t have had anything to do with this murder, of course, but let us make certain of it.’

Monstre! she wanted to shriek, but found the will to softly say, ‘Then, if you will follow me, I will take you to it.’

Twenty-four avenue Raphaël was tucked against the Jardin du Ranelagh and not a stone’s throw from the Bois. Once the villa of François Coty, the perfumer, it had been requisitioned like so many others. Drawing that splendid front-wheel drive of Louis’s into the kerb and locking the Citroën’s doors, Kohler stood in darkness as the faint blue lights of workmen fretted feverishly over the lower stonework of the villa. White paint was being removed with wire brushes and cloths soaked in gasoline. There were large, dripping letters nearest to the windows … MORT AUX BOCHES … VICTOIRE! LIBERTÉ!

Death to the Germans … Victory! Liberty! Von Schaumburg would be in a rage. Not only had the Résistance done a job in the deepest darkness of the night, they had taught the sentries a damned good lesson: both could so easily have had their throats cut.

‘Relax, eh? I’ll see what I can do to calm him,’ he said to a pink-cheeked Grenadier who couldn’t be any more than sixteen and was dreading the Russian Front. ‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central.’

Cigarettes were passed to both of the boys for later. ‘Danke,’ said the other one softly. ‘He’s in there frying our balls, I guess.’

It was very quiet in the spacious foyer where tapestries hung and gilded Louis XIV armchairs offered respite. But the doors to the salons were all closed, the adjutant not at his desk, the secretary …

Ilse Gross came through to take one look at him and shake her head. ‘Von Paulus,’ she mouthed the name. ‘Der Führer …’

Prising off his shoes and dumping coat, fedora and gloves on top of them, Kohler headed for the grand salon. Clearly the rolling drumbeat and trumpet call of Die Wache am Rhein came to him and then words over a wireless that crackled.

Radio-Berlin were broadcasting von Paulus’s faint-voiced gratitude to the Führer who had just made him a Field Marshal and expected him to carry on to the death.

Looking ill, a grey, bristle-headed giant struck down, von Schaumburg was huddled under blankets before a roaring fire. Field-grey, regulation-issue woollen long johns were pulled up to the knees; the big bare feet plunked into a tin basin of steaming water that smelled strongly of Friar’s balsam. Both his adjutant, Rittmeister Graf Waldersee, and his aides, Major Prince Ratibor and Oberleutnant von Dühring, were with him.

But only von Schaumburg had the flu. And why must that God of Louis’s do this to them?

The radio message came to an end as the Führer’s Headquarters signed off.

‘Kohler, ach du lieber Gott, Dummkopf, what has happened? Why aren’t you working?’ Phlegm was hawked up, choked on, and spat into a handkerchief.

‘Nothing’s happened, General. It’s just a small delivery my partner and I thought you would …’

‘Das Bienen …’ he coughed. ‘Have you brought them. Idiot?’

The bees … ah shit!

Startled, Kohler threw the others a puzzled glance only to see the three of them quickly retreat and softly close the doors.

‘Well?’ demanded von Schaumburg. ‘My knuckles, they’re swollen. Swollen, Kohler.’

Arthritis, and Louis hadn’t told him everything that had been in that little book of de Bonnevies’. ‘The bees were all dead, General. As soon as we can find replacements, we’ll send their owner to you.’

‘Ten stings a week, one on each knuckle. He was to have come to me yesterday.’

‘Yes, General, we know that.’

‘Verfluchte Franzosen.’

Damned French …

‘Banditen, Kohler. Terroristen. Did you see what you and that … that partner of yours let those people do?’

Gott im Himmel, were they now to be blamed for everything? ‘General, I’ve brought your honey and pollen, the royal …’

‘ANSWERS. I WANT ANSWERS, DAMN YOU!’

A coughing fit intruded, the nose erupted. Mulled wine was taken deeply. The Nordic eyes, with their sagging pouches, were filled with rheum.

The throat was cleared. ‘You see what the filthy French have done to me, Kohler? Now tell me how he died.’

Here was the man to whom Vichy was now forced to pay not 400 million but 500 million francs per day to the Reich in reparations and costs: £2,500,000 at the official exchange rate of 200 francs to the pound sterling, or at 43.5 francs to the American dollar, all but $11,500,000.

Pine needles littered the surface of the foot-bath. Rheumatism, too, thought Kohler ruefully. Nearly seventy, and long past retirement, the general waited. The unshaven jowls were grey, the blunt, high forehead and prominent nose damp with perspiration.

Briefly he gave him an update on the murder but for a moment Old Shatter Hand’s thoughts were transfixed by the flames of other matters. ‘Von Paulus will surrender tomorrow, Kohler, and for this, the Führer will call him a traitor. Cut off, surrounded, outnumbered and out-gunned, should he lay down the lives of those of his men who remain?’

‘General, I leave all such matters to those who know best.’

‘And the Führer is always right, is that it, eh?’

‘General …’

‘Yes, yes, you don’t believe it for a moment and have just recently lost both of your sons. War isn’t pleasant. Condolences, Kohler. Condolences.’

Another deep draught of the mulled wine was taken. A Gevrey-Chambertin, the 1919, and mein Gott, was he draining Coty’s cellars in preparation for the Wehrmacht’s packing up and heading home?

‘In 1935, de Bonnevies visited my family’s estates in Mecklenburg on the Plauer See. He remembered our beekeeper fondly – they’d spent an afternoon discussing a mutual interest in bee-breeding and making mead.’

‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees, General …’

‘From Russia, Kohler. Russia!’

It had to be asked. ‘Brought in with squashed honeycomb, some of which might then be used for supplementing the winter stores of Parisian bees?’

Kohler had been to the Restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, so gut, ja gut! but that honeycomb hadn’t been from Russia. ‘To the Gare de l’Est, you idiot. Rerouted through the Reich to find its way to Paris thereby denying the needs of the Fatherland. I want the practice stopped.’

Oh-oh. ‘A name, General?’

‘That I can’t give you and you know this. All I can tell you is de Bonnevies was aware of it and deeply concerned for the health of not just his own bees, but those of his colleagues and all others.’

‘And was that why he was poisoned, General?’

‘Questions … must you ask me questions when you find me like this? He had a sister in the Salpêtrière, the women’s asylum. He may have gone to see her on Thursday. He always did.’

Frau Gross came in with one of the Wehrmacht’s doctors. Two nurses followed. There was talk of putting the general in hospital, of at least getting him back to bed.

‘Candles, Kohler. I think it had something to do with candles.’

‘The wax.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s it. The shortages.’

And the marché noir, the black market? wondered Kohler, but let the matter sit. Louis might have something by now. Louis …

The candle was no more than ten centimetres in length and one in diameter. Made from tightly rolled foundation sheet, the wick, a simple piece of string, would work well enough, thought St-Cyr. First soaked in salt water and then dried, it brought back boyhood memories of homemade fireworks and other forbidden explosive devices. The pewter candleholder would have entranced a boy of ten and filled his head with dreams of brigands and seaside inns.

Madame de Bonnevies was tensely watching him. ‘Do you light one of these every day?’ he asked and saw a faint, sad smile briefly touch her lips.

‘When I can, yes. It perfumes the air. Étienne loved the smell of it. He …’

‘Madame, your son can’t have occupied this room in several years. Not, I think, since beyond the age of …’

How could he do this to her? ‘Sixteen,’ she gasped.

‘And did your husband know you were using his foundation sheets for such a purpose?’

‘No! There, are you satisfied?’

‘And this practice?’ He indicated the candle. ‘Has been going on for how long?’

The police were always brutal, the Sûreté only more despicable. ‘Since the Defeat, since my son was taken. A mother has to do something, hasn’t she? Well?’

She wouldn’t cry, she told herself. She would face his scrutiny bravely. But he turned away and, setting the candleholder down on Étienne’s desk next to the windows, found Sûreté matches and lit it.

‘One name,’ he said, and she, like him, watched the flame splutter to life. ‘There are well over forty in this book of your husband’s, madame. My partner and I have little time. I think you know the one we need.’

‘I don’t. I haven’t seen that book in …’

‘Then why, please, did you take it?’

‘Did I look through it – is that what you’re implying?’

‘You know it is.’

‘Then I must tell you I saw nothing untoward.’ There, she had him now.’ Defeated, he picked up one of the tiny Plasticine sculptures of ducks, pigs, geese and horses, too, in the farmyard Étienne had made at the age of four and which she had saved all these years.

‘Beautifully done,’ he said.

‘Please don’t touch them. You’ve no right.’

‘Is it that you want me to obtain a magistrate’s order? It will take much time, but if you have nothing to hide, why imply that you have?’

Salaud! she cried inwardly and swiftly turned away.

‘Sixteen, madame. Why did your son feel he’ had to leave this house at such a tender age?’

Tender … ‘It has nothing to do with my husband’s murder! Nothing, do you understand? He … he simply couldn’t stand seeing what was happening to me.’

There were photographs of the boy with his mother in happier times, some of the sister, too. In one snapshot, the two youngsters, at the ages of perhaps twelve and eight, were shyly holding hands at the water’s edge; in another the boy was moulding river clay into a pregnant female form. In yet another, he and his mother were fondly embracing.

‘One always looks for answers, madame. You must forgive the detective in me.’

Had he seen something? she wondered and looking up, knew at once that he was now watching her closely in the mirrored door of the armoire and had positioned himself so as to do so.

‘Is there anything else you want?’ she asked harshly.

‘The watercolours, madame. Your son is also an accomplished painter. Very sensitive, very accurate. Lupins, achillea, dogwood in flower, roses, but …’

‘But, what?’ she spat.

He shrugged and parted the black-out drapes to peer down into the garden and then to pull them aside. ‘But in your husband’s study, madame, there are those of Pierre-Joseph Redouté and others. Un bouquet de pensées, Rosa x odorata, lilium superbum …’

‘And?’she shrilled defiantly.

‘But none of your son’s work. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?’

Pinching out the flame, St-Cyr heard her suck in a wounded breath and stammer, ‘I … I never do that. Not … not until the candle’s burned out.’

‘Then let us hope your prayers will be answered.’

Wax and candles and a sister in the Salpêtrière. Acarine mites from Russia … Old Shatter Hand hadn’t given them a hell of a lot to go on, thought Kohler, finishing a cigarette while standing next to a newspaper kiosk inside the Gare de l’Est.

People were everywhere; uniforms, too, the smell of boot grease, sweat and urine mingling with those of cheap cologne, unwashed bodies, stale tobacco smoke, farts and all the rest. Jesus, merde alors, why did the French have to make their railway stations so huge?

High above him, the glass-and-iron dome of the roof was lathered with regulation laundry blueing, each pane criss-crossed with brown sticking-paper, but now daylight fought to get in to discolour everything in this perpetual gloom. More than thirty platforms fed lines to and from Eastern France, the Reich and Switzerland. It was from here that trainload upon trainload of goods left the country. Fully 80 per cent of the country’s wheat, nearly all of its potatoes, eggs, cheese, wine, copper, lead, zinc and steel. There were goods-sheds upon sheds in the yards to the north of the station, warehouses upon warehouses. So how the hell did honeycomb from Russia bypass the Reich to find its way into this, and where was it being kept?

Tucking the cigarette butt away in his mégot tin for another day – a real butt collector like everyone else – Kohler took a moment longer to look around.

People came and went or milled about in their thousands, or joined seemingly endless queues at the controls which solidly blocked the traffic up. Some had burlap sacks of onions – firewood even – on tired, worried shoulders. Others lugged suitcases – the better dressed, their briefcases. A crate of carrots, one of cabbages – artichokes in a hamper that was stuffed to the limit. Sacks empty, on occasion, and oh, bien sûr, it was a city and a nation on the scrounge and most here had been out foraging the countryside or were on their way to it. And those returning with the spoils had to face the lottery of the controls.

Paris had become a city of police and nowhere did one see this better than in places like this. The flics in their dark blue capes and képis patrolled endlessly looking for trouble or just being damned officious to show that they still had some power. The Feldgendarmen, the military police, in field-grey greatcoats and with badges of office that looked like miniature breastplates dangling from the neck, were here in force. The Kettenhunde, they were called behind their backs: the chained dogs. They, too, carried black leatherclad, lead-weighted truncheons.

Gestapo … there were lots of those and invariably they carried thin briefcases and looked like down-at-the-heel undertakers who’d had a bad year. But the Wehrmacht had its plain-clothed secret police, too: the GFPs, the Geheime Feldpolizei, on the hunt primarily for deserters.

And wasn’t this matter of the mites a question for the railway police? he asked himself and said, Go carefully. Remember that these days there has to be a system for every commodity.

The Reichsbahn supervised the railways, so he’d have to go to them. But in France they didn’t wear the becoming light blue-grey they did at home. Here they wore coal black with silver piping on their tunics. Swastikas and eagles also, of course.

Where … where the hell to start? Soldier-boys were everywhere, arriving and departing, laughing, shouting, crying, too, as they kissed their girls goodbye. There were boys from the Kreigsmarine and also from the Luftwaffe, for Paris was Mecca to all and probably the closest one could get to how things had been before the war – no bombing; well, hardly any. Rest and recupe’ and this really was the Führer’s little showcase of how the Occupied should behave.

Good luck then, mein Führer, he snorted inwardly at the thought of what wasn’t so easily seen, that vast undercurrent of dissent and deceit that would one day erupt into outright hatred.

When he found the appropriate office, a burly Bahnschutzpolizei corporal from Schwaben was standing guard over a bench filled with kids. Some were young, others older, but all had dutifully crossed their knees. Books were open on each of their laps – one, two, three, four, five in all. Scruffy shoes needed mending, mismatched kneesocks drooped, and all were obviously from the same family, for a mismatched sock found its mate well down the line …

Would a sweet voice help? ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Offizier. A moment, bitte. I seem to be lost.’

Suspicious blue eyes raked him savagely. ‘Lost? Don’t give me that crap! Gott im Himmel, mein Schweinebulle, since when was a cop ever lost?’

Was he really that easy to spot? wondered Kohler, somewhat taken aback. ‘Okay, I’m looking for something.’ Affably he grinned and offered a cigarette as a token of peace.

The packet was taken in expectation of more to come. The kids didn’t look up. A page was turned and then another and on down the line.

It would be best to get it out and over with. ‘A railway truck in from Russia recently. Honey or beeswax.’ He gave a futile shrug. ‘My boss wants to know.’

‘Your boss,’ sighed the corporal.

‘Sturmbannführer Boemelburg.’

‘That’s better.’

Reluctantly Kohler dragged out a wad of bills. Cursing the constant need to pay for information that should rightly be shared, he peeled off five hundred Reichskassenscheine, the Occupation marks and equivalent to ten thousand francs at the official rate.

‘It’s important,’ grunted the corporal. ‘Your boss must really want to know.’

Another five hundred were found. A page was turned, another and another and on down the line.

‘Try Shed fourteen, line twenty. Enjoy yourself.’

‘Danke.’ Kohler started to leave but curiosity got the better of him. ‘So, why are the kids being held?’

‘Why do you think, mein lieber Detektiv?’

Knees were uncrossed and recrossed and this continued on down the line. A thin skirt was primly tugged into place beneath its book. Trousers were tugged … Another skirt …

‘Your sergeant has arrested their mother,’ sighed Kohler.

‘Detained her.’

‘For how long now?’

A lifelessness entered the corporal’s gaze. ‘Long enough.’

‘Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central, mein Herr. I’m sorry but I’d better check into it.’

‘He won’t like it.’

‘Nor will I.’

The door was locked. The kids had all stopped reading. People came and went constantly. None looked up. None were curious.

When a woman who couldn’t possibly be old enough to be the mother of those kids came out to urgent banging and cries of ‘Gestapo! Raus! Raus!’ she was carrying two big and obviously freshly emptied old suitcases. There were tears in her wounded brown eyes, those of rage and those of humiliation and despair. Her overcoat was unbuttoned, the little pillbox hat with its bit of veiling askew. Blouse and sweater were also unbuttoned.

‘Get out of my Way,’ she said fiercely to Kohler.

So few of the Occupier spoke French, he knew his use of it would startle her. ‘A moment, madame. Hey, let me settle this properly, eh? Just wait here. I won’t be long.’

Louis wasn’t going to like it. They had enough trouble as it was but what the hell. Chance was everything these days. One could go through a control and nothing would happen or there’d be an absolute disaster, but this one’s misfortune could have its silver lining.

Stepping into the office, he closed the door and locked it behind him. Out in the station they’d be waiting, the kids not turning a page, the woman trying to button her things and finding her fingers were shaking too much.

The beret and earmuffs were dark brown, the belted brown suede, three-quarter-length jacket and grey woollen gloves old. As St-Cyr watched her from inside the honey-house, Danielle de Bonnevies hesitated. The girl had entered the garden from the Impasse de champ de parc de Charonne, and now stood just inside the tall wooden carriage doors through which she had come.

The once dark blue Terrot bicycle was caked with dirt and badly scratched, its mudguards dented, the glass of its blue-blinkered lamp cracked. A torn bit of towelling padded the seat. Wires secured the tyres to their rims – a bike no one would want to steal or requisition, but it was the load she had brought that begged closer scrutiny. The front carrier basket held a large, worn brown leather suitcase, tied round with old rope; on the rear carrier rack there was a wooden cage that held two worried rabbits beneath an oft-mended burlap sack that bulged.

Above the hiking boots, coarse grey woollen socks hid the turn-ups of the heavy khaki trousers she had made over for herself. Originally from quartermasters’ stores, the trousers had been left on the beaches at Dunkirk in early June of 1940 like thousands of other pairs, boots, shirts, et cetera, as the Allies had fled to Britain. Such garments had been rarely worn at first, but now in the third winter of the Occupation, were increasingly being seen, and with the defeat at Stalingrad, would be even more in demand.

The girl’s breath came hesitantly, as she sensed that things were not right but couldn’t put her finger on the cause. The police photographer had been and gone, the corpse would be in the morgue, yet not one of the neighbours had thought to stop her in the street to tell her. Not one.

Cautiously she wheeled the bike towards the honey-house. Noting the footprints of others trampled in the snow, she held her breath, looked questioningly over a shoulder towards the house – searched its windows on the first floor, one in particular. That of the brother, he thought. Then she looked towards the gate in the wall at the back of the garden.

A girl of eighteen, with pale, silky auburn hair that didn’t quite reach her shoulders. The large, wary eyes were gaunt and darkly shadowed by fatigue under finely curving brows. The forehead was furrowed with anxiety and chalky, the nose that of the father, although in her it made the face appear narrower than it was, giving height to the brow but a fine, soft curve to the chin. The lips, unreddened by anything but the cold, and slightly parted in apprehension, were not thin like the father’s, but more those of the mother. Good kissing lips, Hermann would have said. The cheeks, though rosy, were frost-bitten under that same chalky whiteness as the brow. Was she ill?

When she opened the door to the honey-house and saw him waiting for her, Danielle sucked in a breath and blanched.

Quivering, she waited for him to … to arrest her? wondered St-Cyr and sighed inwardly as he told her who he was.

Alarm filled her grey eyes. Faintly she found her voice. ‘What … what has happened? The Sûreté …?’ she managed.

Not the flics, not the Gestapo either, or the Milice. Although it would be best to put the jump on her and find out what he could, he told himself he would have to be kind. ‘An accident, I think.’

‘An accident,’ she repeated.

‘Your father, mademoiselle. I regret the news I must impart, but …’

‘Dead?’ she asked emptily. ‘Dead?’

‘Please go into the house, mademoiselle. Take as long as you need. A few questions, nothing difficult …’

‘An accident, you said.’

‘Well, perhaps it was attempted murder.’

‘She did it. He always said she would. Maman!’ she cried in anguish and began to run towards the house only to be caught by an arm and pulled back.

Vehemently shaking her head, she stammered, ‘I … I shouldn’t have said that. I … I told him she would never do it. Never, do you understand? Maman only threatened to because she … she was so unhappy. Murder was never in either of their hearts, Inspector. How could it have been?’ ‘

The urge to say, That is what we must determine, was suppressed. St-Cyr released his hold on her, the girl instantly dropping her eyes and pressing a fist hard against her lips to stop herself from crying.

Turning away, she began to pluck at the ropes that bound the cage and sack to her carrier. Breaking a fingernail, she tore off the offending shred with her teeth. ‘Bacon …’ she wept. ‘Some sausage … The last of the late pears, wrapped in newspaper … Butter. I managed a kilo this time. Cheese, too, and eggs – enough for an omelette.’

Taking her by the shoulders, St-Cyr stood behind her saying, ‘Cry, mademoiselle. Go on, please. You’re exhausted and now in shock and deeply distressed. Things will sort themselves out in time. Leave the unloading and the rabbits to me. They’re to go under the kitchen stove, isn’t that so?’ he asked and saw her nod.

‘The cage there is bigger. I … I made it for them. He … he really would have been pleased. I know he would.’

It was a cry of despair.

Turning from her, he began to untie the ropes that bound the suitcase to her front carrier. Danielle knew he would open it – that he’d see both what she’d brought back and what she hadn’t been able to barter or had hung on to by never giving in and always sticking to her price.

She knew he’d see her for what she had become – a travelling stall-keeper, a peddlar – and that the crucible of her very being was in those things, and that the bike was not nearly so beat-up as it appeared. The sack bulged where those of others did not; the rabbits were not two males as others often discovered, but a buck and a doe whose mating had been performed before her as proof positive and at her insistence.

But would he find in that stained and slag-encrusted crucible, the button of gold at the bottom of its white-hot melt?

‘Excuse me, then, Inspector. I … I’m not myself, I’m afraid. Papa … papa and I, we were the best of friends. I understood him, you see. I alone appreciated what he did and what he had worked so hard to become.’

St-Cyr watched and, as he had felt she would, the girl turned to look back at the honey-house before entering the study to pick her way through it and wonder what really had happened there.

A little thread, some buttons on cards, a few safety pins and hairpins met his eyes as he opened the suitcase. Carpenter’s nails were like gold and she had them in several sizes and neat little bundles, and had hung on to them in the hope of a better deal. Shoelaces, string, glue – what else had she carried in trade?

Unlike most, she hadn’t taken small valuables from the house but had built up a stock of necessities and simple luxuries. Toothbrushes were extremely rare and she had them, elastic bands, too. Hairbrushes, hair-combs, pencils, playing cards, dice, lipsticks, cigarette lighters, small tins of black-market lighter fuel but watch out, it’s gasoline!

Matches, too, but from the Reich, not French. Cigarettes – Russian, these. Pipe tobacco – Dutch. How had she come by it?

Chocolate – real chocolate!

Balls of wool – blue-grey, black and white – recovered from unravelled sweaters. Some reasonably good perfume, face powder and compacts. Tins of tuna fish. A christening dress for a baby, a bonnet, too. Three brassieres and several pairs of underwear, both male and female, not new, of course, but well laundered and with, yes, that same clean, white sand …

Jammed into the suitcase were the spoils of bartering: a small sack of chicken manure to be mixed with wood ash if possible, and used to fertilize the soil under the forty or so inverted glass bell jars, the cloches beneath which the girl would soon start growing Belgian endive, green onions, radishes, lettuces, et cetera, in the garden.

The smoked pork sausage with garlic, smelled also of savory and mushrooms. Six chicken eggs were cradled in a cigar box that was lined with straw and secured by elastic bands. The bacon, a slab of about two kilograms, was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. There was a small crock of pate. Two jars of redcurrant jelly were nestled beside others of plum jam. Dried cherries and dried apples filled a small tin box. There was also a rope of garlic.

The sack held beets, but among them were potatoes, carrots and a stalk of Brussels sprouts.

Among the tins of face powder she had to offer was one whose shade would easily have matched the pallor he’d seen and he realized then that here was a very resourceful young woman. At each control she would have coughed, looked like death, and gasped, ‘A fever. The flu, I think, Herr Offizier. Forgive me.’

‘Pass. Let this one pass.’

Not only would it have discouraged a close inspection but also flirtation. And yes, the road controls were normally run by the Wehrmacht, not the Gestapo, not the flics, the Milice and other Vichy goons as at the railway stations. But how had she come by so many things to trade, and where the hell was Hermann? Surely he should have been here with the car by now?

There wasn’t just one man in the Bahnschutzpolizei office at the Gare de l’Est, a hole in the wall with stove, table and chairs. There were three of them, and the contents of the woman’s purse was still strewn across the table, so they weren’t yet finished with her, thought Kohler. Ah damn …

Putting his back to the door, he took in the competition. The Bzp Obergruppenfuhrer who had watched the other two at play, didn’t smile. A climber who would have liked to have worn a different uniform, the man was about forty years of age, clean-shaven and serious.

‘So, mein Herr, you have a problem?’ asked the Bzp in deutsch – in German. ‘The woman is suspected of being a courier for the terrorists.’

Black tunics and flies were undone on the other two, not on this one. He even wore his cap.

‘Several times we have noticed her,’ eagerly sang out an eighteen-year-old boy in French, the younger of the two miliciens. ‘When I was with the Service d’Ordre, she would come and go twice a week. I watched her.’

‘Always she has those kids with her as a distraction,’ grunted the older milicien, grim-faced and smug about doing his ‘duty’. Both wore the regulation-issue brown shirts, black ties and trousers. Her suitcases had been emptied into a corner, but they’d not had time yet to pick through the loot – winter beans, dried and still in their pods, potatoes …

‘You raped her,’ sighed Kohler in French. ‘Under OKW ordinance eighty-four, section thirty-six, article seven – that’s Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to you two – what you’ve just done is a criminal offence and subject to the death penalty. Look, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to report it.’

‘To whom?’ asked the Obergruppenführer softly.

‘To the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. How’s that for an answer?’

Herr Kohler’s German was still perfect, of course, but his French had really been very good and far better than most. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’

Deutsch again. ‘And why not?’

‘Word gets around. Besides …’ The Obergruppenführer thumbed her identity card. ‘This, I believe, is a forgery.’

What else was the bastard to have said? scoffed Kohler silently as the other two quickly buttoned themselves. The boy found his chasseur alpin beret and truncheon, the older one, his cigarettes and those of the woman, her lipstick, too.

Was there nothing for it, then? asked Kohler silently. Louis wasn’t here to back him up. Louis wasn’t anywhere near. Had she been arrested by the Gestapo or the SS, things would have been far harsher and still would be. Yet if a courier, then wasn’t the item these bastards wanted not on her person at all, but being passed from child to child out there on that bench!

‘Look, I can’t have trouble. Not at the moment. My partner and I are on to something really big and need a little help.’

‘So, are we to let the whore go in return? Is this what you’re saying?’ asked the sergeant, finding the thought mildly amusing.

Neither of the other two could comprehend a word, so gut, ja gut, thought Kohler. ‘That’s it. Old Shatter Hand wants me to have a look at …’ He found his little black notebook and flipped it open to any page. ‘Shed fourteen, line twenty. Help me out and I’ll put in a good word for you and forget all about what happened here.’

Kohler … Kripo, Paris-Central … where had he heard that name before? wondered Obergruppenführer Karl Otto Denke. The rue des Saussaises, he told himself, and something about the SS. A rawhide whip and their not liking this one. The scar on the left cheek – yes, yes that was it, so he could go to them if Kohler should reveal anything useful. ‘Okay, you’ve got a deal. Let her go, you two. Vite, vite. Orders from above. Orders, idiots!’ He swept an arm across the table and, dumping the contents of the purse back into it, handed the bag to the boy.

Kohler took it from him. ‘The cigarettes and the lipstick,’ he asked the older milicien in French and snapped his fingers. ‘Just to calm her nerves, eh? Then maybe if she really is working for the terrorists, those salauds won’t come looking for you.’

Unable to comprehend all that had been said, suspicion registered in the Bzp’s countenance; doubt and fear were in those of the other two.

‘So, okay, we’ve got ourselves a deal,’ quipped Kohler, ‘and the three of us will visit the shed.’

Out on the concourse, he told the corporal to make certain the suitcases were refilled. ‘We wouldn’t want her going home empty-handed, especially since her papers are in perfect order.’

She would change them within the hour. She had that look about her. One after another the storybooks were closed and the staircase of kids got to their feet to dutifully wait.

‘Take care of her,’ he said to the littlest one. Nothing else. Just that.

Madame de Bonnevies was in the kitchen, sipping the leftover of the daughter’s tisane of linden blossom, perhaps sweetened with honey. She didn’t look up when St-Cyr put the last of the things the girl had brought on the counter, but when he shook the matchbox the husband had used to hold its little corpses, the woman set the bowl down.

‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees,’ he said. ‘An address entitled, “Will no one speak for the bees of Russia?”‘

‘Danielle can perhaps help you, Inspector, but you will have to wait.’

‘Murder seldom does.’

‘Merde alors, I’ve already told you I know nothing of these. The child is exhausted. Have you no compassion? No thought for the worry she has caused her mother?’

The Inspector wasn’t buying it. He set the matchbox down on the table in front of her and found his pipe and tobacco pouch.

‘Your husband was freshly shaven, madame, and had dressed as if for an evening out.’

‘I … I don’t know what he was up to. Believe me, I wouldn’t have. Danielle … Danielle is the only one who might be able to tell you.’

‘The girl stayed at the family’s country house?’

She met his gaze, asked herself, What the hell has Danielle already told him? and said with a shrug, ‘It’s near Soisy-sur-Seine. She … she goes there sometimes – it’s on one of her “routes”, but she tries not to visit it too much. That way it’s … it’s safer.’

‘And unoccupied otherwise?’ he asked and heard her acidly answer, ‘Of course. Fortunately the Occupier has found no need of it.’ But then she calmed herself.

‘My father loved it, Inspector. Danielle never really knew him but feels the same and I know she … she would like to live there, too.’

‘As your father did, madame, or as your son, before the war?’

Ah damn him. ‘My son, yes. My father left the property to him.’ There, he could make of that what he wanted!

The table, one of those exquisite pieces from the provinces, had the warmth of old pine boards that always seem to ask, How many have sat here in days gone by? Bare but for a decorative bowl which would, before the Defeat, have held fruit, it would have easily seated eight or ten.

And this one has realized I love the table, she warned herself as he sat down to examine the beets in the bowl.

‘The names in this directory, madame. If we could just run through them.’

‘It’s … it’s been a long time, as I’ve already told you.’

‘Of course, but …’

He paused to light that pipe of his and to look steadily at her until he had forced her to bleat, ‘But what, Inspector?’

‘One name, that’s all my partner and I need. Enough to make a good start and save much time.’

Again he forced her to wait. Taking out his little black notebook, the Inspector struggled to find a pencil stub and at last rescued one from his jacket pocket.

Alexandre’s signet ring was among the debris that had come out of that pocket – he would have had to remove it from the corpse. Why had he done so? Why had he left it on the table like that?

Elastic bands were also there, burnt-out matchsticks, a cigarette butt that had dribbled its tobacco on the table, the mégot tin it was to have gone into, a tin that was years old and had once held sweets: Anis de l’Abbaye de Flavigny …

‘Does the name Frau Uma Schlacht ring any bells, madame?’

‘Schlacht?’ she heard herself saying.

‘Age: forty-four. Address: 28 quai d’Orléans. She’s not one of the Blitzmädels, not with a schedule that allows for visits during the day.’

The Île Saint-Louis, and not one of the grey mice, the girls who had come in their droves from the Reich as telegraphists, typists, clerks, cooks, canteen help and other jobs like prison warders and interrogators.

‘“Treatments: Mondays,” madame, “at four p.m.” What sort of treatments?’

‘How the hell am I supposed to know?’

‘Would your daughter have carried out those treatments?’

‘Instead of my husband?’

The woman was shaking, and as he watched her, more tears fell. ‘You know that’s what I mean, madame.’

‘Then, no! Alexandre would have insisted on attending to this … this foreigner himself.’

‘Then did your daughter help him with other patients, other clients?’

She would toss an uncaring hand and shrug, thought Juliette, would say acidly, ‘Ask her, don’t ask me. Mon Dieu, those two had shut me right out of their lives. We … we hardly spoke.’

There, he’d make what he wanted of that, too, she told herself. A son who had left the house at the age of sixteen and now a daughter who had loved her father, not her mother because she hadn’t wanted her to be born.

‘“Two litres of mead a month, madame. Six hundred grams of pollen – apple or rose if possible. Honey in two 400CC jars.” Again Frau Schlacht prefers the apple or rose. “For facial masks and for the throat.” Is she a singer?’

‘Pouf! You think you can pry answers from a head that is empty? Quelle folie, Inspector. Quelle absurdité. For the sake of justice, I hope you find his killer, but for myself, I sorely feel you are not up to it! A Sûreté? A Chief Inspector? Pah! I ought to have known not to hope.’

‘I’ll keep your objections in mind. But it says here “the honey, mead and pollen to be left, if necessary, at the Palais d’Eiffel”?’

A beautiful townhouse on the avenue Matignon, the palais, so named by those who worked there, had once been the residence of Alexandre Gustav Eiffel, the builder of the Tower.

‘The Offices of the German Procurement Staff, madame. Das Deutsche Beschaffungsamt in Frankreich.’

Of all the names in that little book, why had he chosen the one she most wanted him to avoid?

Intuitively anticipating her question, the Inspector slid the book across the table, forcing her to look at it. Inadvertently, when she had discovered Alexandre’s body and had taken the book to search through it, she had slightly crumpled the top-right corner of the page. Alexandre had always been so meticulous, so fussy. Perfect pages elsewhere. In just such things as this would the detective find his answers.

‘My husband was a strong advocate of the healthful benefits of taking pollen, Inspector. A spoonful a day. The Père Michel has taken it for years … Ah! here is his name. The Église de Saint-Germain de Charonne. It’s but a short walk. Père Michel could, perhaps, help you greatly and then … why then, you could come back to see Danielle.’

She was desperate and would have to be given a breather, but one must do so curtly and leave her with doubt in mind.

He wagged a forefinger at her. ‘That is exactly the help I want from you. Merci.’ Hermann … where the hell was he? ‘If my partner should turn up with my car, please tell him not to hotfoot it about the city but to wait patiently. In the honey-house perhaps. He used to keep bees on his father’s farm and will find much in there to touch on memories I sadly fear he has long been too busy to recall.’

Shed fourteen, line twenty was well to the north of the Gare de l’Est through a wind-blasted Siberia of rails and a taiga of switches. Trains came and went, huffing, belching steam and coal-smoke; electric ones, too, and noise like you wouldn’t believe, thought Kohler. Donkey engines roared as track was lifted on to flatbed wagons destined for the Reich. Crates of produce were over there … People … a long double line of them. Kids held by the hand, mothers and older daughters …

Though the roundups of Jews and other so-called undesirables had largely gone on last year and Louis had documented as much as he could, there were still some who had hidden and then been caught. Gypsies, too, and Communists, Allied agents and résistants, et cetera.

Wehrmacht boys with carbines slung over their shoulders and dogs on the leash, patrolled the shuffling line, while those with the Schmeissers covered the flanks, and those who had come to supervise the deportations stood nearby.

Suitcase after suitcase was being left to one side of the tracks, but the ‘carriages’ the passengers were to take were still some distance ahead.

‘We’re there,’ said the Bzp Obergruppenführer, indicating a corrugated, rusty-roofed shed of grey concrete block that looked exactly like all the others.

‘Your name …’ began Kohler. ‘I seem to have heard of it years ago. Where’d you say you were from?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Münsterberg.’

‘Near Breslau?’

Kohler was just ragging him. Of course everyone in 1924 had heard of Karl Denke, the mass murderer and butcher who had smoked and then sold the meat of his victims. ‘We weren’t related.’

‘I just wondered. Police work – you know how it is. I was in Munich; the wife at home on her father’s farm. We hadn’t yet had our two boys, Jurgen and Hans. Mein Gott, the inflation, eh? I wheeled a barrow full of marks to buy a dinner of boiled cabbage and a toothbrush!’

There’d been famine. Real hardship. From an official exchange rate of 4.2 marks to the U.S. dollar in 1918, the mark had fallen to 1,000,000 to the dollar in 1923. Those who had had work, had instantly spent their wages on anything they could get.

The smoked ‘pork’ Herr Denke had marketed had sold very well. Buttons from the bones, too, and soap from the fat and ashes.

I can’t let what’s happening to the deportees set me off, said Kohler to himself. I mustn’t.

They were climbing into cattle trucks and would freeze in them. Jésus, merde alors, how could anyone do this? He was glad Louis wasn’t here to witness it; Oona neither, nor Giselle.

‘Look, tell your miliciens to wait outside, eh? This is between the two of us. The less who know of it, the. better.’

Charonne was still very much the village it had once been. As he left the house and began to walk uphill along the cul-de-sac towards the rue Stendhal, St-Cyr knew he was being watched from more than one window. ‘A manage de convenance,’ Madame de Bonnevies had said to Hermann and told him not to ask the neighbours. ‘Life is hard enough.’

Whispers … rumours … there would have been lots of those, for when all was said and done, the beekeeper had been an original, an odd character, an eccentric, and in any village or small town such idiosyncrasies always singled one out. Her money, too – they’d not have missed such a juicy thing.

But had she been carrying on an affair? If so, she would have done it discreetly but even then, the women of this street would have noticed and commented on a made-over skirt, a newly polished pair of prewar high heels – those silk stockings Hermann had mentioned; a chapeau cloche or beret set at a more determined angle, the hair perhaps curled.

Since the Defeat there had been a flood of anonymous letters to the authorities. Vichy and the Gestapo encouraged them, to the shame of the nation. Old scores were being settled, lies told upon lies. Even children – especially children – could be useful to those who would encourage such trash, but had there been letters of complaint about de Bonnevies?

Which of you smashed those hives and robbed them? he demanded silently. Is this why you watch me so closely?

The matter of the hives would have to be settled but for now it was the least of his difficulties. Something had caused madame to hide the fact she had known very well who Frau Schlacht was and that could only spell trouble for Hermann and himself if things turned sour.

At the intersection of the impasse, the rue Stendhal ran downhill past the graveyard and church to end in a set of stone steps. Although the day was almost half-over, the sun had failed to show itself. But here was history, he reminded himself. Architecturally there were those, he knew, who thought the Église de Saint-Germain de Charonne frightful. Only its bell tower remained of the original structure. Fires, wars, dedicated, well-meaning parishioners and determined priests had seen what had been in place since the twelfth century all but completely rebuilt in the fifteenth, gutted of its transepts in the nineteenth and left with a clock in its bell tower to give the time of funerals, confessionals, weddings and christenings, in verdigris-stained Roman numerals.

An original in itself.

Père Michel wasn’t at home in the presbytery or in the church. He was downhill from them a short distance along the rue Saint-Blaise, sitting at a corner table in the Café au Rendezvous, waiting for the Sûreté to question him.

One saw it at a glance on entering. Word had somehow been telegraphed on ahead. Mon Dieu, there were so few telephones in such quartiers, one seldom considered their use.

No, this had been done whisper by whisper and as if through the walls, but how had they known madame would be certain to send him to the priest? Oh bien sûr, it was logical. A death in the parish, the murder of one of their own, but the Sûreté could have come at any time.

They’d seen it, right from the moment he had stepped from the front entrance. They’d known it in his walk. Merde, these villages, he said, letting a rush of affection pass through him, for he was of Belleville, had been born there, and knew it and Ménilmontant and Charonne like the palm of his hand, as would this priest.

In the faltering light of a single electric bulb, shadows seemed to fill Shed fourteen. The smell was overpoweringly of buckwheat, of ripening fields, of straw and wax and beebread, cordite, blood and burning barns. The image of peasant women and children on their knees was clear. Pistol muzzles pressed to the backs of their heads. Bang, bang and into the mud and shit. The men were being hanged.

Kohler sucked in a breath and heaved a defeated sigh at the stupidity of it all, only to notice that Obergruppenführer Denke was watching him closely. The smug little bastard would report his reactions …

‘Mein Gott,’ he said and tried to flash a grin as he indicated the contents of the shed. ‘The Wehrmacht’s boys sure did a job, didn’t they?’

Denke probably wouldn’t know a damned thing about bees. ‘They didn’t just take the heaviest and lightest of the hives – those of the old, well-established colonies that might harbour disease, or the youngest that were too light to overwinter,’ said Kohler. ‘They took everything.’

Inverted straw skeps, grey and golden, the thimble- to basket-shaped hives not used in ages in the Reich, nor in France for that matter – except for catching a swarm – had been piled one on top of another right to the roof. Russia … the Ukraine? he asked himself, and going in among the stacks, touched one and then another.

‘My grandmother used to make these,’ he said, the sound of his voice flat in the freezing, pungent air. ‘Toothless and so old, the arthritis in her hands caused her constant pain she ignored. And forget that crap you hear about bee stings helping. They didn’t.’

The iron skep needle had been like a skewer, twenty centimetres long and sharply pointed, but with a circular loop at its opposite end. ‘Peeled, split willow and blackberry shoots are used to bind the tightly coiled ropes of straw. My brother and I used to gather them for her.’

So why the trip down memory lane? wondered Denke uneasily. Some of the hives had been removed, and because of this there was a gap in the stacks. Kohler had wandered out of sight.

‘Okay, so who’s bringing these in?’ called out the Detektiv.

‘We can go through the manifests, if you like. The Frenchies keep them in the main office.’

A shot rang out, puncturing the metal roof and killing a rat with a sweet tooth.

‘Herr Kohler, what is the meaning of this? What’s going on?’

Nervous was he, at the sound of gunfire and yet wanting a different uniform? ‘Just tell me who it is. Whoever set this up had help – lots of it – and long lines of communication.’

Where … where the hell was Kohler now? ‘I … I simply don’t know, mein Herr. How could I?’

‘And you an Obergruppenführer in the Bahnschutzpolizei who’d look better in a Leutnant’s grey-green? Hey, mein Kamerad from Münsterberg, I know you’re sharper than that. Cough up and I’ll put in a good word for you like I said.’

Another rat fell from the roof timbers, and then another. The miliciens didn’t try to enter. In his mind’s eye, Denke could see them running back along the tracks towards the stationhouse. Had Kohler planned it this way? Of course he had!

‘He’s … he’s important,’ faltered Denke only to hear Kohler quip, ‘He’d have to be.’

‘He’s one of the Bonzen.’

The bigshots. That was better, but teasing the name from the sergeant would be like coaxing the rats to show themselves.

Verdammt, the lousy Schweinebulle, thought Denke. The shed had dropped to silence.

‘Oskar Schlacht. He has an office in the Palais d’Eiffel but is seldom there, or so I’ve been told.’

A busy man, then. ‘So who does Herr Schlacht ring up in a Wehrmacht supply depot in Kodyma or Krivoy Rog, or maybe Lugansk?’

Kohler had worked his way right round the stacks and was not two metres from him! ‘I … I really couldn’t tell you, mein Herr.’

‘It’s Detektiv Aufsichstbeamter or Herr Hauptmann.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Look, relax, will you? Don’t worry about it. A cousin – is that who Herr Schlacht rings up?’

‘He has relatives stationed in several places. In Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, too, and the South of France.’

A man with a big family. ‘Gut! So come and have a look, eh? You never know. Maybe what I’m about to show you could be the key to your future.’

They went among the hives. There was little else he could have done, thought Denke warily. Kohler still had the Walther P38 in hand, but held loosely.

With each stack, the lowest hives had all but been crushed. Others above them were distorted – squished this way and that – but all gave ribbed shadows where light struck the bound coils of straw.

Except in the uppermost hives, where near-dormant bees stirred and fanned their wings, everything was frozen. Dead bees littered the floor. Wax and honey were underfoot. ‘These are Caucasians,’ confided Kohler, handing the pistol to him to hold. ‘You can tell that by their big size and grey hairs. Here, let me gather a few for you to take to the Kommandant von Schaumburg. You can tell him I’m still looking for others. He’ll be at home today. I’ll write the address down for you, no problem. Just hand him this matchbox and he’ll understand.’

Von Schaumburg …

Kohler’s expression was companionable. He found a pencil and a little black notebook, and tearing out a page, wrote the address and then: Herr Kommandant, this is a man the OKW could use. It’s not right to let the past of a relative stigmatize what could be a promising and very successful career. Heil Hitler.

He had even signed the note.

‘Why, danke, Herr Hauptmann Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter. For a moment there, I thought … Well, that young woman and those two. I found them in the office on their hands and knees, the younger one rutting at her like a wild beast while the older one pinned her wrists and head to the floor. I … I didn’t quite know what to do, and then there you were to settle the matter.’

‘Your lucky day, just like I said. Oh, have you ever tried chewing this? It’s propolis – bee glue, the bees get from trees. The sap. My boys used to love chewing it, like gum, only this is way better.’

Louis would be pleased. A call to Use Gross would suffice. One Obergruppenführer who should have known better, two miliciens the world could well do without, and a charge of rape. Flu or no flu, Old Shatter Hand would hit the roof, and as for Herr Oskar Schlacht, why, the fun had just begun.