Dollmaker (12 page)

‘Does your father no longer play the piano?' he asked quite pleasantly.

She shook her head. ‘He's too busy. Besides, where are the concert halls in a place like this? Who would come to listen? He
won't
play for the Boches. He refuses absolutely though the Captain has asked him many times.'

‘The critics were very harsh with him after his last concert in Paris. I myself was there. He was magnificent.'

‘
You
should hear him play Chopin then.
You
would see that he is not just magnificent but a genius!'

‘He cuts his hands sometimes?'

‘Who told you this?' she asked suspiciously. Her frown was fierce.

‘Please just answer the question.'

She
had told him. Therefore it would be wise to give him the shrug of indifference and then lead him like a dog to his breakfast. ‘Sometimes, yes, but it is not so much, though once
she
had to perform the surgery and stitch his palm.'

Go easy, he warned himself as he dried his hands. ‘And when was that?'

He was like a mush of wet clay in her fingers but she would not make it so greasy for him after all. ‘I don't know. I can't remember. Maybe it was a long time ago. Yes. Yes, it was last summer.
She
cried.
She
held his hand as if it was made of ancient glass. She could hardly keep the needle still.
I
had to help her. It was an interesting operation. The result was good.'

‘Why did she cry?'

We were getting near the breakfast now,
Monsieur le Détective. ‘She
said he was ruining his hands for the silliest of reasons and that he mustn't do it no matter the cost, that Adèle – my mother – would be greatly troubled if she knew.'

‘And your father, Angélique,' he asked gently, ‘what did he do?'

‘Gazed at her with his wounded eyes and said, “I loved you.”'

Oh-oh … ‘It was only the other day, wasn't it? The day of the murder.'

‘Yes. Now come and I will show you his study and his map so that you will have the proof of the location. Later we can examine her bicycle tyres. There is still some of the white clay caught among the treads.'

Hermann, he silently pleaded, why did you have to choose to interview the woman? Why could you not have chosen the child?

Hélène Charbonneau sat forward in her chair with arms resting on her knees and hands clasped before her as she stared at the fire. Etched into her face there was that look of deep intelligence but also a sensuality Kohler found disturbing. Kaestner must be in love with the woman but what of herself? he asked. She looked so sad.

He offered a cigarette but she absently shook her head, didn't even turn to notice the proffered package. ‘It's something I never took up. Like too much of the sun, tobacco causes wrinkles. Adèle and I both agreed the sun was far more valuable and that, if we had to take our chances in life's little lotteries, we would choose it.'

The soft cream cashmere throw was wrapped loosely about her neck and worn over the left shoulder. The ribbed blue-grey cardigan suited, though it had been twice mended at the elbows and had mismatched buttons. The dark green skirt didn't match a thing, nor did the rose-coloured woollen knee socks. The low-heeled brown leather shoes had been mended with fishing line, he thought.

Hard times had cut into everything but then even the women in Paris were beginning not to care. Were they all giving up? he wondered. Everyone was tired of the Occupation, even some of the Occupiers.

‘You must miss her terribly,' he said, betraying an unexpected sensitivity in one who looked so like a storm-trooper even in a shabby grey business suit. The duelling scar down the left cheek from eye to chin was at odds with the suit – how had he really got that thing? she wondered. Victor hadn't told her of it.

‘I miss her, yes, of course,' she said, unsettled by his look, for it gave no hint as to where his comment might lead. But would it hurt to tell him how it really was? He ought to know. ‘I held her in my arms on the road beside the car. The sun was very bright. It was such a beautifully clear day. Clothes, suitcases, wagons and baby carriages were all piled high with things. There were dead and wounded horses, smashed-up cars, yes, because we had money then but it didn't make a damn bit of difference. No one stood around. Oh
mon Dieu
no. Just the dead and us and the screams of those poor horses. Blood all over my hands and front. Her blood. She'd been hit in the chest. Those who still lived, hid along the roadside in the ditches or out in the fields if they could find a place, which wasn't likely. Your people didn't just machine-gun the road, Inspector.'

Was bitterness her first line of defence? he wondered. It very nearly got to him. He wanted to stand up and tell her he hadn't been there, that if it had been up to him, there wouldn't have been a war. He'd seen it all before, had seen far too much of it.

‘The Messerschmitts came over again, a second pass. Yes, that's the way it was, Inspector. Like angry wasps. Adèle and I watched them. Yvon yelled at me to leave her but I couldn't. I didn't want to. Not then, not at any time. Bullets peppered the road and smashed into the car and things all round us. I screamed – I know I did. I cringed and tried to shield her and only when the fighters had left, did I realize she had already been dead for some time.'

‘The child?' he asked.

‘She still has nightmares.'

What else did you expect? – he could see this in the look she gave him.

‘Does she have friends of her own age?' he asked.

Herr Kohler was a father with two sons at Stalingrad. Victor had said this might be used to distract him. He would want to know how the boys were, but she wouldn't ask. It would not be right of her to take advantage of another's worry.

‘I teach her, Inspector. I won't have her going to the local school and coming home with head lice and whooping cough or some such thing. It's selfish of me, of course, but she's also far too intelligent for them. There is …' She paused to look again into the fire. ‘… the language barrier as well. Since the Occupation, the Bretons here in the Morbihan have been returning to their roots. It's something your people encourage so as to divide them from the rest of France and set them at our throats.'

She was really bitter but not without good reason. ‘How is it you can entertain the Captain? We know you've been seeing him.'

Ah no. Had Victor told them or had Johann? ‘The Captain …' She must try to flash a sad smile but do so to the fire since the Inspector Kohler was concentrating so hard on her. ‘He comes here, yes, and we let him do so under duress. He's of the Occupier, isn't that so, Inspector? Oh
mon Dieu
, how could I ever forget what you … you people did to us, to me, to Adèle and, yes, to poor Yvon who is still so broken-hearted he cannot get her out of his mind and we have yet to make love?'

There, that ought to shut him up. She would shrug it off. She would say, ‘A meal, a talk, a few hours about books, music, films we might have seen … What harm is there in that? So what if we speak German and it makes Herr Kaestner feel like he is at home? So what if it's a lie for me? I do so only because he asks. The Captain brings us food, Inspector. Food the child needs.'

‘And the dolls?'

‘You've seen them?'

Why was she alarmed? ‘Yes. The one of your stepdaughter – the head. Louis has seen others in the shop.'

‘Dolls,' she said hollowly and felt so helpless. How could she begin to tell anyone what it had really been like for her?

I mustn't, she said to herself, but Angélique will tell them. Angélique will make certain they know everything.

In the darkened study there were baby spiders in a clear glass fruit sealer and when the torch was pointed at them, they threw their tiny shadows on the map.

Forced to watch the game of
silhouettes terribles
, the detective took in short, sharp breaths of impatience and interest, ah yes.

‘There,' she said, a sigh. ‘I told you so. There are megaliths at the clay pits. The Ancients sometimes, but not always, cremated their dead in pits at the base of these standing stones, then buried the bones with pots and tools and occasionally bits of jewellery. My father was digging right near the clay pits on the day of the murder.
She
knew he would be working there.'

The bicycle tracks … the shed, the little bits of clay she had spoken of. Had the Captain been aware he wasn't alone? Had the watchman seen the father too?

‘Does your father always let you and your stepmother know where he will be working?' he asked.

She could hear the hesitation in his voice. Were detectives always so cautious? ‘This time he did. You see, the Captain sent us a message from Paris that he would be returning on New Year's Day and would drop in after he had been to the pits.'

‘When was this message delivered?'

‘On the 30th of December but you should ask first who delivered it, I think.'

She was making him feel completely out of his depth. ‘Very well, who was it?'

‘The Obersteuermann, Herr Baumann. Both my father and that … that woman he has married were present. Both read the note and thanked Herr Baumann. He had a cup of the acorn coffee and
two
of my biscuits, the flat ones with the sprinklings of crushed walnuts and watered honey on top.'

‘They'd be very tasty.'

She nodded. ‘Yes, they were. And now, if you like, I will switch on the overhead lights.'

He touched her arm. ‘A moment, please, Mademoiselle Charbonneau. I wish to experience the study as you have first introduced me to it.'

The room, with heavy dark beams across its ceiling, occupied perhaps more than half the ground floor of the oldest part of the house. As in the living-room, there was a massive stone fireplace with granite mantelpiece, but no fire. On either side of this, and stretching into darkness, there were superbly carved Breton armoires and cabinets, tables and shelves – everywhere he looked there was both the ordered and disordered pilings of antiquity.

‘It was once the billiards room,' she said, swinging the torch round. ‘That is the table over there under all those things from the passage graves. The entrances are where the good finds are sometimes made. The Ancients blocked up the entrances to seal their dead in and stop them from coming out at night, I think, and in the blockages there are many things of value and broken things as well. A kind of garbage heap. A midden perhaps. Yes, it must have been like that,' she nodded severely. ‘After working hard all day they would eat their supper and then throw the oyster shells and pig bones in too.'

There were shards of terracotta with simple decorations of dots in parallel lines or slanting dash strokes, zigzags occasionally and even on one reassembled piece, a swastika among its intricate designs.

Knives, spear-points and arrowheads of flint, copper and bronze lay with ceremonial axeheads of polished stone, all scattered in little collections among the shards – perhaps two thousand years of prehistory on the forgotten green baize of a late nineteenth-century billiard table.

‘There are a few gold coins and some of silver,' she hazarded softly. ‘Coins are very rare but those I like best all have the horse and chariot racing madly on the back, with the driver of course. The Armoricans fought naked, Chief Inspector, and were taken as slaves that way to Rome, or had the dagger plunged by themselves straight down into their hearts from the base of the throat. Then their heads were cut off.'

They did not always fight naked – this much he
did
know, but no matter. ‘The Veneti,' he managed. ‘The Celts and the last great battle in Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul. A … a naval battle, I believe. Off the coast of the Morbihan in …'

‘In 56
BC,
in the Bay of Quiberon. Caesar is said to have watched from Port-Navalo but that's impossible. It simply does not agree with the geography of the times. The sea was not so close and only came in to flood the Gulf of Morbihan well after the event. At least, that is what the experts say. Perhaps careful readings of Caesar's
Gallic War
might bear this out, or the Greek historian and geographer Strabo's
Geography
. They are both in languages I cannot yet read, you understand, but my father has copies, as he has of most other things.'

‘In any case, the battle was fought,' he murmured uncomfortably.

‘Yes. The Veneti, the most powerful and brave of all the Armoricans, lost to the Romans and …'

He gave a sigh. ‘And were then led into slavery.'

‘With their women, their young girls, their virgins.'

Ah
merde
, why must she bait him like this? ‘Please turn on the lights. I've experienced enough of your darkness.'

Bits of charred human bones in little heaps, all with carefully labelled cards giving the location and details of excavation, lay about among the artefacts. In all it was the work of a pack rat of antiquities. Prehistory, perhaps some two or even three thousand years of it up to 56
BC
and a little more recently, yes, had been gathered in one room.

Skulls were among the treasures. Bronze cloak pins and belt buckles lay with linked cloak belts of exquisite design and glass bracelets of deep blue or soft pink, most of which had been broken long ago by age, by frost, or simply by ancient custom or carelessness.

Charbonneau had not been selective. ‘Your father has been busy.'

She heaved a weary, much troubled sigh. ‘Yes, but there are many sites he has yet to explore.'

‘And that is his map of them.'

Herr Kohler was persistent. ‘The Préfet …?' she said. ‘Victor is just a friend, Inspector. Oh for sure he's a little lonely now that his children are all grown up and his wife has turned to religion. What man of his age would not seek the cup of coffee or herbal tea with someone younger, especially if that someone herself was a little lonely and, yes, a little lost and perhaps even in need of help or just plain friendship? The people around here keep to themselves. Yvon's behaviour has … has, well, scared them off, I suppose.'