Dollmaker (7 page)

‘And leave behind a doll that was not like one of the Captain's? If they did, I heard nothing of it, Inspector. She was of money but has fallen on hard times, though still for such a one to visit our shop … Ah, that one would not do so even if reduced to her last centime.'

For a woman who was bedridden, Madame le Trocquer was exceedingly well informed. The town gossip perhaps or certainly included among them.

Paulette looked as if wanting to say something about Madame Charbonneau and the child but at a glance from the mother, held her tongue.

‘Inspector, I do not know why my poor husband was killed nor who would do such a horrible thing. He was a good man, the soul of consideration. I never wanted for anything, did I, Paulette?'

The girl stood like a pillar of salt with head bowed.

‘Paulette?' said the mother sharply. ‘Please answer me.'

They broke down then and hugged each other with a show of wet kisses, much weeping and protestations of loss and everlasting love. Heaving an impatient sigh, St-Cyr muttered, ‘I will show myself out and will put the lock on, have no fear.'

The girl's bedroom door was tightly closed and as he passed it, he thought to duck in for a little look. Clearly she knew far more than she was letting on and just as clearly things in the household had been far from what they should have been.

The door was locked. Alarmed, he threw a look back along the all but barren corridor, then gave it up and went down into the shop. They would have to get a magistrate's order to search the place. Days … it could take weeks!

A last glance about revealed the row of dolls all looking at him with the widened eyes of innocence betrayed.

Reaching up, he took down one of them and, shutting his eyes to better concentrate, ran a fingertip delicately over a cheek.

‘The bisque is very fleshlike, very lifelike,' he muttered to himself. ‘Hard and yet soft feeling, finely porous like skin and cool, and that is why the Captain sought only the finest kaolin.'

Taking out the shards he had picked up from the railway bed, he was saddened to find them too small to compare, or the one too smeared with blood.

It wasn't hard to find the Hotel of the Sunbathing Mermaid who gave her favours to lonely sailors and tourists who might well lose their wallets. Her pale blue tail fin, voluptuous body, bright blue eyes and extra long lashes, sparkles and ravishingly long blonde hair added that little touch of whimsy to the stark facade of a fifty-room hotel that had been built in 1890 out of granite and given Gothic spires to make it interesting.

Like Madame Quévillon had said, all the shutters were open.

Kohler grinned appreciatively. The mermaid was at least five metres tall and had, before the war, been neon-lighted so as to make her visible from well out to sea. ‘I like it, Louis. Yes, I can see why the Freikorps Doenitz chose the place.'

‘A few oysters, a bottle of the Muscadet, some lobster perhaps and the fillet of sole or turbot.'

‘Stop whining like a collaborator! Hey, I'll see what I can do.'

The plate was heaped with sauerkraut around whose soggy, steaming nest a curve of coarse, thick, boiled sausage huddled.

Boiled potatoes lay pathetically to one side, a sort of horsd'oeuvre perhaps. No one else was in the mess, the former dining-room. They were to be fed a submariner's standard fare after thirty days at sea. There was even black bread with a suspiciously thick crust of mould.

Kohler took up his knife and fork then reached decisively for the mustard.

‘Your stomach, idiot!' shot St-Cyr testily. ‘
Don't
scorch it and bellyache to me.'

‘I'll see if there's any tomato sauce.'

Sacré nom de nom
!

‘So, Louis, what's with the stovepipe coifs?'

It was too good an opportunity to miss. Besides, Hermann would file the information away. His curiosity about the French was like that of a man in a flea market. Everything of interest was a bargain to him.

‘The stovepipes, yes,' began St-Cyr. ‘The Bretons are Celtic but due to the absence of phosphates in the soil, most are not so tall – you will have noticed.'

He hacked off a chunk of sausage and examined it suspiciously. One never knew these days. Cat, rat, fishmeal, sawdust – edible seaweeds perhaps …

‘Eat it,
Dummkopf
!'

‘The Bretons, the Armoricans, Hermann, they wanted their women taller so they bound their heads with wire as the ancient Chinese did the feet of their princesses. When France took the region over, of course the practice was stopped, but …'

‘But the stovepipes remain,' breathed Kohler. ‘I think, I've got it, Louis. The influence of Paris and of refinement.'

‘Yes, you've got it.'

‘Then it's just like the Captain must have said. The dolls had to be dressed in Paris because only there would they know how to do things properly.'

The sauerkraut was salty. Beer was called for but it was deliberately thin and flat, and by the time Kohler had managed it, his sausage was cold.

They ate in silence. Not another soul ventured into the darkly panelled dining-room. Though there must be other U-boat crews on rest and recupe, there wasn't a sound but that of the wind which had decided to bring more rain.

‘We're being shut out, Louis.'

‘Ostracized is the word you want.'

‘No matter. U-297's crew are convinced the Captain did it and
that
, my fine Sûreté, is
not
something they conveyed to the Admiral.'

‘What of Freisen? Wouldn't he have informed the Admiral of this?'

‘We'll find out later. He'll be there at 1530 hours.'

The potatoes were without butter, margarine or even a sprinkling of parsley but when salt and ersatz pepper were liberally added, a tiny particle of taste crept forward to remind one of the past. Poor Marianne had not been able to keep even potatoes down. Four days of agony and then … why then Paris and life with a man who had seldom been home for more than a few days at most and had neglected to think his absence might have been troubling. Young and healthy women do need sex. When denied it, they crave it and who can blame them if they are tempted by another?

‘We have also the distinct possibility of a marriage of convenience, Hermann. A Madame Charbonneau is married to a Parisian concert pianist who has a ten-year-old daughter whose mother was machine-gunned to death during the blitzkrieg.'

Marriages of convenience these days were so often done to hide one's identity or past.
Verdammt!
‘Does the kid still have nightmares?'

It was spoken like a father. ‘Probably. Was the doll hers, Hermann? That is what I want to know since the Admiral insists the bisque was not the Captain's.'

St-Cyr dragged out his pipe and tobacco pouch only to gaze ruefully at the few remaining shreds. Hermann mopped up the last of the juice with a bit of bread from the inside of the loaf. Like many who had once been in the front lines of that other war under intense bombardment, he ate stolidly.

He was really a very uncomplicated person, this former detective from Munich and Berlin, a man who had seen so much of death, his stomach had finally rebelled. A man who had two sons at Stalingrad … Ah
merde
, the telex Boemelburg gave me, thought St-Cyr guiltily. The boys were missing in action and presumed dead, and Boemelburg, being the Chief, had left the dirty work to Hermann's partner who was a coward, yes, when it came to such things.

‘The Captain must have told Freisen the fragments weren't from one of his dolls,' said Kohler. ‘Bullet then passed it on to the Admiral.'

Did they all have nicknames? ‘Why don't they simply let U-297 put to sea without the Dollmaker?'

Kohler found his
mégot
tin and made the supreme sacrifice of sliding it across the table. ‘Because, my fine friend, if you ask me, the men won't sail without him. They must have had such a bad time on their last cruise, the Admiral is willing to humour them by asking for a couple of detectives to prove his boy is innocent.'

The tin contained Hermann's collection of cigarette butts, most saved, some picked up from God knows where. Several had lipstick on them, that last case? wondered St-Cyr. A cache of butts in a Louis XVI-style concrete urn that would hold geraniums in season. The garden of the Palais Royal, a missing eighteen-year-old girl and a bank robbery …

He heaved a sigh. ‘More than two years of constant stress, never knowing if the next moment would be their last. Even Paulette le Trocquer was sympathetic to their plight and knew the odds.'

‘Obersteuermann Baumann wears the look of death, Louis. He knows he's going to die no matter what, so it's all to the good if the Captain's case keeps them ashore for a little longer.'

Packing his pipe, St-Cyr lit up, coughed suddenly at the hot fire, and, wincing, tried to settle down. ‘Please clear the plates,' he choked, and when this was done, laid out his little bits and pieces: the fragments of bisque, the clots of coarse black wool, one packet of American cigarettes, a crumpled white handkerchief and lastly, wrapped in paper, a small and much kneaded wad of kaolin no doubt taken from the Captain's satchel.

Reluctantly he withheld the cigarettes, forcing Hermann to clumsily try to roll one from the contents of his tin.
Mon Dieu
, it was cruel. The Bavarian's fingers, which could defuse even the most clever of tripwires or fuses, could not seem to control the cigarette paper or its tobacco. ‘Here, let me. To think that you, a former artilleryman and bomb disposal expert, never learned the art even in that French prisoner-of-war camp you managed to find refuge in.'

Deftly St-Cyr rolled the cigarette, licked the paper, smoothed the thing out, pinched off both ends, tapped them and returned the recovered tobacco to the tin.

‘We must offer a Lucky Strike to Freisen and the Captain,' he said by way of apology. ‘It may be our only hope of driving a wedge between them.'

Kohler lit up and blew smoke towards the ceiling then indicated the handkerchief. ‘Things the Bullet wasn't told, eh? A cosy ride in the hay and the woman forgetting a little something?'

The shed and the bicycle tracks … ‘Then why was the handkerchief crumpled so tightly unless she wanted only to resist but found she dared not do so.'

‘Did that belong to the piano player's wife?'

‘And these?' asked St-Cyr, plucking at the tufts of wool. ‘Is it that this Madame Charbonneau, who it is rumoured is both mistress of the Préfet and the Captain, witnessed the murder or committed it?'

‘Or were the shopkeeper's wife and daughter simply lying to you about her being the mistress of anyone?'

‘The pianist spends all his time searching the megaliths for clues to the past. They would not have lied about that. It's far too easy to check.'

‘Driven to it, is he, by the wife's fooling around?' shot Kohler.

‘Perhaps.'

‘Then he'd be out and about a good deal and that, my fine Sûreté, is what those two wanted you to think. Besides, clots of wool like that could have come from almost any female here, or hadn't you noticed? The men even have black overcoats.'

‘But would a man have retreated? Would he have pushed himself away on his seat, or dropped the doll and then, yes then, returned to step on the victim's glasses quite by accident?'

‘We'll interview the Captain first, then borrow a set of wheels and pay the pianist and his wife a little visit.'

3

Kaestner's look was piercing. It was as if the Dollmaker could not stop himself. Sharp grey-green eyes sought the absolute truth with a frankness that was disturbing.

A man of thirty-two, of medium height, he was slight, not unhandsome, though the face was narrow, the chin pointed, the lips thin and often tightly parted showing the crowns of clenched teeth, the ears prominent.

The thick brown hair had been cut short, boyishly parted on the left and given but the whisper of a hasty brush. When he spoke, he did so with clarity and pointedness. More intent on observing, he kept his own counsel with good reason.

Préfet Kerjean had seen fit to be present.

On the other hand, the Kapitän zur See Freisen, the C.-in-C. U-boats Kernével, would always be the man in the background. Ever watchful of the Captain, he was suspicious of everyone, under orders from above and intense in his own way. A man of thirty-four perhaps, and with a short-cropped sandy beard, moustache, high forehead, prominent brows, blue eyes, large blunt nose and crinkly hair that was parted on the left and closely trimmed.

Somewhat taller than the Captain, the Bullet sat more stiffly, rocking back in his chair when the notion took him. Was he not a little impatient? wondered St-Cyr. Did he really mind so much the stench of sardines, sewage, iodine and lifeless air? If so, why hadn't he insisted on moving the prisoner elsewhere?

Neither of the captains were in uniform except for their white
Schirmmützes
, their caps, which sat formally to one side of each of them on the table. Their dark blue turtle-neck sweaters, heavy dark blue corduroy trousers and boots were the essence of informality and comfort.

One of the
Blitzmädels
from Base Kernével sat primly at the opposite end of the table from the Préfet with a pad and pencil in her lap and still wrinkling her nose distastefully. Blonde, curly, wavy hair, serious blue eyes, soft pink cheeks, lovely red lips, a trim, neat twenty-two-year-old in a snappy blue Kriegsmarine uniform. A telegraphist.

Everything was to be taken down in shorthand to be later transcribed and telexed to the Admiral at the U-boat Command Centre in Paris.

The cell was cramped. There was barely room to stretch one's legs. The racket from the canneries intruded but would just have to be ignored. Kohler longed for a cigarette and coffee, even the ersatz garbage of ground, roasted acorns, barley and chicory, but none had been offered and no one was suggesting it. The generalities over, they'd now get down to business with the decisiveness of battle.