Flykiller (20 page)

A mousetrap.

*

The blood-and vomit-stained sock that had been crammed into Lucie Trudel's mouth and then taken from it had been thrown behind her killer or killers and had landed under her bed.

Lying flat on the floor, St-Cyr reached for it with the tweezers. He'd have to bag it but bags were in too short a supply even for murder investigations and Stores were obstinate. ‘A leaflet, then,' he grunted. ‘Two perhaps, and tightly folded over. Idiot, the ink will run. Everything these days is made not to last!'

The sock had been hand-knitted in four-ply white wool with a cable pattern above the ankle. He was certain it matched the other one he'd found. It, and this other one, had been mended not once but twice by the look of them. Both were definitely from the thirties, from when she'd have been eighteen or nineteen. Treasured because Maman or Grand-mere had knitted them. Used and mended until they unravelled during the Occupation to be used elsewhere.

‘You came from a good home, didn't you,' he said, looking across the room at her. ‘But they wouldn't have thought well of your returning with child and unmarried. Was that why the indecision, or did someone really interrupt your early-morning walk from the Hall des Sources and demand the location of that key?'

She couldn't answer, couldn't speak, yet he felt she would have liked to have said, Papa was very ill. They had trouble enough at home.

‘Was he dying?' he asked gently. The leaflets in the inner pocket of his overcoat had been dropped by the RAF on a night-bombing raid over the U-boat pens at Lorient on the Breton coast. ‘Target missed and town hit,' he said by way of explanation. ‘My partner and I were lucky not to have left the living. I seldom empty these pockets,' he apologized. ‘We were there at the beginning of January. A dollmaker, a U-boat captain who wanted to revive his grandfather's business of making beautiful dolls, the Royal Kaestners. Another difficult murder investigation. We always seem to get them. Well?' he asked suddenly.

Dying, she seemed to say of her father. I was torn between murdering my unborn child and returning home for a last visit perhaps, and … and the funeral.

‘And the interruption?'

The location of the key to the Hall, but why, she seemed to insist, would he, she or they have needed to ask me when so many others knew Albert?

‘A warning then. Was that it, eh, or did your killer simply follow you back to this hotel?'

Two black leather thongs, each about a half-metre in length, were neatly coiled among the things in her Paris suitcase, and he had to ask himself, Had the riding crop also been packed? Had that been why her killer or killers had fitted it into her hand after they'd killed her?

Deschambeault had shed no tears, had expressed anger, yes, but not really remorse and regret at her killing. More a concern for himself, a curiosity and a thinly disguised sense of relief.

‘Did you beat him during sex? Was he of that nature or did he beat you? Please forgive me for asking, mademoiselle, but it's necessary. Pain does, with some, increase pleasure; with others it's essential.'

She wouldn't have answered, would have ducked her eyes in shame, or would she? Accustomed to coming across all manner of perversions, he filed the thought away and again took to examining the contents of her bed.

The rats had all been caught in traps but not the usual, he felt.

There were, in so far as he could see, no broken backs or broken necks and legs, nor was there any sign of the froth that poison often brought. Instead of this last, or a spring-loaded trap whose bar would snap down when the bait was taken, a wire snare had been used.

‘Coroner Laloux will confirm this,' he said. ‘Rats are very intelligent and not easily tricked. Each family quickly becomes aware of the consequences of poisoned bait and avoids it like the plague. Those spring-loaded traps are often of no use either. Bacon, cheese, bread soaked in wine or soup – whatever I used, even securely tying the bait to its little pan with thread, they would leave the trap set
sans
its little reward and the thread still perfectly in place. Wire cage traps, though expensive, are better. Of course I shot some, but with this bunch I think snares were used. The bait put in a difficult and out of the way place, the rat curious, then growing a little bolder until jerking frantically.

‘But our killer or killers have been careless, mademoiselle. If not the trapper, then he, she or they both know someone who is good at his business, even to determining the sex of those he has caught. The livers are also missing. Tasty, no doubt, though I haven't yet had to dine on them, nor has my partner. At least, not knowingly.'

Still the hotel was silent. It was uncanny how news of their continued presence must constantly be telegraphed from room to room and past those that were unoccupied.

Deschambeault had left his cigar band on her bedside table next to the bottle of the Chomel. ‘An El Rey del Mundo, mademoiselle,' he said, carefully flattening it. ‘A Choix Supreme perhaps? Taste is everything to those who can afford to cultivate it. Taste in cigars and in mistresses.
Salut.
The band is glued to the cigar. Once plain, and used to prevent the fingertips from becoming strained with nicotine, the bands soon acquired great diversity of design. Gold coins to wrap themselves around Albert Grenier's finger. Does Albert know you were stopped on your way here? If so, then he's in even more danger than I had first thought.'

But had the cigar band from the Hall des Sources been left for them to find, or simply removed as this one had been by an automatic response of long custom and only when heat from the lighted cigar had softened the adhesive?

The
laissez-passer
she had been given by the sous-directeur had indeed been countersigned by Fernand de Brinon whose signature appeared beneath that of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and its stamp. ‘Deschambeault's wife is a neurotic, is she?' he asked, desperately wanting answers. ‘Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux must have known her from the clinic of …' He flipped through his little black book. ‘Dr Raoul Normand. Céline Dupuis left a message for you: “Lucie, please come back soon. We have to talk. It's urgent.”

‘Talk about what, mademoiselle? About jealous wives wanting revenge or about vans from the Bank of France being used to haul cigars and other luxuries from Paris so that your lover and those of the others could enjoy the high life while the rest of us knuckle under? Or was it this?' He indicated the
laissez-passer.
‘They're so very hard to come by unless you know the right people. You see, it's rumoured Monsieur de Brinon, our delegate in Paris, sells them. Secrétaire-Général Bousquet is patently aware of this and afraid I am too. A little under-the-table business that's probably not so little. Certainly such things,' he said and shrugged, ‘are never recorded and thus the income is never taxed.

‘You ran with the pack. You all did, for various reasons no doubt. And now … now have paid for it while we must find your killer or killers but protect those we would most like to see taught a damned good lesson!

‘
L'Humanité
,' he went on. ‘It's only natural that I should dread what could well happen to me. Questioned first, and not kindly! Then up against the post, Mademoiselle Trudel, or with the necktie.

‘Hermann … Hermann, why the hell are you being so quiet?' he asked.

Sans toi
, she seemed to say.
Sans toi.
And when the voice of Lucienne Boyer filtered down the corridors and stairs, a wild moment of panic rushed through him and he heard himself blurting, ‘Hermann … Hermann, are you all right?' Had they killed him? Were the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans really behind this thing, this so-called plot to
bousiller les gars
? The FTP had formed a secret murder squad in the winter of 1941-42 and it was still very active, still
selecting
its targets and not at random!

Softly closing and locking the door to her room, he started out, knowing only as that sincere and lovely voice permeated every part of his being that others also listened and waited. Bousquet, on making his deal with Oberg and Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris, had said the French had better become accustomed to ‘a police force that intervenes ruthlessly'. Parisians and all others would be in for ‘a shock at the sight of it'.

Of an all-too-willing collaboration, of often violent arrest for little or no reason, of brutality, cruelty and theft being carried out by ordinary
gendarmes, les flics
of cities like Paris and Lyons, but even in some little villages by their trusted
gardes champêtres.
The French Gestapo also, and now, too, the Milice who were to enforce the Service de Travail Obligatoire, the compulsory labour service that would send thousands to the Reich. And yes, too, the Bidder Unit, and the Intervention-Referat.

People had good reason to be very angry. A lot of people.

Putting the Lebel on full cock, he started up the stairs, listening always to that voice, thinking of it, of dancing cheek to cheek with his first wife. They'd been so in love, but the long absences, she never knowing if and when he'd return, had intruded just as they had with the second wife, with Marianne. And now there was Gabrielle who would sing that song as well or even better, but to 800 of the Wehrmacht's servicemen on leave at the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre, and to those in the front lines and barracks, for her voice was carried by German wireless to men on both sides of this lousy war.

Gabrielle Arcuri who was of the Resistance, her group so tiny she, too, could well be in danger from the mistakes and reprisals of other
résistants.

‘It's the shits, isn't it?' he said softly, as if to Hermann. ‘While you want the quiet life with Giselle tending a bar in that little place you're always saying you'll buy on the Costa del Sol, and Oona keeping house for you and looking after Giselle's and your babies – you know I've warned you it will never work – I want to go fishing with Gabi and her son on the Loire in summer. Yet here we are and no one except Premier Laval – I repeat no one but him,
mon vieux
– wants us to be anywhere near here.'

The song came to its end. A big man, a giant with strong, capable hands and thick fingers whose nails were closely trimmed, Herr Kohler used great sensitivity to lift the armature with its needle from the recording. Does he defuse bombs? wondered Blanche. Bombs that are meant to kill the unsuspecting?

Paul was suffering under the detective's gaze and nervously waited, but Herr Kohler deliberately didn't switch off the gramophone. He would let it unwind itself.

‘All right,' he said. ‘You say that the last time you saw Lucie Trudel you met her quite by accident Friday evening at just after seven, the new time. You were on your way to the casino, she was returning here to the hotel. You asked if you could borrow the record and the machine.'

‘That is correct,' said Paul, the turntable going round and round.
Chéri
, be careful, begged Blanche silently, only to hear him saying, ‘Look, Inspector, I was a little early for work and knew how much my sister loved that recording, so thought to surprise her and walked back here with Lucie.'

‘The sleeve … There's no sleeve,' said Herr Kohler.

‘Of course there isn't!'

Paul
would
use sarcasm!

‘The record was on the turntable.
That
is why we don't have its sleeve!'

Idiot … Did Paul want to say, Idiot?

‘Where had she been?' asked Herr Kohler.

‘At work, where else?' Paul
would
snap back answers and think he was in control. You're not, my darling. Not with this one. The machine was still winding down, still making its little grinding sounds that went on and on and seemed to fill the room. The room …

‘What street were you on?'

‘Street?' yelped Paul. ‘Why, in the Park.'

‘Near the Hall des Sources?'

‘Yes. She … she had just come out of the Hôtel du Parc.'

‘From work?'

‘Isn't that what I said?'

‘The offices of the Bank of France aren't there,
mon fin.
Try the Carlton.'

‘She had delivered some papers,' said Paul calmly, now very much the dealer of
vingt-et-un
who knows the deck in his hand is thin of fives and tens and therefore vastly in his favour.

‘Your shoes. Let me see them.'

Paul was wearing carpet slippers. ‘My shoes …?' he managed. ‘They're …'

‘They're under his side of the bed, Inspector. I'll get them for you if you wish.'

‘I don't.'

The headboard was against the corridor wall, the sister having that side closest to the door and window, the brother the one next to the far wall; the things one had to do these days to make do.

‘One pair of boots without hobnails or cleats, one pair of leather shoes with soles of the same, pre-war and needing attention, and a pair with wooden soles,' said Herr Kohler.

Running those fingers of his over the wooden soles, he looked at Paul and then at her, didn't say a thing about their having to share a bed but … but for just a moment his fingers hesitated on the right sole and then … then began to trace something out. A gouge, a deep scratch? wondered Blanche, sickened by the thought. ‘Inspector …' She heard her voice. It was too sharp. ‘Inspector, you've not told us why you want to know when we last saw Lucie, or what has happened to her to make you ask. She met us on the avenue Thermal, if you must know.'

The main thoroughfare.

‘She had just come from the Église Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc on place Chanoine Gouttet, had been praying to the Virgin for help and guidance, and had gone to confession. I … I knew she was pregnant. Paul hadn't been told but … but must have sensed the reason for her distress of late and … and has now tried to protect her reputation. She was a good friend, and she readily said we could borrow her gramophone and the record while she was away at home to see her father. She …'
Merde
, it was going to sound badly but Paul had to be rescued. ‘She gave me her key and said to leave it in her box at the front desk, that she'd collect it later that evening.'