Flykiller (44 page)

‘A Flykiller or killers who can come and go at will, Hermann, and know beforehand exactly what the boys are planning.'

‘Premier,' said Herr Kohler, obviously not liking this new piece of evidence one bit, ‘how was it found?'

‘Placed on the back of the right hand that clasped her breast. Here … here, I have it in my pocket. A sharp splinter underlines the burned half of the V when the match is opened.'

A pair of earrings, a knife from the past and a touch of perfume, a cigar band, the tin-plated post from a small, mother of pearl button, and a V for Victory, for that is what the match had meant: such little symbols, this one taken from the now-familiar gesture of the British Prime Minister, were increasingly to be found.

‘The Résistance, Louis,' grated Herr Kohler.
Mon Dieu
, he could put such feeling into those few words! thought Inès.

‘Or the killer or killers wish us to blame them, Hermann,' cautioned his partner and friend.

‘So as to unleash a campaign of terror which has now already started?' scoffed Kohler, referring to the
ratissage
the
Sonderkom mando
were conducting.

‘Premier, the doctor pronounced her dead at 7.32 a.m. on Wednesday,' said St-Cyr. ‘At what time did you step in here?'

‘At just before eight. The police hadn't yet been notified. The door was open. Staff were hurrying past to their offices. I simply ducked in unnoticed.'

‘Having learned of the killing how?' asked the Sûreté.

‘One overhears everything in that Hotel,' snorted Laval. ‘Ménétrel was in a frightful turmoil, claiming he'd been betrayed and that there'd been a flagrant breach of security. Ferbrave was, of course, to blame and had been dismissed, but it wasn't the first time our ranting doctor had made that little threat, so I paid it no mind and simply went to see for myself.'

‘Your footprints in the snow must have been noticed by the police,' said St-Cyr, ‘yet none were mentioned in the report?'

‘Clearly I had no reason to kill her and was above suspicion. I'd been at home, at my chateau in Châteldon, and could prove it. I simply pointed out my footprints to the sous-préfet when he and his men were deciding which prints might be useful.'

‘Among those that hadn't been trampled?' asked St-Cyr as if stung by such incompetence on the part of the local police.

‘We were, I'm afraid, all caught by surprise.'

‘Yet all of you knew of the little visit she was to pay the Maréchal,' said Kohler.

‘I didn't. I hadn't the slightest inkling of it.'

‘Even though one can overhear everything in that hotel?' he demanded.

‘Even then.'

‘Nor did I,' said Sandrine Richard. ‘How could I have?'

‘But Mademoiselle Blanche and her brother knew of it, Louis.'

‘Yes! Yes, a thousand times,' cried Blanche, ‘but we
didn't
kill her, I swear it! We took the earrings and a little of mother's perfume in a phial I had brought along but only because Dr Ménétrel had demanded this.'

‘And when did you leave them with him, mademoiselle?' asked Louis.

‘On Monday afternoon, late.'

‘And the knife?' asked Herr Kohler, quickly leaving the
buvette
to stand before her.

‘Was lying on the chair in her room, with the laudanum bottle.'

‘This one?' asked St-Cyr, showing the bottle as he joined his partner.

‘Yes!' Blanche's voice quavered. ‘My father had brought it home with the clothes Mother had left on the Pont Barrage the day she drowned herself. It was, I think, the last time he ever set eyes on that room of hers. A broken man.'

‘And neither you nor your brother touched this knife?' asked St-Cyr, the bottle in one hand, the weapon in the other.

‘Paul … Paul did open it on our first visit. Edith … Edith was so upset, he … my brother put it back.'

‘With the blade open or closed?' he asked.

‘Would it really matter?' she yelped. ‘We
didn't
take it! We're not killers. At first we only wanted what was rightfully ours, and then … then we agreed to do what was asked simply to protect Paul from the forced labour.'

Head bowed in despair, Blanche clenched her fists at her sides. ‘Please, you must believe me. If Papa would have listened to us, Paul and I would have gone straight to him, but we knew he wouldn't. When we first went to her, Edith had told us it would be useless to try.'

It was Herr Kohler who gently asked, ‘Could Mademoiselle Pascal have noticed you'd taken the earrings and come after them?'

‘To the Hotel d'Allier?' blurted Blanche. ‘It's … it's possible, yes.'

‘And the love letters?' demanded St-Cyr.

‘Were any of them taken?' she asked, caught suddenly by surprise.

‘Please just answer.'

‘Then no! Edith … Edith would have noticed right away if we'd so much as touched them. She goes into that room every day to finger Mother's things as if in doubt, in hope. I know she's read those letters often, know she sleeps in Mother's bed. Why … why does she do such things if not demented?'

‘The dress, mademoiselle, and the strand of sapphires?' he asked.

‘Dress? Which dress, please?'

‘Left in Madame Dupuis's room after the killing,' said Louis gruffly, the sternness of his Sûreté gaze not leaving her. She tried hard to meet it and finally succeeded.

‘One that we would find and not Bousquet,' said Kohler, watching her intently.

‘Who had earlier been left Céline's identity card,' breathed St-Cyr.

‘As a warning from the Resistance, Louis. A warning!'

‘Premier, although you've already given us a reason, why, please, did that telex you sent to Paris really use the name Flykiller?' asked St-Cyr.

‘Those damned girlfriends were like flies,' spat Laval. ‘Always buzzing about their men and threatening to spoil things for us. I was all but certain they were informants and have now been proven correct!'

They sat alone, those two detectives, in the Chante Clair Restaurant where the ladies, the
crème de la crème
of Vichy, wore fashion's latest whim, the colourful turban. The wives were at afternoon tea and gossip, the sound of their voices suddenly rising to a shrillness that frightened before dropping to a whisper that only served to increase anxiety.

Sandrine Richard had curtly been given permission to join Madame Pétain and Élisabeth de Fleury, their heads close in urgent conference. Blanche, alone and looking lost, sat at a table beneath the stained-glass lights of tall, streaked windows that overlooked the snow-dusted statuary of the inner courtyard. And I? mused Inès. I, instinctively not wishing to sit with Blanche, nor she with me, sit alone, having just learned that Albert has been released into his father's recognizance.

St-Cyr had agreed to do this, perhaps out of kindness, but had he also wanted to see what would happen? she wondered.

Kohler, in defiance of the hour, the head chef and the kitchen staff, had loudly ordered pea soup with ham, sausages and sauerkraut, and ‘good German beer'; a pastis for his friend and partner. ‘A double.'

Since he sat with his back to her, she could only clearly see St-Cyr who, from time to time, an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth or in a fist, would look across the crowded dining room to see her sitting primly beneath one of the wall mirrors, her back to that very wall, knowing she couldn't possibly overhear them now or see what lay before them. That tin-plated little post, Inspector?
Laval au poteau
? Had it been a coincidence, post and post? Would Monsieur le Premier wonder if it had meaning and make a hurried visit to his clairvoyant, Madame Ribot, of the Hotel Ruhl, at 15 boulevard de l'Hôtel de Ville, to ask her advice?

Would he believe what the cards, the stars, the moon and conjunctions said?

‘Hermann, our sculptress is still without her precious valise. Just what the hell is she really doing here?'

‘Blanche asked the same thing.'

‘Ah
oui.
She makes Albert edgy and now she's got me edgy too.'

The understatement of the year! ‘Relax. Eat up.'

‘And try to concentrate?
Merde
, I've no appetite. How can I when I know Herr Gessler must be watching the clock – our clock – and counting off the minutes? If he gets his hands on that one …' he indicated the sculptress, ‘neither of us will be able to save her.'

Stripped naked, shrieked at constantly, her head shoved repeatedly under water in the bathtub those bastards were fond of using, she'd be strung up and further clubbed with rubber truncheons if she didn't tell them what they wanted, or thrown to the swill-soaked floor to be kicked by hobnailed boots until dead.

‘Please don't let us forget that, Hermann.'

‘You know I won't. How could I? It applies also to Blanche and that brother of hers as well as to Albert and others, especially Olivier and his Edith.'

‘Olivier,' said Louis, opening Noëlle's knife. Quickly arranging. the items and ignoring the food, he set the V for Victory beneath the knife; the earrings, laudanum bottle and
billets doux
to the left; the button-post to the right and isolated for the moment.

‘One killing is a drowning, quick and easy, and no one sees it as murder, Hermann, until much later. The next is a garrotting, embellished only in that the wire, similar to that which Albert Grenier uses, is found embedded in the victim's throat. The third killing is further embellished by a riding crop, dead rats, a corpse that is hidden in an armoire, as if a child, a young man, a naughty boy, had done it.'

‘Albert again.'

‘Only with the fourth killing, as we now know, do we see further embellishment. A cigar band, cigar ashes, a knife with a past; earrings and perfume of the same; but since we may no longer be dealing with two assailants, a man and woman, we had best go carefully over things.'

Steam rose from the waiting soup. ‘Blanche claims that Edith told her and her brother that Pétain met their mother in the Hall the day Noëlle took her life, Louis.'

‘Then everything with this fourth killing is to point to Olivier as the killer.'

The soup would still be too hot in any case and Louis was trying hard to face up to the worst of this affair.

‘A body is found by Albert just after curfew, and at 7.32 a.m. Ménétrel pronounces Madame Dupuis dead, Hermann.'

‘Laval fails to mention the V for Victory, as does Ménétrel, but was it there at 7.32 or is it left afterwards, but before Laval's arrival?'

Sadly it was a good question, for if it was present overnight, the Resistance could well have killed Madame Dupuis; if not, then the matchstick could either have been left just before or after Ménétrel's viewing the corpse, either as a further warning to
les gars
or, if left by someone other than a
résistant
, to implicate them. ‘Left there overnight, perhaps,' said St-Cyr, not liking it but motioning to Hermann to eat. ‘Crush up some bread. Here, let me do it for you.'

‘You know I can do that for myself!'

‘Yes! but I want the sculptress to see that we look after each other.'

‘A Résistance killing,' muttered Kohler. Louis had seen that their discussing it couldn't be avoided, but had the civil war begun? They did tend to leave other tokens of their presence, not just painted slogans. ‘But why, then, did Ménétrel fail to mention it?'

That, too, was a good question. ‘Fear perhaps. Also a need to first find answers for himself. Remember, please, with what we are dealing.'

‘An
éminence grise
who's accustomed to holding things close and is fiercely competitive, Louis, but let's set that one aside for the moment, eh? It would still have been dark at 7.32 Berlin Time. The police hadn't yet been notified. Albert would have had to give the doctor his torch or lantern.'

The sun not up for an hour. ‘Darkness, then, and yes, someone who could come and go at will and with no one the wiser, but with less than twenty minutes in which to complete the task, since Laval was there at near to eight.'

‘Someone who has an ear glued so closely to the ground that he, she or they would know beforehand what's to happen,' said Kohler.

‘They'd have had to know Laval would leave his office. It's too tight a timing, Hermann. The V for Victory was left when she was killed.'

‘Or afterwards but before her body was first discovered.'

‘The girl is killed, the knife removed and dropped into a portable toilet, one that Albert is sure to investigate. But why remove it in the first place if one wishes to focus attention on Olivier? Just what the hell is really going on, Hermann? Love letters are left for us to find? Sapphires that the Résistance should, by rights, have stolen? Press clippings for Laval?'

‘An identity card.'

‘Charles-Frédéric Hébert knew only of the earrings and the perfume, but was taken aback when he learned of the dress.'

‘As was Blanche Varollier.'

‘Light would have been needed if one was to duck into the Hall after the killing and Ménétrel's visit to the corpse. Light and then darkness, Hermann. Night blindness. Olivier told me he suffered from it. Ten minutes were required for his eyes to adjust. He knew Céline Dupuis. The girl had asked him to write to Mademoiselle Charpentier and send the letter with Lucie Trudel …'

Kohler set his soup spoon down and sighed. ‘He'd have walked behind Céline along that corridor in the hotel, would have let her lead the way to freedom – was that what he told her, Louis? That the FTP had organized an escape for her? No struggle, the girl not trying to get away until in the Hall.'

‘Only to then be killed.'

‘Having tried her damnedest to remove and hide the earrings.'

Herr Kohler methodically added more bread to his soup and stirred it in. He was not happy, thought Inès, was disgruntled.