Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  Schultz took the string bag from him and, grinning, set each of the skulls in wall niches where once the stone lamps would have been placed. They would have a trial and they’d find out what he knew but then what? wondered Kohler uneasily. On Thursday, in another forty-eight hours, they would put to sea taking their Dollmaker with them and no one the wiser as to the whereabouts of this half of the partnership, particularly if they locked the owner of that hotel and his family in with him.

  St-Cyr was not happy. Ah no, most certainly. With the first grey touches of dawn, the rain had ceased. Now dense fog had come in to blanket everything and give to the alarm of foraging gulls and ravens a special sharpness.

  Something was attracting them. Kerjean had heard it too, and so had Hélène Charbonneau but more than this, far more, was the Préfet’s having not stopped where he should have, and the woman’s alertness to the unannounced change of plan.

  The Dolmen of Crucuno was a good one and a half kilometres behind them and that is where Kerjean had said he was taking them to look for her husband.

  Tense and wary, she sat in the far corner of the back seat, directly behind the Préfet but visible to him in the rear-view mirror, for he had turned it so as to see her. Though it must hurt her to do so, she was clutching the door handle as if ready to bolt and run at the slightest sign.

  She was afraid of Kerjean and must have overheard them talking about her.

  Kerjean knew it too.

  ‘Hélène, why not stay in the car,’ he said, looking at her in the rear-view. ‘It may be the child the birds have found. It may be your husband. Until Jean-Louis and I have had a look, it could be anything.’

  She didn’t answer. With the back of her other hand, she rubbed the side window clear then stared emptily out at the moor.

  Desolate and all but hidden beneath the fog, its scattered clumps of heather, gorse and stunted hawthorn gave shades of grey and brown to the ever-present silvery tufts of wind-twisted grass and boulders with mosses and lichens on them.

  ‘Hélène …’

  ‘I heard you, Victor. Why, please, have we stopped here? This place soon becomes marshy. There’s a bog and then a fen of several hectares with an open space of water in the middle.’

  Must she be so difficult? ‘You know I have often found your husband there, Hélène. You know he swore he could hear parts of his symphony and that the Veneti and those from long before them used to throw offerings into its centre and to sometimes make sacrifices.’

  ‘Sacrifices? Sacrifices for what?’ she said harshly. ‘My husband? Don’t you mean Yvon? Don’t you mean the man you cared enough about to watch over him for me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘What have you done with him?’

  ‘Hélène, you are overwrought.’

  ‘Am I? You were there at the clay pits on the day of the murder, Victor. You came to the house to warn me of trouble but you did not offer to go with me. You said you mustn’t, that I would have to handle le Trocquer myself. Me, Victor. Me!’

  ‘Jean-Louis, don’t listen to her. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’

  ‘I know it only too well, Inspector. A package of American cigarettes? A crumpled handkerchief in the straw? My handkerchief. Mine!’

  ‘Madame …’ began St-Cyr.

  Bitterly she looked at him. ‘Angélique is aware of this place and will have told the Captain of it. My husband often took her with him both to hear the “symphony” and to gather sphagnum moss and the leaves of what the old fishermen call Labrador tea. Berries too, and other things. She is very close to her father and understands him better even than myself but she is also with the Captain and may be under his spell.’

  ‘Hélène …’

  ‘If you have killed my husband, Victor, I will tell the Germans everything. I know about your Resistance. Everything, do you understand?’

  The gulls cried and the sound of them grew as she pushed open the door and bolted from the car.

  ‘Ah merde,’ breathed St-Cyr. ‘Victor, I must ask that you …’

  ‘Jean-Louis, I did not kill le Trocquer nor did I kill her husband. I swear it. She’s crazy. She’s all mixed up. Oh for sure, it’s understandable but …’

  ‘But, what, Victor?’

  ‘But if the gulls and the ravens have got to his corpse we had best find her before she finds him.’

  ‘Then stay close. Don’t let us become separated. You first, then myself.’

  ‘And the child, Jean-Louis? What if it is the child they are crying over?’

  In less than twenty metres, the car and the road were lost to them. Kerjean asked again about the child but St-Cyr did not answer. Instead, he let only the sound of the gulls and the ravens come to them. Victor could well be guilty. Certainly he had been playing a very dangerous game. And what of Paulette le Trocquer and her mother? he asked himself. What of those empty jerry cans? Had he gone to Quiberon to settle the girl and her mother once and for all? Had he then returned to the house and taken the woman and this detective on to the clay pits so as to give himself an alibi?

  Kerjean moved again, and he followed the Préfet for some distance. There were cairns half sunk into the peaty soil. Sometimes only a single, small menhir, perhaps not placed by the ancients but in far more recent times, marked the route.

  Frequently they both stopped and listened hard but beneath the crying of the gulls and ravens, there was not even the patient dripping of water.

  So muffled were the sounds at ground level, the birds had full dominion but then, suddenly, her voice came loudly and from all directions hollowly echoing. ‘Yvon … Yvon … darling, please forgive me. I was so afraid the Captain would have us all arrested.’ Arrested … arrested … ‘I could not tell him to leave me alone.’ Alone … alone … ‘Darling are you out there?’

  Ah damn, where the hell was Kerjean? Why had he not kept his eyes on him?

  ‘Yvon, is Angélique with you?’ You … you … ‘Did you meet up with the Captain?’ The Captain … the Captain … ‘He took her from the house, Yvon.’ The house … the house …

  St-Cyr went forward but was soon up to his calves in springy, water-soaked sphagnum moss which grew in low mounds and humps with leatherleaf, Labrador tea and cranberry and sometimes stunted black spruce. And to the damp salt smell of a cold sea, came that of rotting vegetation, of peat, black water and methane, and the sense of someone near but never seen.

  Nom de Dieu, de Dieu, he said to himself, why could Hermann not have been with him?

  He would only have bitched about getting his shoes and socks thoroughly wet! He would only have blamed his partner for being so stupid as to have let the Préfet out of his sight!

  The humps and hollows grew more difficult but soon there were sedges, feather mosses and tall, coarse grasses, the beginnings of the fenland. ‘The gulls are out there somewhere,’ he said.

  Everything wept moisture, everything was shrouded in fog. Stunted black spruce were spindly like the bones of a fish and often clublike at the top with a witch’s broom of many shoots.

  He fell. He went down on his hands and knees. His shoes were in danger of becoming lost with the sucking of the bottom muds. He almost called out, Kerjean, where are you?

  He almost said, You leave her alone.

  When he arrived at a bit of staging, a dock of sorts up on pilings and none too solid, there wasn’t a sign of anyone. Only the fog and the beginnings of open water that was ringed by rushes now sear.

  The tightly knotted painter with which the pianist had tethered his punt had been cleanly cut. ‘Last night,’ he said and knew he was right.

  The gulls were out over the water. The ravens had no place to land except on the punt.

  Kohler swallowed tightly. The chamber, deep in the Tumulus of Saint-Michel, was large enough and roofed by massive slabs that were held up by standing stones of several tonnes. He sat all alone before the men on a large, flat rock – had it been a megalithic butcher’s block? he wondered.
His feet were sunk into one of a scattering of cremation pits – shallow, round holes about a metre or so in diameter that had been dug into the floor perhaps four thousand years ago. They’d been excavated more lately, of course, but … Ach! There were still bits of charcoal and charred bone. He noticed a molar and tried not to concentrate on it, looked up suddenly.

  Death’s-head Schultz had his Walther P38 in a pocket, the Second Engineer had Louis’s Lebel, and Baumann still had the Captain’s Luger.

  Among the thirty or so men who were gathered, those who had one of the thick, greasy candles held it before them in a clenched fist, and the light … the light not only flickered hauntingly across their faces but those of the others, and they all cast shadows on the roof and walls behind them. The stench of grease, soot, smoke, sour wine and beer, puke and sweat was close on the damp, cold, musty air just like in a submarine.

  They were definitely not friendly. Grim-faced, stolid and silent, they were almost as apprehensive as himself. After all, he was Gestapo, was one of them, and mock trials, no matter how much of a joke they might claim them to be, were nothing to fool with should word get back to Berlin. Things could also go wrong. Ah Gott im Himmel, what was he to do?

  Having searched and found no sign of Charbonneau, they wanted answers. They were about as much in the dark as he was. They genuinely needed to find out what the hell had been going on. Their Captain, their Vati, was being blamed for something he maintained he hadn’t done. Paulette le Trocquer had been gang-raped and murdered and the Inspector was saying their cook, the Obersteuermann Baumann, the Second Engineer and Erich Fromm were responsible. The girl’s mother had been killed. The money – some of it their own – was still missing.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ grimaced the prisoner, ‘that sweet little bit you guys nailed in the toilet would have told you everything, Death’s-head. The question is, why don’t you tell the rest of us?’

  His head bent forward uncomfortably lest it hit the stone roof, the cook grinned and let his lark’s eyes dance over the prisoner. ‘We’re asking the questions. You are doing the answering.’

  ‘Then ask. Let it be between the two of us.’

  ‘Otto, he hasn’t understood.’

  Baumann sighed. ‘We found the girl just as you did, Herr Kohler, the mother also. Now, if we didn’t kill them, who did?’

  ‘Your Vati?’

  Baumann dragged out the key to the cell and waved it reprovingly. ‘He’s locked up. I myself saw him into the cell last night after his brief visit to the party.’

  ‘And there’s no other key? Don’t be a Dummkopf. Quiberon’s gendarmes would have had a spare. The Préfet …’

  ‘The Préfet,’ said Death’s-head, still grinning. ‘Bitte, Herr Detektif. Bitte. Why would Préfet Kerjean release our Dollmaker when he believes him guilty of murder?’

  ‘I didn’t say he did. I only meant there could well have been two keys and that, given the opportunity, Fräulein Krüger could well have palmed the other one and passed it to the Captain.’

  ‘The Fräulein Krüger …? But … but how was she given that opportunity?’ asked Baumann.

  ‘Were there two cell keys hanging on the wall of that piss pot gendarmerie?’ countered Kohler. He had got them talking. At least that was something.

  Baumann thought about it. The Obersteuermann raked over the leaves of the past few days. The arrest, their demanding to take charge of Vati, the telexes to and from the Lion in Paris, the Préfet’s backing down. Kerjean had vehemently argued that the Dollmaker was his responsibility yet had let them guard the Captain, ‘Ja, there may well have been two keys.’

  ‘Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Question is, did she give that key to the Captain because I damned well saw him in a car outside that shop. He nearly ran me over.’

  ‘Yet you do not believe he killed Madame le Trocquer?’ asked Baumann. ‘Why, please, is this?’

  ‘Yes, why?’ demanded Death’s-head. ‘Why blame us when you know Vati was there?’

  ‘Because you bastards were looking for your money. You smashed the place up. The dollmaker wouldn’t have bothered.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Baumann, half in thought and half in doubt, ‘unless he had wanted to make it look as if someone else had done it.’

  I.e., the crew.

  ‘Were all four of you always together at the last?’ asked Kohler, wishing he had fags to pass around. Tobacco was the great pacifier. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Not always,’ admitted Baumann cautiously. ‘But we were together when he found the girl on her knees and then found the mother.’

  ‘Before or after I did?’

  ‘Before. You were still looking for us in the rain. We went straight from the Club to the shop and in a hurry.’

  ‘No sign of the Captain?’

  ‘No sign of anyone.’

  ‘Would the Captain have killed them – did he have a reason, damn it?’

  A reason … A reason … Herr Kohler had raised his voice and the passages had echoed it back.

  Baumann threw Death’s-head an uncertain look. The lark’s glimmer vanished. Kohler caught the drift and said, ‘Schultz, you had better tell us about the doll Angélique Charbonneau left in that shop. Maybe then we’ll all understand why you wanted to find the pianist so badly. You were going to kill him, too, weren’t you, eh? You were going to shut him up before he spilled it all to the others.’ He indicated the rest of the men.

  ‘Otto, he’s lying. He’s just trying to get us rattled.’

  ‘Am I?’

  Only the sound of the pianist’s symphony came to them and they listened for it to a man.

  ‘Death’s-head, the doll,’ said Baumann.

  ‘The woman dropped it on the tracks. I saw her backing away from le Trocquer. I heard him shouting at her.’

  ‘Good, that’s very good,’ sighed Kohler. ‘Now tell us the rest.’

  ‘She couldn’t speak. She was too terrified. Her eyes were on the bend in the tracks. We both heard that iron bar come down. I swear we did. Then it hit the rails as it was thrown aside.’

  ‘Where were you at the time?’

  Damn Kohler. Damn the Lion for demanding that a detective be sent from Paris. ‘Among the stones of that alignment.’

  ‘Where was the pianist?’

  ‘Nowhere near. I didn’t see him, if that’s what you’re asking. I only saw the woman. She didn’t see me. Not once. I made sure of that.’

  ‘What about the Captain?’

  ‘Vati was still in the clay pits or in the watchman’s shed. Vati wasn’t anywhere near the site of the murder. I would have known, yes? From where I was standing, I would have seen him.’

  That too was good, but Death’s-head still had the Walther P38 in a pocket, and that was bad. Kohler let his gaze move slowly over the men. He drew in a breath and nodded curtly at Baumann. So be it. ‘You’re lying, Schultz. The Dollmaker was there. During our second interrogation, Herr Kaestner told me he had overheard shouting, an altercation in French, and had seen the woman standing between the rails.’

  The lark’s eyes didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Vati was only trying to protect her. He still doesn’t know I was there.’

  Nor did any of the others until now. ‘Then that only leaves you, my friend,’ said Kohler.

  ‘And the Préfet, and the pianist and the woman,’ countered the cook, laughing at him. ‘If Kerjean is so sure Vati killed le Trocquer, why not ask yourself, did Kerjean not also want that shopkeeper dead?’

  ‘Did you see him there?’

  Were detectives always so stupid? ‘If I had seen him, I would have said so right away.’

  ‘Providing you hadn’t killed the shopkeeper and were certain you wouldn’t be accused of it.’

  Baumann interceded. ‘Vati says he and the woman never met in that shed beside the tracks, Herr Kohler, yet there was one of his cigarette packages in it and the woman’s handkerchief?’

  Kohler spoke his thoughts aloud. ‘The Préfet let m
y partner and I find them all by ourselves. He denied there were any bicycle tracks yet he must have seen them …’

  ‘Forty on the Captain? Do I hear forty,’ quipped the cook. ‘I think the odds have just gone down to twenty on our Dollmaker, sixty on the Préfet, and ten each on the woman and her husband.’

  ‘But what about yourself?’ asked one of the crew.

  ‘Yes, what about the doll, Schultzi? Why that doll?’ asked another.

  ‘Yes, why that doll, Death’s-head?’ asked Kohler. ‘What was there about it that made you keep from the others that you had been there?’

  ‘Nothing. Vati had been accused. I knew he couldn’t possibly have done it. Like him, I merely waited to see what you and your partner would come up with. If Vati was to be convicted, I’d have come forward but admit it, Herr Detektif, you and the French judges would only have thought I was lying to protect him.’

  The doll … what the hell had there been about that doll to make the cook so evasive and to make Kaestner pick up the pieces and refuse to yield them until certain he could not only do so but that the time was right?

  It was Baumann who said, ‘Death’s-head, you had better tell us.’

  ‘Otto, there’s nothing to tell. It was just a child’s doll. A nothing doll. What else could it possibly have been?’

  The look of death perceived sought him out. ‘Then why, please, did le Trocquer take it with him, and why, please, did he give it to the woman when it was the Captain he was going to see?’

  Ah yes.

  Trapped, Schultz flicked a glance to the right and left. He was near the entrance but perhaps four or five of the men were in the way behind him.

  ‘Don’t even think of it, Death’s-head,’ said Baumann. ‘When we went after Paulette, you were the first to go for her and the last to rejoin us. You could have gone back to the Club. You could have killed her to shut her up but about what, please? This you had best tell us.’

  The cook was a big man but he was going to need help. Verdammt!