Ah! it was so hard to gauge him. His expression was grave, but would Vernet really regret the loss of his niece, since he would then most probably inherit everything? Would the mistake in identity cause him to panic?
The attendant stood ready. ‘Leave us,’ said St-Cyr with a curt toss of his head. ‘Wait in the outer office.’
‘Inspector, what is this?’ demanded Vernet.
‘A moment,’ came the hushed command, as they watched the attendant reluctantly depart. The préfet would be furious with the man for not having listened in. Too bad.
‘Inspector, am I some sort of suspect?’
Vernet had removed the wide-brimmed, dark grey velour trilby some well-placed Berliner must have presented to him. He stood immaculate in his Hermès grey-blue scarf, overcoat and black kidskin gloves, and the years of dealing with such people at more than infrequent intervals came tumbling in on St-Cyr, telling him not to judge too harshly, that wealth and power were not always corrupt. ‘If you have anything to hide, monsieur, might I suggest you tell me of it now. Things are not quite right with this one, and that is why I have asked for privacy.’
‘Then remove the shroud at once, idiot!’
‘Of course.’
A breath was sucked in. The voice was blunt. ‘That’s not her. That is her friend from school. Now do you mind telling me just how such a mistake could have been made? I’ll make you sweat for this. I’ll have your badge.’
‘Perhaps, but then … ah then, monsieur, perhaps it is that you can offer some explanation for the change your niece and this one made in their identity papers.’
‘Pardon?’
Was it such a surprise? ‘The photograph …’ St-Cyr handed the papers over. Vernet looked from them to the child several times and at last swore under his breath. ‘The silly little bitches. What the hell did they think they were playing at? Trapping this Sandman? Was that it, Inspector? The knitting needle, the …’
He thrust the papers back and turned away to hide his discomposure. ‘Not dead,’ he murmured. ‘Not dead!’ And then, loudly, ‘Bâtards! You flics …’ He turned, a fist clenched. ‘How dare you do this to me? To me?’
And now, monsieur, is that the moisture of perplexity and remorse in your eyes, wondered St-Cyr, or that of relief and concern for your niece?
Vernet tossed the hand with the fedora in defeat. ‘I had to put a stop to Nénette’s nonsense. That is why I obtained a laissez-passer for this one to go to Chamonix to join her parents. I could not have my niece making such preposterous claims and saying she knew who the Sandman was and that if I did not summon the préfet to speak to her alone and at once, she would take the matter into her own hands.’
A stubborn child. The préfet no less and at once, and in private. ‘And do you still believe she spoke nonsense?’
‘How dare you ask me that? Would you humiliate me further? She’s dead. Look at her yourself. A child. Innocence left to languish with the sisters while her … her no-good parents partied at Chamonix. Ah, damn that stupid, stupid mother of hers. I shall have to see that the couple are notified. There will have to be a funeral. As few as possible—we can’t have the press getting wind of this. Those vultures would only feast on the carrion.’
‘A funeral—yes, yes, of course, but burial where? In the ancien Cimetière de Neuilly?’
Vernet threw him a startled, questioning look. ‘Burial wherever her parents choose. It’s customary.’
He was still visibly shaken by the mistake in identity, but even as they looked at each other, St-Cyr could see the mask begin to descend.
‘And what about your niece, monsieur? Is there anything you can tell us?’
Caution entered. ‘Only that you had best find her before it is too late. I need not remind you, Inspector, that police bungling cannot possibly sit well with the Kommandant von Gross-Paris.’
‘Then let us pay Mademoiselle Chambert and her lover a little visit. Perhaps it is that she can clear the matter up.’
‘Liline …? Ah! yes. Yes, of course. I had forgotten. The flat is in Montpamasse, on the rue d’Assas. Number eighty-four. The fifth floor, apartment two, facing the street. We will have to awaken the concierge, but fortunately that one is a light sleeper.’
Good, nodded St-Cyr inwardly. Your response is just as I have suspected. It is not only your chauffeur who knows of the address. The death here has rattled you.
A cube of sponge, a tangled white thread, a hope, a prayer, a silk chemise no student with a part-time job could ever have purchased. Not at any time and certainly not on the black market.
Kohler let the dried cube of self-preservation dangle from its braided umbilical cord. He saw himself in the mirrors starkly juxtaposed with the plaster head of the seer and the torso, grey on white and white on gold, the single candle he had lighted in contravention of the black-out regulations fluttering in some sudden draught.
When he found the address, it was on a folded scrap of paper tucked into the toe of a brown leather pump—memorized, since people could not walk around with such things in their pockets for fear of arrest.
‘Forty-seven quai du Président Paul Doumer, room thirteen, Sunday at two p.m.,’ he breathed, and in that one breath was all of a detective’s dismay, a hope, a prayer of its own.
‘Inspector, what is the meaning of this? Surely my husband gave permission for no such thing?’
Madame Vernet stood framed in the doorway and he saw her in the girl’s mirrors, tall and statuesque, her dark brown hair a thick mop of curls, the image of her impinging on and overlapping the others, his own included.
Spaghetti straps held the full-length nightdress up. Laces criss-crossed the chest, leaving gaps between and glimpses of lots of cleavage. The scratches had been treated with iodine. ‘Madame, we have five murders and the disappearance of this one. Was Mademoiselle Chambert pregnant?’
‘Pardon? Surely you’re not …’
‘Look, I’ll put it to you straight. Did she go to see a maker of little angels?’
‘An abortionist …? But … but why? Liline gave us no cause to think such a thing. She was distressed. Yes, of course. She and Nénette were very close about things but we … we just thought it was this … this business of the Sandman and that she was worried about Nénette taking it far too seriously.’
‘Then why an assignation in a room in a flea-bitten tenement across the river in Courbevoie? Why something within easy walking distance of the Jardin d’Acclimatation? She was supposed to be with your niece, having tea. Your chauffeur had dropped them off after their climb up into the belfries of the Notre-Dame.’
‘Exercise … Ah merde, I … Ah no, no, you must be mistaken.’
‘Exercise before an abortion, eh?’
Damn him! ‘Liline is too pure. A virgin. A sculptress—these things are her own. She studies and perfects. But a man, a lover … Please don’t be so foolish. The boy she has been seeing will not have slept with her. This I can assure you.’
‘Good. Then what about your husband?’
‘Antoine …? With Liline …? Oh mon Dieu, you’re serious. He’s like a father to her. No, it’s impossible. He’s far too astute. I would have got wind of it. The girl would have been out on her ear.’
‘Then tell me why she laid out that dress and dropped a curtain ring on it.’
‘What dress?’ She arched, quivering.
Moving swiftly across the room, she came to the foot of the bed. She felt the wool. She dropped it and grated, ‘Antoine, you bastard. I didn’t know. I didn’t!’
‘He was fucking her, wasn’t he?’ said Kohler harshly. ‘That husband of yours had made her pregnant. A houseguest, eh? A visitor and companion to your niece? A girl in his care.’
She tore her hair and slapped herself in anguish, could not turn to face him but held her mouth to stop herself from vomiting and said, ‘Sweet Jesus, what am I to do?’
It was now nearly 4.30 a.m. and St-Cyr was anxious. Painstakingly the burly Feldwebel with the
Schmeisser shone his torch over the permit, billowing fifteen degrees of frost while his men, armed with Mauser rifles, inspected the black-out tape on the headlamps or stood about and coughed.
A pug-nosed, wart-faced Pomeranian dockworker with sad, boozer’s eyes that looked so lifeless in the fringe of the torchlight, the sergeant grunted dispassionately, ‘You are out when you shouldn’t be.’
Ah merde, he couldn’t read French! ‘Mein Herr …’ began St-Cyr, only to feel the touch of Vernet’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Herr Hauptmann, I realize it is late and you and your men have had a long and miserable night. We are on a little business for the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, yes? The matter is discreet, you understand. My permit, you will see, is stamped and signed by the General von Schaumburg himself, a personal friend. We will only be a few minutes and then we will be gone, so you need not make a note of the visit.’
Vernet’s Deutsch hadn’t just been flawless, he had used Low German so as not to distance himself too much.
‘It is highly irregular, mein Herr,’ grunted the Feldwebel.
‘Yes, yes, I know, but these things, they can be so delicate. Honoré, my good man, is there not a little something we could offer the captain for his trouble?’
As if on cue, Deloitte found a bottle of brandy in the map pocket of the door next to himself.
‘Warm yourselves,’ enthused Vernet. ‘Yours is not an easy but a most essential task.’ Perhaps five thousand francs were handed over. ‘Coffee and croissants for the boys and a little something for yourself.’
Perhaps another ten thousand francs changed hands, the torch going out so swiftly the men on patrol knew they would get only a taste of the bottle. But that was something more than they usually got, and the night was indeed cold.
They moved off, the sound of their jackboots and hobnails squeaking painfully in the snow.
‘There, that’s done,’ sighed Vernet. ‘Now let us find the flat.’
Only then did St-Cyr realize Vernet and his driver had known exactly where to intercept the patrol at 4.30 a.m. At a snail’s pace Deloitte followed the patrol until, at last, he was able to turn on to the rue d’Assas unencumbered.
Awakened, the concierge, a portly, pasty-faced man of sixty in shawl, blanket and nightshirt over his everyday clothes, deferentially ducked his head and sleepily mumbled, ‘Monsieur,’ before retreating to his cage. Again largesse was spread, Vernet taking another five thousand francs from his wallet to set them on the counter.
As if by magic, the bills vanished and the slot was silently closed to leave them alone in the corridor under a forty-watt electric light bulb that would soon be switched off out of frugality.
A frequent visitor, ah yes, and well known to the concierge.
‘Inspector,’ confided Vernet as they took the lift and the night was filled with the sounds of it. ‘Inspector, these things …’ he said of the girl. ‘You do understand.’
‘Of course.’
Letting himself into the flat, Vernet first closed the curtains before switching on a light. The sitting room was a tasteful jumble from the twenties, the bedroom hadn’t been slept in and there was no sign of anyone.
‘So?’ said the Sûreté, giving him the open-handed gesture of It’s-your-turn again.
‘The boy is usually here,’ said Vernet, not liking it. ‘Liline …’
He went over to an armoire to search it. He opened another in the narrow hallway and went through to the kitchen to stand in its emptiness and say, ‘They’ve left. They’ve cleared out. The boy is a homosexual she had befriended. He was afraid of the Relève, of what our friends are going to do in February. Turn it into the Service de Travail Obligatoire, the forced labour in the Reich. She must have told him his name was bound to come up, so he buggered off.’
‘And the girl, monsieur?’
‘Liline must have gone with him. His rucksack, it’s missing. Look, he was too timid for his own good. Though she didn’t live here, she was always having to put the muscle into him. They’ll have gone south like so many these days. He’ll try to join the maquis of the Auvergne perhaps. Liline has relatives in Clermont-Ferrand.’
Ah yes, the maquis was growing and its young and not so young men were living in the wilds as fugitives, supplied by some and hated by others. A Resistance without arms unless stolen from the Occupier. But what about suitable laissez-passer, eh, and was Vernet so desperate he would fabricate? ‘Monsieur, if the boy was in danger of this … this new Service, surely with your contacts you could have found a way of keeping him in Paris?’
‘Don’t be silly. I was fucking Liline. Would you have had me broadcast that little piece of information by placing his name on one of my lists of those who are to remain in France?’
The SS and the Gestapo would have known of the affair in any case and perhaps that, really, was why he had done nothing.
‘Now we had best find Nénette, Inspector, or is it that you still want more from me about this?’
‘No. For the moment we have sufficient, but I must ask, is Madame Vernet aware Mademoiselle Chambert is your mistress?’
‘Bernadette? Of course not.’
‘And Mademoiselle Chambert, monsieur, what of her? Did she come to you willingly or did you—’
‘How dare you?’
‘I dare because I have at the moment two lives to concern me. That of your mistress and that of your niece.’
Kohler followed Madame Vernet into the child’s room, which was in a far corner of the house next to the staircase to the servants’ quarters and the kitchens. He noted the amber and gold dragonflies on the stained-glass shade of the lamp she had switched on, the porcelain frog below it with walking stick, orange waistcoat, silk scarf and cream knitted trousers and silver-buckled shoes.
Above the mantelpiece there was a Meissen clock in white and gilded porcelain with a turbaned potentate riding atop the clock face, which rested on the back of an elephant. The bed was superb, a Louis XV canopied affair whose gold brocade rose to ostrich plumes at all four corners.
‘This was her room. Nénette loved it. She used to say having privacy was next to being with God.’
There were more tears, more tearing of the hair and tugging at the laces across the chest of her nightdress. It was bad enough her niece being murdered by the Sandman, but to have her husband fooling around right under her nose was too much. Ah yes.
She broke down completely and he let her weep in a chair, didn’t give her another thought. Christ, what had the kid discovered? A map of the city gave the locations of every one of the killings. Press clippings had been pinned to it. The tenement in Aubervilliers, the one near the Terrot bicycle works in Suresnes, the murders in les Halles and in the Notre-Dame …
Even the Jardin d’Acclimatation had been noted. This one is next. Sunday afternoon, 10 January. I am certain of it.
Bang on. Ah merde …
A Louis-Philippe secrétaire held pigeonholes and drawers the kid had stuffed and locked, some of them. School exercise books—French composition, Latin, Greek, religious studies, the catechism, et cetera, et cetera, and then … then, as he flipped quickly through them, a scribbled note. Sister Céline hates us. We are the cabbages she feeds to her pigs after first giving them the names of each of us. We are her droppings.
Trash overflowed the child’s waste-paper basket. Things picked up in the gutters and on the métro filled several drawers. Where … where the hell to begin?
Using her letter-opener, he jammed it into the gap near the lock of the pencil drawer and snapped the blade in haste.
The pocket-knife the Kaiser had given him and countless others in 1914 did the task and the drawer popped open. No pencils. A simple crucifix of black wrought iron with the Christ pinned up by nails stared back at him, looking so like the top of a coffin, nestled as it was in that long, thin drawer, he had to wonder at the careful placing of it. The thing was heavy and about eight centimetres in length by four in width at the arms. Beside it the
re was a Number Four knitting needle of grey steel, flexible and yet stiff.
He sucked in a breath. He felt the tremors within himself, heard the sobbing of Madame Vernet behind him.
Louis, he said to himself of the knitting needle. Louis, I think I need you here.
‘Madame,’ he said.
Tears streaked her cheeks. Blood ran from reopened scratches he was certain the poodle had never inflicted. ‘Madame, would your niece have sought refuge with the sisters?’
‘Sought refuge …? But she’s dead? He killed her. He used one of those to …’
She threw up, coughed, bent double and vomited again before hurrying from the room to stagger in the hall and turn. ‘Dead … She is dead, isn’t she? It was her, wasn’t it?’
Ah merde … Sadly he shook his head and watched as she crumpled to the floor. Out like a light.
3
TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN THEY SHARED A cigarette in the darkness of the Bois de Boulogne while they waited to make their first report to von Schaumburg. The clay-pigeon shoot was just to their left, the riding stables were very near.
‘Louis, this thing, it looks worse and worse. We’re to believe this latest killing was the work of the Sandman, but was it? Those two girls knew Nénette would be followed. They planned what they did.’
Hermann was really worried. ‘Andrée Noireau was to have left the city on Thursday … Madame Vernet has said she believed the child had done so, but was that woman deliberately taken in by her niece?’
‘She must have been. She fainted at the news Nénette hadn’t been killed. She expected the child to have been alone.’
‘And Vernet claims his wife didn’t know of the affair he was having …’
Kohler took the cigarette from him. ‘But she must have, since she told me the boy at the flat could not have been having sex with Mademoiselle Chambert.’
It would have to be asked. ‘Has the student-sculptress really gone south to take that boy to the Auvergne?’
‘Or did she leave, as I think she did, to have an abortion while the other two were in the Bois, and if so, where the hell is she now?’
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