The girl was leaning against the stone wall of a windmill or mas.
‘Inspector …’ began Spaggiari, only to hear the Kripo caution him with, ‘Why not use your head and keep your mouth shut for now?’
She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit and espadrilles. Her hands were behind her back and she was smiling demurely at the camera. Moisture beaded her skin. Her hair was pinned in a tight chignon that was very wet. She had only just come out of the water.
‘Was she a good swimmer?’ he asked, ‘seeing as she “accidentally” drowned?’
They didn’t answer. It was so damned dry in summer in the hills, the pond or whatever would have to have been deep enough for bathing. Later, or beforehand, she had bared her breasts and had let someone photograph them, but this one showed every sign of being modest.
‘Okay, so we’ve got her name and now a snapshot of her, and one of you – I don’t give a damn which one since you’re all in the same bucket of shit as far as I’m concerned – stated clearly that you hardly knew her.’
‘She was of the Parisian beau monde,’ offered the cherub, nervously darting little looks at his confreres. Did he like to feel a girl’s hair when looking at a photograph only of her uncovered breasts? wondered Kohler.
‘Her family sent her to Avignon to get her away from an affair they didn’t want to happen,’ said Guy Rochon.
‘A mezzo-soprano,’ interjected Spaggiari with an exasperated sigh. ‘She had passed her final audition and was to have joined our little group. César had written in a part for her halfway between those of Christiane and Genèvieve.’
‘Or Xavier. We mustn’t forget him,’ offered the cherub hesitantly. ‘Xavier’s voice …’
‘What Norman means to say, Inspector, is that Xavier and Genèvieve often sing the same part. Their voices are equally pitched, though hers is fuller and far more mature.’
Like wine, eh?, Kohler wanted to snort, but said, ‘So why was this photo up here if you hardly knew the girl?’
‘A Requiem of our own,’ said the cherub softly, the mischief all too clear.
‘A drunken orgy, was that it, eh?’
Again Spaggiari sighed heavily. ‘Her drowning has nothing to do with what happened to Mireille, Inspector.’
‘And she was a good swimmer?’
‘We swam in a cistern, Inspector. A cave, but our feet could touch bottom if desired.’
‘So, when and where was this taken?’
He’d have to be told. There was no way of avoiding it – Kohler would stick to the matter until satisfied. ‘Early last June, at the mas Madame de Sinéty leases from César. The windmill is no longer in use. It’s on a hill behind what remains of a small retreat that was once used by the monks at Saint-Michel-de-Frigolet. The cistern is a little farther into the hills, but is easy to find.’
A ready source of water in a normally parched and thirsty land. ‘And Simondi owns the place?’
‘As he owns many places. After all, there are lots of bargains these days and even six hundred hectares of good farmland in several choice parcels will bring only 30,000 francs if one is lucky.’
‘Could she swim?’
‘Why not?’
They sat in the car, letting the engine warm while knowing they were being watched through more than one of the Villa Marenzio’s windows.
‘Spaggiari made a point of telling me his boss could buy farmland for a song, Louis. Hell, everyone knows the farmers can’t get their produce to market and the Occupier steals it anyway, so the price of land has plummeted. And sure, what few tractors they had before the war have long since been taken and the Russian Campaign has left so few horses, pulling a plough is now damned hard on the wife’s shoulders, but did our Basso Continuo tell me that about Simondi to take the heat off himself and the others?
‘The accabussade …’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘For Thérèse Godard the threat of being locked into one was real enough.’
‘And drowned?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Spaggiari indicated Adrienne de Langlade could swim.’
‘Whereas Christiane Bissert stated positively that the girl couldn’t.’
Kohler waited. After nearly two and a half years of working together, he knew Louis hadn’t finished.
‘A sickle is missing from among the stage props. Xavier tried to lie about it and in the process convinced me he had done the tidying up.’
Again Kohler waited.
‘The boy hides a thick twist of Adrienne de Langlade’s hair, Hermann. Dried twigs, waterweeds, sand grains and fragments of snail shells were caught in it, so the hair was taken after she had drowned. I took only sufficient for Peretti to match with the curl on our postcard, but visually there is absolutely no doubt in my mind.’
‘Did the boy kill her?’
‘Or find her body under the water?’
‘What now, then, Chief?’
‘The Préfecture and a file others may hope remains dosed.’
Police photographers, lacking in sensitivity, welcomed the thought of lesser beings vomiting on seeing their photos; detectives especially.
Hermann was using a waste-paper basket as a receptacle. Once, twice … ah mon Dieu, couldn’t someone give him a brandy?
Buried up to the waist in the bottom muds, the girl had obviously been in the water a good two or three weeks before the floods of last November n to 18 had dislodged her corpse. Swept along, tumbled, dragged, her skin pierced by sticks, rusty bits of metal, broken glass, pebbles and sand, she’d been jammed among the debris – caught against an abutment of the Pont Saint-Bénézet.
Her seat was up, her legs spread at odd angles among the timbers, the rest of her half hidden. A frayed bit of rope was still tied around her right ankle but the boulder that had anchored her to the bottom was now missing.
‘Hermann … Hermann, wait in the car. Go on, please.’
There was no answer, not even the lifting of a feeble hand. ‘He absolutely has to be allowed a damned good rest,’ swore St-Cyr to the clerk. ‘Go with him. Be gentle or I’ll deal with you. I’m worried about him.’
‘You can’t take any of that file away.’
‘I won’t. The memory will be sufficient, eh? Now beat it. And don’t let de Passe know we’re here.’
No one had expected them to look for this file. No one.
She’d been a pretty girl with a figure she’d have been proud of, but after such a time under water, her hair had slipped completely away. Like gloves, the skin of her hands had been peeled off to cling at the last by the nails.
Fish, worms, eels, parasites, all manner of underwater creatures had been at the torso and head whereas the rest of her, buried beneath the mud, had been somewhat protected. The face, unrecognizable to any, would have been livid to flaccid grey and blotched by bluish green. Even in black-and-white photos there were sufficient differences of shading to indicate this. Tatters of flesh had all but been parted from the bones. The lips and nose were gone, the ears, the eyes, the eyelids also.
He bowed his head and said grimly, ‘Where? Where were you drowned and when, exactly, you poor thing?’
There was no mention of any of this in the file. Others would have drowned in the flooding. Animals … Overtaxed, the rescue crews would have had her taken to a temporary morgue.
‘Unidentified Caucasian female,’ had been crossed out later and her name entered above it.
There was no mention of who had identified her. Peretti had not examined the corpse. No coroner had. ‘And yes,’ said St-Cyr coldly to himself and the photos, ‘Xavier must have found you along the bank a good two or three weeks before the flooding. Your hair was still intact. You’d been in the water but a short time. Did he then tie the boulder to your feet and remain silent, or was it already there and yet he’d known exactly where to find you?’
Back in the car, himself behind the wheel and Hermann looking like death, he went through the order book Mireille de Sinéty had kept privately.
�
�“Sunday, 25 October, 1942”, Hermann. She has used a glyph to represent the name – an alchemist’s symbol, an m against and with whose tail there is an l, but I’m sure it must mean the girl. “Adrienne has missed her final fitting. I can’t understand this because she knows how terribly important it is and that only I can help her hide what has happened to her.
‘“Tuesday, 27 October”. There’s another glyph that looks like two Grecian columns with a flat roof and floor. Yes, it must be one of the singers. This person “says Adrienne went home to Paris to tell her parents the good news about joining the group.” Merde, there’s yet another glyph! This one has asked – ah! it’s Madame Simondi – “Adrienne to go to Hediard’s with a request she has written out.
‘“Friday, 30 October. Adrienne has still not returned and we are to leave tomorrow. Nice, Cannes and then Fréjus. Will she catch up with us, I ask but am afraid for her. Something isn’t right. There has been no word from her. César …” Grâce à Dieu, she gave us a name! “César is very angry and swears she is finished and that he will have nothing more to do with her for leaving him in the lurch like this.
‘“I am to take her costumes along just in case he can bring himself to forgive her.”’
‘Louis, for Christ’s sake don’t tell anyone we may have another murder on our hands. Not yet. Giselle and Oona need me. You know they won’t be able to make it through this lousy war without me.’
‘The Kommandant, Hermann. We have no other choice but to go to him.’
‘But he’s not here! He’s out in the hills. He’s probably hunting down our petite lingère’s boyfriend.’
The Kommandant was one of Simondi’s and the bishop’s hunting partners, but was he also a business associate? wondered St-Cyr. He had been evasive when interviewed and had refused to let them question his wife …‘Mireille de Sinéty must have known about the death of this one, Hermann, and was about to confront her judges with the truth. She went to her audition hoping Dédou Favre would be there to back her up.’
‘Favre wasn’t waiting on the ramparts.’
‘But Xavier lies, as do all the others.’
‘Then was Dédou there, Louis, and did our altar boy of the cracked voice and the thieving hands tell her differently?’
‘She took a tin of sardines with her just in case he should come …’
‘Had prepared herself for every eventuality.’
‘Was found by a dog, Hermann …’
‘A dog named Nino, with a penchant for wandering and collecting last year’s birds’ nests.’
‘There was a clochette …’
‘The clochette of one of the bishop’s hounds, Louis …’
‘A bell that rings …’
‘When a grive has been shot, a young girl drowned, or a throat opened with a sickle.’
They sat a moment in silence. Then Kohler said, ‘I didn’t know you could part sing.’
‘Nor I you, but you’re better.’
Louis deserved to have the last word, but it had to be said, ‘Let’s go to the dogs, eh?, and see what they have to tell us.’
* From Io piango (1581), by Luca Marenzio (1553-99), after a poem by Petrarch.
* From La Guerre (The War), by Clement Janequin (1485-1558).
5
The study was huge and hugely cluttered, and it showed at once a side to Bishop Henry-Baptiste Rivaille that was totally unexpected. It was not a room in which to officially greet people. It was very private and tucked away in a far corner of the Cloister of the Pilgrims’ Well, le Cloitre du puit des pèlerins, which dated from the fourteenth century and was on the rue Sainte-Catherine within a few minutes’ walk of the Palais.
‘You find me at home, Inspectors, and busy at my researches,’ he said, taken aback at the intrusion but valiantly trying to hide the discomfort. ‘What can I do for you? A glass of anisette, some coffee …? It’s not often detectives from Paris visit the Bishop of Avignon and the Vaucluse unannounced.’
The cook, who had, under the threat of Sûreté duress, escorted them from a side entrance, and who had been with the house for centuries, was going to get a tongue-lashing later. ‘The anisette, merci,’ said St-Cyr.
Ah not that Quatsch again, swore Kohler silently as he grimaced at the thought of liquorice’s cloying taste. ‘Some coffee?’ he asked and swallowed.
‘Both, then. I’m honoured. Please … please find a seat. Move things … ah!, be sure to put them back exactly in the same order. One grows old. One tends to forget in the heat of one’s thoughts.’
Rivaille turned to the cook. ‘Bénédictine, ma chère, our visitors look hungry. A little of the bread and chèvre, some of the prosciutto affumicato César so kindly brought us – he smokes it himself, Inspectors, with juniper and fir from the hills. It’s perfect. A dish of the olives, Bénédictine – they must try them, of course. All who seek succour at the hand of God must be given sustenance.’
And warned, was that it, eh? wondered Kohler, realizing that word of their not having eaten must have reached here some time ago. No longer used as a cloister, the villa’s seemingly endless corridors, salons and staircases had been hung with Old Masters, tapestries, crossed swords, heraldic shields and armour. There’d been bronzes, too, and marble statues, and a wealth of carpets and furnishings. But here there was none of that. Here there was at heart a simple man but one who was dedicated absolutely to an ideal, a dream.
‘The return of the Papacy to our fair city,’ breathed Rivaille, hesitantly watching them, for he must have sensed they would peel back the ancient manuscripts, thought Kohler, searching through their blotting paper flags if necessary until they damned well had what they wanted.
‘Please, I’m a consummate student and collector of our past. The bas-reliefs on the walls are pieces from the days of the Romans. Naked Gauls being taken to the coliseum to be torn to shreds – one can still hear their cries, can’t one? Maidens being debauched in the streets and then slaughtered mercilessly, their tresses caught in bestial hands, Christ unknown to them, poor innocents; God but in waiting.’
There were bits and pieces from more recent centuries, Renaissance floor tiles, plans of the Palais with each of its periods of construction, terracotta pottery, and hundreds of books and manuscripts, many in Latin. These last were arranged around the simple table-cum-desk in phalanxes with their spines facing upwards so that flags could extend from both the top and bottom of each book.
‘I learned to read while still a shepherd,’ he said. ‘Everything you see here I owe to the Church, especially the freedom to pursue independent lines of thought. The carpentry is, of course, my own and deliberately functional.’
Among flanking stacks of papers was the discourse Rivaille had been working on when interrupted. Dark, horn-rimmed glasses lay on top of pages where an irritated pen had released droplets of ink as it had been set down.
‘Bishop, a few ..’ began the Sûreté only to hear Rivaille mildly chide, ‘Paris has informed me of this habit of yours. “A few small questions, nothing difficult.” Ah bon, let us get down to it. Sister Agnès removed a ring and this has understandably provoked you. A ruby, the stone blood-red and perfect.’
They waited. Chairs not being available, they sat, like he did, on the same side of the ‘desk’, on the small and simple benches of another age.
Rivaille unlocked a drawer. ‘This ring … These days one can’t tell who to trust and so trusts no one, am I not correct?’
The song of their times … well, one of them, thought Kohler wryly. Louis took the ring. Light from the desk lamp made the stone appear as if warm. A good four carats.
‘Open it,’ said Rivaille, his voice hushed by reverence.
‘You do it, then,’ said St-Cyr.
‘There’s a secret compartment in the bezel,’ confided the bishop. ‘Such things were very common in the Early Renaissance but this …’ The detectives would wonder now about his tone of voice and no doubt would think it motivated by thoughts other than holy when t
hey realized what the compartment held, but God would judge. Only God.
He slid the compartment open and handed the ring back. For a moment the Sûreté was speechless. ‘It’s … it’s a coiled human hair. Bishop, what is the meaning of this, please?’
Ah Christ, thought Kohler.
Rivaille’s unrelenting gaze fell on each of them. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is from the head of the Virgin herself. Down through the ages the great masters have invariably depicted her hair as being auburn or very fair, but among them some such as Pontormo accurately revealed it to be a distinctly reddish strawberry blonde.’
Adrienne de Langlade, swore Kohler silently.
‘A thorn from Christ’s crown,’ interjected Louis, meeting the believer’s gaze with suitable awe. ‘Had I not seen these relics, Bishop, I might never have known they existed.’
Liar! thought Kohler. You don’t believe it any more than I do!
‘Irreplaceable,’ breathed Rivaille. ‘So you see why I absolutely had to have it returned and yet … and yet maintain that element of secrecy all such priceless relics demand.’
‘And the pendant box?’ asked Louis warily.
‘Coroner Peretti is, unfortunately, far too stubborn. He could never have guaranteed the safety of the thorn and when presented with Maître de Passe’s ultimatum, quickly found he had no other choice but to return it.’
‘What ultimatum?’ croaked the Sûreté.
It would be best to give the two of them a magnanimous shrug. ‘These things, they are understood without their being said.’
A little trip then, in a railway cattle truck to an unspecified destination in the east, or simply a case of what the Gestapo and the SS were fond of calling Herzlähmung. Cardiac arrest.
They went on to other matters. There was a small round stool between them, and on this, a game of jacquet whose marquetry gleamed. This board was removed and the tray of food set down. Somehow the coffee and cakes, the thick sandwiches of crusty bread and a small pewter pitcher of anisette, with matching cups, could never taste as well as had they been served before the threat that had just been made.
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