Patience was always necessary with Hermann. The Bavarian temperament often lacked it. ‘Because, mon vieux, history is inevitably involved in murder, and because the Church has power. Corrupt and otherwise.’
‘The Church?’
The telegram was indicated. ‘That crap about the Blessed Saviour keeping me safe. He’s really saying, Let the warning be enough. Break glass and you will be cut. Tamper with the Host and the Blood of Christ and watch out.’
‘And the petite lingère?’
‘Maybe he’s found another one.’
In the dim blue light of the railway station one man stood out beside the clock tower whose Roman numerals gave 11.59 p.m., all but an hour after the curfew in these parts. The doors had been locked. Most would have to spend the rest of the night in here and wouldn’t be allowed to leave until 5.00 a.m. Berlin Time, which was 4.00 a.m. the old time in winter.
His face hidden by semi-darkness and by the cowl of a coarse grey woollen cloak, the man looked not at them when confronted but away.
‘The carriage awaits,’ he grunted in langue d ’oc, the language of Old Provence. ‘I am to take you to her.’
Merde, was he a monk? wondered Kohler. The ash-grey sackcloth was frayed at the cuffs and patched at the elbows. The bell-rope around the waist was old.
There were no sandals, only worn black leather boots, hobnailed and cleated like the thousands Louis and he had seen in use all over France.
Without another word from their guide, they passed on into a wind that took the breath away and caused the eyes to smart. The curse of Provence and the Rhône Valley, that wind of winds, the mistral, was in full force. ‘Jésus,’ cried Kohler. ‘Why us?’
‘Why anyone?’ lamented Louis.
The calèche was open, but unfortunately its only passenger seat faced forward into the wind. They threw up their suitcases themselves and as they and their driver mounted, his stick was used. Urging the tired old nag into the night, they left the kerbside.
The wind froze the cheeks and brought tears. There were no lights. The streets were empty. Muffled by the incessant racket, the sound of the hooves was hardly heard.
‘The cours Jean Jaurès,’ managed St-Cyr.
‘Save it,’ shot his partner. Impatiently Kohler tugged at the cloak. There was no response. He got up and tried to put a word into the driver’s ear, but felt a grip of iron on his wrist. ‘The Palais des Papes,’ was all the man said.
And is this the way it’s to be? wondered St-Cyr. The silent treatment?
‘Nothing is colder than leather in the cold,’ he grumbled. ‘Not even a blanket has been provided.’
The nag took its time. Perhaps it was rebelling against being left behind when most of its fellows had been sent to Russia, perhaps it was simply old age which made it so uncooperative.
When the road began to climb, the stick was applied more rigorously. Ice soon caused trouble and their driver, thinking it would be better perhaps, took a slight turning on to a much narrower street where the cobbles were every bit as icy.
The darkness increased. Houses closed in on either side – many were substantial and had been built in Renaissance times and at the height of Avignon’s power. From 1309 until 1377, the Papal Court had ruled from a city which had teemed with over 80,000 residents, by some reports, but had also had a ‘floating’ population of jugglers, minstrels, carnival dancers, thieves, con artists and prostitutes, thus earning it the sobriquet of the Second Babylon, or more politely where the popes were concerned, the ‘Babylonian Captivity’.
At present there were perhaps no more than 50,000 residents and travellers were few, except for the Occupier and his minions. Yet the town was still very much a centre of wealth and power, of old money and old ideas.
‘Louis, take a look behind us.’
Blinking, St-Cyr cleared his eyes. Faintly in the near distance, blue-shielded, slit-eyed headlamps were following.
‘Three cars,’ he mused.
‘But whose?’ demanded Kohler.
‘The préfet, the bishop and the Kommandant – who else in these days of so few automobiles?’
It was an uncomfortable thought.
The Palais des Papes was as labyrinthian as he’d remembered it from years ago, thought St-Cyr. Brutally cold, insufferably dark, dank and fretted constantly by the wind, its many cavernous rooms and corridors seemed never to end and one had to ask, Why here, why now? And one had to answer, Was this not often a place of murder?
Hobnails ringing, their driver strode on ahead and at a turning, the shadow of him was flung upon a wall from whose thick and flaking, chipped and hammered plasterwork appeared the stark face of another age: 1343 perhaps.
From 1822 until 1906 the Palais had been a barracks, its wealth of early Renaissance frescoes plundered by soldiers so certain of profit they had even designed a tool to better cut and prise the paintings away.
A ruined scrollwork of grapevines gave the delicate green and brown of those time-faded days. ‘She’s in here,’ grunted their guide impatiently, and tearing the shade from the lantern, flung light over a magnificent fresco of songbirds and swans, gardens and flowers, and a clearing from which a hare bolted before the threat of a pontiffs gloved hand on which was perched a hawk.
‘Mon Dieu,’ exclaimed St-Cyr, the breath escaping him.
‘La Chambre du cerf,’ grunted their guide dispassionately. The Stag Room.
She was lying on the floor, on her back but with her face turned away from them, and her long golden hair was bound by a tight headband of silver brocade in which there were insets of pale blue enamelled violets.
The right arm had been flung aside, its hand open, the beringed fingers now rigid.
Bent at the elbow, the left arm lay across her waist, its fist clenched tightly as if, in a last subconscious gesture of defiance, she would not give up its contents but would hide and hug them to herself even as her body collapsed.
Much blood had flowed from her to pool and darken on the glazed and soldier-ravaged tiles. Arterial blood had been pumped so hard, it had sprayed across the floor and over the wall to stain medieval fishermen and run down the long white neck of a swan that was about to be trapped for the table six hundred years ago.
Blood was spattered down her front – had she been on her knees and begging God to intervene? Had she fled to here? Had she run from her assailant? Why had she been in the Palais at all?
‘Leave us. Leave the lantern,’ breathed St-Cyr to their guide but not averting his gaze and aghast at what lay before them, for she was not dressed as she would have been today, but was in the finery of the very early Renaissance and as a maiden of substance, a petitioner to the Papal Court perhaps.
Time clashed – the present, the past, those intervening epochs when the palace had been a prison during the Revolution and then a barracks.
Time folded in on itself, he seeing the victim against the faded frescoes and broken tiles but seeing, too, in the imagination, the furnishings that once would have decorated the Palais, the tapestries, the velvet of its carpets – triple pile, it had been reported – the gold, the silver.
Faintly Kohler said, ‘Our boy has already buggered off.’
‘Good.’
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Merely that, like those who made a point of following us, he was meant to be unsettling at a time when we can least afford it. Now go and find him. Pry what you can from him.’
Leave me alone with her.
‘You’ll need me here.’
‘Then please don’t vomit all over the place. If you have to throw up, head for the Latrines Tower. It’s near the far corner of the old palace. It’s where the Revolutionaries dumped the bodies of the sixty Royalists they had imprisoned here and then murdered in a moment of passionate fervour in 1791. If you think this is blood …’
‘Look, I won’t be sick. Not this time.’
St-Cyr had heard it all before. It wasn’t just the bodies they had
had to examine. It was the roll call of them right back to 1914 and that other war. Hermann had recently lost his two sons at Stalingrad. He’d had a breakdown during their last investigation, had been on Benzedrine for far too long.
Always it was blitzkrieg for them, and almost always there were things like this to confront them.
‘Please hold the lantern up. Let us see her as completely as possible.’
Her throat had been savagely opened. ‘The windpipe, Hermann. The gullet and main arteries, muscles and nerves – the wound must continue to the cervical vertebrae. A little more and she would have been decapitated. She wouldn’t have moved after this. Her assailant had to lower her to the floor.’
Kohler crouched to point out a few short strands of hair that had been cut and left clinging to the blood. For a moment he couldn’t say anything, then at last he blurted, ‘Un sadique? Jésus, Louis, why us? Why here? Why now?’
He was referring to a previous case and another sadist, but it was odd that her killer – if it had been the killer – had found it necessary to take a sample of her hair. ‘Nineteen years old, I think,’ said St-Cyr to calm his partner.
‘Nineteen it is.’
The lantern was brought closer to the body, Louis removing his fedora so that it wouldn’t shade her as he went to work. He loved the challenge, could stomach anything, thought Kohler. Not short, not tall, but blocky and, even with the starvation rations of the Occupation, still somewhat corpulent, the Sûreté’s detective crouched and began to get to know their victim. He’d be ‘talking’ to her soon. He always did that and always it seemed to help.
‘Ah merde, Hermann, it’s as if she had stepped right out of the pages of history. The dark green woollen cloak is trimmed with white ermine tails. The gown is of saffron silk and decorated with a faint design, but over this kirtle, whose tight sleeves, collar and hem are visible, she wears a cote-hardie of cocoa-brown velvet whose bodice is of gold brocade and laced up the front from the waist to the softly curving, now much blood-spattered neckline.’
The cote-hardie had sleeves that came only to above the elbows and were piped with gold brocade. At the hem, it was cut jaggedly so that upwardly-narrowing wedges of the saffron underdress would show through to a height of about thirty centimetres.
The shoes were as no others Kohler had seen except in museum collections. They had no heels, no laces either, and were like modestly pointed slippers of fine black kid, and they fitted perfectly, as did the rest of her costume.
‘It isn’t right, Louis. It’s too weird for me. Her belt—’
‘The girdle, yes.’
Of exceedingly fine suede, the belt was studded with silver and gold, with brooches and pins of emerald, lapis lazuli, amber and moonstone. And this comet’s tail of trinkets began high on the left hip, falling to well below the right hip, in the fashion of the times.
‘There are tiny silver bells,’ managed Kohler, forcing himself to ignore the wound. ‘There are little silver and gold buttons. There’s a—’
‘The “buttons” are enseignes – signs. But among them there are also talismans which were to ward off evil and disease. The bells were to frighten away the devil.’
‘The purse wasn’t taken.’
‘Her aumônière sarrasine. It probably contains the alms she would willingly have handed to the beggars in the streets had she lived back then.’
Everything was as it once must have been. The purse was richly embroidered with silver thread …
‘The wound is from the left to the right,’ muttered Jean-Louis and, losing himself in that moment, said, ‘Excuse me, mademoiselle, but I must bring the light closer now just for a little.’
Concern and sympathy moistened Louis’s brown eyes. The Sûreté used a pair of tweezers to gently prise the edge of the cloak away from where it had become stuck. ‘Strength,’ he grimaced. ‘The one who did this has slaughtered sheep, Hermann. A ruthless cut and done continuously. One motion … and held against the assailant, her back suddenly arched. Something wide, something curved. Ah merde, could it be? Please look for the cork from an old wine bottle. It’s just a thought.’
Please leave me to talk to her.
Rigor would have set in from perhaps two to four hours afterwards, thought St-Cyr, but if she had been running through this empty place, her muscles would have been under extensive exertion and it could then have come on immediately.
The wretched frost of one of the coldest winters on record would prolong it.
Rigor there was. The fingers which clasped her little treasure would have to be broken.
‘There’s a wine cork, Louis. Maybe he flung it aside and didn’t give a damn if we found it.’
‘I’m not so sure it was a he, are you?’
‘Not really, but with a wound like that …’
‘There are bits of dried lavender on the floor, Hermann. Whoever did this also forgot to remove them.’
‘Lavender?’
‘Not from her person. Also winter grass and thyme.’
‘A shepherd?’
‘Or one who has to daily gather feed for rabbits and chickens.’
‘A sickle, then, with a cork to protect its tip when not in use,’ sighed Kohler. Louis had made a point of doing comparative studies of wounds in his early days as a detective. ‘Dead how long, Chief?’
‘At least twenty-four hours. The coroner can, perhaps, be more positive about it and the weapon. We’ll have to ask for Peretti. I want none of the préfet’s interfering, none of the bishop’s and certainly none of the Kommandant’s.’
Killed Monday night, the twenty-fifth. ‘Then you’d better speak to them,’ came the faltering words. ‘We’ve company.’
The Sûreté didn’t even take his eyes from the victim. ‘Please escort them to the entrance, Hermann. We will question each of them individually as necessary.’
‘A moment,’ said someone – the Kommandant, by the atrocious accent.
‘No moments, Herr Oberst,’ said St-Cyr. ‘This is a matter for the Sûreté and the Kripo. If in doubt, please consult Gestapo Boemelburg and Maître Pharand. You will find both at 11 rue des Saussaies in Paris.’
Formerly the Headquarters of the Sûreté Nationale and now that of the Gestapo in France and of the Sûreté. ‘It was myself who asked specifically for you both.’
‘Then please leave us to do what you asked.’
‘Verdammt! How dare you?’
There was a sigh and then, still not pausing in his work, the admonition of, ‘Herr Oberst, you of all people must be accustomed to delegating authority and to placing trust in those so chosen. Are you then also mindful of Orlando Gibbons, the English madrigal composer of the late sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth?’
‘Don’t talk nonsense.’
‘Fortunately, before leaving Paris I was able to find something on madrigals, since that word was mentioned in Gestapo Boemelburg’s directive to us. The book hadn’t been banned and burned by the List Otto.* I’ll give it to you then, shall I, in deutsch, this little quotation I discovered on the train?, and will ask you to listen to the question it forces us to consider, since the three of you are so anxious about this killing you would wait for us to arrive and would stay up more than half the night.
‘“The silver swan, who living had no note. / When death approached unlocked her silent throat:” did she have something to say, Herr Oberst, and is that why she was killed?’
There was no answer.
‘Now please leave, as I have asked. Find Peretti, Hermann. Maître de Passe, get me your best photographer and fingerprint artist, and we’ll want the Palais sealed and placed off-limits to everyone but those we wish to consult.’
They didn’t like it. They huffed and farted about but obeyed. And when he had them at the ancient door and under its Gothic arch, Kohler said, ‘He’s like that. Get used to it. We’re here to find out who did it, and we will, no matter what.’
Alone with her at last, St-Cyr apologized
for the disturbance. ‘Murder invariably attracts the concerned and the curious,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘But sometimes the killer is among the first to appear and is most anxious to assist for reasons of his or her own. Tell me why you are here, dressed as you are? Did you come to meet someone?’
Her eyes, though glazed, were of the softest shade of amber. They couldn’t blink or appear to be evasive, of course, yet he swore the question had upset her.
Ancient keys of beautifully but simply worked iron hung from her belt. There’d be those for the linen boxes – closets and armoires were all but unheard of in those days – others for the pantry and storehouses. Keys for the money box, too. Keys for this and that. In total there were eight of them, and one was both longer by five centimetres than the longest of the others, and stouter. But these were the keys to a house or villa, not a Palais, and the original lock could no longer be in place here in any case.
Had she had a key to the present entrance, or had someone left the door open for her?
‘And if the former, then who gave it to you?’ he asked. ‘A lover? Were you to meet in the Palais, and if so, why? To sing?’ he hazarded.
Madrigals were part songs, the popular music of the day, and she … what would her voice have been? ‘A contralto?’ he asked. ‘A soprano?’ Had it been a lover who had killed her? A boy, a young man, a former shepherd, former altar boy, a baritone now, a tenor or bass among the madrigal singers?
‘You were dressed for your part,’ he said. ‘There were four, five or six of you in the group. Together you sang so well the préfet, the Kommandant and the bishop must have known of you and had their reasons for coming.’
There were so many things that needed looking into. Her belt, the cabochons, they’d tell a story with the enseignes and talismans. There were pewter scissors hanging from the girdle. There was a dirk in its richly tooled sheath of silver and leather. There was also a plain soft brown velvet pouch – needles and thread, no doubt. Did she carry the tools of her trade as well? he wondered.
Easing his back, he stood a moment. ‘You are begging us to become detectives of those times. For myself that may be possible, but for my partner, let me tell you he is definitely of the present. He lives with two women and enjoys them both but rarely, and never at the same time, or so I am given to understand. It’s curious, isn’t it, seeing as the one is almost twice the age of the other? Both are très gentilles, très belles, très differentes, yet are fast friends. War does things like that.’
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