Flykiller

Good for Hermann. As they fell, cigar ashes tended to smear more than cigarette ashes. There was usually more of them, too, and they were softer, sootier and greyer, especially so these days when cigarettes could be made of almost anything and cigars were all but unheard of.

Taking tweezers from a jacket pocket, Louis teased away the bloodstained severed threads. Patiently the battered brown fedora was removed to let the light shine more fully on her, then he rocked back on his heels.

‘A knife, of course,’ he said. ‘Straight in and upwards with maximum force, the haft then lifted hard to make certain of it.’

Skin was elastic; the wound must be wider at the top than a simple entry and retrieval would leave. But merde, how could he remain so calm? wondered Kohler. No feelings of revulsion and loss – that horrible gut-sick emptiness – only a totally absorbed curiosity. A need to know.

‘The blade was probably no more than one and a half centimetres at its widest, Hermann. A single cutting edge. She can’t have moved afterwards, must have been stopped by the shock of it. Our killer knew exactly what to do. Madame Dupuis could well have lived for hours had the haft not been lifted while the blade was still deeply in her.’

‘There’s not a lot of blood.’

‘Precisely!’

‘Therefore the sac that encloses the heart …’

‘The pericardium has been flooded.’

‘Putting her into shock and stopping the heart.’

‘We’ll want Laloux, Hermann. As an ardent socialist with an unbridled tongue, he’ll have been dismissed, but you will tell Bousquet our Felix is the only one who can be trusted to be discreet.’

The coroner. She’d voided herself, poor thing, and would probably have been ashamed of it.

‘Leave me with her now, Hermann. I can’t be in two places at once and need your eyes elsewhere.’

Louis would ‘talk’ to her. That Surete with the pugilist’s nose, bushy brown moustache, brown ox-eyes and broad brow, that somewhat portly partner of his in the open, shabby brown overcoat would be gentle, so gentle.

‘One earring is missing,’ he muttered, not looking up but arching the thatch of his eyebrows.

Hermann had already gone in search of it.

Beyond the circular stand-up bar of white marble, with its geometric lines and patterns in black, the stonework of the Buvette de la Grande Grille climbed into the fog.

Kohler shone the torch upwards. Four cherubs, two facing outwards, two inwards, held a flowering platform on which stood and stretched the statue of a naked girl of eighteen or so. Beautiful, graceful – athletic – the absolute picture of health, the left arm crooked above her head, the right arm bent at the waist, the thighs slender, the buttocks perfect.

Stone faces – two male, two female and mature – gazed benevolently out from around the base of this heap of pulchritude.

He shone the torch behind the bar and over the floor. Had Celine Dupuis been able to break free? he wondered. Had she tried to hide where he was now standing? Was that when she had removed the earring or simply lost it? Her left lobe hadn’t been torn, so robbery couldn’t have been the motive, could it? Her killer would have taken the remaining one unless interrupted.

Again he looked towards the Buvette de Chomel. Louis had put the lantern on the bar and had taken off his overcoat and scarf, but was nowhere in sight, was distant across a floor whose bluntly triangular pieces of dark grey stone, each of about five centimetres in length by half that in width, provided thousands of shallow hollows. Enough and more to hide an earring if thrown.

But why thrown? Fear of being discovered wearing them? Then why have them on if visiting the Marechal?

Round brilliants – Jagers, or had they been Top Cape or Cape? – but worth plenty in any case.

Two stones each, the one of about two and a half carats, the other much smaller – and linked to the larger diamond by a tiny loop of gold.

But why remove it? And where, exactly, had the Marechal’s bodyguards been when all of this was happening?

Finding each tap, he felt the subterranean warmth, saw one dripping here, too, and heard the escape of effervescing bicarbonate of soda and hydrogen sulphide: 42.4 degrees Celsius, Louis had said.

In a nation where warm water was rarely if ever seen, used or felt, Kohler longed for a good soak. It would ease that right shoulder he had failed to tell Louis about, it would ease the knee those ‘horse chestnuts’ had really been for.

‘I should have told him about the shoulder. He depends on me. He says I’m his “alter ego”, whatever that is.’

Ashes had fallen on the counter, grey and soft against the polished stone. When he touched them, they smeared and he knew the girl had hidden here and then had run.

To where? he asked. Her boots would have sounded harshly on a floor that was warm in places, due to the pipes that passed beneath it.

‘Louis, she got away from him,’ he called out, his voice muffled by the fog and the distance.

‘Track her, Hermann. The other earring has been loosened. Its disc has almost been unscrewed.’