Flykiller

There was perfume but far too much time had elapsed since it had been applied. ‘Expensive, though,’ he sighed, leaning back again to gaze at her, the cameras of the mind searching out each detail. The way the killer must have yanked her nightgown open – a broken tie-string – the way the black lace showed through the white but also revealed her skin. The grey smear of the cigar ashes, the left arm stretched out above her head.

It had to be asked. ‘Why, really, did you have to die? Why here of all places? And please, madame, though my partner wants to be convinced that your killer was a man, I still require further information.

‘Hermann, have you found it yet?’ he called out from behind the bar.

‘NO!’

No … No … came the echoes.

‘He will, madame, if it’s here. He’s like that.’

Moving the right hand back to where it had covered the wound, St-Cyr again went over the corpse. She’d been trapped at the last but could have retreated, yet hadn’t taken more than a backward step or two. The killer had come in through the gap in the bar, had grabbed her by the nightgown’s coat and then an arm. There’d be bruises from the fingers, scratches perhaps. Something … They had to have something definite. The cigar ashes? he asked, but these could have been left on purpose to mislead them. Look, damn you, he said to himself. Do as Hermann would.

The floor was bare. Going down on his hands and knees again, he gently lifted the looseness of the nightgown away and ran a hand as far in under her as possible. ‘Nothing … There is nothing.’ He was certain of it.

Only when he got to her head did he find anything. It was buried well beneath her hair.

‘Ah grace a Dieu, madame,’ he sighed but was surprised and disturbed to see it was the back of a small separable cufflink. Rather common. Not of silver or gold but of tin-plated steel. Punched, pressed, the diameter all but that of the larger diamond, the post shaped like an inverted eggcup so that the eyelet of the cuff would be kept easily open as the cufflink’s head was pressed into place. Mother-of-pearl, probably. Flat and cheap and like so many, many thousands.

It could simply have been lying on the floor and could well mean nothing. The girls and women who had once dispensed the waters here had all worn grey-blue maid’s uniforms whose cufflinks, if not buttons, could well have been the same.

But had Celine Dupuis caught at a woman’s arm and inadvertently freed the cufflink, and, if so, where was the other half?

And wouldn’t that woman have worn an overcoat, which would have got in the way, unless … unless, of course, this had also been left elsewhere as it would have been with … Ah merde, had there been blood on that blouse, had it been dumped with her …

‘The victim’s overcoat, Hermann. We have to find it. Please, there may not be time. It’s urgent.’

‘Then go!’ sang out Kohler. ‘I’ll join you when I’ve finished.’

‘I’ll leave you my lantern.’

‘You do that.’

‘The Hotel du Parc, third floor. Perhaps a maid’s closet,’ said St-Cyr.

‘Don’t forget Menetrel’s office is also on that floor.’

Floor … Floor … The echoes died and Louis was gone from him. Gone, thought Kohler. Merde, where would this affair lead them? Into the arms of the Gestapo, the Garde Mobile, the Milice or the Resistance?

Laval had wanted Louis and him to handle the investigation; Bousquet hadn’t and had been upset enough at their arrival to meet them well outside Vichy.

The Buvette Lucas was near a far corner of the Hall and when he held his lantern high, Kohler saw its light reflecting from the tall, arched windows. A simple railing of art nouveau wrought iron had separated the grilled floor and sources from the curistes, the long oval of the buvette being perhaps seven metres by four across. Again there were the hanging cups, jugs and vacuum flasks, but here two eight-sided, carved stone fountains would spill the elixir into shallow basins that encircled them and above each of these basins there were taps.

Square holes made a complete cross-hatching over the floor, a grillework that brought only dismay, for if she’d thrown the earring in there, he had little hope of finding it.

Hanging the lantern from the railing, Kohler set to work. Distances were so hard to gauge here, sounds were too flat and muted. Had she really come this way? Had she even hidden behind either of those fountains?

Ivy had at one time spilled from them to trail to the basins. The leaves were brown, the basins dry. No taps dripped. Whitish encrustations of bicarbonate of soda caught the torchlight. Again there were cigar ashes, again that sense of her having knelt or crouched and then slipped away.

Absolutely terrified and yet concerned enough about her earrings to have tried to remove them both.