Flykiller

The faded wicker carrier basket was frayed to twigs around its edges and held an all but empty, two-litre tin of coal-black paint and a ten-centimetre-wide brush that must date from 1930 and had been used many times to whitewash the inside of a cowshed. A good farm, then, and well above the usual, but perhaps this was the very brush the soldiers had found to use?

‘There are also these, Inspectors,’ said the Auvergnat, giving a quick wave of salutation to schoolchildren who had found the view from the classroom windows more interesting than their lessons.

Cartoons had been cut from a magazine and a newspaper.

‘Both date from 30 October 1940,’ said Laval. ‘Punch Magazine and the Daily Mirror. I had them checked.’

The first portrayed him as the Great Laval in white bow tie, black waistcoat and tails and juggling swastikas, holding a Francisque rolling pin with rubber spikes like those guaranteed to remove excess fat, and bottles of his very own Vichy water, one of which had shattered at his feet.

The second clipping, that of the newspaper, depicted the Premier as a hideously grinning, squat and moustachioed bullfrog cradling a bouquet of chrysanthemums – the press’s funereal choice had been perfect! – as he came courting to knock at a door whose emblem was a large black swastika.

‘Vichy is Vichy, Inspectors. There is no other place like it in the world. There never will be nor can be, and I am at the centre of it. Inheritor of the decisions of others, cementer of bargains that are seldom adhered to. Reviled, hated, ridiculed by an ever-growing number, ah oui, but to be ill thought of and yet useful is better than to be ill thought of and useless. That bicycle must have been stolen; God knows where the artist found the paint. Footprints indicated the general direction of retreat but the children soon put paid to them, though they did establish the time of the atrocity, since the paint they touched on first inspection was then not frozen.’

‘It doesn’t belong to one of the teachers, does it?’ asked Kohler of the bike.

‘Merde alors, you sound like the great one! Is pedantic logic always foremost in the mind of detectives too? Come, there’s more to see.’

‘A moment,’ cautioned Louis. ‘The clippings, Premier?’

‘Slid in an envelope under the door to my office at the Hotel du Parc late last night or early this morning.’

‘In spite of the Garde Mobile’s redoubled presence?’

‘Perhaps because of it. The doctor is, of course, in a rage and once more Henri-Claude Ferbrave has been threatened with immediate dismissal. Derelict. Spending too much time with the horizontales of that maison de tolerance he favours. Menetrel, in spite of the coarseness of his tongue, is very much a prude and family man, and is offended by the unbridled appetite of his chief lieutenant. The Hotel is, I’m afraid, abuzz.’

Workmen, among them the elder Grenier, were busily erasing the damage with scrapers, wire brushes and kerosene. Spectators stood about, lots of them. Passers-by paused. A Wehrmacht lorry dropped off a squad of burly Felgendarmen, the military police.

The Hotel du Parc and Hall des Sources had also been decorated.

COURAGE ON LES AURA faced Petain’s office and balcony, from where the Marechal could be seen sadly gazing down at words he’d spoken to the troops at Verdun in 1917: Take heart, we’ll get them.

BOUSILLER LES GARS! Smash – bump off – the boys! had been splashed directly below him on the ground-floor wall of the hotel, between its sticking-papered and blue-washed windows. And then, as if to rub it in, the artist had used one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s innocent campaign slogans for children. LUTTEZ CONTRE LES DORYPHORES! Fight against the potato beetle. Children all over rural France had been excused from classes, armed with bottles of water and, accompanied by their teachers, encouraged to swarm into the potato fields each summer to catch, drown and squash this pest. But now, of course, Doryphores also meant the Boche and everyone knew it!

‘Premier, the Hall, I think,’ said Louis determinedly.

‘I can tell you little.’

‘Sometimes even a little is enough.’

‘Are the boys next, now that you’ve seen the slogans for yourselves?’ Laval was clearly worried but calm.

‘Let us reserve judgement, Premier. Let us adopt one of yours and the Marechal’s very first policies with the Occupier in 1940, that of attentisme.’

‘Wait-and-see has never been my way, Inspector, but had you the opportunity then, what would you have done?’

‘Exactly the same thing. You … we … had no other choice.’

‘Then let us go in and settle this little matter before Herr Gessler and his gang of thugs trample everything.’

‘And the thugs you, yourself, employ?’