Flykiller

‘Madame, one of your sons was gravely ill. You were at his bedside. You couldn’t have left him until what? Well after noon that Friday? You were exhausted, hadn’t slept, were sick with worry …’

‘All right! All right! I asked my daughter, Monique, to stay home from school while I went to that hotel to … to touch the pillows!’

And smell their cases before throwing back the covers to examine the sheets of an unmade bed? ‘You had a key, did you?’

‘No! I …’

‘She paid the concierge two hundred francs, Inspector,’ said Sandrine Richard, taking out a cigarette only to remember suddenly, at a look from Madame Petain, that she shouldn’t have. ‘We often did this, she and I, if you must know. Eugenie also, for proof. Solid proof!’

Fresh tears wet Elisabeth de Fleury’s cheeks. Madame Richard reached across the table to take her by the hands, scattering shreds of tobacco, for she’d unconsciously crushed the cigarette.

‘Can’t you see how upset she is?’ spat Madame Petain, having seen that this Surete had taken note of the spilled tobacco. ‘Aren’t the photographs sufficient for you, Inspector? Must you have all the details, coarse as they are?’

‘Everything,’ he said.

‘Merde, how can you be so insensitive? A man whose first wife left him with an empty house … the house of his mother, I understand, the second wife running off with the Hauptmann Steiner, only to be blown to pieces by a Resistance bomb on her reluctant return to that same house? Her child as well!’

Ah! what could one say? ‘We police are seldom sensitive, Madame la Marechale. It’s part of the job. The victims, the blood, the oedematous fluid and aborted foetuses … Always a certain detachment is necessary, but they don’t teach this at the Academy, of course, and wisely, I think, as it might dissuade some from taking up the profession.’

‘Touche, eh? You didn’t even know of that room, did you?’

‘We’re learning.’

‘Then listen, Inspector. Though the doctor is certainly no friend of mine, he will tell you Elisabeth did awaken him that evening at about 2 a.m., and if you. press him, I’m sure he will confess to having made a little joke of it. The first words uttered to her by that jackal were that if she desired extramarital sex, she must come to his office during the day, never to his home!’

One had best let that pass. ‘And this room at the Hotel Ruhl, madame. How long have you ladies known of it?’

‘Since early last summer. Since Sandrine and then Elisabeth found the courage to admit their suspicions were more than justified. It was Sandrine who first saw her husband leaving that place just before that nurse of his, he going to the right, she to the left.’

Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux.

Would it hurt to volunteer a little without first consulting madame? wondered Elisabeth. ‘It’s an old place, Inspector, whose rooms are mostly taken by long-term residents who are not well off.’

‘A few of the rooms are reserved for visiting civil servants whose positions demand little better,’ said Madame Petain tartly. ‘Gaetan-Baptiste Deschambeault found it for them.’

Julienne’s husband, Lucie’s lover …

‘That grigou would have made certain the bank covered the cost, Inspector,’ shot Sandrine Richard.

‘Grigou, madame?’

Visibly flustered – realizing she had inadvertently said something she shouldn’t have – she managed a brief and self-conscious grin. ‘A nickname he uses with his wife and family when they demand too much.’

Had she read the notes Deschambeault and Celine had left for Lucie? he wondered. Had these three ‘ladies’ murdered that poor girl, the others also, or hired someone to do it? ‘Is the hotel a maison de passe?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t we just said it was used for that purpose?’ spat Madame Petain.

‘Committee members know the hotel well,’ he muttered, jotting it down in front of them. ‘And at the Grand etablissement thermal, Madame la Marechale?’

This one was trouble. Vipere that he was, the little doctor had been correct about that! ‘Mademoiselle Mailloux couldn’t resist letting us know she and Alain Andre often shared a bath.’

The three exchanged glances, Sandrine Richard taking up the thread of it. ‘About three months before she was drowned, that woman entered our steam room as if by mistake, Inspector. No towel, le costume d’Eve complet and flaunting herself in front of me and my friends. I … I was so taken aback, I didn’t know what to do. Eugenie calmly told her to leave.’

‘Calmly?’

The Inspector had put his question to Elisabeth and was again holding up the hand of justice to prevent interference.

‘She … she shrieked at her to leave,’ confessed Madame de Fleury. ‘Mademoiselle Mailloux blanched and muttered, “Sorry”.’

‘What, exactly, was shrieked?’

That we’d kill her if she didn’t go? ‘I … I can’t recall the precise words. “Get out!” I think.’

‘But she lost her smile, lost composure, was frightened and turned abruptly away? Apologized?’

‘There was not time for that, but as to the rest, yes.’

‘Three months …’ he muttered.