Flykiller

Through long use and much rinsing some of the glass cups had become frosted. Sip thirty cubic centimetres twice daily, monsieur. Morning and evening before eating. Gargle if you wish, but please use the gargle-atorium or whatever they called it!

‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler impatiently. ‘Lead me to it, madame.’

The earring was in one of the hanging cups – not near any of the gaps in the railing but midway between two of them. She’d not quite had time to remove the other one but must have stood here in the pitch darkness feverishly trying to do so.

Outside the Hall, he found where Vichy’s flics had encircled sets of footprints with marking string. A little snow had blown over them, but one set had probably been made by her boots. And, yes, the others were not nearly so clear but held suggestions of that hinged gap, the curse of all wooden-soled shoes, since it often trapped clay and small stones and the wearer then had constantly to tap them or flex the hinge. The snow, too, would build up in the gap, forming ice.

Those shoes made sounds that weren’t at all like those of leather-soled ones. A harsh clack, clack, which she would have heard very clearly from that floor in there.

A dancer, a singer and piano player – a good conversationalist at private dinner parties. Quite knowledgeable about many things. Birds, de Fleury had said, and then had cut himself off before revealing too much.

A working mother, a young widow. At least two sets of footprints but was the second set that of a man?

Getting down on his hands and knees – gasping in pain as his left knee objected – Kohler blew the soft snow from the prints. Only the forward halves of the wooden soles were clear, but they were larger than the toes of the boots. ‘A man’s,’ he said and looked for the scratches and gouges all such soles would bear.

There was a ridge of snow that indicated a deep gouge in the right sole. The thing was about four centimetres in length and parallel with the long axis of the print, so at some time their owner must have struck that foot against something sharp and it had cut the gouge.

Sabots or leather boots would be worn on the farms and in the hills. These prints were from town shoes and, yes, they led from the Hotel du Parc at a quick pace.

All the others that had been enclosed by the string were older, he felt – the day-to-day traffic probably and not involved. There’d been only the two of them, then, the killer and his victim.

Forcing himself to return to the body, Kohler shone the torch over the soles of her boots and then ran an explorative thumb over the scratches and cleats. At least the local gendarmes had got those prints right.

She hadn’t begun to stink as corpses soon do – the cold weather had retarded that – but when he looked along the length of her, he saw so many other corpses that he, too, asked, ‘Why you, why here, when the bloody place should have been locked?’

Louis wouldn’t have run off like that had he not realized something significant. ‘Urgent,’ he had said. ‘It’s urgent.’

But had it really been an attempt to assassinate the Marechal or had the killing been for some other and totally unrelated reason?

Crossing the rue du Parc at a run, St-Cyr made for the main entrance of the hotel, which faced on to that street. He was following in Celine Dupuis’s footsteps, he told himself, but at least up until 11 November of last year neither she nor he or anyone else could ever have gotten so close to the hotel without having first passed through the iron-fisted cordon of the Garde Mobile.

Now they were, apparently, no longer in evidence. Perhaps Petain and the Germans were still discussing whose responsibility it was. Perhaps the fifteen degrees of frost at this hour had simply kept them indoors. ‘But had a window of opportunity been made available?’ he demanded, not liking the thought as he pushed through and into the lobby, was challenged, shrieked at – vos papiers! – and hit; struck hard across the brow with the flat of a revolver.

Slumped against the wall, he found himself sitting on a cold stone floor. Blood had welled up above his left eye and was trickling down to blind it. Blinking, he gingerly explored the parted skin and rapidly swelling goose egg, tried to clear his head. The victim’s overcoat … must find her coat, he warned himself. The killer may have left her blouse with it.