Flykiller

And lost, but deliberately: was that what he implied? wondered Ines. It must be, for Laloux was not at all content.

Blanche couldn’t take her gaze from the corpse. Revulsion, fear … ah, so many emotions were registered in her expression, thought Ines, having at last joined their little group.

The Surete’s voice was harsh. ‘Sandrine Richard, I ask you now in front of these witnesses, did your husband, Alain Andre Richard, bear any such scratches on the evening of 9 December last or in the days following?’

They would have all but healed and vanished by now …

‘Since we were no longer sleeping together, Inspector, I noticed none.’

A cold answer.

‘And you yourself?’ he asked.

Madame Petain caught a breath and held it.

‘Have a conscience that is clear.’

‘The other victims, then,’ he said, swiftly turning to the coroner and obviously furious with Madame Richard’s response.

‘With this one, the same wire, as you noted before,’ said Laloux, ‘the assailant at least of medium height and perhaps a little taller.’

‘Then not Albert Grenier, Louis,’ said Herr Kohler, having reluctantly joined them.

Laloux acknowledged the contribution. ‘With this next one, perhaps the assailant who drowned the first victim, smothered the third. There is that same sense of downward force, that same weight, that same ruthless determination.’

‘A professional?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘Why then the necessity of finishing her off in an armoire? Surely if that were so, the killer would have completed his task in the bed.’

Not a professional then, though the killer had wanted it to look as if Albert Grenier had done it.

‘And with the most recent killing?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Was the lifting on the haft of the knife simply due to jealousy?’

Laloux removed his glasses, for Madame la Marechale’s jealousy had been implied. ‘Or hatred, or both, but desperation, I think, Jean-Louis.’

‘Male or female?’

Blanche had turned away, was fighting for composure, thought Ines, as Coroner Laloux said, ‘I’ve puzzled over this and wish I could be more precise but there is no clear evidence. The same person may have killed all of them, but then, each could also have been killed by a different assailant.’

‘Surely the garrotting of Camille Lefebvre took strength?’

‘But that of a man – is this what you mean? Really, Jean-Louis, are women not as strong as men? Many of them most certainly are.’

A man, said Ines sadly to herself and wept inwardly for Celine who had trusted him as she had. That Opinel, Inspectors. Monsieur Olivier has one. I’ve seen it, for my valise had a rope tied round it when I left the train and this he cut while we were in the cafe, a place where only those he was certain of would be present.

Two of them had looked her over as she’d shown him the portrait mask of Petain. Two of them.

The Clinique du Dr Raoul Normand was on the rue Hubert Colombier in the old part of town. St-Cyr knew this well enough but with no lights, street names would be impossible and he had used, Ines surmised, the silhouette of the nearby Eglise Saint-Blaise against the night sky for guidance. ‘Part fifteenth century, part 1930s, Hermann,’ he had said, no doubt peering out his side windscreen. ‘The latter with magnificent art deco mosaics and stained glass.’

And a black Virgin, Ines said to herself. The Notre-Dame-des-Malades to which I have, during my brief visit, already prayed. The Madonna is surrounded by the commemorative plaques of the faithful, each of which attested to her having answered their prayers and cured them of their afflictions, but could the Virgin ever cure Vichy of what ailed it?

Monsieur Olivier had told her to meet him there after the Marechal’s viewing of the wax portrait. ‘But I don’t yet know when that will be,’ she had said and he … he had answered, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll know.’

As he had known everything? she wondered. When Celine would go to Petain, when Lucie would leave for Clermont-Ferrand or Paris … Paris. And the portrait mask? Tomorrow, monsieur? At 9.50 a.m. and just after the Marechal’s breakfast briefing? How, please, could he have known of this so far ahead of time?. And why was she to meet him? More messages to deliver in Paris, but now … now with Lucie dead, there could no longer be a way for him to get them to her, unless … unless he was counting on her to take them across the Demarcation Line.

Two knives: the Laguiole of the wife who had killed herself in despair on 18 November 1925, at the age of thirty-four, and the cold and worn Opinel of his own pocket.

Had he killed Celine? Had he killed them all?

The clinic, a manor house, was not of the new-Gothic, Flemish style, nor was it neo-Venetian or neoclassical as some buildings in Vichy were, thought St-Cyr, but was, in itself too, superbly of the fin de siede, of art nouveau and of old money. Lots of it.