Flykiller

Wants her corpse naked so that he can see what she’s really like with that riding crop in her hand. Patient is severely paranoid and terrified of losing her own sizeable fortune, her status also, and husband. Claims the girl will use pregnancy as a means of trapping Gaetan-Baptiste into marriage. Claims he’s fool enough to think such a thing possible but will ensure it by demanding that the courts declare her insane and grant the divorce.

Continues to view the hydrotherapie sauvage froid as a punishment for her failure as a wife. While under this treatment, often tears the sheath from herself and begs the attendant to use more force. The breasts, the mons and buttocks, she defiantly standing to face the hose until driven to cower, shivering, in a corner on her hands and knees.

Is, frankly, a very sexually repressed and mentally disturbed woman. A danger to herself let alone Mlle Trudel, the husband’s mistress and personal shorthand typist.

There was more, lots more … Pages of it.

10 November 1942: Has confided that Mme Richard will definitely ‘take care’ of Mlle Marie-Jacqueline Mailloux; that ‘someone’ will do the same with Camille Lefebvre on payment of a large sum by Mme Richard, but that Mlles Trudel and Dupuis will be taken care of by Sandrine Richard and herself, Elisabeth de Fleury knowing of it and having agreed, but lacking the courage to ‘participate’.

The woman had, apparently, been absent from the clinic on Thursday, 28 January, and hadn’t returned until 3 February, the day after the most recent murder.

She’d also been absent at the times of the first two killings but was it all hogwash? Had Menetrel told the doctor what to write?

The paper was crisp, the penmanship precise but there were no faded places over the almost two years the bugger had been treating Julienne Deschambeault.

Fountain pens always run dry and have to be refilled or dipped, and each time that happens, the likelihood of leaving a blot or at least a misplaced period spells it out.

Other files, chosen at random, verified that Normand had. written the file at a sitting and not on different dates as it implied.

In the corner next to the wall mirror, and buried under clutter, there was a small, turn-of-the-century cast-iron safe. Frantically Kohler searched the desk but Normand wasn’t the type to have written the combination down on the back of the wife’s photo or tucked beneath a corner of the blotter. He’d have kept it safely in his waistcoat pocket or wallet, though if either were misplaced …? An overworked, understaffed practitioner of la medecine thermale with added sidelines in forgery and herbalism?

Jars and jars of rose petals, spruce needles, juniper berries, et cetera, were ranked on the shelves above, their Gothic-script labels bordered by gold leaf and each of them bearing the Latin name … Vitex agnus-castus L. Verbenaceae … Monk’s pepper. Zanthoxylum americanum Mill. Rutaceae … Toothache Tree. Mein Gott, the bark had been used by the Red Indians of the Americas!

Turning the jar, lifting the lid to first tentatively smell the contents and then shake out a little on to a sheet of paper for the sculptress, he saw the combination written in time-faded ink on the underside of the label.

2-27 left, 1-4 right, 17 left, 9 right, 3 left.

Julienne Deschambeault’s file was there at the top of the heap. Like doctors the world over, Normand had thought it best to keep a little insurance.

*

Stark in a white-collared, beige house dress with crocheted shawl tight about thin shoulders, Julienne Deschambeault stood as if trapped before drawn blackout curtain’s, her expression that of a woman of fifty-five who was haunted by guilt and fear.

Clearly distraught, she’d been pacing endlessly back and forth in her room. The Thonet chaise longue and matching wicker armchair had been shoved aside. On the small, round wicker table with its lace cloth, the glass beside the measured bottle of the Chomel had fallen over to roll about as the table had been hurriedly lifted aside.

‘Eugenie, why have I been locked into my room? Why am I not allowed to leave if I so choose?’ she shrilled.

‘It’s for your own good,’ said Dr Normand ingratiatingly. ‘The Chief Inspector merely wishes …’

‘A Surete?’ she yelped, the ribbed and knitted gloves rolled down below the wrists, the hands clasped tightly and pressed hard against the bony chest and just beneath the angular chin.

‘The negatives,’ said St-Cyr.

Her hazel eyes were quick to register suspicion.

‘You can’t have them. I haven’t got them!’

The shoulder-length, auburn hair was awry and framed the haggard countenance of one whose crisis was definitely of the nerves and whose lips were parted in despair.