Flykiller

‘Henri-Claude Ferbrave,’ he said, tasting blood – his own blood! – and looking up at his assailant. ‘Age thirty-two. Former altar boy of the Saint-Sulpice, and between June 1936 and the call-up of ’39, a key member of the Parti Populaire Francais’s “riot guard”. Accused of killing an obstreperous socialist with a wooden club during a noisy intercalation at the March 1937 gathering of the PPF when one hundred and thirty thousand of the faithful were crowded into the Velodrome d’Hiver to hear your leader, but released for lack of reliable witnesses. Being one of Doriot’s former toughs won’t help you, mon fin, nor will being one of the Marechal’s bodyguards. You are under arrest for assaulting a police officer. Please put that gun down before I take it from you.’

‘Why not relax, since we have to work together?’

‘Never! Ahh … my forehead, you salaud!’

‘Some ice and a few stitches will help.’

‘And there’s a doctor in the house, isn’t there?’

‘It’s only five-thirty. Menetrel doesn’t usually show up for breakfast until after seven.’

‘And I’m to bleed to death for having reached only for those papers you demanded?’ Hermann … where the hell was Hermann? They had to find her overcoat, they had to …

‘Messieurs, I … I have some sticking plasters in my case. Perhaps …’

Again the detective blinked to clear his eye. She must try to smile softly and hope he wouldn’t notice she’d been crying, thought Ines. She must forget everything else and put him at ease. ‘My name is Mademoiselle Charpentier, Inspector. From Paris to … to see the Marechal.’

‘She’s from the Musee Grevin,’ snorted Ferbrave, not bothering to look behind himself and across the lobby to where the girl sat in her overcoat, scarf and cloche on the edge of a chair. ‘A sculptress whose train arrived last night.’

‘I spent the intervening hours in the station,’ confessed Ines, ‘until … until the curfew had ended.’

At 5 a.m. ‘Your sticking plasters, please, Mademoiselle Charpentier. It’s most kind of you to have offered them.’

Had the Inspector deliberately repeated her name to let her know he wouldn’t forget it? she wondered. Four others of the Garde hung about, all with machine pistols – Bergmanns and Schmeissers. All in their disgusting black uniforms with brown shirts, black ties, black berets and black leather, three-quarter-length coats. Arrogant smart-asses all of them and cruel. Cruel!

The girl was gentle but unsettled, thought St-Cyr. Several tissues sopped up the excess blood. Some water was called for, a little brandy. More tissues were needed to quickly dry the cut, then there came the sting of the iodine she had taken from her case. ‘It’s necessary,’ she said, the accent clearly from the quartier Sorbonne and the Pantheon but with suppressed overtones of the rue Mouffetard also.

On her knees beside him, and still wearing the fawn-coloured, camel’s hair overcoat with the big lapels and deer-horn buttons of the thirties, she taped the parted skin as best she could, then lingered a moment to examine her workmanship. ‘It will do for now,’ she said with beautifully modulated tones, and gave a curt little nod more to herself than to anyone else. A girl with soft reddish hair and lovely but still smarting sea-green eyes under finely curving brows, the freckled nose turned up a little, the lips slightly parted, the chin and lower jaw delicately boned but determined.

‘Guerlain,’ he heard himself muttering. ‘Absolute rose, bergamot and jasmine, mademoiselle. Oil of cloves and cinnamon, but with sandalwood, of course, and ambergris. You or your lover have exquisite taste. Though the scent is not a recent one, the memory of it haunts.’

Ah Sainte Mere, her perfume! ‘Merci,’ she managed.

‘My case of tools, Inspector,’ he heard her quickly saying as she indicated a worn leather valise with a tray of many compartments. Spatulas, hooks, knives and other wooden-handled tools – the same essentially as a taxidermist would use – were there. Scissors, balls of knotted twine, rolls of surgical gauze … a small, tightly stoppered phial of some kind of oil, another of the perfume – could he manage to get a closer look at it? he wondered. Some drawing pins …

‘All the rubbish of my humble trade, Inspector.’

‘And the Marechal is to sit for you?’ She was still close to him, still on her knees …

‘The Musee is always late when granting its commissions, but fortunately has decided Monsieur le Marechal should have a head-and-shoulders done for posterity’s sake. I am nervous, of course, but understandably so, even though experienced. Ten years, and with the medals to prove it.’

Petain, like Charlemagne, would take his place in the waxworks of history at 10 boulevard Montmartre. ‘The Musee already has a life-sized statue of him, mademoiselle.’

‘Yes. The Victor of Verdun and on the white horse he once rode in a parade, but that … that was done long ago.’