Flykiller

‘Yes! The … the student who had owned the rucksack had been on holiday in Switzerland but had run out of money. Please … please don’t look at me like that in the mirror, Inspector. I … I can’t tell you. I mustn’t!’

Sconces on either side of the mirror held candles whose soft light would have bathed Celine’s reflection …

The Chief Inspector went straight to the chair and bent to pick up the shoe. He would come to her now, this Surete, and would place it in her hand – she knew this, knew, too, that the tears couldn’t be stopped.

‘I loved her as one does a sister. I had no one else. No one, damn you!’

‘On arrival here in Vichy, mademoiselle, you met with Auguste-Alphonse Olivier. You’d been couriering messages for him in Paris. Perhaps he’d a snapshot of you that Mademoiselle Dupuis had given him, but she felt the perfume necessary as well – a little password, n’est-ce pas, and had asked you to wear it.’

Her head was bowed; the faded pink satin slipper, with its tightly wound ties, was in both hands; the finely curving lashes were wet.

‘He discovered you couldn’t see when going from a lighted room into darkness. He warned you not to tell us of your night blindness so that he could use it. You were to watch what you said to us and what you did, but you began to look for things yourself. ‘Why was this, please?’

The Inspector was still looking at her reflection in the mirror, a glass in front of which Celine would have stood to be admired, made love to, fucked! ‘He … he was upset with me for not having told him of my night blindness. When … when I asked where Celine was, for she, not him, was to have met me at the train, he … he said he didn’t know.’

Yet he must have. ‘You then found out and threw up before seeing her for yourself.’

Ever so slightly she nodded.

‘He didn’t want you coming to this hotel, did he?’

‘It … it was not even mentioned.’

The delicately boned chin and lower jaw were still determined. The sea-green eyes avoided him. ‘Then can you think why Monsieur Olivier would have warned me to stay away from it and threatened me if I didn’t?’

‘Monsieur Laval’s clairvoyant … You asked him about her?’

‘I did.’

‘Then perhaps it is that you should ask her yourself, Inspector?’

‘Shall I leave you here, then, while I do?’ he said angrily.

‘Celine was silenced; Lucie also, Inspector.’

‘And the others?’

‘Most probably.’

‘But she tried to protect him? She tried to hide the earrings?’

Was it that this Surete did not want to believe the truth? ‘Monsieur Olivier took her from the Hotel du Parc and she went willingly with him, Inspector. She tried to remove and hide the earrings both to protect Blanche and Paul – she must have known they’d taken them – and to let you and Herr Kohler know who had betrayed her.’

‘He’d have taken them, then, would he?’

‘Yes. Yes, I tell myself that must have been so.’

‘But he didn’t, mademoiselle. Had Monsieur Olivier seen even one of his wife’s earrings, he’d have removed it and left us to find the other, or come back himself to search it out.’

‘Then why didn’t her killer take it?’

‘Because, I think, the assailant wanted us to find it. That is certainly why the cigar band was left, but to point us towards Albert Grenier and the past.’

An earring had been loosened … ‘And Edith Pascal?’

‘Would not have left any of it, for she would not have wanted to implicate in any way the man she loved.’

‘A resistant.’

A grace a Dieu, the girl had broken at last. ‘You were his courier in Paris. Please, mademoiselle, you can trust both Hermann and myself. Monsieur Olivier told me he was district leader of the FTP. Hermann knows of this also.’

‘Then you will know, as I do, that Monsieur Olivier has people at his command. The slogans we saw on those walls, the warning Monsieur Bousquet was given …’

Mademoiselle Dupuis’s carte d’identite. ‘The civil war the boys speak of.’

‘Has started.’

As he listened to the street, listened to the town, Kohler hoped Louis could prise what was needed from the sculptress before it was too late. At the very edges of the pollarded, tree-lined boulevard de l’Hotel de Ville, the shadows were deeper, the darkness complete in places, thinner where the stumpy, naked branches reached out to the snow-covered road. Two velo-taxis struggled towards him. A few pedestrians were about but none of the town’s autobuses aux gazogene, for those would have stopped running at 7 p.m. as they had done even before the Defeat. Like towns and villages all over France, Vichy shut down hard and early for most people, even with the presence of the Government.

Far in the distance, a Wehrmacht motorcycle patrol let the world know it was busy. Out of the darkness urgent voices came.

‘Cheri, I forgot the blankets.’

‘Merde, Heloise, you know how cold it is in that flat of theirs. Now we’ll have to keep our overcoats on and play cards in mittens!’