Flykiller

‘Love, lust, jealousy and murder, even assassination,’ she said, still not looking up. ‘Lisette, ma chere, you’re such a delightfully dutiful creature, a treasure to a stubborn old woman such as myself, but I am conscious of the presence of these visitors. Now you must ask them to wait a little longer. Please stop the music. I thought it would help, but it has not done so at all. Indeed, it is a frightful racket to a woman who dotes on Debussy, Saint-Saens, Brahms and Chopin!’

‘Monsieur … Mademoiselle …’ blurted the girl to Ines and St-Cyr. ‘Madame, she is working on an urgent matter for Monsieur le Premier.’

‘The fingerprints?’ shot St-Cyr, but no answer was given. Inked palm prints – done by rolling the hand with black ink and then gently pressing it flat on tracing paper, after which the hand and paper were held up to work the ink in carefully and the paper then slowly peeled off – had been positioned on a makeshift light-table of frosted white glass. Bent over this table, the woman used a hand-held magnifier, instead of the spectacles that dangled against the tartan folds.

‘Monsieur Laval has again telephoned to ask if an assassination is in the offing. Four times today, no less,’ said Madame Ribot, still studying the prints. ‘Progress reports, of course, were given.’

‘And the fingerprints he was concerned about?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘The police photographer’s efforts have yielded nothing so far. Not from the envelope in which press clippings were slid under the door, not from the Hall des Sources either, nor from the Hotel d’Allier and the rooms of these two.’

She lifted away the handprints she’d been studying and replaced them with two sets. ‘These, Inspector, are Lucie Trudel’s, and these, Celine Dupuis’s.’

Ghost-like – as if the dead, in terror, were pressing their hands to the underside of a window, with them trapped inside and drowning, thought Ines – the prints cried out to them.

‘Celine was an Aries; Lucie a Virgo,’ said Madame Ribot, conscious of the sculptress’s pallor and wondering if she could convince the girl to allow prints of her own hands to be taken. ‘Camille Lefebvre was an Aquarian, Marie-Jacqueline a …’

Firmness would be best. ‘But you weren’t examining any of those when we came in here,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Please replace the ones you were studying.’

This was the Chief Inspector of the Surete whom Monsieur Laval had requested from Paris. ‘Very well, as you wish.’

A suitcase, set to one side on the day of the Defeat, its brass studs and corners scoured by years of travel, bore once-colourful, now tattered and long-faded labels: The Peter’s-Bad Hotel um Hirsch, at Baden-Baden … The Splendide, at Evian-les-Bains … The Nassauer Hof, at Wiesbaden … The Hotel les Bains, at Spa, in Belgium … The Grand, at the Montecatini Terme in Tuscany …

Not for a moment would this one have entertained the thought of taking less expensive lodgings and surreptitiously acquiring the stickers. She had gone from one to the other during each season for years and had stayed at nothing but the finest hotels.

‘Two prints, the left hands first, Inspector. Monsieur le Marechal would most certainly not have allowed me to take one had Noelle Olivier not begged him to join her for a reading on my return in the early autumn of 1924. I saw suicide even then, but could not bring myself to warn her and have chastised myself ever since.’

‘And the other print?’

‘Is Monsieur le Premier’s, whose excellent wine, so generously given, and whose wood and coal keep these old bones warm because he is genuinely concerned with my well-being.’ There, that ought to stop him from questioning her about having them! ‘A Taurus,’ she said of Petain, ‘and a Cancer; the one ruled by Venus, the other by the Moon. The one an Earth Hand, the other, a Water Hand, but there are many complexities with both and I cannot convince myself that the analysis is wrong. Regrettably I must disagree with what Herr Kohler and yourself have told the Premier, Inspector, for I feel assassination is a very distinct possibility. Though I seldom use Belot, I have consulted his sixteenth-century work on palmistry and its relationship to the signs of the zodiac. Between the line of Life and that of Fate, and just near the latter’s juncture with the Line of Head, there is a region where, if the fine lines criss-cross many times and the Line of Life is broken, one can, after consulting the zodiac, deduce assassination. The analysis is not much used, if at all today, and has been widely discredited, but it does reinforce the others I’ve made, and when one seeks answers for such a man as the Premier, at a time of such crisis, one leaves no stone unturned.’

Hermann should have heard her but where was he? Why hadn’t he rejoined them? Trouble …? Had there been trouble?