Flykiller

‘Stay close. I will awaken your eyes,’ she had confided, rejoicing in the sight of so many obviously unmarried couples whose men had been old enough to have known better than to consort with girls, who certainly had known better and were often far less than half their ages.

She had introduced him to tobacco and had known full well he had taken three of her Turkish cigarettes, yet had said nothing of the theft.

She had introduced him to gambling and the Grand Casino, where the Chambre des Deputes, under Laval’s conniving and cajoling, had met in July 1940 to vote themselves out of office by a margin of 569 to 8o, thus putting an end to the Third Republic and initiating what some had called the ‘Casino Government’. She had introduced him to crime as well, for she had loved nothing better than a juicy scandal, and had avidly read the news reports of such to him, commenting at length on what had lain between the lines and the sheets. She would have had much to say about the current scandal and the murder of those girls.

And, yes, he said as he started cautiously down a far staircase, she would have agreed with Petain’s return to the soil, especially as one-third of all of France’s agricultural workers were in POW camps in the Reich. But she would not have agreed with Marcel Deat, that France was and should be ‘Germany’s vegetable garden’. ‘The Boche are savage, Jean-Louis,’ she had said, referring to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. ‘I am going to send you to a farm near Saarbrucken to stay with distant relatives so that you will not only learn their language but how they think.’

Aurore Irene Molinet … Had she known then that the Boche would be back?

He hadn’t thought of her since their last investigation. Once he had innocently asked her here in Vichy if her side of the family had descended from the poet and chronicler Jean Molinet, who’d been in the service of the dukes of Burgundy in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

She had answered as only she would, ‘I. have no patience with poets,’ and that had been it. A woman – a lady – of great contrasts. One who had introduced him to absinthe and, if truth were told, had no use for the convention that had seen her strapped into a whalebone corset under widow’s black.

But was it at moments like this that the legacy of one’s past became clear, or was her ghost simply trying to tell him he must have missed something?

Louis wasn’t with him. Louis hadn’t backed him up. Verdammt! swore Kohler silently, what the hell had happened to him? Killed? he asked himself and answered, I heard no shots. Shots would have echoed down here in the cellars.

Two of the Garde were stationed at each of the far corners of the baths. Bergmanns there and no chance of a way out. Sour, still in a lot of pain and just itching to pull the trigger, the one with the broken arm now cradled it and a long-barrelled Luger with drum clip – thirty-two shots. Merde!

Burning sheets of paper – the files he’d taken from Dr Normand’s safe – were being held up, page by page, to be released only at the last by Charles-Frederic Hebert, their charred remains drifting slowly down until extinguished by the water that coursed around hobnailed boots. And why must that God of Louis’s allow things like this to happen to honest, hard-working detectives?

Henri-Claude Ferbrave, that little gangster from the roof of the Jockey Club and the foyer of the Hotel du Parc, now had a Schmeisser tucked under his right arm. As he lit each page, he handed it to Hebert. Disarmed, Kohler knew he could only wait it out and hope. But when the sculptress and Albert Grenier were hustled in to stand with him on the walkway between the bas-reliefs and the baths, the girl, still clutching her valise and bag, shrilled, ‘The lift, monsieur. The Inspector had climbed out and was standing on it when Albert and I punched the buttons and caused it to go up and down.’

The lift … Ah Christ, had Louis fallen? Was he caught in the cables, torn, mangled, bleeding?

‘Not there,’ said one of the two who had brought the girl and Albert. ‘We looked, Henri-Claude. He must have reached the third floor.’

Afraid of Ferbrave, Albert clung to the sculptress, which only made her cringe all the more. His woollen hat was pulled down, the scarf loose, the jacket of the bleus de travail open.

The burlap sack he held, he now released, letting it fall into the water at his feet.

‘Ah bon, it’s done,’ sighed Hebert as the last of the pages was torched, ‘Now there is no proof.’

‘And Menetrel will be happy, eh?’ yelled Kohler.

The bushy eyebrows arched as the faded blue eyes sought him out. ‘I did not kill them, Inspector. August-Alphonse Olivier did.’

‘Th-That’s right,’ said Albert. ‘Monsieur Olivier took the knife you promised you’d give me. He … He dropped it in the shit. I saw him.’

Saw him … Saw him …

Water coursed over naked stone thighs, releasing bubbles and catching the light as it ran to swirl around their boots.