Flykiller

Jesus, merde alors, must this salaud persist? ‘All right, I did tell them things would be secure enough. The visit would be in the evening. It’s the depths of winter … How was I to have known an assassin would strike so closely and in our hotel, a hotel that is always guarded?’

‘Then she wasn’t challenged as she entered the foyer?’

The bag was closed, the catches secured.

‘The lift attendant was also absent,’ confessed Menetrel, not looking at him. ‘The Marechal needed to have his self-confidence restored, Inspector. If I have erred, it was only for his sake, and I don’t really know how anyone else could have learned of her visit but someone obviously did.’

‘And were there any other such visits recently?’

‘From her, no!’

‘From others, then?’

Ah damn him! ‘Bousquet had to be summoned late one evening last autumn. The woman’s husband had got wind of the liaison and was pacing up and down outside the hotel in a fury. Fortunately our secretaire general has the ability to pacify not only the Boches, but even a distraught cuckold whose wife is upstairs being penetrated by another.’

St-Cyr didn’t smile and that was as expected. Early last December he had lost his wife and little son to a Resistance bomb that had been meant for him but had been purposely left in place by Gestapo Paris-Central’s Watchers. She’d been coming home from a particularly torrid affair with the Hauptmann Steiner, nephew of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, and yet St-Cyr was still missing her, still blaming himself for what had happened!

‘Did you see the victim after she’d been found, Doctor?’

Such coldness of tone was commendable. ‘I did. I was the one who pronounced her dead. That imbecile of a groundsman who found her was incoherent.’

‘Then describe how she was. Leave nothing out.’

‘Were things tidied? Is this what you’re, wondering?’

‘I would not ask otherwise.’

The clearing of a throat next door indicated Petain was waiting for his daily massage and the heat treatments Menetrel would administer. ‘A moment, Marechal,’ sang out the doctor. ‘Let me just tie my shoelaces.’

‘Breakfast, Bernard. I want to go down. The hotel is up.’

‘Begin the exercises, please. The arms …’

‘Yes, yes,’ came the reedy answer, heard as clearly as if there’d been no connecting door.

‘Sometimes at night he drums his fingers on the wall above his bed,’ confided Menetrel. ‘The older he gets, the less he sleeps. Now where were we? Oh yes … She was lying on her back, the left arm extended well above the head, the legs parted slackly. One knee – the left – was bent a little.’

‘And you’re certain the legs weren’t turned either to one side or the other?’

‘How did you find her?’

‘For now, Doctor, please just answer.’

‘The legs were as I’ve described. One hand, the right, was flattened over the wound. She’d been knifed, I felt, but didn’t move her hand to make certain of this. There was no sign of the weapon.’

Menetrel took a moment, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

‘Anything else?’

‘Her earrings. I had the feeling her killer must have taken one but had then panicked and left the other.’

‘Which one?’

‘The left. I’m certain of it.’

‘Blancs exceptionnels, Doctor. Who gave them to her?’

How pleasant of this Surete. ‘I only wish I knew.’

It seemed strange, stepping back into the Hall des Sources knowing what he now did, thought Kohler, carrying the victim’s overcoat, scarf, gloves and beret, but not her handbag. The place was still pitch dark in its recesses even with the lanterns glowing – hell, the dawn wouldn’t break until well past seven the old time and it wasn’t quite seven yet.

She couldn’t have cried out when confronted by the bastard on that balcony, hadn’t struggled, nor had the curtains or windows been damaged.

A gun, then? he asked himself again. Had she recognized her assailant’s voice? Had he been afraid of this? Had there really been two of them? The one here and waiting in an unlocked Hall – a woman with a knife and wearing no overcoat or woollen cardigan – the other bringing the victim to her at pistol point?

But the wrong victim.

‘Then they hadn’t wanted to kill Petain in his bedroom for fear of awakening Captain Bonhomme, or someone else,’ he sighed, longing for a cigarette and for time to think it all through with Louis.

She’d got away from the one who’d brought her here. He would have called out to the killer, would have told her what had happened and that they had no choice but to silence Celine …

‘Madame Dupuis. I’ve got to think of her only that way,’ he said.

‘Inspector …’ came a voice.

It was the ‘iron man’, the police photographer and fingerprint artist – nothing ever upset these guys. Tough … Mein Gott, they could photograph anything and then patiently dust all round for prints. Old men who’d had their brains blown out, horizontales who’d been carved up, kids, housewives, it didn’t matter.

‘Marcel Barbault, Inspector.’