Flykiller

‘Had the person who dropped it been sick?’ asked Kohler.

Albert gave an eager nod, then frowned and said, ‘It … it must have slipped and fallen. Yes … yes, that’s what it did!’

‘Open or closed? The blade, that is.’

‘Open. Straight up, and in like a dagger!’

‘Blood … was there blood?’

‘Frozen. It had been washed,’ grumbled Albert, gritting his teeth. ‘There wasn’t any blood. Why should there have been?’

‘When … when did you find it?’

‘In … in the morning, after the … the vomiting.’

‘A cigar? Did you find one?’

‘No.’

‘The key …?’ prompted Lulu, meaning the one to the Hall where the murder had taken place. Merde, the tension was terrible, but had Albert lied to protect the killer?

‘Those portable toilets are never locked, Inspector, only the permanent ones,’ said the elder Grenier.

The kid, the boy, the man, deserved a medal, but would Louis still be at the morgue?

‘A tisane of lime flowers with apple skins, or the carrot greens with liquorice. If I can’t drink it, I can always smoke it,’ said St-Cyr.

A wise one reeking of Surete and Paris and pissed off at having to wait his turn! The forlornly clutched pipe was empty, the tobacco pouch also, as further evidence. ‘A moment, m’sieur. I will see if there is anything beyond ashes. Sometimes the urn contains a few leaves.’

Verdammt, Louis, how many times have you told me never to try to joke with a waiter? Hermann would have gone on and on about the ‘lessons’ in French etiquette he constantly received from his partner, but Hermann wasn’t here as anticipated and perversity had won out!

Vichy’s railway station stank of cold, damp soot, unwashed bodies, disinfectant and urine. Dirt was everywhere: in the saucer that was used for powdered saccharin, on the floor that hadn’t been swept in months, in the shabbiness of the crowd that mingled or came and went but that held few happy faces. Papers being checked – plain-clothed Gestapo on the hunt; GFPs too, the Wehrmacht’s secret police, looking for deserters; its uniformed military police also, the Kettenhunde, the ‘chained dogs’ who wore their badge of office on a chain around their necks. Tough, brutal, no-nonsense men to whom even the Vichy goons and flics gave a wide berth.

The sculptress had taken the same train as Hermann and himself, but try as he now did, St-Cyr could find no memory of her having been in any of the waiting queues, either at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on Wednesday, the day after Celine Dupuis’s murder, or at the Demarcation Line.

‘Ines Charpentier,’ he said. Oh for sure, her name had been in the register. She’d taken a sleeper – normally one would think nothing of it except that, as an artist and poor, how could she have afforded such a luxury when even detectives didn’t dare to do such a thing?

Then, too, since the Defeat, the trains had been policed, not by the Surete, but by the German railway police. And everyone, including most especially the Resistance, was well aware of the respect and admiration given to wealth and position by the common and ordinary of the Occupier.

Even at the Demarcation Line they seldom bothered to disturb those in the wagons-lits, the Schlafwagens.

‘A man and a woman, but one of the latter,’ he said, ‘who knows well how to come and go and now has a reason for staying here.’ Had someone paid her fare, someone in the Resistance?

It was an uncomfortable thought and, as always these days, things could be so complicated. Many of the railway workers, especially in Lyons, had been communists until the party had been banned, and when the Germans invaded Russia in June 1941, the cheminots formed what was to become, in 1942, the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, but by then the assassinations they had initiated were being carried out in earnest. Prominent collaborators, Wehrmacht corporals and higher-ups. In December 1941, General Keitel signed the Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Night and Fog decree. In retaliation for the killings, all those arrested whose innocence could not be quickly determined were to be deported to the Reich under cover of darkness.

Families could not even find out where their sons or daughters had been taken or if they had even been arrested. Brothers lost brothers; sisters the same. One simply vanished without a trace.

Hostages were also taken and shot. At first only a few, then ten for each German killed, then more, people being rounded up and held as Suhnepersone – as expiators – for those who’d been killed.

And yes, a civil war between Vichy’s newest police force, the Milice, and the Resistance was definitely possible. And yes, Hermann and he himself would be caught up in it, his Giselle and Oona too; Gabrielle also.

But these killings, he reminded himself, these failed assassination attempts, if indeed that is what they’d been, might not have been the work of the Resistance at all.