Flykiller

‘It’s the shits, isn’t it?’ he said softly, as if to Hermann. ‘While you want the quiet life with Giselle tending a bar in that little place you’re always saying you’ll buy on the Costa del Sol, and Oona keeping house for you and looking after Giselle’s and your babies – you know I’ve warned you it will never work – I want to go fishing with Gabi and her son on the Loire in summer. Yet here we are and no one except Premier Laval – I repeat no one but him, mon vieux – wants us to be anywhere near here.’

The song came to its end. A big man, a giant with strong, capable hands and thick fingers whose nails were closely trimmed, Herr Kohler used great sensitivity to lift the armature with its needle from the recording. Does he defuse bombs? wondered Blanche. Bombs that are meant to kill the unsuspecting?

Paul was suffering under the detective’s gaze and nervously waited, but Herr Kohler deliberately didn’t switch off the gramophone. He would let it unwind itself.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You say that the last time you saw Lucie Trudel you met her quite by accident Friday evening at just after seven, the new time. You were on your way to the casino, she was returning here to the hotel. You asked if you could borrow the record and the machine.’

‘That is correct,’ said Paul, the turntable going round and round. Cheri, be careful, begged Blanche silently, only to hear him saying, ‘Look, Inspector, I was a little early for work and knew how much my sister loved that recording, so thought to surprise her and walked back here with Lucie.’

‘The sleeve … There’s no sleeve,’ said Herr Kohler.

‘Of course there isn’t!’

Paul would use sarcasm!

‘The record was on the turntable. That is why we don’t have its sleeve!’

Idiot … Did Paul want to say, Idiot?

‘Where had she been?’ asked Herr Kohler.

‘At work, where else?’ Paul would snap back answers and think he was in control. You’re not, my darling. Not with this one. The machine was still winding down, still making its little grinding sounds that went on and on and seemed to fill the room. The room …

‘What street were you on?’

‘Street?’ yelped Paul. ‘Why, in the Park.’

‘Near the Hall des Sources?’

‘Yes. She … she had just come out of the Hotel du Parc.’

‘From work?’

‘Isn’t that what I said?’

‘The offices of the Bank of France aren’t there, mon fin. Try the Carlton.’

‘She had delivered some papers,’ said Paul calmly, now very much the dealer of vingt-et-un who knows the deck in his hand is thin of fives and tens and therefore vastly in his favour.

‘Your shoes. Let me see them.’

Paul was wearing carpet slippers. ‘My shoes …?’ he managed. ‘They’re …’

‘They’re under his side of the bed, Inspector. I’ll get them for you if you wish.’

‘I don’t.’

The headboard was against the corridor wall, the sister having that side closest to the door and window, the brother the one next to the far wall; the things one had to do these days to make do.

‘One pair of boots without hobnails or cleats, one pair of leather shoes with soles of the same, pre-war and needing attention, and a pair with wooden soles,’ said Herr Kohler.

Running those fingers of his over the wooden soles, he looked at Paul and then at her, didn’t say a thing about their having to share a bed but … but for just a moment his fingers hesitated on the right sole and then … then began to trace something out. A gouge, a deep scratch? wondered Blanche, sickened by the thought. ‘Inspector …’ She heard her voice. It was too sharp. ‘Inspector, you’ve not told us why you want to know when we last saw Lucie, or what has happened to her to make you ask. She met us on the avenue Thermal, if you must know.’

The main thoroughfare.

‘She had just come from the Eglise Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc on place Chanoine Gouttet, had been praying to the Virgin for help and guidance, and had gone to confession. I … I knew she was pregnant. Paul hadn’t been told but … but must have sensed the reason for her distress of late and … and has now tried to protect her reputation. She was a good friend, and she readily said we could borrow her gramophone and the record while she was away at home to see her father. She …’ Merde, it was going to sound badly but Paul had to be rescued. ‘She gave me her key and said to leave it in her box at the front desk, that she’d collect it later that evening.’

‘Then she wasn’t on her way here?’

‘She … she said she had to meet someone.’

‘Who?’

‘Celine, I think, but … but she must have known Celine had already gone to work at the Theatre de Casino.’

The girl was desperate. ‘As one of its dancers?’ he asked. Had the sister read the note Celine had left for Lucie on Saturday and said this simply to protect her brother? he wondered.

‘The piano also,’ she said. ‘An … an operetta. La Bayadere. All I know about it is that it’s the one that Dr Menetrel thought would most please the Marechal. It was only to run for a few nights, a week at most, and is still on, I think, or … or has it finished its run, Paul?’