Flykiller

Closed for the season, the Jockey Club’s bar and restaurant would be pitch dark, Ines told herself. Still terrified by what had happened, still shaking, she knew the building must be huge, knew the beams from St-Cyr’s and Kohler’s distant torches must be flickering over empty tables with chairs leaning inwards. Sometimes she could hear the detectives, most often not, for in their haste to stop Henri-Claude, they’d left her far behind, hadn’t realized, grace a Dieu, that her eyes were giving her such trouble. They couldn’t know that always now it was like this for her when going from a lighted room into darkness. Everything totally black. No use in blinking the eyelids to clear the eyes, though she often did this and must learn to stop. Always the panic, the terror, that cloying sickness of never knowing if and when someone might grab her or her handbag.

The detectives must be going up a staircase, for Herr Kohler’s voice suddenly echoed. ‘Louis, you leave that salaud to me!’ To me …

‘Never, and you know it!’ shouted St-Cyr.

Their shoulders hit a door, Herr Kohler shouting at the occupants as it burst inwards, ‘Ferbrave?’ The answer, one she knew the detectives could only dread: ‘Outside.’

And in the grandstand.

Feeling her hesitant way forwards – telling herself that she absolutely must somehow continue to keep from them her not being able to see – Ines stumbled blindly into a table, knocked over a chair, then … then started up the staircase. Henri-Claude had cared only to find out how much Albert really knew of the killings and the knife he’d found, and what the groundskeeper’s son had told the detectives of the transport of illegal goods by vans of the Bank of France. There’d been no time to prise such answers from him in the stables. Ferbrave hadn’t cared a damn about what might happen to her. She was expendable. She must hide the darkness from him, too, for he could just as easily have slit her throat and might still do so. He had run after Albert. Monsieur Gaetan-Baptiste Deschambeault hadn’t cared either and had run after them.

And now? she asked herself, pausing to listen closely and to still the panic the darkness always brought. Now the curved iron of what must be an art nouveau balustrade was cold beneath her hand. Now Ferbrave would either protect himself and the others, and what had been going on for far too long, or fail.

The others, she thought and wept inwardly. Bousquet, Richard – Minister of Supplies and Rationing – the banker also and, yes most certainly, Honore de Fleury, Inspector of Finances, to say nothing of their friends and associates.

‘Louis … Louis, where are they?’ asked Kohler, dismayed by what lay before them.

Ice clung to the rows of seats, and in the beams from their torches, falling snow swept along. Away towards the far side of the grandstand, Kohler knew that neither he nor Louis could make out more than this; towards the lower railing and the racetrack, they could see little else.

There wasn’t a sound but that of the wind and the incessant flapping of what were, most probably, swastikas on the flagstaffs that rose from the lower railing to stand well above the roof overhead. Having arrived on 11 November last, the Army of the South must have held a parade here, a show of force, and still the flags remained.

‘I’ll work my way among the boxes,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘You take the lower rows of seats.’

‘They’re not here. They’re above us,’ sighed Kohler, the beam of his torch having found a flagstaff cleat whose rope now trailed in the wind.

‘There has to be a better way.’

Albert had shinned up the flagstaff; Ferbrave had used the ladder that was at the back of the grandstand, behind the seats. The one had thought he could reach the trapdoor to hold it shut by lying on top of it; the other had beat him to it.

‘It’ll be a skating rink, Louis. That’s why they’re so silent. Give me a moment, will you?’

Lowering a flag, he cut off its rope and let the wind take the rest.

‘Me first,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Tie it around one of my ankles and anchor me to something. You know that knee of yours will only cause trouble.’

Gun and torch were handed over, hat and overcoat too. Up on the roof the little ridges, glazed and with wide and shallow troughs, ran straight downslope, the wind making mischief as it whipped the snow along.

‘Albert …’ muttered St-Cyr to himself. ‘Ah merde

, Hermann,’ he yelled. ‘Keep your light on them!’

Spreadeagled next to the lower edge of the roof, the groundskeeper’s son clung by one gloved hand to Henri-Claude who, in turn, clung bare-handed to one of the flagpoles.

‘I didn’t tell them anything! what vans?’ shrieked Albert. ‘I’m not hearing you?’

‘You keep that mouth of yours shut or else!’ cried Ferbrave.

‘Can’t shut what isn’t open!’

‘Who used that knife and then dropped it?’