Flykiller

‘Don’t even consider it,’ mused St-Cyr, having easily read his partner’s mind after the two and a half years they’d spent constantly in each other’s company. ‘It’s far too expensive a country for you. Concentrate on the murder. All things in their proper place and time. Besides, the Swiss are turning them back.’

Freeing the tall iron-and-glass doors brought only grunts and curses and then, at a sudden yank, the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphide and that of warm, wet mould.

Water dripped. Effervescing carbon dioxide hissed as it escaped, but from where? wondered Kohler. Pipes banged in protest as if throttled.

Through the pitch darkness of the hall, the beams of their torches began to pick things out. Pollarded lime trees that were dead – those palms Louis had mentioned were coated with so much ice their blade-like foliage had collapsed about the glazed jardinieres of another time.

The hall must be huge and would have held five hundred or a thousand at a time. Breath billowed, and as they looked at each other and then shone their torches around and upwards, they found that the beams of light would penetrate only so far. The air was filled with vapour, grey and layered, especially when not stirred by footsteps.

‘Four sources have their buvettes here, Hermann. Their pump kiosks. La Grande Grille, which issues at a temperature of 42.4 degrees Celsius (108.3 degrees Fahrenheit); Chomel, at 43 degrees Celsius; Lucas, at 28.1 degrees Celsius; and Parc, at 22.5 degrees Celsius (72.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although Grand-mere should have warned me, she said, “Why not try them all, mon petit?” I foolishly did and spent the next twenty-four hours locating the toilets, something she probably had had in mind for me to do in any case.’

By just such little exchanges do we keep ourselves sane, thought Kohler, dreading what they’d find. The throat probably hacked open but not before the breasts had been slashed, the womb repeatedly stabbed, the buttocks and … Jesus, Jesus, how much more of this could he stand? ‘Chomel, Louis. There it is. Bousquet said we’d find her behind that counter.’

Though seen under the scanning beams of their torches, the Buvette du Chomel was much as St-Cyr first remembered it. A marvellously curved and ample art nouveau, glass-topped table, perhaps five metres by three, whose ringed ridges, atop the glass, had given the image of water flowing outwards from its source in a curved, eight-sided, glass-and-gilded, beehived dome with interlaced crown. Both the table and its source had been suffused with the soft glow of electric lights, as if shining upwards from deep underground.

Wicker-clad bottles, vacuum flasks, jugs and measured glass cups with handles were still much in evidence. Had those in their hundreds who had come to take the waters, and those who had served them from behind the enclosing counter, simply departed in haste?

‘Take a little stroll, Hermann. Look for things Bousquet and whoever first found her will not have seen.’

‘I’m okay. Really I am.’

‘You’re not and you know it!’ Hermann had seen too much of death – at Verdun on 21 February 1916 when 850 German artillery pieces had suddenly opened up at dawn in a sheet of flame, his battery among them, and the flash of thunder had been heard 150 kilometres away. Death then, and later. Death, too, as a detective in the back alleys and streets of Munich, then Berlin, then Paris. Ah yes, Paris.

Celine Dupuis was but a short distance from one of the gaps in the counter. She was lying on her back, but the hips and legs were turned towards her left and that arm was stretched well above her head, as though, in her final spasm, she had sought to pull herself away from her assailant.

The coat of the nightgown was unfastened, the bloodstained decolletage of antique lace clasped instinctively by a right hand that had then flattened itself and now hid the wound.

The blue eyes, their lashes long and false, were wide open and she was staring up into the light of the lantern Hermann now stubbornly held over her.

A black velvet choker encircled the slender neck; the face was not the classic oval but long and thin, the cheeks pinched even in repose, the painted lips parted, the blonde hair askew and of more than shoulder length.

‘Caught between the dispensing bar and the table, Louis, but did someone pin her arms from behind as the bastard knifed her? That is a knifing. I’m certain of it.’

‘But why, then, does she reach that way?’

Louis saw so much more than he did. Always he was better at it. Well, nearly so. And always one had to tone oneself up when working with him. He demanded that, but silently.

Beneath the nightgown she wore a teddy of black lace, black garters too, and black lisle stockings that reached to mid-thigh from the tops of tightly fitting, well-polished black riding boots.