‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees,’ he said. ‘An address entitled, “Will no one speak for the bees of Russia?”‘
‘Danielle can perhaps help you, Inspector, but you will have to wait.’
‘Murder seldom does.’
‘Merde alors, I’ve already told you I know nothing of these. The child is exhausted. Have you no compassion? No thought for the worry she has caused her mother?’
The Inspector wasn’t buying it. He set the matchbox down on the table in front of her and found his pipe and tobacco pouch.
‘Your husband was freshly shaven, madame, and had dressed as if for an evening out.’
‘I … I don’t know what he was up to. Believe me, I wouldn’t have. Danielle … Danielle is the only one who might be able to tell you.’
‘The girl stayed at the family’s country house?’
She met his gaze, asked herself, What the hell has Danielle already told him? and said with a shrug, ‘It’s near Soisy-sur-Seine. She … she goes there sometimes — it’s on one of her “routes”, but she tries not to visit it too much. That way it’s … it’s safer.’
‘And unoccupied otherwise?’ he asked and heard her acidly answer, ‘Of course. Fortunately the Occupier has found no need of it.’ But then she calmed herself.
‘My father loved it, Inspector. Danielle never really knew him but feels the same and I know she … she would like to live there, too.’
‘As your father did, madame, or as your son, before the war?’
Ah damn him. ‘My son, yes. My father left the property to him.’ There, he could make of that what he wanted!
The table, one of those exquisite pieces from the provinces, had the warmth of old pine boards that always seem to ask, How many have sat here in days gone by? Bare but for a decorative bowl which would, before the Defeat, have held fruit, it would have easily seated eight or ten.
And this one has realized I love the table, she warned herself as he sat down to examine the beets in the bowl.
‘The names in this directory, madame. If we could just run through them.’
‘It’s … it’s been a long time, as I’ve already told you.’
‘Of course, but …’
He paused to light that pipe of his and to look steadily at her until he had forced her to bleat, ‘But what, Inspector?’
‘One name, that’s all my partner and I need. Enough to make a good start and save much time.’
Again he forced her to wait. Taking out his little black notebook, the Inspector struggled to find a pencil stub and at last rescued one from his jacket pocket.
Alexandre’s signet ring was among the debris that had come out of that pocket — he would have had to remove it from the corpse. Why had he done so? Why had he left it on the table like that?
Elastic bands were also there, burnt-out matchsticks, a cigarette butt that had dribbled its tobacco on the table, the mégot tin it was to have gone into, a tin that was years old and had once held sweets: Anis de l’Abbaye de Flavigny …
‘Does the name Frau Uma Schlacht ring any bells, madame?’
‘Schlacht?’ she heard herself saying.
‘Age: forty-four. Address: 28 quai d’Orléans. She’s not one of the Blitzmädels, not with a schedule that allows for visits during the day.’
The Île Saint-Louis, and not one of the grey mice, the girls who had come in their droves from the Reich as telegraphists, typists, clerks, cooks, canteen help and other jobs like prison warders and interrogators.
‘“Treatments: Mondays,” madame, “at four p.m.” What sort of treatments?’
‘How the hell am I supposed to know?’
‘Would your daughter have carried out those treatments?’
‘Instead of my husband?’
The woman was shaking, and as he watched her, more tears fell. ‘You know that’s what I mean, madame.’
‘Then, no! Alexandre would have insisted on attending to this … this foreigner himself.’
‘Then did your daughter help him with other patients, other clients?’
She would toss an uncaring hand and shrug, thought Juliette, would say acidly, ‘Ask her, don’t ask me. Mon Dieu, those two had shut me right out of their lives. We … we hardly spoke.’
There, he’d make what he wanted of that, too, she told herself. A son who had left the house at the age of sixteen and now a daughter who had loved her father, not her mother because she hadn’t wanted her to be born.
‘“Two litres of mead a month, madame. Six hundred grams of pollen — apple or rose if possible. Honey in two 40 °CC jars.” Again Frau Schlacht prefers the apple or rose. “For facial masks and for the throat.” Is she a singer?’
‘Pouf! You think you can pry answers from a head that is empty? Quelle folie, Inspector. Quelle absurdité. For the sake of justice, I hope you find his killer, but for myself, I sorely feel you are not up to it! A Sûreté? A Chief Inspector? Pah! I ought to have known not to hope.’
‘I’ll keep your objections in mind. But it says here “the honey, mead and pollen to be left, if necessary, at the Palais d’Eiffel”?’
A beautiful townhouse on the avenue Matignon, the palais, so named by those who worked there, had once been the residence of Alexandre Gustav Eiffel, the builder of the Tower.
‘The Offices of the German Procurement Staff, madame. Das Deutsche Beschaffungsamt in Frankreich.’
Of all the names in that little book, why had he chosen the one she most wanted him to avoid?
Intuitively anticipating her question, the Inspector slid the book across the table, forcing her to look at it. Inadvertently, when she had discovered Alexandre’s body and had taken the book to search through it, she had slightly crumpled the top-right corner of the page. Alexandre had always been so meticulous, so fussy. Perfect pages elsewhere. In just such things as this would the detective find his answers.
‘My husband was a strong advocate of the healthful benefits of taking pollen, Inspector. A spoonful a day. The Père Michel has taken it for years … Ah! here is his name. The Église de Saint-Germain de Charonne. It’s but a short walk. Père Michel could, perhaps, help you greatly and then … why then, you could come back to see Danielle.’
She was desperate and would have to be given a breather, but one must do so curtly and leave her with doubt in mind.
He wagged a forefinger at her. ‘That is exactly the help I want from you. Merci.’ Hermann … where the hell was he? ‘If my partner should turn up with my car, please tell him not to hotfoot it about the city but to wait patiently. In the honey-house perhaps. He used to keep bees on his father’s farm and will find much in there to touch on memories I sadly fear he has long been too busy to recall.’
Shed fourteen, line twenty was well to the north of the Gare de l’Est through a wind-blasted Siberia of rails and a taiga of switches. Trains came and went, huffing, belching steam and coal-smoke; electric ones, too, and noise like you wouldn’t believe, thought Kohler. Donkey engines roared as track was lifted on to flatbed wagons destined for the Reich. Crates of produce were over there … People … a long double line of them. Kids held by the hand, mothers and older daughters …
Though the roundups of Jews and other so-called undesirables had largely gone on last year and Louis had documented as much as he could, there were still some who had hidden and then been caught. Gypsies, too, and Communists, Allied agents and résistants, et cetera.
Wehrmacht boys with carbines slung over their shoulders and dogs on the leash, patrolled the shuffling line, while those with the Schmeissers covered the flanks, and those who had come to supervise the deportations stood nearby.
Suitcase after suitcase was being left to one side of the tracks, but the ‘carriages’ the passengers were to take were still some distance ahead.