Indicating a poorly defined thumbprint, he said, ‘Whoever robbed the hives wore gloves and was afraid of bees. They could so easily have scraped the cluster away and taken everything.’
Instead, they had left perhaps a good three kilos of honey in each hive.
Kohler switched off his torch and for a moment the star-filled sky came down to them, the air cold and clear. No hint of smoke or car exhaust in a city of nearly two and a half million. Paris had the most fantastically clear sunrises and sunsets these days, the most beautiful views over its pewter and copper-green roofs.
In ’39 there had been 350,000 private automobiles and traffic jams like no others; in July of 1940 there had been, and now were, no more than 4,500 cars and most of those were driven by the Occupier. Sixty thousand cubic metres of gasoline had been required per month before the Defeat; now all that was allowed was 650 cubic metres. Thirteen hundred of the city’s buses had disappeared from the streets and virtually all of the lorries.
Now the city ran on bicycles or on two feet, and when it shut down like this at midnight, it didn’t open up again until 5 a.m. Berlin Time, 4 a.m. the old time in winter and hell for those who had to get up and go to work.
‘So when were the hives robbed and by whom, Chief?’
Hermann was below him in rank. Sometimes he would use this accolade to prod his partner; sometimes, when others were present, to let them know he was subordinate to a Frenchman.
‘Footprints,’ sighed St-Cyr.
‘I was wondering if you’d noticed them. The préfet’s boys and those of the commissariat on the rue des Orteaux, which isn’t far, is it, but did they have to trample everything and visit every hive?’
‘A woman, I think.’
‘Madame de Bonnevies?’
‘Or another, but the matter can be left for now. Why not go and have a talk with the grieving widow? Let me take care of the rest.’
The corpse. ‘Are you sure?’
Having seen too much of it, Hermann hated the sight of death. ‘Positive. Fortunately the study is separated from the rest of the house and this kept the fumes from it, but it’s interesting, is it not, that the woman didn’t spend much time in there after she discovered what had happened? We could so easily have had two corpses on our hands. Use the front entrance; leave me to go in by the back. I want time alone and undisturbed with him, Hermann. I need to think and want Madame out of the way and distracted.’
‘And the daughter?’
‘It would be best if she were to come upon us by surprise, but then these days anything is possible, and a daughter who is absent without a laissez-passer and a sauf-conduit will have to be questioned about what she missed.’
About the missing permit and safe-conduct pass or the murder? wondered Kohler but let him have the last word, for Louis was in his element.
‘Madame …’ hazarded Kohler on entering the salon.
The woman didn’t look up or turn from the stone-cold hearth. ‘Oui. What is it, Inspector?’
‘A few small questions. Nothing difficult.’
His voice was gentle but this grated on her nerves, though she told herself he was only trying to be kind. She heard him sit in one of the other armchairs, knew he would have noticed there wasn’t a speck of dust in the room and that she must have an obsession about cleanliness. Would he smell the eau de Javel, she wondered, or just the lavender water she used when wiping down afterwards?
The Javel, she said to herself. He has the sound and manner of it.
‘Your husband, madame. I gather he spent all his time with his bees.’
And didn’t go out to work like normal husbands with responsibilities? ‘Ours was old money, Inspector. My money.’
Under Napoleonic Law a husband had control of his wife’s money and property and could do as he pleased, even to gambling the lot away.
Kohler found his cigarettes and offered one, only to see her vehemently shake her head and hear her saying, ‘I haven’t since the Defeat. Women aren’t allowed a tobacco ration, isn’t that so? He … my husband refused to share even his cigarette butts and delighted in my anguish as he lit up.’
‘I take it, then, that you weren’t getting on?’
‘Not getting on? We hardly spoke.’
‘Then is there anything you can tell me that might help us?’
She pulled the bulky white dressing gown more tightly about herself and thrust her hands deeply into its pockets, still hadn’t looked at him. A woman with very dark brown, almost black hair, cut short, kept straight, and worn with a bit of a fringe whose carelessness suggested an irritable, hasty brush with a hand.
‘He wouldn’t have taken that stuff by mistake, Inspector, not of his own accord.’
In tears, she faced him now, was angry and afraid and didn’t really know what to make of things, thought Kohler. Was still in shock, was very much the Parisienne, but not of the quartier Charonne. Definitely of the Sorbonne and probably of the quartier Palais-Royal or some other up-market district. Of medium height and slender-weren’t so many women slender these days? — she had a sharply defined face with high and prominent cheekbones, skin that was very fair, a jutting defiant chin, dark brown eyes, good brows, lips, a nice nose, nice ears, throat and all the rest probably.
The hair was thick, and as he looked her over and she fought to return his scrutiny, her right hand nervously tried to brush the fringe from her brow.
‘Your daughter, madame …’
‘Danielle, yes. Something … something must have happened to her. The Gestapo, the Service d’Ordre …’
The Vichy goons, the Milice.
‘A control … Was she stopped and taken into custody, Inspector, or did they just “requisition” her bicycle again and force her to walk home?’
Hastily she wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand and snapped, ‘Well?’
The daughter, like so many these days, had gone out into the countryside to search for food, but that had been on Thursday, well before dawn, well before the murder. ‘Look, we don’t know yet what, if anything, has happened to her. We’ll find out. Don’t worry, please. She’s probably okay.’
The Inspector had been writing notes in his little black book. A big man, broad shouldered and comfortable with himself even though there was a savage scar down his left cheek; others, too …
When he didn’t look up at her but let her continue to look at him, she told herself he could know nothing and she was not to worry.
It was small comfort. And what about Danielle? she demanded of herself while waiting for his questions. Danielle who had never been the first-born, always the second and had therefore become so defiantly independent and competent. But … but these days, even those qualities could go against a person if arrested.
‘The timing, madame?’ he said, and she realized he was using the notebook to avoid looking at her so as to gain her confidence.
‘Last night … Well, Thursday night, at … at about ten o’clock the new time. Berlin Time. My husband … he hadn’t left that study of his, that “laboratory” as he loved to call it. When I went to knock on the door, he … he didn’t answer.’
‘And the door?’
‘Was locked as usual. Mon Dieu, he could have been up to anything in there and I’d not have known, but always with him it was his bees.’
‘You went in by the garden?’
‘I went outside, yes, and around to that field.’
‘You took the footpath that leads down from the cul-de-sac, the impasse, here to the gate that’s off the rue des Pyrénées?’
‘Yes. From there a lane leads to it.’
‘The apiary your husband leases from the city?’
‘Yes! And … and then I came in through the garden.’
‘The gate to that field’s kept locked but you’ve got a key?’