Frau Hillebrand simply smoked a cigarette in silence and stared out her side window while Honoré de Saussine muttered things to himself.
The sofa and armchairs had been in the library since well before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to ’71, felt St-Cyr. Their wine-red morocco was crackled and faded but also wore that dark patina of solid comfort and many cigars. Books climbed to the ceiling.
‘Inspector, I’ll be frank. I’m a woman who never had any patience for waiters, street beggars, or the police and other civil servants. Please state your reason for this invasion of my privacy.’
Madame de Trouvelot was in her early eighties, a tall, slim, dignified woman in a soft grey prewar suit of immaculate cut. The single strand of pearls was worth a fortune, the rings and brooch, too, but exactly the right amount of jewellery was worn, no more, no less. The face was narrow, the nose bringing together a sharpness whose deep blue eyes perceptively assessed this Sûreté and plumbed for the depths of his little visit. No matter what Hermann had advised, one did not go quickly with a woman such as this because she simply would not allow it. The bourgeoisie aisée, the really well off, could often be so difficult.
‘The aristocracy,’ she said, having read his thoughts. ‘Oh do sit by the fire. You find me in much reduced circumstances, Inspector, but living in one room saves on my having to employ a lot of ungrateful servants. My cook is considerably happier, since he can now steal far more and his new employer is apparently oblivious to it. The maids smile because they are fed a daily diet of compliments and little presents by the Generalmajor’s staff who want, no doubt, to get under their skirts. The chauffeur, however, still considers himself above such plebeianisms, since I’ve always turned a blind eye to his philandering, even to his disgusting habit, when I am not present, of using the back seat of my automobile for his liaisons sexuelles.’
‘Madame, a small matter. A few questions. Nothing difficult, I assure you.’
‘Must you be so tiresome?’
‘The library is pleasant.’
‘Am I to understand that you are interested in real estate?’
‘Madame, the watercolours that hang among the Old Masters, the exquisite array of small bronzes on your mantelpiece, that portrait photograph … May I?’
‘Since you have already picked it up, who am I to deny the police their pleasure in these days of trial?’
She would take a cigarette now, thought Marie-Elisabeth. This presumptuous Sûreté would try to offer a light she would coldly refuse.
‘I have sufficient,’ she said, flicking the lighter the Generalmajor Krüger had given her. She’d let this Sûreté see that it bore the SS runes and swastika, a piece of cheapness the Generalmajor had not wanted on his person perhaps, but an item also that necessity had forced upon her.
‘Madame, this portrait photograph is of Juliette de Bonnevies née de Goncourt.’
‘Beautiful, wasn’t she, at the age of nineteen? Pregnancy always makes a girl radiant in its first month or two. Flushed, warm, soft, tender. A seductress, Inspector. The earrings dangling like that. Cheap seed pearls and rhinestones that fooled no one.’
‘Diamonds, madame. Two strands of magnificent pearls which match in lustre the seeds but are larger and far more expensive. Your son … Did he, perhaps, give them to her?’
‘How dare you?’
The dress, of a white silk crêpe de Chine, was worn well off the shoulder and with double straps. On the right wrist there was the slim, black leather band of a Hermes watch, on the left, some bracelets, no doubt from Cartier’s and again of diamonds. The straight jet-black hair was parted in the middle and pulled back tightly, the dark eyes magnificent and full of warmth and happiness, nothing else. A young girl who was sitting sideways, so as to look over her right shoulder at the camera. Not shy, not bold, just herself and totally in love.
‘A girl of few morals and loose ways, Inspector. Oh bien sûr, she seduced my son and the boy wanted desperately to marry her, but passion and love are the least of reasons for one to marry and we could not allow it. A position was found in the Service Diplomatique for Henri-Christophe and we sent him to Indochina. The girl married and had her child, a son, I believe, and then a daughter.’
‘And you’ve not seen her since?’ He indicated the photo.
‘Not since.’
‘Then why, please, have you the photo out? Why the bronzes, the watercolours, all of which were done by Étienne de Bonnevies?’
The Inspector leaped from his chair to touch the bronzes. ‘Sandpipers,’ he said. ‘Swans. A girl of fifteen, Madame de Trouvelot, a mermaid rising from the Seine near …’
‘Do you really think I would let that woman know I had bought them, Inspector? Ah! you police, you’re all the same. Of course I had them removed before she came to see me. I had to have my revenge, but one mustn’t go too far with such things.’
‘You bought some of the boy’s work.’
‘As a way of encouraging him and because Henri-Christophe had genuinely admired his talent. They never met, of course. To have done so would have been for my son to have broken his solemn promise to me.’
‘Then how did he know the boy had talent?’
‘Because that mother of his once stopped my son in the street and gave him some of the boy’s sketches.’
The Sûrete put the mermaid back. ‘The boy’s sister,’ she said, ‘but he does not, I am forced to say, and glad of it too, think of her in the way a man usually thinks of a naked girl.’
She would give this one a moment to digest such a morsel, thought Marie-Élisabeth, and then would leave him to consider it. ‘Inspector, Juliette should have come to me long before she did. To think that the boy has languished in prisoner-of-war camps all these years since the Defeat. I went the very next day, the sixth of November, to Maxim’s and made enquiries. Fifty thousand francs was, of course, outrageous, but waiters have never known their proper place and times like these only make them far more arrogant. The boy is never to return to the house of that mother of his, you understand, but has sent me a note that he is safely back in France and staying at the country house where he had, before the war, a studio. He will pay me a visit only when I ask it of him. He has, I gather, started to paint again.’
‘At the country house …’
‘That is just what I said. Really, Inspector, you can’t have expected me to have told Juliette? Surely not.’
‘And have you paid this waiter the final fifty thousand francs?’
‘As agreed. I did so as soon as I received the boy’s letter. It was written on the fourth of this month and arrived on the sixth — the mail these days is simply not what it used to be. I went to the restaurant on the seventh.’
‘Might I see the letter?’
‘It’s there beside the rose my son gave me when he was called away to Berlin.’
‘As a diplomat?’
‘Thirteenth September 1938. A road accident. There was heavy rain and fog. The other car was totally demolished. Three people … The police claimed they were driving too fast and that my son was in the right, but …’ She shrugged. ‘These things are never clear when they happen in such places and at such times, are they?’
A nod would be best, since the son could well have been on sensitive business and murdered by the Nazis. The letter seemed genuine enough but, still, he’d best ask, ‘Have you ever had any other letters from Étienne de Bonnevies?’
‘The signature matches that on his sketches, Inspector, and I am satisfied as best I can be.’
‘Good. Madame, you stated that the boy would pay you a-’
‘Inspector, I thought I had made myself clear. He’s very talented and most of what you have seen of this house, and whatever else I possess, will soon be his. I have no other heir to whom I would wish to leave my estate.’