When he came to the shed, Kohler leaned the crutches against the wall and hobbled inside. Only then did he switch on his torch and curse Gestapo stores for the lousy batteries they supplied. Striking two matches which flew apart in a rush of sparks, he again cursed, this time the State-run monopoly Vichy now managed but no better than the Government of the Third Republic. The French had been putting up with the same lousy matches ever since the damned things had been invented!
Finally one of them lighted and his frost-numbed fingers added two more. As though it were yesterday and he still deep in that other war, he saw the map tube and rucksack. He remembered the battery of field guns he had commanded, the fierceness of the shelling, the constant stench of cordite, wet, mouldy earth and death, of opened French bunkers and upheaved trenches, the scatterings of last letters from home. ‘Ah Scheisse,’ he said. ‘Louis …’
Hobbling as quickly as he could, he raced to find the main door of the house and bang on it. ‘Open up!’ he yelled. ‘Police!’
‘Louis …’ he bleated. ‘Louis, I heard no shot. Has the kid killed herself?’
Only silence answered, and as he nudged the door, it swung open.
It was freezing in the car, the endless waiting an agony, and when Honoré de Saussine got out, Juliette did so too.
Then Father Michel decided to stretch his legs. ‘It is not good, this silence,’ he said. ‘I think we’d best go to the house and find out what has happened. I might be needed.’
‘Suit yourselves,’ said de Saussine. ‘For me, I will walk back to the main road. There must be a small hotel or restaurant nearby — is there one, madame?’
‘All will be closed. It’s nearly curfew,’ she answered emptily. Had Danielle done something terrible; had Étienne?
‘You’ve no laissez-passer or sauf-conduit, monsieur,’ cautioned Father Michel. ‘If I were you, I would stay with the rest of us.’
‘What makes you so certain the German woman wants to remain here?’ asked de Saussine.
‘We’ll ask her, shall we?’ countered Father Michel swiftly.
‘A moment, mon Père,’ cautioned de Saussine. ‘She knows far more than she’s letting on. Herr Schlacht had keys to Alexandre’s gates and study. Since I did not take them when offered, who, obviously, do you think he gave them to?’
‘Madame de Bonnevies and myself were in the kitchen, monsieur. We would have heard Frau Hillebrand. And please do not forget that from the window there is a clear view of the honey-house and garden. I myself sat facing that window; Madame de Bonnevies with her back to it.’
‘And you didn’t look away, didn’t go into any other room, Father?’ scoffed de Saussine.
‘We spoke in earnest.’
‘And couldn’t have done much looking up and out of that window, eh?’ taunted de Saussine.
‘But … but, Father, you do remember that I went upstairs to Étienne’s room to bring you his last letter,’ said Juliette in distress. ‘I couldn’t find it on his writing table. I searched the drawers, searched Alexandre’s bedroom and only when I went into Danielle’s room, found it beside her bed. It was so censored I … I wanted your opinion as to how it must originally have read. You do recall this, don’t you?’
Merde, why had she had to mention it? cursed Father Michel silently, only to hear de Saussine sigh and say with evident delight, ‘Then madame was away sufficiently, mon Père, and I will be certain to inform the detectives of this.’
‘You’re forgetting, my son, that for me, and not the German lady, or yourself to have poisoned one of my oldest and dearest friends I would have needed a key to his study.’
‘Madame de Bonnevies left one on the table for you! Her absence had been agreed upon and was deliberate. Admit it, this “oldest and dearest of friends” was a distinct liability. He would accuse his son and have the boy arrested. He’d have that sister of his brought home from the madhouse, and … and, Father, he’d continue to make madame suffer.’
‘You took the million francs Oskar had offered, didn’t you, Monsieur de Saussine?’ swore Käthe, having quietly got out of the other side of the car.
There was something in the woman’s hands, thought de Saussine, and she was resting them on the roof of the car and pointing it at them. ‘I was terrified,’ he said, his voice climbing, ‘but refused, so that leaves only yourself.’
‘Or the Father, or madame, or the son or his half-sister,’ she answered calmly.
‘Or Oskar himself,’ said Juliette anxiously wondering if the woman was about to shoot them. ‘Oskar wanted you, Monsieur de Saussine, to do it, and you, too, Frau Hillebrand, but if neither of you were willing, then what was he to have done?’
‘You knew where the poison was kept, didn’t you?’ said Käthe. ‘You had a set of keys!’
Was she going to shoot her first? wondered Juliette and tried to keep calm … calm. ‘Oskar knew my husband would go with those two whores after visiting his sister because Alexandre had always done so and I had told Oskar of this often enough.’
‘You knew about the bottle of Amaretto, didn’t you?’ said Käthe.
‘A liqueur which smells of bitter almonds, as does the oil of mirbane,’ interjected de Saussine nervously. He’d run. He’d have to, he told himself.
‘Which is why it was chosen,’ sighed Father Michel, ‘though Alexandre would not have cared for it in the least.’
‘But Oskar does like liqueurs,’ countered Käthe. ‘And Uma knew he would sample it and not just casually, isn’t that right, Juliette? Well, isn’t it? Oskar would have had you pour him a tumblerful and would have downed it all at once and you … you knew he would because when naked you had served and serviced him often enough!’
‘What’s in your hands?’ quavered de Saussine.
‘A Beretta 9mm, but Herr Kohler seems to have removed its clip, although I did not hear or feel him do so.’
The studio, some distance beyond the house and closer to the river, must once have been a carpenter’s shop, thought St-Cyr. Skylights and French windows had been added, and a nineteenth-century Belgian cookstove with inlaid ceramic tiles. But it was the almost unbelievable clutter that drew the beam of the torch and caused it to flit from place to place. Tubes of oil paint, canvases and easels were everywhere. Fruit jars held upended fistfuls of cleaned brushes, others, a dried stew of paint and brush. There were plaster and clay maquettes and figurines and these threw shadows, small bronzes, too. Experiments with pottery and the firing of sculpted heads and figures were mingled with dried leaves and wild flowers, hanging bits of coloured glass, ropes of it and spirals …
Imprints of dead fish, in slabs of sunbaked river mud that must have been carefully excavated years ago, were near prints of the half-sister’s bare feet and those of the boy, as if the two of them had walked out from the dawn of history. The bleached skeleton of a seagull flew towards that of a rook some farmer must have shot and the boy or girl had carted home one day. Among the many portraits were sketches of Danielle that had been done in charcoal, in a soft, reddish ochre, in watercolours, too, and in oils. Yet everywhere the torch shone, it seemed the dust had settled.
‘Except on the chaise longue,’ said Kohler, having found him at last. ‘The kid must have slept here on Thursday and Friday nights, Louis.’
She had been going through a number of sketches of herself. Whatever pose the half-brother had wanted, she had adopted. Naked at the age of four, and often up until that of fifteen, she had let him draw and paint her, had been completely at ease. Just as often, though, she was fully dressed; often, too, in a bathing suit or an old pair of coveralls and weeding the vegetable garden or cradling, with evident delight, an errant hen she had just captured.