‘And the fee that was to be paid?’
‘Five hundred greenbacks-oh, sorry. US dollars, a cheque. Caroline didn’t mind. She would have paid five thousand. Anything, I think.’
Had it been clever of her to have suggested this? ‘For Madame to ask Cérès to talk to whom?’
‘She never said.’
‘Come, come, Mademoiselle Hamilton, we haven’t time for this!’
To flash a grin wouldn’t be wise, felt Jennifer. He wanted the answer and would have to be given it. ‘Madame de Vernon’s husband. Caroline had a photo she’d taken from Madame’s suitcase but was terrified Madame would discover it was missing before she could put it back.’
‘And the photo?’
‘It was of the villa Madame had once owned in Provence. I. . well, I burned it in the stove after Caroline was killed. I didn’t want Madame finding it here.’
‘Because she would have blamed you for encouraging Caroline?’
‘That is correct. Inspector, Madame de Vernon hated me for having freed Caroline from her grasp. Merde alors, all I’d done, and everyone will agree, was to let Caroline decide to have a life of her own for once.’
‘Yet the two of you quarreled on the night Mary-Lynn Allan fell?’
Madame de Vernon must have told him this. ‘It was nothing. A simple misunderstanding. We embraced and. . and made up.’
‘Then there was no thought of her breaking off the affair?’
‘None whatsoever.’
And determined about it too. ‘This photo, mademoiselle, was the husband in it?’
She would shake her head and watch him closely, felt Jennifer, the others all intent. ‘He was the one who took the photos, for Caroline had said there were others. Madame didn’t find the prints until after he had left her. Always, though, when in Paris or anywhere else with Caroline, she kept them in her purse, but when they got here to their room, she. . she put one on the wall beside her pillow.’
And kept the others safely in her suitcase but had this one known the whereabouts of that spare key Madame had hidden to that very suitcase since Caroline Lacy must have? ‘For now, mesdemoiselles, that is all. You’ve been most helpful. I must find my partner.’
‘Inspector. . ’
It was Nora. ‘Oui?’
‘Those missing datura seeds. . ’
‘Ah, like you I wish I knew where they were, which brings us to a parting question: Have any or all of you had anything stolen? Some small, insignificant item, of little or no use beyond sentiment and the memories it might have brought?’
Quickly they glanced from one to another, then Jennifer Hamilton said, ‘All of us have lost things, Inspector. Some of us more than once.’
‘There hasn’t just been a rash of these thefts, but a plague of them,’ said Lisa, the little twenty-two-year-old brunette from Duke University with the hazel eyes and ponytail. ‘Whoever does it is really, really fast.’
‘Like Houdini,’ said Jennifer.
‘Me, I’ve lost things too,’ said Nora, ‘but the best was the Indian Head penny my dad sent me for good luck. It was dated 1907 but he had found it on the day I was born. At least. . well, at least that’s what he always told me. The second luckiest day in his life.’
‘And the first?’
‘The day he met my mom.’
Each of the others wholly believed this pathos, their concern for her loss all too evident, but was there only one way to deal with this lot: divide and conquer? ‘Ah, bon, mes amies, merci. For now, let me leave you to get on with things. Mademoiselle Arnarson, be so good as to show me your still.’
He didn’t wait until they were there, but once out of sight of the others and alone on the cellar stairs, he stopped her.
She had to face him. ‘Mademoiselle, upstairs you said Mary-Lynn Allan had had more of the home brew than you.’
‘She. . she felt sick and had run on ahead.’
‘Ah, oui, oui, but earlier, when interviewed by my partner, Jill Faber said you weren’t as drunk as Mary-Lynn. But you, however, claimed you were the drunker and that you had been hallucinating.’
‘That is correct.’
‘Perhaps, but it doesn’t add up, does it?’
‘I. . I really was feeling dizzy.’
‘Bien sûr, but given everything, including the presence of Datura stramonium, a known hallucinogenic, you then deliberately destroy valuable evidence not after Mary-Lynn is killed but after Caroline Lacy, and with two investigating officers on your doorstep?’
Ah, damn it, did he forget nothing? ‘All right. There wasn’t any eau-de-vie. Mary-Lynn insisted we drop in to the poker game to tell them all the news, that Cérès had said her dad had at last made contact and had forgiven her for having had a love affair with a German and that she wasn’t to worry anymore but simply to take great care, that it was really he who was worried about her. It was all a pack of lies, Inspector. Fog. . the stench of mustard gas. Compasses whose bearings would make them lose their way? Machine-gun fire and grenades, her dad crying out to the daughter who had never known him but through Cérès from a battlefield to the north of here twenty-five years ago? The poor thing was so relieved, yet it was absolute rubbish and damned cruel of Madame Chevreul to have taken advantage of her. The cost alone was horrendous, given what most of us have to spare. She was all but broke. I’d loaned her that last fifty. . ’
‘A cheque?’
‘Yes, of course. Who has any cash?’
‘And Madame Chevreul knew of your feelings?’
‘That’s just the rub. I think so, then I think not, then I think it again when not worrying over Caroline and Madame de Vernon and that damned datura.’
‘With which you were never hallucinating, nor was Mary-Lynn.’
‘Look, I’m sorry. I. . I thought maybe I was doing the right thing by alerting you to the possibility of its having been used.’
And the others, letting her lie to a police officer about the eau-de-vie so as to cover for her. Merde! ‘A believer and a disbeliever, a set of stairs, an argument, hurt feelings, the one not really sick but running up the stairs in tears ahead of the other.’
‘A Kommandant who is a confirmed believer and is very close to her, Inspector. Too close maybe. We really don’t know, because Mary-Lynn, though afraid herself, and a close friend of mine, would never tell any of us who the father was.’
‘And a medium who charges whatever can be taken from the sitter even if exorbitant.’
‘Mary-Lynn was pushed, Inspector, but was I the one who should have been?’
From what he’d seen so far, thought Kohler, the English camp was better organized than the American, but bedlam still. They ate in shifts, all 1,678 of them, the dining room of the Hôtel Grand deafening: constant gossip in two languages, recipes, makeovers, hairdos and don’ts, the hair up in curlers, pins, bandanas, or turbans-this last the latest Paris fashion-housecoats on some, overcoats on others, and fingerless gloves. In all, it was the rule of the vulgar and the loud, and God help those who were refined or timid or simply wanted a little privacy.
Lines of tables, placed end to end, ran parallel and between rows of those same Pavillon de Cérès honey-coloured marble columns that were nearly two storeys high. Cherubs with armorial shields were up there on the ceiling, a leftover from earlier days; chandeliers dripping crystal on Kentia palms in dark-blue Art Deco jardinières, the whole perhaps looking of the Otherworld or at least making the interned seem damned out of place.
To the soup and bread, lumps of what appeared to be boiled mutton had been doled out, each table, each group left to fight over the division. Inevitably squabbles had broken out and rose above the general discourse, rocketing into fiercely slapped faces, savagely yanked hair, shrieks, and swearing not only coarse but equally in French and English.