Ach, and get the hell away from her dressing table, was that it?
‘My husband loved the breed and knew our stables so well he could walk there unaided. Understandably he was very distressed by all we had had to let go to the war-we only had two mares and one stallion left by 1919. Gun carriages and supply wagons took the others instead of the plow and cart. Isn’t it a downright disgrace the idiocy you men will get up to? Come, come, you knew that war. Fighting over virtually nothing? Killing? Destroying so much? Had even one woman had the vote, none of it would have happened. No sons would have been lost, not the millions and millions; no lovers, either, or our beautiful Percherons.’
Votes for women, and how the hell did she know he must have experienced that other war? Kessler, the former Kommandant, was that it? A last parting word from him, or Weber but the information via Berlin?
The stallions in the photos were magnificent dappled greys, the mares too, and of at least seventeen hands. Big, heavy, strong, docile, and intelligent, the ploughman’s constant friend, the artilleryman’s Kamerad. ‘I knew them on the farm and at the front. None are better.’
But did he think it a matter of mere coincidence or divine predestination that he might well, as an artillery officer in that other war, have used Percherons from the Château de Mon Plaisir? ‘When this war is over, Inspector, you must pay me a visit. Indeed, I insist.’
‘I’d have to bring Louis.’
Ah, merde, he had gone right back to the dressing table but what, please, was he searching for? Intimacy? Understanding? Doubt still crowding all else? ‘Is it all a con, Inspector? Is that what you’re still thinking?’
The hairbrush, mirror, and powder case were of enamelled silver and decorated with naked goddesses-Cérès among them? he must wonder.
The accessories were of Baccarat. Perfume in one crystal phial, oil in another, the portrait photo of Rebecca Thompson-that of a slim, dark-eyed beauty also of twenty-three and looking defiantly into the lens as she stood straight, though turned all but sideways to the viewer, hands folded demurely in front and below the waist, eye shadow deepening the depth of her look. A woman with a mind of her own, Inspector? Is that what you’re thinking, or simply, as most men would, are you wondering what it would be like to have sexual intercourse with her? The fucking, I think you would call it.
The empty perfume bottle in Caroline Lacy’s pocket had been by Guerlain, remembered Kohler, a 1925 Exposition presentation, Baccarat having made the bottle in an Art Deco style, and much favoured by this one, but he’d leave it until Louis and he had had a chance to talk things over. Judith Merrill, in the other portrait photo, was the oldest and maybe six years senior. ‘Élizabeth what?’ he asked of her own maiden name, not turning.
Unfortunately such things couldn’t be avoided. ‘Chevreul née Beacham. Inspector, those photographs are from a long time ago and have no bearing whatsoever on the tragedies here. They are but fond memories of a past I still treasure.’
But there were none of her family and only two of the husband-one as a boy of eighteen driving a piebald mare and cart, and the other as the blind French soldier he had become. ‘Did you spend time in the Old Bailey yourself?’
He was watching her too closely in the mirrors, but had he seen her tremble? ‘Was that what they whispered? Well, was it?’
He nodded. Without asking permission, he helped himself to another of her cigarettes. ‘And from truck driver to ambulance driver, for Léa was but a step?’ he asked, waving out the match and leaving it on her dressing table.
In another day, at another time, she would have turned her back on him! ‘Léa and I met time and again throughout that war, Inspector, for she tirelessly brought wounded to the various stations where I was on duty, including the ward where in July of 1916 I first met my André. War smashes social conventions, isn’t that so? War collapses time and brings the distant into instant contact with the result that associations unheard of before suddenly become the norm.’
‘And then?’ he asked, still unwilling to leave the matter.
‘An exploding artillery shell destroyed her ambulance, killing all five of the wounded and the orderly she had in the back. Sent to Paris to recover in the early autumn of 1917, she met Claude Monnier at one of the canteens. Abruptly we lost contact but war came again in 1939 and. . ’
Had he anticipated this too? ‘We didn’t meet until 3 December, 1940, when we were rounded up and sent first to Besançon. Terrible. . the conditions there were shameful. Léa. . Léa looked after me when I came down with flu and then pneumonia. I “owe” her, Inspector, as our boys used to say of one another-yourselves, too, I suspect.’
He still hadn’t touched his tea but had set it on her dressing table. ‘Madame de Vernon?’ he suddenly asked.
Was this safer ground or a minefield? ‘Irène de Vernon soon discovered that Caroline Lacy and Jennifer Hamilton wanted to become sitters. She wouldn’t reveal why she objected so vehemently. Caroline didn’t understand her, she said, and was being wayward. I was to refuse all further approaches. At first an offer of payment in postdated cheques was made-forged, I concluded, on Mademoiselle Lacy’s account at the Morgan Bank in Paris. When I refused, as I should have, she then threatened me. Violent. . Ah, mon Dieu, even Léa was afraid of what that woman might do.’
‘And must have, is that it?’
‘Inspector, please!’
‘Yet you finally agreed to let Caroline become a sitter.’
‘Only if Jennifer Hamilton would wait outside the Pavillon de Cérès to accompany the girl safely back to her room, if such an exception to the curfew could have been made. If not, they would have had to stay the rest of the night, which would have been fine by them. They were lovers, Inspector. Everyone knew it, for they hid nothing. Their love was pure, but Madame de Vernon spat on it and hated that Hamilton girl.’
‘Lovers. . Why didn’t you inform my partner and me of this when we first spoke?’
‘I. . I didn’t think it appropriate-polite, damn you!’
‘And earlier, when asked what Caroline was to have brought along, you told my partner that it was only what that girl desperately wanted to know.’
Men. . Why must they be such irritating pigs! ‘The wording of our invitations is always couched in ambiguity, but I’m sure that partner of yours will have discovered what it was the girl was to have brought. A photo of Madame’s former villa in Provence. Caroline Lacy wanted me to ask Cérès to contact Monsieur de Vernon. She was determined to find out what had really happened to him. Madame had been left a widow but the leaving needed explanation. I agreed, finally, to take the girl as a sitter but, of course, that became impossible, last night’s séance having been held without her.’
And we’ll never know the answer, was that it, wondered Kohler, or was Madame de Vernon now to be blackmailed with it and the murder? ‘Things have been stolen. Did you suspect either Caroline Lacy or Jennifer Hamilton? They were here often enough-seven times, I understand.’
One would have to try. ‘But not here, Inspector. In there,’ she said, pointing to the room whose door he knew was locked. ‘Neither would have had an opportunity, since there is an entrance off the corridor. Léa showed them in. I came through from here. They held hands as they sat before me on the divan. Always the hands. Caroline needed constant reassurance; Jennifer perhaps just as much, for she’s a strange one. Outwardly very confident, then suddenly inward and introverted.’
‘And with Nora Arnarson?’