And not stolen at all?
The ball was stopped. He must long for his pipe and tobacco, thought Nora, for he took them out as one would from compulsive habit, only to quickly tuck them away as he spoke his thoughts aloud: ‘My partner was informed otherwise, mademoiselle, and we will have to deal with it when time allows, but with Madame de Vernon we have a woman whose husband had stolen everything and left her to eke out a living playing the piano in a ballet studio.’
Had Madame Chevreul told his partner that or had Étienne? wondered Nora. ‘Where she met and saw a chance to get a meal ticket and maybe enough for her retirement? All Caroline ever wanted was to dance, and being the youngest of a very wealthy family, she went to work on her daddy, as girls will, until he agreed to let her study in Paris and let that woman be her guardian and mentor.’
‘But it never happened, the dancing career.’
‘Not with Poland in September of 1939 and the Blitzkrieg in 1940. The villa in Provence must have looked pretty good then, it being in the zone non occupée.’
‘Was it empty?’
Had he experience of such? ‘It was but they couldn’t stay there. Even though the caretaker knew her from before, he wouldn’t let them, so they found a place in the village until the call went out for Americans and someone turned them in for the reward.’
Again she began to throw the ball. ‘What really happened to the husband?’ he asked.
She would put it into the lower right corner. ‘All Caroline really knew was that he had come from a very wealthy family in Barre, Vermont.’
‘Tombstones and polished granite slabs for monuments and buildings.’
‘Maybe his is in one of the graveyards in town-Caroline did wonder, and taking a chance, even asked some of the women who came in to do laundry in the afternoons and offered to pay them if they’d find out for her. If you ask me, Caroline thought he wasn’t any good, Inspector-that he had run off to Paris as a young man, to the girls, the fun, the booze, and the drugs. Too much money, too little sense. It happens all the time. You must have seen it lots.’
‘And the gambling, mademoiselle?’ he asked as the ball hit the floor and went into the upper-left corner.
‘She thought that too, since after he had sold the villa, he must have then lost the whole bundle. He did join up in 1917 and was wounded on 29 September, 1918, and sent here to recover-that much Caroline was pretty sure of.’
‘Only to die in 1920 in a fire, mademoiselle?’
On 17 July of that year. ‘Caroline didn’t know but wanted to find out, I think.’
‘And you have been trying to piece it together.’
‘Wouldn’t you if you were bored out of your skull in a place like this? All the records were lost. The debts, the names. I’ll bet arson was suspected, but I don’t know. Caroline might have whispered that to Jennifer, since she confided everything to her. I’m sure of it.’
‘And Madame de Vernon is aware of this?’ he asked, she having stopped the ball only to throw it again and again.
‘Probably.’
‘Then Jennifer Hamilton is also a target-is this what you think?’
The ball couldn’t be stopped now. ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to her. Things have been happening too quickly.’
‘But it’s possible?’
‘Yes!’
‘Did the couple have a falling out?’
‘Caroline was upset after Mary-Lynn fell, but then so were the rest of us. . and still are.’
A cautious answer. ‘Is Jennifer the thief, mademoiselle?’
‘Jen? If she thought I felt that way she would be here now, facing right up to me.’
‘Perhaps, but you are also hiding too much. Is Herr Weber aware of this?’
The ball was missed! ‘That Nazihund, that bastard? He’s pointed me out three times in the lineups we have, chooses one here, another there, then I’ve had to wait for hours outside that damned office of his. Twice while Caroline was in there being grilled-the poor thing coming out in tears. Once while Jen was in there, then he showed me a spread of the anonymous letters he had received about me. My name was misspelled. Some of them couldn’t even get their grammar straight, never mind the spelling.’
‘British?’
The ball was returned to the net. ‘Mostly, but not all unfortunately.’
‘And what were they denouncing?’
‘My independence, my loneliness, my long hikes even in the bitterest of weather.’
She stopped to look out over the golf course, to the Hôtel de l’Ermitage and the forest beyond, and as the tears came again, she said, ‘It’s a perfect day for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing especially. Every time it’s like this, I think of being with my dad. I was five when he first took me with him. Five years old, Inspector. We had to camp out. The blizzard lasted for four days. Never have I felt so close to someone before or since. I loved him with a passion that was crazy.’
‘Did they complain about your trapping rabbits?’
She mustn’t look at him now. ‘Everyone knew of it soon enough, and forgive me for wanting to take the Lord’s name in vain, but the others come into our room as if they own it. They stare at you even if they’ve nothing to say, or ask the dumbest of questions. If you’re at all different in this life, watch out, and the closer the community, the tighter the grip the others have on you. Beware of les originaux ou originales, Inspector, and I am definitely one of them.’
The odd ones. She retrieved the ball, deftly picking it up off the snow as if both stick and ball were parts of her. ‘Did they object to your looking after Angèle?’
‘Here the aspergillum doesn’t just sprinkle holy water but kindness. Brother Étienne is a saint and everyone knows it and knows what would happen to them should they speak out or point the finger at him. Granted, he’s like a hairdresser at times and some idiots will tell him the most scandalous of things while others seek his advice and reveal far too much.’
‘Does he gossip?’
‘Is he an informant-isn’t that what you really want to ask? A man who risks his life time and again to bring a little happiness and sometimes, as today, food that is desperately needed and hasn’t been tasted in years?’
When he gave no answer, Nora found she still couldn’t stop throwing the ball, because it really did help not to have to face him. ‘Chacun pour soi, Inspector? Is that what you still think?’
Everyone for him- or herself.
The lower-left corner of the net received five direct hits.
‘It’s the catechism of the times, isn’t it,’ Nora continued, ‘so why shouldn’t it be even worse in here behind that bloody wire? Lying, cheating, stealing-did you know we had a terrible bout of underwear theft from the laundry lines and had to post guards? Can you imagine waiting while the damned laundry dried in a place like this? But now it’s only the little things.’
Wanting that pipe and tobacco of his, he again took out the one and clenched its stem between his teeth for comfort.
‘Which brings us right back to Jennifer Hamilton and Caroline Lacy,’ he said, gesturing with the pipe.
Ah, damn! ‘All right, I was suspicious of Jen but really only because of her relationship with Caroline. It was out of character, I felt at first, and then opportunistic because Caroline’s family has a whopping lot of money. Jen had tried and tried to get Mary-Lynn to speak to Colonel Kessler about her flat in Paris. She needed to get there-everyone agreed that she did, and exceptions here are being made every now and then. Some do buy their way out or have it paid by someone else. Bien sûr, Jen could have sold some of the things in her flat if she had been able to get there. The prices are fabulously high now for Old Masters and antiques, especially if the latter were originally from the Third Reich.’