The cook’s off-blond hair of fifty-five years looked as if self-cropped before a broken mirror, the bags beneath uncompromising grey eyes sagging to hard-cleaved pale cheeks and unpainted, grimly set lips.
‘Any fool could see that it must have taken us months and months to organize.’
‘Open a year, then?’ he asked. She was getting the measure of him, was not as tall as the dove but at least twice as wide and ten times as strong.
‘A year? It means nothing.’
‘Simply that Jennifer Hamilton and Caroline Lacy were interviewed in here by Madame Chevreul, but there’s no divan.’
‘There was for them. They sat before that.’
The tent, the cabinet. ‘With the curtain drawn and Madame inside?’
‘Questions needed to be asked, answers given.’
‘First the palms, Inspector,’ dared Marguerite, ‘then the tarot cards and my crystal ball, and only after those, the Ouija board and Hortense, and finally le cabinet de Madame Chevreul, médium des médiums.’
‘Madame Chevreul sitting in judgement of them behind that screen?’ he asked.
‘Things had been stolen. Little things,’ said Hortense. ‘So many we were all wondering who was doing it.’
‘But then Madame’s talisman vanished and wonder of wonders, things turned ugly, is that it?’
Hortense would tolerate no more from her, thought Marguerite, but Herr Kohler would demand it. ‘Jennifer couldn’t have stolen anything, Inspector. It’s simply not in her nature, not after what I have seen of it in my crystal ball. That, however, could only mean Caroline Lacy, her. . her little companion.’
‘Her lover?’
How quick he was to say it. ‘Oui.’
‘Who must have gone through the curtain that hides the door behind that thing when Madame was no longer in conference with the goddess and was known to also be absent from her other rooms?’
And on a visit to Untersturmführer Weber, was this what he meant, or was he just fishing?
‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘If you say so, then yes.’
‘Marguerite. . ’
‘Hortense, ma chère, I had better tell him. Jennifer first came here alone, Inspector, and several times. Me, I read her future in my crystal ball. To begin, I used the smoky quartz, as I would have with you and for much the same reasons, but then it was the rose quartz and only after that the clear crystal, for her worries drive her to anxiety and one must search deeply for the reasons. Always I cleanse each ball before and after a reading. This washes away all evidence of former images, ensuring each new reading is uninfluenced by them. I also magnetize the ball by passing the hands over it, though never touching it. I burn incense: apple blossom to sharpen the symbolic visions if those are being received; lavender to release myself from my own past, which might hinder intuition; lilac to stimulate perception. With Jennifer there were so many things clouding the ball and troubling her innermost psyche, but before we could reach total clarity, she was taken from me, only to then return but with Caroline.’
‘Hand in hand, eh, and well after Jennifer’s having been hustled into the cellars here and telling the truth about that one’s past and Madame Chevreul’s?’
Léa had come. Léa filled the doorway. Having heard what Kohler had just said, she was not happy.
‘Caroline was such a shy and repressed creature,’ continued Madame Chevreul, she and Brother Étienne having started in again on their lunch. ‘Trampled, Inspector, by that dreadful woman who had dominated every facet of her tender life.’
The brother, having entrusted that very woman in total with enough datura to kill from six to twelve, was clearly haunted by the thought of what had been stolen-a third of it-but where, really, did he sit in things, this healer, this gossip, this courier of BBC Free French broadcast news, this bell ringer?
‘Your talisman, madame?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘My gris-gris-isn’t that what some would call it? A black who tells fortunes is better than me, Inspector? A man who is not only poor and uneducated but one step from the savage?’
‘Élizabeth, I must caution you.’
‘Étienne, please eat and then tend to the others. I’m sure we have kept you long enough.’
‘He stays.’
‘I think I had best, for the moment.’
A generous morsel was taken, the dark goatee of this nothing monk given a hasty wipe with a napkin.
‘Laughter, Inspector,’ she asked, causing that napkin to be impatiently crushed in a fist. ‘Snide remarks? Whispers about my abilities? I who have done so much for so many and have freely given of myself? I who had as one of my most loyal and strongest of believers Colonel Kessler, the very Kommandant of this camp?’
‘Élizabeth, he was asking about your talisman.’
‘A mere trinket of no consequence, so please be kind enough to help yourself to the warm potato salad, Étienne. Time and again, Inspector, Colonel Kessler came to me, at first at the urging of Mary-Lynn Allan, though he knew, of course, of the interest in spiritualism in the camp, and even of some of its mediums, having paid a few visits to them out of curiosity.’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, Élizabeth, he was a doubter,’ muttered Brother Étienne, shovelling salad onto his plate.
‘Certainly, and certainly, like so many after that terrible war of 1914-18, he was curious but also, Étienne, Beate Kessler née von Hennig, his wife of thirty-seven years, having lost her father and two brothers in it, had long ago become a devout believer and practitioner. As you well know, it was really she who convinced him to find out more.’
Knife and fork were lifted in a resigned gesture. ‘This is nonsense, Inspector. Élizabeth, repeatedly I have warned that what you claim is against the laws of the Church.’
‘Nonsense, is it, to reach those who have passed over, Étienne? To talk to them? Ask questions of import and be given answers? Doesn’t the inspector need to know why Colonel Kessler was so distressed and what he wanted desperately to ask that wife of his and their little maid?’
‘A girl, a child of twenty,’ whispered the brother. A forkful of the salad was taken, a bit of the bread brusquely torn off and used to mop up sauce that had been missed. ‘Continue, Élizabeth, if you must.’
Étienne would use the bread like that and eat like a peasant! ‘Cérès was asked by him to contact Frau Kessler, Inspector, I having placed before the other sitters the wedding ring his wife had given him and the photos and letters from her that he had brought along. Initially he wanted proof, and asked things only his wife could have known. The name of their first dog? Mädy. The breed? A dachshund. The number of puppies in her first litter and why a new maid had been needed? Five. Their names? Johann, Käte, Christina, Jörg, and Erik.
‘After that, his doubts began to leave him. He did ask Cérès if his wife could give his former rank, the date and time of their wedding. A captain, she said, 15 June, 1906, a Friday at 1600 hours, the drawn swords of his hussars catching the sunlight as they had formed the archway over them and cheered. Fortunately his commanding officer had managed a small task for him to perform in Paris, but the couple didn’t stay at the Ritz, she said when asked. They had only had one evening’s meal there. Instead they had stayed at a small inn on the quai Voltaire, in the very house where Voltaire and Richard Wagner had once stayed. Across the Seine there had been a magnificent view of the Jardin des Tuileries, he having thrown the French windows open and stepped out onto the balcony every morning on waking. Visits to the Louvre, the theatres and galleries, shops, and gardens had occupied the fortnight they’d spent there and only on the last day had he had any diplomatic duties to perform. All such details poured from her in a rush of joy at being able to reach him, he dumbfounded at first, then shedding tears of joy himself and begging her forgiveness.’