‘Don’t be tiresome, Kohler. Both were suicides. The colonel’s secretary had seen things at Natzweiler-Struthof she couldn’t stomach; the other one-our chemist who ran the lab-had just discovered that his wife had been repeatedly breaking her marriage vows. Here … Here, you can take the letter we received from Berlin. Don’t lose it. Now get out. Do whatever it is Colonel Rasche expects, but don’t bother me again. I, too, have work.’
Hermann still hadn’t found his way to the laboratory where three large rooms were separated by glass partitions above the workbenches. Two technicians in white lab coats were busy in the adjacent room. One was repeatedly ironing a swatch similar to the sample of fabric the colonel had left on his desk at the Polizeikommandantur, the other conducting a water-repellency test. Now a fine mist for a half-minute, now a close examination of the result-the beading of the water probably but girls in their late teens and temptation? wondered St-Cyr, for if ever a prisoner of war had had a cosy little nest, it had been Eugene Andre Thomas. Here there would at once have been immense relief from the crowding of the other POWs with whom he had to live and take his meals, then, too, the female company that had been denied the rest of the men, cleanliness too.
The technicians were Alsatian and very businesslike. Engrossed in their tasks, they were trying their best to take no notice of this Surete. Bien sur, the colonel had said Thomas had trained them well, but had there been more than that? Such close contact on a daily basis must have produced something, but their questioning had best be left until later.
The Executive Offices were just beyond the laboratory. He had all but collided with a very well-dressed woman who had angrily rushed past him, failing entirely to hide her tears.
‘Sophie Schrijen,’ he muttered. The name, in typed letters on white pasteboard, had been taped to her office door beneath the Gothically lettered brass of an Alain Fernand of the same surname, her brother, the office next to it being that of her father, Yvan Leonard (Lowe) Schrijen, General Manager, Chief Executive Officer, and Owner, but had the Fraulein Schrijen been close to either of the victims? Had that been why she had been so upset, or had it simply been the presence of two unwanted detectives?
Carefully he began to arrange the contents of Thomas’s pockets on the section of workbench the prisoner had used as a desk. The ID and other papers went to the left, then in an arc, the rag, the cash, the megot tin and wedding ring, with the postcard text face up at the top of the arc, and the pieced-together snapshots following, especially the one of little Paul at the age of six months.
The two rose-coloured dress buttons were found and placed directly below the tin, along with the scant remains of a last cigarette. ‘Rust,’ he said, and drawing in a deep breath, looked slowly over the contents, trying to get a better fix on the man in his laboratory, his little kingdom, for that would have been precisely what at least some, if not all of his fellow prisoners would have felt.
‘Ah, the formulae,’ he muttered, and finding the crumpled scrap of paper, smoothed it out. Printed lines showed that it had been torn from the corner of a page. Victoria Bodicker’s notebook? he silently asked, seeing as the colonel had left it out on his desk at the Polizeikommandantur and had been reluctant to part with it at lunch but had said that Eugene Thomas had been working on a new dye batch.
There were three chemical equations on the scrap of notepaper, each precisely and neatly written. The first involved a compound of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen with caustic soda. The second equation took the product of the first and combined it with carbon disulphide, the source of the stench of rotten eggs-the product of that reaction then being treated with sulphuric acid.
These equations were nothing more than the process, much simplified, of taking wood pulp, which was cellulose, and converting it to the artificial silk, the rayon the Works produced, but why write them on the corner of a notebook from which they were then torn? Why hastily scribble another formula below them, that of trinitrophenol-picric acid-used as a yellow dye, oh for sure, and as an antiseptic, but also as an extremely unstable and highly dangerous explosive? Why stuff that scrap of paper into a pocket the colonel must surely have gone through and found?
The handwriting of the trinitrophenol was decidedly different from the rest.
‘Louis, he lived in despair,’ said Kohler, having at last arrived.
One had best run a finger over the contents of the note, ending at the trinitrophenol, something they both knew only too well. ‘For now, mon vieux, let’s just keep it to ourselves.’
‘Since Rasche must have known about it?’
‘Ah, mais alors, alors, Hermann, for now the benefit of doubt, especially as these two buttons I found in Thomas’s pockets are totally unlike those he left out for us to find and are from a girl’s summer dress.’
‘Then you’d best read this, seeing as the salaud failed to mention it as well.’
“To whom it may concern,
Messieurs, I feel it is my duty to report that the wife of Eugene Thomas, prisoner 220371, Stalag XIV J, Arbeitslager 13, Colmar, Alsace, has been unfaithful to him. On occasions too numerous, his little son, a boy of five, has been left with a neighbour while Mme. Paulette Thomas goes to Pigalle, les Halles and other such well-known rendezvous and does not return until the following morning. Sometimes it is noon before she gets home, sometimes later or not at all.
‘Hermann, is this really necessary?’
‘Read on.’
“At other times the victorious soldiers of our German friends are seen entering her flat, the child then being shoved out the door in the cruelest of weather. An hour goes by, two hours. Sometimes she is with two men, sometimes with three.”
‘How can anyone give credence to such rubbish?’
‘Anonymous and uncensored, Louis, but as to his having killed himself because of it … ’
‘There was also rust from iron filings.’
‘Ach, any Kriegie worth his salt finds himself a carpenter’s nail and a little stone. He grinds off a bit every day. You put the filings on your tongue and wash them down with water. Stomach acid then changes the filings to iron chloride which is absorbed by the blood, but I have to tell you, Rasche’s second-in-command here is positive it’s a suicide.’
‘Then why, please, does a man who watches his health as closely as he can under such circumstances, kill himself even if he had only just read that letter, which he couldn’t have, since it wasn’t found with him?’
‘The Oberstleutnant Rudel would have shown it to him earlier.’
‘And yet our victim still takes his iron?’
‘There was this, too, and this.’
One of the ‘nature’ magazines and a cutout from another.
‘Left in the toilet for him to find, Louis. Maybe by one of the Postzensuren, since they were both gun-shy of me and the firm has lost several of its former staff members to the meat grinder of the present conflict.’
‘A grudge, a wanting to get back at the enemy?’
‘Perhaps, but for now that driver of ours is insisting that he show us a little something else.’
To the flat farmlands some seven kilometres to the east of Kolmar, the long and ever-deepening shadows of the late afternoon brought a bleakness that couldn’t help but be felt. Snow drifted. The wind, down from the Vosges to the west, found each obstruction: a lonely, shaggy-maned russet mare, an orchard, a haystack, cows being driven to a barn. Two boys pulling a toboggan heaped with firewood stopped to stare at the car, while beyond them, across the barren, windswept fields where cabbages would flourish in season, the carnival lay in ruins partly enclosed by the Kastenwald, a woods whose bare branches and darkened trunks had helped to shelter what remained.