Rasche shone his blue-blinkered torch on the shattered entrance. ‘A chair was used,’ he said, ‘the rope thrown over one of the cross-poles.’
‘Colonel, since she didn’t return after lunch on Saturday, the thirtieth,’ asked Louis, ‘how is it that you are certain she died on the following day?’
‘The girl was seen by a farm family on their way to the early Mass. They waved to her, but she appeared too cold and tired to respond. She’d been cross-country skiing.’
‘All night?’ asked Louis.
‘Apparently.’
Hence the need for secrecy, said Kohler silently. ‘Who questioned them?’
‘I did. Renee was an accomplished skier. The woods, the flat-lands, the hills and mountains, each offered challenges she loved.’
It was Louis who patently ignored what was due east of them and not that far, the old frontier, the Rhine and the Black Forest, and simply asked, ‘At what time, then, was she last seen?’
These two would think the worst. ‘At just after dawn on Sunday. The church isn’t far.’
‘Had she a rucksack?’ asked Kohler.
‘It’s still with her as is the empty vacuum flask she had filled with soup and the newspaper she had wrapped some sandwiches in.’
‘Only some, Colonel?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘A good lunch, that’s all. Ach, did you think I would try to hide the distance those skis of hers might have helped? Look, you two, I know exactly how difficult it will be for me if this should ever get out. Why else would I have called Paris, Kohler, had I not needed someone I could depend on? Renee came back here to warm up and rest and had, I am certain, every intention of returning to Kolmar. None of us would have known where she had been, not really. She could have told us anything and we would have accepted it. She was that kind of person. Totally reliable and above suspicion.’
Yet she had been out all night, thought Kohler, and wasn’t this carnival a place where one might be watched by another without knowing it? ‘Colonel, when I dropped in on the Oberst shy;leutnant Rudel, he stated flatly that both deaths were suicides. This one due to despair over something the girl had seen at Natzweiler-Struthof.’
Would a sigh be best? ‘Karl’s forte is expedience. Three weeks before Christmas, Renee went up to Natzweiler-Struthof to ski. The Konzentrationslager is nearby. Skiers have gone there for years. When she came back, she was subdued and not her usually outgoing self. I thought to cheer her up, and on our return from a meeting in Neu-Breisach, we stopped in here, but she said she wasn’t feeling well and would rather go home. I insisted, and it did help. She was always intrigued by the things she constantly found here.’
‘And did the Fraulein Ekkehard mention what had troubled her?’ asked Louis.
‘Ach, we never spoke of it. There are some things one simply doesn’t discuss. Now, please, it is this way.’
‘The lanterns, Colonel,’ said Hermann. ‘Hadn’t I best light them? One for you and Louis, and the other for myself.’
A harlequin, a hangman, a frantic young girl trapped at the end of a seedy passage, a lewd and laughing butcher advancing upon her, blood dripping from his hands and upraised cleaver; in the background, a high-court judge, jailer and ax-wielding executioner whose crowd of onlookers shrilled their venom.
Children also, terrified children.
Masks grinned, frowned, grimaced or were wide-eyed in horror above the wagon’s mural panels but all were seen in the surrealistic blue wash of the lantern and in the full-length, distorting mirrors that stood round, their carved frames carefully repaired, the decorations lovingly restored: some with vines and succulent bunches of grapes, others with spiderwebs whose decidedly humanoid insects were not only trapped but fought back fiercely.
Palms, snakes, jungles with strange birds and bats completed the panorama, along with glasses of wine and links of sausage.
‘From one house of mirrors to another,’ breathed St-Cyr, the colonel having placed the lantern atop a trestle-held coffin that, in itself, hadn’t been made of plain pine boards but of carnival panelboard whose ruined cartouches with their hieroglyphics in gold, silver and ruby, had faded and peeled.
Rasche, his image warped by the mirrors behind and on either side, faced him, a black-gloved hand still on the lantern. ‘Though you’ve yet to meet him, Chief Inspector, never underestimate Lowe Schrijen. Curved inwardly, bowed outwardly-even prismatic probably-whatever glass was needed, he had it found. Frankly, I think he went too far, but you’d never convince him of that. What his daughter Sophie required for this little effort of hers she got. They simply dismantled a house of mirrors in Berlin, no doubt saving it from the bombing.’
‘And then used the old frames from here.’ For now one had best say nothing of the months of internment work this alone must have required, but one had to wonder at such evasiveness.
‘You or me?’ asked Rasche, indicating the screwdriver he had taken from Hermann.
‘Myself, I think.’
‘To make certain no one has tampered with her?’
‘Colonel, if what my partner and I are coming to realize was at all the case, then you had best cooperate fully.’
‘Renee wasn’t my lover.’
‘Had she one?’
‘A boy she met from time to time.’
‘At official functions?’
‘And others.’
Sacre nom de nom, must this evasiveness continue and things go deeper still? ‘His name, Colonel?’
Perhaps now St-Cyr and Kohler would begin to understand. ‘Alain Fernand Schrijen.’
‘The chairman’s son and brother of Sophie?’
‘Who else?’
** the Haut-Rhin or High Rhine area of Alsace
3
In a cul-de-sac of shattered mirrors and lantern light at the end of a corridor, Kohler felt just as alone as Renee Ekkehard must have. Worried too-terrified perhaps, poor thing-certainly far from happy and with the sounds of flapping canvas and the like coming at her, or had there been nothing at all but an ice-cold silence on that early Sunday morning? Had it been then that she hanged herself, or had it been later on in the day, the girl waiting it out, arguing with herself until no arguments remained shy;?
Trinitrophenol … Lieber Christus im Himmel, what had Louis and himself landed in? Rasche had, apparently, touched as little as possible here. He had even carried in a box to stand on as he’d cut her down, rather than use the chair that had been kicked away and was on its side, facing a corner.
A career soldier, nerves of steel too. Odd, though, that he should have been so calm, given that he must have been in shock and thinking only of his secretary, that ‘daughter to him.’
Louis didn’t know the half about the colonel; Louis couldn’t. That cosy little nest with Oberfeldwebel Lutze and Yvonne and Rasche’s leavings from that other war? Trust the salaud to think nothing of it and come back to use her again, if only as his housekeeper!
Lutze, like others at Vieil-Armand and elsewhere during the 1914-15 campaign, had known about the affair. Maybe shy; he had simply had his colonel’s best interests at heart, maybe shy; there had been a payoff, even love, for he’d married her. Certainly now Yvonne Lutze would have watched Renee Ekkehard and her former lover at their meals and listened in the night as well.
Yes, Louis didn’t know the half of it.
Finding an empty hook on one of the corridor walls, Kohler hung the lantern up and to hell with the blackout, to hell with laundry blueing. No one was going to notice one star down here when there were so many up there.