And now? asked Victoria. Now she sat between them, neither knowing when the SS would overtake them, each wanting to reach out to the other, herself the gulf, the quarry between.
Perhaps some sixth sense alerted St-Cyr, perhaps he had seen the glint of unshielded headlamps well behind them. Snowbanks crowded closely. There were no lanes that she could see, no side roads onto which they might turn. Again and again St-Cyr glanced into the rearview. ‘Two lorries, Hermann.’
They didn’t have a chance. ‘Kramer must have gotten through to Berlin and they’ve now told him what to do,’ said Kohler. ‘Pull over. Switch off and douse the headlamps.’
The lorries didn’t stop. They roared past in clouds of billowing snow. ‘They’re going for those boys in Straf, Louis. There’s nothing we can do but follow and they know it.’
‘That doctor, mademoiselle,’ said St-Cyr, darkness now enveloping them.
‘The Professor Haagan. The Obersturmfuhrer Meyer wanted him to include me in his experiments, but Haagan had to have his little piece of paper. Fortunately I overheard them and was firm enough to tell him that if he so much as touched me, word of it would get back to Berlin. Had I not done, I would, I think, no longer be alive but immersed in formalin.’
Neither of them said a thing. They just looked at each other for what seemed the longest time. ‘Phenol,’ Victoria heard herself saying at last. ‘Twenty cc’s. That is how much he uses in one of his “experiments.”’
‘Not Evipan?’ asked St-Cyr, sickened by what she had just said.
Involuntarily she shivered, Herr Kohler managing to drag off his greatcoat and wrap it about her. Again St-Cyr asked, and she knew that this much she had best tell them. ‘The phenol is given intravenously in the guise of a tetanus or typhoid-fever shot. Perhaps it is that Berlin wants the professors to find a quick and easy way of killing that does not entail anything so overt as hanging, decapitating with an axe or shooting. Perhaps it is that …’
‘Phenol’s strongly caustic, Louis. The pain would be-’
‘Excruciating, mon vieux. Unconsciousness and death would certainly follow.’
‘Agony, Louis,’ muttered Herr Kohler emptily.
‘Inspectors, Alain told Renee of the torture in the faces of four girls who had been selected and sent to the camp. All of them were N und Ns. He spoke of how, as they fell unconscious, their expressions softened. He thought it curious. Among his duties, he has to watch and record everything that happens so that the professors and their students will then have an independent observer’s comments.’
Tonelessly she told them of the other experiments and the autopsies that were being done both at the quarry camp and at the University of Strassburg.
‘Rasche would have had to visit that camp often enough, Louis, and must have known.’
‘And yet, Hermann, he made no mention of it beyond saying that they were doing autopsies all the time.’
‘He knew Renee Ekkehard would be at the carnival,’ said Herr Kohler.
‘He sent Werner Lutze there in the Polizeikommandantur’s Grune Minna, Hermann.’
‘Knowing damned well she would see it and panic, Louis. He knew Alain Schrijen would be there and that the boy would chase after her.’
‘Had the best of reasons for wanting that girl dead,’ said the chief inspector sadly. ‘A daughter in Clermont-Ferrand. One of the Mischlinge.’
‘Then why call us in?’
‘If not knowing we’d be certain to point the finger at Alain Schrijen.’
‘Since that one had every reason as well,’ sighed Herr Kohler, ‘but wouldn’t have dared to do it at the camp or ski lodge, not the Kommandant’s personal secretary.’
‘And knowing, too, Hermann, that Alain’s father had every reason to want her silenced, but quietly.’
And Sophie? wondered Victoria. Did these two not consider that Sophie might have done it? Sophie who had come to realize that her father must have learned of what his daughter and her committee had really been up to?
‘Mademoiselle, when I went through Eugene Thomas’s pockets, I found a bankroll of four hundred and seventy-one Lagermark.’
‘They’d not have been of any use outside the Arbeitslager,’ muttered Herr Kohler.
‘But they were, Inspectors. You see, there are among Colmar’s tradespeople, some who will accept Lagergeld. Bien sur, it’s risky and they try to do it as unobtrusively as possible, but still …’
‘Then the money wasn’t to pay Martin Caroff for crafting the wedding ring Thomas wore?’ asked the chief inspector.
She could not smile though she wanted to. ‘It was for toothbrushes, tooth powder, hair combs, medicines and other personal items at the pharmacy.’
‘Lucie Ferber, Louis. I might have known.’
Hermann’s pharmacist, but now was not the time to console him. ‘And the two rose-coloured buttons that were torn from Mademoiselle Ekkehard’s dress last August?’
‘Eugene found them in our field office and put them in the fruit jar with the others. I … I then gave them to Sophie who always kept them close as a reminder of what had happened. She would have been beside herself with grief at Eugene’s death. He was like a brother should have been to her. Always kind, always helpful …’
‘Would she have had to see his body, mademoiselle?’ asked Herr Kohler.
‘But why?’
‘Tell her, Louis.’
‘Ah, bon. Because I then found those buttons in his pockets.’
‘But after Rasche had had him laid out and had gone through the damned things himself,’ said Herr Kohler.
‘He having called Paris, she then wanted us to look a little closer at things, mademoiselle.’
‘But was Thomas murdered, Louis?’
It would not hurt to tell them, thought Victoria. ‘As a fire warden, a Luftschutzfeldwebel, Inspectors, Werner Lutze can come and go at the Textilfabrikschrijen any time he likes and has a blanket pass for just such visits.’
‘Whereas you have none,’ said the chief inspector.
‘That is correct.’
‘Then what about that scrap of notebook paper, Louis?’
‘Ah, bon. Your notebook, mademoiselle. Trace for us, please, how it came to have chemical equations for the viscose process written across the corner of an otherwise empty page and then-’
‘The formula for picric acid?’ she asked.
‘A yellow dye,’ said Herr Kohler blandly.
This could not be avoided. ‘When Sophie decided that Renee and myself should serve on her Winterhilfswerk Committee, she asked Renee to find out what she could of my background and I, learning of this, told Renee to take the notebook to her. But … but that was in the late spring of 1941. That is how long I’ve been on her committee.’
‘But did her father see it then?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘He must have, Louis. That’s why his daughter asked for it. Lowe Schrijen told me he hadn’t approved of his daughter’s choice.’
‘Inspectors, I’ve known Sophie for years, through the bookshop. She had no need to find out anything about me, and didn’t let her father stop her from asking me to join her committee.’
‘And when was it written in by others?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘Eugene apologized for having done that. Sophie can sometimes be very impulsive. You’ve seen how she is. He had been teaching her everything he could about the viscose process-she was new to it all in that spring of ’41. They needed a bit of paper and Sophie had my notebook in hand and thrust it at him, he then jotting down the sequence of equations for her as they went over them.’
And weren’t the simplest of explanations often the most elusive? ‘And the formula for trinitrophenol?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘That was jotted down much later. About a week after Renee had come back from the party, I noticed that the notebook was again missing. I really didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t like Renee to have taken anything of mine. She was distraught and badly frightened. Herr Lutze … I did wonder if he might have taken it, for he’d come that week to check the house and shop for the fire-prevention measures in case of an air raid, but I had stayed with him every step of the way because he had asked it of me.’