St-Cyr drew in another breath. Everywhere he looked there was broken glass. Cork-stoppered bottles had once held deformed and perfectly formed fetuses that had been drenched in formalin. Jars of the same had held pickled organs: the heart, the lungs, liver and kidneys, the brain of ‘a real live man,’ the reproductive organs also.
Against a broken, blue-, white- and gold-tiled mural of a gowned and bearded ancient Hippocrates holding a sick child, the hourglass of time had shed its last grains of sand.
Cobwebs caught the gently falling snow as they stretched from spine to spine of shattered glass. Autumn’s dead leaves, blown in from the nearby Kastenwald, were everywhere. Stains were everywhere: grey, dark red, brown, the shards of glass most often fogged and smeared, the light catching everything that had fallen from the displays.
The battery-powered lantern, its stiff wire handle upright, was on the ground at Sophie Schrijen’s feet. Caught in its spotlight, Victoria Bodicker stood well out in the middle of this exhibit whose roof had fallen in. The canted cross-poles, with their rotten, now frozen canvas, were all around her, her shadow large and looming over a still standing wall whose hangings cried out: Embryologie et Maternite and the Damnation of Illicit Sex.
Kohler couldn’t stop shaking. Caught in the beam of his torch, the skulls that littered the floor of this little room he was in, this cul-de-sac, spoke for all those he had had to see in the trenches of that other war. Shells screamed overhead as if he was right back at Vieil-Armand. Thrown up, the stench of rotting flesh, of blood, guts, brains and shattered granite mingled with those of mildewed earth and spruce gum. Panicking, he was suddenly terrified he would die without ever seeing Gerda again, wept as the skulls accused him, cursed him, mocked him; those also from all the murders he’d had to investigate.
‘YOU KILLED HER, VICTORIA!’ shrieked Sophie Schrijen, the sound of her voice breaking over him.
‘MADEMOISELLE, SHE DID NOT MURDER RENEE EKKEHARD!’
Louis … was that Louis shouting?
‘SHE DID! MY BROTHER DIDN’T!’
‘But could and would have.’
Louis had said that.
‘MY FATHER DIDN’T GET ANYONE TO KILL HER EITHER!’
‘But would have seen to it. Now, please, mademoiselle, put the gun down.’
‘INSPECTOR, STAY WHERE YOU ARE!’
Ah, merde, she was going to shoot Louis.
‘Sophie, please listen to me.’
That had been Victoria.
‘Sophie, you know how despondent she was.’
‘A SUICIDE, YOU SAID!’
‘MADEMOISELLE, THE GUN, S’IL VOUS PLAIT!’
Louis must have moved closer. He’d have his hand stretched out to take that gun …
‘Give it to him, Sophie. He and Herr Kohler will try to help us.’
Postcards littered the skull-strewn floor at Kohler’s feet: stained, frozen, faded photos of cadavers swathed in blood-soaked, white muslin or not; wounds … horribly gaping wounds. One who’d just had his head blown off-how many times had he seen just such a thing? Another without his limbs. No morphia, the poor bastard just staring emptily up at him like others he’d seen. Deformities too: twins linked at the hip, the shoulder or trunk but also pornographic shots the doctor must have sold on the sly. Shots of beautiful young girls, those of boys too. Several displays of sadomasochisme …
A shaving brush.
Kohler shook his head to clear it. The brush stood upright on a little shelf before the splinters of a mirror. A drinking glass held a toothbrush. An all but empty bottle of grass-green shaving lotion held clots of last autumn’s flies. A tin of boot grease had been left in haste. Regulation issue and if found by others, an automatic sentence of death for Renee Ekkehard, Victoria Bodicker and Sophie Schrijen unless Vati could intervene.
Shards of glass were almost everywhere, but near the shaving brush there were none of them. The chipped enamel of the tin basin was whisper clean. ‘Louis …’ he muttered. ‘They hid those boys in here until Sophie could drive them to the farm and send them on their way.’
There was a chair, a stool, the dust of cigarette ashes. A key hung on a nail-Ach, how naive of them. It was to the wagon they had used as a field office. At night, the one or two they were moving would have crawled out of here and had something to eat in that office. They would never have stayed long at the carnival, but as sure as he was standing here, Martin Caroff, Eugene Thomas and the others had begun to notice that something was going on.
‘Sophie,’ pleaded Victoria, ‘Renee didn’t want to live.’
‘YOU DRUGGED HER!’
‘Mademoiselle, your lover took ampoules of Evipan from the SS hospital at Natzweiler-Struthof,’ said Louis.
‘YOU CUT YOUR FINGER WHEN YOU BROKE THE TOP OFF ONE OF THOSE THINGS, VICTORIA!’
‘Mademoiselle Schrijen, you found the sticking plaster she had used. You found the lipstick also, with which she had written the suicide note your lover begged her to write. Now, please, the gun.’
‘INSPECTOR, IF YOU COME ANY CLOSER, I WILL HAVE TO KILL YOU!’
Louis was going to try to stop her. Kohler knew it, felt it, would have to get to them, have to distract her …
‘Mademoiselle, your brother came out here on Saturday, 30 January, to kill her but she got away from him. The deserters or escaped prisoners of war the three of you had expected were not here either. Renee then went well to the east, to the Totenkopf.’
‘She found the hut empty, Sophie,’ said Victoria. ‘They weren’t there, and neither was Herr Springer’s brother. She had skied and walked and had even hitched a lift in a Wehrmacht lorry all for nothing, and had then made her way back here because she had nowhere else to go. Nowhere, Sophie.’
‘Alain … Alain had told Father where to find them, Victoria. Renee must have said something at Natzweiler. Vati … Vati, saw to it that they were stopped.’
‘WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME, SOPHIE?’
‘I couldn’t. By then it was too late. None of them were interrogated. They were all simply taken out and shot. Herr Deiss and Herr Paulus did it for Father, for money.’
Sophie Schrijen stood with the lantern at her feet; Louis within two metres of her now and simply not close enough.
‘She was exhausted, Sophie, and convinced that the only way she could save you was to take her own life.’
‘You’re lying. You thought only of yourself.’
‘She begged me to help her.’
‘You sat with her,’ said Louis. ‘You had a cigarette, a little schnapps, something she didn’t really care for. You talked. You rummaged about in that tin box where the three of you kept the bits of costume jewellery that you’d found and took out the earring.’
‘Renee had wanted so badly to find its mate, Inspector, we pretended that we had. She cupped it in her hands, held it to the light and pressed it against her cheek, and as she became sleepier and sleepier, she said, “Tell Sophie to try to forgive me.”’
‘By committing suicide, Mademoiselle Schrijen, your lover felt that your father would do everything he could to protect you.’
‘But not myself, Sophie. Not me. Renee and I both knew that it was only a matter of time until he sent someone for me.’
‘LOUIS, DON’T!’
The Mauser leapt, the sound of the shot reverberating as Victoria was knocked off her feet and thrown back. She cried out for her mother, cried repeatedly for the woman to come quickly. Cried for all the things she hadn’t done, for the children she would never have, for Blaise Oberkircher and for forgiveness, but cried it ever more faintly in darkness.
Gently St-Cyr lowered her to the ground, having held her at the last. ‘Hermann … ?’ he managed.
Hermann had gone after Sophie Schrijen but that could only mean … ‘HERMANN, LET HER GO! HERMANN, PLEASE!’
Two shots were fired and then another, the blast smashing things all around him as he cringed and held on to Victoria Bodicker. In wave after wave, the sound of the explosion came until a last shower of broken glass and other debris had finally settled.