Getting angrily out of the car, Kohler started across the lawns. The chateau’s blue-slate turrets and yellowish buff stone walls half enclosed the courtyard.
The horse was dragging in the air. Sweat streaked its neck and flanks.
Without another glance at leaded windows he knew must be watching, Kohler took up the reins and led the poor thing in search of the stables. Built in medieval times as a river fortress high on limestone bluffs, the chateau was self-contained. The stables would be off to the left. When he found them, he helped the stable-boy to rub the horse down.
The latest Madame Audit was waiting for him in the library, had been pacing irritably back and forth before the windows, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
‘Why have you come here?’ she shrilled, not turning to look at him, but pausing to cup her left elbow more firmly in her right hand and suck on the cigarette as if she just couldn’t get enough nicotine into her.
Kohler didn’t answer; it was always best this way. He gave the crone who had announced him a nod and indicated the madame and he were to be left alone.
The doors closed. An antique table held drinks. Vermouth, whisky, cognac, vodka and all of the many Audit specialities. The strawberry liqueur then? A toast to a certain goose girl’s lost maidenhood?
Glassed-in bookcases held leatherbound tomes. The floor was a mosaic of verd-antique. Nice … yes, it was very nice, and Jewish of course.
He handed her a cut-glass tumbler of strawberry liqueur. ‘The view of the river’s great from here.’
‘What the hell do you want?’
Up close, she was modestly pretty. ‘Just a few questions.’
‘That … that woman you brought with you says Christabelle was murdered?’
‘Raped and murdered, or vice versa.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
The nostrils were pinched. The hand that held the strawberry liqueur trembled.
‘Antoine would not have done it, monsieur. He … he is not the type to have done such a thing.’
‘I didn’t say he was, but if I have to, madame, I’ll see that the boys at Headquarters take you apart piece by piece.’
‘Batard!’ The dark-brown eyes flicked away to settle on the windows and the river that lay far below them in its gorge.
Kohler took a sip of the liqueur. ‘Permit me, madame, to advance a theory that’s fast taking shape. Is it not correct that you went to Paris on a number of occasions with the Major, Count Felix von Lindermann, and that …’
‘That little bitch, I’ll cut out her tongue!’
He grabbed her by the arm but kept his voice calm and hard. ‘You stayed at the Villa Audit on the rue Polonceau primarily with the intention of checking up on your husband.’
She yanked her arm free of him. The cigarette was finished, the butt crushed out. ‘Yes, that is correct, but neither Antoine nor Felix suspected it.’
‘And what did you find?’
Her snort was very quick and very real and it lifted the narrow chin, giving a touch of regality. ‘That he was meeting a young girl in a nearby hotel. Look, I’ve had two sons by him. I …’ She indicated the chateau, the manor house, the walnut mill …
‘Did you or did you not meet with that girl?’ he asked.
She would have to answer readily to allay suspicion. ‘I did on … on two occasions. I caught her in the courtyard of the villa one evening after dark. It … it was in summer, in August. Felix – the Major – hadn’t come back, a meeting, I suppose. I was sitting under the sycamore where it was a little cooler. She said she’d just stepped into the courtyard to avoid someone whom she’d thought had been following her. I took her at her word but then discovered she’d been meeting my husband in that hotel.’
‘And then? The next meeting?’
Some of the strawberry liqueur dribbled from a corner of the slender lips.
‘I … I caught her stealing things from the villa.’
Kohler scoffed. ‘Yet you didn’t inform the police?’
Damn him! ‘No … no, I did not do so. She didn’t threaten me, Inspector. Oh, she could so easily have said she would tell Antoine about Felix and me, but … but the girl was really very shy, and …’
‘And what?’
She would let a faint smile brush her lips. She would leave the liqueur on her chin, since it seemed to trouble him that she’d forgotten it. ‘And odd, Inspector, if you know what I mean. It pleased her to know that I was being unfaithful to my husband and I got the feeling, too, that on more than one occasion, the girl had listened to the Major and I making love in that villa.’
Louis should have been with him. ‘Does Count von Lindermann have other women?’
‘Probably. Oh I see what you’re after, Inspector. Yes, yes, Felix could quite possible have used the villa to entertain others. He’s really very good as a lover, but I have no illusions. Antoine robbed me of those.’
Gott im Himmel, where was Louis? ‘Would the girl have been afraid of your husband?’
The chestnut eyes were lowered in a touch of shyness or doubt.
‘Why should she have been?’
‘Because she’d been raised by him, madame, until the age of six. Because she was Charles Audit and Michele-Louis Prevost’s granddaughter. Surely you must have realized this when you caught her stealing things?’
She wouldn’t turn away. She’d face him! ‘We didn’t discuss it. At the time I thought she’d got into the villa through one of the windows.’
He’d let her have it quietly. ‘But you met her more than twice then, madame, and you did ask her, and she told you who she really was.’
‘Yes … yes, she did.’
‘And realizing that the bits of jewellery should have been hers, you let her have them and did not inform the police because, madame, you needed her silence.’
The gorge was deep, the walls across the river were stained with rust. ‘Yes … yes, that is true. Antoine … Sometimes a woman never really knows the man she marries, Inspector. Antoine has always had a thing about his older brother. He took Charles’s wife and drove him into debt so that he could have her.’
‘Then he made certain the poor bastard went to Devil’s Island.’
The villa, the room, that bed, Michele-Louise’s perfume, the sketches of her lying in the nude … ‘She was wild, but … but Antoine still thinks of her.’ She gave a shrug. ‘Again you see I have no illusions. The girl was the absolute reincarnation of the grandmother. Christabelle looked exactly like Michele-Louise must have looked.’
And had dyed her hair to do it. ‘What did you think went on in that hotel room?’
‘Sex, what else? He bought her things. He took her things from here, never much, but I know they went to bed. Why else would he have gone to her so many times and she to him?’
It made her nervous to have to stand under scrutiny. It made her wipe the liqueur from her chin at last.
‘Would it surprise you, madame, if I were to tell you the girl was a virgin?’
‘A what?’
Anger, rage – jealousy, for she’d been cheated of the one thing she’d wanted so much to believe – so many things flashed before him in that moment.
The woman conquered them by vehemently shaking her head. ‘He loved the girl – did you think I wasn’t aware of this, eh? The trips to Paris, monsieur. They were more than just for business and to play with a new mistress. Ah, yes, he’s had several. Antoine is like a boar in rut. It’s the vraie truffe he hunts so avidly. An aphrodisiac, Inspector, as well as a major source of income.’
She tossed a hand. Another cigarette was found and lit, her head tilted well back as she drew in and blew smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Just how certain are you that girl was a virgin?’
‘Let’s be brutal about it, eh? Is that it?’
‘Yes, that’s it!’
‘Reasonably.’
‘Pardon? Reasonably? Surely the coroner’s report would have spelled it out for you, Inspector? Did you not look for God’s sake? Ah, you did, eh?’