It even held an eau de vie de poire.
‘The Williams pear, Louis, the same as what’s called the Bartlett in America. Giselle got it for me. The bottle’s in the boot but it doesn’t have a label so it’s just one of those from a travelling still that goes from farm to farm and holds a good deal back because of that same black market and in spite of all the red tape your Vichy food controllers have thrown up against such necessary things.’
Giselle being one of the two women Hermann cohabited with when he had time and was in Paris and not busy, the girl having returned to live with him, Oona also. ‘Enjoy yourself.’
‘Be sure to look for cartridge casings, Chief. Footprints will be out of the question. We’ll let that ex-corporal stew in his own juice and then we’ll pickle him for good measure.’
Adding a few twigs to the fire that siphoned gasoline from the van had started, Rocheleau heaved a grateful sigh. The ‘steaks’ had done their work. Those two from Paris had noticed nothing. They’d find the bodies and would have a look at the van and then they’d come back with their questions to receive the answers already given.
Taking another piece of sausage from his coat pocket, he skewered it onto the stick he would burn once the repast had been consumed. Un saucisson fume de Champagne and with the fully ripened Brie de Meaux, a little taste from heaven and who would have thought such would be possible in a bank van? Even Father Adrien had been surprised. He had seen the bottles and had immediately shoved two into the deep pockets of that cassock of his and had clutched a third and given him the gospel. ‘For the Mass, Eugene. Say nothing, my son. What has happened here is not for us. Let the police from Paris deal with it.’
Fritz-haired when he had pulled off the Gestapo’s storm hat, Herr Kohler was taller by far than that Surete turtle of his. And yes, a glistening scar caressed the left cheek from eye to chin, giving reminders of something Herr Kohler would definitely remember for the rest of his life should the end of this Occupation require a certain garde champetre to point the finger of truth before the post was used, the one at least for that collabo partner of his.
Shrapnel scars from that other war had graced the storm-trooper countenance, the age, that of about fifty-five or fifty-six and maybe three years older than his little follower. Bulldog jowls had given the sad, rheumy faded-blue eyes a little more intensity, but they had held interest only in the rifle and its bayonet, and memories perhaps of that other war. The hands had been big, the touch of the fingers as he had held that cigarette, light.
The tortoise was, of course, still with that bland, broad and defiant holier-than-thou brow, the moustache much more than that of the German Fuhrer he served, the thick and bushy eyebrows the same as before, the hair a dark brown but without the grey that had immediately overtaken his own after that battle. Medium in height, blocky across the shoulders, that one had changed so little he still terrified. But the bullet scars across the brow had been more recent, though it was a great pity some criminal had missed him. Here, as the battle had raged, the limestone had caused an infinity of rounds to ricochet until one from a sniper had slipped through to knock that salaud off his feet, causing St-Cyr to drop the rifle he had only just picked up, intending to thrust it back at himself and prevent such an act of cowardice.
Crossing himself, he said to no one but himself, Me, I thought he really was dead and that all my worries were over, but when I found that he wasn’t, I thought to take up his Lebel Modele 1873 and let him have one of those old eleven millimetres even if that revolver should misfire due to the years of the government’s having stored them in dampness. Black powder too. But he opened his eyes and said, ‘Ah bon, mon brave, you’ve got your rifle again. Push on. Keep them from me.’
When everyone else was shitting themselves and wanting to run.
Those two from Paris would find the victims for certain and food enough for the Action Courts, but could they be accused of stealing any of it for themselves?
Having crossed what little remained of the cloister and its courtyard, and now adjacent to the eastern end of the church itself, St-Cyr entered what had been the chapter house. This small, square room, with its arched and gaping doorway to what was left of the sanctuary and altar, had two openings that faced onto the eastern walk of the cloister. Light would have entered from the remains of the three windows in its outer wall, and it was here that the abbot and his monks would have met each morning after the first hour to go over any problems and the business of the day. A lectern would have stood facing the cloister openings, the abbot sitting behind it, the monks on two rows of benches before him.
But all of that was gone except for the broken-off stems of a couple of the columns that would have supported the vault above which now gaped at the sky.
‘From just such a past do we poor mortals pass into the present,’ he said to the victim as if by way of greeting, for no matter how hard one tried, the reverence of these ruins still intruded on the thoughts.
Caught among the squared-off blocks of medium-grey limestone with their encroaching dark-green moss, ivy and wild grape, the man lay under canvas as if in the Great War. Hermann would immediately have turned away and probably thrown up. Having lost his two sons at Stalingrad before the defeat of von Paulus and the Sixth Army there early last February, this impulse of his had become more intense with every new murder. The younger, the harder; the more innocent, the more terrible. ‘My partner’s really a very good detective and I’ve come to absolutely depend on him, while he himself has increasingly become the citizen of the world I’ve been encouraging.’
Pausing to let that sink in and the cameras of the mind to do their work, he gave the room the once over, noted the sodden grass and wildflowers that had gone to seed, lush as they both were, and the encroaching saplings of the forest. And finding one of the latter broken off some distance from the corpse, fingered it in doubt and said, ‘Ah bon, mon ami, what has gone on here?’
The grass could, or could not have been trampled more than necessary. It was simply impossible to tell, but the room was small and all but a cul-de-sac. Had the victim been trying to hide? Had he heard the other one being shot, or had he been the first?
Gently pulling back the canvas, he had to pause, for before being killed, the victim had been holding a bloodied handkerchief to his forehead. ‘Had you been hit by a stone, or did you fall and hit yourself? Is that why there was that broken sapling? Dazed, you would have stood, the killer then jamming that weapon of his tight against your chest.’
Surprise … Had that been it, that left hand up and near the head as if, in having been startled, he had just removed the handkerchief?
The bank’s uniform jacket, vest, shirt and undershirt had all been torn by the bullet’s entry, the muzzle having left its circle around the bullet hole. There would be powder burns. Joliot would also find the tiny tattoos the grains of that gunpowder would have left as they’d been driven into the skin.
‘Had your clothing not been torn, I’d have thought the bullet had been fired from at least a metre away.’
Rigor had passed, but with the cold and dampness, decay would have been retarded. Hypostasis, the lividity due to the gravitational settling of the blood into its lowest parts, would have begun after about two hours, giving the slatey blue to reddish patches that were evident. The lips were that same blue, the eyes somewhat clouded, though of a deep brown, the face broad, strongly-boned and quite pale.
‘Since on average rigor lasts for sixteen to twenty-four hours, mon ami, and begins from two to four after death, the time this could most recently have happened is yesterday and probably in the morning since it is now 1320 hours, but it could also have happened on the preceding day, perhaps in the afternoon. Joliot will be able to give a far more definite estimate since I’ve broken my thermometer, but when were you first found and who was it that reported the killings? Certainly not Rocheleau, and why, of course, did whoever it was happen to come upon you and that van in a place like this? It’s not usual to walk here, nor to visit the ruins in weather like this.’