The victim had been unarmed, the Germans increasingly hesitant to even allow such a thing as pistols for bank guards. In age he was in his mid-thirties, but nowadays especially with Gauleiter Sauckel’s demands for forced labour and the Vichy government’s compulsory labour draft, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, papers would be needed detailing the absolute necessity of the Banque Nationale de Credit et Commercial’s having him. Such a necessity would also have meant that the third bank employee, the one who would normally have ridden in the back and assisted the second with the pickups and deliveries, had no longer been possible and they were having to deal with only two victims.
‘Also, mon ami, and one has to ask this, why were you not a prisoner of war in the Reich, along with all the others? Had you been rejected by the military for health reasons, tuberculosis perhaps? Bien sur, there could be any number of reasons, the eyesight among them, but still there has to be a reason, n’est-ce pas?’
The pockets had been turned out and emptied, the papers and everything else simply taken, even the small change that was so necessary now if one was to ride the metro, whose riders had gone from 2 million a day in the autumn of 1940 to nearly 4 million. And since German soldiers on leave were fond of being forgetful and continued to take their change home, the correct amount was now being demanded by the ticket collectors, causing utter chaos at times.
Unlike so many these days, however, this one had obviously been eating well enough. ‘And married too. Have you children?’ he asked.
When he found a wooden-handled Opinel, the peasant’s standby, behind a stone, he wondered if the knife had been held in defiance. ‘But not by yourself, mon ami. Not when found here. Was it torn from the hand that held it and thrown aside by yourself, eh? Is that why the rock that bashed your forehead left such a mark you had to pause to mop it?
‘Ah merde, monsieur, was it a third victim we are now going to have to concern ourselves with, and while we’re at it, why would your killer take the time to empty your pockets if your partner was still on the run, or was he the first?’
Deep in the grass and wildflowers to the right of where the killer would have stood, he found the cartridge casing and heaving a contented sigh, said, ‘Now the investigation really begins, doesn’t it? An altercation causes the forehead wound, that party then running from you, yourself to sit and mop the forehead only to then be confronted by the killer. Understandably I need more proof, of course, so for now we’ll just say it’s curious.’
The cartridge casing was from a nine-millimetre Parabellum round, common enough in a Luger or Walther P38, and certainly the Resistance, if the killer was of them, could have bought the weapon from among the Occupier.
‘Automatically this casing was ejected, but Hermann will remind me that the Browning FN, the first truly automatic pistol, the one that the Belgians gave to the world of killing and adopted for their own army prior to this war, was also adopted by the Dutch, who called it the Pistool M25, No. 2. The Browning Hi-Power has a thirteen-round magazine and it’s not a common Resistance gun, so it has to be telling us something else if that is what it really was. Merde, but the questions keep piling up, don’t they? The Parabellum is a high-powered round. There will be markings on this cartridge-scratches from the breech and its ejector, the imprint of the firing pin as well. All of these can be compared with the next one I had better find because then, if they’re the same, it will tell us that whoever killed you most probably went after your partner using the very same weapon.’
But clearly something else had happened here before that shot had been fired. ‘It really does get deeper and deeper, doesn’t it? Hermann would have said, “It’s like swimming in gravy, Louis. The bottom’s hard to find and the lumps just get in the way, but we always have the taste of it.”’
Turning the body over, he found the slug and pocketed it. Hermann would be pleased.
It was a Purdey smooth bore, side-by-side 12-gauge, an absolutely gorgeous upland gun. Still in the cradle that had been made for it between the two seats in the van’s cab, it certainly would have been a bit of a problem drawing it quickly, but there would have been no argument from anyone as the crew had collected deposits or made a delivery. Beautifully chased ducks on the wing in silver set off the gun-metal blue of the barrels and the straight-grained French walnut stock. Tightly incised, the crosshatching of the left hand’s grip sparkled even with this lousy daylight and fitted that fist perfectly. And were the day not so miserable, Kohler knew he would have stepped out to flow through the motions of shooting imaginary birds on the wing.
‘Louis, it’s a honey,’ he said, though Louis was elsewhere. ‘I’ll have to lock it up in the Citroen’s boot so that no one steals the evidence.’
As to why the killer or killers had left it, and why the driver or his assistant hadn’t at least tried to draw it, would have to remain questions for now, but back in the early autumn of 1940 guns like this had been confiscated unless smeared with cosmoline and buried, the penalty for doing such being far too onerous for most. There had been racks and racks of hunting rifles and shotguns, pistols and revolvers too. Those whose owners had held British passports, including, no doubt, the owner of this shotgun, had been arrested, the men sent to the internment camp in the former French Army barracks at Saint-Denis, just to the north of Paris. British women, and those with that passport who were French, had all been sent to the old military barracks atop the mesa overlooking Besancon, but so bad had the winter of 1940-1941 been, so appalling the conditions the French had imposed, that the Wehrmacht had insisted that those with children under the age of fifteen should be released and sent back to their homes in France, the rest to Vittel’s Parc Thermal, an internationally famous spa and one that Louis and he knew only too well from last February.
Stamped and signed by the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and the Reich’s chief supervisor of French banks, since such travel permission was required, the van’s manifest on its clipboard was under a spill of shotgun shells he quickly pocketed. As he ran his gaze down the list, he muttered, ‘Cash … cash … and more of it. Eighteen branch pickups, for a total of 42 bags and 65,250,000 francs.’
Even at the official exchange rates of 20 francs to the Reichskassenscheine the troops were given to spend, it was 3,262,500 of those, or when at 200 francs to the British pound, or 45 to the U.S. dollar, not the black bourse’s 100 to 140, still 326,250 pounds or 1,450,000 dollars, a bigger than usual pickup.
All of the notes would have been sorted as to size and tied with that twisted paper string everyone had to use these days and hated, elastics being simply nonexistent. But once at the designated entrance to the city, the Porte d’Aubervilliers, no one would have bothered to take any more than a glance at this manifest, not unless some of the Fuhrer’s finest had had a share in what else was in the back.
Squeezing round, he had a look through the armoured window. Cut open, the heavy grey bags had been scattered in haste, loose banknotes seemingly everywhere, the blue, green and white of the five-franc notes, brown of the tens and hundreds. But right on top of a wooden case whose straw packing had been scattered, was a round of what could only be Brie de Meaux. A bottle of Moet et Chandon had had its neck snapped off, the champagne downed in celebration probably, but why leave it standing upright near that cheese, why not throw it out the back since that door would have been open as it now was?