And never mind the Fuhrer’s having put France on Central European Time in June 1940 and recently having added an hour of daylight saving time in autumn and winter, making that 0800 really 0600 the old time. ‘Not if we have to spend the night here, Colonel, and haven’t finished our preliminary examination and are still awaiting Coroner Joliot and his clean-up crew.’
The first sprinklings of the next deluge had arrived. As if he had plenty of tobacco, this ‘Ludin’ passed his cigarette over.
‘Contact me when you’re ready, Kohler, but don’t leave it too long. Full details, nothing left out, everything to myself.’
‘Then be so good as to tell us why the hell you lot should even be interested?’
‘That’s for us to know, and not yourselves. Just do as I’ve said and we’ll get along fine.’
Skidding in the mud, the tourer departed, and as they watched, that feeling of being alone against the world returned. In spite of the partnership’s desperate need, Hermann crumbled the cigarette and let the deluge take it.
‘Merde alors, Louis, what has Boemelburg dropped us into this time?’
‘A fetid shell crater full of water and hidden by barbed wire. Let’s deal with our garde champetre while there’s still some semblance of daylight. We’ll visit his campfire, pick up the necessary, and let him stand guard while we question him from the shelter of the van.’
‘Why hasn’t the bank shown up?’
‘A good question, but perhaps no one has thought to tell them or they simply got word of the other visitors and decided it would be better to wait. That Kriminalrattenfanger is trouble, Hermann. Didn’t the RAF firebomb Hamburg on the night of 27 July last, and the USAAF during the day, the two then carrying on the visit for a few more nights and days?’
With winds said to have been at temperatures of up to 1000°C and speeds of 240 kph, there had been more than 40,000 dead, up to 100,000 injured and countless left homeless. And since Kriminalkommissar and Kriminalrattenfanger meant the same, the latter’s shortened form of ‘criminal rat-catcher’ would do. ‘Maybe that Kriminalrat is just out for blood, Louis, and feels we’ll slake his thirst, but whoever killed those two didn’t bother with the big bills and left virtually all of the food and wine, the champagne and black truffles.’
‘But took time to empty the pockets and take the identity papers of the victims, even the small change? That doesn’t make sense.’
‘Not unless we’re dealing with something very different.’
Rocheleau hadn’t just stolen a few coils of sausage and several other items. His makeshift satchel, tucked as it had been behind yet further blocks of stone, betrayed something in the clutter they definitely didn’t want to see. Sickened, Hermann said, ‘Where the hell is she, Louis? Out there somewhere lying naked with her throat cut?’
A forearm was grabbed to steady him. ‘It’s only a pair of shoes. There could well have been a perfectly logical reason.’
‘You’re hedging. Me, I can always tell. High heels like those? Dark blue leather like it used to be? Hardly ever worn? Kept for good? Those were kicked off so that she could run when those bastards up front brought her here and she realized what they were going to do. They hadn’t gone into lockdown. That back door would have been locked from the outside with the key they use when collecting cash or delivering it. She wouldn’t have known what the hell to do to open it and they damned well wouldn’t have told her, not with what they had in mind.’
Sometimes Hermann jumped to conclusions, but was that really the case, considering the forehead of the first victim and the Opinel that had been thrown aside? Yet there had been a robbery. ‘She could have been a decoy.’
Must Louis examine everything from every angle? ‘A plant who then found she had to run? Did those two grab her?’
‘Or find her too fleet of foot, and then find a little something else? A nine millimetre in each, Hermann, the Genickschuss in the second, the chest up tight in the first.’
‘Then why not empty that bloody van? Why take only the small bills, cut two wedges from a Brie, snap off the neck of a bottle of Moet et Chandon and drain but a mouthful?’
This definitely wasn’t good. ‘She can’t have been a decoy unless the robbers and the killer intended to silence her too. We’ll both have to search, you to the ruins, myself to where I think she might have headed, since its cover is somewhat better. Rocheleau is to remain on guard.’
‘I’ll take that bayonet and rifle and lock them in the van.’
‘Not without its keys, Hermann. The killer must have taken them.’
‘So as to break into something else?’
The bank’s depot, garage, offices or vault? Had Hermann hit on it? ‘Let’s leave that one for now.’
Louis headed off toward the Chemin des Dames with determination. Young or old, corpse or no corpse, it was always the same, a detective through and through, felt Kohler. ‘And an example to us all,’ he muttered, ‘but lieber Gott, mon vieux, is she lying up there in those woods, naked, splayed out, pegged down hard like the one I found in Munich on a Sunday, 6 May 1939 at 0540 hours?’
Ilse Grunwald had been fifteen, the throat cut so deeply, the head had all but been severed, the flashlight glinting from her eyes.
He paused. He had to, and when done, said, ‘Verdammt, I can’t be throwing up anymore. I’m just going to have to press on like the chief, and he knows it too.’
When he found the ashes, though soaking wet, they lay in the tall grass but a couple of metres from the ruins and ten along from the van. Almost side by side were two arched doorways, the farthest with an empty ocular that gazed with suspicion, as rampart by rampart the ruins descended until almost shoulder height next to the ashes. Incompletely burned charcoal lay amid what had to be the ash of starter wood and charcoal, suggesting that the robbers had come in the usuaclass="underline" a gazogene with firebox well dampened to make the producer-gas with which to feed the engine instead of gasoline or diesel fuel.
When he saw what looked to be metal, he began to sift the ashes, and when the corners of identity photos came up and then some coins, he fortunately found the keys to the van and set them all aside in a cluster on the nearby wall, only to find a little something else too. It was just lying there, yet tobacco was in such short supply, most collected cigarette butts and thought nothing of picking them up in the streets and bars, and this just had to be the megot tin of that firebox’s feeder. On its lid was an enraptured, free-spirited fin-de-siecle nude lying back on a divan, sampling one of the honey-and-absinthe throat lozenges and declaring it perfect while admiring a diamond the size of a pigeon’s egg on her finger.
An elongated puddle, parallel to the wall, lay in the grass. Deep, it indicated a heavy load, and when that truck had finally got going again, it had skidded several times, but had that girl of the shoes managed to escape, only to be caught by the killer or one of the others who must have been with him?
When he had gathered up the necessary, he glanced behind the wall and found the charred, soggy remains of what must have been a poultice.
* A lever that locks all the doors if the van is threatened.
* Tracking prices during the Occupation is exceedingly difficult, for they changed from year to year and place to place, hence best estimates for October 1943 are used.
2
Coming to a grove of beech, St-Cyr immediately began to gather a few of the nuts only to stop himself. He was now to the south of the ruins and much nearer to the Chemin des Dames. From its lower heights, he could look back out over the flat valley floor to see Hermann and then the van, the ruins running east-to-west to catch maximum sunlight whenever possible, for the Cistercians always built their abbeys this way and with plenty of water, forest and field. He could even follow the line of the hollow, now full of rainwater, that must mark the top of the once much deeper, timber-lined channel that would have conducted water from the Ailette to gristmill, forge, brewery, latrines and sawmill, and the ponds in which the monks would have raised the carp they ate instead of meat. But they would not have used that water for everything. He was, he realized, near the spring they would have visited daily for their drinking water and cooking. He could even hear it.