‘Hermann, have you found it yet?’ he called out from behind the bar.
‘NO!’
No … No … came the echoes.
‘He will, madame, if it’s here. He’s like that.’
Moving the right hand back to where it had covered the wound, St-Cyr again went over the corpse. She’d been trapped at the last but could have retreated, yet hadn’t taken more than a backward step or two. The killer had come in through the gap in the bar, had grabbed her by the nightgown’s coat and then an arm. There’d be bruises from the fingers, scratches perhaps. Something … They had to have something definite. The cigar ashes? he asked, but these could have been left on purpose to mislead them. Look, damn you, he said to himself. Do as Hermann would.
The floor was bare. Going down on his hands and knees again, he gently lifted the looseness of the nightgown away and ran a hand as far in under her as possible. ‘Nothing … There is nothing.’ He was certain of it.
Only when he got to her head did he find anything. It was buried well beneath her hair.
‘Ah grace a Dieu, madame,’ he sighed but was surprised and disturbed to see it was the back of a small separable cufflink. Rather common. Not of silver or gold but of tin-plated steel. Punched, pressed, the diameter all but that of the larger diamond, the post shaped like an inverted eggcup so that the eyelet of the cuff would be kept easily open as the cufflink’s head was pressed into place. Mother-of-pearl, probably. Flat and cheap and like so many, many thousands.
It could simply have been lying on the floor and could well mean nothing. The girls and women who had once dispensed the waters here had all worn grey-blue maid’s uniforms whose cufflinks, if not buttons, could well have been the same.
But had Celine Dupuis caught at a woman’s arm and inadvertently freed the cufflink, and, if so, where was the other half?
And wouldn’t that woman have worn an overcoat, which would have got in the way, unless … unless, of course, this had also been left elsewhere as it would have been with … Ah merde, had there been blood on that blouse, had it been dumped with her …
‘The victim’s overcoat, Hermann. We have to find it. Please, there may not be time. It’s urgent.’
‘Then go!’ sang out Kohler. ‘I’ll join you when I’ve finished.’
‘I’ll leave you my lantern.’
‘You do that.’
‘The Hotel du Parc, third floor. Perhaps a maid’s closet,’ said St-Cyr.
‘Don’t forget Menetrel’s office is also on that floor.’
Floor … Floor … The echoes died and Louis was gone from him. Gone, thought Kohler. Merde, where would this affair lead them? Into the arms of the Gestapo, the Garde Mobile, the Milice or the Resistance?
Laval had wanted Louis and him to handle the investigation; Bousquet hadn’t and had been upset enough at their arrival to meet them well outside Vichy.
The Buvette Lucas was near a far corner of the Hall and when he held his lantern high, Kohler saw its light reflecting from the tall, arched windows. A simple railing of art nouveau wrought iron had separated the grilled floor and sources from the curistes, the long oval of the buvette being perhaps seven metres by four across. Again there were the hanging cups, jugs and vacuum flasks, but here two eight-sided, carved stone fountains would spill the elixir into shallow basins that encircled them and above each of these basins there were taps.
Square holes made a complete cross-hatching over the floor, a grillework that brought only dismay, for if she’d thrown the earring in there, he had little hope of finding it.
Hanging the lantern from the railing, Kohler set to work. Distances were so hard to gauge here, sounds were too flat and muted. Had she really come this way? Had she even hidden behind either of those fountains?
Ivy had at one time spilled from them to trail to the basins. The leaves were brown, the basins dry. No taps dripped. Whitish encrustations of bicarbonate of soda caught the torchlight. Again there were cigar ashes, again that sense of her having knelt or crouched and then slipped away.
Absolutely terrified and yet concerned enough about her earrings to have tried to remove them both.
Through long use and much rinsing some of the glass cups had become frosted. Sip thirty cubic centimetres twice daily, monsieur. Morning and evening before eating. Gargle if you wish, but please use the gargle-atorium or whatever they called it!
‘Come on,’ breathed Kohler impatiently. ‘Lead me to it, madame.’
The earring was in one of the hanging cups — not near any of the gaps in the railing but midway between two of them. She’d not quite had time to remove the other one but must have stood here in the pitch darkness feverishly trying to do so.
Outside the Hall, he found where Vichy’s flics had encircled sets of footprints with marking string. A little snow had blown over them, but one set had probably been made by her boots. And, yes, the others were not nearly so clear but held suggestions of that hinged gap, the curse of all wooden-soled shoes, since it often trapped clay and small stones and the wearer then had constantly to tap them or flex the hinge. The snow, too, would build up in the gap, forming ice.
Those shoes made sounds that weren’t at all like those of leather-soled ones. A harsh clack, clack, which she would have heard very clearly from that floor in there.
A dancer, a singer and piano player — a good conversationalist at private dinner parties. Quite knowledgeable about many things. Birds, de Fleury had said, and then had cut himself off before revealing too much.
A working mother, a young widow. At least two sets of footprints but was the second set that of a man?
Getting down on his hands and knees — gasping in pain as his left knee objected — Kohler blew the soft snow from the prints. Only the forward halves of the wooden soles were clear, but they were larger than the toes of the boots. ‘A man’s,’ he said and looked for the scratches and gouges all such soles would bear.
There was a ridge of snow that indicated a deep gouge in the right sole. The thing was about four centimetres in length and parallel with the long axis of the print, so at some time their owner must have struck that foot against something sharp and it had cut the gouge.
Sabots or leather boots would be worn on the farms and in the hills. These prints were from town shoes and, yes, they led from the Hotel du Parc at a quick pace.
All the others that had been enclosed by the string were older, he felt — the day-to-day traffic probably and not involved. There’d been only the two of them, then, the killer and his victim.
Forcing himself to return to the body, Kohler shone the torch over the soles of her boots and then ran an explorative thumb over the scratches and cleats. At least the local gendarmes had got those prints right.
She hadn’t begun to stink as corpses soon do — the cold weather had retarded that — but when he looked along the length of her, he saw so many other corpses that he, too, asked, ‘Why you, why here, when the bloody place should have been locked?’
Louis wouldn’t have run off like that had he not realized something significant. ‘Urgent,’ he had said. ‘It’s urgent.’
But had it really been an attempt to assassinate the Marechal or had the killing been for some other and totally unrelated reason?
Crossing the rue du Parc at a run, St-Cyr made for the main entrance of the hotel, which faced on to that street. He was following in Celine Dupuis’s footsteps, he told himself, but at least up until 11 November of last year neither she nor he or anyone else could ever have gotten so close to the hotel without having first passed through the iron-fisted cordon of the Garde Mobile.