‘You were still living at the home of your aunt and uncle then?’
‘They … they had passed away. I …’
‘Had you the studio then, the job at the Musee Grevin?’
‘Yes! The … the student who had owned the rucksack had been on holiday in Switzerland but had run out of money. Please … please don’t look at me like that in the mirror, Inspector. I … I can’t tell you. I mustn’t!’
Sconces on either side of the mirror held candles whose soft light would have bathed Celine’s reflection …
The Chief Inspector went straight to the chair and bent to pick up the shoe. He would come to her now, this Surete, and would place it in her hand — she knew this, knew, too, that the tears couldn’t be stopped.
‘I loved her as one does a sister. I had no one else. No one, damn you!’
‘On arrival here in Vichy, mademoiselle, you met with Auguste-Alphonse Olivier. You’d been couriering messages for him in Paris. Perhaps he’d a snapshot of you that Mademoiselle Dupuis had given him, but she felt the perfume necessary as well — a little password, n’est-ce pas, and had asked you to wear it.’
Her head was bowed; the faded pink satin slipper, with its tightly wound ties, was in both hands; the finely curving lashes were wet.
‘He discovered you couldn’t see when going from a lighted room into darkness. He warned you not to tell us of your night blindness so that he could use it. You were to watch what you said to us and what you did, but you began to look for things yourself. ‘Why was this, please?’
The Inspector was still looking at her reflection in the mirror, a glass in front of which Celine would have stood to be admired, made love to, fucked! ‘He … he was upset with me for not having told him of my night blindness. When … when I asked where Celine was, for she, not him, was to have met me at the train, he … he said he didn’t know.’
Yet he must have. ‘You then found out and threw up before seeing her for yourself.’
Ever so slightly she nodded.
‘He didn’t want you coming to this hotel, did he?’
‘It … it was not even mentioned.’
The delicately boned chin and lower jaw were still determined. The sea-green eyes avoided him. ‘Then can you think why Monsieur Olivier would have warned me to stay away from it and threatened me if I didn’t?’
‘Monsieur Laval’s clairvoyant … You asked him about her?’
‘I did.’
‘Then perhaps it is that you should ask her yourself, Inspector?’
‘Shall I leave you here, then, while I do?’ he said angrily.
‘Celine was silenced; Lucie also, Inspector.’
‘And the others?’
‘Most probably.’
‘But she tried to protect him? She tried to hide the earrings?’
Was it that this Surete did not want to believe the truth? ‘Monsieur Olivier took her from the Hotel du Parc and she went willingly with him, Inspector. She tried to remove and hide the earrings both to protect Blanche and Paul — she must have known they’d taken them — and to let you and Herr Kohler know who had betrayed her.’
‘He’d have taken them, then, would he?’
‘Yes. Yes, I tell myself that must have been so.’
‘But he didn’t, mademoiselle. Had Monsieur Olivier seen even one of his wife’s earrings, he’d have removed it and left us to find the other, or come back himself to search it out.’
‘Then why didn’t her killer take it?’
‘Because, I think, the assailant wanted us to find it. That is certainly why the cigar band was left, but to point us towards Albert Grenier and the past.’
An earring had been loosened … ‘And Edith Pascal?’
‘Would not have left any of it, for she would not have wanted to implicate in any way the man she loved.’
‘A resistant.’
A grace a Dieu, the girl had broken at last. ‘You were his courier in Paris. Please, mademoiselle, you can trust both Hermann and myself. Monsieur Olivier told me he was district leader of the FTP. Hermann knows of this also.’
‘Then you will know, as I do, that Monsieur Olivier has people at his command. The slogans we saw on those walls, the warning Monsieur Bousquet was given …’
Mademoiselle Dupuis’s carte d’identite. ‘The civil war the boys speak of.’
‘Has started.’
As he listened to the street, listened to the town, Kohler hoped Louis could prise what was needed from the sculptress before it was too late. At the very edges of the pollarded, tree-lined boulevard de l’Hotel de Ville, the shadows were deeper, the darkness complete in places, thinner where the stumpy, naked branches reached out to the snow-covered road. Two velo-taxis struggled towards him. A few pedestrians were about but none of the town’s autobuses aux gazogene, for those would have stopped running at 7 p.m. as they had done even before the Defeat. Like towns and villages all over France, Vichy shut down hard and early for most people, even with the presence of the Government.
Far in the distance, a Wehrmacht motorcycle patrol let the world know it was busy. Out of the darkness urgent voices came.
‘Cheri, I forgot the blankets.’
‘Merde, Heloise, you know how cold it is in that flat of theirs. Now we’ll have to keep our overcoats on and play cards in mittens!’
Parsimoniously the light from the blue-blinkered torch was rationed. Now on, now off, the husband smoking an American cigarette, the tobacco mild, totally foreign, raising hackles only to have them die as the couple hurried past, not even realizing he was standing in the shadows. Shivering. Not wanting, at the moment, to think about Giselle and Oona and Paris, for people there said exactly the same things, and if one stayed out beyond the curfew, one stayed put until 5 a.m. or else!
Giselle, he knew, often went round the corner to see her friends and former colleagues at the house of Madame Chabot on the rue Danton. Hadn’t he leased the flat on the rue Suger just so that she could do that and not feel lonely when he was away?
Oona would have gone after her by now. Oona never said a thing about Giselle’s little visits. Close … those two had become really close.
‘But their living with me can’t go on,’ he said aloud and to himself but softly. ‘Louis and I’ve crossed too many. One of these days we’ll all be taking a train east to nowhere unless I can get them out of France and to safety. Louis, too, and Gabrielle.’
As if to mock him and the night and Vichy, and the Occupier, some son of a bitch put his wireless set next to an open window and cranked the volume up.
‘Ici londres … ici londres … des francais parlent des fran-cais …’
‘Jesus merde alors, idiot, have some sense!’
‘Radio-paris ment.’ Radio-Paris lies …
Kohler fired two shots harmlessly into the night sky above him. Kids … it was probably just that couple’s kids!
Immediately the waveband was switched to ‘Lily Marlene’* and he heard the voice of Louis’s chanteuse reaching out to the boys on both sides of this lousy war.
‘Gabi …’ he said, swallowing with difficulty at the thought. Some stopped on their way to listen. Others hesitated. One even began to hum along with her.
A last glance up the street revealed that a van — perhaps an armoured one — had drawn to a stop some distance away.
When he looked back down the boulevard towards the rue du Pont, he thought he could detect another one but they made no sound; he hadn’t even heard them. Like soldiers everywhere in this bitter winter, he’d been sucked right in by that voice.