‘Delphane?’ he asked but rushed on. Suddenly he was lost to her. He got up to search the cupboard for something and when he had it, opened the tin and shook a little out into his hand, drew in the smell of sage.
‘The espadrille, Gabi. The shards of Roman glass that must have come from Hermann’s ruins. Ah Nom de Dieu, why have I not seen it before?’
More he would not say but rapidly gathered everything up stuffing it into pockets wherever he could find them.
‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘Tell Rene Yvon-Paul we will hunt for the osprey and when we find it, we will know that is where to fish.’
Son of a bitch, he had the answer! Not the murderer or murderess yet, ah no, it was too early for that. But the answer all the same.
The kaleidoscope had made its first complete turning. A pattern had unfolded.
7
Far below the intense blue of the sky, fresh snow blanketed the ground. It sharpened the contrast of orange-tiled roofs in their jumble against the bleached grey-white of the ruined fortress perched on the summit.
St-Cyr stood alone on that hillside. Frost was in the air. Smoke trailed thinly from the village. Goats foraged amid snow-dusted clumps of mimosa and juniper. Grey-green, the scattered ilex and olive gave to the landscape some semblance of the once luxurious forest that had stood here in ancient times. Solitary pines cast long shadows as if that same forest had now all but been forgotten.
Dedou Fratani had brought them in the hearse. Now the girl, Josette-Louise and Hermann waited in the cottage below.
He tried to put himself into the shoes of that girl’s mother. A birthday – she’d been exactly fifty-two years old. Some sixty metres from her, the assailant had held the crossbow. They’d exchanged a few words. The woman had extended the pawn ticket. Viviane, I’ve always loved you. Viviane, forgive me, please. Viviane, you don’t understand. I was helping the Resistance.
Or had it been: Mother, why couldn’t you have helped me? Mother, you knew I was down and out. Mother, I tried to sell my body in the streets of Paris but could not find the courage.
Viviane sent you money, Josette. Viviane saved you from that, though she disobeyed me.
No, no, he cautioned. It’s not Josette-Louise up there on that snow-covered rock where Hermann found the santon. It’s Josianne-Michele.
He heard the wheels of the morning’s express to Lyon as if they were still beneath them. He saw the girl, Josette-Louise, asleep before him on the opposite seat. He felt himself slipping inside her head to explore the caverns and tunnelled passageways of her mind.
My father never loved me, he said. Josianne-Michele has always been his favourite. Mother has rejected me and now … now after all the years of my absence, I must come home to face her burial and my sister with my failure.
Josette-Louise Buemondi had not drifted off to sleep easily. Instead, she had fought it long and hard. Exhaustion had ringed the dark eyes. Alone with Hermann and himself, she had stared out of the compartment windows and said so little.
She had dreaded coming home but had also feared their scrutiny and had fought sleep until only it had offered welcome respite.
Josette-Louise Buemondi. The same pale lustre to the skin, that same slender neck and gauntness, that same little brown mole high on the right cheek-bone, the same slight laziness in the right eye.
Hermann had put his coat over her and had lifted her feet up on to the seat. She had sighed – had been so deeply unconscious of them, her fleeting smile had given but a glimpse of happier times.
‘Louis … Louis, the girl’s vomiting.’
‘Wha …? Ah, Hermann. What is it?’
‘The kid’s sick. It must have been that lousy ham we had in Lyon. Ersatz like all the rest of it.’
‘Or fear. Is it not dread, Hermann, at meeting the sister of her childhood?’
Kohler broke off a bit of thyme and began to chew it. He, too, looked uphill to the ruins beyond the village. ‘Two sisters, two partings of the ways, the one to hell and the other to heaven, Louis. Fear knows no equal to the loneliness of a small village when all the doors are closed and eyes watch everything you do. I’d best get the herbalist. He’ll be able to give her something to settle that stomach.’
‘Ah yes, the herbalist. Is it that Josette-Louise believes that one will help her and therefore has brought the vomiting upon herself?’
‘You’re too suspicious. Give the kid a break eh? She’s had a rough time of it, Louis.’
Was Hermann getting soft in his old age? ‘Suspicion is midwife to detection. It is the umbilical cord of answers.’
‘And Delphane? What about our friend?’
‘He is absent as are the villagers from this hillside. Fear is at once their enemy, Hermann, and their only friend.’
Muttering, ‘You’re too deep for me,’ Kohler raised a tired hand in half-salute and pushed on up the hill. He knew that Louis would watch him until the ramparts had cut him off from view. He knew all about the threat of the maquis in those hills, of what it could only mean for both of them.
An end to their partnership; a return to hatred because only then can wars be won and enemies conquered.
He reached the spot where the crossbow had been fired and paused before turning to look back at his partner and friend.
Then he raised his arms and bent them as if aiming that same bow at Louis.
Shabby and diffident, an old trilby tilted back to expose the broad, bland brow, Monsieur Ox-Eyes and Bushy Moustache looked up at him.
Frost hung in the air they breathed. Louis extended his right hand and shook it a little as though holding the pawn ticket out and pleading with him to understand that justice must always be done no matter the consequences or opposition.
‘She didn’t do it, Louis. That kid from Paris hasn’t got it in her.’
The air burst with a puff of vapour as the words chased up to him, but Kohler knew them anyway, had already said them to himself and aloud, ‘Perhaps, but then … then …’ Mais alors … alors …
Lonely on that snow-covered hillside, Hermann was etched in relief, sharpened by the sunlight that, as with the pines, cast a long shadow from him. The air, though crisp, was pungent with the mingled perfume of sage and thyme. New leaves protruded from beneath the clumps of snow. ‘A pattern set is a pattern fixed in memory,’ said St-Cyr, but to himself.
When he turned to walk down to the cottage, the weaver stopped and she, too, stood out on that hillside for God to mock. She wore the russet cloak with hood thrown back. She looked up at him and then beyond to Hermann’s fast-dwindling figure.
He said, ‘Mademoiselle Darnot, where is the other sister, please? Our cable specifically asked that you both be here.’ In mirror after mirror he saw those same dark grey-blue eyes ache with anguish and fear. Flashing at him through the semi-darkness of some stairwell; gazing up at him through the sterile brightness of some clinic.
‘Did you have to bring her?’ demanded the weaver harshly. ‘Are you now satisfied?’
‘Mademoiselle, I asked you a question. Please, it is your duty to answer truthfully even though such answers may be used against you.’
‘Josianne-Michele has gone into the mountains, Inspector. I could not stop her.’
‘And Jean-Paul Delphane, Mademoiselle Viviane? Where, please, is he?’
She shook her head and did not come closer. Perhaps five metres still separated them. ‘I … I don’t know, Inspector.’
Again he saw that look in her eyes. Ah, it was of such tragedy, such anguish, she lay broken at his feet.