‘You know, don’t you,’ she said at last.
That boyhood intuition had served him well. ‘Yes … yes, I know,’ he said.
Hands in the pockets of her cloak, the weaver tightly shrugged. ‘Josianne-Michele needed help, Inspector – qualified doctors and psychiatrists. Against Anne-Marie’s wishes I took the girl to Chamonix, yes, and we were there when … when the financier killed himself in my father’s villa.’
‘Josianne-Michele?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. The girls were sixteen at the time. Anne-Marie was at her wits’ end. Carlo would do nothing. I thought … That is, I … I interfered, if you want the truth. I came down here and together, Josianne and I went to Chamonix to see an old friend of my father’s.’
‘You told no one? Not her mother or her father?’
‘Neither of them knew.’
‘But Carlo Buemondi has told my partner that he demanded the girl be brought back here?’
‘Yes, yes, Carlo said the treatments weren’t working and he wanted his little pigeon back. The man’s a bastard, Inspector. You saw how she bit your friend. Carlo raped her repeatedly.’
‘His own daughter? His little Josianne …?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t let it happen any longer but … but Anne-Marie made me bring her back.’
‘Knowing what he was doing to the girl? Please, mademoiselle, the time for family secrets is past.’
He’d find out anyway; he had that look about him. ‘Josianne-Michele had tried to kill herself, Inspector. Not once or twice, but several times. It’s true the treatments weren’t working.’
‘Is it also true that your lover and friend, Madame Anne-Marie Buemondi, asked you to take her daughter to Chamonix?’
‘Yes, yes, it’s true.’ Ah merde! He’d discover the truth and all would be lost. ‘We’d been there for nearly four months and … and nothing seemed to be working. Josianne-Michele herself begged me to bring her home even though she knew exactly what awaited her.’
‘Was she in love with the herbalist’s eldest son even then?’
There was a nod, the woman brushing a booted foot over the snow to clear a small patch. ‘If love can have its roots in loneliness then, yes. Everyone up there in that village, Inspector, was only too well aware of what Carlo had been doing to the girl. You see, they had the aftereffects to contend with, isn’t that correct? Madame Peretti, that blind woman who sees everything, has the memory of that child’s screams on her conscience.’
‘And now?’ he asked, longing for his pipe and quiet contemplation.
‘Now she waits like all the rest of them to see what you and your friend will do.’
‘And the Nazis.’
‘Yes, yes, and them.’
‘What happened at the villa near Chamonix, mademoiselle?’
He was so intent, she’d have to tell him something. ‘My father telephoned from London to say that the villa was urgently needed by a friend and that I should leave the key with our gardener and caretaker. Josianne-Michele was at the clinic – about three kilometres away, in the town. I packed our things and did exactly as my father asked. It was me you saw sitting in that waiting-room when the nurse came to ask you what was the matter.’
‘I’d fallen. I’d hit myself. There was blood on the back of my head.’
She held her breath. Puzzled, then baffled by something, he asked, ‘But why that clinic, mademoiselle? Why did I go there and not to a pharmacy or the hospital?’
When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘I was looking for you, wasn’t I?’
Her lungs filled, her chest rose. She turned away and he saw her shoulders slump in defeat as she looked downhill towards the cottage, hidden in its little valley.
‘Not me, Inspector. Jean-Paul Delphane. You were after that one and you had followed him to the clinic because he had come to find me.’
‘After the death of the financier?’
It was no use. Things could not be hidden from him for long. ‘Yes … yes, after Stavisky’s death.’
‘But you were in that villa before it, mademoiselle? Me, I remember seeing you in a stairwell. Your eyes … you were hiding among some things. You were holding your breath.’
‘Just as I am now?’
‘Yes … yes, exactly!’
‘Then my back must have been turned to you, Inspector, and you could not possibly have seen my eyes.’
‘There was a mirror on the wall in front of me, mademoiselle, and you were behind me. The staircase rose above you. There were some hangings – it is, and was, all in semi-darkness, a sliver of light, a triangle of it, the frame of the mind rapidly opening as the cinematographer’s aperture does in shade, only to close down as I moved away from you and more light entered the stairwell.’
Ah damn, he had seen her. She must walk away from him, walk right back into the present and go down to Josette-Louise. She must cradle that poor child in her arms as she had so often before, and weep over the death of Anne-Marie.
My lover, she said, but only to herself. My heart and my life.
*
Kohler didn’t like it. The village was too still. Beyond the rampart gate, that ugly warren of narrow, twisting streets boxed him in. Shuttered windows looked down with suspicion and alarm. Snow clung tenaciously to mossy crevices and ledges. Ivy climbed yellowish-grey walls but there was little of it. A tendril strained to reach a shutter three floors up in brilliant sunlight. The pale ochrous paint of the shutters was peeling.
He knew he was being watched; knew then with absolute certainty the village was united in its silence and afraid.
Winding steps led steeply to another street just visible. No one had bothered to sweep the snow from their doorsteps. There were few footprints, but one set led from house to house and at each door, a new set of prints appeared to follow those of the others. Dedou Fratani, hearse-driver, village cop and general handyman when not flogging stuff on the black market, had been busy but had said nothing of it when he’d picked them up at the station in Cannes.
Since dawn the men of the village had been waiting for Louis and himself. They’d be at the cafe or up at the church. The Abbe Roussel would urge caution and counsel silence.
The bastards must be only too well aware of the maquis in the hills. The Gestapo Munk would hold them responsible and if not that one, then Jean-Paul Delphane.
Kohler began to hunt for the herbalist’s shop only to find himself drawn deeper and deeper into the web of interconnecting streets. They’d view him as at one with Munk; as far as they were concerned, one Gestapo was as bad as another.
Water ran from a tap at a plain stone fountain in a tiny square of no name. Ice rimmed its basin. Footprints led up to it, then went away. The sound of the water was everywhere in the stillness of the square. Directly above him, the sky was still so very blue, though the afternoon was getting on.
Snow clung to eaves where orange-red tiles jutted out.
The water was ice cold. He wet his throat and looked around at closed shutters. An iron-grilled, ground-floor window sought him out. Beyond its bars and glass and lace curtains, an old woman in black and wearing a shawl crossed herself when he noticed her.
You are of the Gestapo, monsieur, he heard her saying to herself. You are as the bell that tolls before death comes.
Several archways of stone provided walkways from house to house above the street. Steps led down into cellars, while the street itself went uphill under the arches. Jesus it was narrow – dished so as to carry the run-off, and cobbled. Globular terracotta urns held grape and trumpet vines that twisted up the railing of a rickety set of nearby stairs.
There were gas lanterns the black-out didn’t allow – no time to even give them a wash of blue paint. The Occupation of the south had been too rapid. Now the villagers simply didn’t bother to light their lamps. Ah yes.
Figs and cacti grew in other urns, olive trees from some, herbs in still others and winter lettuces the cold snap had finished.