Her head was bowed, the face covered by a hand. Kohler went to hold her by the shoulders but she shrugged him off. ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Please don’t. I’d only scream. I cannot bear the touch of a man, Inspector. I’m sorry, but that … that is the way it is for me.’
The detective was disconcerted, the weaver tense. Buemondi gave them a moment before launching himself into the studio. ‘Inspector,’ he boomed in a strongly Italian accent. ‘Mademoiselle Viviane, I’m enchanted. But … but why did you not telephone ahead?’ He threw out his arms gregariously. ‘Some wine. The lights – ah! you will need to see things properly. Take your time. Yes, yes, Inspector. Stroll at liberty. Study, my friend. Absorb. Question. The only secrets here are in the self. Lie naked upon the table and let the self come out. Be the body cast and the mask. Recognize the truth within and welcome it.’
‘Carlo, shut up! The Inspector’s no fool. He wants to ask you some questions.’
‘The murder. Yes, yes, of course. An unfortunate affair. A great loss.’
‘There. Don’t you see what I mean, Inspector? Now he moans about her death!’
‘Whereas before he couldn’t have cared less,’ said Kohler, welcoming the exchange. ‘You’ve been sexually abusing one of your daughters, monsieur, and I’ve the thumb to show for it. What other sort of hold have you got over her?’
Startled – alarmed – Buemondi threw the weaver a questioning glance. ‘Josianne-Michele lied about it, Inspector. Me, I swear I never harmed the girl. She was my …’
‘Your sweetheart! Your little Josianne …’ began Viviane Darnot.
She was close to tears.
‘Viviane, get a hold of yourself, eh? Don’t lie to the Inspector. Don’t try to pin the murder on me!’
They were shouting now.
‘You bastard! You think I did it – is that what you’ve been saying? Oh, I understand you, Carlo. I must have seen Anne-Marie with that girl, that gorgeous creature in her arms, eh? Kissing and fondling Angelique Girard, one of your little pets! Well listen, my fine egomaniac. I understood your wife. Though she was always difficult, I loved her and forgave her. And,’ she dropped her voice, ‘I understand you also, Carlo. Ah yes, but I do, you old rooster. Lecher! Whore-master! If I could, it’s you I’d kill for what you did to that child.’
‘Then use my crossbow. Shoot me also!’ Buemondi leapt away to a drawing cabinet. Yanking on a drawer, he pulled a sheet of paper out and shouted triumphantly, ‘Here, Inspector. Here it is and I have saved it for just such a moment!’
The life-sized charcoal drawing revealed at once both the professor’s character and the skill of the artist who had done it, the weaver no doubt. Ah yes. Buemondi stood as if caught crossing a lawn about to deflower his daughter. The barrel gut was there, the fleshy hips, hairy shoulders and big lips, the bull neck and arms. Licentiousness was in every particle. He didn’t just lust after the girl he was after, he ravaged her with his eyes and Gott im Himmel, he looked exactly like II Duce. That same sense of omnipotence, that same comic posturing, yet behind it all, a real bastard.
In hole after hole those two women had shot the hell out of him with that crossbow he so cherished. Several of the bolts had hit the groin area and that prick he so loved to scribble. Two had passed right through the heart, another had hit him right between the eyes.
Buemondi took a deep breath. ‘Now, Inspector, ask this one who was the archer. Ask her to deny that she went often into the hills to see the herbalist Ludo Borel and to hunt with that one for the plants with which to dye the wool for her weaving. Ask why she took my daughter Josette-Louise, not Josianne-Michele, to a clinic near Chamonix when your financier was killed. Ask what happened in the past to make the present so unpleasant.’
Ah damn! ‘Carlo, please! Enough is enough.’
The bitch! ‘Is it? Come, come, Viviane. Take off your things. Lie naked on my table. Let me make the cast of you and the mask, eh? Let the world see the truth you have hidden for so long.’
‘What truth?’ asked Kohler darkly.
The weaver’s troubled eyes sought him out. ‘It doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with Anne-Marie’s murder. Ask Jean-Paul, Inspector. Ask that one. Maybe he will give you all the answers you want.’
‘And Angelique Girard?’ asked Kohler of Buemondi. ‘Where is she?’
The professor shrugged effusively. ‘How should I know? Me, I do not keep track of my students, Inspector. Not beyond the hours of study.’
‘And those of bathing in the mud? Listen, my fine, you’ve still got traces of ochre round your eyes. That receptionist I asked to find you knew exactly where you were. In the mud again.’
‘Then you will find Angelique there, Inspector. Her back, it was bothering her. A lower vertebra, I think.’
‘Her ass?’ snorted the weaver. ‘Admit that you’ve been fucking her, Carlo, and that the poor creature is simply worn out and sore right up to her lovely lips.’
Oh-oh. They were a pair, the two of them. Kohler heaved a detective’s sigh. ‘The professor drives his car; you ride in the back. We’ll know soon enough where she aches.’
Viviane Darnot said, ‘I’d rather not come. I’d rather stay here.’ She had meant it too.
‘Delphane?’ he asked, but she did not answer.
There were footprints in the snow at the weaver’s house and immediately St-Cyr recognized Hermann’s and the woman’s – it must be her. But the tracks showed they’d been and gone. A fresh grave, no sign of the hearse or of Dedou Fratani.
He found the tracks of the red Majestic bicycle. Two sets: the one leaving early in the morning for the villa in Le Cannet; the other returning only recently. Ah Nom de Dieu, was Josianne-Michele now waiting for him in that house?
Another set of tracks all but matched Hermann’s. This set had come only recently, he thought, but had it also left the house? He gripped his chin in doubt and favoured the scruffy moustache to which the frost now clung.
Delphane, was he in there with the girl, and where the hell was Hermann? Hermann! he wanted to shout. I need you.
Snow covered the shoulders of the terracotta urns that stood about the weaver’s back garden in clusters among the abbey ruins. The door to her kitchen was open, the house in darkness. Stars were beginning to appear through the faint dusting of crystalline snow that fell to mock the very thought of Christmas that was only three days away.
Immediately and unbidden the scent of Mirage came to him and he heard a voice bell-clear and strong in praise and hope, singing ‘Oh Holy Night’. But across the silk screen of his imagination flashed the stark image of a group of shabby men, one boy in particular and their priest. A tiny village square. Walls of stone; the sound of water running somewhere … yes, yes, a tap, a stone basin that had been in use for centuries.
He was now certain of so many things and yet still uncertain of others. He heard the words: ‘Attention! For crimes against the State …’ He heard the crash of Mauser rifles even as Gabrielle Arcuri continued to sing and German soldiers, on leave in Paris, listened with tears in their eyes because that song and all others like it were universal in appeal.
Ah Nom de Dieu, Josianne-Michele, don’t hole up in this house. Let us not go through the same thing again! Hermann … where was Hermann? Jean-Paul Delphane was in the house, but was the girl dead or alive and still hunting him or waiting for the Surete to find her?
An escape network, Hermann, he said. Maquis in the hills – ah! me, I don’t know, my old one. The Buemondi woman was desperate for cash. Cash! When she had bundles and bundles of it in that safe of hers. Perhaps 3,000,000 francs, Hermann. Perhaps 4,000,000.