The wind froze the cheeks and brought tears. There were no lights. The streets were empty. Muffled by the incessant racket, the sound of the hooves was hardly heard.
‘The cours Jean Jaurès,’ managed St-Cyr.
‘Save it,’ shot his partner. Impatiently Kohler tugged at the cloak. There was no response. He got up and tried to put a word into the driver’s ear, but felt a grip of iron on his wrist. ‘The Palais des Papes,’ was all the man said.
And is this the way it’s to be? wondered St-Cyr. The silent treatment?
‘Nothing is colder than leather in the cold,’ he grumbled. ‘Not even a blanket has been provided.’
The nag took its time. Perhaps it was rebelling against being left behind when most of its fellows had been sent to Russia, perhaps it was simply old age which made it so uncooperative.
When the road began to climb, the stick was applied more rigorously. Ice soon caused trouble and their driver, thinking it would be better perhaps, took a slight turning on to a much narrower street where the cobbles were every bit as icy.
The darkness increased. Houses closed in on either side — many were substantial and had been built in Renaissance times and at the height of Avignon’s power. From 1309 until 1377, the Papal Court had ruled from a city which had teemed with over 80,000 residents, by some reports, but had also had a ‘floating’ population of jugglers, minstrels, carnival dancers, thieves, con artists and prostitutes, thus earning it the sobriquet of the Second Babylon, or more politely where the popes were concerned, the ‘Babylonian Captivity’.
At present there were perhaps no more than 50,000 residents and travellers were few, except for the Occupier and his minions. Yet the town was still very much a centre of wealth and power, of old money and old ideas.
‘Louis, take a look behind us.’
Blinking, St-Cyr cleared his eyes. Faintly in the near distance, blue-shielded, slit-eyed headlamps were following.
‘Three cars,’ he mused.
‘But whose?’ demanded Kohler.
‘The préfet, the bishop and the Kommandant — who else in these days of so few automobiles?’
It was an uncomfortable thought.
The Palais des Papes was as labyrinthian as he’d remembered it from years ago, thought St-Cyr. Brutally cold, insufferably dark, dank and fretted constantly by the wind, its many cavernous rooms and corridors seemed never to end and one had to ask, Why here, why now? And one had to answer, Was this not often a place of murder?
Hobnails ringing, their driver strode on ahead and at a turning, the shadow of him was flung upon a wall from whose thick and flaking, chipped and hammered plasterwork appeared the stark face of another age: 1343 perhaps.
From 1822 until 1906 the Palais had been a barracks, its wealth of early Renaissance frescoes plundered by soldiers so certain of profit they had even designed a tool to better cut and prise the paintings away.
A ruined scrollwork of grapevines gave the delicate green and brown of those time-faded days. ‘She’s in here,’ grunted their guide impatiently, and tearing the shade from the lantern, flung light over a magnificent fresco of songbirds and swans, gardens and flowers, and a clearing from which a hare bolted before the threat of a pontiffs gloved hand on which was perched a hawk.
‘Mon Dieu,’ exclaimed St-Cyr, the breath escaping him.
‘La Chambre du cerf,’ grunted their guide dispassionately. The Stag Room.
She was lying on the floor, on her back but with her face turned away from them, and her long golden hair was bound by a tight headband of silver brocade in which there were insets of pale blue enamelled violets.
The right arm had been flung aside, its hand open, the beringed fingers now rigid.
Bent at the elbow, the left arm lay across her waist, its fist clenched tightly as if, in a last subconscious gesture of defiance, she would not give up its contents but would hide and hug them to herself even as her body collapsed.
Much blood had flowed from her to pool and darken on the glazed and soldier-ravaged tiles. Arterial blood had been pumped so hard, it had sprayed across the floor and over the wall to stain medieval fishermen and run down the long white neck of a swan that was about to be trapped for the table six hundred years ago.
Blood was spattered down her front — had she been on her knees and begging God to intervene? Had she fled to here? Had she run from her assailant? Why had she been in the Palais at all?
‘Leave us. Leave the lantern,’ breathed St-Cyr to their guide but not averting his gaze and aghast at what lay before them, for she was not dressed as she would have been today, but was in the finery of the very early Renaissance and as a maiden of substance, a petitioner to the Papal Court perhaps.
Time clashed — the present, the past, those intervening epochs when the palace had been a prison during the Revolution and then a barracks.
Time folded in on itself, he seeing the victim against the faded frescoes and broken tiles but seeing, too, in the imagination, the furnishings that once would have decorated the Palais, the tapestries, the velvet of its carpets — triple pile, it had been reported — the gold, the silver.
Faintly Kohler said, ‘Our boy has already buggered off.’
‘Good.’
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Merely that, like those who made a point of following us, he was meant to be unsettling at a time when we can least afford it. Now go and find him. Pry what you can from him.’
Leave me alone with her.
‘You’ll need me here.’
‘Then please don’t vomit all over the place. If you have to throw up, head for the Latrines Tower. It’s near the far corner of the old palace. It’s where the Revolutionaries dumped the bodies of the sixty Royalists they had imprisoned here and then murdered in a moment of passionate fervour in 1791. If you think this is blood …’
‘Look, I won’t be sick. Not this time.’
St-Cyr had heard it all before. It wasn’t just the bodies they had had to examine. It was the roll call of them right back to 1914 and that other war. Hermann had recently lost his two sons at Stalingrad. He’d had a breakdown during their last investigation, had been on Benzedrine for far too long.
Always it was blitzkrieg for them, and almost always there were things like this to confront them.
‘Please hold the lantern up. Let us see her as completely as possible.’
Her throat had been savagely opened. ‘The windpipe, Hermann. The gullet and main arteries, muscles and nerves — the wound must continue to the cervical vertebrae. A little more and she would have been decapitated. She wouldn’t have moved after this. Her assailant had to lower her to the floor.’
Kohler crouched to point out a few short strands of hair that had been cut and left clinging to the blood. For a moment he couldn’t say anything, then at last he blurted, ‘Un sadique? Jésus, Louis, why us? Why here? Why now?’
He was referring to a previous case and another sadist, but it was odd that her killer — if it had been the killer — had found it necessary to take a sample of her hair. ‘Nineteen years old, I think,’ said St-Cyr to calm his partner.
‘Nineteen it is.’
The lantern was brought closer to the body, Louis removing his fedora so that it wouldn’t shade her as he went to work. He loved the challenge, could stomach anything, thought Kohler. Not short, not tall, but blocky and, even with the starvation rations of the Occupation, still somewhat corpulent, the Sûreté’s detective crouched and began to get to know their victim. He’d be ‘talking’ to her soon. He always did that and always it seemed to help.
‘Ah merde, Hermann, it’s as if she had stepped right out of the pages of history. The dark green woollen cloak is trimmed with white ermine tails. The gown is of saffron silk and decorated with a faint design, but over this kirtle, whose tight sleeves, collar and hem are visible, she wears a cote-hardie of cocoa-brown velvet whose bodice is of gold brocade and laced up the front from the waist to the softly curving, now much blood-spattered neckline.’