‘A Jew … She was married to a Jew she had kept hidden.’
Hermann had taken her in for her own safety. ‘You don’t fool around, do you, Bishop?’
‘I can’t afford to. There’s far too much at stake.’
Crumbs had fallen on the Sûreté’s waistcoat, he looking old and defeated, but had the message finally registered? Would he now be very careful not to touch the Church?
‘Bishop, why not state what you have in mind?’
Rivaille helped himself to more of the anisette. Without asking, he refilled the Sûreté’s cup. ‘This girl, this murder in our Palais … oh bien sûr it’s a tragedy, a terrible loss and one I could ill afford. She was to be my assistant here, in addition to her other duties — trusted implicitly — but we can’t let her death cloud negotiations with the Holy See and the Reich. Go carefully. Steal eggs if you must but do not awaken the hens.’
Or the rooster. Had Hermann been here, he would have had the son of a bitch up against the wall or down on his knees with a Walther P38 jammed against the back of that tonsured head. But Hermann was of the Occupier, and when in Avignon, all others had best do as the Avignonnais.
‘Begin, then, by telling me where and with whom you were on Monday evening between six p.m. and curfew.’
‘I could refuse.’
‘You won’t. Not if you want to keep the hens quiet. I would simply go to the District Magistrate for an order making you comply, and though he’s no doubt a good friend of yours, it still would be difficult for him to say no.’
‘I could then ask the Kommandant to rescind it.’
‘A request, I’m certain, he would ignore, given that he and his wife much admired the victim.’
Having been suitably prepared, St-Cyr would now begin to scrape the mould from the bread, but would he eat from the loaf? wondered Rivaille. Would he accept what he would be allowed to discover? And what of Kohler? Had that one stepped in the shit he was supposed to find?
The photograph, one of several Kohler had found in Xavier’s trunk, was of Adrienne de Langlade and there was no mistaking that the girl had been at least four months pregnant at the time. Her breasts were beginning to swell, her bellybutton to protrude. The pulled-up white cotton underpants emphasized her state. A pleasing young girl with good, square shoulders, good legs, her head cocked to one side, the shoulder-length hair thick and worn with an almost eyebrow-length fringe, looking at herself in an unseen mirror with a quizzical expression.
The right hand grasped the leg of the tripod which came between her slightly parted legs and on which was mounted a bellows camera whose black headdress, like that of a nun, was thrown back to keep the film from the light, framing the lens and box.
She had taken the photo herself in front of what must have been a full-length mirror, the snapshot revealing all but her ankles and feet. Her left hand rested on her tummy, as if she was asking, How could this be?
All of the other photographs had been taken near the mas of Mireille de Sinéty’s mother in early June of last year. He was certain of it, certain, too, that the girl definitely hadn’t looked pregnant in any of them. There’d been no shots of the petite lingère and he had the thought that she hadn’t been invited along for the picnic and the swim.
Naked, Adrienne de Langlade lay fast asleep on a bed of lavender that had been freshly cut in swaths which had fallen all around and under her. Time and again she’d been photographed that way. Bits of lavender clung to her hair. Her skin was very fair and, with the strong sunlight, fairer still. The left leg was crooked. Her arms were extended languidly above her head which was turned on its side away from the sun as if by instinct.
The mouth was slack, the hair caught the light and, even in the photos, he could see that it would have had a coppery sheen.
That of her underarms and pubes was darker. A pretty girl Xavier might well have lingered over, ogling the photos night after night in secret. But that couldn’t have been, he told himself, and wished Louis was with him. Louis had an eye for things detectives weren’t supposed to see.
The prints had been cared for. Yet he’d found them loose between a rumpled old sweater and a pair of sweat-stained trousers.
Twelve-by-fifteen-centimetre prints, a dozen of them, including the most recent.
They had rolled her over and had photographed her backside, and likely she’d got more than a sunburn out of it, for there were the shadows of at least two of those who had stood over her. An initiation into the singers, had that been it, eh? Spaggiari, Galiteau and Rochon, with Genèvieve Ravier and Christiane Bissert as witnesses?
Had the girl been dead drunk or drugged? Had the singers, or one among them, then given the photos to the bishop? They must have, but why would they have done so?
To torment him? To show him what the girl was really like — was that it, eh?
And why had Rivaille then put them here for this Schweinebulle to find? To take the heat off himself and throw suspicion on to the boy and the rest of the singers?
Xavier didn’t have much. His rucksack was years old. Kohler took it down and emptied it out. Wire snares, a much used slingshot, fishing lines, lead weights and hooks, dried apricots, garlic too …
The empty medicine bottle the boy had drained of its grappa, ‘for the toothache, Inspector’.
When he found beneath the paillasse, and under the floor-boards, the boy’s private little hidey-hole, Kohler discovered what he felt could not have been left by the bishop for him to find.
‘A hundred thousand francs,’ he said, sadly looking at four bundles of used banknotes, in five-hundreds, one-hundreds and fifties. ‘Xavier is trouble,’ Salvatore Biron had said.
Had the choirboy with the broken voice sold Mireille de Sinéty’s boyfriend to the préfet?
‘He must have, and so much for Dédou not having been waiting on the ramparts last Monday before dawn.’
What had it been that Xavier had claimed she had said on hearing Dédou hadn’t come as promised? ‘I have to go through with it anyway. I must.’ But of course the little bastard could well have been lying about that too.
Instinct said otherwise.
The Parabellum rounds had been for the Luger Dédou was supposed to have had. Thérèse Godard had been sent to the mas on Monday with a letter, but hadn’t been able to give it to Dédou and had left it in the mill.
The couple had used that letter box before, but had Xavier learned of it? The petite lingère had been ‘special’ to him. ‘The costumes,’ he had said.
The 100,000 franc reward.
Xavier hadn’t slept with the dogs. He had slept with his pal Nino up here. There were dog hairs in plenty, and Kohler took several for Ovid Peretti to compare with the one that had been caught in the girl’s fingernail.
Some of Nino’s treasures lay in a far corner. Pig bones, beef bones, duck eggs now in the half-shell and in bits and pieces, a bit of driftwood, a strap of leather … Rubbish all of it.
Crammed into the toe of a tennis shoe was one of the high heels from a pair of dress shoes. Jade green to go with the strawberry blonde hair and sea-green, smashing eyes, no doubt. Prewar and Italian-made by the look but purchased in Paris, for that’s where Adrienne de Langlade had come from. Very classy, very expensive and overlooked by the bishop. Ah yes!
Again he turned to the photos and only then noticed what Louis would have seen straightaway, that in three of them the girl’s nipples had been stiffened. ‘Wetted with alcohol?’ he wondered, she so out of it otherwise. ‘Absinthe?’ he asked. Drinking it had excited the central nervous system — in the addict, it had often caused fits of delirium, violent fist-fights and generally highly antisocial behaviour; in others, a blissful contentment, a numbness, a passivity.