There were so many things that needed looking into. Her belt, the cabochons, they’d tell a story with the enseignes and talismans. There were pewter scissors hanging from the girdle. There was a dirk in its richly tooled sheath of silver and leather. There was also a plain soft brown velvet pouch — needles and thread, no doubt. Did she carry the tools of her trade as well? he wondered.
Easing his back, he stood a moment. ‘You are begging us to become detectives of those times. For myself that may be possible, but for my partner, let me tell you he is definitely of the present. He lives with two women and enjoys them both but rarely, and never at the same time, or so I am given to understand. It’s curious, isn’t it, seeing as the one is almost twice the age of the other? Both are très gentilles, très belles, très differentes, yet are fast friends. War does things like that.’
He knew she would have been shocked — intrigued, but so modest her eyes would have ducked away. She was young — perhaps two years younger than Hermann’s Giselle — and pretty. Not beautiful, but lovely — très charmante. One could tell she’d been decent, honest, diligent, steadfast and true, but the detective in him had to say, ‘I mustn’t be a sentimental fool.’
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t avoid the gaping throat. Had she the voice of an angel? Just what had she known and had her killing really been to silence her?
Hatred, rage — so many things were evident in her murder, a total lack of conscience, a ruthless arrogance that frightened. She’d have been alone, must have been terrified. Had sex been denied? One always had to ask, and where, please, was the murder weapon?
Caught in the flesh there was another bit of winter-grey lavender. Bending closer, he teased it away, said, ‘This clung to the haft of the sickle, if that really was the weapon.’ And furious with himself for not having any envelopes — the constant shortages these days — found a scrap of paper in a pocket, another of the leaflets the Allies were dropping to encourage resistance. Carefully he gathered the bits from the floor, then used yet another leaflet to hold the hairs that had fallen when her assailant or someone else had cut off a sample.
Though faint, there was the scent of coriander and cloves.
‘A toilet water,’ he said. ‘Did you make it yourself, according to a recipe from those times?’
Mon Dieu, but she was so of the past, her skin had even been anointed with one of the unguents of those days. ‘You’re a puzzle,’ he said, and then, ‘Forgive me.’
Abruptly he broke the fingers of her left hand. Her little treasure rolled away, and for a moment he was too preoccupied to say a thing.
‘A pomander,’ he managed at last. ‘Of gold and in the shape of a medieval tower with battlements, whose lid is hinged and with a fine gold chain and clasp.’
There were second- and third-storey windows in the walls, and embrasures for firing arrows — openings from which the scent could constantly escape in those times of plague to momentarily purge the stench of raw sewage and rotting refuse in the streets. But there were few of these openings and he had the thought that the pomander must have been modelled after an actual tower in the Palais.
The pomander was filled with half-centimetre-sized spheres of grey, polished ambergris. Though hard to define, its scent was musty, earthy and still quite strong, though he had the thought the ambergris wasn’t recent.
All over the walls there was the finely engraved design of an alternating upright lute, separated by a downwardly pointing needle, beneath which was an upended thimble to catch a single droplet of blood.
The pomander was very old and, in keeping with the riddles of those times, he wondered if in its design there wasn’t a rebus, a puzzle with which she would tease others to discover its true meaning?
When he opened the purse, he found gold double dinars, base-silver dineros and silver pennies, gold écus and agnels, salutos, ducats and a Cretan coin, an exquisite piece, dating perhaps from the first century BC. Cast with all its imperfections of roundness, it held the beautifully executed, raised design of a maze.
‘Le fil d ’Ariane,’ he sighed. ‘Is this why you carried it?’ Ariadne’s clue. The thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. ‘Were you trying to indicate that should something happen to you, that others must find the thread and follow it?’
Among the hoard at the bottom of the purse there was a tin of sardines that had definitely not come from the very early Renaissance or from such a far distant time as the maze.
‘Hermann,’ he said. ‘Hermann, what is this?’ But his partner was busy elsewhere.
The corridor was dark except for the faint flickering of an ‘Occupation’ fire in the room ahead. Kohler waited. Drawn by the smell of smoke that the mistral had driven down the chimney and throughout the palace’s ground floor, he had at last found them.
Their voices were muted, the patois not easily understood and soon silenced, they sensing an intruder.
The monk, still with hood covering his head, sat to the left on a three-legged stool that must have been rescued from a medieval cowshed; the boy was to his right, sitting on the hearthstone, all but hidden under a filthy horse blanket and no doubt freezing.
‘Okay,’ sighed Kohler. ‘Let’s start by your telling me who the hell you are and why the kid’s here, and don’t tell me he’s taken the vow of silence.’
Such impatience befitted Gestapo Paris-Central. ‘My name is Brother Matthieu. I am envoy to His Eminence, the Bishop. I do odd jobs.’
‘In sackcloth?’
‘It’s my mistral coat. You’d be surprised how effective are the clothes of our departed brethren. Six hundred years ago the mistral was every bit as much of a curse. Now, please, Inspector, I must send Xavier back to the kitchens and to his bed. The boy knows nothing of the matter here.’
Neither of them had turned from the fire. Too afraid perhaps. The room was barren except for the stool, a wooden soup bowl, a wooden spoon and a small cast-iron stew pot whose lid had been set aside.
A thin litter of reeds barely raised the threat of a fire.
‘Xavier is a ward of the Church, Inspector, and was given into God’s Holy Service by his parents as was I myself. We share much in common, and out of the great goodness of his heart he has brought me a modest repast for which I am truly grateful.’
‘Un civet de lièvre, eh?’ snorted the Kripo. A hare stew. Both continued to stare at the tender flames. ‘Hey, mon fin, trapping hare and rabbit is illegal, and so is eating meat on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and it is Wednesday now.’
All spoils to the victor, even small game. ‘Are you threatening me with three years in prison, Inspector, or with forced labour in the Reich?’
The official and much-touted penalty.
The face that had turned to look up at him was in shadow but darker still and fierce, the nose prominent and scarred.
‘Pull the hood back. Go on, do it!’
‘If it pleases you,’ came the mild rebuke. The harshness of a perpetual smile registered in once broad lips, the lower of which had been tightly folded up and in by the surgeons of twenty-five years ago. The rugged, scarred cheeks, with the grey-black bristles of a thin and closely clipped beard, hid nothing. Not the terrible shrapnel wounds of that other war; not the fear, the pain of knowing one had been about to die — that never left a person; not the reprieve and the disfigurement. Une gueule cassée, one of the Broken Mugs.
There were pouches under the dark grey eyes, one of which was permanently half closed, but the intensity of the gaze had mellowed a little as sympathy had registered starkly in the face of the detective.