‘You haven’t asked him?’
Was such a lack of familial discourse so questionable? ‘My father and I don’t discuss things, Inspector. Though I live above the house of my parents, I see little of them. I live my own life.’
He began to move away from her and she didn’t like him doing this since it said he was questioning everything she said. Everything, ah no. A grey woollen jersey skirt and Hermes block-printed silk scarf attracted him, then the pleated front of a white silk blouse, then the perfumes where he lingered and asked if they manufactured some of their own.
When she said no, he told her he had a friend in the trade who did this. ‘She’s really very good,’ he said, but didn’t tell her the name of this friend or that of her shop and its location. Instead, he left her out in the cold so that she would wonder what this friend of his would say about Chez Denise and would be unsettled. Gossip was always trouble, jealousy rampant, and compliments too hard to come by but why had he done it to her? Why?
Several of the customers and salesgirls were now stealing little looks at them. An oberleutnant, a hauptmann, their women …
Suddenly having made up his mind, the detective turned to confront her. ‘Your girls, mademoiselle. Every one of them must be questioned. Look, I’m sorry but it’s necessary. A teller was shot and killed. Someone obviously knew that car would be waiting in the street. Let’s begin with the one who brought the news of the robbery to you and Mademoiselle St. Onge.’
She must force herself to give him a hard, shrewd look. She must! ‘Very well, if that’s what you wish. Juliette is the one you will want first.’
‘Did none of them see a thing?’ he asked, caught off stride.
Her little smile must be cruel so as to put him in his place and stop him in his tracks. ‘None, Inspector. One of the girls from the shop next door came to tell Juliette who was, herself, busy with a customer.’
He would have to accept this for the moment. He would have to show the face of defeat, that of the humble detective who would now have to go away and think about it so as to put her at ease. ‘What time is it, please?’
Automatically she glanced at her wrist-watch but had to pull the sleeve up.
The watch was worn on the back of the left wrist but had he seen the scars? she wondered. Had he? ‘3 … 3.14, Inspector.’
St-Cyr gave her that little nod he reserved for those whose actions revealed rare insights into their characters. He wouldn’t ask about the jewellery yet or if she had told her friend and employer or anyone else of the shipment of cash from Lyon. For now he would have to leave it.
‘You have an eye for display, Mademoiselle de Brisson. The shop is lovely. Everything is displayed to best advantage so that the whole collection produces at once intense feelings of delight in its elegance and refinement.’
How cold of him. ‘We deal in nothing else, Inspector, and nothing less. Chez Denise is that happy marriage of employer who knows what she wants and employee and friend who carries out her every wish.’
Two women …‘I’ll show myself out. Please return to your customers. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.’
Just to prove to the customers there was nothing wrong, she forced herself to shake hands with him, and only at the last did her slender fingers betray what a herculean task it had been.
Long after he had left the shop she remained staring at the door, knowing he had seen the scars on her wrist and dreading what they would cause him to believe.
Still in the attic pied-a-terre, Kohler forced himself to slow down and think as Louis would have done. Marie-Claire de Brisson was a tidy thing. Everything about the flat suggested great attention to detail-too much so, he thought.
The girl had been adopted at birth. While at the Sorbonne she had become close friends with Denise St. Onge.
She had also taken up photography-was very good, he thought but, in so far as he could determine from a search of her dark-room and filing cabinets, had given it all up in the late spring of 1940. There were no more recent photographs on her walls or in her files. The bottles of developing solution looked unused in years though none had any dust on them. Perhaps she had wisely thought the hobby too dangerous, too open to question by the authorities? She would have needed a permit in any case. Perhaps the very cost of film on the black market had deterred her.
There were two Leicas, a Hasselbad and a Graflex press camera but all had been packed away. There were lenses, lens tissues, even spare packs of film still unopened and ready but bearing the dates of 2 April and 13 May 1940.
Stubbing out his cigarette and forgetting to pocket the butt, Kohler got up to move about the bedroom, searching the photographs on the walls both here and then in the rest of the flat.
There was in all of them nothing but beauty. Not a hint of the tragedies of life. Children in plenty, but only those with happy faces. Old people smiling. Flowers. Birds nesting. Leaves in autumn in the Luxembourg Gardens.
It was a puzzle, for if she photographed only beauty, how could she have photographed those girls? And in any case, knowing what he now did, he had to ask himself, Was she even aware of what was going on across the garden?
There were no fashion photographs, not even a hint of them. The clothes in the armoires were very chic and, though they looked like some of the clothes in the photographs of the victims, he couldn’t recall sufficient detail to match them.
Opening the french doors, he let himself out onto the balcony. Stone urns, that in summer would hold geraniums, now were cold and bleak but marked the balustrade with regimented regularity round the three occupied sides of the quadrangle. The daughter would have stood out here at night, looking over the garden and beyond the rooftops to that of the Bank of France. She would have had a cigarette. There would have been the sounds of crickets and cicadas in summer, little intrusion of traffic-hell, the city was so damned quiet at night it was like a tomb and dark if for no other reason than that it was illegal to show a light in any window.
When he found a clutch of frozen cigarette butts in the left of the two urns that abutted her turf, he knew she hadn’t just stood out here in summer. Most had lipstick on them and most had been stubbed out in anger or fear.
There was no sign of Louis across the way. He, himself, had sent Madame de Brisson downstairs to her own house thinking the woman would be sure to summon her husband from the bank. This she hadn’t done even though she’d been afraid.
Returning to the flat, he began to search in earnest for the secret compartment the daughter must use to store her negatives, prints and film. It wasn’t in the dark-room, or in any of the other rooms but lying atop the cistern in the water closet.
It was not film or photographs of naked girls whose breasts would be removed but a series of ‘Letters to Myself’ all neatly bound in leather.
Wednesday 23 December 1942
I hear his footsteps on the stairs and know my father is coming up to see me again. The sound is like a hammer in my tortured brain. It makes the chasms open and I see myself as a girl often caught between the pinning walls of his arms. I feel his hands on my naked body. I smell the sweat of him, the pomade, the garlic too-whatever we have had for supper that night. Which night? Ah, jesus, Dear Sweet jesus, I cannot remember, for each time the agony is the same, and each time I weep and pray and vow I will never tell a soul.
From the rue Quatre Septembre to the rue de la Paix and down it to the place Vendome was not far. Never one to miss the beauty of the city he loved more than any other, St-Cyr tried to slow his steps but, ah, it was no use. Mademoiselle Marie-Claire de Brisson filled his cinematographer’s mind in living colour. Against the lovely long view that ended in that tall bronze column with its statue of Napoleon as Caesar on high, he saw the girl naked in the bath, slashing her wrists with a razor.