The robbery … ‘You’re full of surprises,’ snorted Kohler. Somewhat diffident, somewhat chubby, a gardener, a muse, a reader of books and a fisherman when he could break the law and get away with it and find the time, Louis was fifty-two years of age, himself a little older. The scruffy brown moustache was tweaked, a shred of tobacco plucked from generous lips and examined closely in case it was worth saving. The shortages, the things one did to overcome them.
‘Well, tell me what it is you’ve found, Hermann. Please, suspense I do not need in my life, having had enough of it already with you.’
‘She was chloroformed up in the attic.’
The Frenchman spun round. ‘She was what?’
Kohler grinned hugely and pulled down his lower left eyelid in mock salutation before triumphantly thrusting the crumpled cotton pad at him. ‘I found this behind the bathtub. They couldn’t have had time to search for it. She may still be alive, Louis. Alive!’
‘Chloroformed …’ squawked the Surete, alarmed.
‘And why not? What better place?’
‘Then is it that those who emptied the house in such a hurry were the same as those who abducted the girls?’
Kohler swallowed hard. ‘The bastards who pulled off that bank job wouldn’t have had chloroform, would they? There’s nothing to suggest it was them, Louis.’
‘Then why were the photographs scattered if not to tell the police what happened here?’
Why indeed? Surely the kidnappers wouldn’t have deliberately left the photos to point the finger at themselves?
Hermann found a broken cigarette and lit up. A giant with frizzy, greying hair that was not black or brown but something in between, the Bavarian had the heart and mind of a small-time hustler and the innate suspicion of the farmboy he had once been. A bad Gestapo-lousy would be a better word-he was a doubter of Germanic invincibility who had suffered for such doubts. The scar down the left cheek from eye to chin and the other one across the chest from shoulder to hip were from another case, a rawhide whip and a lesson he was supposed to learn.
An older brother had inherited the small farm near Wasserburg but, long before the deaths of his parents, Hermann had wanted to become a big-city detective. Now he was no longer sure of this but nothing short of a bullet or the piano-wire garrotte of Gestapo retribution could intervene. He was stuck with it, and with the Occupation, and so made the best of a bad bargain.
He had two women in Paris to warm a bed he seldom used. Giselle, a young and very vibrant hooker from the house of Madame Chabot around the corner on the rue Danton, and Oona, a Dutch alien he sheltered, though everyone in Gestapo circles must know of it.
A man for the times and in his element. A man on holiday. Well, almost.
‘Let me keep the pad, Hermann.’
‘Certainly. Just tell me where the photographer got the chloroform.’
‘And the film.’
Questions, there were always questions.
Patiently they gathered the photographs into a pile for each victim. From time to time they studied them and made terse comments or paused to ease an aching back or knees, but for the most part they were tireless. Two very determined men who knew they had little time in which to find Joanne alive.
All of the girls had good bodies-hell, most of that age were biological honey pots, thought Kohler, and wasn’t it a pity so many of the young men were dead or away in the Reich in POW camps or with the forced labour brigades or hiding out in the woods and hills of France with the maquis, the ‘terrorists’, the fledgeling Resistance? ‘But why the stipulation of chestnut hair and eyes, Louis?’
‘Such specifics demand a rationale.’
‘A sister, a former lover, a mistress or hated mother,’ offered the Gestapo.
‘Or nanny.’
‘Right back to the crib, eh?’
‘They’ve all been photographed in exactly the same poses, Hermann.’
‘On or against the same pieces of furniture? Naked and trapped in the same …’ Quickly Kohler sorted through three of the piles, then sat back on his heels and sighed. ‘That corner over there, I think. Behind the armchair and sofa, beside the lamp-squashed in next to the desk and with the vitrine full of porcelain and silver directly behind them so that the light reflected off the curvature of the glass for special effects. Ah merde, Louis, with what are we dealing?’
Each of the girls had retreated in shock to cower in that same corner, dismayed and in tears, with a breast clasped hard or the base of the throat and, in two of the photos, the other hand tightly gripping the crotch.
St-Cyr tried to clear his throat, but still a catch remained. ‘Surely someone bent on humiliating a succession of young women would have been distracted sufficiendy by fear of discovery and would not have chosen the same settings for all fourteen girls?’
Yet when the photos had been spread out in broad arcs across the living-room floor, they realized that, indeed, each girl had been caught in almost exactly the same poses and settings. On the chaise-longue and looking up into the camera, most with doubt and fear, one self-consciously smiling, for she had got the message and had thought perhaps that by offering the use of her body she could escape. Poor thing.
‘They were all photographed in a prearranged sequence, Louis. First the clothes and the modelling, the girls modestly getting undressed and dressed behind a screen.’ Kohler tapped a photo. ‘Then, having got used to the camera, a few shots in evening gowns on the staircase with the chandelier’s glimmer in the eyes and diamonds around the neck and wrists-are they really diamonds?’
‘Perhaps, but then …’
‘Paste perhaps. So, okay, it’s something to think about, seeing as there’s gold or silver jewellery elsewhere-it is gold or silver, isn’t it? Hey, it looks like it.’
‘Then a few more shots in the bedrooms, Hermann, and on up the stairs to the attic but never were any photos taken in the rooms up there. Never.’
‘But into the main bathroom and finally, the insistence that it would really be best if a shoulder was bared or a bit of thigh.’
‘Still no gun and no threats,’ muttered St-Cyr. ‘But to ease the minds of nervous young ladies whose stations in life might not have matched this place, there would have to have been more than just words of reassurance. The presence of another woman perhaps?’
A man and a woman, and a kid from Belleville … ‘Good. Yes, that’s very good, Chief. Having to work with me is toning you up, eh? So, come on, my fine flic from the Surete, let your big brother from the Gestapo show you a little something else.’
‘The balcony off the attic?’ mused St-Cyr.
‘Verdammt!’ snorted Kohler. ‘And here I thought I was going to be one up on you.’
From the french windows of what might have been a bedroom or the sitting-room of an attic suite, they looked out into the rapidly fading light across a balcony that ran to a stone balustrade and urns and continuously around the three sides of the quadrangle, servicing every one of the houses and offering a ready means of coming and going.
‘I’ll quiedy ask of the neighbours, Hermann. Nothing so alarming here as your presence, I think. Not just yet.’
‘Then I’ll chase up the robbery details and see if I can find out if the other girls are listed as missing.’
‘Of course, but please don’t alert the prefet. To invade his territory is to stamp on his balls and disturb the city.’
Paris and its environs were Talbotte’s beat. The Surete and its Gestapo counterpart in the fight against common crime had the rest of the country to forage, and in any case, their investigation was totally unofficial.
Intuitively Kohler understood that Louis needed to be alone. ‘Take care, mon vieux,’ he said, gripping him by the arm. ‘I’ll drop back in a couple of hours and we’ll go over to Chez Rudi’s for a bite to eat.’