‘Provins is only about 80 kilometres from Paris, Hermann. Kempf and le Blanc could have gone there under the assumed identities, hidden the cash, and come back easily under Kempf’s auspices using their own identities and no one really the wiser. They could be using the Chateau des belles fleurs bleues. Verges and his son might no longer be alive.’
Uncomfortable at the thought, Kohler fiddled with a cigarette. ‘It doesn’t make a bit of sense having a man-shy thing like Marie-Claire de Brisson working with those two humpers. By rights that third set of papers ought to have been for Denise St. Onge, not her.’
‘Then is it that she asked Mademoiselle de Brisson to have those papers forged for her friends, Hermann, or is it that Mademoiselle St. Onge doesn’t even know of them?’
A man had turned in the alarm on the engravers. No doubt he had spoken fluent French. But had Denise St. Onge been the one to warn her lover there might be trouble?
Kohler recalled the photograph on her mantelpiece of her and Kempf and how the hat of the banker’s daughter had cast its shadow behind the couple to spoil the snapshot. In just such little things were there sometimes answers.
‘Did Mademoiselle de Brisson lie to me about being in the back of the shop with Mademoiselle St. Onge?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Was her employer and friend watching the street for the robbers or following Joanne, or both?’
‘Then why scatter the photographs if you’re a part of it?’
Why indeed. It was a problem.
Kohler lit the cigarette and took two deep drags before sharing it. ‘Was that teller silenced, Louis? Did he recognize the Sonderfuhrer from an earlier visit with Mademoiselle St. Onge, a visit perhaps to put pressure on the banker to extend her shop more credit?’
It was a possibility, but an idiot could have hit the teller at that range.
Again they came back to the woman in the street. Had she felt Joanne a threat and followed her simply for this reason? If so, then there might be no connection to what had been going on in that house, only its final interruption.
‘An amateur photographer,’ said Kohler. ‘A good one but one who, on the surface at least, hasn’t used her cameras since before the Defeat and in any case takes only sweetheart photos because …’
A cloud of cigarette smoke filled the air. ‘Because “To forget is to survive.” Our Mademoiselle de Brisson said this to me at the shop and now you have supplied the answer as to why she said it.’
‘But if sexually abused, why the desire to abuse and kill girls who want to become mannequins and then, only those with chestnut hair and deep brown eyes?’
‘To do to others what she herself has had to endure, Hermann. To get back at what has happened-it’s common enough, but is Mademoiselle St. Onge aware of her friend’s abuse and using it in some way? The girls, that house …?’
‘Or to extend her credit at the father’s bank?’
‘Yes, the bank, or is it that the daughter herself has warned the father that if he shuts down the shop of her friend, he ends her own silence?’
There were other problems. The presence of the jewellery in the shop window; similar things among the bric-a-brac of Mademoiselle St. Onge’s flat-hieroglyphics, tablets, seals … Egyptian things-she had often loaned clothing from the shop to the banker’s daughter.
‘So, what about the drooler?’ asked Kohler, clearing a patch of frost to stare out at the street. ‘Do we write him off as being completely innocent?’
St-Cyr heaved a troubled sigh. ‘The drooler, ah yes, Gaetan Verges and his fiancee, Angelique Desthieux. It’s still possible the drooler could have waited upstairs until the initial photographs had been taken and Joanne was then completely naked.’
‘The poor kid.’
‘A mannequin with chestnut hair and deep brown eyes,’ said St-Cyr of Angelique Desthieux, ‘whose career ended abruptly when someone threw acid into her face. She had a business agent, one Albert Luc Tonnerre who fell in love with her in spite of her betrothal to Gaetan Verges.’
‘Did the drooler know him?’
‘Most probably.’
Then that’s one more reason for us to visit the Chateau,’ breathed Kohler, lost to old memories of that other war, to unparalleled suffering and what it had done to decent men. Changed their whole personalities, made some men hate so much they would …
‘There is another reason,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Monsieur Verges senior had a number of paintings in that house. Were they stolen and is this not why the house was emptied so quickly?’
‘The auction … the invitation to the Jeu de Paume and the Ritz.’
‘And afterwards, on the morning of the 1st, the banker’s daughter quietly leaves Paris for Dijon and the home of the drooler’s ex-fiancee.’
They had both avoided one thing, and Kohler knew he would have to mention it. He started the car-he’d give it a moment to warm up. Christ! It was nearly eight o’clock. ‘One of the victims died of acid burns, Louis.’
‘Ah yes, but the acid was deliberately not thrown in her face. It was poured on the rest of her. That’s what puzzles me.’
Silenced by the thought, they drove slowly to the Palais Royal and round past the Bank of France to leave the car in the rue de Valois which was even darker than the Champs-Elysees.
Louis would talk to Madame Lemaire and her maid, leaving the Gestapo half of their partnership to speak to the neighbours on the other side of that empty house, then they would both have a few quiet words with the banker and his daughter.
‘Inspector-Madame, she is still at her supper. Could you …?’
‘Come back a little later?’ asked St-Cyr. ‘Ah, no, Mademoiselle Nanette. Murder seldom allows the luxury of such lapses and it is, I fear, your murder I’m worried about.’
‘Mine? Ah no. No!’
He slid into the vestibule, into that tired remnant of a once proud house and touched a finger to his lips as she sat on the little bench Madame Lemaire used when putting on her over-boots or simply resting after coming in from the street. ‘Please, it’s best we talk and that you give me straight answers.’
Moisture made her large blue eyes all the clearer, reminding him again and poignandy of Marianne, his dead wife. ‘Nanette, why didn’t you tell me that on the night the furniture was taken from next door, you went outside to see whose firm it was? You couldn’t have seen this from the windows above the street.’
The darkness … the black-out. He would pry the answers from her now and she would have to tell him. Then he would despise her and not ask his friends if they could find a position for her in their shop when Madame passed away. ‘The noises, Inspector, I … I was worried so I …’
‘When you heard those lorries, you took your life into your hands. Did you not realize how dangerous it was to go out there?’
Her eyes were wiped with her fingers. ‘No one saw me. I … I was careful.’
‘Were there really four men and were they all French?’
‘Yes.’
‘No women?’
‘No. Ah … Perhaps. I … I can’t really say. Forgive me, but I can’t.’
‘Did they say anything to each other? Come, come, there is very little time.’
‘Only that they must be careful not to make much noise, that they must look as if they were simply doing a job. They … they had papers to … to prove who they were and why they were there. One of them said this to the others and warned them to let him do the talking if the police or the Germans came by.’
More forgeries … the papers would have been taken from the firm’s warehouse in Saint-Denis. St-Cyr drew in an impatient breath. The girl must be made to realize he wasn’t happy with her answers. ‘Did that one have a name?’
She shook her head. ‘They said so little and I … I was afraid to stay too close to them.’
He would have to let it be but had to ask, ‘Has Madame ever mentioned the name of that firm?’
There was a startled look he would not forget. ‘They … they …’
‘Well, what is it?’