‘Dallaire and Sons used to do all the moving business for the houses of the Palais Royal. Madame, she has told me that when Monsieur de Brisson and his wife and daughter moved in ten years ago, it … it was they who did the moving.’
And now you’ve trapped yourself, thought St-Cyr, because, ma chere Nanette, you didn’t ask this of your employer until after that house had been emptied. ‘What made you ask her? Come, come, you saw something else. I know you did. Was it then or earlier? Much earlier? People coming and going, a girl …’
She gave a nod and took a deep breath. ‘The cat. I … The cat came to the window-doors of my room. I … I let it in.’
‘When?’
‘Late last spring.’
‘The cat of Madame de Brisson?’
‘Oui. It wanders. I …’
How pale she was and so preoccupied she didn’t even hear Madame Lemaire asking for her. ‘You were lonely and frightened,’ he said. Her eyes were downcast, the lashes long and damp. ‘You took the cat in for a little company, Nanette, and Mademoiselle de Brisson came for it.’
‘She had seen me looking out my windows while holding it. She demanded that I return it. I did so.’
‘And?’
‘And she told me never again to step out on to the balcony to retrieve it or anything else. She … she has said she would report me to the authorities if I ever went out there again, and … and that she would tell them I was illegally in the city. Illegally when I have worked for Madame these past five years and am a good girl!’
There was a sudden rush of tears that made him want to comfort her but he must not do so.
‘Could Mademoiselle de Brisson have felt you had seen something you shouldn’t have in the house next door?’
The apron was used to blow her nose and wipe her eyes, making him ask himself, Why must God remind him of how unhappy Marianne had been? The long absences, the loneliness of the house at 3 Laurence-Savart. The feeling of still being a foreigner trapped in the big city never knowing if he would return alive from yet another murder case or robbery.
‘Well?’ he asked harshly. ‘Nanette, tell me what she thought you must have seen.’
‘There … there was a gap in the curtains-just a little one. A girl with … with her hair in tufts. Naked and … and chained by the wrists and ankles so that she …’ The girl broke down. ‘She was stretched out, Inspector. Stretched! Reaching for the ceiling and … and leaning well forward over the lamp with … with her legs spread widely and her ankles tied to … to the floor.’
‘The lamp?’
The girl dragged in a breath. ‘Painted blue and without its shade. Its shade!’
‘When?’
Would he arrest her? ‘Late last spring. She … she had fainted. She … she looked as though she had fallen asleep but was still chained up like that with … with a rag stuffed into her mouth and … and her eyes blindfolded.’
‘Yet you said nothing to anyone? Nothing?’
The girl was frantic. ‘I couldn’! I would have been arrested and sent home!’
Was there more? he wondered. The sound of crying, this one awake at night listening to it and knowing what was going on!
He must be firm. ‘Did you see anyone else in that room?’
She shook her head as if her life depended on it, was so ashamed.
‘Who did you see on the balcony, Nanette? Was it only Mademoiselle de Brisson or was there someone else?’
The girl bolted and ran from him. He heard her on the stairs, heard her fling herself on to her bed, heard weeping as if she herself was one of the victims.
She lay with her face buried in the pillows. Madame Lemaire was now shouting at the top of her ancient lungs and banging her cane. A decanter fell …
‘M … Monsieur de Brisson,’ blurted the girl. ‘De Brisson! He watched at my windows for the longest time and … and finally he went away.’
‘You didn’t draw the curtains?’
‘I was waiting to see if anyone would come to the house next door. I was sitting in a far corner of my room, in darkness. It was not so very late. Perhaps only eleven o’clock.’
You fool! he said but to himself. Again he asked when this had happened and again she said. ‘In the late spring. Just a few days after Mademoiselle de Brisson found me with their cat.’
‘Did Monsieur de Brisson go into the house next door? Come, come, Nanette, now is not the time to hesitate or hide the truth.’
‘He must have! He went that way, Inspector, and not back towards his house. For the longest time I waited, but then the telephone rang and Madame … I was so afraid it would awaken her but … but when I answered it, they hung up.’
There were the usual things in the bedroom of a girl such as this. A heavy white flannel nightgown was folded over the back of a chair. There were no slippers. Like so many these days, she would wear two or even three pairs of woollen socks to bed.
Letting himself out on to the balcony, St-Cyr made his way next door to peer into that empty house and test its lock and door handle.
How was access gained? Had Monsieur Verges left a key with someone? The banker? A notary-this would be the most logical-but how had he kept the Germans from requisitioning the house?
Kempf? he asked. Had Kempf seized on the use of the house and made certain no one in authority would interfere?
If so, then the Sonderfuhrer and Denise St. Onge most probably had visited Mademoiselle de Brisson in her attic pied-a-terre as early as September of 1940, and it was then that the possibility of using the house had been conceived.
‘Access could simply have been a matter of breaking in and replacing the glass, he muttered to himself.’ Once a spare key was found in the house, they could come and go at will, or perhaps they changed the locks.’
Through the darkness all he could discern was the line of the rooftops across the garden and more dimly beyond them, those of the houses on the rue de Montpensier. Leaving the girl with a warning to say nothing to anyone, he went downstairs and outside, to enter the house from the street.
Empty, it had its own feeling as if the walls, the voices of those girls, cried out to him.
Shining his pocket torch briefly on the ceiling, he found where the ringbolts had been-the holes had been plastered over and painted but this had been done in haste and the plaster not allowed to dry.
The holes in the floor had simply been filled with sawdust and wax.
If only Madame Lemaire’s maid had spoken up. How many would have been saved? Two-would it have been two or three?
But he couldn’t find it within himself to blame the girl. He understood only too well how fragile her position was even after five years of service.
As far as he could determine, the attic window-doors hadn’t been forced nor had a pane of glass been broken and replaced. They had had a key, then, right from the start. A key …
Hermann was waiting for him beside the Citroen. ‘Nothing, Louis. A bookseller and his assistant in the attic flat who claims he is nearly deaf and that the assistant doesn’t stay the night. Homosexuals who won’t say a thing for fear of drawing attention to themselves and getting a one-way ticket to nowhere. A medical doctor, his wife and son in the flat below who must be out having supper, then the owner of a department store who says he saw and heard nothing. Absolutely nothing!’
‘Good. That makes life easier for us. I’ve just cracked a bank and must transfer my accounts to another.’
‘Monsieur de Brisson?’
‘The same.’
* * *
The descendants of the Kings of Prussia ate in uniform-blue, grey and black or the business suits of the mighty-amid the sumptuously warm glitter of the restaurant. Gilded, trifold, mirrored screens reflected the gaiety of bejewelled mistresses and wealthy friends. A banker, the owner of a racing stable, a judge-all sat before framed tapestries of barefooted, docile girls, a lamplighter, a gatherer of grapes.