Joanne … thought St-Cyr with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Chateau des belles fleurs bleues was well to the south of Provins. For too long they had been feeling their way closer to the Seine. There had been ploughed fields, then scrub pasture that had been let go. Then woods and finally a broken signboard, a mere grey-weathered arrow and this road, this lost track of icy solitude among tall and crowding hornbeams whose smooth, blue-grey bark was forbidding in the late afternoon light … ‘Ah merde alors, Hermann. There are the gates at last.’
Shit!
Two giant beeches stood on either side of a high iron gate that had defied all entry for years. Nothing special. No coat of arms. Just matching curls of ironwork above.
‘Have we been led up a blind alley?’ breathed Kohler, cursing their luck. The snow was perhaps eight to ten centimetres thick and undisturbed. The road beneath it had been full of pot-holes and large boulders. Not an easy drive, though he knew the aching in him stemmed, not from the hours behind the wheel, but from thoughts of Joanne and what they might well find.
At last the Citroen stopped and, to the cooling of its engine, came the quiet of the forest and then the musical tinkling of tiny birds and still-falling sheaths of ice from branches stirred by the softness of a wind. A thaw. One of those freaks of nature that, in the dead of winter, turned the land briefly to spring and misery.
Paris would soon be awash and shrouded in fog. Then it would freeze.
Kohler got out and eased his cramped muscles and back. The newish padlock and chain were heavy, the propriete privee defense d’entrer notice all too clear.
Louis couldn’t keep the uneasiness from his voice. ‘Is the son really an ether-drinker? Is it that his affliction is so bad, Hermann, even here he has had to be hidden?’
Uncomfortable at the thought, they approached the gate and looked through its bars to yet a further extension of the lane and, as yet, no sight of the Chateau.
‘We may have to spend the night,’ cursed Kohler exasperatedly. ‘This fucking lock hasn’t been opened in years, Louis. What the hell’s been going on?’
‘Is there a road around the gate? I seem to remember we passed one.’
‘We’d have to back out. We’re going to have to anyway.’
‘Let’s leave the car and climb over. The foot-gate will also be locked.’
It was, though here the original lock was still in use and the key, no doubt, hanging in the kitchen perhaps or in the caretaker’s cottage.
About a kilometre of lane led between giant sycamores whose spatulated bark formed a stark camouflage against the snow-covered lawns and formal gardens that had been let go. Branches that had fallen had simply not been cleared.
The ‘Chateau’ was a large manor house of buff-grey sandstone with a blue slate roof and turret, high-peaked dormer windows in its attic, and shuttered french windows below at the front, no shutters at the sides.
‘The drapes are all drawn, Louis. The house has been simply closed and left. Our Monsieur Verges must have gone south.’
‘Or into the grave. Ah nom de Dieu, what are we to make of it, eh? It has an uncomfortable feeling, mon vieux. I’ve seen too many places like this and found too many old people in them, with all the jewellery and silver missing.’
‘You’re full of surprises. Why not retire and write a book about it, eh? My Life as a Detective!’
‘Please don’t joke. It isn’t helping.’
‘Then quit talking about bludgeoned old people!’
They tried the front door, the side door-found all were locked and no answer came to persistent ringing of the bell-pull.
The house was of a ground floor, one storey and then the attic but above this last, the single turret rose another storey so as to provide a good view of the grounds. Had it ever been a happy house? wondered St-Cyr. Built perhaps as early as 1725 and well before the Revolution, it had been occupied, no doubt, by the same family ever since. ‘It’s a typical maison de maitre, Hermann. The family mansion or master’s house of what was once a working farm.’
From a walled potager of perhaps a hectare, they stood looking at the place wondering what to do. The house appeared to be empty and unfeeling. No smoke issued from its chimneys. The silence was uncomfortable. There were no footprints but their own.
‘Well, do we break in or not, Louis? I vote we do.’
The walls of the kitchen garden were tall and had been built to withstand the centuries. Mottled by slabs of pale brown sandstone, they rose to steeply pitched roofs that were flagged with coarse slate. Trellises clung to the walls-beans, roses, hops … ‘Everything needed to sustain life would have been grown here, Hermann.’
‘Look, you’re no goddamned farmer, so stop kidding yourself and gassing on about cabbages. Hey, my fine-tuned ear, I hear no chickens or pigs. Where the hell are the old man and his son?’
‘And Joanne, if indeed she is here?’
Louis was staring emptily at the house that rose to its tower just beyond the wall of the kitchen garden. The stables were behind the house and an attached wing of it. To the left, and beyond, there were more tall trees-a long line of lindens, so a drainage ditch over there, thought Kohler. A woods to the very left, extending to the bank of the Seine and the carpet of violets in spring.
‘I’m going in, Louis, are you?’
‘Yes. Before it gets too dark for us to find what we must find.’
‘There’s no sign of the lorries from Dallaire and Sons.’
Was it the offer of hope? ‘Not yet, but there may be.’
Merde, he was taking it hard! ‘Mademoiselle de Brisson didn’t ask Paul Meunier to forge transit papers for two loads of furniture, Louis. The boy would have told me if she had.’
‘Certainly. But our droolers, Hermann? What of them?’
Dear God, if You’re really up there, hide the truth from him, begged Kohler.
When they found the lorries in an open-ended, timbered bam the size of a medieval market hall, they knew the worst.
‘Dede,’ blurted Louis. ‘What am I to say to him, Hermann?’
‘Just let me have a look, eh? Stand back. That’s an order.’
‘From my big Bavarian brother who hasn’t the stomach for it? Don’t be an imbecile, Hermann. This is my case, my task. Me, I brought you into it on your holiday!’
Verdammt, he’d be crying in a minute! ‘Joanne may not be in either lorry. Maybe she got away?’
Were all Bavarians so sentimental?
The roof-timbers towered above them. The vacant nests of summer’s swallows were grey below with splattered droppings. Light filtered in through the gaping doorways.
So, we have trouble to face, said St-Cyr grimly to himself. Let me find Joanne and then her killers.
They opened the rear doors of both lorries and stood before the tangled contents of Louis XVI armchairs-superb pieces in giltwood and dark green velvet upholstery-a Regence sofa that was covered with exquisite needlepoint, lamps, tables … a Louis XV bergere in antique brocatelle silk, twin tabourets …
Everything had been hastily crammed into the lorries. Just to climb over the obstacle course would take hours. Arms, legs, shelves, mirrors, crates of crystal and porcelain wrapped in towels, sheets and drapes that had been ripped apart in haste. Clothing too.
Only by standing well back was it possible to see if anything had been disturbed on arrival.
‘There,’ said St-Cyr. ‘That dining-room table. Some of the things on top of it have been pushed aside.’
Squeezing himself into the lorry, Louis somehow managed to work his way towards the front until he reached the other end of the table. ‘A chest, Hermann,’ he called out, looking down over the edge. ‘It’s open.’