‘Is she …?’
There was a grunt, grim with determination. ‘No. No, she isn’t here. There’s vomit, there’s hair-lots of hair.’
‘Christ!’
‘There are some short lengths of cord. They’ve been cut with a very sharp knife.’
Deftly Kohler hoisted himself up into the lorry. Shoving things aside, he clambered awkwardly forward until he reached Louis.
The chest was just big enough for the girl to have been folded into it with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around the lower part of her legs, wrists tied to the ankles. ‘Ether?’ he asked sharply.
The outline of her nestled body still lay deeply in the hair of not only herself but the other victims. No clump was more than three or four centimetres long. ‘Each girl was forced to kneel beside this chest, Hermann, and while they cut off her hair, she had that of the others to look at.’
‘The bastards, Louis! Ether?’ he asked.
‘Most probably. Even so, she would have lost consciousness for only from two to ten minutes.’
‘Unless they forced her to drink it. Then she would have been out for an hour or two, maybe more.’
Much safer as an anaesthetic than chloroform when inhaled, ether did have its unpleasant side. Instant vomiting on regaining consciousness. When drunk, its burning taste tightened the tongue and throat, giving a tingling sensation while suffusing the body with warmth and producing feelings of extreme excitement, joyfulness and elation, then deep intoxication.
‘Does it heighten sexual arousal and make one uninhibited?’ hazarded Kohler uncomfortably.
‘Were they in the habit of feeding it to their victims so as to gain their co-operation?’ demanded St-Cyr, the catch all too evident in his throat. ‘Ah, I do not know, mon vieux. It’s fortunate they didn’t gag her. She’d have choked and drowned.’
There was so much hair in the bottom of the chest …
‘Is it that they wanted to keep her alive for more of their fun?’ asked Louis.
‘The house,’ said Kohler.
‘The torches … We left them in the car. Ah, damn!’
‘There’ll be candles-a lantern. Me first, you second and that really is an order.’
‘Ah, no, Hermann. For Dede and for Joanne, it must be me who finds her. Me!’
Kohler knew he was going to have to watch over him. ‘Then we go together, eh? Side by side.’
‘Until the doorway or the staircase becomes too small for both, Hermann. Then I go on alone because this is a matter between my friends, my God, the killers and myself.’
7
The side door finally gave a little. Assaulted by a stench of rotting food, St-Cyr threw back his head and gagged. ‘The kitchen, Hermann! Ah nom de Jesus-Christ, give me room!’
The stench was fruity, pungent, deep and stinging. Of green beef, high fish, eggs, chicken guts and a black sop of once-wet mushrooms that had oozed from their canvas collecting bag to web the tiled floor around it.
‘Louis, what the hell has happened?’
‘A moment.’ The Surete’s hard-soled brown brogue hit the plain plank door. Crashing against something, the door wedged itself on a faience shard the shape of a half-moon. A soupiere- Nevers, thought St-Cyr, giving the tureen’s provenance and seeing it once lovingly placed in the centre of a table ringed by straight-backed open chairs, all in that plain but beautiful style of the provinces.
The kitchen was a shambles. No shelf or cupboard was full or even half-empty. Everything lay about or on the floor. The old, black-iron stove and row of brick ovens held copper pots and pans once used, then bashed in or turned upside down in rage, their contents burnt to tar and dusty cinders grey with age.
There was garbage everywhere. Bags and pails overflowed. Filthy tea towels and washcloths lay crumpled on the floor, on the stone drainboard beside the sink, or clung tenaciously to the pump handle, a wallpeg, or the edge of a side table and chair.
‘The son has had to live alone, Hermann, and has tried to care for himself. Soup, soup and nothing more solid than more pureed soup. The father must have died some years ago.’
Kohler had never seen anything like it. Gingerly they began to pick their way into the house. The ceilings were low and of whitewashed beams and plaster. The walls might once have been decorated in the subdued colours of the country, with flowers everywhere and paintings. Portraits of long-deceased relatives in gilded oval frames were now smashed-smashed to smithereens! The chairs, the sofas, the desk with its once beautiful marquetry, all were broken and ripped. ‘A rampage, Louis?’ he asked, his voice empty.
‘Living, I think, from day to day-two years, three perhaps. Ah, it’s so hard to tell, Hermann. Night by night and week by week Gaetan Verges must have destroyed every last link with his ancestors. This …’ he indicated the once-proud salon, ‘was not the refinement of Paris, but was once lovely all the same. It was here, from the family farm, that the money must have come to maintain the house in Paris. Vegetables and poultry, roses for the perfume trade and as cut flowers in the markets and shops. Is the son now dead?’
A fauteuil, upholstered with tapestry, had been thrown in a demented rage at the mantelpiece mirror. Other pieces had been broken up and fed into the fire which had then been left to go out.
‘He is or was a man in great and constant pain, Hermann.’
‘An ether-drinker.’
There were books on horticulture and beekeeping whose pages held badly stained and futilely thumbed lithographs. Apples, pears … Many of the books were open and had been thrown as if in disgust that the recommended treatment, a spraying of copper sulphate perhaps, had not controlled whatever pest had infested the orchards. A fungus perhaps, or aphids. No bit of floor space was uncovered. Pages and pages of manuscript in pen and ink held the love letters, the poems, the diaries even of his ancestors and, yes, those letters from him to Angelique Desthieux …
My dearest Angelique … At dawn the assault will come again. We are waiting.
It was dated 29 September 1916.
‘Louis, let’s check the rest of the place and get out of here.’
A rudimentary barometer with calibrated gaugeboard had been spared and still hung on the wall beside the doorway to the main hall, forgotten in his passage from room to room. The main staircase curved continuously upwards through the filth. Its iron rails had been painted a dark green, as had all the stairwell trim and footboards, but the much-scuffed steps themselves and the curved balustrade were of unpainted oak.
A single, gilded and superbly carved pine cone, a symbol of fecundity, stood upright on top of the Napoleonic newel post. No paintings hung on the walls of the stairwell. All had been pulled down and either smashed underfoot or simply flung aside.
Step by step they picked their way through the half-light. Verges was not in any of the rooms whose beds, room by room, had been slept in until too filthy when, at last, he had found it necessary to move on to another room.
Clothing lay scattered everywhere-suits, coats, shirts and neckties, the uniform he had worn on parade, the medals with their ribbons …
At one end of the corridor there was a bathroom with a copper-plated Napoleonic tub, brass taps and water heater; at the other end was the tower with its spiral staircase in dark green again and unpainted oak.
The room at the top of the tower was large, with windows facing the four corners of the compass. A small desk, a chair, an armoire and commode, a simple cot in whose lumpy mattress of striped grey and white fabric the mice had made their nests and left their urine.
The floor was littered with more pages of manuscript-a diary of the war perhaps. Smashed and scattered. Ink nearly everywhere. Pens and countless nibs, more letters … Angelique, I can never forget you …