There was a porcelain wash-basin and jug on a night stand. The jug had been split by the frost.
‘Louis …’ Kohler grabbed him. ‘Don’t!’ he hissed.
The girl was lying on her side, folded up on a heap of soiled blankets beneath a far window, one of whose shutters had somehow come open. Her back was to them, the wrists were tied to the ankles so that her chin rested on her knees.
She looked so cold. She did not move. Her skin had the pallor of bluish grey wax. Her hair had all been hacked off, and the double twist of stout white cord had bitten so deeply and savagely into her neck, the skin was pinched, the windpipe crushed.
At the moment of death, she had evacuated herself but these discharges were now frozen.
Her tongue was caught between clenched teeth. The lips were lead-blue, the deep brown eyes wide open, the pupils dilated.
A bloody froth of mucus and other fluids had erupted from her nose and mouth.
The smell was sickening.
‘Joanne …’
‘Louis, go easy. It had to happen. That’s all there is to it’
‘Why?’
‘Ah Gott im Himmel! We both knew she had very little chance. Sure, we kidded ourselves by hoping but …’
The Surete’s look was desperate. ‘Dede, Hermann. How am I to tell him?’
‘I’ll do it.’
Louis blinked. He fought to think, then said, ‘No, no, I will. Go and look for the drooler. See if there’s a cottage. Cross the kitchen garden and take the path towards the river. Leave me alone with her. Please!’
‘Jesus merde alors, Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’
A last doubtful glance revealed Louis among the rubbish, standing over her, hat in hand, eyes clamped shut. Beaten, defeated, all alone and begging himself to find the strength to be calm and detached.
It’s impossible, said Kohler sadly to himself. Without another word, he went downstairs to stand in the snow-covered drive among the overgrown stubble, wishing things hadn’t turned out as they had.
From the kitchen garden, he looked back up at the tower. The open shutter moved, recording but the faintest of breezes. Though he couldn’t be certain, he wondered if her killer had not called down from that window to someone in the garden, It’s done. She’s gone.
It wasn’t pleasant to look at Joanne. More than once St-Cyr had to back away. He had found a kerosene lantern in one of the lower bedrooms and had carried it up into the tower to hold it over her.
Light flickered on the walls. The time of death would have to be established by the coroner. Was Armand Tremblay still in charge of this district? Tremblay was a good man and would not attempt to hide things no matter how uncomfortable to the Occupier or damaging to the Verges’s family honour.
Rigor had set in. Everything seemed to suggest death very early Monday morning, 28 December-either on arrival at perhaps 3.00 a.m., or somewhat later that day.
There were bruises on her buttocks, thighs and knees, those of fingermarks also. The bruises on the knees were from having fallen or banged into a chair.
Others on her breasts and upper arms and shoulders suggested she had been grabbed and mauled in those parte and perhaps thrown from assailant to assailant. A small cut above the left eye confirmed the thought. She had been struck across the face several times. There was a scratch behind the right ear and this extended down the back of the neck for about seven centimetres. Other scratches were on her seat and inner thighs, her stomach and groin. More than once her legs had been forced apart, a child, a curly-haired little girl on a street in Belleville who had looked quizzically up at him and said, ‘But, monsieur, you cannot possibly like what you do?’
‘I must not close your eyes, Joanne. Dr. Tremblay must see you exactly as you are. It’s best that way.’
The froth from her lips was of blood, spittle and fluid from the lungs, not semen though they would have done that to her as well. Gingerly he leaned down to smell the froth. Had she been drugged with ether-forced to swallow it? Had they shoved one of Verges’s rubber feeding-tubes down her throat and made her drink the damned stuff to get her to co-operate?
Was it merely the workings of his imagination that brought the smell of ether to him?
Again, only the coroner could pin this down. The ether could also have been administered through the rectum. She was their property. They had had total control over her. She would have tried to scream, to …
‘Stop! Please, stop,’ he said, admonishing himself. ‘Try to think. Try to remain calm.’
He moved the lantern back a little but had difficulty nestling it among the soiled blankets where other girls had lain and died perhaps. The dark hairs of her nostrils hadn’t been clipped-she had still been such an innocent when she had gone to that house on the rue de Valois.
The flickering of the light was reflected in her eyes, it … ‘What’s this?’ he asked, a whisper. ‘You can’t possibly have a gold tooth. Your family’s far too poor.’
Searching-dragging out the pair of reading glasses for which he had unfortunately found an increasing need of late, St-Cyr examined her lips.
There was a small gold wire caught in the froth. He thought of Tremblay, thought he must not disturb a thing but said, ‘I can’t leave this, can I, Joanne?’
With a pair of tweezers, he teased the thing and gradually it came free. As he held it up to the light, he sighed and said, ‘Good. Good for you, ma brave. You were defiant right up to your last moment and this is something I must tell Dede, for it will help him and he’ll take pride in what you did, as will I.’
The ear-ring must have fallen to the floor or been set on a table or chair perhaps. Unnoticed, Joanne had taken it into her mouth, the only way she could have hidden it.
A tiny turquoise scarab dangled from the end to match those on the bracelet and the other things she had seen in that shop window.
‘Denise St. Onge?’ he asked. ‘Was Mademoiselle St. Onge witness to your killing, Joanne, or did she leave this room, this tower and this house before you died?’
Or was she even a part of it?
Though webbed with blood, the thing caused the cinematographer in him to see her secretly taking the ear-ring into her mouth-the girl was naked, bound hand and foot, held perhaps. He saw Denise St. Onge in a sleeveless black silk dress wearing such a pair of ear-rings, saw her slowly taking them off as a woman would who was about to have sex. Sex!
He saw her putting the ear-rings aside and shook his head. ‘I mustn’t conjure tricks of the imagination. I must stick to the facts. The droolers?’ he asked. ‘Did they make Joanne wear the ear-rings and other pieces, only then to remove them from her and set them aside?’
Old stock, Muriel Barteaux had said of the jewellery, things brought to light to service the Occupier who would pay handsomely for such trinkets to send home to their wives or give to their new mistresses.
Muriel and Chantal were looking into the matter and might possibly have something for them.
Carefully wrapping the ear-ring in the handkerchief he kept for such things, St-Cyr pocketed it.
On examining the fingernails of Joanne’s right hand, he found a black hair caught in a small tear in the middle fingernail. This hair was further caught between that finger and the index, and between the ankle and that hand.
Had Gaetan Verges jet-black hair? he wondered. Had she been high on ether? Had she run her hands through the drooler’s hair as they had had sex, not love? Never love.
‘Michel le Blanc,’ he said. ‘Le Blanc has jet-black hair.’
The knots suggested a man of some strength, or two persons. ‘A man and a woman?’ he asked, settling back on his haunches to see Joanne lying there so still and cold, a child.