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Umbrellas clutched and pouring their streams onto the worn linoleum, they rushed the stairs, barged through the main door, passed a ragged hole in the plaster-just a hole in the wall, a window … The concierge’s loge! ‘Messieurs …’

‘Christ!’ leapt Kohler. ‘Don’t do that!’

‘Tonnerre, monsieur, and quickly!’ hissed St-Cyr. The key, idiot. Is he in?’

‘In?’ bleated the man, quivering. ‘Yes. Yes, that one is in and has been for the past few days.’

Reluctantly he gave them the key, refusing to meet their eyes. ‘Drunk,’ he said. ‘Noisy as usual and then the silence. Let him sleep it off.’

‘Drunk since when, exactly?’ asked the Surete cautiously.

‘Since Monday late.’

‘It’s now Thursday afternoon.’

‘I haven’t disturbed him.’

‘Verdammt, Louis!’ Kohler snatched the key and took the stairs two at a time. The flat was nothing much. Two dingy rooms, one of which was used both as kitchen and bedroom …

Fully clothed and still in his overcoat and scarf as if he had just come back from the Chateau des belles fleurs bleues, Tonnerre lay on his back on the soiled bedspread with his head propped by pillows that long ago had lost their slips.

Above him, strapped to the peeling iron headboard by a dirty band of heavy elastic, was an empty two-litre bottle of ether.

A worn, red rubber tube led from this as a siphon to dangle its end just above his left shoulder. There was a stopcock, a thing of metal that had pinched off the flow. An empty bottle and a closed stopcock … Closed?

‘Maudit, let’s open the windows!’

‘Ah nom de Dieu, Hermann, are we to think he killed Joanne, then his friend and then himself?’

‘It’s too easy. It isn’t right. Why fake the suicide of another if you intend to kill yourself?’

‘Why close the stopcock when the bottle is empty?’

Caught by the rapidly expanding cloud of shrapnel, Tonnerre had not been blinded in one eye like his friend but had, through some whim of Chance, lost both ears, part of his cheeks and nose, the lips and lower jaw and, probably, most of his tongue.

‘Two litres, Hermann. It’s a lot if one is not accustomed to it and has found it hard to come by of late.’

‘So why is the stopcock closed, mien lieber Surete? If he passed out with that much in him, how the hell could he have closed it and why?’

‘Precisely,’ breathed St-Cyr. Both hands would have been needed. Ether, like alcohol, could be consumed in quantity by the confirmed addict. Highly inflammable and volatile, it evaporated rapidly. Like alcohol, it, too, left little or no stain but would dissolve grease and was, indeed, used as an industrial solvent. ‘The pillows, Hermann. To the left of the head. A faint line of grease from the hair. The pomade of too little washing, dissolved quite recently and then redeposited on evaporation.’

St-Cyr traced the line out but Hermann was looking decidedly green. ‘Ah merde, go into the other room, idiot! Leave me with him.’

Kohler fled saying, ‘I’m going to talk to that concierge, Louis. I’ve got to get a breath of air!’

The door slammed. St-Cyr heard him hesitate in the corridor and knew he was leaning against a wall trying to still the panic. ‘It’s been happening too much of late,’ he said gravely to himself. ‘He desperately needs to get away from this business for a while.’

But could they ever do so? They were practically the only flying squad left in the Kripo and the Paris Surete, the only ones to handle things such as this. Common crime.

Tonnerre’s hands were badly scarred but showed no signs of rope marks, of having strangled Joanne. None at all.

Both the index and the middle finger of the right hand were missing-lost to the shrapnel. In that instant of destruction, he had tried to shield his face. Had he groped for the friend he had deceived, the friend to whom he had given nude photos of his lover and written: This is how she was and what she was really like-Angelique Desthieux, the mannequin they had each wanted in their own way, so much so, that this one had thrown acid into her face.

She had had a child by him. Marie-Claire de Brisson.

Wine, cognac and ether … Soup-endless soup and humiliation. The scorn and laughter of ordinary people who ought to have known better. Their turning away in horror. Had the daughter known of him? Had she ever seen and spoken to him?

They would have to find out.

St-Cyr let his eyes search for details and asked softly with a sigh, ‘But if the right hand is disabled, monsieur, why should the tubing not hang to the right of you so that your left hand might better operate the stopcock? Is this why some of the ether has spilled on the pillows? The remaining fingers of your right hand, were they not too clumsy, the mind deadened and long past any feeling of well-being?’

And in any case, why close the stopcock on an empty bottle? No, it was not right.

Caught in the black bristles of poorly clipped whiskers that could never be properly shaven, were tiny, short white cotton fibres. ‘A pad … Ah grace a Dieu, that is why the spill of ether. That is why the stopcock is tightly closed.’

When he heard the door open, he called out, ‘It’s murder, Hermann, but like everything else about this case, things are not quite as perfect as they should have been.’

From four to five per cent of ether in air was required for anaesthesia, about 100 to 140 milligrams per 100 cubic centimetres of blood-far more of it than of chloroform. Perhaps four times as much. 160 to 170 milligrams of ether per 100 cubic centimetres of blood would cause respiration to cease. The victim would never know.

‘He hasn’t struggled, Hermann. He came in, lay down here and got dead drunk, but if allowed to, would have slept it off.’

‘Whoever held that pad over his face knew exactly how much to use. Lots!’

‘Did the concierge say this one had had a visitor?’

‘No. He said there’s a back door to the house and another passage leading to it!’

‘The visitor had come and gone. If they themselves could obtain the address from the association of les baveux, so could someone else. There’d been several changes of address over the years, nothing out of the ordinary for a badly disabled veteran, to the shame of the nation. Furniture and things that had been acquired before the Great War had had to be sold off bit by bit.

There were only a few changes of clothing, a few framed photographs-none of Angelique Desthieux. A camera that had been smashed long ago lay in pieces in a cardboard box as if kept in hopes of repairs and to remind him of the past.

‘Torn-up prints, Louis, of her in the buff,’ breathed Kohler crouching over the box. ‘Negatives of her playing around in that house. Every piece of furniture that was used in the later photos, a few of the same poses but none of the clothes or the jewellery since those came later.’

‘And none of the more recent photos?’

‘None. If he was in on it, Louis, why hasn’t he got them? Why hasn’t he been leering over them in his quiet moments between girls?’

Why indeed.

A well-thumbed passbook was fixed with a drawing-pin to the back of a bureau drawer. ‘Credit Lyonnais, Hermann. Within easy walking distance, as is the Palais Royal. Pension cheques, the disabled veteran’s allowance.’

‘Then why hide it?’

There was a grim nod of agreement. ‘Payments of from 3000 to 5000 francs from time to time.’

Kohler took the proffered passbook and, quickly glancing through it, frowned. ‘Tonnerre drove a car to the farm before the Defeat but he couldn’t have had the money even then and must have had to borrow one.’

‘But from whom?’