‘Slept together,’ said Louis, ‘and did so again.’
‘But it wasn’t enough,’ breathed Kohler.
Ashen and trembling, she again lowered her eyes. She knew that no matter how long it took, they wouldn’t stop until she had told them everything. ‘No. No, it wasn’t enough. Not for him. He wanted to do something “different”, something “really exciting”. One night soon after the Defeat we were in Marie-Claire’s flat when Marie asked him about houses whose owners hadn’t come back. I think maybe she wanted a place for herself. I really don’t know what made her ask such a question. Franz went to have a look. I stayed with her. It … it was then that she told me of the jewellery she had found for the shop and of the man who was her real father.’
Kohler filled the Chief in, offering a cigarette. ‘Tonnerre had been taking money from Madame de Brisson for years, threatening to tell her daughter he was the girl’s father. Tonnerre had a key to the house. They …’
‘He never missed it,’ she said bleakly, not looking up. ‘It was nothing to him. Not any more. Only memories of a mannequin he hated, the mother of the daughter he had never spoken to until the day Marie went to ask him about the jewellery. Even then they didn’t speak of who her real parents were. Later, Franz and I gave him ether. We got him very drunk on it, very quickly-like lightning, isn’t that so? We went through his place, finding first the key and then the negatives of his mannequin naked on a chaise-longue, naked and bent over a chair, a table … everything … everything done in that very house!’
‘Those negatives then gave you the idea for the advertisements and you worked out the schedule of photographs and put together the clothes each girl would be asked to wear,’ said Louis, lost to the thing. ‘Always the same clothes, always the same poses because Tonnerre and Gaetan Verges were the ones who were to be blamed for the crimes if discovered.’ He drew on his pipe, had a sudden thought, asked, ‘When did Mademoiselle de Brisson tell you about her own abuse, mademoiselle? Monsieur de Brisson was …’
‘Fucking her? Is this what you think?’ It was. ‘Oh mon Dieu, you are so wrong! Marie-Claire hadn’t been touched by him since the age of fifteen!’
‘Yet she wrote of it every day,’ sighed Louis, his pipe forgotten. ‘And you, mademoiselle? You let her feed on this fear. She was afraid you would tell others, so much so that she would never leave your employ no matter how good the offer.’
Her smile was twisted. ‘Monsieur de Brisson came to secretly watch us. He was so hungry, that one. He had such lust in his eyes. Franz caught him on the balcony looking through the gap we had deliberately left in the curtains for him. It was perfect. Perfect! Monsieur de Brisson the banker joined the party!’
‘Louis, I’ve heard enough,’ grunted Boemelburg.
‘Walter, a moment, please.’ St-Cyr turned to the prisoner who looked up beseechingly at him through her tears. ‘Were photographs taken of the banker with any of those girls?’
Again there was that smile. ‘What do you think, Inspector? How else could we have found out about the money from Lyon? How else could we have got him to convince Madame de Brisson to help us so that we had them both? He enjoyed it! What man would not enjoy a naked girl who has a bag over her head and cannot identify her assailant?’
Merde alors! what had happened to give her such ideas? wondered St-Cyr, greatly troubled by her. Had she been so possessive of Kempf, she had willingly gone along with things?
Sadly he knew this was how it must have been, otherwise Kempf would soon have gotten rid of her and found another.
Again Kohler filled the Chief in. ‘Eventually Marie-Claire de Brisson discovered what they were up to. She warned the neighbour’s maid to stay away from the balcony for fear the girl would be killed. She made copies of some of the photographs without their knowledge and, after the house was emptied, scattered them for us to find.’
‘She had forged papers made for Kempf and le Blanc,’ said Louis, picking up the thread of it. ‘She hid the money where they wouldn’t find it, then wrote everything down so that when she killed herself in Dijon, we would find it on her body. She took a terrible chance they would discover what she was up to, SturmbannFuhrer, but they failed to do so until the end.’
‘Why wouldn’t they have scattered the photos themselves, since their wish was to pin it all on the two droolers?’ asked Boemelburg.
St-Cyr shook his head. ‘Everything was to point to the Chateau des belles fleurs bleues so as to gain distance from themselves. No doubt the photos were to have been left with Gaetan Verges’s body but …’ he paused to look steadily at the prisoner, ‘but were destroyed at the country house, were they not, mademoiselle?’
Must he act like God? ‘Yes, I burned them in the kitchen. Franz was very angry when he found out but …’ She shrugged. Those photographs, they were always such a worry to me. Something … ah, I don’t know what, told me they would cause us trouble in the end and …’ Her smile was again twisted. ‘I was correct.’
Boemelburg still couldn’t leave things. ‘Why did Marie-Claire de Brisson wait so long, Louis? Why didn’t she speak up?’
There was a sad shrug. The hand, with its forgotten pipe, lifted. ‘She didn’t know of it until early last May, Walter, when she heard or saw her father returning from that house and then discovered the horror of what they’d been up to.’
‘The acid,’ breathed Kohler. They had gagged that one and …’
She would force herself to face them through her tears.‘We … we had spread the girl out in the cellars and … and had tied her down. De Brisson … de Brisson left us in a hurry and … and then Franz said that it had to be done so as to make the motive clear. He … he took the acid bottles and … and he made Michel and me watch.’
‘The daughter then tried to kill herself, Walter,’ said the one from the Surete gruffly.
She would try to smile at him again so as to tell him he had been right about her in this too. ‘But I saved her, Inspector, and I told her she could say nothing because if she did, I would swear that she, too, had been involved.’
‘You must have been very careful when going to and from that house,’ he said, never leaving her eyes for a moment.
‘Careful? We had to be, but these days, Inspector, isn’t it always best for others to simply turn away and say nothing?’
She had tried her best to condemn him as being a party to the Occupation but he would ignore it. ‘And Joanne?’ he asked, lifting his eyebrows in question.
‘Joanne Labelle … Oh for sure, Inspector, that last one, she told us many times that you were a neighbour and that you and your partner would find and bring us to justice.’
‘Kempf or le Blanc took her upstairs to the tower room,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Which of them killed her?’
‘Franz … after we … we had had one last quick session with her. She … she kept on telling us you would … Franz hit her several times. He … he hated her for saying this. When … when it was done, he signalled to me from the window. I was in the kitchen garden waiting for him to do so.’
‘You then went to find Gaetan Verges whom Ie Blanc was holding in the cottage.’
‘Yes. Yes, Inspector. You see Verges knew all about what we had been doing to those girls. We took him ether, we got him so very drunk-and them too, us also. Why else would he have turned away the very people who had helped him through the years? We made him watch us. We often left him alone with one of the girls and he would, in his drunken state, try to release them, but of course they didn’t understand what he was doing and thought the worst. Later, he would realize what had happened and would rampage through the house, destroying everything in his desire for ether and his hatred of himself until, at last, he would fall into a stupor and live in filth.’