Brother Michael was telling his rosary. The beads trickled through the workworn fingers. The sad grey eyes, now granite hard, searched the new flowers and the wreaths for answers as he grimly moved his lips.
The beekeeper’s head was bowed – real grief there, was that it? Had the beekeeper made advances to Brother Jerome and been rejected? Had he then killed Jerome in a fit of rejection and somehow moved the body to Fontainebleau Woods? And the bicycle … one mustn’t forget Brother Michael’s bicycle. And one mustn’t forget that the abbey possessed a gasogene and made regular deliveries to Paris. Ah yes.
But, had Ackermann and Jerome been lovers? To be a homosexual in the SS was to ask for death yet the general looked as cold as steel. Was it Poland all over again and 50 millimetre cannon at a stone’s throw or the flame throwers?
Ackermann’s gaze never wavered. Not a muscle moved. Perhaps he was used to ceremonies. Perhaps he was here simply to make an arrest for the Sicherheitsdienst and to fight a duel.
The scar tissue glistened.
13 July/42 – Fontainebleau Woods, the pond. Spent the afternoon sunbathing. Went swimming twice. Drank champagne. After the chase, there is resignation and acceptance.
22 November/42 – Arrived at the Gorge of the Archers and took the footpath up into the woods. Waited from 2.30 p.m. until 3.30 p.m. Sat in the car and talked until 5.10 p.m., after which, drove back to Paris.
Sat in the car and talked … Whose car? Mademoiselle Arcuri’s?
Waited from 2.30 p.m. until 3.30 p.m.… Had the person being met – Ackermann, presumably – not shown up? Had Jerome then gone back to the car and talked with its driver for nearly two hours?
Had that driver been Gabrielle Arcuri or the countess? Had the diary even been written by Yvette?
Or had the driver been Ackermann and they’d simply waited an hour before settling down to business?
They had braided the girl’s hair and had pinned the braids across the top of her brow. It was very French, very of the countryside.
7 November/42 – The Ritz again. From 9.00 p.m. until after curfew. Was driven back to the flat on the rue Daguerre. The Corsicans’ aunt.
Yvette could not possibly have followed her brother to all of those places. Only one conclusion could be drawn. He’d told her of them and she’d written them down. If she’d written the diary at all.
Or had he told them to Mademoiselle Arcuri, who had then recorded them?
After the chase, there is resignation and acceptance …
A boulder and a bullet – two vastly different killings, both linked by more than blood.
A virgin … Three stiff shots of plum brandy in her stomach when she died. ‘Tell Mademoiselle Arcuri it’s all going to be fixed.’
Ackermann had developed a nervous twitch in the left side of his face. From time to time he touched the cheek and cursed whoever had been responsible for the burns.
He’d kill Hermann. He wouldn’t miss. They’d use the gardens inside the walls of the chateau and the general would choose the time.
Did you fall in love with that boy? asked St-Cyr. Did you caress his young body to forget the pain of your disfigurement? Was it you who bit his thigh or one of the countess’s dogs?
Ah yes, one of the greyhounds could well have done such a thing in play. Jerome would have known them well.
A key … there had to be a key. Something they’d overlooked. The Russian angle, was it really deep enough to drive Ackermann to look into Gabrielle Arcuri’s past? After all, he was working with the Sicherheitsdienst. Oberg could have assigned him her file. Jerome could simply have been the inside source. Hence, After the chase, there is resignation and acceptance, but why tell Yvette of it, why tell one who was obviously so loyal to her mistress?
Or had she been? What of the condoms in their little silk sleeves? What of the cigarette case, the purse itself, and the diamonds?
Had the ‘theft’ of the purse simply been a lie, tearful though it was? Had its contents been planted by Yvette to hide the truth of the killing and throw suspicion on to her mistress?
Were the condoms there to signify Natasha Kulakov Myshkin’s brief past as a young girl of the streets or were they but the precaution of a married woman in a time of war?
A woman whose husband wasn’t dead.
And the diamonds, Mademoiselle Arcuri? he asked, studying the veiled mirage with an intensity that frightened him. Death … death was down there in more than two places. He saw her naked, shorn of her hair and lying beside the river, saw the blood draining from the gash in her throat. The Resistance.
The diamonds … were they to pay someone for their silence, Mademoiselle Arcuri? Jerome perhaps, or were they the result of his blackmailing the SS General Hans Gerhardt Ackermann?
Would Ackermann have even stood for such a thing, no matter how much he’d been in love with the boy? No, of course not. He’d have killed Jerome if someone else hadn’t done it first, and then he’d have killed Yvette. He’d kill the chanteuse too. He’d try to put the blame on the Resistance and he’d put a stop to everything. He’d even come to witness the burials.
Rene Yvon-Paul hesitantly took his mother’s hand in his. She squeezed the boy’s fingers. It could mean nothing more than the touching bond between a mother and her son.
Or it could be that the boy knew full well she was desperately afraid and badly in need of reassurance.
At a word from the priest, the mourners rose and began to file past the caskets.
Kohler opened the door of the shed behind the church to find two men sitting on the floor, leaning back against a wall and having a bite to eat. As gravediggers went, they were a pair of princes. The ox-eyed one with the walrus moustache and the little black bow tie was bursting the buttons of his vest and the seams of the stovepipe suit he wore; the weasel, a tough, belligerent little bastard, looked as if he was waiting to rob the dead. All nose, thin, tight lips, a parsimonious moustache and eyes that were as hard and dark as anthracite.
Being their guest, Kohler magnanimously offered cigarettes and intro’s but declined to share their much-swigged bottle of wine, even if it was from Vouvray. ‘It’s too hard on my stomach,’ he quipped. ‘Gives me gas – any wine, you understand. German, French, Italian, it’s all the same. Pickle juice.’
They nodded with disinterest and kept their thoughts to themselves. Gas, eh? Bavarian farts! Too much good French cabbage and black market olive oil in the diet!
The whores, thought the weasel. Little French girls under the age of sixteen. Dolls in their underwear. They’re what’s given Big-foot the wind. Wine … since when did wine bother anybody?
The weasel dragged out his handkerchief and in the process scattered the more than two precious handfuls of funeral-parlour oats he’d stolen from the horses. In dismay he searched the floor for mice to gobble it up.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Kohler blithely. ‘I think I’ve got just the thing.’
He went out to the hearses, not to get one of the nags, though he would have liked to do so, but to strip the feedbags from two of them and fill the weasel’s pockets again.
‘So, my friends, a few questions, eh? While the dead give up the last of their prayers.’
The weasel had by then, on the insistence of his partner, swept up the offending oats and hidden them away. He now filled a small sack, taking equal amounts from both feedbags. ‘Questions …? Is it that you are from the police, monsieur?’
‘The Gestapo,’ said Kohler quietly, as the grains fell from that thieving hand.
‘Gestapo?’ asked the walrus, swallowing tightly. ‘But I thought you said you were from Paris, from one of the newspapers? Le Matin …?’