‘A giraffe.’
‘An elephant. A baby, but that was taken on a last dare, I think, and much later, and by then, why then, the identity of the Sandman, it had been discovered by that child. My sister. My Céline. A nun.’
‘You’re lying. You’re only trying to protect your priest.’
Even now he could not believe it of a nun. ‘Then wait and see. Find what you can. Please close the door Henri and me, we wish to be alone.’
‘Henri?’
‘Yes. I have decided to name him after my father. It’s the least I can do, but if he scratches me, I will have to kill him.’
The barn of the Norman farm was not warm-no, of course not, thought St-Cyr. Hay had been forked out for the two milch cows and the nanny goats, and he could hear them softly chewing and moving about in their stalls. There was a loft above, and from this the sound of wayward chickens, disturbed at their roosting, came to him. Others began to stir down here. He waited. He pressed his back to the wall and rubbed the muzzle of the ancient mare the Germans had not thought fit enough to send to Russia.
The chickens up there didn’t want to be disturbed. The rooster objected. When the child hissed, ‘Shush!’ he began in earnest to seek the ladder that must lead to the loft.
Someone else sought it, too. Unfortunately, the Sûreté did not have the use of his torch anymore. The batteries hadn’t liked the cold weather. Having taken them out, he was trying to rejuvenate them with body heat in his trouser pockets.
Ah merde, but it was dark! A button or clasp hit a rung of the ladder. After this there were only the sounds of the chickens, the cows, the goats and the wind, which found every chance to enter the building. Paris seldom saw such storms. Hundreds would freeze to death.
‘Nénette … Nénette Vernet, is that you?’ asked the nun. ‘Attend to me, child. You are in great danger and should not have left the infirmary. We would not have harmed you.’
Steps sounded above him. Bits of straw filtered down and these were caught by the wind and blown into his eyes …
‘Child, stand up. Don’t you dare hide from me. Now, come along. You must be frozen. Here, give me your hand. Why have you taken your mittens off?’
The beam of the sister’s torch flitted around up there. He climbed. He tried to reach them unnoticed. He …
‘You did it. You killed them.’
Ah no, go carefully, he cried out inwardly to the child, carefully, please, and grasped another rung.
‘I did no such thing. It is despicable of you to think this. Those girls were hungry. I fed them, as did the other sisters. We gave them love. God’s love.’
The child must have swallowed or tried to look for a way out, but then he realized she had simply been screwing up her courage. ‘Not in the belfries of the Notre-Dame. Not there, Sister,’ she shrilled. ‘After that girl was killed, I … I found some things in the pockets of your cloak on the very same day. I did. I really did. After the murder in les Halles also.’
‘What?’
It was almost a scream.
The smell of the stables came to him strongly, the sound of the wind and something else, something down there at the entrance Had someone come into the barn?
‘Lots of those … those rubber things, Sister. All sticky. Really sticky.’
Ah nom de Jésus-Christ! He reached the loft. He saw them against a far corner. Crossbeams separated him from them. The nun had her back to him and seemed to tower over the child, who was scrunched against the walls. Under the light from the sister’s torch, the child’s big dark blue eyes gazed up warily from a pinched face. A fringe of jet-black hair protruded from beneath the crocheted pink-and-white tea cosy.
The cloak was of coarse black wool. It was webbed with snow. Now it all but hid the child from him. The hood was thrown back. The sister’s hair was as if hacked off with scissors. Closer … he must get closer. Someone … someone else had come into the barn …
The chickens moved about up here, complaining. The child had several eggs clutched in both hands.
‘Don’t lie to me, Nénette.’
Somehow the child found her voice. ‘I’m not, Sister,’ she quavered. Neither of them realized they were no longer alone or that he was but two metres behind the nun. ‘You didn’t kill Andrée, Sister, but … but you killed all the others and I … I must tell myself not to cry. I must!’
Something went out of Céline then. Her voice dropped to a weary sadness. ‘Please just trust me, child. There are things you cannot possibly understand, but as God is my witness, I have killed no one. You must believe me. Violette, she … she is not well. It’s the devil who makes her do what she does. She must have put those … those filthy things in my pockets when I was last with her. You had no right to touch them.’
‘Then did she put them there also after les Halles?’
‘You’re lying! Don’t lie! It isn’t right! It’s shameful!’
The outburst passed. Again the child somehow found her voice. ‘She gave me the coins the soldiers throw away because they cannot spend them in our country, Sister. She told me all about you. She said you were E-VIL and that we were R-IGHT about you.’
The beam of the torch wavered but then it came back to shine more fully on the child. ‘Please come to me, Nénette. Let’s both ask God to help us. That man Violette calls her priest will kill you to protect her.’
‘And you?’ croaked Nénette all but to herself. ‘What, please, will he do to you?’
The child was evil. The child was afraid. She could so easily freeze to death, an accident … ‘He will ask to hear my confession. He will try to be the priest he once was.’
‘He’ll kill you, too, won’t he?’
‘Céline … Céline, is that you up there?’ called out Debauve.
She switched off her torch. She whispered. ‘Nénette, we must leave here at once!’
St-Cyr took a step. The child did not throw the eggs. She leapt at the sister and smashed them into Céline’s face, smashed them and smashed them. There was a cry, a shriek, another and another. He tried to wrap his arms about the nun and pull her down, down, tried to stop the child … the child.
The girl kicked and bit and scratched and smeared broken eggs fiercely into the sister’s face, shrieking, ‘LET ME GO. LET ME GO. YOU DID IT! YOU DID IT!’
Ah merde, merde, the child had escaped. She ran full tilt into something in the darkness, fell back, scrambled up-dashed across something else, slipped, threw baskets behind her, chickens, anything that came to hand, and when he reached where he thought the ladder had been, it was no longer there.
‘Nénette …’ he began. He coughed. He tried to catch a breath. Something touched his back. It sent shock waves through his spine. It made him cry out, ‘H … e … r … mann!’
He threw out his hands and tried to grab something … anything. He twisted, he turned, and as he fell, he was reminded briefly of himself as a boy falling from the roof of his Uncle Alexandre’s barn. He must never do that again. Never.
There was a crash, a splintering of flying boards, the stench and taste of manure, hard and frozen in the straw.
Dazed and in shock, numb all over and then in pain, much pain, he tried to move, and only when he had rolled over on to his good side, his right side, did he see between the canted iron spokes of a barrow’s wheel the first flames being sucked up and teased against a far wall.
‘Hermann …’ he managed. ‘Hermann, where the hell are you?’