And near or at the Lido from which the telephone caller had later rung the commissariat? ‘Jean-Louis, you mustn’t worry so much. Of course we’d both like to save that girl, but by now with so many hours having passed …’
The shrug was not one of uncaring but simply of logic. At fifty-six years of age, dark-shadowed and ruddy, corpulent too, though not nearly so much as before the Defeat, Armand had had to deal with successions of prefets and knew how best to preserve integrity through hard reason and fact. The dark brown eyes behind spectacles whose surgically taped repairs had yet to be properly mended, were intent. From time to time he tossed his head, gestured or shrugged the rounded shoulders as if in communication with himself.
Again he muttered, ‘It’s not the usual but all the evidence points to it.’ Long ago the cigarette that had fastened itself to his lower lip had gone out. ‘It’s curious, Jean-Louis,’ he said, not looking up. ‘The position of the body isn’t right, is it? Partly up on the knees, the arms and back stiffly bent-why, please, hasn’t he completely collapsed? The muscles should have been flaccid, yet here we have a victim who-oh for sure, rigor is now well advanced-but he’s too tense even for that. Was he rigid before being dragged down several of those steps?’
Not thrown from the top of them as first thought. ‘Violent exertion?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘Any such struggle would speed the onset of rigor, making the body almost immediately rigid.’
But this was more. ‘The hands,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Were they so tightly clenched, the only way the fingers could be loosened was to stamp on the fists?’
‘Precisely!’
‘As a result of instantaneous cadaveric spasm?’
One didn’t see this often, but … ‘He was strong and in good shape,’ acknowledged Tremblay. ‘He resisted his attackers. At one point he got away from them but …’
‘Was brought down and hit again, that second time.’
‘The bruising of the buttocks and thighs bear this out, also that of the left shoulder. The scrotum was then grabbed and torn, not crushed. He may well have passed out, though; would have been brought round, dragged up, steadied …’
‘Held by two men, while a third smashed him across the face with the flat of a long-handled shovel, the neck instantly breaking.’
‘A sudden, violent disruption of the nervous system, Jean-Louis, but unlike rigor, the fingers stiffen so much they are far more difficult to open even when compared to the tightly clenched fists of a living person who resists with all their might.’
Had the victim grasped something during the struggle? Had this been why it had been necessary to open the hands, the fingers then removed not so much to hide the victim’s identity as to hide the reason for their opening? ‘Strands of hair?’ St-Cyr heard himself ask. ‘A wristwatch perhaps? Some item that could lead to the identity of his killers?’
It wasn’t a happy thought, they both looking down at the grille of the sewer. ‘There might be a catchment at the bottom of the shaft or a weir to hold back the solids,’ mused Jean-Louis who had, it must be admitted, far more experience with such things. ‘We could,’ he added, ‘order up the sewer workers and wait for them to arrive, or go fishing ourselves to save time and further possible loss.’
‘Idiot, it’ll be freezing. Is it that you would have us toss a coin to see who strips off to take the first plunge? In any case, he must be turned over and moved, and that will help to verify the spasm.’
* * *
Kohler longed for a cigarette. More than ever he felt Louis and he were on quicksand. Too much bad feeling towards them, the two of them being put on the run like that last night.
Austere in the old Cite barracks, the Prefecture de Police was to his right, overlooking place du Parvis Notre-Dame. To the south and directly ahead of him beyond the quai, the Seine was mud-grey in the rain, to the east, the main portal of the Notre-Dame accepted a hurrying, umbrella-bearing flock of sisters. Wounded, the eye of the rose window had been plucked to safety in the autumn of 1939. Now its canvas and timber-framed bandage bagged and sagged with accumulated moisture, causing the gargoyles to cringe.
The Trinite victim, Madame Adrienne Guillaumet, age thirty-two, had been a part-time teacher of German for the Deutsche Institut, and hadn’t the French, its Parisians especially, flocked to learn the language, and wasn’t everything being done to encourage them? But here, too, things were never simple. The Institut had taken over the Hotel Sagan, the former Polish Chancellory on the rue de Talleyrand and not far from her flat at 131 rue Saint-Dominique, which was in the quartier du Gros-Caillou and just to the west of the Invalides, in a very up-market Left Bank neighbourhood.
The Ecole Militaire was immediately to the south of the Gros-Caillou, the Champ de Mars and Tour Eiffel to the southwest. Money there, too, bien sur, but the quartier Ecole Militaire was home to retired career officers from that other war and this one too, some of them, and most were nothing more than pompous pains in the ass who would be all too ready to damn an absent fellow officer’s wife if she strayed.
She had taught her evening class at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, over on the rue Vaucanson in the Third. At just after 9.30 p.m., or close to it, she must have stood in the rain on the rue Conte to hail a velo-taxi’s little blue light. The college of engineering and manufacturing was popular. Some of those taxis would have been waiting until evening classes were out, but why hadn’t she just run the short distance south to the metro entrance on place General-Morin? That would have got her home safely.
Though he didn’t want to think it, not with her, not with those kids of hers and a husband locked up in the Reich, it would have to be asked: Had she been on her way to meet someone? She had left the children at home, hadn’t had the cash perhaps to have hired anyone to come in or hadn’t wanted the neighbours to know, yet had had the cash for a taxi.
The passage de la Trinite hadn’t been far, the time perhaps 9.45 or 9.50 p.m. He shuddered at what she had had to go through, couldn’t help but recall other such cases.
When Matron Aurore Aumont of the Hotel-Dieu found the detective, he was staring bleakly down at the square as many must have done in the old days when dragged there to be anointed with oil before being set afire in the face of God. He looked, she was certain, like a gentilhomme de fortune who had just seen the ashes of his life.
She had been going to tell this gestapiste that there was no soap and little disinfectant, that there had been a 50 percent increase in tuberculosis, wards full of those who had foolishly smoked uncured tobacco, obtained illegally of course, and that appendicitis, ulcers of the stomach and ruptures of the bowel were due entirely to the eating of rutabagas-cattle food! the potatoes having all gone to the Reich. But she couldn’t bring herself to say any of it to this fritz-haired giant with the terrible scar and others far smaller but still far too many to count.
‘Monsieur, you wished to see me?’
‘Has Madame Guillaumet said anything?’
‘Not to us. There may be memory loss simply from hunger, you understand. Like so many these days, it’s the little things first that one forgets, and not just with the rape cases, which are never easy, as I can see you are only too aware.’
As if it mattered deeply to him, he said that he and his French partner handled only common crime. ‘We’re floaters,’ he said, and that they had been brought in especially to deal with this tidal wave of blackout crime and could use all the help she could give. ‘The girl who let the press in?’