Bellringer (12 page)

‘Two victims, Hermann, the one claiming she was the intended and that the first killing definitely wasn’t an accident.’

‘Even getting someone to arrange a meeting for her with one of the
sénégalais
. It has to have been one of those boys, Louis. A note in French and then in
Deutsch
.’

‘But not translated by Mary-Lynn, who spoke German so fluently the former Kommandant had offered to help make her life a little easier, and perhaps that too of Jennifer Hamilton.’

Whose flat in Paris was full of client antiques and artwork, and whose maid was looking after things and visited her when allowed. ‘But did the killer make a mistake, Louis, and compound it with the second killing?’

‘Madame Chevreul having warned that first victim to take great care.’

‘And having enhanced her reputation by that one’s death, she then sends an invitation to the second, telling her to bring what she had but not telling us a damned thing more.’

Their glasses were refreshed. Another cigarette was found and shared. Louis would be longing for a little pipe tobacco. ‘That juju woman has power well beyond her celestial orbit. Those skirmishers of yours were afraid of her and you know it.’

‘Wallpaper, Hermann. Why use that to light a stove when collabo newsprint from Paris is clearly available?’

‘And whatever Léa wants, Léa gets.’

‘But not golf balls, which must have come from over there. Beyond the racetrack, there’s a golf course and beside it, the Hôtel de l’Ermitage that was built in 1929 to offer luxury in excess even to that of the Grand, only to find the Great Depression on its doorstep and then, after but a few years, this war and Occupation.’

‘Mothballed, is it?’

‘Certainly it is well on the other side of the wire that encircles the landscaped parts of the Parc Thermal that are open to the inmates, and that has to mean it’s out of bounds for them but not necessarily to our Senegalese, since Colonel Kessler must have gone there with one or two of them to get his golf balls.’

Again they paused, both warming their cognac by cupping the glass in hand, Hermann even blowing cigarette smoke into his.

‘A truck driver from Limehouse, Louis.’

‘Madame Léa Monnier wearing jewellery as if she was a safe deposit box.’

‘She’d have spent time at Besançon.’

Where, on December sixth, 1940, the British females, almost four thousand of them who had been rounded up by the French police, had been housed in the old brick military barracks that had been vacated but a few days before by a division of the Army of the Armistice, who had mistakenly thought the Wehrmacht were to be moving in and had wrecked the place.
*

No heat, no window glass, and no plumbing, to say nothing of the absence of food and water in the first few days. Latrine trenches, then. . . there had only been three of them, and in winter who could have dug others? And that, why, that had left the courtyard to be used even during the blizzards that would have hit the plateau.

‘The old, the young, the very young, Hermann. It’s a cross we all have to bear, not just me.’

‘You weren’t to blame, and neither was I. We didn’t even know about it until later that month.’

‘
Ah, oui, oui,
Inspector, but their graves are witness and I must go there someday to pay my respects.’

‘Don’t take it so hard. Our Léa’s a survivor.’

‘As is Madame Chevreul, who claims she came to France as a nurse, but when exactly, and from where? What family? What circumstance? There is something about that woman that isn’t quite right, Hermann. Wealth, breeding, and a good education, yet she chooses as her henchwoman one with whom she can have absolutely
nothing
in common?’

‘Did our truck driver become an ambulance driver in that other war?’

It had happened lots of times. ‘Did they meet en route only to lose contact for all the intervening years and then find themselves together again in Besançon? Interred, the two of them, but whereas the one now wears a fortune, the other doesn’t even wear her wedding ring yet speaks fondly of undying love and a departed husband who left her his family home and Percherons.’

‘Six hundred francs, Louis. That’s all they were allowed to keep on arrival.’

‘Watches and jewellery. . . Shouldn’t they have been handed over and put into safekeeping on receipt of the usual piece of paper?’

‘Maybe Colonel Kessler felt he’d have a riot on his hands.’

‘Both at Besançon and here, Hermann? Perhaps, but some items being handed over and others not?’

‘Those last having been kept hidden.’

‘That still doesn’t explain the blatant display.’

‘To which others were definitely silent, but afraid to mention it for fear of Léa beating them to a pulp?’

Ash was flicked, their glasses drained. ‘Perhaps, Hermann. Perhaps.’

‘Things have been stolen. Little things, not the big and the obvious.’

‘Items so insignificant to male eyes we couldn’t possibly realize that they could well have been the essence of cherished female memories no matter the coarseness of their former owners. Why make a point of saying such a thing?’

‘And when asked, Louis, admit to having suffered such a loss herself but having forgotten entirely what it was.’

‘Another splash,
mon vieux
. Just a touch to wet the throat.’

‘Four splashes. Weber might decide to remove the bottle tomorrow.’

‘
Ah, bon, merci
. Now, where were we? Madame Chevreul gets us to accept that for her to differentiate between a suspect and that one’s anonymous accuser, she must place both among the sitters while asking Cérès to speak through her, thereby disclaiming all responsibility.’

It had to be asked. ‘Have they been holding secret trials?’

‘Indirectly she did ask us to understand that she had no other choice but to look into the matter.’

‘Since she had lost a little something herself, Louis! Now tell me where Nora and Mary-Lynn went
after
that final séance and why our trapper didn’t bother to enlighten us. An hour and a half. Drunk and hallucinating—that much Nora
did
tell me, Jill Faber claiming Mary-Lynn was the drunker, Nora insisting that she was and that she couldn’t remember a thing, but obviously could.’

‘And was very afraid, Hermann, and thinking she was the intended victim—is that it? She knew where that spare key to Madame de Vernon’s suitcase was kept and had looked into that little box well before I did, had known there had originally been three of the seed capsules.’

‘But who needs one of those when there’s a handy elevator shaft and a pitchfork that’s been branded by the First American Army?’

It was a soldier’s breakfast, if one who was under fire could ever be so lucky, and served piping hot at 0610 hours in the casino’s canteen: Schmalzbrot und Stammgericht—black bread with lard spread on it—before salting, and the dish of the day, a viscous soup of potatoes, potato flour, lard, salt, and suggestions of questionable meat.

Weber was already having a cigarette; Louis had wisely stayed behind.

‘Golf and the clay pigeons, Kohler? Attending séances?
Mein Gott,
what was I to have done? Colonel Kessler was all too familiar with the enemy. Berlin were not pleased.’

‘The murder of Mary-Lynn Allan finished him off, did it? A girl in different circumstances?’

‘
Ach,
you use the polite term for pregnant? That damned whore repeatedly opened her legs. She spoke our language. She knew books and Colonel Kessler loved to talk of them with her because she also gave him the opportunity to polish his English. A coffee, a glass of wine in his office; strolls, too, in the park, and visits to the dentist in town? I tell you, Kohler, when that one claimed he couldn’t come here as required, Colonel Kessler took her in his
own
car, himself behind the wheel and
knowing
the prisoners were never allowed to leave the camp unless under orders from Berlin!’

There was more, and Kohler was waiting for it with bread and spoon poised as he should.

‘That monk he favoured tried to help her, but is it that Colonel Kessler told him what to do, Kohler? Milk, cheese, eggs, soap, herbs, and honey—always that monk had a little something for that girl. Had he been
paid
to bring her things that the others couldn’t afford? Things the child might need in the womb?’

And if that wasn’t a hint, what was, the bread being sour, the soup bringing but memories of that other war and idiots like this. ‘Your superior officer did say Brother Étienne was harmless.’

‘A homosexual is harmless?’

Must he be so shrill? ‘When Colonel Kessler telephoned the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, he mentioned a bell ringer.’

‘
Ach,
I thought so. The brother rings the order’s bell for vespers.’

Again the Kripo waited like a dog for its master to tell it to continue eating. ‘He also oversees their dairy, Kohler. Endless vats of milk, cream, and whey. Butter and cheeses, the Port-du-Salut those people call it, and the Camembert.’

‘Is he into soap as well?’

‘And the black market, you ask?’

‘I’m just filling in details.’

‘Then keep in mind that we’re going to get the monk on that charge if needed.’

And from three to five years of forced labour, if lucky. Weber was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi who looked like a heavyset schoolmaster, boyish even at the age of thirty-two, the light brown hair cut in military style, the big hands folded on the table as at a high-level conference, the gaze not only steadfastly watchful but accusative, the world at large always being distrusted. The jaw was bony and prominent in defiance, the frown permanent, the look perpetually wounded, so one had best ask, ‘Does the brother also bring things for the Senegalese?’

The shoulders were drawn back, the hands placed flatly on the table before him. ‘He is friendly with all and makes no distinction whereas I do. My sister Sonja, the light of a small boy’s life, was torn from me, Kohler. Ripped! Ended! A Friday, 23 December, 1921, at 1807 hours. Left behind the burned-out shell of the house on the Rheinstrasse where I used to play with my friends. She had been to the Liebfrauenkirche nearby to distribute soup to the destitute and had given, I tell you—
given
—a cup of it to one of those. . . those
Neger Untermenschen
. He was “cold,” he said, when arrested and beaten senseless by the men of our district.
Cold,
Kohler!’

In 1921 and the Allied occupation of the Rhineland: the Americans having negotiated a separate treaty with the Germans on 2 July, which their Senate had then ratified on 18 October of that year; their troops had left, France’s moving in to take care of things in Koblenz. A Negro subhuman.

‘He followed her on her way home. It was getting dark. He hit her twice to silence her before. . . ’

Even now Weber couldn’t speak of it, tears moistening his dark blue eyes. The Nazi Party pin was touched as if a talisman—the badge, too, of a party cell leader and the one for a
Motorgruppe
in 1937 when he must have been a navigator in the rally car of a friend, or had helped out in the repair pit, and so much for who his sister’s killer had really been.

‘Let me tell you, Kohler, they are paying for it now and I’m making sure they do.’

Louis would advise backing off. ‘But does Brother Étienne bring things for them?’

‘The soutane has many hiding places, the clergy being the most insidious of liars, but things are going to change now that he no longer has the protection of our former Kommandant. The brother just hasn’t realized it.’

And Weber would now have the backing of Jundt. ‘Colonel Kessler allowed him a gasoline ration?’

‘And complete freedom to come and go as he wished, often staying later, I tell you, Kohler, than the 1700-hour curfew for all visitors and non-camp personnel.’

‘Did they often have a little chat on the way in or out?’

‘Often. Things were handed over. I know this for a fact. A round of that cheese he makes, a kilo of butter—some of the order’s
Schnapps
. This I have seen.’

‘But did they talk about the camp and its inmates?’

Had this
Schweinebulle
the snout now to the ground? ‘Brother Étienne was full of stories he then embellished for the colonel’s ears.’

‘An
éminence grise
or simply an informant?’

‘Both, Kohler. Both, but his usefulness has been brought into question with the change in command.’

‘You’ve other informants and don’t need him.’

Would Kohler now understand how useful this head of security could be to him if approached properly? ‘I have never had any need for his services. Cigarette currency
, ja
? As a former prisoner of war, you will know that tobacco paves the road with gold. Those bitches will answer anything just so long as I give them a smoke. Both the British
and
the Americans.’

And Kessler hadn’t entirely trusted this one’s informants and had used the brother’s word on such things. ‘
Ach,
my partner and I enjoyed the cigarettes and cognac. That was kind of you.’

And no question yet, thought Weber, of where the directive was on the first killing, a document that Colonel Kessler would most certainly have left for them, especially since he had been using the whore. ‘
Gut
. It’s that partner of yours I want to speak to you about, but come. A little tour of our operations here will, I think, be of some use.’

‘Louis should be with us.’

‘It’s better we leave him behind. Then we can speak as countryman to countryman.’

Sister Jane, the British nun in charge of the other nursing sisters at the hospital had seen many wars, not just this one, and when she filled the doorway to the room Hermann and he had been allotted, St-Cyr knew it.

‘Chief Inspector, Madame de Vernon isn’t well. If you were to place in front of her those items you took from Caroline’s pockets and have hastily gathered from your bed to keep from my eyes, she might. . . well, I hesitate to say.’

‘At the first sign of trouble, I’ll call you.’

Must this
sûreté
be so stubborn? ‘Can you not understand there may well be no outward sign? Her state of illness isn’t physical. It’s mental. We have little enough sedative. Already we have had to use three ampoules. I really can’t afford to use any more. She cries and no one gets any peace, not our other patients, nor ourselves or the doctors. Last night was but the exception.’