Bellringer (2 page)

Very quickly, though, two Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bars were found and then a small, white cardboard box of Cracker Jack Nut Candy Popcorn and a packet of Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum—six sticks in all and still tightly wrapped.

‘Beechnut oil,’ said St-Cyr, of a little amber-coloured bar of soap. ‘Definitely not the National.’

Which was of grey slaked lime, ground horse chestnuts, sand, and wood ashes, and cast into cubes heavier than a brick but no bigger than a die, and one for every month of the year, not that a lot of the French bothered too much with bathing, but a bar of Lifebuoy Soap was retrieved from the pocket the
sûreté
was avidly mining, and then a rain of shiny, yellowish-brown seeds.

‘Alfalfa,’ said Kohler, glad to be of help.

There was a sigh. ‘Sprouts if sown indoors, Hermann. A much needed source of vitamins and minerals, but also a hopeful abortifacient.’

SCHEISSE,
must Louis mention it at a time like this?

Hermann’s stomach rumbled but a paisley sewing pouch was quickly found. He set it aside with everything else in a tidy row beside a tidy victim. They were working now as they should, thought St-Cyr. Two detectives, one from each side of this lousy war and Occupation, the first, it must be admitted, a chief inspector of the Sûreté Nationale; the second of a lower rank but from the Gestapo, since all such had been placed under that roof whether they liked it or not, and of course the Germans always had to be the overseers since the French had to be kept out of trouble and working hard for them, but then, too, this one just happened to have had the good sense to have learned a proper language as a prisoner of war in that other war—the one the Germans had lost.

Kohler found an oval seashell, maybe three centimetres long by two in width—a porcellaneous, creamy white-to-yellow thing with a row of coarse teeth on each side of its top-to-bottom aperture: something the victim had found or been given and had probably kept for the memories it would have brought.

A sachet of herbs smelled of lavender. A small cough syrup bottle held honey, but when one of those yellow cloth stars with a
J
on it was retrieved, he knew he couldn’t help but swallow hard. ‘Louis. . . ’

It dangled from capable fingers, bringing its own memories of Hermann’s Oona, the woman he had rescued from just such things and still lived with when in Paris. Well, one of the women. There were two of them.

‘It’s been removed from someone’s overcoat. The needle holes. . . ’

‘Are clear enough, but why keep it, Louis?’

Since doing so could but bring its terrible punishment. ‘Are there Jewish citizens in this camp?’ said St-Cyr.

‘
Ach,
why ask me? Ask yourself. Though the Wehrmacht run the camp, Vichy suggested its being set up here and gave their OK, didn’t they?’

The government of Maréchal Pétain, in the town of Vichy and another international spa, one they’d left not so very long ago, that investigation settled.

‘But was that star crammed into her pocket in haste?’ Or carefully hidden?

‘Crammed.’

‘Then perhaps she was given it during an argument, or after death.’

And this murder was now looking more and more challenging.

‘There was also this,’ said St-Cyr. A thin, white pasteboard card held its little message in a script of blue-black ink whose many flourishes held no pauses. ‘It’s in English, Hermann, a language I unfortunately have little knowledge of.’

‘And what memories I have of it,’ said Kohler, ‘are just about as rusty as those stovepipes.’

In the mid-1930s, Hermann had been sent to London on a police course and had earnestly worked at the language so as to enjoy himself and make the best of it instead of spying for the Reich.

Bit by bit it came out: ‘You have been chosen and are cordially invited to attend. Please bring what you have.’

‘That Shield of David?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘Then tell me why the party-throwers would want it?’

‘Assuming that the invitation was to such a gathering.’

As always, there were no easy answers. Seed packets gave carrots, peas, lettuces, and even pumpkins, each with an artist’s rendition of the same. ‘And all sent from home in Red Cross parcels, Hermann, but was she intending to sell them?’

A much-worn packet of Craven A cigarettes held a logo: a faded black cat on a red background. Tobacco being in such short supply, Kohler thought they’d best try one. ‘It’ll help us think,’ he said, but when he had one of the hand-rolled fags between his lips, he had to spit it out. ‘Thorn apple!’

‘Angel’s trumpet.
Datura stramonium
.’

‘Was she accustomed to getting high on it only to be thrown into an agony, eh, whose sole memory would be just that?’

‘The dried leaves are sometimes smoked to treat asthma. . . ’

‘If so, then she’s one dead herbal.’

‘Who couldn’t have become one without a little help,’ muttered St-Cyr.

‘Our bell ringer? There was also this.’

Hermann was very good at finding such things. Having carefully felt the underside of the coat collar, he’d come up with a hidden pocket. The note, written in a far different hand, was in French first and then in German: ‘Please tell the Kommandant that was no accident. I saw it happen and know who did it. Miss Caroline Lacy, Room 3–38 Vittel-Palace.’

But by signing it, had she then signed her own death warrant?

‘At least now we know who she was,’ said St-Cyr.

‘And have a motive. She must have been about to meet one of the guards. Two chocolate bars, the chewing gum if necessary, then the bar of Lifebuoy Soap as a last resort. Such a big payoff implies considerable risk.’

‘Only someone got to her.’

‘And left that star.’

‘Perhaps, but then. . . ’

A fist was clenched. ‘
Verdammt,
that’s how it happened. Don’t keep hedging!’

‘Take the easy route, Hermann?’

‘It might help—have you ever thought of that?’

‘And have you, Inspector, paused to even consider why that note was written in
two
languages?’

Ah sacré nom de nom!
‘The
français
can’t have been for one of the guards, can it? Do they have French doctors in the camp?’

‘Or
Tirailleurs sénégalais,
Hermann? The ones we caught a glimpse of. Former skirmishers from a defeated army who are now here as prisoners of war doing the bidding of their masters, namely the heavy work.’

Again Kohler asked what they were dealing with.

‘The usual. Now go and find our acting Kommandant but please don’t enlighten him about that note and the invitation. Let him find out when necessary.’

‘And our first victim?’ To whom the note must have referred.

‘We’ll get to her soon enough.’

‘Enjoy yourself then. I’ll see if I can find us a place to stay.’

‘In town. It’s very provincial and hardworking but insular, Hermann. As with Les Francs-Comtois in the province just to the south, they tend to keep to themselves, especially at times of defeat like this, as in the Franco-Prussian War. So you may need to use your Gestapo clout. We’d never get any sleep in either of those hotels knowing what we do now.’

But where, please, were her papers? wondered St-Cyr. And why, really, had she been tidied? She was of a little more than medium height and slender, and her legs had been placed side by side as if for burial, her right arm bent and lain precisely across the chest. All down the length of her there wasn’t a thing out of place. The saddle shoes—very American—were scuffed and worn, but here, too, the thought was that a moment had been taken to clean them of their straw and dried dung; and yes, the soles were all but gone. After two and a half years of shortages in France, neither leather nor rubber could be found except perhaps by the privileged few.

‘Were you a ballet dancer or still a student?’ he asked her and himself. ‘You have the build, the look—all such things. A real stage presence,
n’est-ce pas
?’

Her French would have been perfect. Her ash-blond hair, beneath its knitted, soft grey toque, was in a tightly pinned chignon, but here, too, things had been tidied. Some strands, having come loose over the brow, had been smoothed back into place.

‘Please, I must,’ he said and, turning her onto her side, hiked up coat, skirt, and slip to pull the underpants down and gently ease the thermometer into her. ‘Hermann can’t stand me doing this, but it’s necessary if we are to have some idea of when this happened. Given the frost, the night, the shelter here, and the fact that you were fully dressed and wearing your overcoat and must have been terrified—all such things—perhaps a fall of one-and-a-quarter degrees Celsius per hour. If outside, it would have been more—two degrees per hour. One has always to wait when taking such readings, and Hermann has neither the patience nor the stomach for it.

‘
Ah, bon,
7.2 degrees Celsius, with a drop of 30 degrees, giving us somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1600 hours yesterday. Were many of you still out and about?’

She would have been terribly embarrassed by what he had just done and would need to be distracted. Tidying her, he removed one of the woollen mittens. ‘Since none of the Host wafers have been eaten, we can assume that you must have met our bell ringer, if that one really is a priest, at quite close to the time of death.
Bien sûr,
I realize such people can murder just like any other, but was he your herbalist?’

The wafers, in themselves, didn’t mean a sacrilege, for in better days, churches, monasteries, and nunneries had often sold the scraps and even half-kilos of the whole, and these had only been of the latter.

‘Mademoiselle, your skin was very dry, but did he prepare this lotion for you? Chamomile with lavender, but rose and neroli also, on a base of honey and almond oil. I’m sure of it.’

There were dried, finely chopped lavender flowers in the sachet, but also dried chamomile flowers and orris root, to which droplets of oil of lavender had been added. ‘Has this Occupation of ours put us all back into the Middle Ages?’ he asked. ‘The smells in that hotel, the stench at times? Were they so bad you and the others had taken to carrying these little sachets for their moments of hurried relief?’

She had done her lips with what appeared to be a lipstick of beeswax, henna, and almond oil. Far softer and gentler on the skin than what was usually available these days, it had produced the necessary effect. ‘Chamomile,’ he went on. ‘You’ve applied it as a rinse to lighten your hair. You took your time in getting yourself ready for this meeting. More and more you are telling me that my partner and I had best talk to this bell ringer.’

The face was thin but finely boned, the forehead high and smooth, the nose sharply defined. The eye shadow would perhaps have been made of kaolin clay, talc, cornstarch, and, for darkening, iron oxide. Mascara had firmed the eyelashes. Again the hand cream had been used on the face as a base, but a blush of henna had been added to brighten an otherwise winter pallor.

She had been caught unawares, had been forced back against that wall, the pitchfork having been snatched up by the killer. ‘Did you plead you wouldn’t tell a soul? Was pressure then released, your thinking it a reprieve?’

The star was not something to be carried or taken lightly. ‘Did you snatch it from your pocket and thrust it towards your assailant? Did the two of you argue vehemently? There are no frozen tears, but were these wiped away and the makeup smoothed over their traces by your tidier, or was the star not hers at all but yours?’

To have remained hidden among so many would have been a terrible ordeal.

‘Were you still alive when that fork was withdrawn? Did you see the look in your killer’s eyes? Did that person then angrily stuff the star back into your pocket, and if so, why?’

Already there were no easy answers. ‘You were then carefully laid out. We do know you had come to meet someone who was either French-speaking or German, but as so few of the latter speak our language, I have to wonder about the former. Had this person agreed beforehand to the meeting place? You couldn’t have been the one to have arranged it, otherwise you’d have known what language that person spoke.

‘But did you unwittingly ask your killer to speak to him on your behalf, and what, please, was the invitation to, and what, of course, were you to have brought? This Shield of David?’

A careful survey of the stall found only an overturned water pail; a small, sharply cut-off sprig from a beech tree; and three curls from the inner bark of the same. These last items had probably been dropped either by the assailant or the victim and were halfway inside the stall.

A sadness came, and he couldn’t help it. ‘Spring,’ he said. ‘Were you thinking of it as you felt each tiny, spear-shaped bud or merely planning to chew them and the bark for a little nourishment, as did the Iroquois and other North American tribes?’

From every window Kohler knew he was being watched. They would be whispering to each other, asking, What did they find? Is that why he’s trying to hurry on that ice? Was she naked? Was she cold? Did they realize Caroline wasn’t the only one who had died?

The camp offices were in the casino, and as he turned away, he knew how disappointed they would be at losing sight of him. Attached to the southwest corner of the Hôtel Grand, the casino would, he knew, have direct access, but here the main entrance was, of course, close to the camp’s gate and directly across from the Gothic spire of a church-cum-chapel in its own little forest. Prayers, then, in the old days before entry or upon leaving if bankrupt or in clover, but now. . . why, now, if one had gained the necessary pass and safe-conduct to leave for something better like one’s flat or house, that was OK, but if being sent on to somewhere else, well, definitely not.

Even here the threat of deportation to a concentration camp would always be present.

Four staff cars lined the road out front, any of which would do nicely for Louis and himself. All had been requisitioned from the Occupied and painted with the regulation Wehrmacht camouflage so as to let folks know who was behind the wheel.

Two large white-domed, circular rooms anchored what would once have been the Salle des Fêtes, the reception hall, but before he got there, steps led up to a broad terrace and then an Art Deco door, with an etched glass fountain just like the one Louis had been on about. Yet another female watcher opened the door, but this one was a BDM, one of the Federation of German Milch Cows, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of the same. Earnest girls from home doing their duty in uniforms so grey the French had taken to calling them
les souris grises
—the grey mice.