Bellringer (31 page)

Like a wraith, the trapper had lost herself and though he searched and searched, she could not be found. But had Madame Chevreul watched the proceedings from her windows late on Friday afternoon as he was now, and where, please, had Becky Torrence really been, Becky who had gone out there early yesterday morning to find Caroline’s body and yet had said nothing of it until forced to by Hermann?

The aroma of smouldering rosemary, the incense, felt St-Cyr, of medieval monks that had perfumed the otherwise saturated air of their abbeys, filled the bedroom, instantly clearing the mind with its flavourful sharpness and competing with the lingering eau de cologne. Léa Monnier had just been attended to. With evident propriety, Brother Étienne hurriedly tugged the grey Blitzmädel dress and flannel slip down over the last of that backside to swollen ankles, cracked toenails, and bunions.

Madame Chevreul, her timing all but perfect, had opened the door, only a glimpse of the patient’s state of undress having been offered.

‘Chief Inspector, how good of you to have been patient. Léa, dearest, perhaps a few of your delightful
canapés de raifort à l’anglaise
and a glass of Brother Étienne’s magnificent elderberry wine to polish off the inspector’s lunch of cold pork and beans and SPAM.

‘Really, Inspector, we would have heated it for you had we but known.

‘Léa, dearest. . . ’

A dark look was given this
sûreté,
a beet-red fist wrapping itself around a corked brown medicine bottle, the admonition breathed.

‘
Couillon,
you didn’t arrest the little one. How many times must I tell you it was her?’

Becky Torrence. ‘Léa, Léa, I won’t have this. Please don’t be vulgar. The chief inspector is a guest,
n’est-ce pas
? Be the eminently polite and capable woman I know.

‘Inspector, you must forgive her upbringing. Léa has been in terrible pain all morning, last night as well.’

Washing his hands in a large cut-glass bowl, the same as was used in the séances, no doubt, and uncertain if he should say anything in the presence of the
sûreté,
the brother did. ‘Madame Monnier, please have whomever rubs you down use a glove. No cuts or scrapes in your skin or theirs, you understand, otherwise it will enter the bloodstream and we do not want that.’

The hands were dried, a doubtful glance given before taking hold of Madame Chevreul by a forearm, as one would an old and dear friend.

‘I must emphasize its danger, Élizabeth. Oh for sure it will work like a charm. Our brother, the abbot, swears by it and blesses the day it was first administered, but I must urge extreme caution. Only a little at any one time, and rubbed in only until the numbness is felt. The skin will tingle. There will be that welcome sensation of warmth, but all in moderation and with great care, as emphasized.’

The Art Deco and other jewellery that Léa Monnier had worn when first encountered caught the light, setting off the fair hair, dark-blue eyes, and perfectly made-up cheeks and lips of this medium whose powder-blue woollen suit and soft grey silk blouse were magnificent.

Earrings matched the bracelet and one of the rings. The high heels were of dark-blue patent leather and worth an absolute fortune in themselves.

‘Isn’t he wonderful, Inspector?’ she said, having noted with pleasure his scrutiny. ‘Léa suffers terribly from sciatica and lumbago.’

‘Gout, too,’ grunted the woman defiantly.

‘Hence the horseradish canapés?’ he asked, gesturing with pipe in hand: thin slices of buttered black bread with chives and mustard to which had been added a topping of finely grated horseradish.

‘The goutweed poultices are better,’ grunted Léa.

‘And a tincture of juniper, Inspector,’ hastily added the brother to avoid further unpleasantness. ‘A teaspoonful thrice daily, with a little water.’

‘
Juniperus communis?
’

‘Of course.’

Juniperus sabina
being occasionally fatal, if taken internally. ‘And the monkshood rub?’ asked St-Cyr.

The wolfsbane, the blue rocket of gardens, the little turnip, and
sûreté
thoughts that would not be good. ‘
Aconitum napellus,
first used by Welsh physicians in the thirteenth century. Dissolved in alcohol and mixed with belladonna.’

Deadly nightshade. ‘A liniment, then, of not one but two poisons, Brother, the first one of the most deadly.’

The latter containing atropine, hyoscyamine, and hyoscine, as did the
Datura stramonium,
the belladonna having been favoured by Venetian ladies in waiting whose pupils would then be dilated by beautifying draughts.

‘Belladonna, itself, is nothing to play with. A hallucinogenic and a sedative, Brother? Respiration and body temperature increase until, with restlessness and giddiness, numbness leads to a comatose state, usually causing death, albeit delayed for some hours, even days; the former, the aconite, if but 0.00405 of a gram is ingested, one-sixteenth of a grain, within two to six hours, sometimes less.’

It was clear that this
sûreté
thought him imprudent, but one must be firm. ‘The aconite giving a most agonizing death, Inspector. Hence my urging the utmost caution.’

‘You don’t fool around, do you? A bitter taste, after which there is that tingling and numbness you mentioned, but on the tongue and lips.
Ah, mon Dieu, mon Frère,
as little as 0.0000324 gram—one two-thousandth of a grain—will give the taste test, but that alone is sufficient to kill a healthy mouse in but a few minutes.’

‘Inspector. . . Inspector, shouldn’t you be more concerned with those missing seeds? Brother Étienne and I both agree that Irène de Vernon must have them. Caroline Lacy was terrified of her and very clear about the hatred that woman bore her and her roommates and, I must add, Jennifer Hamilton.’

‘One capsule of four pods, each of which will contain from fifty to one hundred seeds, each in turn of about 0.1 milligram strength, one hundred seeds at most yielding the ten milligrams that are needed,’ said Brother Étienne, sadly shaking his head. ‘Caroline Lacy, I am certain now, must have been in danger of it, Nora Arnarson also, and Jill Faber, and Marni Huntington.’

‘And Becky Torrence, Étienne. We mustn’t forget her,’ said Madame Chevreul.

‘Each seed is but from two to three millimetres long, Inspector, and all can be easily hidden if removed from the capsule and its pods.’

‘Jennifer Hamilton is in the greatest danger, Inspector. That is what Cérès said Caroline Lacy had insisted when the goddess spoke through me last night. Léa can confirm. We are all, as a result, extremely worried about that girl. Please make certain that nothing untoward happens to her. I have this feeling, and it makes me tremble.’

Jennifer then. A wineglass was brought and filled, the canapés offered, Léa Monnier’s expression remaining grim and unrelenting.

The brother gave a nervous smile. ‘Since I uncorked it myself, Inspector, I think you will find it untainted.’

‘
Ah, bon, merci
. And did Caroline Lacy give the name of her killer?’

‘Léa has already told you,’ said Élizabeth.

Becky Torrence. ‘A fait accompli, then?’

Time. . . was it an opportune time? she wondered. ‘That girl was seen entering the Chalet des Ânes on Friday afternoon at around 1600 hours, Inspector, and all but on the footsteps of the Lacy girl. Perhaps Becky Torrence chose not to tell you this, but should have known that from here there is an excellent view which neither the gathering dusk nor that wretched ground fog entirely obscured. Léa and I were earnestly awaiting Étienne’s arrival as, I dare say, were many others. Would this dear servant of the Lord bring the oft-promised liniment or again “forget” due to his deep concern over its nature? We saw him speak to Caroline first, giving her a few items, which she gratefully tucked away in her overcoat pockets. Then, as he would have done, he blessed her.’

‘And wheeled my bike over to Sergeant Senghor and his corporal before coming in, it being the Hôtel Grand’s turn to receive the first of my visitations.’

‘Becky Torrence spent no more than seven or eight minutes inside that chalet, Inspector. Certainly when Cérès contacted her last night, Caroline anxiously stated that she hadn’t expected Becky to confront her. I, of course, have no recollection of what was said, for when in clairaudience, it is only my voice that the goddess uses to reach the needy.’

‘They argued violently,’ said Léa, again passing the canapés. ‘She said she had been wrongly accused of something, a star perhaps. The Milky Way was mentioned and that when she had denied any wrongdoing, the Torrence girl had seized a pitchfork and pinned her to the wall, demanding she confess.’

‘Really, Inspector, if only you and Herr Kohler would agree to become sitters, all would be made most clear.’

And they had known precisely, felt St-Cyr, what had been found with Caroline—that Star of David that would have worried Becky the most.

Quickly at a signal from Madame, lunch was served to avoid further questions.
Oeufs brayons,
a favourite in Normandy: baked eggs with crème fraîche on crusty white bread, the last of the sauce then being added, with butter, salt and pepper, and chopped parsley. A warm potato and frisée salad with bacon would follow,
une salade au lard champenoise,
the frisée being winter’s curly endive.

Unfortunately there was just enough for Madame and the brother, and one had to settle for the canapés and wine.

‘Your partner, Inspector?’ she asked. ‘Where is he?’

‘Hermann? Interviewing your maid, I think, and now your cook.’

‘Léa. . . ’

‘Stays, Madame Chevreul. For now just trust to the gods that nothing untoward will be revealed.’

It was a room like no other, for the signs of the zodiac, half-moons, asteroids, comets, stars, and other things in silver and gold paper covered its walls and hung from the ceiling, and when he had closed and locked the door behind himself, Kohler stood looking down at this ‘maid’ of Madame Chevreul’s, this former waif with the jet-black hair who had somehow, in that first crush of a mob encounter, slid a hand inside a greatcoat to steal his Walther P38.

She was like a sparrow yet a merlin, and her soft violet eyes looked up at him from under naturally curving, long black lashes as if from adventure’s doorway. Not that of a room on the other side of Les Halles or even one from around the Carrefour Vavin in Montparnasse, but rather that of the 5th arrondissement, the rue St-Jacques or rue St-Germain and the Sorbonne. Innocence, then, and intelligence, but the dream of both and the memory.

‘Cosy,’ he said of the room. She wouldn’t smile, wouldn’t say a thing, thought Marguerite Lefèvre. Men like this had wanted to use her often enough in the past and she was certain she knew exactly what he was thinking.

The tent, the ‘cabinet’ that blocked the doorway into Madame Chevreul’s bedroom, was both circus and child’s playhouse, yet neither. From its inner sanctum, behind its dropped curtained doorway, the resident medium could conjure up anything she liked while the sitters pensively waited all but in darkness and with eyes tightly closed, holding hands in a semicircle around the table out front.

‘Wallpaper,’ he said. ‘That of flowers, birds, Chinese pagodas and sampans, glued and pinned to cloth. Louis could give you the makers even if from a hundred years ago, but where did they get it?’

‘They?’ she softly asked, blinking up at him but only once.

‘The blacks. The Senegalese.’

Her French was Parisian and perfect, her age not more than twenty-five, though she would definitely, with the Brother’s help, keep that youthful complexion for years—the figure, too.

Block printed and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century design, the wallpaper had been patiently stripped from opulent walls, dried, coiled, smuggled in, and sold to Madame Chevreul or simply handed over in return for a favour.

‘The Hôtel de l’Ermitage?’ he asked, now fingering an uncoiled curl of the paper as if a silk chemise he would trail down a girl’s thighs before teasing off her step-ins.

She must shake her head and shrug, felt Marguerite. He looked inside the cabinet, the tent, saw that the door to Madame’s bedroom was curtained off but easily accessible, saw the armchair she used, the throw rug on the floor, all such things, the luminescent gauze as well, the white ectoplasm that would appear to issue from Madame’s throat when in a trance.

‘Phosphorescent paint,’ he said, fingering the gauze now and smiling that smile of his, for, on drying, the gauze had been crinkled repeatedly to make it again soft and pliable.

Curbs and crosswalks in Paris and elsewhere were painted with its whiteness to aide pedestrians during the blackout, thought Marguerite, but Madame wasn’t going to be happy with her for having allowed him in here. Madame was going to tell Léa to see that she was punished severely, but what Madame had still not realized, or perhaps she had, was that such a punishment could be exciting in itself.
Une flagellation
.

And anyway there was nothing she could have done to have stopped him, a Gestapo.

‘Léa gets things from time to time,’ she said of the paint with a shrug.

‘In trade?’

‘Or by purchase.’

‘And if one of those guards asks for a little comfort?’

Another shrug, but curt this time, would be best, the glimpse of a smile, now shy and defenceless. ‘Don’t you want me to gaze into my crystal ball?’

This item was on another table, and of smoky quartz, about twelve centimetres in diameter. Damask-covered, the table would have seated two, with one chair against the wall that faced the tent.

‘You are a doubter,’ she said, her pulse quickening at the thought. ‘It’s best then to start with such a ball. Once that negativity has been banished, clarity will come. You will definitely be surprised by what I see. The instant I set eyes on you, I knew.’

They read palms and tarot cards too, and the Ouija board, and places for each were set about the room. ‘Caroline Lacy and Jennifer Hamilton were interviewed in here, amongst all of this?’ he asked.

‘If Madame has said so, then it must be.’