Madrigal (42 page)

‘The timing, madame?' he said, and she realized he was using the notebook to avoid looking at her so as to gain her confidence.

‘Last night … Well, Thursday night, at … at about ten o'clock the new time. Berlin Time. My husband … he hadn't left that study of his, that “laboratory” as he loved to call it. When I went to knock on the door, he … he didn't answer.'

‘And the door?'

‘Was locked as usual.
Mon Dieu
, he could have been up to anything in there and I'd not have known, but always with him it was his bees.'

‘You went in by the garden?'

‘I went outside, yes, and around to that field.'

‘You took the footpath that leads down from the cul-de-sac, the
impasse
, here to the gate that's off the rue des Pyrénées?'

‘Yes. From there a lane leads to it.'

‘The apiary your husband leases from the city?'

‘
Yes!
And … and then I came in through the garden.'

‘The gate to that field's kept locked but you've got a key?'

‘No I don't have. It … it wasn't locked, nor was the one to the garden.'

‘Could anyone else have come in that way?'

‘The thief, the destroyer of the hives?'

‘You noticed in passing that they'd been robbed?'

‘Not then, no, but …' She shrugged. ‘I don't really know when that happened. Yesterday – on Friday, probably, and after … after one of the neighbours had discovered he'd been murdered and would no longer have need of the hives.'

Kohler scribbled:
Hives not robbed night of murder but next day (?) Neighbours a problem
. ‘Anyone else?' he asked, not looking up.

‘Whoever delivered that little gift he drank from, the seller of it perhaps?
Yes
!'

‘Do you mean your husband left those two gates unlocked because he was expecting someone?'

‘I … I don't know.
How could I have
?'

‘Okay, okay, calm down. So you found a brick in the garden and broke a pane of glass in one of the doors.'

‘I had to. He … he did not answer me.'

‘And you found him lying on the floor, dead?'

‘
Merde alors
, must I shout the obvious to you? The fumes alone were enough!' she shrilled and gripped her head in anguish, shut her eyes and wept – let him see her like this. Ashamed, terrified, completely exposed and totally unable to control herself.

Kohler lit a cigarette and forced it between her trembling lips. ‘
Merci
,' she gasped and inhaled deeply. Calmed a little, she tossed her head back, but gave him a hard look to warn him off, thinking he was getting too close. Still fighting for control, she turned her back on him.

‘I choked. I ran back outside and tried to think. He … he hadn't been dead for long, Inspector, because we'd spoken through that damned door of his at about seven thirty, or was it eight thirty? I … I can't remember. I'm so confused. Eight thirty … yes, it was eight thirty. He hadn't wanted to eat what little I had prepared. Soup … endless days of soup. A few cooked carrots. A little endive … No wine. We'd run out and you can't buy any, can you? Not here. Not in Charonne anyway, and one must shop at those places where one is known, isn't that so?'

Everyone was bitching about the shopkeepers, many of whom abused their positions and lorded it over their customers, selling a little to their favourites and nothing to the rest.

Kohler told her to sit down.

‘And freeze?' she snapped. ‘Forgive me. I'm … I'm just not myself,' but thought he would only wonder if this really
was
herself. Shattered and unable to think, and so afraid.

Instinctively the woman's fingers sought the gilt-bronze sculpture of a naked young man which stood, perhaps some thirty centimetres high, on a glass and bronze table in front of the fireplace. There was a vase of long-stemmed red silk roses beside it and, as he watched, she fingered the sculpture's shoulders, arms and thighs, couldn't seem to stop herself and trembled at the touch.

Complete in every detail, handsome and virile, the sculpture was one of a pair but its mate, a girl of fifteen or sixteen, stood not on the table but up above it and dead centre on the white mantelpiece of fluted wood, and before its mirror. The girl's right foot was down a step from the other foot on her pedestal, her torso turned towards the viewer, her head away and to the right.

Tiny acanthus leaves made a delicate tracery of chained ovals on the flat frame of the mirror that was as wide as the mantel. Two life-sized white marble faces, those of a boy and a girl, flanked the statue, looking out into the room.

‘My son … our son, did these,' she said as if afraid of sounding foolish. ‘Étienne … Étienne is in one of your prisoner-of-war camps.'

Along with one and a half million other Frenchmen, but they aren't
my
camps, thought Kohler and said, ‘Look, I'm sorry to hear that. You obviously need him with you.'

‘I've always “needed” him, Inspector. Always.'

But not the daughter? Then why put her sculpture up there front and centre and with her gorgeous backside reflected in the mirror? The father? he asked himself. Had de Bonnevies insisted on her placing it there?

The chairs, the sofa and chaise all matched the mantelpiece with white and fluted wooden frames and the clean, sharp lines of the late 1920s. Moderne, then, or post-moderne, and all covered in a cocoa-brown fabric that was almost silvery in the lamplight. Italian silk velvet, he told himself, and very expensive even then. Had the furniture been a wedding gift from her father, he wondered and thought it probable.

The carpet was not an Aubusson or a Savonnerie or any of those to which, as a child and then a university student, she might have been accustomed. But the soft, warm and very light beige of its wool went well with the armchairs and the rest of the furniture. In the mirror he could see the oil paintings she had hung, and knew they were good and must have been in her family for years.

‘Inspector, my husband had his enemies – the petty jealousies of other beekeepers. He was president of the
Société Centrale d'Apiculture
, and for the third year in a row, and so had trampled on a good many toes. But … but who the hell would do that to him?
Who
?'

And had that person come in through the apiary? wondered Kohler.

For a moment they looked at each other and finally, realizing what she was fingering, the woman let her hand fall away from the sculpture of her son. ‘That is Danielle,' she said acidly of the other bronze. ‘My son is very talented but his sister did not pose like that for him. Not without her bathing suit. I'm certain of it.'

But not quite, was that it, thought Kohler, and wrote it all down for Louis and himself to digest. ‘Your daughter, madame. How old is she?'

‘Eighteen. Étienne is twenty-two. Why can't you people let him come home? He was badly wounded, and is still in need of a long convalescence. He can do you no harm, not now, not even then, in '39 and '40. A stretcher-bearer, an artist … He who had never wanted to hurt anyone, especially not his dear
maman
, his
bienaimée.
' His beloved. ‘They shot at him, even though he wore a Red Cross armband.'

‘Madame, your husband.'

She waited, letting him know she wanted to shriek, That bastard, yes?.

‘Thirty hives. Were there more?'

Out-apiaries – that was what the Inspector was thinking. ‘Several. One here, one there. Maybe two or three. It depended on the locations. A flat with a roof-top that was sheltered and not much frequented; the garden of a private house or villa. The city has plenty of such places.'

Have fun chasing them, she seemed to imply. ‘And the honey, madame. Did he sell it and the pollen and the propolis – the bee glue? The
gelée royale
also, his extra queens and the wax?'

The detective had forced her to look at him in a new light, that of one who was well versed on the little slaves Alexandre had adored. ‘He had his “clients”, yes. There's a book, a list with all the addresses and details. Your partner will have found it unless … unless, of course, whoever poisoned my husband took it away with him, or the sous-préfet and préfet, since both came here briefly to view the body yesterday at noon, and to discuss the matter.

‘Now if you will excuse me, Inspector, it's very late and I'm very tired. My bedroom is at the back, overlooking the garden and that field, but while I'm in my bed, avail yourself of the rest of the house. Search all you like. I've nothing to hide and I don't think he had either. We didn't sleep together, not any more, and not in a long, long time. Ours was always a marriage of convenience. I'll not deny it, and you would soon have discovered this in any case, so please don't bother to ask the neighbours. Life is hard enough.'

Alone in the study, St-Cyr drew on his pipe as he sought out each detail, but this killing had not – he was now certain – been as it had first appeared.

The smell of bitter almonds, of nitrobenzene, though minor, was still present, for the corpse exuded it. Some, too, had been spilled on the worktable and tiled floor, and some had been absorbed by a fistful of rags. These things had had to be cleaned up and removed by Hermann and himself, both wearing rubber gloves and before they had gone out into the apiary to find that the hives had been robbed. Hermann had put a match to the stains and had burned the rags in the stove – no other course of action had been possible. The damned stuff was just too dangerous.

He, himself, had capped the bottle of ersatz Amaretto and never mind the fingerprint artists fooling around with it while open. He had picked up and had capped the tin container of nitrobenzene that the beekeeper, in his panic, had taken down from a shelf and had hastily opened.

Flung wide, the doors to the garden still let in the cold night air as an added precaution, while the heavy black-out curtains kept in the light. Fortunately, the Occupier hadn't chosen to switch off the electricity to this quartier or the whole city in reprisal for some act of ‘terrorism' or because the Citroën and Renault works, et cetera, were in desperate need of the power to make things for the German war machine.

‘Nitrobenzene is nothing to fool with, is it, monsieur?' he said to the dark blue-suited, scarved and cashmere-sweatered victim who lay on the floor near the desk, curled into the fetal position by a final spasm, and in rigor. ‘The poison is rapidly absorbed through the skin and lungs, and that is, I fear, what really killed you. Death by misadventure, albeit with intent.'

The right side of the head, and a portion of the white woollen scarf, were awash in now frozen vomit. Everything, at first glance, had pointed to the bottle of Amaretto that sat on the desk among his papers. Oil of mirbane was soluble in alcohol, not in water, so there was, perhaps, no problem there. But drinking it was to experience its fiercely burning taste and to die long after ingestion.

De Bonnevies had probably first smelled the liqueur, and finding its bouquet acceptable, for Amaretto's flavour came normally from apricots and their stones which have the odour and taste of bitter almonds, had apparently taken a sip or a mouthful and then had instantly spat it out and set the bottle down.

‘In panic, you thought the worst, monsieur – your wife, perhaps?' he said, gesturing companionably with his pipe. ‘You rushed over to the shelves and took down the tin which you had kept in here for safety's sake, and not in the honey-house in the garden. You had to see if it had been the source of the poison. You had to,
mon ami.
Let us make no mistake about this.'

Giving the matter a moment's thought, St-Cyr then said, ‘The container had been put back in haste,
n'est-ce pas
? The cap was loose, wasn't it? Accidentally you spilled some. You grabbed the rags to wipe it up. You were extremely agitated. Angry, I should think. Your fingers shook. Did the realization of what you felt had happened cause your shaking hands to accidentally knock that tin over? Had you argued with your wife, monsieur? Had she threatened you?'

The fingerless gloves which de Bonnevies had used while working in the cold at his desk, had absorbed some of the spilled nitrobenzene. He had dragged them off and, yes, they, too, had been burnt in the stove by Hermann.

‘You tried to wipe the residue from your hands with the rags, monsieur. There was also some on the workbench. In your haste, your panic, did you then knock the tin over again and is this what caused it to fall to the floor?'

Suddenly feeling very dizzy, had he cried out to madame? Had he seen in the container lying on its side on the floor, the truth of what he felt she had done to him?

‘Did you then look at the door which you had kept locked so as to shut her out? A door that opens into a narrow corridor and a set of stairs down which that woman would have had to walk each time she wanted to talk to you?'

The rest was clear enough. Breathing in more and more of the fumes and unable to get the pale, lemon-coloured oil from his hands, de Bonnevies had started for the garden. ‘Suddenly you felt very drunk, monsieur. You had a splitting headache. You began to throw up – first over there by the table you used when selecting queens for your colonies, then by the one on which is the apparatus you use for artificially inseminating them. You had left the tin lying on its side on the floor. You had to get out. Out!

‘You tripped and fell. You hit your head and threw up violently. Your vision was blurred, your skin began to itch. Drunk … you felt very drunk and as you got up, you stumbled, only to realize then that you had just put your hand down into the spill and that container had rolled across the floor towards you.'

A bloodied froth of vomit and mucous had erupted from the mouth and nostrils. The rictus was far from pleasant and exposed tobacco-stained and gold-filled teeth. The lips and mucous membranes, the fingernails also, were the deep shade overripe blackberries give to their juice when crushed. The skin was but a paler shade of the same.