Mannequin (25 page)

The floor was littered with more pages of manuscript—a diary of the war perhaps. Smashed and scattered. Ink nearly everywhere. Pens and countless nibs, more letters …
Angèlique, I can never forget you …

There was a porcelain wash-basin and jug on a night stand. The jug had been split by the frost.

‘Louis …' Kohler grabbed him.
‘Don't!
' he hissed.

The girl was lying on her side, folded up on a heap of soiled blankets beneath a far window, one of whose shutters had somehow come open. Her back was to them, the wrists were tied to the ankles so that her chin rested on her knees.

She looked so cold. She did not move. Her skin had the pallor of bluish grey wax. Her hair had all been hacked off, and the double twist of stout white cord had bitten so deeply and savagely into her neck, the skin was pinched, the windpipe crushed.

At the moment of death, she had evacuated herself but these discharges were now frozen.

Her tongue was caught between clenched teeth. The lips were lead-blue, the deep brown eyes wide open, the pupils dilated.

A bloody froth of mucus and other fluids had erupted from her nose and mouth.

The smell was sickening.

‘Joanne …'

‘Louis, go easy. It had to happen. That's all there is to it'

‘
Why?
'

‘Ah
Gott im Himmel!
We both knew she had very little chance. Sure, we kidded ourselves by hoping but …'

The Sûreté's look was desperate. ‘Dédé, Hermann. How am I to tell him?'

‘I'll do it.'

Louis blinked. He fought to think, then said, ‘No, no, I will. Go and look for the drooler. See if there's a cottage. Cross the kitchen garden and take the path towards the river. Leave me alone with her.
Please!
'

‘Jésus merde alors,
Are you sure?'

‘Yes!
'

A last doubtful glance revealed Louis among the rubbish, standing over her, hat in hand, eyes clamped shut. Beaten, defeated, all alone and begging himself to find the strength to be calm and detached.

It's impossible, said Kohler sadly to himself. Without another word, he went downstairs to stand in the snow-covered drive among the overgrown stubble, wishing things hadn't turned out as they had.

From the kitchen garden, he looked back up at the tower. The open shutter moved, recording but the faintest of breezes. Though he couldn't be certain, he wondered if her killer had not called down from that window to someone in the garden, It's done. She's gone.

It wasn't pleasant to look at Joanne. More than once St-Cyr had to back away. He had found a kerosene lantern in one of the lower bedrooms and had carried it up into the tower to hold it over her.

Light flickered on the walls. The time of death would have to be established by the coroner. Was Armand Tremblay still in charge of this district? Tremblay was a good man and would not attempt to hide things no matter how uncomfortable to the Occupier or damaging to the Vergès's family honour.

Rigor had set in. Everything seemed to suggest death very early Monday morning, 28 December—either on arrival at perhaps 3.00 a.m., or somewhat later that day.

There were bruises on her buttocks, thighs and knees, those of fingermarks also. The bruises on the knees were from having fallen or banged into a chair.

Others on her breasts and upper arms and shoulders suggested she had been grabbed and mauled in those parte and perhaps thrown from assailant to assailant. A small cut above the left eye confirmed the thought. She had been struck across the face several times. There was a scratch behind the right ear and this extended down the back of the neck for about seven centimetres. Other scratches were on her seat and inner thighs, her stomach and groin. More than once her legs had been forced apart, a child, a curly-haired little girl on a street in Belleville who had looked quizzically up at him and said, ‘But, monsieur, you cannot possibly like what you do?'

‘I must not close your eyes, Joanne. Dr. Tremblay must see you exactly as you are. It's best that way.'

The froth from her lips was of blood, spittle and fluid from the lungs, not semen though they would have done that to her as well. Gingerly he leaned down to smell the froth. Had she been drugged with ether—forced to swallow it? Had they shoved one of Vergès's rubber feeding-tubes down her throat and made her drink the damned stuff to get her to co-operate?

Was it merely the workings of his imagination that brought the smell of ether to him?

Again, only the coroner could pin this down. The ether could also have been administered through the rectum. She was their property. They had had total control over her. She would have tried to scream, to …

‘Stop! Please, stop,' he said, admonishing himself. ‘Try to think. Try to remain calm.'

He moved the lantern back a little but had difficulty nestling it among the soiled blankets where other girls had lain and died perhaps. The dark hairs of her nostrils hadn't been clipped—she had still been such an innocent when she had gone to that house on the rue de Valois.

The flickering of the light was reflected in her eyes, it … ‘What's this?' he asked, a whisper. ‘You can't possibly have a gold tooth. Your family's far too poor.'

Searching—dragging out the pair of reading glasses for which he had unfortunately found an increasing need of late, St-Cyr examined her lips.

There was a small gold wire caught in the froth. He thought of Tremblay, thought he must not disturb a thing but said, ‘I can't leave this, can I, Joanne?'

With a pair of tweezers, he teased the thing and gradually it came free. As he held it up to the light, he sighed and said, ‘Good. Good for you,
ma brave.
You were defiant right up to your last moment and this is something I must tell Dédé, for it will help him and he'll take pride in what you did, as will I.'

The ear-ring must have fallen to the floor or been set on a table or chair perhaps. Unnoticed, Joanne had taken it into her mouth, the only way she could have hidden it.

A tiny turquoise scarab dangled from the end to match those on the bracelet and the other things she had seen in that shop window.

‘Denise St. Onge?' he asked. ‘Was Mademoiselle St. Onge witness to your killing, Joanne, or did she leave this room, this tower and this house before you died?'

Or was she even a part of it?

Though webbed with blood, the thing caused the cinematographer in him to see her secretly taking the ear-ring into her mouth—the girl was naked, bound hand and foot, held perhaps. He saw Denise St. Onge in a sleeveless black silk dress wearing such a pair of ear-rings, saw her slowly taking them off as a woman would who was about to have sex.
Sex!

He saw her putting the ear-rings aside and shook his head. ‘I mustn't conjure tricks of the imagination. I must stick to the facts. The droolers?' he asked. ‘Did they make Joanne wear the ear-rings and other pieces, only then to remove them from her and set them aside?'

Old stock, Muriel Barteaux had said of the jewellery, things brought to light to service the Occupier who would pay handsomely for such trinkets to send home to their wives or give to their new mistresses.

Muriel and Chantal were looking into the matter and might possibly have something for them.

Carefully wrapping the ear-ring in the handkerchief he kept for such things, St-Cyr pocketed it.

On examining the fingernails of Joanne's right hand, he found a black hair caught in a small tear in the middle fingernail. This hair was further caught between that finger and the index, and between the ankle and that hand.

Had Gaetan Vergès jet-black hair? he wondered. Had she been high on ether? Had she run her hands through the drooler's hair as they had had sex, not love? Never love.

‘Michel le Blanc,' he said. ‘Le Blanc has jet-black hair.'

The knots suggested a man of some strength, or two persons. ‘A man and a woman?' he asked, settling back on his haunches to see Joanne lying there so still and cold, a child.

‘You're not alone,' he said. ‘Believe me, we
will
find out who did this and then we'll bring them to justice even if one is not a drooler but a member of the Luftwaffe's Press Service, another not a drooler either but a reporter on
Paris-Soir,
and the third a woman and owner of a certain shop or even the daughter of a well-known banker or that one's wife!'

Right in the small of her back, shading gave the pressure point of her assailant's knee as the cord had been savagely twisted.

Needing the lantern now, he had to take it with him. As he stood over her with it, he saw her chained to the attic ceiling of that room overlooking the balcony round the garden of the Palais Royal, asked, ‘Did they put a blue light on the floor, Joanne, and let it shine up over your blindfolded eyes?'

Did André-Philippe de Brisson see you like that? Did he put his hands on you and is this not the final link to the robbery?

Kohler hesitated. At dusk, the three-room cottage of stone and timber looked quaint and peaceful amid the snow and open woodland at a bend in the Seine. No smoke issued from its chimney and this worried him but what else was there about the place?

A rowboat had been drawn up and overturned on the simple dock of weathered poles and planks. Reeds, now brown and old, rose thickly through the shore ice. There was no loosestrife to bugger everything up and choke off the food supply the waterfowl needed. ‘Cleaned out,' he breathed. ‘A hunter?' he asked of the son, of Gaetan Vergès. There was something about the place that gave him the shivers.

Tepees of dead branches had been gathered by wagon and left to await use years ago—how many years? he asked, recalling the lane between the sycamores and the final approach to the main house.

There was a good stack of cut firewood—oak and beech— under a shed with a plank roof, but the wood looked untouched for at least a couple of years. A man's bicycle, gently rusting, was leaning against the wall nearest the front door. Heavy timbers framed the doorway and extended out so as to form a covered entrance. Two wrought-iron squirrels shared an iron walnut above a mud-caked bootscraper next to a sisal mat. The mud was not quite dry—hell, nothing really dried out in this climate so close to the river, unless indoors by the fire.

Easing the door latch down and finding it unlocked, he let the door swing slowly open. The place was all but dark, the smell … ah
Gott im Himmel!

Again there were beamed, low ceilings. A massive stone hearth, directly opposite the door, held charred logs and a good bed of ashes. There was an iron pot on an arm that could be swung in over the fire, a spit that, when its rope was unwound by the counterweight, rotated.

There were chairs, tables, a roll-top Napoleonic desk, brass candlesticks, fishing rods, an old shotgun that should have been turned in to the authorities. Smooth bore, both barrels, and unloaded.

Carefully he put it back. In contrast to the main house, the cottage was immaculate but whereas the former had been lived in continuously, this had been left until …

A shoe, a sock—the turn-up of a trouser leg—caught the last of the light. Nervously Kohler drew the Walther P38, then realized how stupid the gesture was and slid it back into its shoulder holster.

The man was lying face down on the carpet behind the table that separated the fireside from the rest of the room. A service revolver, one of the old Lebel Model 1873s, was clutched in the right hand.

Grey and splattered across the carpet, greasy and frozen—streaked with congealed blood—his brains had been blown out, the bullet having not only entered the right temple but having been cut before firing with the Cross of Hope for divine forgiveness.

A pocket-knife, lying on the carpet nearby, showed shavings of lead and it was as he looked at these, that the light finally slipped away without his realizing it.

‘Verdammt!
' Fumbling with his pocket matches, Kohler lit first one and then another and another of the candles.

Still shaking, he lit a cigarette and for a time stood there trying to get a grip on himself. ‘It's finally got to me,' he breathed and was glad Louis wasn't with him. ‘I've had it. Death, death,
death!
That's all I ever seem to get!'

A fleeting memory of his sons came to him. A wagon, a trip into Wasserburg to market, one of those rare times when papa, who made the money that had kept the farm alive, had come home from Munich. Papa on a visit. The big detective. ‘Shit!'

There was a photograph among several others on the desk. Kohler picked it up and turned it over to read the inscription.
Luc and I at the École Militaire, 10 March 1914.
The saps. They should have gone AWOL and beat it to Algeria and the desert or headed south to the Congo.

Another photo showed Angèlique Desthieux and Gaetan Vergès, the happy couple. It was signed
From Luc who relinquishes all claim with regrets and kind regards, Paris 3 July 1916, Jardin du Palais Royal.

There was little left to resemble the once handsome young man in that photograph. The face which remained was without the lower jaw, most of the upper jaw was horribly twisted to the left and up, the skin flayed by a mass of deep scars among which grew small forests of bristles. One eye was completely gone and most of the nose.

The plastic surgeons had done their best—a new science then and finding its way with lots of fodder for experiment. Plates of silver and those of nickel had been fixed under the skin to give some semblance of form to shattered cheekbones and a forehead that still didn't look right even with a toupee above.

There were no muscles in what must pass for lips—nothing but a slack hole for the spoon or rubber tube that would feed him and slake his thirst for the rest of his life. Constant drooling and no voice. A slate board and chalk or bit of paper and pencil for ‘talking'.

‘The poor bastard,' breathed Kohler. ‘By rights he should have died on the battlefield.'