Bellringer (25 page)

This informant of Weber’s was panicking. Now a glance up at him, now away to the bed, then back up to him in doubt, the soft brown eyes furtive.

‘Was it tidied more recently?’ said Kohler.

Why had he to ask? ‘I. . . I don’t know. It. . . it looks the same to me.’

The scar had tightened on that chin of hers, the fair hair falling forward over a knitted brow. He’d have to ignore the others, felt Kohler. ‘Why was she looking for Nora in this room?’

Under such scrutiny Jennifer felt her stomach muscles tighten. Vomit began to rise. ‘Maybe she was looking for Caroline.’

‘Because Nora had been dogging the footsteps of the two of you, was that it, eh?’

So he had found that out. Again the muscles tightened, harder this time. Harder. ‘Nora thought Caroline might have been stealing things. I told her she was crazy but she persisted. Caroline had lost things too. One of the pink satin ribbons from her practice shoes, a pebble she’d kept because it was interesting. A trachyte porphyry, Nora had called it.’

She swallowed, but it didn’t go down well, noted Kohler. ‘Anything else?’

Had she winced? wondered Jennifer. Had that been what had caused him to ask? ‘A glass marble—a cat’s-eye. It had been her “shooter” in grade school and was, I think, the only thing she had left from home. Madame de Vernon kept throwing Caroline’s things out. Caroline. . . ’

Swiftly she turned away to hide her tears in panic.

‘Inspector, how could you?’ seethed Lisa Banbridge. ‘You know Jen can’t have done a thing. None of us have.’

Candice Peters of the frizzy brown hair wrapped her arms about the girl. ‘That was cruel,’ she said. ‘And here we all thought you were different from Weber and the others. Jen has been holding in her grief terrifically. We’re all upset, but she was in love with Caroline. Love, damn you!’

‘Love,’ said another.

‘OK, OK, I’ll back off, but there are things I have to ask her. Nothing difficult. Just a few questions.’

‘Like
what
?’ asked Lisa suspiciously.

‘Like, what is the brother treating her for?’

‘Anxiety,’ sighed Brother Étienne, having used the rest of the comfrey to prepare a hot footbath for the case of athlete’s foot. ‘I should have thought that evident, Inspector. An infusion of lemon balm taken twice daily, morning and night, and with a little of the honey in that cough syrup bottle she’s still clutching, or hadn’t you noticed?’

‘The tea of France?’

‘
Oui
. You should try it instead of longing for tobacco. It relaxes the nerves, calms the heart, and is but a mild and pleasing sedative.’

‘Ask her if she left this room the night Mary-Lynn died.’

The eyes and nose were wiped, the look valiant. ‘I didn’t. Caroline left, as I told you, at about midnight.’

‘A terrible attack of asthma,’ said Lisa, still not convinced he was going easy.

‘I was afraid to accompany her because of Madame de Vernon. Caroline. . . Caroline said she would be all right once she had found her cigarettes.’

‘You’d been having an argument—that right?’

‘A disagreement, nothing worse. We’d patched it up by the time she’d left.’

‘But hadn’t. Caroline had still been in tears and very upset.’

‘Was she?’ asked Jennifer.

‘And the photo that one had borrowed from Madame’s suitcase?’ demanded Kohler.

Did he really
think
she would have kept it when she had
told
him she hadn’t? ‘I burned it in the stove, like I said.’

Although in better control of herself, there was still anger. ‘But you only did that
after
Caroline had been killed.’

She mustn’t smile, felt Jennifer, must simply be firm. ‘Really, Inspector, I wouldn’t have done so before. We were to have taken it to the séance last night.’

All well and good and tough, was she? ‘You could have returned it instead.’

‘Could I?’

‘Caroline must have told you where Madame had hidden the spare key. Everyone else in that room of hers knew of it.’

‘But I didn’t.
Bien sûr,
there were things Caroline would tell me—lots of them—but there were also those she wouldn’t and didn’t.’

And that was one of them. ‘What did you lose to the resident kleptomaniac whose speed of filching things reminded you of Houdini?’

She mustn’t waver, felt Jennifer, must face up to him even if his partner had remembered that comment of hers and had passed it on. ‘Am I that person—isn’t this what you really want to ask?’

‘Just tell me.’

The urge to rattle off two dozen items was almost more than she could bear. Lisa would be quick to add things, Barb, too, but she’d best use anger. ‘One of these.’

Snatching at the blue Bakelite butterfly pin in her hair, she dragged it free and snapped off its spring-loaded alligator clip before handing the butterfly to him. ‘It was broken, but I had kept it because I only had this one left. Sure they were teenage, little-girl things, but I wore one when dealing to give that impression of innocence and naiveté. Women will do such things—you should know this as a man. Even though times were very difficult for the sellers, the paintings and antiques I was buying didn’t come easily.’

She shrugged, forced a weak smile, and said, ‘They still asked far too much, but a touch of innocence was useful, and of course I emphasized the new home they’d be getting. What I did wasn’t illegal, Inspector, and what I finally paid was simply less than had been asked.’

The sellers had been Jews and others on the run. ‘That why you stuck around until it was too late for you to leave France?’

‘Partly, but I also couldn’t manage the shipping. The Occupier and the French kept throwing up the roadblocks.’

Reichsmarschall Göring being the biggest of them. ‘How much is the stuff you’ve got in that flat of yours worth?’

‘In Boston and New York, or in Paris and Berlin?’

She seemed to thrive when talking business. ‘Both.’

‘Lots, then. There’s an early Corot landscape that I bought for myself in the autumn of 1940, paying 28,000 francs. In June of 1941, I could have sold it for 1,210,000, today. . . ’ She shrugged. ‘And it’s only one of several pieces I have, or had.’

The official exchange rate was 50 francs to the dollar, or 200 to the pound sterling, the black bourse rate being the more usual and at 110 to 120, and 350 to 400, a worry to be sure and maybe the reason entirely for the anxiety attacks, but one had to ask, wasn’t it being a little too free with the info? ‘Did our kleptomaniac take anything else of yours?’

‘Inspector, please don’t blame me for buying from the desperate. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, and at least they knew, or thought, that the pieces were going to a place of safety and to owners such as themselves who would value them. The Paris market is everything in the art world—surely you must know this. I was just a little fish in a big and very turbulent pond.’

Excuses. . . they all had their excuses. Time and again Louis and he had come up against these ‘buyers,’ Göring especially. ‘Just answer what I asked.’

Were Herr Kohler and his partner really on the side of the persecuted as everyone was saying, even Untersturmführer Weber? ‘The key to my flat. It. . . it was on a string I would wear around my neck. When taking a shower downstairs, I had hung it on a hook, but when I got out, why, it. . . it had been taken.’

‘Why a shower downstairs?’

‘Because one was free, and for which I paid two cigarettes.’

‘Was anything else of yours stolen?’

‘A lipstick. The tube was empty—I’d even used a matchstick to get at the last of it—but one keeps such things as reminders of what we once had. One has to here.’

That was fair enough, but she was still too wary. ‘You and the others asked the Senegalese to look into your futures.’

So he had found that out too. ‘Just after the Christmas party. We all thought it would be a lark and were still in a partying mood.’

‘You asked about your flat?’

‘Bamba. . . That was his name. He said Thérèse, my maid, would come soon and she did, that very afternoon.’

‘Was that all?’

Had he talked to Bamba? ‘I was to leave offerings of food—crumbs, really—and. . . and was to come back for another reading. My fortune wasn’t good, but I haven’t been back yet.’

‘Was anything taken from that little basket of his?’

‘By me, or by Caroline?’

He waited. He didn’t and wouldn’t say another thing, thought Jennifer, until she had answered him, but she mustn’t let apprehension get ahead of her. ‘Or by neither of us, Inspector? Caroline did keep nudging me to watch Becky. That one wasn’t just tense. It was as if something exciting were building up inside her, but we. . . we didn’t see her take anything. Was something missing?’

‘Don’t worry about it. Tell me about Mary-Lynn and Colonel Kessler.’

‘Why not ask what you really want? Mary-Lynn had been left in the lurch by her “fiancé.”’

‘An SS, a Sturmbannführer.’

‘
Oui,
Karl Hoffmann. She wanted to get even—lots of girls feel like that. Colonel Kessler was friendly but not a lover, not if you ask me. It was more the friendship of one who wanted to practice his English and who enjoyed her knowledge of books and appreciated her support at the séances. Mary-Lynn wanted to find out where her dad’s remains were. It. . . it had become an obsession with her.’

‘One that Madame Chevreul played upon?’

‘Really, Inspector, I’m not the doubter Nora is. Caroline
wanted
to become a sitter and I. . . why, I
wanted
whatever Caroline wanted.’

‘Did she steal that L’Heure Bleue box and bottle from Madame Chevreul?’

‘And claim that Madame had given it to her?’

‘Just answer.’

‘Then no. Madame Chevreul pressed it into Caroline’s hands to cement the goodwill between them.’

‘And seal the payment of five hundred greenbacks?’

Would his questions never stop? ‘That, too, since you ask. Madame Chevreul knew only too well that Madame de Vernon had been getting after Caroline for wanting to become a sitter. The presentation box was something Caroline would love to have for the thoughts it would bring, and of course having it would strengthen her resolve.’

‘Picked up from Madame’s dressing table, was it?’

Why had he to ask that? ‘It. . . it was near the photos of the friends Madame had left behind when she came to France. A Rebecca Thompson and a Judith Merrill. Léa Monnier used to work as kitchen help for Mrs. Merrill. That’s. . . that’s how Madame Chevreul first met her.’

‘Léa Easton.’

‘Yes, but Madame Chevreul wasn’t married then. Her maiden name was Beacham. You. . .
Ah, merde, merde!
You don’t know, do you?’

Herr Kohler took her by the arm and, leading her out of the room, walked her along the corridor toward that elevator shaft with everyone looking at them. Just
everyone
. ‘No place is more private,’ he said. ‘Now, you start telling me what I don’t know and should.’

The gate to the elevator had been locked again, and using another chain, and he saw this as they stopped, would know that Mrs. Parker had insisted on it, but wouldn’t know how sick she, herself, still felt at the thought of it having been left open. ‘They were suffragettes. Judith Merrill took Léa Easton to their meetings and convinced her to join. Léa was only sixteen at the time but soon found herself leading a screaming mob of umbrella-wielding, vote-demanding women. She would have, wouldn’t she? She’s a natural.’

He said nothing, this Gestapo detective. He just looked at her, she with her back now to that gate. ‘Léa wasn’t the only one who spent time in prison, Inspector, in London’s Old Bailey, where they were force-fed in the summer of 1914. Judith Merrill, being the oldest, was accused of being the ringleader. A bomb had been set off in Oxted Station on 4 April, 1913, four houses torched on the third in the suburb of Hampstead Garden, then later, I think, the Yarmouth Pier pavilion. It had just been built at a cost of 20,000 pounds, but the police and Scotland Yard didn’t catch up with Léa and the others until 1914.’

Still he waited, saying nothing but giving no further hint of what he was really thinking. ‘When Lord Merrill finally got his wife out of jail, he sent her to the remotest of his country estates and kept her there without her ever being able to see their children.’

Still he didn’t say anything. ‘She killed herself with an overdose of white arsenic.’

Rat poison. ‘And the other one?’ he asked, but only after seeing that they were still quite alone, though some along the corridor were watching them.

‘Rebecca Thompson was twenty-three years old. Separated from the mob, she had run up a narrow lane to avoid the truncheons but was caught, beaten, and then savagely raped by no less than four men, each of them a bobby. The judge was solicitous and committed her to an insane asylum.’

‘While Élizabeth Beacham and Léa Easton volunteered to go to France for king and country.’

‘Eventually, yes, that is correct, insofar as I was told. The one as a nurse, the other as a truck driver.’

And now resident head juju woman and her number-one flunky. ‘So how is it that you know all this, and do the others in Room 3–54 and Room 3–38?’

She winced. She couldn’t help but do so, looked desperately away to the distant onlookers, then at his shoes, and only when her chin was lifted, at him. ‘I. . . ’ The tears couldn’t be stopped. ‘I was told it by two of the British. They. . . they grabbed me in the Hôtel Grand and forced me into the darkness of the cellars where they. . . they said that if I ever told anyone who had said it to me, they would see that I never told anyone another thing.’

‘And Caroline, did you tell her of the suffragette past?’

‘I couldn’t. She. . . she wanted so much to go to that séance, I had to keep it all to myself.’

‘How many times did you wander about in the Hôtel Grand by yourself?’

‘Lots, but. . . but not after that happened. After that, I avoided the hotel like the plague and only later went there with Caroline.’

‘And did those British women ask if you had broadcast that choice bit of news about Madame Chevreul in the Vittel-Palace as they would have wanted you to?’