Bellringer (35 page)

Candice Peters, the all-but-forty-year-old with the frizzy brown hair from North Carolina State, was sitting on Nora’s cot. Droplets from the newspaper-covered cone she held fell to her slippered feet.

Barbara Caldwell, the auburn-haired thirty-two- to thirty-six-year-old from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, was standing beside Marni’s cot on which sat Lisa Banbridge, the twenty-two-year-old brunette from Duke with the lovely hazel eyes and ponytail.

There was no sign of Nora, none either of Jennifer or of Madame de Vernon.

‘The washing, Louis.
Diese Pariser
.’

The condoms. Three of these hung limply from the curtain cord that had shut Caroline Lacy and Irène de Vernon off from the others.

‘It was just fun,’ confessed Jill with a shrug. ‘All we wanted was to be by ourselves for a little like it used to be when Mary-Lynn was with us.’

‘
Une veillée,
inspectors,’ offered Lisa. ‘For centuries such evening gatherings of women have been a tradition in France, a chance to talk things over, to recall the past while doing a little sewing or mending. Jill was telling us about Madison, Wisconsin, and the farmers’ markets she used to go to every Saturday morning as a student. The apples. . . ’

‘The McIntosh,’ said Marni, that chocolate thing of hers all but gone.

‘The Red Delicious—tart yet sweet,’ said Dorothy with longing.

‘The cheese,’ said Candice. ‘Muenster, Gruyère, caraway, brick, and Havarti, but best of all, the farmer’s. Little cubes on toothpicks were always given away, inspectors, slices of apple too, sometimes a whole one if a girl smiled and flashed her eyes the right way. It would be snatched up and quickly handed over to be tucked out of sight in a pocket or ravenously bitten, the farmer’s wife giving her husband the elbow.’

‘Maple syrup,’ sighed Becky, unable to stop herself from smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Mary-Lynn
loved
maple syrup.’

‘Popcorn,’ said Jill, giving her a tight hug. ‘She liked that, too.’

‘Pumpkins at Halloween,’ said Candice. ‘We used to fry the seeds in a little salt and butter and then eat them while they were hot. They were
so
delicious.’

‘Honey,’ said Marni, as if reliving the memories of a ten-year-old. ‘Clover, basswood, wildflower, buckwheat, and black locust, inspectors, the sweetest of all and softest of golden yellows. The beekeepers would let you have a sample. If you wanted to try any of them they’d dip one of the twigs they’d whittled into whatever jar you chose even if they knew you weren’t going to buy a thing.’

‘You could have your
whole
breakfast or lunch that way just by going from stall to stall,’ said Becky, having regained her composure. ‘There would be the smells of freshly baked bread and buns from the bakers’ stalls—those of chestnuts, too, sometimes—and fudge or pull taffy from the candymaker’s. Certainly those of burning hickory and grilling sausages, and of the winter, spring, summer, or autumn. Maybe a little sharpness in the air or even falling snow but that wonderful, wonderful tingling feeling of just being outdoors and absolutely free to do whatever one wanted. No guards, no war, no internment.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Louis impatiently. ‘Where is Madame de Vernon?’

They looked at one another. It was Lisa who said, ‘Jill was telling us about the Red Gym—the Armoury Gymnasium that is on Langdon Street down by Lake Mendota and had been built in 1893. She used to have a beau in the Badgers Rowing Club and had taken to getting up at five to row with one of the girls’ crews just for a chance of seeing him. From its redbrick walls and heavy, oaken door you can look uphill to see the sun glistening on the beautiful big white dome of the State Capitol. It’s built of blocks of Bethel granite.’

‘From Vermont,’ confessed Jill.

‘And Madame, knowing of Barre, Vermont, and her former husband, was convinced you were taunting her, as indeed you were with those.’

The
Kondoms
. It would be best to shrug and to tell them, thought Jill. ‘Bango, she flew into another of her boiling rages. Oh, sorry. Bango means “right away.”’

‘And left us to ourselves,’ managed Becky. ‘I didn’t kill anyone, inspectors. I swear I didn’t. Gosh, all I ever wanted was to help Antoine.’

‘Her fiancé,’ said Marni, tightly gripping the girl’s right hand. If an arrest was to be made, it would have to be of all of them.

‘And Nora and Jennifer?’ asked Hermann.

‘Nora’s gone to get some more clean snow so that she can make us another of these glorious snow ice-cream cones her dad taught her how to make, though he liked the raspberry best, Nora the blueberry. Jen’s doing her laundry.’

‘We always have to make sacrifices,’ said Dorothy of Jennifer’s absence. ‘Everyone in this hotel tends to eat early because we’re hungry by four and positively ravenous by five.’

Which would mean, of course, that when Caroline Lacy was killed, all but a few had been in their rooms doing that after having, like Madame Chevreul and Léa Monnier, just watched Brother Étienne arrive.

Blue eyes, green, dark olive-brown, hazel, and dark grey impassively looked at St-Cyr and Kohler as if, when they eventually left the room, there would be a collective sigh of relief and they’d go right back to what they’d been doing, discussing the simple things that everyone had taken for granted before this war.

It was Jill who said ‘The laundry’s behind the kitchens and about as far from here as you can get. Sometimes at this hour there’s still a little hot water but it’ll be lukewarm at best. It always is.’

The room was cavernous but of electric lighting there was only that from two widely spaced forty-watt bulbs. Leaking bronze taps, above the rows of zinc-lined drain tables yielded the periodic patience of ice-cold droplets that would, in the early hours of a still-distant morning, freeze.

Oak-framed, truss-backed washboards hung above the tables. Only one of them was being used—a lone occupant—and from it came the irritable clash of buttons on rippled brass as invective was muttered. The smell of ivy leaves, stewed and drained in desperation to give a liquid hopeful of soap, was clear enough. Sand could be used, and there was evidence of it.

At regular intervals, cast-iron, rubber-roller clothes wringers were clamped to the tables, but of the washing machines and bench ironers of the interwar period there wasn’t a sign. All would have been removed and placed in storage. The Hôtel de l’Ermitage? wondered St-Cyr.

‘
Curtis,
Louis,’ said Hermann, giving the manufacturer’s name of the clothes wringers. ‘It’s like taking a step back in time.’

Those twenty-six and -seven years since the wounded of the First American Army had been in residence. ‘Soldiers everywhere have no need of the complicated, Hermann. In any case, the simple copper wash-boiler, a mere tub, didn’t come into general use in France until the late ’20s and early ’30s. Washing machines and other such labour-saving devices were but objects of curiosity in catalogues.’

Hand cranks turned the rollers and these were all but as long and heavy as tire irons, thought Kohler. Jennifer simply wasn’t present, only the small heap of wet underclothes that she had left on a distant drain table along with a bottle of what must be Brother Étienne’s lavender wash water.

The nearby wringer roller’s hand crank had also absented itself, a worry to be sure.

‘Madame de Vernon,’ said Louis to her back, ‘what have you done with that girl?’

She wouldn’t turn, thought Irène. She would concentrate on the scrubbing. ‘Me, Chief Inspector? Nothing, but why not ask that
garce
yourself? I arrived and she fled.’

‘Where to?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

‘Madame, you hated that girl. She was terrified of you.’

‘Terrified? For raping the innocence of my Caroline?
Bien sûr,
I wasn’t happy with what she was doing to that child of mine but as to her being terrified of me, that I couldn’t say.’

‘Have you killed her?’

The scarf-swathed neck stiffened as the head was tossed. ‘You accuse without a shred of evidence? You arrest without the magistrate’s warrant? That door leads to the Hôtel Grand, the stairs nearby, to the cellars. Please take your choice.’

‘And leave you to your laundry?’

She had him now! ‘It’s Caroline’s. Are laundered clothes, freshly ironed not necessary when the dead are to be buried, or have such considerations been dispensed with, and if so, how, please, am I to inform that girl’s parents of such a desecration?’

Releasing the blouse, she hastily crossed herself, then rigidly waited for the proceedings to continue.

Hermann went to check the door and to leave it open, momentarily disappearing toward the Hôtel Grand. Such ease of alternate access had not been anticipated.

‘A mortised pin tumbler deadbolt, Louis, no doubt with a key Weber takes from that board of his every evening and hands to the designated guard.’

That one then leaving the door unlocked if paid enough; if not, the key itself having been purloined and perhaps even copied—Hermann didn’t need to say it, only, ‘She could be in the Grand.’

Since both doors had yet to be locked.

‘Madame. . . ’ began Louis.

These two from Paris hadn’t realized that such comings and goings had been possible and would now have to think about it. ‘As I’ve told you, Chief Inspector, I didn’t notice.’

‘The cellars, Hermann. Leave me to deal with this one.’

‘Why should I tell you anything? You both protect the Jews, isn’t that so? One snap of the fingers and Herr Weber learns of what you, a
sûreté,
said to the others in that room I must share. You asked, Chief Inspector, if any of them were Jewish and you said. . . ’

‘Yes, yes, that neither Hermann nor I would report them.’

She must keep the pressure up! ‘Even if Jennifer Hamilton were a Jewess, you would have kept silent? A submarine, I believe that Jill Faber said of such filth. Oh, please don’t look so dismayed. Gossip is everything in a place like this. Those bitches I have to live with whisper in English to each other, and me—I listen! Now, if you don’t mind. . . ’

‘Louis, bring her with us. Let her point the way.’

‘
Je refuse catégoriquement!
’

‘Filth, madame?’

‘
Untermenschen
—is this not what
les Allemands
call such people?’

Subhumans. Inadvertently she had revealed that she also knew how to speak
Deutsch
.

‘Me, I repeatedly told Caroline exactly what they were like. Taking the jobs from others, charging far too much for things,
cheating
at every chance.’

Hermann had gone down into the cellars. ‘
Ah, bon,
madame, let’s discuss the matter, but before we do you’ll tell me why you didn’t want that girl asking questions of the husband who had taken you to the cleaners in 1910 and died in 1920.’

‘Laurence? In a place like this, where gossip is but food for regurgitating vultures? As was my right, I demanded that she obey me but that. . . that
salope,
Jennifer Hamilton, told her otherwise and now. . . now look at what has happened. My Caroline taken from me and everyone whispering that I thought to kill the child but
pushed,
I tell you, the wrong person? I who was asleep. Asleep!’

‘Having hidden the datura cigarettes she would desperately need.’

Ah, merde,
this had gone too far, but there was no turning back. ‘I did not
hide
them, as those bitches are saying. I simply set them out in a more convenient place since there had been trouble with the electric lights.’

‘That girl refused to leave Room 3–54 and Jennifer Hamilton, madame. She had slammed the door in your face and yet now you claim you were asleep?’

‘Lies. . . it is all lies. Oh for sure I tried to put a stop to Caroline’s attending one of those séances of Madame Chevreul’s. I begged that woman to reject her. I offered far more than the usual fee but even that was refused. Why? I ask you. Why was I to have had my most private affairs aired in front of a gang of so-called sitters, I who have given
everything
for that child?’

‘You threatened Madame Chevreul. Even Léa Monnier was afraid of what you might do.’

‘
Bon!
She should be!’

‘Laurence Vernon, madame. Let’s dispense with the prefix of
les hautes
that you must have added.’

‘Why should I not have done? Everyone else here dreams of something and lives it. My father was of the de Marignanes of Aix, the same as the daughter the great orator and writer Mirabeau took to wife in 1772.’

After having scandalously deflowered Marie Emilie, her unhappy father then cutting off the couple’s allowance, Mirabeau plunging them into debt with equal scandal. ‘The fire, madame?’

This
sûreté
wasn’t going to leave it. ‘Did you think I didn’t know what those bitches were trying to prove? The casino here, arson on the night of Saturday, 17 July, 1920, a corpse charred but not beyond recognition, I tell you, and one missing adulterous husband who had stolen everything from me including one of the villas of the de Marignanes? How else was I to have put a stop to such maliciousness? Was I to have let Caroline, in all her innocence, have that. . . that charlatan of a woman ask a
goddess
about my Laurence?’

‘How did he die?’

‘I wasn’t here. I was in Paris. Caroline. . . Caroline knew this, but that. . . that bitch Jennifer Hamilton wouldn’t leave well enough alone.’

Kohler didn’t really know what he’d find in the cellars, but a third murder, especially that of a lead informant, would definitely be to Weber’s advantage, since the son-of-a-bitch could then claim them incompetent and put a call in to Berlin.

Louis and he couldn’t withstand another run-in with the SS. Vouvray in early December had been bad enough, Paris often far worse—Lyon, too, and Vichy more recently. A legacy then of hatred: two honest cops who were stupid enough never to look the other way when pointing the finger of truth.

Had Madame de Vernon crushed that girl’s skull? Was that informant of Weber’s lying in some darkened storeroom, blood all over the stone floor but freeing up a flat full of valuable antiques and paintings?