Carousel (18 page)

And like the rest of the house so, too, this bathroom. Things picked up for a song and tastefully done over – artistically, yes. She'd had a fabulous sense of colour and design. A bird entrapped by marriage? he wondered.

Quite obviously there was a housekeeper who came in to dust and air the place. Yet there was this sense of its not just being left unused but left that way on purpose.

Behind the dressing-screen there was a small stool and a table with an oval mirror. Shelves of books were ranked on either side and above the table; no space was wasted. Proust, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant … books on existentialism, the roots of Symbolism and its art.

Books on flowers. Sketches of them. The sketch, in charcoal, of a young woman in her early twenties lying naked on that
chaise.

An arm supported her head. She'd lovely legs, a lovely figure, and she looked up at the viewer quite boldly, as if to challenge that person into embarrassment or the honesty of carnal lust.

He knew she'd done the sketch herself, just as he knew that though the house would have been in her husband's name, it had been hers to decorate in the style of her choosing.

A dark-haired woman with a penetratingly frank gaze. Had the eyes been violet? he wondered.

A pearl-handled mirror, comb and brush set lay to one side of a dressing-table that had been painted an antique white with gold threads in Celtic swirls and spirals. Two snakes faced each other with fangs bared and bodies entwined. She'd have sat here looking at herself even as her elbows had rested on the snakes she'd drawn and painted so well.

There was a box of face-powder, some rouge, tints to accent eyes and lashes, all these things from at least thirty years ago.

Gingerly he drew open the middle drawer of the dressing-table. There were the usual things of that period. Buttonhooks, corset stays that had been removed in anger perhaps, or in freedom's relish. Some hatpins, a cushion for them in the shape of a pomegranate. Calling-cards embossed with the motif of a hand-painted peacock fanning its tail. Letters in gold, and others in silver.

Michèle-Louise Prévost
, and underneath this, in brackets, as if it had been important but not the most critical thing in her life,
Mme Charles Audit.

A lipstick, very new and incongruous because it shouldn't have been there at all, lay next to the lock, in the centre of the front of the drawer. Pre-war and of very good quality.

There was also a crystal vial of scent, half full. Had it been forgotten by the owner of the lipstick?

The perfume was the same as the one Christabelle Audit had worn and he thought then that the girl had come in here, not to leave her lipstick, ah no, but to ‘borrow' some of the forgotten perfume. But why should she do such a thing? To remind her Monsieur Antoine of this other woman, the owner of the lipstick? To hope he'd notice, eh?

Christabelle Audit; Christiane Baudelaire.

In a far corner of the drawer, wrapped in thin tissue, was a small, dried contraceptive sponge attached to its thin length of thread.

A handkerchief smelled faintly of the scent, and he thought then that the owner of the lipstick had left these four items here quite recently. And he wondered who that person could have been and if the vial of perfume had really been hers?

Unfortunately, though of silk, there were no monogrammed initials on the handkerchief, but he thought that it had been made in Lyon.

Pocketing the lipstick, bottle of scent and handkerchief, he softly closed the drawer.

Hermann was in the kitchen at the back of the house. He'd a wicker hamper on the marble-topped pastry-cutting table that was near the cast-iron stove.

‘
Pâté
de foie gras aux truffes
, Louis.
Vraie truffe avec pâté dé
poulet jeune aux champignons
– young chicken and mushrooms, what will they think of next? The dishes are for two, my old one, the silver also and really quite nice for a picnic. One bottle of raspberry liqueur, made on the premises of Antoine Audit and Sons. How's that for detective work? One also of apricot brandy and this one,' he held up a bottle, ‘the local specialty, Cream of the Walnut! My guess is that a certain M Antoine Audit or one of his sons packed the happy couple the hamper, which they then lunched on in bliss as they drove to Paris from Périgord.'

‘The girl – the woman with the lipstick and the scent,' muttered the Frog, withdrawing the same from a pocket and dropping the handkerchief which then had to be retrieved.

‘One half-smoked excellent cigar, Louis. One pair of forgotten black leather gloves, Kriegsmarine issue, no less, their owner with hands much smaller than mine unfortunately, but larger than a woman's and definitely of the officer class.'

‘I'm liking this less and less. Was there anything else?'

Hermann shook his head. ‘The housekeeper was too tidy. The pair of them could have stayed here a week or a month ago, maybe more. The cigar was considered too valuable to throw out or steal.'

Together they went into the sitting-room. Again there was that clutter of made-over, second-hand things. The divan was covered with fabrics bought in the bazaars of Marrakesh perhaps. There was a round, brass coffee table on ebony legs with a border of green Art Nouveau leaves she'd hand painted, a hammered brass urn with a beautiful globular shape. Candlesticks in brass with white candles, sprigs of dried flowers – those would have been replaced, but had that been done by her, or by Antoine Audit in her memory?

Potted tree-ferns appeared to be exceptionally healthy, as did the rubber plants that grew about the room. There was a green Tiffany cobweb lamp, a gorgeous thing that didn't look a bit out of place if one threw oneself back in time at least thirty years.

There were books, books and more of them, scattered about as if Michèle-Louise Prévost had but left the room to make a cup of coffee.

‘Three women, Hermann. The one who decorated this house and painted the pictures, the granddaughter who left her keys and identity papers outside, and a visitor.'

‘And that last one's boyfriend. The Kriegsmarine, Louis, but there aren't any ships or submarines in Périgord.'

The room was at once comfortable and intimate, but crowded, too, with easy chairs, cushions for sitting on the floor if that seemed best, a sofa, prints on the walls, bits of sculpture – strange, surrealistic fish, Lalique-like girls and peacock feathers. Dashes of colour, whole blendings of it.

St-Cyr pinched his moustache in thought. ‘This place must be registered, Hermann.'

‘On loan to the Great and Glorious Third Reich, but to whom, eh, Louis? The Abwehr, my old one, since they share the same uniform.'

The Abwehr, ah
merde
!

In the hall there was a woodcut of a nude done in the style of Félix Vallotton. The woman was lying on her stomach on a divan, reaching languidly out to a black cat.

‘She was better than Vallotton, Hermann.'

There were Gauginesque things, again symbolistic and surrealistic. Hibiscus claws in flower, wrapped around a sleeping girl who'd somehow lost her clothes; the lover sitting cross-legged in studious, loinclothed contemplation of her.

An earlier study, perhaps, was exactly of the Carrière school, and showed in brushed gossamer a mother and child.

St-Cyr found himself thinking of his wife and son. He was deeply moved by the picture.

‘Michèle-Louise Prévost, Hermann. The wife of Monsieur Charles Audit copied many of the French masters of Symbolist and Surrealist art, but even better, I think, than they could have done themselves.'

It was when she got to Gustav Klimt that she had showed she'd been a master of them all. Her study of his
Female Friends
was more than equal to his own.

‘Did she forge coins?' asked Kohler, fingering the sculpted study of a nymph who was trying to reach the ceiling but was being shy about it because she'd lost the towel she'd been wearing.

There were several fired-clay tablets on yet another bookcase: bison in full flight, in ochrous hues of rusty red and reddish brown; ibex and horses running across some Neolithic plain; a superb study of a giant black bull, done simply in outline.

‘Les Eyzies or Font-de-Gaume, Hermann. She's done these from some of the cave paintings in Périgord. Wait here, I won't be a moment.'

St-Cyr went up the stairs two at a time and when, rising through the trap door he reached the attic, he found the dust of ages in her studio. It was all a clutter just as she must have left it in 1905, some thirty-seven years ago. A sculptor's pedestal held the half-finished bust of a commission – a banker perhaps – so she'd had to do some of her work just to earn a bit of cash and Charles Audit really hadn't been all that well off.

Her easel was there, the paints and brushes all laid out on trestle-tables among frames and sketches, bits of fabric she'd been designing, a model's stool – everything.

He could smell the turpentine and the oils, even the dryness of the clays that had gone so hard in their tin pails.

There were three trunks that had been hastily stored in the centre of the room, near the trap door, and on the floorboards near these, where a candle had been fixed, there were the burnt stubs of two forgotten matchsticks.

Someone had knelt beneath the skylights that had given the artist the north light so necessary to her work.

The trunk nearest the match stubs was full of her clothes from that other era and, beneath these, on the left side at the bottom, he found her jewel case – a made-over thing that had once held silver cutlery.

She had left everything and had gone away or died, but now her granddaughter had come back to take some of her things and try to sell them.

There was one more butterfly brooch, a superb thing in the style of Gaillard, that master of enamelled Art Nouveau. Even with this she had dabbled. Gold and enamelled silver and tiny diamonds – God knew where she'd have got those, but they were real, not rhinestones. The figure of a young and slender woman was wrapped in its golden sheath, her body that of the butterfly, her outspread wings green, blue, black, gold and pale shades of rose enamel.

He held it in his palm. He knew the girl would not have wanted to sell such a thing, not even if it had meant starvation.

There was a coiled serpent bracelet in the style of Georges Fouquet, circa 1890, with opal platelets forming scales on its head and tiny ruby eyes – they would be rubies, he knew this now. She'd have settled for nothing less, this Michèle-Louise Prévost.

Beetlebug pins and caterpillars, haircombs, strands and strands of beads, and earrings to dangle from pierced ears – she'd made some, bought others no doubt, and been given still others.

There were no emeralds that he could see and he had the thought again that the emeralds must have come later, that everything here was from the time before Charles Audit had gone away.

Hermann had selected a half-dozen photographs from an album in the woman's bedroom. ‘Charles Audit and his brother. The three of them together at those caves. Then a shot of them hunting truffles – that's Antoine holding the loot. Two of the woman bathing
à la
buff. Those must have been taken by Antoine, eh? And one of him fully clothed and out for sport with his shotgun.

‘Oh, there's one other, Louis. A shop on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Our boy Charles sold shoes and wasn't too happy about it.'

5

‘M Charles Audit! Yes, yes, monsieur. I knew him well. A brave man. Killed like all the rest.'

The old soldier looked away in sadness at the thought. St-Cyr heaved a detective's sigh. The room in the Hotel of the Silent Life was far too stuffy for health and badly in need of cleaning. There were ribbons on the lapels of the blue blazer. The thin red of the Legion of Honour, the yellow and green of the Military Medal. The medals themselves were on prominent display in a locked
vitrine
, along with the splintered remains of the shell that had killed his comrades and some bits of china and silver still too precious to sell.

‘This war, it is nothing, monsieur. Nothing! No spine, do you understand?'

The voice had leapt with accusation. It would be best to offer a cigarette and wait while those vibrating fingers took their nourishment.

Major Fernand Corbet gave a dignified sniff of thanks, then, as if the record was broken, for all invariably said the same these days, he spat, ‘They ran, monsieur, when they should have stayed and held their ground as we did.'

Corbet lived in 4-9, next to 4-7. A little man with cigarette ash and dandruff on his jacket, tie and beret, he'd been about to go out for his afternoon
apéritif.
‘A simple glass of the
vin ordinaire
, the white you understand. These days the red's too acid for the digestion.'

St-Cyr drew up the only other chair. ‘M'sieur –'

‘Major. Please, I must insist. These days one
has
to do something.'

‘Major, the girl who used the room next door to you?'

‘A student. No spine. She should be making bombs or seducing Boches so that real men could cut their throats, not fucking some fat windbag of commerce!'

‘Yes, yes, Major, but she's dead.'

‘Dead? What is this, eh? A murder in the hotel?
Nom de Jésus-Christ
, I'll get that bitch this time! Calls herself a concierge! Can't keep order in this place.
Order
, do you understand?'

He was quaking with rage. ‘Yes … yes, of course I understand, Major. Later … we'll both speak to her later.'

‘You're from the police, aren't you?'

‘The Sûreté.'

‘Who let you into my room, eh? That bitch …'

Corbet had a coughing fit. It was several moments before he had fully recovered.

‘That girl …' he began. ‘Yes, yes. Always at it, the two of them. Naked … naked on that floor in there.'