Dollmaker (20 page)

Merde
, he was being too co-operative. Ah damn, thought Kohler and asked cautiously, ‘How was he? In what state of mind did you find him?'

The shrewd grey-green eyes sought him out as they would a distant tanker. ‘Vague as usual and reticent – he is a very lonely man. Many creative types are really very shy and withdrawn. You will have found this out in your work, I expect?'

‘Just answer. Never mind playing around with my career.'

‘Of course. Sorry, but I wasn't “playing around”, Inspector. Yvon Charbonneau spoke of the passage he was working on in his symphony – a major interlude, I gather. One needs always patience with people like that. I was in a hurry. I hope I didn't upset him.'

The hypocrite.

Friesen handed cigarettes around to interrupt things and head off trouble. All but Elizabeth Krüger took one. ‘U-boat rations,' grinned Kohler. ‘I always knew you fellows were being treated as well if not better than Goering's fly-boys. The symphony?' he asked, giving Kaestner a nod.

‘“The main theme had to be broken”, he said, “so as to give structure and attain greatness. The druids had not yet gathered among the standing stones.”'

‘The druids?'

‘Yes. Look, I can't explain it any better. The symphony is Celtic, druidic, very brooding and like Wagner's
Tannhauser
, I should think. Very of the Morbihan and the megaliths. Very bleak, uncomfortable, and unfriendly, if you ask me. Joyless because, poor fellow that he is, he is taking life far too seriously at the moment. The passage graves and dolmens are a daily thing with him, the alignments and even the single standing stones, the menhirs.'

Kohler set his cigarette aside and studied the smoke curling up from it as a chief druid might when about to explore a virgin's womb or stab her in the heart. ‘Has he got a name for this “symphony” of his?'

Kaestner grinned inwardly as he sat back to survey this Gestapo gumshoe from Paris. ‘Veneti, what else? The last great tribe, yes? The one Caesar defeated in 56
BC
and led into slavery.'

Louis hadn't been the only one to hear the child's tale. ‘But the stones are thousands of years older?'

‘As are most of the artefacts and bits of charred bone he finds but the Veneti worshipped at those stones as well, and if not, at least held them in awe and were respectful of them.'

The Dollmaker and the child must have talked it over several times. ‘And when you left the clay pits?' he asked.

‘Did I see him then?' countered Kaestner. ‘No. Of course not. He …'

‘He
what
, Captain?'

Kaestner drew on his cigarette and took his time, then tried to make apologies for accusing someone perhaps unjustly. ‘Look, Yvon, he … ah, he could have been out on the moor. Yes, of course. Hidden among the stones of that alignment. There are seven of them and they are all quite tall and big around. I didn't see him when I came back along the tracks. I thought he had left but …'

Freisen noted the Captain's shrug but said nothing and kept a weather eye on the Fräulein Krüger. Was he upset with her for telling the Captain something? wondered Kohler. She would definitely not have told her boss a certain detective had been reading a certain psychiatric analysis. ‘Would the pianist have had any reason to kill that shopkeeper?'

The thin lips were tightly parted in a grimace of thought. ‘He hardly knew him. Hélène … Madame Charbonneau never went into that shop. Yvon is … well the husband isn't wealthy. In fact they're very hard up these days. It's a tremendous strain on him of course. He's also very secretive and fanatically possessive of his finds until he has completed excavating them.'

‘And has finished listening to the music they give him?'

‘Yes, of course, if you want to put it that way.' Why wouldn't Kohler accept that the pianist had done it?

‘He has a map of the locations,' muttered the Gestapo, lost in thought. ‘My partner saw it in his study. I gather it's quite like the Führer's map in that newspaper out there. “Hits”.'

‘But not all of them,' came the wary answer.

And the pianist didn't object to your ‘intruding' on his find? thought Kohler. Well, we'll see, shall we? ‘So you saw and heard no one. Is that right?'

Freisen was trying to signal the woman to get her to ask for a break, but she was having none of it. Too worried to even look up.

‘I heard shouting, Inspector, as you well know from our previous session. An altercation in French. Then the sound of iron hitting iron – yes, the switch-bar. Now I remember it. The bar must have been flung aside in disgust at what he had done.'

‘The pianist?'

‘Who else?'

Kohler looked at each of them in turn. ‘Who else? Yes, of course. The person who was either sitting on the railway bed between the rails or standing. The person who dropped the doll, perhaps just as that switch-bar came down, Captain. The person who must have been between you and the victim if what you say is true. The person who then stepped on the shopkeeper's glasses.'

‘Please, I … I must go to the toilet, yes? A moment.'

Kohler threw out a hand and gripped her by the wrist. ‘Sit down. Hold on. I'm not quite finished.'

‘This meeting is concluded,' snapped Freisen, getting to his feet. ‘We're late as it is, Fräulein Krüger. The reception, yes? and then the party for the Kapitän Hahn and his crew or had you forgotten?'

The submarine that had returned to base this morning.

‘No one leaves,' said Kohler. ‘Not yet. If you do, Herr Freisen, I will ask your secretary here to telex my objections to Gestapo Mueller in Berlin.'

Freisen didn't like it. ‘Very well. Elizabeth, you may leave us. I'll take over the notes.'

‘It … it is all right. I can wait.'

Knees pressed together now, was that it? snorted Kohler inwardly. Well, prepare yourself,
Liebchen
. Hang on.

He dragged out the small black notebook he liked to use on such occasions and flipped it open. ‘Apparently early on the afternoon in question, the Unteroffizier Jacob Dorst and the Feldwebel Helmut Ruediger gave a lift to Lorient and well beyond it out of courtesy to a pretty Frenchwoman in her late thirties with dark brown almost black hair underneath her kerchief and dark hazel eyes. She had a bicycle with Wehrmacht issue tyres and she was in a hurry.'

Involuntarily Elizabeth Krüger gripped her stomach. Freisen remained in the background silently watching the Dollmaker who hadn't moved a hair and hadn't liked that little bit about the free tyres with, no doubt, the healthy inner tubes.

‘There was a packet of American cigarettes in that railway shed, Captain. A woman's crumpled handkerchief had been shoved well down in the straw. You and Yvon Charbonneau's wife are, to put it discreetly, on very intimate terms. On more than one occasion the pianist's daughter saw you with her stepmother on the beach.'

‘Walking. Just talking. There is no harm in that.'

Was Kaestner so cool he could treat it all as if waiting for a convoy to pass on either side of him before opening fire? ‘Yes, but you also came to stay the night, Captain, when Angélique Charbonneau's father was away' – it was just a shot in the dark. ‘The child apparently wanders but not in her sleep. From what my partner could gather, the kid is a regular one hundred per cent night owl and we both know kids of that age have ears.'

Anger flared so suddenly, Kohler was taken aback. ‘Kerjean is crazy. He has put this … this idiocy into your heads! Did she see us making love?' The Dollmaker slammed a hand down hard on the table. ‘Of course she didn't because it never happened! We'd have been speaking
Deutsch
anyway and
that
, my fine imbecile from the Gestapo, Angélique does not understand. Not yet anyway. Christ, the interfering bastard! And he calls himself a Préfet!'

Calmness would be best. ‘Then why the cigarettes and the handkerchief in that shed?'

‘Why indeed? Yvon left his bicycle there and yes, I might have left a package of cigarettes or some tobacco for him now and then as a gesture of kindness, but not there, Inspector. Never there. Hélène and I never used that shed or any other. Never once. The child is lying and so is Préfet Kerjean.'

A shoe tipped over and Kohler felt it do so as a tender reassuring foot was stretched out to touch the Captain's leg. She'd stay in this … this pigeon-hole with him all night if she could. The constant racket and the stench of sardines wouldn't matter a damn to her. Nothing would. Not even the presence of Baumann and the others or their relief.

‘So, okay you weren't having an affair but she still came to see you that afternoon or to …'

Kaestner didn't smile. Every particle of him was focused on the target. ‘Or to stop her husband from killing the shopkeeper, Herr Kohler? Is that how it was?'

Ach!
The bastard had him by the balls. ‘The doll?' bleated Kohler. ‘Where would it have come from?'

‘The shop. Someone must have either left it in trade or simply forgotten it. Le Trocquer never buys – at least, he never did if he could avoid it.'

‘In trade for what?'

‘Some of his rubbish. A sweet dish, an ashtray – who's to say, Inspector? It was …'

‘The morning of the murder or the day before it, Captain?'

‘I really wouldn't know. How could I? I was in Paris, or on my way back and then out to the clay pits.'

A Steiner or a Bru doll but most probably a Jumeau. Louis might have something more on what had gone on in that shop but Louis had yet to show up.
Verdammt!
Where is he? wondered Kohler. ‘Why did you choose le Trocquer as a partner?'

‘Our cook found him for me. The men went there to buy things to send home to their girlfriends and families. The dolls do sell but only at certain times of the year.'

‘And at other times?'

Kohler was like a heavily laden ship that simply would not go down. Not yet. ‘A few here and there. Surprisingly le Trocquer did have good contacts – people he hadn't yet tried to cheat. An uncle, due soon to retire, is part owner of the faience works we use and want to purchase and improve. There are also his wife's sister and brother. One has a shop in Quimper and the other in Quimperle. That wife of his comes from a long line of shopkeepers. Little people but effective when one needs them. Most of the dolls stay in Paris at the Galeries Lafayette, two very exclusive shops on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and another on the Place Vendome, near the Ritz. I didn't trust everything to him, Inspector. I'm not so foolish.'

‘And the money you left with him?'

‘He said he needed time and I gave it to him. I had every reason to believe and still do, as did he himself, that his daughter Paulette had either stolen it or had had a hand in its stealing but that the money would soon be recovered in total.'

An optimist to say the least! ‘And you know of no reason why the pianist might have wanted to kill him?'

‘Only that Yvon feels very threatened when one of his discoveries appears to be intruded upon by others before he has finished excavating the thing.'

But not by you yourself, eh? thought Kohler. Is that how it was? ‘And the Préfet?' he asked, closing the notebook.

There was a brief smile of admission. ‘No reason whatsoever. My God, a Chief of Police? Don't be an idiot.'

You bastard, thought Kohler, sizing him up. You've already accused Kerjean once. You get me to think it was the pianist, then you throw the blame right back on to the Préfet by telling me you had no reason to accuse him even though Kerjean obviously thought you had.

‘This session is concluded. I'll want a copy of your telex to the Admiral, Fräulein Krüger. See that it is delivered to my hotel along with the first one and make goddamned sure both are in a sealed envelope. I don't want Madame Quévillon having a read. I don't want her steaming the envelope open either.'

*

The fish stew – or was it the soup? – was cold and not very good. The dining-room at the Hotel Mégalithe was lighted only by one parsimonious candle stub. Every sound was magnified – the creaking of the damned floorboards, the sighing of timbers, a clogged drain that sucked hollowly at its fuzzy plug and gulped to the building of a sou'wester. Christ! were they now to have four days of solid rain?

Kohler shoved the soup plate forward until it lay like a sick moon just before the fanned-out, biliously chartreuse ration tickets the Préfet had left for them. Louis hadn't shown up here. He hadn't been with Kerjean either. Ah damn, where the hell was he? In trouble … was that it?

Reaching down to the floor, he caught up the Lebel Model 1873 six-shooter the Sûreté carried when needed. Guns were this Gestapo's responsibility when not in use, a stupid rule of Boemelburg's that ought to have been done away with long ago.

Breaking the gun open, he squinted down the barrel at the candle flame. Clean as a whistle and ready to go as always. A careful man. Louis could knock the head off a pigeon at thirty paces but was a lover of nature, a tree-planter on occasion even when investigating a murder! He seldom used a gun, preferring his precious bracelets and leaving the guillotine to do its work. ‘The basket always catches them,' he'd say.

He had come here with Marianne on his second honeymoon. She had been a very pretty thing. Blonde, blue-eyed and quite innocent at first, no doubt. But in the buff, she had had an absolutely gorgeous figure, not only awakening to the joys of sex but eager for them, so eager. The poor Frog. The Hauptmann Steiner had made damned good use of her for far too long and Gestapo Paris's The Watchers had photographed the couple at play on several occasions, none of which had been cluttered up by bedcovers or clothing. Half the boys at the rue des Saussaies had seen the films. They were still holding regular showings when they thought it funny and Louis, who had yet to see the films and never would, wasn't around.