Madrigal (10 page)

Two silver thimbles, one crushed flat, the other crumpled, had been cleaned but were still black.

The pattern on them matched that of the thimbles in the motif on the sides of the pomander.

There was cloth in plenty, either folded neatly on the workroom shelves or in bolts and remnants, and he had to ask, How had she come by it? and had to answer, ‘The Church, the bishop and the nuns – wealth that has been stored for centuries.' And then, fingering satin, silk and velvet, ‘The drapes, bed linens and clothing from abandoned villas. Wrist-watches, too, no doubt.'

Those of the wealthy who could get out before the Free Zone had been occupied had had to leave virtually everything behind. Now most of these places had been taken over by the Occupier and his friends, if in convenient locations and ‘suitable'; if not, they had remained empty. A ready source of fabrics especially for a group of singers to collect when on tour.

The cutting table yielded patterns, fabric shears, scissors, thread, thimbles, needles and detailed sketches of the costumes she was making. There were hundreds of notations with arrows to each seam and tuck. A collection of volumes on Renaissance painting offered ready comparisons.

An order book would hold the dates, customers, projects and fees charged. Alain de Passe would have looked through it but in search of what? he asked himself.

A recent page had been torn out. A fragment remained, and from this, there were two letters in pencil.
Ai
… Aix? he asked himself. The tour the group were to make? Had Simondi demanded different costumes for every tour? Had the girl written down his needs? Then why tear the page out?

Unfortunately several other pages had been removed and these went right back to the beginning, nearly four years ago. But why hadn't de Passe simply taken the book and destroyed it? Thérèse Godard would have told them of it, yes, of course, but had it been left as a warning to watch out and tread lightly?

‘Ah
merde
, Avignon,' muttered St-Cyr, not liking things at all.

A narrow cabinet held spools of thread, including that of gold and silver. There were buttons, ribbons, bodice laces, boxes of pins, rolls of basting tape, et cetera.

When he went up into the tower, he saw at once that the pomander was a replica of the Palais's Bell Tower, that it must, indeed, date from the mid-fourteenth century, and he had to ask, How had she come by such a valuable thing?

Her lute was a treasure, too, not nearly so old as to have come from those times, but old and beautifully kept. A relative? he wondered. A legacy?

There were letters that had been written in Latin, in the French of the North, and in the
langue d'oc
of those days. Treasures, too, and many of them bore the signatures of the de Sinéty family and of another Mireille. Her namesake.

On the table she had used as a desk, there were recipes for beauty oils and creams, and these had been noted down from references no longer in evidence but attributed to this other Mireille.

Stanzas, verses and lines were from poems and madrigals.

My love for my mistress is so gentle,

I serve her so timidly, am so humble,

I do not even tell her of my longing,

Bernard de Ventadour had been among the leading troubadors of the third quarter of the twelfth century. The passage, more of which appeared, was from
The Timid Wooing
. ‘His style of poetry,' she had noted, ‘is very firmly elemental and of
les provençaux.
'

De Ventadour had been a baker's son who had risen to sing at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. After the age of the troubadors had come that of the motet, and then the madrigal.

A leather-bound volume, the
Musica Transalpina
, of 1588 and borrowed from whom, he wondered, held a collection of madrigals, written in Italian but with their English translations, too, and many of these pieces had been composed by Luca Marenzio. Unbidden, the face of Christiane Bissert as she had entered the cafe this morning came to him. The Villa Marenzio.
I await your questions
, she had written,
with a heart that is open
.

‘Louis, de Passe went through her things all by himself. There was no one else with him.'

‘Then let us find what he missed.'

Two tins of sardines were from Marseille and they matched, exactly, the one Louis had taken from the victim.

Kohler reached well into the hidey-hole he had found under the floorboards beneath a wooden box that was full of fabric remnants. A corked, dark green wine bottle was next. ‘Extra
Vierge
,' he breathed.

There were freshly harvested black olives as big as small plums. Dried figs and apricots had been threaded on to braided lengths of straw for ease of carrying to and from market or hanging up in the kitchen, but few would have done so these days for fear of a visit from Vichy's hated
Service d'ordre
, soon to become the
Milice
, who, among other tasks, hunted for hoarders and the lesser black-marketeers, the little men, the
lampistes
. Never the big ones. Never! It was only the little ones who couldn't buy their way out of trouble.

A beating and arrest were guaranteed; theft, too, of the offending items and anything else that might appear appealing.

The braiding of the straw and style of tying matched that of the recently acquired ropes of garlic and sun-dried tomatoes that hung freely in sight above the tiny basin she had used as a sink.

A cake of homemade olive-oil soap smelled of honey, too, and lavender, not of ground horse chestnuts, sand and slaked lime as did the infamous ‘National' soap, which was always served up in grey, pasty two-centimetre-sized cubes and rationed. Nor would this soap have burned her skin and scratched it as the National's did Giselle's and Oona's. Not used until recently, the soap had to have come with the olives and the oil. None of these items was ever seen in Paris by ordinary people. And as sure as that God of Louis's had made olives to ripen like that near les Baux, the shepherd boy had some answering to do.

A small round of
chèvre de crottin
had been dusted with herbs. Three slices of honey-drenched, fried bread were golden in colour and lying under a cover on a plate – the
tranches dorèes
the peasant would take at his mid-afternoon
goûter
, his little ‘tea break' among the groves or vineyards and fortified by at least four litres of red wine. Had the shepherd boy been bribing the victim or just trying to encourage her favour?

A last item was harder to retrieve and it caused consternation for it couldn't have come from a similar source.

‘Hédiard,' he muttered. ‘Kumquats.
Merde alors
, she's full of surprises!'

The pale green glass jar, with its gold lettered and embossed label, spoke of luxuries not seen by most since before the war and then only from the street side of a shop window.

There was dust on the lid; the seal was intact, a puzzle these days.

From behind the false backing of the small cupboard that served as her kitchen counter and drainboard, he took a jar of English marmalade, one of candied ginger, a tin of litchi nuts and another of crystallized, unrefined sugar from Barbados. Again, all the items had come from Hédiard's. Again there was dust on all of the lids and this was thickest on the jar of marmalade. From there through to the kumquats it varied, indicating the items hadn't come in all at once but had been given to her in payment perhaps, and at intervals. But why had she partaken of none of them?

Everyone knew or had heard of Hédiard. One of Paris's venerable institutions, and much revered not just for its delicatessen but for its upstairs tearoom, the shop had occupied premises at 21 place de la Madeleine since 1851. And oh
bien sûr
, had they closed it in protest at the Defeat of June 1940, they would have lost the business to a friend or friends of the Occupier. That had been one of the many ordinances of the time, and had been obeyed or else.

Among other things, she had been working on an order for six replacement surplices for the Cathedral's choir, a donation of her already overstressed time, no doubt, since there was no mention of the order in her ledger.

But then, of course, Alain de Passe, that warner of Don't mess with the Host and the Blood of Christ, had torn out page after page.

When he found a false panel beneath the top of her main worktable, his fingers trembled and he had to calm them. Infrequent sleep and meals hadn't helped the nerves, nor had the pace of things. Always it was blitzkrieg for them, and always of late those little dove-grey pills of Benzedrine the fighter pilots took to stay awake and alive had been necessary.

The ledger she had hidden was complete. Greatly humbled by the thoroughness of this
petite lingère
, he began to peruse it.' Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Toulon and Aries … The tour after the concert on the thirtieth.'

Beneath each of these place names she had noted the costume changes the singing master had demanded. Detail after detail followed in columns and sketches so orderly he had to recall the Kommandant's admiration of her practicality. She had even used a code – in glyphs – to denote the singers' names and those of others, and nowhere here did the actual names appear. A kind of shorthand, he supposed, but another rebus for them to sort out.

Beneath the glyphs and the details there were notations of payment: for the costumes at Aix, a mere 205 francs; for those at Marseille, 103; for Aries only 63 francs.

The singing master must have had her modify existing costumes, but even so it was far too little, far too parsimonious.

At the bottom of the page she had written:
Maître Simondi's cheque for 876 francs has been postdated to 25 April
- three months, no less! – and
given on the Aries branch of the Banque des Pays du Sud this time.

Two things were immediately clear: the singing master was a demanding, cheap son of a bitch – an astute businessman, the Kommandant had said. And Mireille de Sinéty had felt it necessary to keep hidden a far more detailed copy of her ledger.

They'd been watching her, and she had damned well known it.

Xavier had brought her gifts from his father's farm, and things he had stolen when the group had broken into abandoned villas. Someone else – he didn't think it could have been the shepherd boy – had paid her in, or given her, the tins of sardines. And yet again, someone had done so with the items from Hédiard's, but at intervals.

Up in the tower, Louis was lost in thought, puzzling over something on the girl's dressing table and sucking on a pipe he had forgotten to light.

Fingering a cheap, ersatz pewter crucifix and a rosary of black Bakelite beads, the Sûreté said, ‘This medallion, Hermann. The image of the Holy Mother has been so poorly stamped, the second impression blurs the first.'

Yet their victim had been a perfectionist, a lover of the past, her family once of the lesser nobility.

The items were next to her hairbrush and comb as if, in a final gesture, it had been they to which she had turned before leaving for the Palais. A pair of scissors lay on top of a four-centimetre-long lock of her hair …

‘A label provides the source of the religious bric-a-brac, which has only just recently been purchased from Les Fleurs du Petit Enfant,' said St-Cyr. ‘It's on the rue de Mons not far from the Palais and the Cathedral, but what does a shop which sells religious motifs of the worst kind have to do with
this?
'

Of postcard size, but definitely
not
a postcard, the black-and-white photographic print was of a young woman's naked breasts. No shoulders, arms or waist were visible, no name either. Instead, one end of a curl of their owner's hair had been glued to the lower right corner of the card so that the hair could be fingered while gazing raptly at the breasts.

The card had been hidden behind the backing of a gaudily framed sketch of the
Petit Jésus
, complete with phosphorescent halo and angels in the sky.

The hair was distinctly reddish, a pronounced strawberry blonde and soft, but with a sheen like burnished copper in strong sunlight. There were scattered freckles on the breasts. The skin was very white – ‘creamy', a
fétichiste de cheveux
might have whispered during his orgy of gawking and self-masturbation. The nipples had been stiffened, probably at the photographer's insistence and simply by their owner having first wetted her fingers. Chorus girls did this as a matter of routine at the Lido and other such places, so much so that in winter they were always bitching about their being chapped.

‘The Silver Swan …' hazarded Kohler, indicating the post-card.

‘“When death approached unlocked her silent throat,”' said Louis, comparing the hair with the loose strands Mireille de Sinéty had cut from herself and had left for them or others to find.

‘De Passe must have seen the hair she left but not the photograph, Louis.'

‘But did he leave it for us to find as a warning to us, or not think it important?'

Kohler indicated the card. ‘Is this the reason she was silenced? Is the
fétichiste
the bishop?'

It had to be faced. ‘He practises flagellation, Hermann. He's one of the
Pénitents Noirs
. I'm not sure that such a practice is common to them now, but there was also the
enseigne
of a
martinet
on her belt.'

‘And wouldn't you know it, eh? The sins of the flesh needing to be scourged.'

‘Whoever tidied up after the murder took the time to cut off a lock of our victim's hair.'

‘To go with a photograph of her breasts – is that it, eh? Is that why she cut this off herself?'

‘Calm down. We must think as she would have had us think.'

‘The Church, you idiot! The préfet and his warning!'

Early in the afternoon long shadows were cast by the Palais, and the town, with its ramparts seen from the tower room, held narrow streets, some of which already appeared as if at dusk, such was the flatness of the sun's trajectory in winter.