Mannequin (23 page)

‘Then who threw the acid?' asked Hermann.

‘Why must you ask?
I have said all there is to say, messieurs! That business, it is closed!'

‘But must be reopened,' said Louis. Clearing a space on the table, he laid out single photos of each of the missing girls then quietly told her why they had come.

‘So many?' she asked, trembling at the sight of them and what their hair, their eyes and ages must imply.

‘If Gaetan Vergés didn't throw acid into your face, Mademoiselle Desthieux, who could it have been?'

‘Luc'

Ah
merde.
‘Albert Luc Tonnerre?' he asked, tossing Hermann a look of alarm.

They must know something of her past, but who had told them? she wondered. ‘My former business agent was among
les baveux,
Inspector. It's God's irony that the two men in my life should have been disfigured by the same cloud of shrapnel. I didn't know this at the time of my visit to the ward of that hospital. I discovered it only later when the letters began to come.'

‘The letters …?' asked Kohler uneasily.

‘Letters of such hatred, I destroyed them and told no one.'

‘Not even when the acid …' began Kohler.

‘It was thrown a year later. By then the letters had stopped. I had my life in Paris. I didn't even
think
I was in danger.'

‘The Gare de Lyon?' prompted St-Cyr.

‘How is it that you knew?'

‘I didn't. I merely guessed. The platform would have been very crowded. Hundreds of soldiers heading for the Gare de l'Est and the war, or returning homeward on crutches and stretchers, the ambulances and nurses, a few civilians …

‘Believe me, I saw nothing. I was
blinded. Burned!
I screamed in agony just as they had done. I panicked and tore at my face, my beautiful face. My lips were on fire, my skin, my cheeks, my eyes … I rolled and thrashed about and finally someone pinned me down and I fainted. When I awoke, I was just like them.'

‘How close in friendship were Tonnerre and young Vergès?' asked Louis.

‘Very. They were comrades in arms, Inspector, two of the droolers.'

‘Could your fiancé have …'

‘My ex-fiancé.'

‘Could they have decided it together?' he asked.

She had to sit down before them. She must try to compose herself and tell them how it really was. ‘It's a question I've had the years to answer, Inspectors, and yet my answer has always been the same. Gaetan would never have harmed me. He was far too gentle and kind—not bitter, I think, as so many would have been, but philosophical. If he had even in the slightest suspected Luc of such a thing, he would have gone to the authorities.'

Yet she had so readily given them Tonnerre's name. ‘Then could it have been another of the patients on that ward?'

This was a question that deeply troubled them for they had the life of this one girl to consider and the deaths and mutilations of the others. ‘Luc must have had an alibi Gaetan was positive he could accept,' she said blankly.

Ah
nom de Dieu,
it was evident she had counted on Vergès coming forward to accuse his friend! ‘Was it Tonnerre who threw the acid, mademoiselle?' asked St-Cyr, determined to settle the matter.

Her gaze was unrelenting. ‘That I will never say, Inspector. You see, I'm now one of them.'

‘Not quite.'

How cruel of him! ‘No, not quite, but in spirit.'

They prepared to leave. The Frenchman gathered the photos, the other one held the briefcase open. Both were disappointed in her responses. Both had a young girl to find before it was too late.

‘Inspectors, I … I've not seen or written to Gaetan since the summer of 1917 when I saw his face so clearly I can still recall it.'

‘The letters, then, had begun to arrive in the fall?' asked Louis and saw her nod.

He wouldn't leave it alone. She had best tell him. ‘But then they stopped on the day of their anniversary, the day the shrapnel hit them.'

‘Pardon?' he asked.

‘Both were wounded on 2 October 1916, Inspector. I saw the damage the following summer, and in the fall of that year, the letters stopped on that very day, 2 October 1917.'

‘Then the acid the following summer, Louis. 1918 …'

‘Yes, yes, Hermann.' Would it help to show her the photo of that one girl? wondered St-Cyr and took it out.

‘Oh!' she gasped and turned away.

Kohler took hold of her by the shoulders and said they were sorry. ‘Could Tonnerre have done it?' he asked. ‘We need to know.'

‘Poured acid on her like that?' she asked, distraught. ‘Luc … Luc liked the young ones, the younger the better. I once caught him in bed with … with two fifteen-year-olds. He had tied up one of them and had gagged her. He was going to …' She swallowed hard and shook her head. ‘Paris—he will have found himself a place there and will be living on his pension, even though the memories of the good times will constantly remind him of what he once had and was … was able to do.'

Two fifteen-year-old girls …

St-Cyr put the photo away and closed the briefcase. For a moment he seemed undecided. Again he threw Kohler a troubled glance. ‘A daughter, Mademoiselle Desthieux,' he said, and she dreaded what must come next. ‘Whose child was it that you gave to the Sisters?'

The child … ‘Gaetan's. She … she was such a tiny thing but I couldn't bring myself to tell him what I had done. You see, by then I knew what I faced and that I couldn't marry him and keep her.'

‘Did Tonnerre know of it?'

‘How could he have?
No one knew except … except Aurora, whom you have met, and my parents.'

‘And the doctor or the midwife and the Sisters.'

‘Yes, but Luc could not have known!'

‘But could he have found out?'

She shrugged. She said bitterly, ‘I suppose he could have. I've never seen her since. I don't even know where she is. I
don't!
I wish I did but,' again she shrugged, ‘wishes are for fools.'

‘Mademoiselle, the Paris house of Monsieur Vergès … could Luc Tonnerre have known it well?' asked Louis, keeping up the pressure.

‘The girls …? Is that where they were taken?' she asked. It was. She could see this in the look he gave. ‘We all knew it well, Inspector. Gaetan, Luc, myself and others. Those were very happy times. Well, mostly they were.'

‘The paintings … Can you tell us anything about them?'

What did the question stem from? she wondered. ‘Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, a Dürer, a Cranach—Vermeer. I remember there were two small sketches. Heads. Lovely things. They were in the study.'

‘Impressionists, too?'

‘Yes. Monsieur Vergès loved to collect beautiful things, Inspector, as did his father and grandfather before him. I … I was one of them—everyone used to say this, but for his son. I … I accepted it as his way of saying he was happy for Gaetan and myself and very pleased.'

‘Anything else?' asked Louis.

Was it safer ground for her? she wondered. ‘Some lovely marble sculptures and bronzes. A fifteenth-century Eve that was absolutely adorable and had longer hair than mine. Two Gobelin tapestries that were exquisite, Savonnerie carpets … Inspector, why are you asking? Has something happened to Monsieur Vergès? If so, Gaetan … what's to become of him?'

‘This we don't know yet, mademoiselle. The Impressionist paintings …? Manet perhaps?'

‘A lovely study of a young mother and daughter. The mother is waiting for the train to bring the father home and sits with her back to the iron rails of the fence, while the daughter in a white halter dress with a soft blue bow clings to it and looks towards the locomotive where only a cloud of steam can be seen.'

‘Any others? Choose any one.'

He was so intent. ‘A woman, a girl with … with her breasts and shoulders bared but wearing a hat in which are tucked some red flowers. There was also a study of Renoir's, a young woman reading a book.'

It was enough and when she heard him say,
‘Bon,
' she could not help but sigh with relief. The whole interview could not have taken any more than fifteen or twenty minutes. They had come all the way from Paris and must be very anxious.

‘I feel quite empty,' she said and tried to shyly smile.

It was Louis who said, ‘Not quite, mademoiselle. Are you absolutely certain the child was Gaetan Vergès's?'

Ah no … ‘Inspector, if you are implying that I slept with both of them, then you are very wrong.'

He would take a breath and hold it. He would simply say quite firmly, ‘I wasn't.'

Could it really be important? Was he so insensitive? ‘Then I must admit she wasn't Gaetan's and I must ask that you keep this to yourselves. Now you know everything, Inspector St-Cyr, and you leave me nothing for myself.'

‘Nothing but the blessings of relief at having told another, mademoiselle, and perhaps helped to save this one.'

From his jacket pocket he took a simple pencil sketch, very finely but quickly executed. ‘That is Joanne Labelle,' he said, ‘and the boy who drew it is now dead because he did something for the daughter you gave to the Sisters in the early summer of 1917.'

Must he take from her everything? ‘In June, Inspector. The … the 12th, not three days after she was born and I had begun to love her. Luc Tonnerre had a way with him. He … he was very handsome and debonair. He and I … Well, what can I say? But he was no match for Gaetan whom I came, in my months of trial and secrecy, to love with all my heart and soul. Of course I cheated Gaetan and must live with myself always for such foolishness and cruelty, and perhaps he would have discovered the child some day, but had things been different for us, Gaetan would have forgiven me and taken her to his heart. That is the kind of man he was, the man I knew.'

‘Whereas Tonnerre would only …' said Louis.

Why must he force her to say it? ‘Would only hate me.'

*  *  *

‘Louis, how the hell did you know she was lying about the child?'

‘She answered too readily, Hermann. She didn't deny its existence which she could so easily have done. Remember, she had promised herself to Vergès. If the child had been his, it should have bound her to him no matter what, and it hadn't done so.'

‘She would have been too ashamed of herself to tell us.'

‘Precisely! But Tonnerre must have known of the child. When our mannequin rejected Gaetan Vergès, she rejected him even more so. Hence the letters of hatred and then the acid.'

Louis gestured with a hand. ‘You have no doubts?' asked Kohler.

‘None. A crime of passion from a man who, though he didn't truly love her, had been rejected for another, only to have her reject the two of them.'

‘Then that's a good enough reason for Gaetan Vergès to hate the very sight and thought of girls who look like her and want to become mannequins.'

‘Ah, yes, I'm afraid it is, Hermann, and we shall have to ask him.'

Kohler thought to let it be—Louis was apprehensive enough about what they might find at the Château, but … ‘She said Tonnerre liked the young ones, Louis. She said it as if a woman betrayed.'

St-Cyr fought down his doubts about what must have become of Joanne. ‘She was once probably very much in love with Tonnerre—did the two of them play around in that house when the son's back was turned?'

The happy times … ‘Played loose and easy and took a few photographs, eh?'

‘Perhaps. It's just a thought. Somehow there must be a reason for those sequences, Hermann. A start at least'

‘That war was hell, Louis. It did things to normally decent men.'

‘Yes, hell.'

‘Are you still certain someone could have waited upstairs in the attic rooms until the last of the photos had been taken?'

Must Hermann ask it? ‘Not certain, ah, no. It's only a possibility. But if a drooler, then … why then, was each girl forced into having …'

Poor Louis couldn't bring himself to say it. All choked up, thought Kohler, cursing the case and the stresses it caused.

Both were exhausted and for a long time they didn't speak. The Citroën held the road beautifully. The countryside to the north of Dijon passed rapidly behind them. Town after town, village after village all seen in winter from an empty road upon which there was not even a Wehrmacht convoy.

Joanne … thought St-Cyr with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Château des belles fleurs bleues was well to the south of Provins. For too long they had been feeling their way closer to the Seine. There had been ploughed fields, then scrub pasture that had been let go. Then woods and finally a broken signboard, a mere grey-weathered arrow and this road, this lost track of icy solitude among tall and crowding hornbeams whose smooth, blue-grey bark was forbidding in the late afternoon light … ‘Ah
merde alors,
Hermann. There are the gates at last.'

Shit!

Two giant beeches stood on either side of a high iron gate that had defied all entry for years. Nothing special. No coat of arms. Just matching curls of ironwork above.

‘Have we been led up a blind alley?' breathed Kohler, cursing their luck. The snow was perhaps eight to ten centimetres thick and undisturbed. The road beneath it had been full of pot-holes and large boulders. Not an easy drive, though he knew the aching in him stemmed, not from the hours behind the wheel, but from thoughts of Joanne and what they might well find.

At last the Citroën stopped and, to the cooling of its engine, came the quiet of the forest and then the musical tinkling of tiny birds and still-falling sheaths of ice from branches stirred by the softness of a wind. A thaw. One of those freaks of nature that, in the dead of winter, turned the land briefly to spring and misery.

Paris would soon be awash and shrouded in fog. Then it would freeze.