Lying flat on the floor, St-Cyr reached for it with the tweezers. He’d have to bag it but bags were in too short a supply even for murder investigations and Stores were obstinate. ‘A leaflet, then,’ he grunted. ‘Two perhaps, and tightly folded over. Idiot, the ink will run. Everything these days is made not to last!’
The sock had been hand-knitted in four-ply white wool with a cable pattern above the ankle. He was certain it matched the other one he’d found. It, and this other one, had been mended not once but twice by the look of them. Both were definitely from the thirties, from when she’d have been eighteen or nineteen. Treasured because Maman or Grand-mere had knitted them. Used and mended until they unravelled during the Occupation to be used elsewhere.
‘You came from a good home, didn’t you,’ he said, looking across the room at her. ‘But they wouldn’t have thought well of your returning with child and unmarried. Was that why the indecision, or did someone really interrupt your early-morning walk from the Hall des Sources and demand the location of that key?’
She couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak, yet he felt she would have liked to have said, Papa was very ill. They had trouble enough at home.
‘Was he dying?’ he asked gently. The leaflets in the inner pocket of his overcoat had been dropped by the RAF on a night-bombing raid over the U-boat pens at Lorient on the Breton coast. ‘Target missed and town hit,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘My partner and I were lucky not to have left the living. I seldom empty these pockets,’ he apologized. ‘We were there at the beginning of January. A dollmaker, a U-boat captain who wanted to revive his grandfather’s business of making beautiful dolls, the Royal Kaestners. Another difficult murder investigation. We always seem to get them. Well?’ he asked suddenly.
Dying, she seemed to say of her father. I was torn between murdering my unborn child and returning home for a last visit perhaps, and … and the funeral.
‘And the interruption?’
The location of the key to the Hall, but why, she seemed to insist, would he, she or they have needed to ask me when so many others knew Albert?
‘A warning then. Was that it, eh, or did your killer simply follow you back to this hotel?’
Two black leather thongs, each about a half-metre in length, were neatly coiled among the things in her Paris suitcase, and he had to ask himself, Had the riding crop also been packed? Had that been why her killer or killers had fitted it into her hand after they’d killed her?
Deschambeault had shed no tears, had expressed anger, yes, but not really remorse and regret at her killing. More a concern for himself, a curiosity and a thinly disguised sense of relief.
‘Did you beat him during sex? Was he of that nature or did he beat you? Please forgive me for asking, mademoiselle, but it’s necessary. Pain does, with some, increase pleasure; with others it’s essential.’
She wouldn’t have answered, would have ducked her eyes in shame, or would she? Accustomed to coming across all manner of perversions, he filed the thought away and again took to examining the contents of her bed.
The rats had all been caught in traps but not the usual, he felt.
There were, in so far as he could see, no broken backs or broken necks and legs, nor was there any sign of the froth that poison often brought. Instead of this last, or a spring-loaded trap whose bar would snap down when the bait was taken, a wire snare had been used.
‘Coroner Laloux will confirm this,’ he said. ‘Rats are very intelligent and not easily tricked. Each family quickly becomes aware of the consequences of poisoned bait and avoids it like the plague. Those spring-loaded traps are often of no use either. Bacon, cheese, bread soaked in wine or soup – whatever I used, even securely tying the bait to its little pan with thread, they would leave the trap set
‘But our killer or killers have been careless, mademoiselle. If not the trapper, then he, she or they both know someone who is good at his business, even to determining the sex of those he has caught. The livers are also missing. Tasty, no doubt, though I haven’t yet had to dine on them, nor has my partner. At least, not knowingly.’
Still the hotel was silent. It was uncanny how news of their continued presence must constantly be telegraphed from room to room and past those that were unoccupied.
