Ferbrave hadn’t screamed when she’d done as Herr Kohler had asked and had poured the iodine on to that torn strip of flesh. He had simply looked at and through her, thought Ines, and she had realized he had been convinced she knew more than she was letting on.
Herr Kohler had gone to look at the railway lines and the ease of access. He would conclude there was no problem at all in getting to and from that shed unseen so long as one could avoid the patrols with their dogs. St-Cyr was inside it with the father; Albert indoors, in tears, his mother beside herself with trying to calm him.
While I … I stand out here where I’ve been told to wait by St-Cyr until he returns, she said, and the moon, so pure and silent, sails high above me, the innocent perhaps, or the condemned. And should I move from my little root, he will see my tracks in the snow.
But had the rats that had been found really come from here? Did Albert really know who had taken them?
She wished she could listen to what was being said but knew she daren’t move …
‘Inspector,’ said the elder Grenier, ‘my Albert was very upset when he returned from the Hotel d’Allier last Friday evening. He said he had done well, and that with what he’d trapped in the cellars of the Hotel du Parc, he’d managed six males and four females – he was positive of this – but that someone had stolen five of the males.’
‘Stolen while he was still at the Hotel d’Allier?’
‘One of the tenants lets him play with her rabbit. Always when he’s on a job there, he takes time out for this. She … she’d been to confession and was still very distressed.’
‘That was Lucie Trudel. Celine Dupuis owned the rabbit.’
‘Yes, but one of the others … a Mademoiselle Blanche – I’m sorry I don’t know her last name – had returned to console Mademoiselle Trudel when Albert knocked on her door. Blanche had a key to the other one’s flat.’
‘And the sack Albert kept his rats in?’
‘Was left in the cellars, as always. Dead of course. Albert finishes them off with a chair leg he keeps for just such a purpose. Even if they’ve hanged themselves in his snares, he gives them a good rap just to be certain.’
A rough-hewn bench served as butcher’s block, its wooden-handled butcher’s knife thin and old, but razor-sharp, the blade a good fifteen centimetres long but worn down at the haft to a width of about a centimetre and a half.
A tin pail caught the skins, the heads and entrails.
One mustn’t alarm the elder Grenier too much. ‘Monsieur, it would be best if you, or one of the others on your staff, could accompany him on his early-morning rounds and at other times. Do so as unobtrusively as possible. Make up some excuse that’s logical, a little schedule with the others perhaps. Just for a few days, until this thing is settled.’
But would it be settled? Would Albert tell them what they needed to know? ‘Four murders, four lovely girls, Inspector. They were each very kind to him. Never a cross word or the disdain and impatience he gets from so many. Though very shy, he’d come to greet them whenever they passed through the park or he’d see them elsewhere in town. If they could, each would always pause to exchange a few words. If he could, Albert would have a little something saved up for at least one of them, a few flowers, an apple … We can’t spare much, but always let him do this.’
‘And Mademoiselle Charpentier?’
‘Has taken their place, I think, until just recently.’
The furnace at the Hotel du Parc had been banked for the night. At a word from St-Cyr, the firebox door was slammed, the lone man on duty begrudgingly excusing himself to leave the ‘nest’ to the three of them.
Herr Kohler set her valise on the workbench, then stood aside to let her open it. St-Cyr was to her left, the other one reaching up to hold the ceiling light a little closer.
