Mannequin (24 page)

Kohler got out and eased his cramped muscles and back. The newish padlock and chain were heavy, the
propriéte privée défense d'entrer
notice all too clear.

Louis couldn't keep the uneasiness from his voice. ‘Is the son really an ether-drinker? Is it that his affliction is so bad, Hermann, even here he has had to be hidden?'

Uncomfortable at the thought, they approached the gate and looked through its bars to yet a further extension of the lane and, as yet, no sight of the Château.

‘We may have to spend the night,' cursed Kohler exasperatedly. ‘This fucking lock hasn't been opened in years, Louis. What the hell's been going on?'

‘Is there a road around the gate? I seem to remember we passed one.'

‘We'd have to back out. We're going to have to anyway.'

‘Let's leave the car and climb over. The foot-gate will also be locked.'

It was, though here the original lock was still in use and the key, no doubt, hanging in the kitchen perhaps or in the caretaker's cottage.

About a kilometre of lane led between giant sycamores whose spatulated bark formed a stark camouflage against the snow-covered lawns and formal gardens that had been let go. Branches that had fallen had simply not been cleared.

The ‘Château' was a large manor house of buff-grey sandstone with a blue slate roof and turret, high-peaked dormer windows in its attic, and shuttered french windows below at the front, no shutters at the sides.

‘The drapes are all drawn, Louis. The house has been simply closed and left. Our Monsieur Vergès must have gone south.'

‘Or into the grave. Ah
nom de Dieu,
what are we to make of it, eh? It has an uncomfortable feeling,
mon vieux.
I've seen too many places like this and found too many old people in them, with all the jewellery and silver missing.'

‘You're full of surprises. Why not retire and write a book about it, eh? My
Life as a Detective!'

‘Please don't joke. It isn't helping.'

‘Then quit talking about bludgeoned old people!'

They tried the front door, the side door—found all were locked and no answer came to persistent ringing of the bell-pull.

The house was of a ground floor, one storey and then the attic but above this last, the single turret rose another storey so as to provide a good view of the grounds. Had it ever been a happy house? wondered St-Cyr. Built perhaps as early as 1725 and well before the Revolution, it had been occupied, no doubt, by the same family ever since. ‘It's a typical
maison de maître,
Hermann. The family mansion or master's house of what was once a working farm.'

From a walled
potager
of perhaps a hectare, they stood looking at the place wondering what to do. The house appeared to be empty and unfeeling. No smoke issued from its chimneys. The silence was uncomfortable. There were no footprints but their own.

‘Well, do we break in or not, Louis? I vote we do.'

The walls of the kitchen garden were tall and had been built to withstand the centuries. Mottled by slabs of pale brown sandstone, they rose to steeply pitched roofs that were flagged with coarse slate. Trellises clung to the walls—beans, roses, hops … ‘Everything needed to sustain life would have been grown here, Hermann.'

‘Look, you're no goddamned farmer, so stop kidding yourself and gassing on about cabbages. Hey, my fine-tuned ear, I hear no chickens or pigs. Where the hell are the old man and his son?'

‘And Joanne, if indeed she is here?'

Louis was staring emptily at the house that rose to its tower just beyond the wall of the kitchen garden. The stables were behind the house and an attached wing of it. To the left, and beyond, there were more tall trees—a long line of lindens, so a drainage ditch over there, thought Kohler. A woods to the very left, extending to the bank of the Seine and the carpet of violets in spring.

‘I'm going in, Louis, are you?'

‘Yes. Before it gets too dark for us to find what we must find.'

‘There's no sign of the lorries from Dallaire and Sons.'

Was it the offer of hope? ‘Not yet, but there may be.'

Merde,
he was taking it hard! ‘Mademoiselle de Brisson didn't ask Paul Meunier to forge transit papers for two loads of furniture, Louis. The boy would have told me if she had.'

‘Certainly. But our droolers, Hermann? What of them?'

Dear God, if You're really up there, hide the truth from him, begged Kohler.

When they found the lorries in an open-ended, timbered bam the size of a medieval market hall, they knew the worst.

‘Dédé,' blurted Louis. ‘What am I to say to him, Hermann?'

‘Just let me have a look, eh? Stand back. That's an order.'

‘From my big Bavarian brother who hasn't the stomach for it? Don't be an imbecile, Hermann. This is my case, my task.
Me,
I brought you into it on your holiday!'

Verdammt,
he'd be crying in a minute! ‘Joanne may not be in either lorry. Maybe she got away?'

Were all Bavarians so sentimental?

The roof-timbers towered above them. The vacant nests of summer's swallows were grey below with splattered droppings. Light filtered in through the gaping doorways.

So, we have trouble to face, said St-Cyr grimly to himself. Let me find Joanne and then her killers.

They opened the rear doors of both lorries and stood before the tangled contents of Louis XVI armchairs—superb pieces in giltwood and dark green velvet upholstery—a
Régence
sofa that was covered with exquisite needlepoint, lamps, tables … a Louis XV
bergère
in antique brocatelle silk, twin
tabourets …

Everything had been hastily crammed into the lorries. Just to climb over the obstacle course would take hours. Arms, legs, shelves, mirrors, crates of crystal and porcelain wrapped in towels, sheets and drapes that had been ripped apart in haste. Clothing too.

Only by standing well back was it possible to see if anything had been disturbed on arrival.

‘There,' said St-Cyr. ‘That dining-room table. Some of the things on top of it have been pushed aside.'

Squeezing himself into the lorry, Louis somehow managed to work his way towards the front until he reached the other end of the table. ‘A chest, Hermann,' he called out, looking down over the edge. ‘It's open.'

‘Is she …?'

There was a grunt, grim with determination. ‘No. No, she isn't here. There's vomit, there's hair—lots of hair.'

‘Christ!
'

‘There are some short lengths of cord. They've been cut with a very sharp knife.'

Deftly Kohler hoisted himself up into the lorry. Shoving things aside, he clambered awkwardly forward until he reached Louis.

The chest was just big enough for the girl to have been folded into it with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around the lower part of her legs, wrists tied to the ankles. ‘Ether?' he asked sharply.

The outline of her nestled body still lay deeply in the hair of not only herself but the other victims. No clump was more than three or four centimetres long. ‘Each girl was forced to kneel beside this chest, Hermann, and while they cut off her hair, she had that of the others to look at.'

‘The
bastards,
Louis! Ether?' he asked.

‘Most probably. Even so, she would have lost consciousness for only from two to ten minutes.'

‘Unless they forced her to drink it. Then she would have been out for an hour or two, maybe more.'

Much safer as an anaesthetic than chloroform when inhaled, ether did have its unpleasant side. Instant vomiting on regaining consciousness. When drunk, its burning taste tightened the tongue and throat, giving a tingling sensation while suffusing the body with warmth and producing feelings of extreme excitement, joyfulness and elation, then deep intoxication.

‘Does it heighten sexual arousal and make one uninhibited?' hazarded Kohler uncomfortably.

‘Were they in the habit of feeding it to their victims so as to gain their co-operation?' demanded St-Cyr, the catch all too evident in his throat. ‘Ah, I do not know,
mon vieux.
It's fortunate they didn't gag her. She'd have choked and drowned.'

There was so much hair in the bottom of the chest …

‘Is it that they wanted to keep her alive for more of their fun?' asked Louis.

‘The house,' said Kohler.

‘The torches … We left them in the car. Ah, damn!'

‘There'll be candles—a lantern. Me first, you second and that really is an order.'

‘Ah, no, Hermann. For Dédé and for Joanne, it must be me who finds her.
Me!
'

Kohler knew he was going to have to watch over him. ‘Then we go together, eh? Side by side.'

‘Until the doorway or the staircase becomes too small for both, Hermann. Then I go on alone because this is a matter between my friends, my God, the killers and myself.'

7

T
HE SIDE DOOR FINALLY GAVE A LITTLE.
Assaulted by a stench of rotting food, St-Cyr threw back his head and gagged. ‘The kitchen, Hermann! Ah
nom de Jésus-Christ,
give me room!'

The stench was fruity, pungent, deep and stinging. Of green beef, high fish, eggs, chicken guts and a black sop of once-wet mushrooms that had oozed from their canvas collecting bag to web the tiled floor around it.

‘Louis, what the hell has happened?'

‘A moment.' The Sûreté's hard-soled brown brogue hit the plain plank door. Crashing against something, the door wedged itself on a faience shard the shape of a half-moon. A
soupière—
Nevers, thought St-Cyr, giving the tureen's provenance and seeing it once lovingly placed in the centre of a table ringed by straight-backed open chairs, all in that plain but beautiful style of the provinces.

The kitchen was a shambles. No shelf or cupboard was full or even half-empty. Everything lay about or on the floor. The old, black-iron stove and row of brick ovens held copper pots and pans once used, then bashed in or turned upside down in rage, their contents burnt to tar and dusty cinders grey with age.

There was garbage everywhere. Bags and pails overflowed. Filthy tea towels and washcloths lay crumpled on the floor, on the stone drainboard beside the sink, or clung tenaciously to the pump handle, a wallpeg, or the edge of a side table and chair.

‘The son has had to live alone, Hermann, and has tried to care for himself. Soup, soup and nothing more solid than more puréed soup. The father must have died some years ago.'

Kohler had never seen anything like it. Gingerly they began to pick their way into the house. The ceilings were low and of whitewashed beams and plaster. The walls might once have been decorated in the subdued colours of the country, with flowers everywhere and paintings. Portraits of long-deceased relatives in gilded oval frames were now smashed—smashed to smithereens! The chairs, the sofas, the desk with its once beautiful marquetry, all were broken and ripped. ‘A rampage, Louis?' he asked, his voice empty.

‘Living, I think, from day to day—two years, three perhaps. Ah, it's so hard to tell, Hermann. Night by night and week by week Gaetan Vergès must have destroyed every last link with his ancestors. This …' he indicated the once-proud salon, ‘was not the refinement of Paris, but was once lovely all the same. It was here, from the family farm, that the money must have come to maintain the house in Paris. Vegetables and poultry, roses for the perfume trade and as cut flowers in the markets and shops. Is the son now dead?'

A
fauteuil,
upholstered with tapestry, had been thrown in a demented rage at the mantelpiece mirror. Other pieces had been broken up and fed into the fire which had then been left to go out.

‘He is or was a man in great and constant pain, Hermann.'

‘An ether-drinker.'

There were books on horticulture and beekeeping whose pages held badly stained and futilely thumbed lithographs. Apples, pears … Many of the books were open and had been thrown as if in disgust that the recommended treatment, a spraying of copper sulphate perhaps, had not controlled whatever pest had infested the orchards. A fungus perhaps, or aphids. No bit of floor space was uncovered. Pages and pages of manuscript in pen and ink held the love letters, the poems, the diaries even of his ancestors and,
yes,
those letters from him to Angèlique Desthieux …

My dearest Angèlique … At dawn the assault will come again. We are waiting.

It was dated 29 September 1916.

‘Louis, let's check the rest of the place and get out of here.'

A rudimentary barometer with calibrated gaugeboard had been spared and still hung on the wall beside the doorway to the main hall, forgotten in his passage from room to room. The main staircase curved continuously upwards through the filth. Its iron rails had been painted a dark green, as had all the stairwell trim and footboards, but the much-scuffed steps themselves and the curved balustrade were of unpainted oak.

A single, gilded and superbly carved pine cone, a symbol of fecundity, stood upright on top of the Napoleonic newel post. No paintings hung on the walls of the stairwell. All had been pulled down and either smashed underfoot or simply flung aside.

Step by step they picked their way through the half-light. Vergès was not in any of the rooms whose beds, room by room, had been slept in until too filthy when, at last, he had found it necessary to move on to another room.

Clothing lay scattered everywhere—suits, coats, shirts and neckties, the uniform he had worn on parade, the medals with their ribbons …

At one end of the corridor there was a bathroom with a copper-plated Napoleonic tub, brass taps and water heater; at the other end was the tower with its spiral staircase in dark green again and unpainted oak.

The room at the top of the tower was large, with windows facing the four corners of the compass. A small desk, a chair, an armoire and commode, a simple cot in whose lumpy mattress of striped grey and white fabric the mice had made their nests and left their urine.