J. Janes - Sandman

When the snow landed on the girl’s face it did not melt even under lights so strong they made her eyes glisten-lights that disturbed the doves which cooed and fluttered until one wanted to shriek, Shut up! Stay still. As still as she.

It lay on the backs of her hands and dusted the dark navy blue of an open overcoat. It touched the rumpled white woollen kneesocks, the white knickers, dark blue pleated woollen skirt, pushed-up sweater and still-buttoned white shirt-blouse, the chin sharp and jutting up, the head back, lips compressed. Blood oozed and congealed at a corner.

Silently, St-Cyr crossed himself. Hermann, who had just lost his two sons at Stalingrad, blurted, ‘Ah Gott im Himmel , Louis, she isn’t more than eleven years old. Her boots are brand-new. Where … where the hell did her parents get rubber and felt like that?’

On the black market, of course, for this was Neuilly and the Bois de Boulogne and money, but it would be best to save all that for later, best to shrug and say, ‘I don’t know. She’s hardly worn them.’

Hermann liked children even more than he did. ‘Look, why not …’ hazarded St-Cyr.

‘Leave? No, I’ll stay.’

‘Then please do not be sick. You will only embarrass us in front of the préfet’s men.’

That gawking ring of flics stood in their capes and képis just outside the dove cage, some manning the lights. Barred shadows fell on her bony, bare knees and auburn pigtails but, through some accident of kindness, did not touch her face.

She was of average height and skinny, like most girls who are just beginning to shoot up. The face was pinched, the nose sharp. The eyes were of a deep, dark brown and large under long dark lashes and softly curving brows. The ears were large, and St-Cyr knew beyond doubt that she would have hated them and would have prayed to God and the Blessed Virgin for compensating breasts.

‘Louis, there’s a giraffe.’

‘Pardon?’

‘A toy. Over there, under one of the boxes. The poor kid must have had it in her hand when he caught up with her.’

So there was.

The killer had all but smothered her with the weight of his body. He had had her by the throat, had not had time to do more than tear open her coat and push up her sweater and skirt. He had then forced her head back and had driven a steel knitting needle straight up under the chin and deep into her brain. A concierge’s needle. One of those sturdy grey things the sweater-women who ride the trains use to annoy others.

Mercifully, she had died instantly. The blunt head of the needle still protruded a good four centimetres, but the thing had been bent by the force used until its end touched her chin.

‘Her toque, her beret perhaps, is missing,’ said St-Cyr grimly. ‘The schools will still be closed for the holiday, yet she wears the uniform.’

‘A convent, then. A boarder who was left to languish with the nuns over Christmas and the New Year.’

‘Yet she has apparently come to the Bois without any of the sisters to watch over her. All alone, Hermann, but for a toy giraffe she is too old to play with and would have been ashamed to be seen carting around. She has, it appears, put up little if any resistance.’

‘Too terrified, poor thing. Petrified.’

Between the ring of flics and the lights, the cage, one of gilded wire with scrolls and fleurs-de-lis in the style of the Sun King’s hunt marquee, held perhaps two hundred white doves that at nesting times were kept in little boxes beneath its green-and-gilded leafy branches, which were richly carved and provided roosting places. Doves of royalty, then, in a time of war and privation, of hunger so great, one had to ask, Where the hell was the custodian while this was going on?

The branches extended everywhere above the nesting boxes, behind which, in a narrow corridor lined with bins for the droppings, the child had been all but hidden from view.

‘Yet surely, Hermann, someone should have seen what was going on or heard her cry out?’

‘To them he’d have been standing here with his hands on something they couldn’t see. She’d have choked, Louis. She’d have …’

Kohler turned and rushed from the cage into darkness. Everyone could hear him throwing up. It had happened again. For one so accustomed to seeing death, he could no longer stand the sight of it. A detective! A former bomb-disposal expert and artillery officer. A Hauptmann of the last war.

The murders of children were especially difficult, always grim.

Hermann was a Gestapo who had been called up against his will and was hated by his confrères because he did not believe their Nazi doctrine, nor would he do the horrible things they did. A Bavarian. A Fritz-haired, greying giant of fifty-five with the ragged, glistening scar of a rawhide whip down the left cheek from eye to chin. The SS had done that, a little matter near Vouvray they hadn’t liked, ah yes. There were shrapnel scars also but from that last war, and drooping bags under often empty and faded blue eyes, the graze of a bullet wound, too across the brow, a more recent affair but now healed.

‘He’s not himself,’ confessed St-Cyr to that silent ring of men. ‘We’ve only just got in from Quiberon and the submarine pens at Lorient. A dollmaker, a U-boat captain … a girl of about the same age.’

They said nothing, those men. With the bovine insensibility of Parisians the city over, they sought details of the corpse. Had she been violated? Were her lips torn, her tongue perhaps bitten through during the forcing open of the jaws, her hymen ruptured?

Ah Paris … Paris, he said sadly to himself, you are both the heart’s rejoicing and the soul’s lament.

It was the night of Sunday the tenth of January 1943, yet, in spite of the black-out regulations, lights burned here in a city that, with its suburbs, had a population of nearly three million. A city so darkened by its bilious wash of laundry blueing and black-out curtains, no lights but those infrequent pinpricks were allowed. Most people travelled on foot in blindness, the city silent after the curfew but for the tramp of Wehrmacht patrols, the screech of Gestapo tyres and sometimes a piercing scream from the cellars of Number ll rue des Saussaies or some other such place, or the rain of rifle butts on a door to shouts of ‘ Raus, raus!’- Get out, get out!

Hands up. Backs to the wall- you, you and you ! Crash! and it was all over. For every German killed by an act of ‘terrorism’, one, two, five-ten-hostages must die. Most were taken from the jails because it freed up much-needed space. Some, though, were plucked from the streets. To date, these acts of ‘terrorism’ were few and far between, but the defeat at Stalingrad would feed their flames, and if not that, then the hated, indentured labour in the Reich or some other such injustice.

France was on her knees and bleeding in the grip of a winter that could only promise to be far harsher than the last one.

Looking like death, not like a member of the Occupation’s dreaded Gestapo, Kohler staggered back into the cage to prop himself against the nesting boxes. ‘Louis, I think I must have the flu. It’s like it was last winter. I’m sweating when I should be freezing.’

The flu … ah merde , must God do this to them? Last winter’s had been terrible. ‘You didn’t give it to me, did you?’ hissed the Sûreté vehemently. ‘If you did, I …’ He gazed up and said, ‘You didn’t look well on the train. Ah no, no, my fine inspector from the Kripo, you were sleeping fitfully. You awoke several times. I know! You were having nightmares.’