J. Janes - Tapestry

The French loved their martyrs. ‘The press will be adoring. Occupier and Occupied die in battle to clean up our streets and make them safe again.’

‘I can see the smile on your corpse. Now let’s deal with the Jourdan household and talk about it later. If Jeannot Raymond or anyone else from that agency has beaten us to it, he or they have either left the premises or been far quieter than ourselves.’

The tiny kitchen was a shambles. The single electric lightbulb that had hung above the plain deal table with its toppled cane chairs had been flung against the wall, its frayed cord and sliding weight yanked on.

Having escaped the prison of their overturned birdcage, the gerbils had vanished in fright, the girl having put it between herself and her assailant, but far more wood shavings had been scattered across the floor than even it would have held.

She had snatched up a knife and thrown it, then smashed the light. Under torchlight, two rabbits in the screened airing cupboard beyond the drainboard and sink, watched detective proceedings with evident alarm. The drawstring of the cloth bag Noelle Jourdan must have earlier filled with wood shavings, was loose, the throat wide open, the bag empty.

Among the dark, nutbrown to honey-brown shavings and bits of sawdust on the floor, there were pieces of brightly coloured porcelain: the curly-haired, ash-blonde, cap-wearing head of a pretty, blue-eyed peasant girl, the loose, knee-length pantaloons of the fisher boy she had come to meet.

‘Russian, Hermann. A pair of figurines from the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory.’

‘Things must have seemed okay at first, Louis, the visit perhaps a little late in the day.’

‘The girl in here on her own and getting tomorrow’s supper ready …’

‘The father in with whomever had come to see him.’

‘But then she must have heard something.’

‘That bag would have been hidden.’

‘Only to then be dragged out and opened by the visitor, the figurines removed.’

‘Stood side by side, the accusations given, but was she still hearing things from the other room? Was she, Louis?’

‘These date from about 1825 to 1850. The porcelain is exquisite.’

‘And once worth what? Ten thousand francs at least; five hundred Reichskassenscheine .’

‘Stay here and don’t pop any more of those Benzedrine pills. Let me see what has happened.’

That sympathetic, empathetic, old-soldier-understands tone of voice just couldn’t be tolerated anymore. ‘Confronted, Noelle made a run for it, Louis. Since the door to the flat was wide open and she wasn’t on the stairs, she may have escaped.’

‘Which leaves the father and what she must have heard. Now please … Ah, mon Dieu, be sensible. He’s a grand mutile . He’ll only bring back the memories.’

The poor bastard with the stumps and the dyed black moustache, the shrapnel scars and thinning black hair had snatched the vase de nuit from under the moth-eaten bed that was heaped with blankets. Somehow he had managed to get his trousers down but had collapsed on that one leg of his and had broken the chamber pot.

Christ, the constant diet of vegetables and fruit if one could get them. Ripe on the already ripe air, he had drawn that one knee up and in at a spasm and had emptied himself, had vomited as well, the reactions so swift, he hadn’t known what was happening to him and had died within what?

‘Less than five minutes,’ said Louis. ‘Remember, please, that I did warn you.’

Wearing a knitted blue toque, three pullovers, heavy cords and two socks on that one foot, Jourdan had been bundled up in bed when offered the drink and …

‘The last half of a litre of eau-de-vie de poire , Hermann.’

Uncorked, the bottle stood upright on the rickety night table and next to a spent tube of Veronal, but Jesus, merde alors , how could Louis remain so detached?

The glass tumbler the girl must have unwittingly handed to the visitor was still on the bedside table. Under torchlight, its dregs were not like water, the smell not sweet and pleasant but stingingly pungent.

‘Exposure to air and light darkens it …’ began Louis.

‘Nicotine, damn it?’

‘Usually such an eau-de-vie de poire is either clear or a very pale yellow. This is a dark yellowish brown …’

‘You heard me!’

‘An insecticide, a fumigant?’

‘Please don’t try to convince me you’re really serious about that little farm you keep saying you want to retire to. Worm powders also, idiot, and sheep dip. We once had to put down a neighbour’s Alsatian that wouldn’t stop chasing our flock and killing the lambs. Vati made me hold the dog while he gave it two drops. Only two.’

‘Three or four are sufficient for an adult human-less than sixty milligrams, but more has been used, I think. Though oily, nicotine is soluble in most liquids. The taste is violently acrid and instantly burns the tongue and stomach, but by then it has already struck the central nervous system and most especially the sympathetic and parasympathetic ganglia, where it stops the production of acetylcholine which the nerve endings would normally produce in an attempt to counteract the poison.’

End of lecture. ‘But who the hell in the agence uses sheep dip, if indeed that was what was used?’

‘Someone like yourself who has either worked on a farm or sheep ranch, or has used it simply as an insecticide but witnessed its potential.’

‘Jeannot Raymond … Did he go back to the agence to get it, while we were both in with the colonel and the others?’

‘Earlier I didn’t have time to look in his office. It might not even have been there.’

‘And the pear brandy?’

‘Enjoys it as I do on occasion, but perhaps more often. Noelle Jourdan is of the same age and looks a lot like Giselle, Hermann. Please remember that if we find her, it may not be Giselle. Let me be the one to look closely, not yourself.’

Duels, eyes pierced and poisons, place des Vosges had seen them all and too often. Number 24 had been de Vitry’s hotel particulier in 1617 when he’d assassinated Concino Concini, the Florentine, on the whispered orders of a sixteen-year-old boy, King Louis XIII. Concini had, of course, been his mother’s probable lover and definite favourite, Marie de Medici who’d been queen of France for ten years and had been married to Henry IV, that ‘chicken-in-every-peasant’s-pot-every-Sunday’ king who’d been stabbed to death in 1610, and certainly Concini, made marechal de France and marquis d’Ancre by her, had been too greedy and had used his spies too often, but to behead that one’s wife, Leonora Galigai, for sorcery and then to burn her at the stake?

Christ, the French; Christ, this place. Louis would be feeling it. Louis had brought him here in the autumn of 1940 and had taken him from house to house as that grandmother of his must have done. ‘To understand Paris and its crime,’ he had said, ‘is to understand its history. Wealthy or poor, it binds each citizen, even those whose families have more lately adopted the city as their own. Though all might seem oblivious to this history, they breathe it in every day whether you think they do or not.

‘Know the city like your hand, Hermann. Know its moods, its quiet places, its intricate avenues of fast retreat.’

Wise words. The courtyard of Number 2 was paved with cobblestones that had felt the centuries. Beyond it there was the stable Noelle Jourdan must have run to, for she’d found that car of theirs and not thrown away the stained white apron she’d been wearing, but had dragged it off and hung it out as a flag for them under one of the colonnaded arches. Louis had found it and had softly said, ‘This way, mon vieux .’