J. Janes - Mayhem

Kohler acknowledged that it was: grey flannel trousers, a newish brown leather, three-quarter length coat, black beret, grey scarf and black gloves. ‘He’s not from one of your seminaries, is he?’ The youth of France had taken to the priesthood in droves rather than be called up. Cowards, the French. Cowards!

‘That is something we must check. There are several possibilities in the area. Anything else, Inspector?’

Damn him! St-Cyr could use the title ‘Inspector’ like a knife! ‘Was he a collaborator or involved in the black market, Louis?’

‘Or had he jilted his lover?’

‘A nobody then,’ muttered Kohler. ‘I’m going for a crap in the woods. I’ll take a look around up there.’

‘Good thinking, Hermann. The grass, eh? It’s been beaten down.’

One footprint appeared up on the crest of the slope, next to the edge of the forest. ‘I knew you’d notice that,’ replied Kohler lamely.

‘There’s a footprint in the mud on that bank. See what you make of it.’

A small sacrifice to Germanic thoroughness. Unleashed – baited properly – Hermann would now begin to work. St-Cyr ran his eyes over the victim. Height, 155 centimetres; weight, 68 kilos; hair, dark brown; eyes, dark brown.

The boy had walked right into it. He hadn’t suspected a thing. But had he known the murderer? He’d have come over the crest of the hill on his bicycle and would have started down. Then for some reason he had stopped, walked into the grass and had set the bicycle down before taking those last few steps.

The pockets were empty – not a shred of ID. St-Cyr let out a curse. Tracing people was always trouble. These days identity cards and ration cards were in such demand.

‘We’re going to have to have a photographer,’ he called out to the forest above.

‘I could have told you so,’ came the reply, dark in the woods beyond the top of the slope.

Squatting probably. ‘There’s one in Barbizon just along from the Kommandantur. Does weddings and picnics.’

‘I’ll go in a minute. She dropped her purse.’

The bushy eyebrows lifted questioningly. The victim came into view again. ‘Her name?’ sang out St-Cyr.

‘None whatsoever, my friend. Just the empty purse.’

Had it been left deliberately?

St-Cyr turned the body over. Apart from the mess of the forehead, the wide-open eyes and the clothing, the boy looked at peace and hid his identity well. No rings, no sacred medallions or cross on its chain – not even a fountain pen. Just nothing.

Kohler came back and handed him the purse. ‘Beaded silk – something a woman would take to a dinner party.’

The Frenchman used the forefinger and thumb of his right hand to hold the purse gingerly. He examined it with the eye of a born connoisseur before bringing it up to his nose for a whiff of the forgotten perfume all such purses were bound to contain.

‘Is he Jewish?’ asked Kohler, hitting all the possibilities and taking back the purse.

‘Want me to have a look?’ taunted St-Cyr, ‘or can we leave it until he’s on ice?’

‘Who says we’re carting him off to Paris?’

The purse, Inspector. You’re forgetting the purse. That’s not something from around here.’

‘Perhaps he stole it?’

‘Perhaps, but if so, why was it emptied and left for us to find?’ This would often happen in the case of a robbery, of course, but …

The Bavarian hunched his shoulders. ‘I’ll go and get the photographer.’

‘Better ring the boys in blue while you’re there. Paris, Hermann. Take my advice. This one wants to go to the morgue.’

Kohler nodded grimly. St-Cyr watched as the Bavarian drove off in what had once been his car, that great big beautiful black Citroen.

Then he went back to work. The purse could, of course, not have been empty at all but merely dropped in haste.

Hermann always kept a few things to himself.

The woman – for it was the print of a woman’s low-heeled shoe – must have been fairly young and agile. After the killing, she had climbed a nearly vertical bank of some three metres by grasping branches and the stems of young trees. At one place, she’d pulled out a birch sapling.

St-Cyr took the time to replant it.

At another place, high up on the slope, she had encountered wild raspberries and had hooked a stocking.

Silk like the purse. Unheard of these days, except if prewar or purchased on the black market. A tragedy if she was of little means.

Eventually he came to the spot where Kohler had dropped his trousers. Sure enough the purse hadn’t been empty. Hermann had availed himself of a silk handkerchief before depositing the rest of the contents into a pocket.

So, a young man – a boy of eighteen or twenty – and a young girl, perhaps of the same age, perhaps of wealth, but equally perhaps of humble station, a servant, a maid, a governess – something like that.

And a meeting on this lonely road, in the midst of this lonely forest.

Yet she knew the boy would be along. Was she alone in this, or had there been someone with her? The murderer?

Try as he did, St-Cyr could find no evidence of anyone else. But the girl hadn’t run blindly into the forest. Ah no, far from it. There was a footpath up there beyond the top of the slope and she’d known of it – known it well enough to have come by it perhaps and to have gone back along it in the dark.

To where? he wondered. The town of Fontainebleau was a good fifteen kilometres to the east-south-east; Barbizon perhaps four kilometres behind him, Chailly-en-Biere a little more, but to the north, and Paris some forty-five kilometres farther.

The path must cut across the road, so she had either had a bicycle there or someone had waited for her in a car.

Then why hadn’t that someone come with her?

Again he went carefully over the ground. The victim wasn’t all that far from the road – perhaps five metres, the bicycle a little nearer to it. Between the single footprint, the body and the road there wasn’t a sign of anything.

Then the girl had killed the boy.

It saddened him to think of such a thing. Automatically he thought of young lovers, of a jealous rage, only to come back to earth at the purse.

Beaded silk. He wished now that he hadn’t handed it back to Hermann. Hermann had a way of keeping things like that.

But still there was the memory of it. The pale, sky-blue shimmering silk that was electric and would have been so against a young woman’s thigh, the beads that hadn’t been cheap and shoddy, but had been strands of seed pearls.

The scent that had been that of a very expensive perfume – he could see the girl lying in her chemise, silk on silk, with dusky eyes so full of tears.

Ah, Mon Dieu, it would be such a sight but so far from the truth!

*

As the car shot across the flat farmlands around Barbizon, Kohler gave the Citroen all it had. He was in a foul humour and knew it. The General von Schaumburg, the Kommandant of Greater Paris and the Wehrmacht’s big cheese himself, was a personal friend of that arch little file-toothed bastard, the General von Richthausen, the Kommandant of Barbizon. Hence the call at dawn to drag them out of bed. Hence the, ‘Two detectives and both of you asleep? Get on your feet, Kohler.’

‘ Jawohl, Herr General. Heil Hitler!’ Ja, ja , you son-of-a-bitch!

But why the goddamned interest? Why set the Gestapo and the Surete on to something that wasn’t even in their turf and could just as well have been left to the local flics and the Prefet of Paris whose beat it was? Ah yes.

Why, unless those local flics weren’t any good and von Richthausen, being a von like the rest, had got his back up?

A nothing body. A kid, for Christ’s sake! Murders like this, who cared? If clean of complications then forget it. No leads to the Resistance or to other tantalizing things meant no further interest in so far as Boemelburg was concerned. Kaput !