Carnival (10 page)

Kohler was nearby, felt Rasche, but wasn't making a move and must think the worst. Would nothing remain sacrosanct? Would he and St-Cyr insist on going through her personal things? The lingerie that bastard Alain Schrijen had given her on Christmas Eve? The things she had brought back and kept from that damned party at Natzweiler-Struthof?

Would they discover that she hadn't always worn the field-grey uniform of a
Blitzmädel
but had sometimes been allowed to cheer the office up with a gaily flowered frock, high heels too, the shoes purchased in Paris in the autumn of 1938 from the Galeries Lafayette and inexpensive because she had spent nearly all of her money on that wristwatch she'd found in Bréguet's, at 28 place Vendôme. A fortune it had cost her and far more than needed for timing downhill runs or laps in the pool as she'd claimed.

And when, please, had those ladies of the
Winterhilfswerk
Committee first gotten the idea of fixing things up here, Kohler? Have you thought of that yet? Early September of last year,
mein Lieber
, but have you asked yourself why I would have agreed to allow such a thing? A wagon that becomes their campaign headquarters and a place for prisoners of war? Men who, through the camp's
Mundfunk
(mouth radio), knew very well that terrible things were happening at Natzweiler-Struthof and not just things like hanging.

Abruptly Rasche parked his unfinished cigarette on the uppermost step of the wagon and started for the farmhouse.

Kohler watched him stride away without a moment's hesitation, then went back to the wagon, closed the door, and relit the lantern. Louis would find him when he was good and ready.

The wagon had everything and must have been pure heaven to the POWs. There was a stove with a supply of wood—scraps from the coffin, sawn and broken-up branches from the Kastenwald, so a little foraging had also been allowed. There was even a cast-iron frying pan, a saucepan, kettle and saltshaker, knives, forks and spoons.
Liebe Zeit
, the paradise Rasche had sanctioned but why had he done such a thing?

Three chairs, similar to the one the girl had used, were around a table. Elsewhere, a drawing board gave plans and sketches of the booths the crew had been working on, a duty roster, the schedule and a completion date of 6 March, with ticks against those items that had been completed: a bottle-throw in which wooden hoops were tossed, a paper-mâché ball-throw, not yet the
Jeu de massacre
but one with can-can dancers which, if hit, would automatically lift their skirts to much laughter; a shooting gallery also, with squirrels, hares, roe deer and wild boar, all linked by a chain drive that would flip them back up into position after being hit. Pheasants too.

Days, weeks, months the repairs and refurbishing had taken those boys that had been borrowed from that textile works, not all of them at once, but while here having the time of their lives.

The roster listed only the first names. Eugène was three down and after Martin and Gérard, and before Henri and Raymond, these last two being singled out and responsible for the Wheel of Fortune.

Among his chores, Martin had been repairing popguns that fired Ping-Pong balls, but other such guns had been found and brought in and were leaning against a corner. ‘Six lever-action Winchester repeating air rifles,' Kohler heard himself saying. BB guns that fired a copper pellet that was but a shade more than two millimetres in diameter. There were tins and tins of these pellets, found God only knew where, but most probably by Löwe Schrijen.

Target shooting had always been a favourite of such travelling fairs. Gerda and he had had a time of it, competing with each other. Had she been seventeen that first time?

‘Sentiment has no place in a detective's life,' he said.

Assorted tin trunks lay toward the far end of the wagon, with the bundles of mouse-eaten dresses, a pseudo-Florentine velvet being uppermost, but nothing of value, so why keep them? Scattered … Had they been scattered about the floor of this wagon?

Cigarette ashes filled one of those metal ashtrays that were often found in cheap restaurants but there were no cigarette butts, of course.

Shelves held rescued wooden hoops and darts—Sophie Schrijen, Victoria Bödicker and Renée Ekkehard must have spent hours scouring the place for artifacts. Brand-new, hand-rolled papier-mâché balls awaited painting but there were buckets of those that had been found and must have been stored somewhere dry, tent pegs too, and buttons in a fruit jar, lots and lots of those and an absolute fortune if taken inside the camp and sold to the other POWs. Scraps of tin too, and bits of string—even carpenter's nails had been gathered to be wrapped, handful by handful, in bits of weathered canvas, each little bundle tied tightly, and so much for the searches by the guards at the gate of Arbeitslager 13 on return­. The nails and the buttons and such would have commanded­ a price and been desperately put to use. Hadn't Louis found two rose-­coloured buttons among the dross in Eugène Thomas's­ pockets? Of course he had.

There was even a beautifully honed, brand-new cutthroat razor parked discreetly behind a framed photo, sans glass, of a striptease
artiste dans costume d'Ève
, and
ach
, he'd best stop thinking in French. Nice, too, though, that photo, and well thumbed, but
sacré nom de nom
, just what had those boys been up to? To hide the razor and have it discovered by one of the guards would have meant certain death.

Beside this photo, there was an empty half-litre green bottle that had been drained of its marc or
eau-de-vie
. A toast? he had to ask. Had those committee members raised their glasses in salute to one another over what they had all but accomplished, or to something else, and had all of them been present? The three, thin-stemmed little glasses were of ice-clear Baccarat crystal and old, and obviously hadn't been found anywhere near here, but stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder as if carefully replaced.

All were dry and smelled as if unused, but had they been washed and wiped clean, and if so, was that not why they'd been set in such a tidy row?

More and more this wasn't looking good.

Threadbare, once brightly coloured carnival tapestries covered the makeshift tin-trunk bench Renée Ekkehard and the others had used for storage. Cigarette ashes had been dribbled on a far corner, but otherwise there was nothing to indicate that anyone had recently sat here, except for the smoothness of the covering, and, yes, someone in a hurry
had
tried to wipe those ashes away.

‘A suicide,' he said, gingerly peeling back the covering and opening the trunk.

Coiled Manila hemp lay atop neatly folded canvas, the uppermost end of the rope having been yanked out so that its coils overlapped, and to the right of this, as if cast aside in a hurry, lay an open-bladed, worn-handled Opinel pocketknife, the French peasant's constant companion. In just such little things were there answers. Trouble was, the colonel must have known all about it.

‘To be alone with the victim is always best for me, mademoiselle,' said St-Cyr apologetically. ‘You see, patience is required and my partner often has little of it.
Bien sûr
, I tell myself the Occupier invariably demands the Blitzkrieg of us both, but still there are times when the careful step-by-step is essential. And Hermann, you ask? He's improving. Working with me has been good for him, not that he always listens. A member of the Gestapo­? you ask. That's not his fault, by the way, so please don't blame him for it or worry.'

She didn't respond. She just lay waiting in the soft and flickering light of the lantern. ‘I need to get to know you,' he said, packing his pipe, a habit so ingrained he could do it without a glance, the colonel having parked his pouch of splendid tobacco on a corner of the coffin before leaving.

‘Has he gone to the farmhouse as I said he should?' asked St-Cyr, waving out the match. ‘Or has he gone to find Hermann? He hasn't quite been telling us everything, has he? There has been no mention of Eugène Thomas's anonymous letter, none either of trinitrophenol or of why its chemical formula should have been hastily written on the corner of a page in Victoria Bödicker's school notebook.'

Still there was no response. ‘
Ah,
bon
, then, mademoiselle, let's begin with this rope. It's curious only in that after the commencement of hostilities in September '39 it would have become increasingly difficult to find. Perhaps the Fräulein Schrijen asked her father to obtain it, or the carnival owner or owners had wisely laid in a supply? I'm inclined to believe they must have, otherwise synthetic rope—rayon—from the factory would have been used. The choice, then, tells us little, except that something had to be readily available and of good enough quality. And never mind the roughness. My partner will have thought of that. It's the knot that puzzles me. The origins of it go back through the centuries, don't they? It's one of the simplest and earliest of knots and yet … and yet where would history be without it?'

She seemed to relax, to know that at last she was in good hands. ‘Was archery not just a casual interest but a passion of yours the colonel has so far failed to mention? You see, mademoiselle, the inner part of the pads of your left middle three fingers bear such callouses. Repeated bouts of target practice aren't easy on a girl's fingers, even with the special glove that is usually worn. There are also feather cuts on the back of your right hand where the arrow has rested as you gripped the bow. A small sacrifice—it's understandable. One also uses a knot like this, though, when fitting on a new bowstring. First the noose is pulled tightly, and then a stop knot is added to prevent its coming loose, but why did you double the rope? It made the knot so large your head would have been painfully forced aside and how, please, did you manage then to tie its stop knot? You would have had to grope awkwardly for the ends of the doubled line.'

Pipe smoke billowed and as he waved it away from her, he said, ‘This bowstring knot wasn't tied while you were standing on that chair. It was prepared beforehand and was easy to feed through the rope's loop once the doubled line had been thrown over the cross-pole above.'

She seemed not to want to respond, but to wait as if with breath held. ‘The noose was then placed over your head, mademoiselle, and tightened. Hermann may have concluded otherwise, but for now I have to tell you that I don't think you were conscious of what was happening to you until suddenly awakening to it but even your beret, which would surely have been knocked askew, has been tidied, and why, please, would you not have worn a woollen ski cap on a night like that? The degrees of frost alone demanded it, and you were obviously an accomplished skier.'

She
had
kicked out. There
were
splinters of glass in the cable-knit grey woollen socks whose outer pair had been rolled down a little. Others were caught among the laces of her boots, just as the colonel had said.

Holding the lantern closer, St-Cyr searched among the shards. ‘
Ah,
Dieu merci
, mademoiselle, something's caught in the back of your left inner sock, at the top. As you were taken down in haste by the colonel, the outermost sock accidentally hid this little item.'

Chance, though rare, could often make all the difference.

Holding the drop earring up to the light, he marvelled at it, was curious, pleased, so many things. ‘A bit of costume jewellery one of the carnival's performers must have worn. Had you been collecting these? The bezel setting is from the
fin de siècle
. A clear, sharp amethyst, mademoiselle, its brilliant well faceted. Nothing cheap, but still far cheaper than the real thing.'

Five equally spaced beads surrounded the setting, a beautifully worked rope of silver encompassed its bottom edge. ‘The stem's expanding filigree is symmetrical and instantly focuses attention on the droplet but, please, had you found it, or did someone hand it to you in a last gesture? You see, as the rope tightened, so did the fist that held this.'

‘The knot, Louis. I have to see it.'

Harried, Hermann stood in the doorway with the falling snow behind him. ‘What is it?'

‘Trouble.'

Not taking time to explain, he pushed past to stand over the victim, grasping the edge of the coffin with one hand to steady himself and then flinging something down at her chest.

‘
Verdammt
, Louis … '

Five neatly tied little canvas bundles now lay on her blood-spattered jacket.

‘Medicinal iron,' he went on. ‘They must have been carting things behind the wire for those boys.
Ach
, that's fine enough if one can get away with it, but are all of those knots the same as the one that's around her neck?'

Hermann often jumped to conclusions. ‘None of those men were here on that weekend according to … '

‘
Ja
, but who the hell was it who asked for two dumb
Schweinebullen­
to dig him out of the shit? There's a cutthroat parked behind a photo. Escape, Louis. Were those boys that committee had working for them planning a little something of their own?'

A cutthroat …

‘That scrap of paper … '

The trinitrophenol.

‘Either this one tied those little bundles with the idea of smuggling them into the camp, or whoever did also hanged her.'

‘But used a different knot, Hermann. The chair … '

‘Didn't skid, but was carefully positioned so as to make it look like she had kicked it away. I went back to check after I found those little bundles. The son of a bitch was right-handed just as is a certain colonel who could well have tied knots like those in his sleep!'

‘Hermann, listen to me, please. Renée Ekkehard was hanged using a bowstring knot, Eugène Thomas with one that was exactly the same as are around those little bundles.'