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must God do this to him, a simple detective? ‘Listen, mon ami, one can read your mind so clearly! Forging papers. Making a hero out of yourself so that the girls will think more highly of you. Hey, do you know something, my fine martyr? I don’t want to know who you forged them for.’
    He doesn’t want to know …? ‘My father, he … he forbade me to go into the army.’
    An impatient hand was tossed. ‘Forgive him. That’s the only thing you can do. Now listen, I want you to shut up about these forgeries. Sure I know the Resistance must be using you, but I have to walk the knife edge always, so the less said the better.’
    Was the inspector involved in something himself? wondered Meunier. Was it best to let him go on thinking that it was the Resistance he had done the forgeries for and not Mademoiselle Marie-Claire de Brisson, the banker’s daughter? The nights and nights of patient practice and experimentation until she was satisfied and it was done. Three sets of documents with laissez-passers for Provins and Dijon. The travel papers had been the hardest to forge, the others not so bad, and in time, perhaps, the Resistance would be able to use him once a suitable contact was made.
    â€˜Your partner …’ began the boy.
    St-Cyr told himself the Resistance should never have used this one, that the boy would drag them all down, himself as well if mentioned. ‘My partner, yes. Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo.’
    â€˜Will you … will you be telling him that I …’
    â€˜That you are a forger for the Resistance? Perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t. I leave you to worry about it, eh? So watch yourself and don’t try to leave the city. Now tell me about Joanne Labelle. Tell me everything. Try to forget about my partner.’
    Kohler let a breath escape slowly as he compared the head-and-shoulders photo in one of the card-index drums of missing persons with a photo from the house, then moved on to the dossier Émile Turcotte had pulled for him.
    On Thursday, 3 July 1941, a girl named Reneé Marteau had answered an advertisement in Paris-Soir. She had been an out-of-work mannequin with nearly two years’ experience and had, apparently, seized on the advertisement as a means of getting herself back onto the circuit.
    Long chestnut hair and deep brown eyes all right. A bit small in the bust, but what the hell, that wasn’t everything when you had smashing legs, a nice smile and a gorgeous posterior.
    He turned a page and found the first of six grainy black-and-white police prints that made him turn away and nearly lose his lunch, though that had been eaten hours ago.
    On 15 August 1941 her nude and badly battered body had been found washed up downriver in St-Cloud just past the Citroën works. It had caught against the mooring cable of a refuse barge that had been machine-gunned during the blitzkrieg and had sat on the bottom ever since. Weeds were in her mouth and nostrils. Mud was smeared in streaks over pale white skin that looked cold.
    She hadn’t been in the water long. Perhaps twenty-four hours at the most. A vagrant had found her. Hair all chopped off so that only tufts remained. Throat cut. ‘A slice from the right and savagely,’ hissed Turcotte who had never been at the discovery of this corpse or any other, and not even at the morgue. ‘The breasts removed for good measure but we feel this was done before the killing.’
    Verdammt! swore Kohler. What the hell was he to tell Louis?
    Records occupied the whole of the sixth and top floor of what had formerly been the Head Offices of the Sûreté Nationale but was now that of the Gestapo in France. Screams in the cellars, dread on the rue des Saussaies and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré right in the very heart of the city, only whispers and dark looks up here where seventy or so French detective-clerks in grey smocks foraged round the clock in shifts for