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the blackout drapes would have to be helped when drawn.’
    ‘But of what date is the stove?’
    Ach, must he! ‘Eighteen-ninety, I think.’
    ‘Try 1916 to 1919.’
    ‘And that other war?’
    ‘You’re learning. Didn’t I say you would? Vittel’s Parc Thermal and its hotels became a giant hospital camp for les Américains when the French cases were moved out in 1917, myself among them. Perhaps this indicates the origin of that football you noticed.’
    The things one didn’t know. Louis had been wounded twice in that other war but had never said where he’d been sent for treatment.
    A chipped, enamelled metal stew pot, something kept from the Reich’s inevitable scrap drives and left over from those doughboys, no doubt, sat atop a small, electric ring whose cord, by the look, was dangerously frayed. ‘Are they able to call in an electrician now and then, do you think?’
    ‘Perhaps but then. . . The meal, Inspector?’
    Steam was rising from the pot. Kohler started forward only to be held back. ‘There is no need. The aroma,’ said St-Cyr.
    Louis would have separated that one smell from all the others that had been coming at them like those of tennis shoes no amount of washing could cure, given the sachets of lavender that had been tucked into them. ‘A rabbit stew, I think.’
    ‘ Un garenne, mais bouilli à l’anglaise, and without its stuffing of veal, egg, lard, or fat and bread.’
    Boiled wild rabbit, in the English way.
    ‘The flesh is firmer and has a better flavour, Hermann, than the domesticated. Perhaps that is why there are two string snares now washed and ready to be used again and waiting under one of the beds I was preparing to thoroughly scan.’
    With the cameras of his mind, and the nearest of the two against one side wall, the same as had the game of solitaire, the dent, and the lacrosse stick. ‘A loner, is she? Those pelts have been cleaned and stretched.’
    ‘And there are two rabbits in that pot. Are moccasins in the offing?’
    Since a pair of the same were already neatly side by side next to the latest Red Cross parcel whose string had been carefully coiled for use in other snares and such like. . .
    ‘That curtain line next to the ceiling on your side, Hermann? Were the two who slept there accustomed to shutting themselves off from the others?’
    And trust Louis to have noticed it first! ‘That vase of silk chrysanthemums, the arrangement of them, that portrait of Pétain. . . A Tricolour pinned to the wall above a map of France which shows absolutely nothing to signify the country’s defeat and partition into a zone occupée, eh, and a zone non occupée ?’
    ‘And the catches on the suitcase beneath that bed, Hermann? It’s from Goyard Aîné at 1233 rue Saint-Honoré.’
    ‘And the catches are considerably different in style than on those of the others.’
    ‘ Ah, bon, mon vieux, you really are learning.’
    European-style catches: a French occupant, then, and the Americans.
    A pair of pink satin ballet slippers hung from a corner of the armoire between those two beds. ‘And right above our second victim’s,’ said Kohler. ‘And if I check the Red Cross parcel will I find chocolate bars and chewing gum absent but present in all the others?’
    ‘Or is it that the occupants of Room 3–38 pool such resources for the common good?’
    That pantry and merde again! ‘Did they not always get along, the French one here and the Americans?’
    ‘Of those two beds, Hermann, is the one closest to the window that of our victim’s guardian?’
    ‘Was Caroline Lacy her ward?’
    ‘Was the girl the daughter of the woman’s benefactor, Hermann?’
    Everyone knew that before this lousy war a lot of the French had been damned poor due to a constantly devalued franc until opportunity had come along from across the sea.
    Whereas there were photographs of ballerinas and ballets of note that had been cut from magazines and pasted up on that wall, and one of a villa in Provence