Dollmaker by J. Robert Janes

when he does, you can talk to Dollmaker all you want.’
    â€˜He did it, didn’t he?’ swore Kohler exasperatedly. ‘You bunch think the Captain slammed that shopkeeper so you want to give him every bit of help you can.’
    Baumann shrugged, the boy wet his lips and nervously brushed the faded blond hair from his brow. The Second Engineer merely picked up the dice and shook them.
    St-Cyr sat uncomfortably in the straight-backed, uncushioned chair the daughter had fetched from the tiny kitchen. No more funereal a bedroom could be imagined. Madame le Trocquer wore black lace over a black robe and nightdress. Exquisite black lace flowed from her withered, white-dusted, blue-eyed face like an ancient spider’s tent to cover the ample double bed. Black pillows and cushions propped her up. She even wore a square of black lace over her head whose iron-grey and yellowish hair was like wire and braided into two tight pigtails that were tied with black ribbon. The hair was short, so the pigtails stuck out a little.
    Having enjoyed her illness, she was now to enjoy her grief. A widow at what? he asked and put her age at sixty and a good ten years older than her husband.
    He would try again. ‘The woman at the big house near Kerouriec, madame? Your husband and the Préfet argued. Her name was …’
    â€˜Mentioned? Is that what you told him, Paulette?’
    Dutifully the daughter stood with downcast eyes like a handmaiden across the bed from him. ‘Yes, maman ,’ came the whisper.
    â€˜You little fool! Préfet Kerjean and your father were the best of friends. The woman was nothing to them. Nothing , so why should they have argued about her?’
    Livid, Madame le Trocquer hunched her thin, bony shoulders. ‘It’s cold,’ she said spitefully. ‘There never was enough heat. That’s why I have the arthritis. There’ll be heat enough now, Paulette.’
    â€˜Yes, maman .’
    St-Cyr heaved a desperate sigh. ‘Madame, there was an argument. So violent was it, several items in the shop were broken. Your daughter has said she overheard Madame Charbonneau’s name.’
    â€˜That’s all I heard.’
    â€˜Yes, of course. It’s enough for me to demand the truth.’
    â€˜The house is by the sea and some three kilometres from the main road, Inspector. The bus does not always go to Kerouriec. The woman is from Paris. The husband was a famous pianist, though there is never much work for such as those. You’re from Paris. How is it, please, that you do not know of him?’
    Charbonneau … The Rachmaninoff and the Schubert. The Palais de Chaillot in mid-April 1940 with Marianne at his side, a rare evening out. She had worn the azure blue silk dress with matching high heels. She had looked even younger. ‘I do remember, madame. Yvon Charbonneau … the critics were most unkind to savage him. He was marvellous.’
    â€˜Humph! Marvellous or not, he and that new wife and child of his elected to come here for the Duration to that house his Great Aunt Danielle foolishly left him some time ago. Such legacies only produce indolence. Now he no longer plays the piano but searches the megaliths for clues to the past while the wife, she …’
    â€˜She what? ’ he asked.
    Ah! the detective so wanted to hear scandal he was leaning forward in his chair and Paulette was nervously touching the base of her beautiful milk-white throat and looking pale. ‘People say she is the Captain’s mistress, Inspector. Others say she is the Préfet’s and since my husband was sometimes asked to deliver messages for either of those two, well …’ She sucked in on her cheeks. ‘One cannot say what one will find.’
    Was the woman naked, madame? Was she fornicating on the beach with the Captain perhaps, or the Préfet? ‘There was a doll?’ he hazarded.
    â€˜Not one from the shop. Paulette would have seen