Flykiller by J. Robert Janes

, were the walls that thin?
    The Quai d’Orsay had taken the first and part of the second storey – Foreign Affairs – but Premier Laval also had his offices on the second. The Élysée Palace – Pétain and his retinue – were on the third. The main lift sounded. He paused, his heart hammering – those stairs; that Benzedrine he was taking; he’d have to watch himself.
    The lift had stopped. The cage was being opened. Again sounds carried, again he heard them clearly but still couldn’t see the lift. Was that the Maréchal snoring? Pétain was known to be an early riser. Whispers were heard, the lift-cage closed, as it descended to the ground floor …
    Céline Dupuis would most probably have come in through the main entrance to cross the foyer and step into the lift. Had she been challenged, given clearance, or had there been no one on guard in the lobby? And why wouldn’t the lift attendant have been on duty, or had he, too, been excused?
    Questions … There were always questions. Presumably still wearing her overcoat, the girl had come up to this floor and then … then had walked towards the Maréchal’s bedroom, had been seen or heard by her killer who must have been about to target that same door, had been taken from the hotel, forced down the stairs – which stairs? – and out into the street and the Hall des Sources.
    â€˜Without her overcoat,’ he sighed, ‘and in a white nightgown that would have been easily seen at night.’
    Yet, in so far as Louis and he knew, no one had come forward to say they’d noticed her. And where, please, had she left her overcoat? And why, please, remove her if Pétain was to have been the intended target?
    The corridor he was in was flanked by back-to-back pairs of tall wooden filing cabinets, with tiny makeshift desks between them and iron chairs that had been taken from the nearby park. Green-shaded lamps would give but a feeble light to the legions of clerks who worked here day in and day out. A duplicating machine leaked, a typewriter held an unfinished synopsis. Names … letters and postcards of denunciation – Pétain had received about 3,000 a day in 1940, now it was still about 1,800, and eighty per cent of them, like the thousands received by the Kommandantur in Paris and every other French city and town, were the poison-pen missiles of a nation that had all too willingly adopted the saying, ‘I’m going to les Allemands with this!’
    A bad neighbour, jealous wife, unfaithful husband or cheating shopkeeper were all fair game. Old scores were constantly being settled and, to the shame of everyone, the authorities still gave credence to such trash.
    Perhaps thirty of these bulging mailbags, fresh in from the main PTT, the Poste, Télégraphe et Téléphone station, were all waiting to be opened and synopses made for the Maréchal. Yet when Kohler came to the corridor on to which the lift opened, it was like that of any other big hotel, though here there were no trays outside the doors for the maids to collect, no newspapers lying in wait to be read. Simply brass nameplates below the room numbers, and on his right, first that of Captain Bonhomme, the Maréchal’s orderly, then that of the Secretariat, then that of its chief, Dr Ménétrel …
    Stopping outside the Maréchal’s bedroom, Kohler looked back along the corridor – tried to put his mind into that of the victim. She hadn’t really wanted to do this, would have been nervous, worried, was wearing a pair of very expensive earrings – why, for God’s sake?
    Had been let out of de Fleury’s car and had had to make this little journey all alone.
    Ménétrel’s private office, he knew, was connected to Pétain’s bedroom. Rumour had it that there were two approaches to the Maréchal: the official one via the Secretariat and then down the corridor to the