Madrigal by J. Robert Janes Page B

there?’
    â€˜An iron grille keeps all but the smallest of animals from entering.’
    â€˜Then you’d better show it to me, hadn’t you, especially as some son of a bitch must have tidied up and dumped her things down there.’
    Ah merde , did this one miss nothing? ‘We will need a hammer and cold chisel.’
    â€˜Then get them. Bring help if necessary.’
    Though an hour had passed, the body of Mireille de Sinéty had still not been cut into. ‘I thought you were going to question the sisters?’ asked Peretti, not looking up from her hair.
    â€˜I lied,’ murmured St-Cyr. ‘Avignon has already tainted me.’
    Nothing more was said. Peretti was in his late fifties. The face was angular and often sad, for he’d seen death many times, both in such places and on the field of battle. But the hands that could break bones if necessary could also be gentle. Something was teased from her hair and carefully mounted on to a microscope slide. Without pausing, he pulled the instrument from its case and set to work.
    St-Cyr turned back to the trinkets which had been carefully arranged on a nearby pallet. The girl had carried no papers, but to walk the streets without them was to invite arrest, interrogation and possible deportation to one of the camps. Had her killer relieved her of them? he wondered, cursing the Renaissance’s lack of pockets. Had she parked them on a ledge or tucked them into a crack?
    You were a Libra and of the House of Balance, he said silently. Among the zodiacal signs is the oft-repeated hand-held weighing scale, but did you then seek rooms in the Balance Quartier for good luck perhaps, or for some deeper reason?
    Superstition had played such a part in the daily life of the Renaissance. Her gimmel ring set lapis lazuli side by side with a saffron-yellow topaz which matched exactly the colour of her gown. Yet the pattern on the gown, in a faint and delicate shade of brown, was of oak leaves and branches that were entwined with grapevines. Had this, too, had meaning for her and for others to puzzle over? And wasn’t the background pattern in the frescoes of Clement VI’s bedchamber of spiralling vines and oak branches and the deeper blue of lapis lazuli?
    On the soft leather of her girdle he found, among so many other things, the sign of the Archer in gold. A tiny medallion. The Centaur’s arrow was pointed away from a silver House of Balance and towards a Goat that had been cast in lead.
    The House of Balance weighed a tiny lapis lazuli cabochon against that of a saffron-yellow topaz, the two stones of equal weight.
    She would tease and she would dare but had such things led to her death?
    The little silver bells were very old, and he wondered how she had come by them, by all of this, for the trinkets and jewels dated from the Renaissance, whereas the clothing had been cut and sewn by herself.
    â€˜Lapis is the stone of fertility,’ grunted Peretti impatiently. ‘What I’ve found in her hair isn’t much, I admit, but perhaps it’ll be enough.’
    Down through the ocular of the microscope, and at thirty times magnification, the image of a tiny clot of coarse black wool rushed at the eye. ‘A cassock …’ breathed St-Cyr.
    â€˜Or cloak, overcoat or sweater.’
    â€˜The bishop …’
    Back came the Commissaire de Police’s warning. Break glass and you’ll be cut. Tamper with the Host and the Blood of Christ and watch out.
    â€˜Be careful,’ sighed Peretti. ‘I meant what I said.’
    â€˜We will.’
    â€˜How sure are you of that partner of yours?’
    â€˜Hermann? We are like two perpetually crossed fingers. God’s honest cops trying to stop themselves from drowning in a torrent of officially sanctioned crime.’
    Everyone was only too aware of what the Bodies , the Germans, and those who would collaborate with them were stealing. ‘Then leave me with