The Unwanted Dead

by Chris Lloyd

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

'A gripping murder mystery and a vivid recreation of Paris under German Occupation.' ANDREW TAYLOR

*WINNER OF THE HWA GOLD CROWN AWARD FOR BEST HISTORICAL FICTION*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD*

'Terrific' SUNDAY TIMES, Best Books of the Month
'A thoughtful, haunting thriller' MICK HERRON
'Sharp and compelling' THE SUN

* * * * *

Paris, Friday 14th June 1940.

The day the Nazis march into Paris, making headlines around the globe.

Paris police detective Eddie Giral - a survivor of the last World War - watches helplessly on as his world changes forever.

But there is something he still has control over. Finding whoever is responsible for the murder of four refugees. The unwanted dead, who no one wants to claim.

To do so, he must tread carefully between the Occupation and the Resistance, between truth and lies, between the man he is and the man he was.

All the while becoming whoever he must be to survive in this new and terrible order descending on his home...

* * * * *

'Lloyd's Second World War Paris is rougher than Alan Furst's, and Eddie Giral, his French detective, is way edgier than Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther ... Ranks alongside both for its convincingly cloying atmosphere of a city subjugated to a foreign power, a plot that reaches across war-torn Europe and into the rifts in the Nazi factions, and a hero who tries to be a good man in a bad world. Powerful stuff.'
THE TIMES

'A tense and gripping mystery which hums with menace and dark humour as well as immersing the reader in the life of occupied Paris' Judges, HWA GOLD CROWN AWARD

'Excellent ... In Eddie Giral, Lloyd has created a character reminiscent of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther, oozing with attitude and a conflicted morality that powers a complex, polished plot. Historical crime at its finest.'
VASEEM KHAN, author of Midnight at Malabar House

'Monumentally impressive ... A truly wonderful book. If somebody'd given it to me and told me it was the latest Robert Harris, I wouldn't have been surprised. Eddie Giral is a wonderful creation.'
ALIS HAWKINS

'A terrific read - gripping and well-paced. The period atmosphere is excellent.'
MARK ELLIS

'The best kind of crime novel: gripping, thought-provoking and moving. In Detective Eddie Giral, Chris Lloyd has created a flawed hero not just for occupied Paris, but for our own times, too.'
KATHERINE STANSFIELD

Release date: September 17, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 464

Sample

1

Two things happened on June the fourteenth, 1940.

Four men no one knew died in a railway yard and a fifth man stepped off a balcony.

There were other things that happened on June the fourteenth, 1940.

The soldiers of the 187th tank destroyers wanted to look their best as they invaded Paris, so they took a wash in the muddy waters of the Ourcq Canal, six kilometres outside the city. In a race to grab the best beds, General Bogislav von Studnitz set up shop in the Crillon Hotel, while all around him, German officers spread their dusty uniforms on the city’s finest bed linen. And in the summer sun, Wehrmacht bands honked endlessly up and down a deserted Champs-Élysées until finally a giant swastika was unfurled over the tomb of the unknown soldier just in case there was anyone left in Paris who didn’t yet know we’d lost.

But in my world, four men no one knew died in a railway yard and a fifth man stepped off a balcony.

‘Christ, what a stink,’ Auban cursed.

‘Show some respect, Detective,’ I told him. A bruiser in the right-wing leagues who’d brawled his way through the thirties, Auban was tough and muscular. Even in the growing heat of a summer morning, he dressed in a way that wouldn’t let you forget that, a heavy leather jacket over a white shirt so tight as to show off his chest. He glared at me and turned away.

‘This way, Inspector Giral,’ he said through gritted teeth. His usual cocksure insolence was now suffused with a fear he couldn’t hide. I glanced to either side of me and knew why.

Lined up along the railway embankment were row upon row of German soldiers. A gauntlet of faceless figures that had watched me pick my way along the soot-greased sleepers of the marshalling yard to where Auban was waiting for me. They hadn’t shifted a centimetre in all that time. The ones on the right partially obscured the low sun, their long shadows curling across the oil and grime of the railway yard, picking us out as we walked. To the left, hard young faces in bitter contrast stared impassively. I could make out an officer barely fifty metres away looking intently at me, his face expressionless. They were the first Germans I saw that day, some of the first to enter the city. They watched us now in silence, their machine guns pointing at the ground, the grey of their battle dress soaking the black clouds out of the sky.

‘They been here all the time?’ I asked Auban. He nodded.

We set off towards a group of half a dozen uniformed police waiting for us by some goods trucks. The normally bustling railway yard to the south of Gare d’Austerlitz was unnaturally quiet. No trains moved in or out. We picked our way through rubbish strewn along the tracks. In the streets nearby and all over the city, it had lain uncollected for weeks, left to rot while the Germans advanced on Paris and refuse was the least of anyone’s worries.

Auban was right. It did stink. A smell of death and decay in the air. Whether it was the scene that I knew awaited me or the city itself, I couldn’t decide. Under the scrutiny of the German soldiers, we walked past a dead dog lying on the jumble of tracks, its tongue swollen and lolling, its eyes wide open in panic. Flies rose and fell in a putrescent murmuration. I faltered for a moment. There was another smell, faint but acrid, lying underneath – like bitter pineapple doused in black pepper. Only it was different from how I’d remembered it. I shook my head to get rid of it.

I looked away from the dog to see a police sergeant hurrying towards us along the track. My breath caught in my throat and I almost stumbled. I glanced at Auban but he hadn’t noticed. I looked back at the figure running at me and fought down my panic. His face was disfigured by a heavy gas mask and the smell that had been lurking outside my senses finally engulfed my memory.

His voice muffled, the sergeant held out a gas mask each for me and Auban. ‘You need to put this on, Eddie.’

Fighting to stop my hand from shaking, I reached out for mine. It was standard army issue. Not much better than the ones we’d been made to wear the last time Germany went to war with us. Trying to keep control of my breathing, I struggled not to relive the same dark panic as when I’d last worn one a lifetime ago. I recalled another morning when I’d briefly felt the gas burn my nostrils and eyes before getting my mask on in time and peering through the yellow fog at the unlucky ones who’d left it too late slowly dying in the bottom of a trench.

‘It’s just a precaution,’ I heard the sergeant say. ‘The gas will have dissipated by now, but better safe than sorry.’

He led us towards half a dozen uniformed cops huddled in a tight circle, each one wearing a mask.

‘Good morning, Eddie,’ the only civilian there said to me. ‘Not every day we have an audience.’

Bouchard, the forensic doctor, was only a couple of years older than me, but he always wore an old-fashioned cutaway suit and kept his salt-and-pepper hair combed back like a Belle Époque philosopher. Despite the mask obscuring his face, his presence calmed me.

‘Tough crowd, I reckon. I’ll let you take the hat round after.’

The sergeant signalled to us that we should follow him. Without a word, he led us to a row of three goods trucks parked in a siding, their sliding doors pulled shut. He pointed at the middle truck. The ventilation grille near the roof had been stuffed tightly with rags. A small gap showed, where some of the padding had come loose. I nodded to the sergeant to show him I understood the significance.

All three of us stepped forward to the truck. Auban hung back. The lock on the door had already been opened, a metal bar that had evidently been wedged to hold it in place lay on the ground. Cautiously, the sergeant slid the door back and leaned in, climbing on to the metal step and pulling himself up. He pointed at something by the far wall. A small mound of dark broken glass, a stain barely visible on the wooden floor around it. Yellowish dust motes, raised by the sergeant’s movements, clung in the meagre light and slowly settled back to the rough planks.

‘Chlorine,’ he said, his voice distorted.

I climbed in, followed by Bouchard. I had to wait a moment for my eyes to get used to the gloom and to the unreal vision of the murky interior through the cheap glass of the mask. I wished they hadn’t. I saw a man lying slumped on the opposite side, his hand still reaching up to the door. He’d died trying to prise the lock open. I looked at him and saw one more time the desperate, bulging eyes and swollen throat I’d hoped I’d never witness again. The same discoloured saliva dribbling down his chin onto his chest. My breath drew shallow in the tight mask.

The sergeant pointed to the left. Another scattering of broken glass lay on the floor. On the wall above it, a damp stain showed where the flask had shattered against the wood. A second man lay on the ground under the grille, some of the wadding in his hand, his face also red and swollen. The same look of torture and panic was etched on his features. Beyond him, two others lay. The planks at their feet scratched where they’d tried to get away from the gas, their heads huddled in final resignation against the far wall. I’d seen trenches filled with men like this, but few sights as despairing as the one in the grimy goods truck in a railway siding on the first real morning of my new war.

I felt a tightness grip my chest, not from the gas but from the feel of the mask clawing at my face. Unable to bear it a moment longer, I ripped it off and stood at the truck door, sucking in mouthfuls of air from outside. The sergeant lunged at me. Through his own mask, I could see his horror.

‘Are you insane, Eddie?’ I could just make out his words.

‘The gas has gone. You said so yourself.’ I spoke angrily to hide my fear. I turned to face inwards but stayed at the truck door. ‘We can’t work in here. Take the bodies outside and Doctor Bouchard can do his initial examination there.’

‘This is not usual, Eddie,’ Bouchard objected.

I looked at the scene around me, both inside and outside the truck. ‘You’re telling me. Get the bodies out.’

Reluctantly agreeing, the sergeant ordered some of his men to carry the four dead men out and away from the truck. ‘One of you collect the pieces of glass from the gas canisters and put them in separate boxes,’ he ordered. ‘Wear gloves.’

‘And keep your masks on,’ I added. ‘If this is chlorine gas, it’s heavier than air. If there is any left, it’ll be floating on the floor of the truck.’ I needn’t have spoken. I was the only one to have taken my mask off. ‘And remove the packing from the windows and close the doors. We’ll let the gas disperse completely and search the trucks properly later. It’ll be too diluted with the outside air to do any more damage.’

Bouchard had stepped down from the truck and taken his mask off. He adjusted his semi-lunettes over his aquiline nose and looked up at me. I could see the concern on his face.

‘I’ve seen all this before,’ I reassured him. ‘The gas has gone, I know. Will the forensic institute be able to get fingerprints from the rags?’

He looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know. Not that there’s anyone left there to try. Not with this lot in town.’ He gestured at the Germans and turned to follow the first of the bodies to a clear piece of ground some twenty metres from the wagon.

I jumped down from the truck and threw my mask to the ground. Walking away, I took in huge gulps of air, not worrying for once about the soot and corrosion that was suffocating the city. I looked up. Greasy clouds of black smoke clung to the dawn sky, throwing a shadow over Paris. They were from the fuel dumps outside the city. Burned, some were saying, by our own retreating French army. Others reckoned the American oil companies had set fire to their own depots. Either way, it had been to stop the Germans getting their hands on it. It didn’t seem to be making any difference, not to the invaders. It was just us in the city who were suffering from the fingers of scum that clawed their way into your mouth and nose and on to your clothes. It had rained last night, the first we’d had in a month, and I had to walk gingerly between the tracks along the wooden railway sleepers, their usual coating of oil and soot thickened and made murderous by the coarse black dew that had fallen.

Looking around me, I saw Bouchard start a preliminary examination on the four bodies, laid out on tarpaulins on the ground. It was unusual, I knew, but the only option I saw possible. He’d carry out the proper post mortem at the forensic institute. Beyond the three trucks in a battery of sidings, the Germans continued to watch in silence. I’d almost forgotten them. Behind them lay a ragtag jumble of makeshift huts, thrown up over the years like a low-rise skyline, most of them illegally. Had the soldiers not been there, I’d have sent some of the uniformed cops in to take a look. North of the trucks lay the workshops and covered sidings, the passenger terminus past them again to the left. To the south, the tracks disappeared into the streets on their journey out of the city. I watched them narrow and fade, partly longing to follow them, partly not, I was surprised to realise. Behind me, I turned to see row upon row of tracks heading south to north. In the middle, stood a rickety tower reached by a narrow staircase that would have offered a view over the whole of the yard.

A uniformed cop came to fetch me, sent by the sergeant. He’d also removed his mask. Nervously, he hefted the rifle slung over his shoulder. Police in the city had been carrying rifles ever since the Germans had broken through the Ardennes, supposedly to defend on every street corner. Now it seemed like a worthless red rag waving provocation at the occupying troops. The policeman in front of me wore his rifle reluctantly.

‘The workers who found the truck are over here, Eddie,’ the sergeant explained when I rejoined him.

He led me to where a thickset man in his fifties wearing a leather jerkin over oil-stained blue overalls was standing. He looked like a pocket Mussolini, only with a full head of dark hair and without the pugnacious jaw.

‘Le Bailly,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m the union official for the Gare d’Austerlitz.’

‘You should probably keep quiet about that right now.’ I half-gestured to the Germans. ‘Were they here when you found the truck?’

He nodded. The ground shook underfoot and Le Bailly and I looked at each other, both recognising the sensation. ‘And now here’s more of the bastards,’ he added.

Underscoring the strange hush of the railway yard was the noise of lorries and tanks rumbling through the streets of our city, their tyres and tracks reverberating through the ground. In the midst of it, a telephone rang. I looked over to see the German officer talking calmly on a field telephone held for him by a soldier. He kept looking over at us and at the other police and nodding his head. I turned back to Le Bailly.

‘See anyone else?’

‘No one.’ He gestured at two other workers standing a short distance away. ‘We just noticed the smell and I told those two to get away from the trucks as quickly as possible. I was in the last war. It’s not a smell you forget.’

I had to agree with him. I called Auban over and told him to go and talk to the two workers, a tall, lugubrious one with a moustache that had outgrown his face and a squat, bullet-headed heavy with an expression as hostile as Auban’s grace.

I watched him go and looked at Le Bailly. ‘Where had the trucks come from?’

‘They were here overnight. They were going to be coupled to a train that was supposed to be leaving this morning, but nothing’s running today.’

Before I could ask another question, I heard a sound. Le Bailly reacted at the same time as I did. Another memory of the last war. Rifles being cocked. I turned to see the German officer moving towards the group of cops nearest the trucks. His soldiers followed him, their weapons raised. I glanced the other way, the troops the other side were walking towards us. I felt my gun in my holster. The officer spoke to one of the uniforms, who pointed at me. He came towards me, flanked by four soldiers.

‘You are the senior police officer here?’ he asked me in passably good French. He’d unholstered his Luger and was idly pointing it in my direction. I’d seen so many of his type in the last war, on our side and theirs. They looked like they saw themselves permanently on a white horse, looking down at the rest of us festering in the mire. With his white blond hair and sculpted cheekbones, he seemed untouched by the soot and stench the rest of us faced.

‘Yes. No need to ask if you are.’

‘Why would that be?’

‘You’re not covered in shit like everyone else.’

He idly pointed his Luger more meaningfully. I could see him struggle between laughing uncertainly or shooting me. Composure and a faint smirk won. ‘I am an officer in the Wehrmacht. You are mistaken if you think I will tolerate being spoken to like this.’

I pointed to the group of cops being shepherded by the German soldiers, their guns trained on the police. ‘And I’m tired, angry and trying to do my job despite you and Adolf getting in my way. You’re mistaken if you think I’ll tolerate my officers being mistreated like this.’

The smirk went up a scintilla or two. ‘I will remember that.’ He turned and shouted a command at the soldiers. They backed off a little from the other cops and lowered their rifles. The officer turned back to me, his gun still raised, not enough to be directly threatening, but enough to say what he wanted to say. ‘I am Hauptmann Karl Weber of the 87th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht. I have to inform you that the German High Command has issued the order for all French citizens to be disarmed.’

‘We are the police.’

‘Including the police. I must ask you to surrender your weapons.’

I looked at the soldiers gazing at the cops like foxes in a hen house. I could see little choice. ‘Do I have your word that the police won’t be harmed?’

‘You do.’

I signalled to the others to hand over their guns. The German soldiers quickly gathered the guns and rifles and carried them to a junior officer still standing on the perimeter. Hauptmann Weber kept his eyes on me the whole time, his expression an odd blend of aloof superiority and smiling insolence.

I surrendered my pistol to him.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

He shouted an order and the soldiers raised their weapons. I heard one cock his rifle and I looked at Weber. I could feel my anger rising, but with a faint smile on his face, he called a second order and his men fell away, drawing back to their original positions along the side of the railway tracks.

‘I will leave you to get on with your investigation,’ he told me, withdrawing to join his troops. ‘I think we know where we stand now.’

‘Why the fuck are they still there?’ the sergeant hissed. ‘We’re unarmed.’

Bouchard and I couldn’t help looking up. Silent as the heroic statues they seemed to love, the German soldiers were still lined up above us an hour later as we watched Bouchard checking the bodies of the four men. The only one speaking was the officer, a litany of asides lost to us in the ashen air that had the men either side of him sniggering.

‘It’s not because of us,’ I told him. ‘It’s to secure the railway. Make sure our army can’t use it to break in or out.’

‘We have an army?’ Bouchard commented.

A couple of young cops came over with a box each. ‘The two gas bottles,’ one of them explained. ‘What there is of them.’

‘Take them to the station,’ I told them. ‘Make sure Sergeant Mayer gets them.’

The relief palpable in the way they moved, they hurried to the police cars parked at the southern entrance to the yard and left the scene. Auban and eight other uniforms were standing nearby, waiting to take the bodies away when Bouchard gave the say-so. The three railway workers had been joined by half a dozen more and stood a small distance away, their curiosity overcoming their fear of the Germans.

The sergeant and I looked through the men’s clothes. They were once good quality but now ragged. There was nothing in any of the pockets. No money and no papers to identify them.

‘Robbed?’ the sergeant asked. ‘Or refugees?’

‘Or both.’ I found a tailor’s label in one of the jackets and showed it to the sergeant. ‘Probably foreign. This was made somewhere called Bydgoszcz.’

‘Poland,’ he replied. ‘Seen it on the newsreels.’

Involuntarily, I looked at the four men and wondered what had happened to bring them here, to their death in a grimy railway truck on the edge of a strange city with no possessions and no identity.

‘It’ll be chlorine gas.’ Bouchard cut across my thoughts. ‘I’ll know more when I cut them up, but we can take that as read.’

‘Chlorine?’ I wasn’t certain. The smell wasn’t exactly how I’d remembered it.

‘How would they have died?’ Auban asked the doctor. He was a few years too young to have served in the last war and had the morbid interest of those who wrongly felt they’d somehow missed out.

‘Horribly, if you really want to know. The chlorine reacted with the liquid in the lungs and turned it to hydrochloric acid. It simply ate away at them from the inside.’

‘Christ,’ the sergeant commented. ‘It must be an agonising death.’

My voice almost broke at last. ‘It is. I never thought I’d see it again. We can only hope this really is the last time.’

‘Would you count on it, Eddie?’ Bouchard asked, getting slowly to his feet.











2



I was alone in a river of tracks. The four bodies had been carried away to a waiting lorry by the last of the uniformed police. Auban had gone. Bouchard had snapped his bag shut and waited for me.

‘Walk with you to the cars?’ he’d asked me.

‘I’ll wait. When will you do the post mortems?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘This afternoon.’

Bouchard had nodded and looked around us at the soldiers. They seemed to be growing restless. ‘Don’t stay too long, Eddie.’

I watched him go and shot a glance at the German officer. The sun was high now and a bead of sweat ran down my cheek. I rubbed it and saw a smudge of soot on my fingertip. Taking one last look at the truck seeping its wasted poison into the air, I scanned the yards before walking south towards the gate and my car, gunmetal eyes on me all the way. I heard a rifle bolt being pulled and I looked up to see a soldier standing next to Hauptmann Weber putting a bullet in the breech. Weber looked at me, the same aloof scorn on his face, and pointed his fingers at me like a gun.

I raised my hand in salute. ‘Not if I get you first, you bastard,’ I murmured with a smile.

Back in my car, my face crumpled and I held my head in my hands. The gas mask. I closed my eyes for a moment and immediately saw a cloud of smoke. A trench slowly emerged through the haze and the sound of shells and rifles quickly grew. I hurriedly opened my eyes again and the sights and sounds were gone in an instant. I could feel my whole body shaking. They were images I’d kept out of my head for over a decade. Ones I thought I’d seen the last of.

‘If the bastards don’t get me first.’

I looked around me. I was out of sight of the Germans. Reaching for the ledge I’d put in underneath the dashboard, I pulled out a Luger I kept in a clip and stared at it. It was one I’d liberated from a German officer in the trenches at Verdun. I used to keep it in my flat, part of a ritual I thought I’d got over. I knew I daren’t close my eyes again. Shaking my head, I took out the little Manufrance pistol instead from another clip alongside the first. It always looked like a kid’s toy but it could still do what it had to. I replaced the Luger behind the dashboard and shoved the Manufrance in my waistband inside my shirt.

‘I’m a policeman and I carry a gun,’ I said out loud, recalling the bright-eyed sneer of the German officer.

I drove off for the river and police headquarters. In the empty streets, one sense of unreality had given way to another. Our phony war had suddenly become a real one and each felt as illusory as the other. Paris had been a ghost town for the best part of a month and was now haunted by the crash of heavy tyres and boots on cobbles. I heard music, harsh and martial, echo through the halls of the city as I drove down lifeless alleys and along deserted boulevards, past empty apartment buildings and boarded-up shops like coins on a dead man’s eyes. The richer the area, the emptier the streets. Millions had fled the city before the Germans came. Two-thirds of the population had gone. It was the old and the poor who hadn’t been able to get away. And the cops. There was no life, no bustle. Paris was still there, but it was no longer Paris.

I turned onto a main road and came face to face with a German motorbike and sidecar flagging me down. I reached for the gun in my waistband, but the two soldiers simply turned away from me to watch a marching band dirge victoriously past a scattering of French civilians lining the pavement, a look of fearful defiance on their faces. A small boy leaned into his mother, not wanting to watch. An elderly couple cried silently. The band passed and the soldier in the sidecar signalled me to carry on my way. Our streets were now German, our role to move aside.

As the sound of the marching band died away, two German soldiers in a field-green truck following it pulled up in front of the local mairie and set up a loudspeaker. Curious, I got out to see what was happening. I stood next to an ancient guy in a grubby white shirt, its collar long gone.

The loudspeaker whistled into life and told us in accented French that German troops had occupied Paris.

‘You don’t fucking say,’ the old guy next to me said. I decided I liked him.

The metal funnel then asked us to stay calm and told us that the request to stay calm must be obeyed.

‘That should do the trick,’ my commentator added.

We were also told that the German High Command would tolerate no act of hostility. Aggression or sabotage would be punished by death. Arms must be turned in and we were all to stay indoors for forty-eight hours.

‘Just in case you find it hard to stay calm.’ The old guy shook his head at me and slowly shuffled away. With a face like old army boots, he looked ancient enough to have been around the last time the Germans occupied us, back in 1870.

I watched the two Germans pack their truck away and head off, no doubt to the next district mairie on their list. The few people who heard the message melted away, heading for home to close the shutters and lock the doors if they had any sense.

I drove straight to the criminal investigation headquarters at thirty-six, Quai des Orfèvres, Thirty-Six as we all called it, where the first thing they told me was that I had to hand in my gun.

‘Already done it,’ I told the commissioner, explaining the incident with the German soldiers at the railway sidings. I didn’t tell him about the Manufrance in my waistband.

The second thing they told me was that I had to put my watch forward an hour.

‘We’re on Berlin time now,’ Commissioner Dax told me.

‘I’m not.’ I left my watch as it was. For some reason, the Germans telling us what the time was in Paris now they were here annoyed me more than anything else I’d seen that morning. ‘They can wait for me.’

‘The whole of the German army’s going to wait for you?’

‘They’ll get used to it. It’s either that or change it for me. Even then I’ll only change it back.’

Dax just shrugged at that. A painfully thin man with a cassoulet and wine paunch and horn-rimmed glasses on a gaunt face, he was surprisingly expressive in his shrugs. It made up for the clipped paucity of his words. I told him about the four bodies found at the railway sidings.

‘Do we know their identities?’ he asked me.

‘Not yet. They had no papers on them, but I think they’re Polish. Refugees, possibly.’

‘Or fighters. The gas was to attack the Germans and it broke by accident?’

‘I don’t see it. It takes more force to break the glass on a gas canister than just by accident. And they had no other weapons on them. I think they were simply trying to get out of the city and someone stopped them.’

‘We also need to know where the gas came from, Eddie. Keep me informed. I don’t want you doing anything without my knowing. Least of all now.’

‘The Germans that were there. Can’t we just charge them with it and have done?’

Dax rolled his eyes at me and went back to his office. I told you he was expressive.

I took a moment to stare out of the window in the main detectives’ room. I should have seen barges on the river, cars weaving angrily along the road three floors below, men and women walking in a hurry to get somewhere, lovers kissing on the ancient stone bridge, police coming and going in and out of the building. Instead I saw nothing. No movement, no life. Grey streets under a cloud of black smoke from the burning oil to the north of the city. South across the river, the Fifth Arrondissement, my home, was a ragged film set waiting for the actors to return. But I could hear. A rumble of heavy vehicles still rolling through the city, more sporadic now, but enough to rattle the glass in the windows.

‘Heading south,’ Tavernier, an old cop told me, his voice numb. Until that day, he’d thought he’d been serving out his time until he retired. ‘The Germans. A lot of them are stopping here, but most of them are crossing the city, heading south to catch up with the front.’

I just nodded. Barthe, a bluff Grenoblois with a drinker’s bulbous nose, joined in. ‘They say some of our boys got through down by the Porte d’Orléans, trying to make it south to join up with the army. The Boches missed them.’

The Boches. The word we’d used for the Germans in the last war had made a comeback since the start of the new one. Something else I’d hoped to see the last of.

‘Good,’ Tavernier replied, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I saw a French unit retreating through my neighbourhood this morning. Running in panic. Mind you, I haven’t heard anything bad so far about the Germans. Not like the stories you hear in Poland.’

‘And the Netherlands. Let’s hope it lasts. They bombed the shit out of Rotterdam.’

I didn’t have the heart to join in so I went downstairs to see Mayer, the sergeant in charge of the evidence room.

‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he told me.

He made me wait a second while he went to soak a couple of rags in water from a glass flask. I was surprised he knew the old soldier’s trick. He was too young to have fought in the last war. A slim, fine-featured man in his early thirties from the Alsace, he had the fingers of a concert pianist and the mind of a terrier denied a bone. Not for the first time, I wished he was a detective working with me and Auban was languishing down here in the basement. He handed me one of the pieces of cloth. I was reluctant to use it straight away.

‘Any news from your family?’ I asked him.

Like everyone else in Strasbourg, his parents had been evacuated last September between the Germans invading Poland and us declaring war on them. They’d come to live with Mayer in Paris, but had fled the city