He had never had a more receptive audience, Joe thought as he sipped his coffee and accounted for his presence in her pin-neat parlour. He launched into a cheerful account of his meeting with the patient and told the story of Dorcas and the pink biscuit.
Once again the tears threatened to flow.
‘Albert loved those biscuits!’ she said. ‘He wasn’t allowed to have them from the shop, of course, but I used sometimes when he was little to sneak a broken one for him when Guy was looking the other way.’
‘Madame,’ said Joe tentatively, ‘I can’t help noticing that the patient whom you declare to be your son does not resemble you or your husband.’
‘He is not Guy’s son,’ she said. ‘It’s no secret. Albert is illegitimate.’
She cast a wary glance at Dorcas and Joe reassured her: ‘My niece is au fait with the details of the case and is older than she looks. Quite the woman of the world, in fact.’
She nodded and stumbled on. ‘You will have passed on the road in the neighbouring village an inn. The Croix d’Argent. A staging post between Reims and Paris. I was an orphan of the village and sent to work there on my fifteenth birthday. In 1889.’ She paused, choosing her words. ‘I knew nothing of the world . . .’
Joe sighed. He could guess the whole sorry tale.
‘I was six months pregnant before anyone – before I myself – realized what was happening. They threw me out into the street. I was taken up by Langlois. You will have noticed that he is an ugly man with the manners of a boar. He had had no success in finding a wife. He married me and I have been his slave ever since. He disliked Albert. He wanted sons of his own. Fate decided that I should produce daughter after daughter for him and after each girl his anger would increase. “What kind of a woman are you? You can produce a son for a stranger and only girls for your husband?” He was never kind to Albert. And poor Albert! If only he’d looked like me! But the boy was born the spitting image of his father.’
‘You know his father’s identity?’
‘No. I only know that he was like no man that I had ever seen before. A beautiful man. Tall, fair, blue-eyed like Albert and – a German.’
She grasped Joe’s arm. ‘Sir, I have never disclosed as much to Langlois.’
‘I understand. Be reassured, madame – your information is for my ears alone. It must have taken some courage to defy opposition and start on your identification?’
‘I could not have done it without the support of the schoolmaster,’ she said. ‘It was he who came to us last spring, waving a newspaper. Monsieur Barbier had taught my Albert. He liked him and took a special interest in him because he was a clever boy and he pitied him in his situation with his stepfather. He showed us the photograph and assured us that it was Albert. He never forgets any of his pupils, Commander. And I recognized my son, of course. M. Barbier is not impressed by my husband and, in the way of bullies, Langlois defers to a stronger man. He allowed me, grudgingly, to go to Reims with Barbier to see my son. It was the schoolmaster who wrote out my official claim form for me. He always knows what to say.’
‘Can you tell me what evidence you submitted apart from the visual identification?’
‘Photographs.’
She went to a sewing table and automatically looked about her, although they were unobserved, before taking from the bottom three creased photographs and a bundle of letters.
‘I showed these to the director.’
The first photograph was a formal one taken on the steps of the pre-war school building on a clear, sunny day. The children, in their grey school smocks, were excited and overawed by the camera. M. Barbier stood on the right, the proud shepherd of his flock. The flock was, with little variation, dark-haired and chubby. Albert, on the left, stood out from the crowd with his light build and fair hair. His ethereal features, framed by a neat white collar, tugged at Joe’s heart over the gap of a quarter of a century. He wondered if Dorcas, stickily breathing chocolate fumes over his shoulder, had seen it: the same unfocused expression of dislocation and sadness, of other-worldliness that they had seen in Thibaud’s face.
In the second photograph the Langlois children were lined up in height order in a studio, grinning at the camera over their right shoulders. Four dark girls with square faces and dark eyes. Adrift by a few inches at the back and gazing at the middle distance Albert hovered, an alien presence.
The third was also a posed photograph, taken in Reims. The grown Albert looked straight at the camera this time, alone, defiant, wearing with some dash the tight tunic, red jodhpurs, knee-high boots and saucily tilted casquette of an artilleryman.
‘He loved horses, you see. He was very good with them. M. Barbier managed to steer him into the artillery.’
Joe passed the photographs to Dorcas.
‘What a fine man,’ she said quietly. ‘You must be very proud of him, madame.’
‘Always,’ was the whispered reply. ‘Always.’
‘Can you tell us when you last saw your son?’
‘It was in April 1917. We’d returned after the 1914 invasion thinking it couldn’t happen again. Papa Joffre had sent them all packing, hadn’t he? But we were wrong. They came again and it was worse this time. Hardly a village survived the bombing and the burning. We were caught up in it all. And it was just days before that when Albert turned up suddenly on leave. He’d walked all the way from somewhere up by Laon . . .’ She hesitated, trying to remember.
‘The Chemin des Dames?’ Joe supplied. ‘Was he involved in that battle?’
‘That’s the one. Chemin des Dames. He was in the Fifth Army under General Nivelle. Albert told us he was on leave,’ she added uncertainly. ‘Langlois said it was all a lie. They wouldn’t have given leave to anyone at such a bad moment, he said. Albert must have deserted.
‘Albert was wearing his own civilian clothes, helping us to load our things on to the cart, when someone shouted, “The Uhlans are coming!”’ She shivered with remembered terror at the panic-raising call. ‘And the Boche flooded in. They shot the mayor who’d dared to confront them and rounded up fifty hostages. The usual behaviour. And when they retreated they set the houses on fire, marched the hostages out with them and fired cannon at the village until it was rubble. One of the hostages was my son. I never saw or heard from him again until I went to Reims last spring.’
Joe, who had been discreetly jotting down dates, closed his notebook. ‘I wonder . . . is there anything at all, madame, that you could add to the information you have already given to Inspector Bonnefoye? Any detail of a personal and perhaps physical nature that might distinguish Albert? A scar or a birthmark of some description? A mark of which a mother might be aware?’ He could think of no more discreet way of phrasing his question.
She looked embarrassed and awkward. She opened her mouth to speak and decided not to. Then, shrugging: ‘The usual childhood marks . . . scuffed knees . . . cuts and bruises from falling off horses and out of trees. That sort of thing. Would you like to see his letters?’
As Joe agreed to this sudden shift of focus Dorcas stood and asked politely if she might be excused. She’d like to go back into the shop to buy some of the delicious dark French chocolate to take home . . . better than anything they could get in England and made here in the village? They readily agreed to this tactful withdrawal from the next stage of the enquiry which promised to be rather tedious for a young girl.
Joe was intrigued by the small collection of letters written in a good copperplate hand on torn scraps of writing paper. One or two of the messages were almost obliterated by ominous brown stains. At the start jaunty and optimistic (and addressed solely to ‘ma chère maman’), the letters had become progressively sombre and hopeless. The most recent one was dated April 1917, just a week or two before his last appearance in the village. He spoke with despair of stalemate, with anger of the deaths of men in his company, the never-ending bombardment, the foul conditions in the trenches. He ended by saying he was just about to be called up the line to the front ranks again.