Trailing a light scent, she left him, but at the open door, she looked back. “Tell her good-bye for me, will you? I quite liked her, you know.”

Derrick nodded. “Au revoir, Celeste.” He stood gazing after her until the old retainer had closed the door behind her, a chapter closing in his life. Then he walked into the drawing room. It was Tuesday, June 13, 1944.

*  *  *

That same afternoon, in his office at the headquarters of the Prefecture of Police, Chief Detective Maurice Corbett rose from his desk to greet the woman ushered into his office and introduced as Madame Florence Bisset. He judged her age to be in the middle forties, but the working life of a charwoman and years of hunger and worry put her a decade older. Maurice’s heart twisted for her. He invited her to sit down. “How may I be of help, madame?”

He’d already been told by his assistant that she worked as a cleaning woman in the offices of SS headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch, Maurice’s reason for agreeing to see her. He couldn’t place her among the few members of the custodial crew he’d briefly glanced at in questioning the hall janitor last February, but then most women of her mold looked alike. Before she answered, her eyes darted fearfully about the room as if afraid the walls were listening. “You may speak freely, madame,” Maurice encouraged. “Only you and I are here.”

Nervously fingering the crucifix around her neck, the woman spoke in almost a whisper. “I did not know if I should have come…but my priest told me that to earn God’s forgiveness I must confess to you.”

Maurice felt a tickling along his spine. Madame Bisset knew something about the murder of Monsieur Beaumont Fournier. “What must you tell me?” he coaxed kindly.

In a shamed voice, Florence Bisset confessed. Saturday morning, October 31, 1942, she’d happened to see Colonel Derrick Albrecht’s aide leave his desk outside the colonel’s office to go down the hall to the men’s toilettes. Urged by a sudden impulse, spurred by hunger, she’d knocked softly on the colonel’s door and, hearing no answer, opened it to find the room empty. The cleaning help was not to enter SS offices unless their occupants were present. But each morning these rooms were provided fresh croissants for the officers to enjoy with their coffee, the colonel’s usually left uneaten and given to his charwoman to take home to her family at the end of the day. Florence Bisset had slipped in to take a few to feed her own starving family. She had just filled her apron pockets when she heard Colonel Albrecht outside his door conversing with his aide, who had returned to his desk. She’d bolted into a cleaning supply closet because there was no other place to hide, and there she was forced to remain until—until…