Pel & The Pirates (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  Table of Contents

  Copyright & Information

  About the Author

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Note on 'Chief Inspector Pel' Series

  Order of 'Pel' Series Titles

  Synopses of 'Pel' Series Titles

  Copyright & Information

  Pel & The Pirates

  First published in 1984

  Copyright: John Harris; House of Stratus 1984-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Mark Hebden (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842328980 9781842328989 Print

  075512488X 9780755124886 Pdf

  0755125088 9780755125081 Mobi/Kindle

  0755125282 9780755125289 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other 'part time' careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the 'Chief Inspector' Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  One

  Death, Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel thought gloomily, surely couldn’t be far away. Rigor mortis, he felt certain, was already coursing through his veins. Everything seemed to be dripping wet and he expected to see water rushing in on him at any moment in a vast green flood. In his time he had been close to death on many occasions. He’d been shot at, knocked down, attacked with a variety of blunt or sharp instruments but had somehow managed always to survive. This time he had grave doubts about the outcome, and drowning was a rotten way to go – especially for a newly-promoted detective chief inspector of the Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciare on the first day of his honeymoon.

  ‘How do you feel now, Pel?’ The question, quiet and steady from Pel’s new wife, Geneviève, until recently the Widow Faivre-Perret, made him lift his eyes.

  ‘When do we arrive?’ he managed.

  ‘In about another hour?’

  Pel’s heart sank. Because it had been felt he needed to get as far from police work as possible where he couldn’t be called back in an emergency, they had settled for their holiday on the Isle of St Yves, just the other side of the Ile Boniface, off the south coast of France. Pel had been a little dubious about islands when the idea had been first mooted – he was dubious about anywhere that wasn’t within the borders of his beloved Burgundy – and because there was no air link and because in any case Pel was terrified at the thought of flying – they had gone from Nice by boat. Like some wines, Pel didn’t travel well and he was now wishing they’d put him in a cannon and fired him across the intervening water in the manner of those acts you saw in circuses. Seafaring vessels, he felt, would be all right so long as they had firm sturdy legs solidly fixed in concrete to the sea bottom.

  Famed for its blueness and its calmness, the Mediterranean had surprised him with its greyness and ferocity. He had considered he was doing rather well as they set off. For the first hour there had been so sign of nausea and he had felt that, despite the ominous reports, he was not going to embarrass the new Madame Pel by being seasick. No sailor, however, he hadn’t allowed for the fact that during the first hour the ferry had been protected from the weather by the Ile Boniface, and as soon as they had rounded the corner and turned broadside on to the wind the roll of the boat had made him realise at once what a child he was in matters of seafaring. Coming from Burgundy, which was about as far as you could get from the sea in Metropolitan France, even a rowing boat was normally almost too much for him. This was a monstrous agony, and to make it worse Madame, who had grown up on the coast near La Rochelle, was coping with the roll of the boat with all the aplomb of a pirate.

  Pel felt cheated. The previous day, his wedding eve, had been magnificent, windless and with brilliant sunshine, even a cloudless sky so that the waning moon had made the night as light as day. His mind full of romantic thoughts brought on by the brilliance, he had stood in the pocket-handkerchief garden of the house he owned in the Rue Martin-de-Noinville and looked at it for the last time before it went for rent to a lecturer at the university, and thought how his life had changed.

  When they returned he would have left the cramped quarters in the Rue Martin-de-Noinville for the new house Madame had acquired at Fontaine, large, furnished with taste, and expensive enough to give Pel, who had never been known as a big spender, nightmares of the first order in case he went bankrupt. Moreover – and this was a triumph indeed – he had finally shuffled off Madame Routy, his housekeeper, who, he considered, was the only bad cook in a country which quite rightly boasted of its culinary expertise.

  It seemed to auger well for his future and he had looked forward to a honeymoon in the south, with flowers, blue sky, a millpond sea and a great deal of graceful drinking to quench the thirst that would inevitably come from too much sunshine. But then, on the day of his wedding, the one day when he wished to appear to be gallant, a knight in shining armour, the cursed weather had changed. On the short walk from the Mairie to the church, it had blown his hair – what there was of it – all over his face, and the flight down to Marseilles had been so bumpy it had felt as if their aircraft had been colliding with hard and heavy objects in the sky. Finally, with typical southern treachery – Pel attributed treachery to any part of France that wasn’t inside the borders of Burgundy – it had changed completely. The area between Nice and the
island of St Yves, caught in the air currents caused by the mountains behind and the curve of the bay, was as treacherous as the climate round Greece and the appalling weather had inflicted on him this humiliating performance by lashing itself to gale force.

  Because the Isle of St Yves didn’t warrant anything bigger, the ferry was only small and, in addition to the few early holiday-makers and the residents of the island who had been on shopping trips to the mainland, the decks were crowded with sacks of potatoes, cartons of produce, engine parts for the ancient machinery that clearly still operated on the island, a crate of chickens, a couple of mournfully-bleating goats, which were probably also suffering from seasickness, and a very old secondhand Citroën Diane.

  Because of the variety and amount of the cargo it was impossible to go on deck for a reviving breath of fresh air and everybody on board – including the crew who were sheltering from the weather – was crammed into the tiny saloon where the bar, because of the rolling of the boat, could offer little else but brandy, beer and coffee.

  To take his mind off the motion, Pel had tried reading a detective story he had bought from a stand near the ferry jetty, but he didn’t like mysteries – they made him feel he knew nothing at all about detection and was totally inadequate compared with the iron-jawed sleuths who peopled them – so he was now trying grimly to read the newspaper. There had been a spectacular shooting in a Nice bar the week before on the 13th of the month – an unlucky date for someone, obviously – and the newspaper was full of it. Six men standing at the counter had been mown down with a tommy gun. It was clearly a gang crime because Marseilles wasn’t far away and everybody knew the reputation of Marseilles. It stuck out a mile also that people were keeping their mouths shut tight because no weapons had been found and nobody knew who the killers were, despite the fact that they hadn’t been wearing masks and the job had been done in daylight. He could imagine a few pursed lips at police headquarters.

  The press were suggesting they knew, of course. They never did, but they always like to make a lot of song and dance about the private enquiries they were conducting, as if the police didn’t know what day it was and needed their help. Always uninhibited about cases which had not yet appeared before the magistrates, they enjoyed pointing the finger.

  Since it was obviously a gang murder, they were being careful, however, not to point a finger at any of the gangs because that was the surest way there was to a grave in Marseilles harbour wearing a concrete overcoat.

  There was also plenty of coverage on an enquiry being held in Paris at that moment into the activities of the Minister for the Bureau of Environmental Surveys. Government funds set aside for the reservation of land and the minerals therein seemed to have been somehow mislaid and the Minister, a junior member of the government, was having to face questions. He seemed bewildered by the whole business, especially since his chief accuser was his deputy, a man called Jean-Jacques Hardy, a handsome politician of some note with a dashing life-style who was regularly seen with attractive women in large cars.

  Pel was all for politicians being occasionally put on the hook. Considering it was the only profession in the world where a man couldn’t under normal circumstances be sent to jail for losing the firm’s money, its good faith or its reputation abroad, he considered they got away lightly, and he was all for seeing one or two put in the dock, if only to encourage the others to behave themselves. This time, however, he wondered if they’d got the wrong man. It was a well-known fact among policemen that the louder a man shouted his innocence the more likely he was to be guilty. The man who swore his innocence on his mother’s grave always needed looking into, while the man who swore on the head of his unborn child should be charged within the hour. And while the Minister for Environmental Surveys could produce nothing more than a feeble bleat about his bewilderment, Jean-Jacques Hardy was loudly claiming to have no knowledge whatsoever of what had been going on.

  Instinctively, Pel didn’t like Jean-Jacques Hardy. For a start, he was too good-looking, and that was always a black mark with Pel, who wasn’t, and in addition he represented a district in the Vendée, which was also enough in itself to darken him in Pel’s eyes. As a young sergeant he had once been obliged to spend a whole month in the north-west of the Vendée, and its flat marshy land, its winding roads, its dykes, its empty horizons and its rows of stark telegraph poles had put him off it for ever. No wonder, he had thought at the time, that when France had produced a revolution against the Bourbons in 1789 the people of the Vendée had produced a counter-revolution against it. They were the thoughts of a bigot, he knew, but he often felt the world had room for a few more bigots.

  The vessel lurched heavily, lifting slowly and ominously before dropping into the trough between two waves like a high-speed lift going down the shaft of a skyscraper. It left Pel’s stomach suspended somewhere in the region of his throat so that he lowered the paper hurriedly. Surely, he thought miserably, he wasn’t going to disgrace himself on the first day of his married life by being sick?

  ‘How do you feel, Pel?’

  Since becoming engaged, Madame had suddenly taken to addressing him by his surname, not through any lack of affection but because, she claimed, she found it a little awesome being part of the life of someone with the sort of reputation her new husband bore. There was another reason, too, which Pel suspected was probably more applicable. Simply that she found his Christian names just too much to swallow. Evariste, Clovis and Désiré were all of them all very well on their own but together they were just too much. Pel’s mother had had ambitions for her son – nothing much, perhaps the presidency of the Republic and a wife who was a famous film star – and had decided he should have the names to go with them. Unfortunately, she had been just too ambitious and Pel had settled for being a cop, anyway.

  Not daring to speak, he cranked his head round and pulled a face.

  ‘Try closing your eyes,’ Madame suggested. ‘Don’t look through the portholes. Just think of pleasant things.’

  Pel thought about being married, which promised to be the pleasantest thing that had ever happened in what he considered, in his pessimistic, gloom-orientated manner, to be a long life full of woes. With Inspector Darcy, his second-in-command as best man, the ceremony had taken place that morning at the Mairie of Fontaine, and had been blessed at the Church of St Michel nearby. A noisy reception had followed with jokes by the Chief, then the newly-wedded couple had driven to the airport in a procession of cars decorated with ribbons and flowers, all playing hell with the traffic as they pumped at their horns – Frenchmen always liked to let people know they’d been to a wedding. At Nice, they had taken a taxi to the port and not without difficulty because it was small and unimportant, had found the ferry to the Ile de St Yves.

  By this time, Pel was beginning to regret the whole thing and was wishing he had stayed safely in his house in the Rue Martin-de-Noinville. Although no bigger than a dog’s kennel, desperately needing paint and looking inside as if it had been papered with wrapping paper, at least it didn’t go up and down. Perhaps, he felt gloomily, he had been too precipitate in stepping outside his league to get married and it was God’s judgment on him.

  ‘How do you feel now?’ Madame Pel asked, laying a soft hand on his.

  ‘A little better,’ he said, not really believing it. A flood of embarrassment and shame swept over him. ‘I can’t imagine what you see in a husband who gets seasick on a sea like a millpond.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it like a mill pond,’ Madame reassured him. ‘It looks like a typhoon to me, though I don’t suppose it is, and I see a great deal more in you than you ever see in yourself.’

  It was pleasant, Pel reflected, to be informed that there were more attractive facets to your character than you’d thought – because for the life of him, over the years as he’d looked in his mirror as he shaved, he’d never been able to see what people saw in him: he personally wouldn’t have given him house room.

  ‘After all,’ she wen
t on – and he couldn’t help wondering how much she was just trying to make him feel better – ‘you’re successful. You’re a chief inspector at an age when most people haven’t even got to inspector. You’re brave. I know that because of the time you risked your life to save Sergeant Misset.’

  It might have been better if he hadn’t, Pel thought to himself. Lazy, shifty and unreliable, Misset was no adornment to Pel’s squad.

  ‘You’re also honest and very much kinder than you realise.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Claudie Darel told me of your many kindnesses’ – Claudie Darel, who was the only female member of his team, must like him a lot better than he realised ‘–and you’re fair. You don’t claim credit for yourself when it’s your team who’ve done the work.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘And a lot more. As did Darcy and Nosjean and De Troquereau. Even the Chief and Judge Polverari.’

  Tiens, Pel thought, the wonder of it! All his life he had thought what a sour-faced grouch he was and here were people finding him quite bearable. He was going to have a hell of a job living up to it.

  ‘And that,’ Madame went on firmly, ‘is only part of it. I have my own special reasons, of course. I see things in you that other people don’t.

  Such as being seasick, Pel decided as the boat gave another lurch. Such as being tight with his money. Such as being nervous of Madame Routy. And she still hadn’t seen him first thing in the morning with a day’s growth of beard, his hair on end, and dark blue hollows under his eyes that made him look like a giant panda.

  She was studying the sea beyond the portholes now. ‘We’ve rounded the corner,’ she announced. ‘We’re in the shelter of St Yves. It’s calmer now.’

  Pel found it hard to believe.

  ‘Any moment we’ll be there.’