by Mark Hebden
‘I was thinking of something at Hauteville just north of Fontaine,’ Madame said.
‘That’s a very expensive area.’ Like a recalcitrant underslip, Pel’s alarm was beginning to show again.
She was quite unperturbed. ‘There are a few people about the city who can find me something. Businessmen I know.’
Pel’s heart shrivelled with jealousy at the thought of other men sharing Madame with him.
‘A garden, perhaps,’ she went on. ‘Fields, so we don’t feel too enclosed. An orchard. Two bathrooms. A big salon.’
Name of God, Pel thought in a panic, it was growing bigger by the minute! It was already the size of a château and the costs would bankrupt him.
She noticed his look and began to tease a little. ‘You’ll need a study, too, of course. Somewhere you can read all those documents you have to go through.’
Pel looked shocked. ‘I will?’
‘And I think if we’re to live at Hauteville I shall need transport into the city when you’re busy. We’ll need two cars.’
Holy Mother of God, Pel thought, what had he taken on?
Her next words made him sag with relief.
‘Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to provide all this. I have the house at Vitteaux that my aunt left me when she died. I thought we’d sell it and buy something on a lake. Perhaps in the Jura. Somewhere to go at weekends. So you can relax.’
Pel was all for having a house by a lake in the Jura, but he couldn’t see himself relaxing much. Relaxing didn’t come easily to Pel and he called in at the Hôtel de Police every evening to check up on things even when he wasn’t on duty, just in case the place fell down, or somebody – someone who wasn’t a Burgundian and unfortunately there were many such who’d been allowed to sneak across the border into the province – wasn’t paying proper attention to his job.
He was just basking in pleasant thoughts of a secure old age when he saw Darcy appear in the hotel lounge with a girl. Inspector Daniel Darcy was his second-in-command, a handsome young man with a ready smile he liked to use a lot so that his teeth showed to good advantage. Like his girls, Darcy’s teeth were too perfect, too numerous and almost too good to be true.
‘Hello, Patron,’ he said. ‘Celebrating your promotion?’
Pel mumbled something, never very willing to share Madame Faivre-Perret with anyone else, especially Darcy, who had too much of a way with women – and not just young women either.
‘It ought to be champagne,’ Darcy said and turned to click his fingers at the waiter. No uncertain gesture like Pel’s, but a peremptory summons which the waiter was quick to acknowledge.
‘Champagne,’ Darcy ordered and, without so much as a by-your-leave, with nothing more than the briefest of introductions, he and his girl friend sat down. Despite Pel’s sulky looks, Madame seemed quite happy to make it a party and in no time, to Pel’s envious fury, she was laughing at some joke Darcy was telling her so that Pel began to feel that if he didn’t interrupt soon Darcy would be usurping his place. While Pel had spent too little of his life in other people’s beds, Darcy had probably spent too much and was just a little too experienced.
He cleared his throat and his voice came out almost too loud. ‘Just come from the office?’
Darcy turned his head, surprised at the interruption. ‘Yes, Patron.’
‘Anything happening?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘You mean there is something happening.’
‘Nothing to worry us.’ Darcy’s attitude to police work was different from Pel’s; he was inclined to regard it only as a necessary evil best ignored until it arrived in his lap. ‘Just a bit of fuss from the police at Concarneau.’
‘Concarneau? In Brittany? What have we to do with Concarneau?’
‘They fished a girl out of the sea at Beg Meil and they think she came from round here. Suicide, they thought. It’s nothing of importance. Nothing to cause us any work.’
Though Darcy didn’t know it, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
The following morning when Pel arrived in his office, Darcy appeared with a file in his hand. Philippe Duche’s escaped,’ he said.
‘Duche?’
‘We pulled him in for that job at Zamenhofs’. Him and his mob. His mother died and he was let out for the funeral and some silly con took his eye off him for a couple of seconds so that he nipped through a window. Uniformed Branch’s got a full-scale search on for him.’
‘They ought to find him.’
‘They ought to, but they might not. He knows the city.’
‘Are we involved?’
‘You are, Patron. He’s sworn to get you.’ Darcy opened the file and glanced inside. ‘The prison governor’s let us know. While he was safely under lock and key it didn’t seem to matter. Now he’s out, it does.’
Pel shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ll worry about that when it happens. More than likely, he’ll bolt south, join one of the Marseilles gangs, and live in luxury for the rest of his life on the proceeds, with a Mercedes, a villa at St. Trop’ and a mistress of unsurpassing beauty. I’m not worried and we have things to do. We need to organise the new set-up.’
He pulled a list forward. ‘Yourself,’ he said, reading off names as Darcy drew up a chair, ‘Nosjean, De Troquereau, Lagé, Misset. The old team. Together with Aimedieu, Brochard and Debray from Goriot’s team, and Lacocq and Morell from Uniformed Branch, with Claudie Darel to look after the feminine angle and Cadet Martin to take care of the office.’
‘I thought they wanted two teams, Patron.’
‘I don’t think much of this Grand Quartier Général stuff,’ Pel said cheerfully. ‘There will be one team, with me at the head of it, you as deputy, and Nosjean as senior sergeant. However, for the benefit of the authorities we’ll have two lists and two organisations, all on paper and very clearly defined so we’ll know exactly how to ignore it.’
Darcy grinned and Pel smiled back at him. ‘Better have Nosjean in and let him know.’
Nosjean blushed as they informed him what was to happen. He was still young but he had ideas and, like Darcy, was never behind the door when it came to work. At the moment he was particularly preoccupied with his job because, to his astonishment and disgust, his girl friend had unexpectedly married a man who worked in the tax office and he was still working twice as hard as normal to avoid rushing off to join the Foreign Legion.
‘Right, mon brave,’ Pel said briskly as he rose. ‘You can run things from tomorrow. There’s another break-in at the supermarket at Talant. That place has intruders like most people have mice. A wounding at Noray, that death at Marvillers – it’s probably suicide but we have to make sure – the assault at Germaine, those ducks missing from Boyer’s farm at Cholley – there’s a history of a feud with a farmer next door called Jeanneny and Boyer’s a friend of the Chief’s so you’d better get on with it – that theft of petrol from the garage at Loublanc and these people who’re terrorising the Montchapet district.’
After that, Nosjean thought sarcastically, you can go home and have breakfast before coming in to pick up the list for the rest of the day.
‘What about Inspector Darcy?’ he asked.
Pel looked up. He and Darcy had arranged to have lunch together to celebrate Pel’s promotion.
‘He has a lot on,’ he said, a trifle stiffly. ‘This body they found at Beg Meil.’
Nosjean had heard of the dead girl at Beg Meil because requests for information had already arrived in the Hôtel de Police. It didn’t sound the sort of thing, he thought bitterly, that could keep Darcy very heavily involved for long.
As it happened, Nosjean was wrong, too.
Two
When Pel and Darcy returned from their lunch, both of them feeling very mellow, Régis Martin, the cadet who looked after the mail, answered the telephone and brought in the bottles of beer from the Bar Transvaal across the road when the weather was hot, put his head round the door. ‘The Chief wants you, Patron,’ he said
.
The Chief was reading reports with his feet on the desk and he was surprised when Pel refused the brandy he offered. It wasn’t a habit of Pel’s to refuse drinks.
‘Been celebrating your promotion?’ he asked.
Pel frowned. He’d been hoping it didn’t show. ‘Lunch with Darcy,’ he said. ‘To get things sorted out.’
‘Right.’ The Chief tossed a file across. ‘Concarneau wants someone to go over there. This body they took out of the sea at Beg Meil.’
‘I thought it was a suicide. Some kid on drugs.’
‘They’re having second thoughts. I’d like you to go.’ The Chief gestured. ‘Good will for one thing. This co-operation nonsense they’re so keen on in Paris. And I want you to represent us at the funeral of Commissaire Habec at Rennes. He was a big man in his day. Somebody’s got to go, and as I’ve got that enquiry at Lyons it has to be you. You can go on to Concarneau the following day. I’ve telephoned the Chief there. He’s an old friend of mine and he’ll probably meet you himself.’ He gave Pel a beaming smile that was supposed to reduce all his objections to nothing. It didn’t, of course.
‘Concarneau’s about as far as you can get from here without falling in the sea,’ Pel said bitterly. Concarneau was not only outside Burgundy – and to Pel anything beyond the frontiers of his native province was a wilderness – it was almost outside France, beyond which, to Pel, a Frenchman if ever there was one, there was only darkness. Besides, he thought fretfully, he’d been hoping to spend the evening with Madame discussing once more their plans for the future. He hadn’t realised just how well off she was and making plans that involved spending a lot of money appealed to him.
Madame was disappointed that she wouldn’t be seeing him for a day or two, but she was beginning to get used to the demands of his job.
‘I’ll have to get someone responsible to run the business for me,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll be able to come with you. Make it a holiday.’
Pel didn’t fancy her chances. Police enquiries didn’t normally end up as holidays. They were invariably boring and long-drawn-out and he couldn’t really imagine her sitting alone in strange resting places while he did his round of police stations.
He spent the night at Rennes in an uncomfortable hotel near the station. Feeling it was necessary to hoard every penny now that they had finally decided on marriage, he looked for somewhere cheap and rather overdid it. The bed was hard and the food tasted as if it had been prepared by Madame Routy, and he bolted for the station the following morning as if the hounds of hell were after him. And when he stepped off the train at his destination, it wasn’t the Chief who met him, but a detective inspector called Le Bihan. He was enormously fat, so fat that no matter where Pel stood he seemed to be there, too. However, he had his perspectives right.
‘Lunch first,’ he said. ‘I’ve fixed you a hotel. When you’ve cleaned up we’ll eat.’
There were enough apéritifs to make Pel want to fall asleep with his head in the hors d’oeuvre and the meal was an enormous repast at a splendid restaurant where Le Bihan seemed to be a favourite customer.
‘My cousin runs it,’ he explained.
He was smiling as he took Pel back to his office where he sat him down in a chair and began to produce photographs. They didn’t reveal the dead woman but what she’d become, sad and bedraggled despite the attempts to clean her up.
‘When was she found?’ Pel asked.
‘Twenty-third of the month. She’s a mess, isn’t she? The doctor decided she’d been in the sea about a week. That means she went in about the 16th. Want to see her?’
Pal wondered what he was getting at. ‘Do I need to?’
‘Thought you might like to.’
‘Why might I like to?’
Le Bihan ignored the question. ‘She was found near the rocks. She could have gone in anywhere to the west because the tide sets along the coast from that direction. We put her down as being in her late twenties. No indication of what she was, but she’s not much muscled so if she worked at all she did a sedentary job. Clerk. Typist. Something like that. Hair thick and mousy-blonde. Eyes blue. Probably had a good figure and wasn’t bad-looking. Wearing the usual clothing.’ Le Bihan pushed over a list. ‘It’s all there. She’d lost her shoes but otherwise she was fully dressed, even including a light plastic raincoat. We’ve checked everything for laundry marks but there’s nothing. The stuff was all inexpensive so she probably did her own washing. Identifying marks: A scar along her eyebrow. Probably done as a child. The usual vaccination marks. We’ve fingerprinted her but that’s no help unless she’s got a record and she doesn’t seem to have; we’ve also checked her teeth and put out a request for dentists to look at their records. Unfortunately, since it takes time, they don’t always bother. After all, who cares? If she’s not your wife or your sister or your child, does it matter?’
‘You’re a philosopher.’
‘I’m a cop,’ Le Bihan said. ‘I’d like to identify her but the photographs we took would be no good. She was in the water too long. However, there are one or two things that might help.’ He pushed forward a photograph which had been taken of the inside of the girl’s elbow. Despite a certain amount of decomposition, marks clearly showed on the soft flesh of the joint. ‘She’d been on drugs, even if she wasn’t on them when she died. Got anybody like that missing in your area?’
Pel was still wondering why so much importance was being attached to the case, why, in fact, he’d been dragged all the way across France. Suicides didn’t normally merit such interest.
‘Should I have?’ he asked.
‘Well, she comes from your area.’ Le Bihan opened a brown envelope and spread its contents on the table. ‘Labels show that for the most part she bought her clothes in Paris supermarkets. No identification papers or driving licence but a twenty-franc note and six centimes in her pocket. Handkerchief. Make-up compact.’ The articles slid along the table one after the other. ‘Lipstick. Comb. Eyeliner. Handkerchief. Piece of paper bearing the words, “8 p.m. Bar Giorgiou.” Got a Bar Giorgiou in your area?’
‘My area’s roughly the size of Brittany,’ Pel pointed out coldly.
‘Looks as if she made an appointment,’ Le Bihan went on. ‘And it led to her death.’
‘Unless she’d arranged to meet her mother to go shopping.’
Le Bihan looked up sharply. He wasn’t used to Pel’s sense of humour. ‘Finally,’ he said. ‘This.’
‘This’ was a photograph of a label.
‘Found on her dress,’ Le Bihan said. ‘A dress that was the exception to all her other garments in that it was expensive.’ His finger rested on the photograph and Pel caught the name. ‘Mirabelle, Dijon.’
‘Your area,’ Le Bihan said. ‘We telephoned them, of course, and I gather this is a line they’ve been carrying only this year, so it was bought fairly recently. They looked up their records of cheques but there was nothing to indicate who our little friend was, so we have to assume the dress was paid for in cash. And that raises another question: what would a woman her age be doing with a handbag full of cash to pay for a dress like this when she had only twenty francs on her when we pulled her from the sea? It doesn’t make sense. And why was she wearing an expensive dress but cheap underwear and a cheap plastic raincoat? Is she a skivvy who helped herself to one of her employer’s garments? Was she given the dress? If so, by whom? Is she some shop assistant who helped herself from the shelves and went on a spree? Is she a millionaire’s daughter who was trying to pass incognito – some wealthy young philanthropist who wanted to see how the other half lived? Or is she just another foreign spy in Brittany to watch the naval base at St. Nazaire?’
‘You should try writing novels,’ Pel said dryly.
Le Bihan smiled. ‘I’ve often thought it might be a good job,’ he admitted. ‘Just sitting with your feet on the desk with a notepad and a ball-point.’
‘I imagine there’s more to it than that.’
‘I guess so.’ Le B
ihan grinned.
‘And one label on a dress doesn’t mean she comes from our area.’
‘I suspect she does, all the same. Because of this.’ Le Bihan produced a small square of pulpy lavender paper, on which were printed the words ‘Cavernes de Coron, 3 fr. 50.’
‘It’s an entrance ticket,’ he said. ‘To a set of caves. I looked them up. They admit the public. They’re at Drax which again is in your area.’
‘I’ve heard of them,’ Pel agreed.
‘Discovered by lead miners eighty years ago. On a farm owned by a type called Coron. It came from her pocket so she’d obviously been there. The ticket number, according to Coron, indicates it was Ascension Day, when they were open for the holiday. Why?’
Pel was unmoved. ‘You tell me,’ he said.
Le Bihan pulled from his pocket a pipe that looked as if it had been carved from a tree trunk, knotty, shapeless and ugly, and began to stuff it with tobacco. Then, carefully, as if he regarded it as almost too delicate for his large hands, he produced a gold chain with, in its centre, a small chased gold heart. It was incredibly fine and seemed to call for all the delicacy of touch Le Bihan was showing. He turned the heart decoration over and handed Pel a magnifying glass. In the centre of the back was a single minute word, ‘Lucie.’
‘Got any shapely young females in your area called “Lucie” who can afford to pay cash down for expensive dresses at Mirabelle’s?’ he asked. ‘Though it’s our case, it looks as if the lady belongs to you.’
Pel was still puzzled. ‘Do you usually go to all this trouble for a suicide?’ he asked.
‘Ah!’ Le Bihan smiled. ‘That’s the point, you see. At first I decided she’d been drowned. Walked into the sea. Depression. Frustration. That sort of thing. Perhaps unemployed. Boy friend trouble. Flung out of home. Nowhere to go.’
‘You should try writing novels,’ Pel said. ‘You could be good at it.’
