Pel Under Pressure (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  ‘What did I say?’ the little man was bleating. ‘What did I say?’

  Pel stood outside to regain his temper then walked round the corner to the Relais St Armand. The Relais St Armand had once been Pel’s favourite restaurant. It was inexpensive, kept a chablis that burned the skin off your tongue and served the sort of andouillettes that could only have been made by someone able to work miracles. Pel was convinced that the Relais St Armand had a magician in the kitchen.

  He stared at the door. He had not dared go in for months in case he found himself facing Madame Faivre-Perret. Madame Faivre-Perret was a favourite of Pel’s, like the man who made the andouillettes. She ran Nanette’s, a hairdressing salon in the Rue de la Liberté and ever since he’d solicited her help over one of his cases, he’d had a heavy crush on her that reduced him to a state of nerves, doubt and self-accusation.

  Sadly he turned away and headed for the station buffet where he ate his meal in crushed silence. There were times when he felt a desperate need to accomplish something before his buttocks grew lean and stringy. He knew what, too, though he hesitated to let it come to the forefront of his mind and always forced it back into the dark recesses where it didn’t make him feel so ashamed. While he was there, a man came in selling newspapers. Pel bought one to find out what they’d decided he’d decided about the man in the boot of the Renault.

  They’d improved on the stories he’d read earlier. By this time they’d discovered a woman in Lyons. He couldn’t imagine how, because the dead man hadn’t yet been identified, and he put it down to the journalistic passion for femmes fatales. Everything these days had to have sex in it. Even the cartoons.

  There was a photograph alongside the headline of a girl in the arms of a man. She appeared to be wearing no clothes and at first glance seemed to be part of the story of the dead man in the Rue du Chapeau Rouge. At second glance, however, it became obvious she belonged in the trivial affairs of a pop star just below. It was a clever trick and, for people who weren’t very quick on the up-take, helped to establish the idea of a crime passionelle.

  Pel frowned. The man in the car in the Rue du Chapeau Rouge, he felt, had hardly been a sex symbol – even when he was alive. Just short, balding and forty – like Pel – hardly the type to conduct deathless love affairs.

  Finishing his coffee, he headed back to the Hôtel de Police. Darcy was still in the office, standing by the open window. He had it flat on its central hinges so that the maximum amount of air came in. With evening, the city had cooled and the air that swept into the room seemed to come from the hills to the north.

  ‘Nothing turned up?’

  ‘No, Patron. Expecting something?’

  ‘An identification, perhaps. What do you make of him?’

  Darcy shrugged. ‘Whatever he was,’ he said, ‘he was a small-timer. Cheap suit. Cheap socks. Cheap shoes. He was probably just a third-rate chiseller.’

  ‘It has the look of a gang killing,’ Pel said slowly.

  Darcy wasn’t so sure. ‘He doesn’t look much like a gangster, Patron, in spite of what Doc. Minet says. Not smart enough. They’re flashy dressers on the whole.’

  ‘Perhaps he deliberately remained unsmart,’ Pel said. ‘Keeping a low profile.’

  Darcy shrugged again. ‘This one’s profile was so low his nostrils must have been dragging along the pavement.’

  ‘Has Leguyader come up with anything yet?’

  ‘He’s been trying to get you.’

  Sitting at his desk, Pel picked up the telephone. Leguyader was his usual sarcastic self.

  ‘I thought you’d be ringing just when I’d decided to eat,’ he said.

  Pel ignored the sarcasm. ‘Have you finished?’

  ‘Yes. I think he was a Parisian. The suit was labelled “Tati”, and that’s a cheap place. I looked it up. And the dirt on it is Paris dirt. We have it all listed. He smoked – Gauloises. He also wore false teeth and I expect we shall be able to get them identified before long. We have fingerprints, too. Was he involved with drugs?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’d be a good reason to shoot him.’

  Pel sniffed. ‘So would sleeping with another man’s wife. There must be a better reason than that.’

  ‘He had benzedrine tablets in his pocket.’

  ‘A lot?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Perhaps he was depressed and needed pepping up from time to time.’ Pel knew what he was talking about. He did, too, only he merely smoked too many cigarettes.

  Leguyader was unimpressed. ‘And perhaps,’ he said, ‘he carried them about to sell to students. This is a university city, and students go in for that sort of thing. Isn’t young Nosjean worrying about some heroin addict who was trussed up like a piece of veal? Perhaps they’re connected.’

  Perhaps they were, Pel thought. It was an idea. ‘What about the gun?’

  ‘7.65 mm calibre. Probably a Belgian Browning M1900 FN.’

  ‘And the button? Off a workman’s jacket, I suppose, as usual?’

  Leguyader paused. ‘Not this time, mon brave,’ he said. ‘It’s bone.’

  ‘Bone? I thought it was leather.’

  ‘So did I. But it was bone covered with mud. It’s a centimetre and a half across, brown, and with a flower motif carved out of it. It had some green thread through it attached to a fraction of green material. It doesn’t come off the corpse. All his buttons were there.’

  ‘So where did it come from?’

  ‘A garage mechanic who did a service on the car? A hotel porter? But not a French hotel porter. When you get it back you’ll see the flower’s an edelweiss and the green’s what’s known as jaeger green – hunting green. It’s a colour that’s common to one or two countries to the east of France.’

  ‘German?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Leguyader was carefully non-committal. ‘Or Swiss. The mud on it’s similar to that found round Pontarlier, and Pontarlier, as you know, is in the Jura and is the entrance to Switzerland. Some of the dirt on our friend’s shoes comes from Paris, some from here, and some from the Jura. You’re probably looking for a Swiss mechanic with French connections.’

  Pel put the telephone down, then rang Polverari’s number. The judge always liked to know what was going on. He had just finished his meal and was in an expansive mood.

  ‘It’s always a button off somebody’s clothing,’ he said. ‘But bone buttons with flower motifs sewn to Jaeger green cloth aren’t all that common in France.’

  Pel wondered if he could manage a few days in Switzerland at the expense of the Police Department. Polverari chuckled and thought not. Pel sighed. A few days in a Swiss hotel would have done him the world of good.

  As he put the telephone down, Darcy came in from the sergeants’ room. He was carrying his jacket. ‘Our friend in the car?’ he asked.

  Pel looked up. ‘Leguyader wondered if he was dealing in drugs. There were benzedrine tablets in his pocket.’

  ‘Perhaps he took them to stay awake. People do.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘All sorts. Long-distance lorry drivers, for instance. Pop stars.’ Darcy grinned. ‘Cops.’

  ‘Leguyader suggested he was selling them to students.’ As Pel fished in his pocket for a cigarette, Darcy pushed a packet at him. Pel took one gloomily, convinced it was the last nail in his coffin and that he’d never reach home alive.

  ‘It’s quite a thought,’ he said. ‘We’ll go into it.’

  Darcy glanced at his watch. It was nine o’clock and there was a girl in a flat in the Rue d’Ahuy waiting for him to put in an appearance. He looked at Pel. The poor old sod looked lonely, he thought. Then he pushed his sympathy aside hurriedly before Pel suggested they went to the Bar Transvaal across the road for a beer.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Yes.’ Pel, who had been on the point of suggesting a beer, had to agree. ‘Tomorrow.’

  As Darcy vanished, he sighed and went down the stairs to his car. It ought to be a
n exciting evening with Madame Routy, he decided.

  Four

  The sound of the telephone in the top apartment of the Maison Robiquet in the Rue Réauot just north of the Seine, in the St Denis district of Paris, jarred the silence with the urgency of an explosion.

  The Maison Robiquet had been built long before Haussman had opened up the boulevards in the middle of the previous century and should have been pulled down long since. But somehow it had always escaped the depredations of the planners, and the sudden shriek of the bell, hurling itself like a misdirected rocket down the spiral staircase, stirred up all the ancient spectres of all its past occupants and brought the building to a state of quivering awareness.

  A disturbed baby began to wail and the woman in the bed in the top apartment fought herself free of the man who was clinging to her, and reached for the telephone.

  ‘That you, Ernestine?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Ernestine?’

  The man tried to push the telephone back on to its cradle but the woman managed to fight him off.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is Ernestine. Who’s that? Henriette?’

  ‘Of course it is. Who’ve you got there?’

  The woman in the bed managed with her spare hand to push away the man’s arm. ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own.’

  ‘What are you doing then? Polishing the floor? You’re breathing heavily.’

  ‘Dieu!’ The woman shifted in the bed. ‘What have you rung up for? To discuss what I do with myself in the middle of the night?’

  There was a chuckle down the wire. ‘I know what you do with yourself, ma vieille. I rang up because there’s something in France Soir that might interest you.’

  ‘I’m a bit busy at the moment–’

  ‘I expect you are. Who is it? That big hunk of man I saw you with in the Café Antique last weekend? He’ll probably be interested, too. I would, under the same circumstances.’ The voice on the telephone was excited but full of good humour. ‘It’s on the back page. Last column. Half way down. I nearly missed it. I think you’d be wise to have a look at it.’

  The telephone clicked and, staring at it, startled and irritated, the woman in the bed put it back on its cradle. Heaving over, she pushed at the man alongside her.

  ‘For the love of God,’ she snapped. ‘Keep your hands to yourself. There’s something in the paper.’

  His head jerked up. ‘We’re going to read the sports page? Now?’

  ‘It’s not the sports page.’

  ‘Well, the political news? It’s always the same: the Communists are gaining ground. Somebody’s thrown a bomb. The President’s made a statement. They none of them affect us.’

  ‘Listen, that was Henriette. She says there’s something I ought to see.’

  ‘It’ll keep.’

  She fought herself free and reached from the bed to where the newspaper lay on the floor alongside her, with an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a wine bottle and two dirty glasses. The man heaved over after her, so that the blankets leapt and turned as if a wounded whale were in there trying to get out.

  ‘In the name of God, woman!–’

  ‘Shut up! Here it is. “Fortyish, sturdy, plump. Blue eyes. Balding. Dark hair. A mole on his right cheek, with a scar just below running from the cheekbone to the mouth. Appendicitis scar on torso.” Burgundy?’ Leaning on her elbow, the woman lowered the paper and stared ahead of her, her eyes blank, unaware of the untidy bedroom and the scattered clothes. ‘I ought to ring the police,’ she said.

  She made a move to leave the bed, but the man grabbed her and pulled her back, holding her down with a strong arm across her body.

  ‘Afterwards,’ he said.

  ‘Look, Jacques–’

  ‘Afterwards.’

  Her protests grew less certain. ‘Jacques–’

  ‘Afterwards.’ The word came again, like a litany.

  ‘They’ve found a body.’ There was a long silence. ‘In Burgundy somewhere.’ There was a longer silence. ‘I think it’s my husband.’

  The following day, Darcy went round to Emile Escaut’s studio near the École Commerciale. There was something about Escaut that bothered him. His face looked familiar but he wasn’t sure where he’d seen him.

  Never the man to let up on a hunch, on his way to the Hôtel de Police he climbed the stairs to the top of the Lamy Building. Several of the apartments were occupied by students and there was a strong smell of cats and drains. Darcy, who always expected some girl to open a door to him somewhere with the old green light shining in her eyes always made a point of wearing spotless linen and keeping himself immaculate, and his nose wrinkled fastidiously. In a city as fair as this, he felt, there should be no such place as the Lamy Building.

  Escaut wasn’t very pleased to see him. His studio consisted of a few canvases which even Darcy, who was no artist, could tell at once were mere daubs. He was working over a small drawing at a table and, when Darcy entered, he became extremely busy with an eraser. Glancing over his shoulder, Darcy decided that what he’d been drawing was a dirty picture and he wondered if he were in the porn trade.

  He sat down on a broken-backed chair and opened the conversation cheerfully, talking about the body in the Rue du Chapeau Rouge. But the questions he asked had all been answered long before and it wasn’t really that which was engaging his attention. There was something else that bothered him and little warning bells were ringing in the recesses of his mind. There were things that needed to be checked.

  ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ he said eventually. ‘Have a coffee before I go to the office. You’ll have had yours, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes.’ Escaut remained surly.

  ‘That’s the best of having a little woman to look after you, isn’t it?’ Darcy smiled. ‘Was she with you at the party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Darcy’s face changed and his smile vanished. ‘How come you were alone when you found that car then?’ he said.

  Escaut flushed and Darcy pressed the point. ‘Was she at the party?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? A lover’s tiff?’

  ‘No – ’ Escaut scowled ‘ – yes.’

  ‘Make your mind up.’

  ‘She was at her parents’ house.’

  ‘Because of the tiff?’

  ‘No. She goes to see them occasionally.’

  ‘But not with you, of course. What did you say her name was?’

  Escaut scowled. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘No. Come to think of it, you didn’t. Perhaps you’d better.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m beginning to be interested.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘It’s Perdrix. Marie-Bernadette Perdrix.’

  ‘That’s an unusual name. Any relation to Georges-Robert Perdrix?’

  Escaut tried not very successfully to look blank. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Lives out Chevigny way. Big house worth a fortune. He’s head of FMPS.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Darcy frowned and his voice grew harsher. ‘Don’t hedge with me, my friend! Your home’s here in this city. You’ve lived here for four years. You said so yourself. And you’ve got eyes. One each side of your nose. To get from that flat of yours in the Rue de Maroc to this place, you go past FMPS.’

  ‘Sometimes I go the other way.’

  ‘And circle the city?’ Darcy glared. ‘Outside FMPS there’s Perdrix’s name. Right up there. In big red letters. Over the factory gates. Everybody in the city knows who runs it.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Escaut insisted.

  ‘Well, never mind. Is she any relation?’

  ‘Of Perdrix?’ Escaut hedged. ‘Well, yes, I think she is. Sort of.’

  ‘What relation?’

  ‘Daughter.’

  Darcy studied Escaut with interest. ‘And you didn’t know who Pappy was? You didn’t know he’s one of the wealthiest men in the city?
’

  Escaut shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of him, now you mention him.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The daughter.’

  Escaut’s mouth tightened. ‘Nineteen,’ he said. ‘That’s old enough. I told you.’

  Darcy was still thinking about Emile Escaut when the telephone on his desk rang. Picking it up, he listened carefully. ‘Who did you say?’ he asked. ‘Ernestine Miollis? Yes, I’ve got it. Apartment Nine, Maison Robiquet, Rue Réauot, St Denis, Paris. You think it’s your husband, Gilles? You’re pretty sure? Well, look, can you tell us a bit more about him? To help identify him. What did he do for a living?’

  There was a long silence on the telephone. ‘Why do you have to know that?’ the woman asked warily.

  ‘It helps,’ Darcy said. ‘To identify. That sort of thing. For instance, if he was a mechanic, he’s not the man we found. He hasn’t got a mechanic’s hands. More like a clerk’s.’

  ‘He wasn’t a mechanic,’ Madame Miollis said slowly.

  ‘He wasn’t?’

  ‘He wasn’t a clerk either.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Well–’ The woman on the other end of the telephone was remarkably vague and it took Darcy another five minutes to discover that her husband didn’t do anything at all in particular. He just did anything and everything. He was self-employed and always had been, occupied chiefly, it seemed, with buying and selling. A firm idea was beginning to sprout in Darcy’s head and it seemed to confirm that the man found in the Rue du Chapeau Rouge was indeed Gilles Miollis, the husband of the woman on the telephone.

  ‘We’ll need you here,’ he said. ‘To identify him.’

  ‘It’s a bit difficult,’ Madame Miollis said. ‘I work at this tabac, you see.’

  ‘This may be important,’ Darcy said more sharply. ‘I’ll get the Quai des Orfèvres to come round to see you.’

  The voice down the telephone sounded alarmed suddenly. ‘I don’t want the police coming here! They scare me.’

  ‘Madame, they’ll only be bringing you a train ticket. There’ll be a woman detective to look after you, and we’ll meet you here.’