Pel Under Pressure (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  When Darcy opened Pel’s door, Pel was staring at a cigarette, wondering if he dare light it or whether it would send him reeling from the room, an immediate case for the undertaker.

  ‘We’ve got an identification,’ Darcy said.

  Pel’s head jerked up.

  ‘Gilles Miollis, Apartment Nine, Maison Robiquet, Rue Réauot, St Denis district of Paris. I’ve had his wife on the phone.’

  ‘What is he?’

  ‘She seemed a bit vague about that. She said he worked for himself and when I asked her what at, she said she wasn’t sure. He bought and sold things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘As far as I can make out, anything that was going cheap. He did things for people.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  Darcy grinned. ‘All sorts of things. By the sound of it, Patron, he was a small-time crook on the fiddle.’

  Darcy met Madame Miollis at the station. She was a brassy blonde who wore so much make-up, her face looked as if it would crack if she smiled, while her false eyelashes were long enough to sweep the ornaments off the mantelshelf. Her dress was too tight and her heels were so high she walked with her knees bent and her toes turned in like a pigeon. The policewoman who accompanied her, however, managed to have all the chic that Paris was famous for. She was slim and dark-eyed and Darcy wondered why there weren’t any women police officers like her in his own city.

  ‘How’s she taking it?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘All right,’ the policewoman said. ‘I think she’s as tough as old boots. I’ve brought an electric razor her husband used. It’s covered with fingerprints.’

  Darcy introduced himself. Madame Miollis was staring in front of her in a faintly dazed way. ‘I think it’s my husband,’ were the first words she said.

  Darcy didn’t argue, but he spent most of his time between the station and the mortuary explaining that the man in Chapeau Rouge had been dead some time when he’d been found and that it might be a little unpleasant. It didn’t seem to worry her too much.

  The morticians had done a good job on the body and since it had been kept refrigerated for some time the smell had diminished. When Darcy pulled the sheet back Madame Miollis’ face stiffened but she didn’t wince or turn away, staring at the corpse as if making sure it really was dead.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘That’s him. When did it happen?’

  ‘Last weekend, the doctor thinks. On the thirteenth, perhaps.’

  ‘What happened? Was he knocked down?’

  ‘No,’ Darcy said, watching her carefully. ‘He was shot. In the back of the head.’

  He’d been expecting she might show some concern and ask who could possibly have done it, as they usually did, but she took it very calmly – almost, Darcy thought, as if she’d been expecting something of the sort for some time.

  ‘He looks a mess,’ was all she said.

  Pel had a small pile of notes on his desk when Madame Miollis was shown in. He had vaguely expected a frail woman bowed with grief. Madame Miollis seemed to have recovered already.

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ she said as she sat down.

  ‘Brandy?’ Pel asked, thinking she might feel a little faint.

  ‘I’d prefer a beer,’ she said. ‘It’s hot.’

  ‘Send Krauss out,’ Pel said to Darcy. ‘And get the Quai des Orfèvres to watch the house in Paris,’ he added quietly. ‘We’ll probably need to search it.’

  Nosjean came in and put a bundle of photographs on the desk. ‘From Fingerprints,’ he said. ‘Off the razor. They match.’

  Pel lit a cigarette and looked at Madame Miollis. ‘Can we have your husband’s age, Madame?’ he asked.

  ‘Forty-three last birthday.’

  They managed to find out over the beer that Gilles Miollis had never done a regular job in his life and that his income fluctuated a great deal. ‘Sometimes he had a lot,’ his wife said. ‘Sometimes he had nothing. Mostly, he had nothing.’

  ‘You’ve no idea what he did for a living?’

  She shrugged. ‘He did odd jobs. Looking after things. Running errands. Buying and selling.’

  ‘Was he often away from home?’

  ‘No. He usually operated in Paris.’

  It was the word ‘operated’ which strengthened Pel’s belief. Like Darcy, he had already come to the conclusion that Gilles Miollis was a small-time crook and the word confirmed his view. Like the wives of most crooks, Madame Miollis appeared to have lived with the ambiguity of her husband’s life without too much effort, though she had doubtless never considered herself a crook’s woman, and had obviously faced the incongruity of her situation with a deadpan expression.

  He drew a deep breath. ‘Forgive me if this seems hurtful, Madame,’ he said. ‘But was your husband known to the police?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘You sure, Madame?’

  ‘Well–’

  Within five minutes, Pel had it out of her that Miollis had a criminal record and had passed more than one sojourn in the Santé.

  ‘Did your husband associate with known criminals, Madame?’

  She hesitated. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I think he knew a few.’

  ‘Was he involved in criminal activities himself?’

  She sighed and seemed to relinquish the struggle. ‘He never stopped, did he?’ she said bitterly. ‘He was at it when I met him and he never gave up.’

  ‘What sort of criminal activities?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘Well, he got sent down for helping himself from the till when he worked as a garage attendant, didn’t he? We’d only been married six months then. He got a longer stretch for trying to rob some old woman at Cloisart. He got away with that one. They never found the money. Come to that, neither did I. I expect he spent it on some other piece.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then he did a bit of receiving and got mixed up with a car gang. They stole cars and changed the number plates. But he was never violent. Not my husband. Except for that bank thing.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘They robbed a bank at Orgueuil.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Him and a couple of his pals. At least, the other two did. He drove the car. Somebody got hurt and he got two years for it.’

  Gilles Miollis seemed to have been little more than a highly unsuccessful small-timer.

  ‘What do you think he was doing in this city, Madame?’ Pel asked.

  The plump shoulders lifted.

  ‘Did he have business down here?’

  ‘He’s been before, I know. He once told me he was going to Vichy, but I noticed he came back with a case of Burgundy from a place near Beaune, so he must have got it here. In Vichy it would be Bordeaux, wouldn’t it?’

  Pel sniffed. As a good Burgundian, he didn’t acknowledge that there were any wines other than those from his own province.

  ‘Did he come often?’ he asked.

  ‘I think he’d been four or five times. Perhaps five.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘No. He gave me money – when he had it – so I didn’t ask questions. I never supposed he’d got it by working hard at anything, but money’s money and I had to live. Can I go home now?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to stay at a hotel for the night?’

  ‘I’d rather go home.’

  ‘It’ll be late when you arrive in Paris,’ Pel pointed out.

  She gave him a contemptuous look. ‘Paris in the middle of the night’s got more life in it than this place in the middle of the day,’ she said. ‘I’ll go home.’

  ‘Think he was smuggling something?’ Pel asked Darcy. ‘He was the type.’

  Darcy pulled a face. ‘It’s only a hundred and fifty kilometres from here to the Swiss border,’ he said.

  ‘Watches? Could it have been watches? Or precision instruments. Money? Currency? Something like that? And, if so, was he executed?’

  ‘And if he was executed, Patron, why?’

  ‘Tr
ying to take more than his share?’ Pel suggested. ‘Why kill him here then?’ Darcy asked. ‘Why not in Switzerland or wherever he was operating from?’

  ‘We’ll probably learn the answer to that when we find what it was he was smuggling. Contact the Quai des Orfèvres. Find out what’s known of him.’

  ‘Do we tell the Press he’s been identified?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Pel pushed his chair back. ‘Leave it for a while. It sometimes pays to leave people in the dark. Especially people who make a habit of murdering other people. They get scared and make a move. And sometimes it’s the wrong one. I’ll see Polverari. He’ll not argue. In the meantime, I think somebody’ll have to search our fat friend’s home.’

  This time, since Pel was only anxious to go to Paris, neither the Chief nor Judge Polverari was against the idea.

  ‘Paris is different,’ Polverari said enthusiastically. ‘Everybody wants to go to Paris.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Pel said earnestly. For Pel there was only one place in the world and that was Burgundy. Burgundy was a royal duchy, the richest province in France. It provided a wealth of history, an infinite variety of scenery, and a prodigious contribution to art, society and gastronomy. It had also produced Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel.

  Coming from Grenoble, Polverari hadn’t the same feelings and he gestured expansively. ‘Everybody should go to Paris,’ he said, his little black eyes bright. ‘As often as possible. In fact, I think I’ll come with you. You’ll need a judge handy and I have to talk to the Palais de Justice there about that Lavergne woman. She’s a Parisian, too. We’ll make a point of enjoying ourselves. It’ll do us both good. Paris is full of vice, and so long as it’s kept under control, vice is good for you.’

  That evening, the Quai des Orfèvres came up with all they knew about Gilles Miollis. They had a file on him as long as their arm.

  ‘He’s been in prison more times than you know about,’ they said. ‘All small things. Fencing. Robbery. Fraud. Pimping. You name it, he’s done it.’

  ‘Nothing big?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘Nothing that ever brought him in much money, as far as I can see. He was the errand boy. Always on the fringe.’

  ‘Was he connected with any of the gangs?’

  ‘He was part of the Pépé le Cornet outfit once. But that was a long time ago. He just wasn’t clever enough to stay the course.

  And he wasn’t big enough or tough enough to be used as a heavy. He was even a bit squeamish and backed away from violence.’

  ‘Could he have been the victim of some gang feud?’

  The man in Paris hesitated. Darcy could almost hear him shrugging down the telephone. ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘But if he was killed in a gang feud, why dump the body down there in your area?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Pel said when Darcy reported back to him. ‘He was up to something, and he was up to it here. We’d better have a look at this flat of his.’

  Five

  When Pel turned up at his office the following morning for his trip to Paris he looked like Napoleon III receiving the news of his defeat at Sedan.

  He had had a rough night, with Madame Routy listening to the television until the early hours. Since the television was situated directly beneath Pel’s room and Madame Routy liked to pull out all the stops, he had had to listen to the programme to the very end, hearing every momentary uproar without the pleasure of knowing what it was all about. Sometimes, he felt, Madame Routy was not just hard of hearing, she was stone deaf; and Pel, who considered himself an insomniac, had thrashed about in bed until he had convinced himself he would never sleep again. In fact, he required very little sleep, but, daily considering himself exhausted by his work, he always made the mistake of going to bed too early. Getting up worn-out made him feel a martyr and feeling a martyr helped him believe he was succeeding at his job.

  He gazed gloomily at the cigarette Darcy offered him as they waited for Judge Polverari to turn up, and lit it as if it were the last gesture of a man facing a firing squad.

  ‘I wish I could give it up,’ he said.

  ‘Try acupuncture,’ Darcy suggested with a grin, lighting up himself and inhaling with obvious enjoyment. ‘Or you could have an operation. Have your lungs taken out, for instance. As a last resort you could even have your mouth sewn up.

  ‘I’d stick them up my nostrils,’ Pel said bitterly.

  When Polverari appeared, smiling with anticipation, it was Nosjean who drove them to the station. Polverari, his arms full of magazines, was all smiles. Pel looked as if he were going to the guillotine.

  ‘Enjoy your trip, Messieurs,’ Nosjean said.

  Polverari smiled. ‘I intend to. I have plenty of sin in my heart and, though I feel that other slates should be kept clean, I’m not so sure about mine. Isn’t that so, Pel?’

  Pel managed to moderate to fretful the surly expression he wore. He’d probably drop dead in Paris, he was thinking. His cigarettes and his sins would finally catch up with him there. He wondered what his last words would be.

  Grinning at his expression, Nosjean returned to the car, deciding he’d been neglecting the dead student, Cortot, for too long. Cortot had been found behind a locked door, from which the key was missing. His room-mate, Philippe Mortier, had had to use his own key to let himself in and there had been no sign of Cortot’s key. It seemed to be time to do a little checking with Dr Minet.

  Dr Minet welcomed him warmly. He was a fussy little man but he loved his fellow human beings, and though it didn’t trouble him much to see them dead on the slab in his laboratory, as he so often did, he much preferred them alive, and preferably young like Nosjean, for whom, in his warm affectionate way, he had a special spot in his heart.

  ‘What was it that killed him?’ Nosjean asked. ‘If it wasn’t an overdose of drugs or any of the marks we found on his body, then what was it?’

  ‘Let’s examine it carefully, mon brave,’ Minet suggested helpfully. ‘Didn’t you notice his colour?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nosjean said. ‘He was a bit blue.’

  ‘Know what that means?’ Minet was nudging Nosjean carefully forward so that he’d be able to feel he himself had made the discovery Minet was laying before him.

  ‘Cyanide?’ Nosjean suggested. ‘They turn blue with cyanide.’

  ‘No.’ Minet smiled. ‘Not that, mon brave.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘He was just short of air.’ Minet laughed and gestured. ‘He choked. One of those cords he had round him seems to have slipped and tightened underneath the larynx. It barely left a mark but it was enough to kill him. In effect, he hanged himself.’

  ‘Committed suicide?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Nosjean finally realised he was being given a lesson in forensic deduction and he applied his mind to it. Suicides slashed their wrists, turned on gas jets, shot themselves, dived off cliffs, jumped from windows, swallowed rat poison, ammonia or sleeping tablets. Or, finally, hanged themselves. Cortot seemed to have hanged himself, but not deliberately. And where did all that rope come in?

  ‘Suicides don’t usually truss themselves up first,’ he said.

  ‘No, mon brave,’ Minet smiled. ‘They don’t.’

  ‘So, what?’ To Nosjean it looked more like an accident after somebody had been playing a joke. Students got up to funny things – like setting fire to people’s hair, putting vodka into beer, carrying beds containing sleeping fellow students downstairs and leaving them in the street. Sometimes the jokes went too far and someone got hurt. Sometimes they even died. He wondered if someone had tried to play a joke on Cortot.

  ‘I think I’ll go and see that friend of his again,’ he said.

  ‘I think,’ Minet agreed cheerfully, ‘that would be a very good idea.’

  Philippe Mortier’s apartment was in an old house in the area of the Place du Creux d’Enfer. A lot of university lecturers, technicians and students lived in the area, all jammed together cheek by jowl, filling the bars and eating side by
side in the little restaurants that catered for them. It wasn’t a poverty-stricken apartment of the sort students usually occupied. It had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom, which was four more rooms than most students had. But Mortier appeared to have money because his father was a lawyer in Amiens.

  ‘I paid for it,’ he admitted.

  Despite the money and the background, however, and despite the space, the rooms still resembled most student apartments in one thing at least: there were unmade beds, and dirty plates, cups and glasses about.

  ‘We never seemed to have time to clear up,’ Mortier said, picking up books, piles of papers and clothing. ‘We always seemed to be busy.’

  He pushed a cat from where it was sitting on a denim jacket and lifted the jacket. Underneath it was a plate. Picking up the plate, he put it on the table and indicated the chair to Nosjean.

  ‘Look out for the spring,’ he said. ‘It’ll probably spike your backside. What do you want to know?’

  What Nosjean chiefly wanted to know was why Mortier shared the apartment with Cortot.

  Mortier shrugged. ‘Just to have somebody around,’ he said. ‘It could have been anybody. He just happened to be there. I wanted company. Kids who have rooms to themselves end up hanging themselves from the banisters. I have three brothers and a sister and I’m used to having people around. He paid his share of the food.’

  Nosjean studied Mortier. He was tall with strong features, nothing like Cortot’s more sensitive cast of countenance. He was also well in control of himself, while Cortot, from Nosjean’s enquiries, appeared to have been a nervous young man, unsure of himself and his place in society. The two didn’t seem to go together.

  ‘Have you decided it’s murder or something?’ Mortier asked.

  ‘At the moment,’ Nosjean admitted, ‘we’ve decided nothing. There are no wounds and he didn’t die from an overdose of drugs. But he or somebody else tied him up. So why? Tell me what happened?’

  Mortier shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘I’d been to Paris for the weekend,’ he said.

  ‘Proof?’ Nosjean asked.