Pel Under Pressure (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  But they didn’t get that far.

  When Nosjean sat Mortier in the sergeants’ room, he was weeping. ‘What’ll my people say when they find out?’ he wailed.

  ‘You should have thought of that one,’ Nosjean snapped.

  He had a suspicion that Mortier was in need of a fix and that he’d probably talk if he got one. But it would require the Chief’s permission for him to have one from the police surgeon.

  ‘It’ll kill my mother,’ Mortier was moaning.

  Nosjean didn’t answer and Mortier began to sob. ‘Look, can’t we arrange something?’ he begged. ‘I’m not short of money.’

  Nosjean’s eyes narrowed. ‘You trying to bribe me?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Mortier’s sobs were racking his body now. ‘I never thought it would end like this.’

  Nosjean stared at him unfeelingly, then he telephoned for a uniformed man to sit with Mortier while he reported to Pel. ‘Stay with him,’ he said. ‘And don’t take your eyes off him. Got it?’

  ‘Right.’ The uniformed man grinned. ‘I’ve got it.’

  But he hadn’t.

  Nosjean was just explaining what he’d discovered to Pel when there was a scream outside. It came from the Bar Transvaal opposite and, as they hurried to the window, they saw a woman standing at one of the outside tables with her hands to her throat, her eyes wide and full of horror. They couldn’t see what had happened, only the sun on the roofs of the cars in the car park. It was while they were trying to lean out far enough to see that the uniformed man appeared in the doorway, his face white. He didn’t have to tell them what had happened.

  ‘He jumped!’ Nosjean said.

  Nineteen

  Pel was brooding.

  The office was empty, with everybody across the road at the Bar Transvaal, and he sat alone, his spectacles on his forehead, turning over the papers in his file. Leguyader’s people had removed the bloody mash that was all that remained of Philippe Mortier, and his parents had been informed and were already on their way to collect his body.

  Nosjean was still clearing up. The Chief had come down on them all like a clap of thunder. Pel hadn’t really been involved but, after the failure to provide a murderer for Miollis, Treguy and Nincic, he hadn’t entirely escaped either, while poor young Nosjean had found himself standing rigidly, his face taut, his eyes flinching, as the Chief weighed into him. Pel had been obliged to watch.

  What Nosjean had suffered was nothing to what Frachot, the uniformed man, had gone through. Despite everything, Nosjean had not really been wrong. He had told Frachot not to take his eyes off Mortier and Frachot had, and Mortier had dived through the open window.

  ‘Just as if he was going into a swimming pool,’ the policeman had bleated. ‘Straight through without touching it.’

  ‘Four floors up,’ Darcy had commented. ‘The poor bastard probably thought he could fly.’

  It had been a wearing morning and Pel felt exhausted, and vaguely guilty.

  The week had been spoiled. He had been looking forward to his dinner date but this business right outside his own office had cast a blight over it. It would require an effort now to be breezy over the aperitifs and chatty over the wine.

  It depressed him also because it seemed to indicate they were no nearer the solution. They had Archavanne, and Miollis, Treguy and Nincic were dead. But someone else, someone more powerful, someone at the top of the pile, was clearly still around and still active. Without Miollis and Nincic, the thing would probably lie dormant for a while, but it would never be finished. It only needed a little time to set the thing up again, and the gangs were always greedy.

  For a long time, he turned the papers, deep in thought. The file had grown bulky. In it was everything they’d collected, everything that had been written down – everything from Archavanne’s pamphlets and the yellow slip imprinted with Hofer’s address that Nosjean had found, to reminders they’d written to each other – even Krauss’ note to him to ring Madame Faivre-Perret. Reminders sometimes had a habit of reminding – not only of what they were intended to remind about but other things, too. He moved them slowly, one after the other, smoking until his tongue felt like ashes and he was convinced his lungs were charred. He was under no delusions that his job had ended with the discovery of Nincic’s body. Somewhere in the city there was still someone who could lead him to the source – whether it were Pépé le Cornet or Tagliacci – someone who knew the secrets. Was it the Chahu woman? Darcy seemed to think it might be. Or the doorman, Salengro? Darcy didn’t trust him. Ramou? For a student he appeared to have more money than he ought to have. Madame Foussier? It was a startling thought, but not all that strange because she understood drugs and had a background of drugs. Foussier himself? That seemed crazy. And the link seemed to be Marseilles because Tagliacci had come from there, and Treguy had gone over to him. After leaving Paris and before he’d been killed, had he contacted Ramou, who also significantly came from Marseilles? The answer lay probably in someone’s character and the most enigmatic character of the lot belonged to Marie-Anne Chahu.

  The same view exactly was held by Darcy who was sufficiently intrigued by it to have decided that his lunch hour could be put to better use than merely for eating, and he was sitting in his car staring at the Maison Joliet, his mind occupied with the puzzle.

  It wasn’t a criminal offence for her to be Foussier’s mistress, or anybody else’s either. It wasn’t a criminal offence for a man to pay for a love-nest and establish a woman in it. But what puzzled Darcy was why so many students went to see her. The number, he had noticed, had dropped recently, and he wondered if somehow someone had got wind of his interest.

  Somewhere in that flat up there, Darcy felt, were the answers to a lot of questions, and the previous evening a curious little incident had occurred which he had felt was a bonus for his hard work. There had been a scuffle in the Café Schehérezade, which operated a disco where the students gathered to work off their energy, there had been too much drinking, and half a dozen of the youngsters had been brought in. No charges had been preferred because no damage had been done and it had been considered sufficient to have a uniformed inspector dish out a warning. But Darcy had arrived at the Hôtel de Police just as they were leaving, most of them a little shame-faced and glad that it was no worse, and among them, Darcy was surprised to see, was Ramou, and the girl, Nadine Weyl, whom he’d last seen riding on a scooter away from Marie-Anne Chahu’s apartment block. And, as an additional extra, waiting for them at the door was Joachim Salengro, the doorman with the plum suit who protected the inhabitants of the Maison Joliet from such importunate visitors as Darcy. It was too good an opportunity to miss and Darcy had swept them all back inside the Hôtel de Police, full of good humour and interest.

  ‘Trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Salengro said quickly. ‘Just a lot of kids arguing. No damage done.’

  ‘Students?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Salengro’s shifty rubbery face moved into a wink. ‘You know what they’re like.’

  ‘It was a birthday party,’ Ramou said.

  ‘Whose?’

  Ramou indicated the girl. ‘Nadine’s.’

  ‘And you’re all friends?’

  ‘We belong to the same societies. That sort of thing. Go to the same parties. It’s usual.’ Ramou was still a little tipsy and inclined to smile a lot. The girl, however, looked scared and was saying nothing, her pretty face pale, her large eyes worried.

  ‘Who was paying?’ Darcy asked her. ‘You?’

  She shook her head and Ramou interrupted.

  ‘Me,’ he said. ‘Good old Jean-Pierre.’

  ‘Where did you get the money? Student grants aren’t that big.’

  Ramou slapped Nadine Weyl’s backside. ‘I’m fond of Nadine. I wanted to give her a good party.’ He put his finger alongside his nose and grinned. ‘And we have sources, you know. Kind uncles. Rich aunts. That sort of thing.’ He fished in his pocket and took out two or
three large denomination notes. ‘I write lots of letters. It pays to keep them sweet and I remind them how angelic I used to look in my surplice as an altar boy in Marseilles.’

  As he stuffed away the money, Darcy turned to Salengro. ‘Were you at the party, too?’

  Salengro gestured awkwardly. ‘Well – yes, I was.’

  ‘How come?’

  Again the vague gesture and Ramou joined in helpfully again. ‘He’s my uncle,’ he said. ‘I’m from Marseilles. He’s from Toulon. We stick together down there.’

  Darcy had watched them leave, frowning. The explanation seemed sound enough and, in fact, when he checked, what Ramou said seemed to be true. The university records showed that it was Nadine Weyl’s birthday, and Salengro did come from Toulon, so he might well have been Ramou’s uncle. But it smelled all the same. It was asking too much of a man like Darcy that he should accept the coincidence of all three of them being together at a party. Salengro’s job didn’t pay enough for him to help impecunious nephews – if they were nephews – and Darcy had a shrewd suspicion that there weren’t any rich aunts either.

  Intrigued enough to want to find out, he entered the Joliet Building and walked quietly up the stairs. Standing on the corner by the lift, he eyed Marie-Anne Chahu’s door. It was an ordinary door, painted green, with gold studs in it to give it class. What was she doing behind there, he wondered. What went on?

  For a long second he studied it, then he began to step out the distance to it from the lift. Her flat was at the end of the corridor so there was nowhere else the students could have gone except back to the lift. Returning to the lift, on an impulse, he took it to the basement, then through all the floors, and finally back to the ground floor.

  Salengro, the porter, was sitting in his office, smoking a cigar, his plum-coloured jacket hanging on the back of the chair, his sly ugly face watchful.

  ‘You got a list of the people who rent these flats?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘Sure.’ Salengro produced a plan of each floor, with all the names. None of them made any sense to Darcy. A few were known to him and, judging by the professions listed alongside them – as if they’d been chosen to preserve the tone of the place – they were all eminently respectable. Yet there had seemed to be more coming and going than there ought to be and it continued to puzzle Darcy. He knew the city well and most of the people in it, especially the wealthy and important into which class most of the names he’d gathered fell. There weren’t many outsiders who visited the flats and they didn’t look like drug addicts either. They were all successful people with clear heads, and it crossed Darcy’s mind once more that Marie-Anne Chahu might be entertaining them in her bed. But he’d also noticed that they never took the lift to the second floor where she lived, but to the top floor, and on the top floor were people who might well be their associates and friends.

  So far, with the Nincic-Miollis-Treguy business, he had devoted only the odd half-hour to the puzzle and he felt suddenly it needed more.

  Returning to the lift, he rode to the top floor, and stood on the landing, staring about him. Trying various doors, he discovered linen cupboards and closets where the cleaning staff left their pails, brooms and vacuum cleaners. Eventually, he found a door marked ‘Private’. It was locked, but that presented few problems to Darcy who opened it with a plastic banker’s card.

  There was a flight of stairs leading upwards to a flat high-walled roof area where there were several bed sheets hanging on lines in the sun. At one end of the roof space there was a small square brick construction. Moving closer, he peered through a window and saw it was a small furnished flat, complete with sitting room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. By pressing his face to the window, he saw a bottle of champagne and an ice bucket.

  He stared at it a moment longer, then at the list of flat lessees, then he took the lift to the ground floor. Salengro was still in his office.

  ‘What’s that place at the top of the building?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘It’s a flat,’ Salengro said. ‘What did you think it was? – a pigeon loft?’

  Darcy gestured at the plan he held. ‘Why isn’t it on the list?’ he asked.

  ‘Because it’s not for rent. It’s mine. I live there. I’m relieved here at six until eight the next morning. We have a guy comes from an agency. When I go off duty, that’s where I head for.’

  Darcy frowned. ‘And during the day?’

  ‘It’s unoccupied. Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I slip up and do a bit of housework. Make the bed, vacuum, that sort of thing. It’s not very big. It gets warm in weather like this.’ A heavy hand gestured at a folding bed standing in the corner of his office. ‘Then I sleep on that. There’s a kitchen along the corridor. It’s cool.’

  Darcy studied the doorman. ‘I noticed champagne up there,’ he said. ‘You have expensive tastes.’

  Salengro gestured again. ‘It’s good for the stomach and I like it,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s my only indulgence.’

  Darcy eyed him. ‘Apart from cigars,’ he said.

  When Darcy returned to the office, Pel was still staring at the file. In his bones he knew the answer was in the pile of papers somewhere. He was a great believer in details, feeling that, piled one on top of another, providing you got them in the right order, they made a whole.

  The newspaper was alongside him, the front page containing a picture of the Perdrix girl with her parents. She looked sullen, and they had a firm grip on her arms, as if they thought she might bolt again at the first opportunity. Probably she would. It wouldn’t help much, though, because Emile Escaut, né Patrice Bourges, was sitting in the cells until he was charged either with alienation of affection or demanding money with menaces. It was something Judge Brisard, in whose lap it had dropped, would have to decide.

  As Pel brooded, the door opened and Darcy appeared. Sitting opposite Pel, he tossed across his cigarettes and described what he’d been up to.

  ‘At first,’ he said, ‘I thought she was the mistress of Léonard Durandot, of Durandot Plastics. I even made a few enquiries round his works. They said he liked girls and was in the habit of pawing them in the office. But he wasn’t in La Chahu’s apartment that time when I went back. I thought he would be. She must be somebody’s mistress, Patron.’

  ‘She is,’ Pel said. ‘She’s Foussier’s.’

  ‘Is she, by God?’ Darcy grinned. ‘I must admit, I wondered. After all, if I’d got as much money as he’s got, I’d have a mistress.’

  ‘Probably so would I,’ Pel admitted. ‘If I could afford one.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Patron,’ Darcy said. ‘I’ve nothing against it. If it’s there lying about loose, you might as well put it to good use. I’m just curious about who keeps who. It comes in useful sometimes. It certainly does in her case. You know who else have apartments in that block? Chaudordy, the surgeon, and Senator Forton, and old Gissey, of France Industrielle. They earn a bit more than she does, I’ll bet. She also runs a Triumph 1500, too, and that’s not chickenfeed. I run a Citroën.’

  And I, Pel thought, run a Peugeot that looks as though it was made before World War I. Perhaps it was one of the Taxis of the Marne.

  ‘Is she efficient?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s my impression, Patron.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s also efficient at finance.’ Pel spoke with the bitterness of someone who wasn’t. ‘Perhaps Foussier gives her tips across the pillow.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Darcy frowned. ‘But, you know, Patron. There’s more, I think. Why does she hand out old exam papers to kids?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s not a tutor or a lecturer, Patron.’

  Pel rubbed his nose and lit a cigarette from Darcy’s packet.

  ‘And there are a lot of people who visit that block,’ Darcy went on. ‘People who don’t live there. Like Durandot.’ He laid a list in front of Pel. ‘I bet you recognise a few of those names, don’t you?’

  Pel did. His eyebrows rose. ‘That one,’ he said, plac
ing a finger on one of the names. ‘Sanctimony itself. And old Teeth and Trousers. What do they do there?’

  ‘Well, Robert Volnay and his wife live on the top floor, Patron. So does René Walck. They’re in business and very respectable. Perhaps this lot were just visiting friends.’

  Pel sniffed. ‘All the same, they’ll probably turn out not to have been. How many flats are there?’

  ‘Six on the top floor. One’s a retired general who’s a bachelor and eighty years old and another three are occupied by old women. Then there are Walck and the Volnays. And these people like Durandot and Teeth and Trousers could be visiting La Chahu. I did a bit of checking on her. She comes from Quimper and was a bit late in the day starting at university and I wondered what had happened to the years before. She worked in Rennes, it seemed, and there was a bit of scandal with one of the doctors there and she had to leave. So she’s not exactly new to that sort of thing, is she?’

  While they talked, Nosjean appeared. ‘They said you were still here, Patron,’ he said.

  There were several bottles of beer on the desk and Pel pushed one across. ‘Better have a drink,’ he said. ‘Was it painful with the Chief?’

  ‘I expect I shall get over it, Patron.’

  ‘Don’t worry too much,’ Pel said. ‘The Chief’s no fool and he knows your record. Frachot looks like getting a dirty mark on his file, perhaps even a transfer to one of the hill villages. There’ll be nothing in yours. I’ll see to that.’

  ‘Thanks, Patron.’ Nosjean cleared his throat. ‘Mortier,’ he said hesitantly.

  Pel looked up, frowning. ‘That’s finished,’ he said. ‘The matter’s closed.’

  Nosjean blushed. ‘I’m not sure it is, Patron.’ He laid a slip of paper on Pel’s desk. ‘They just brought me the contents of his wallet. This was among them. It’s a telephone number – one I’ve had for some time. I recognised it at once. It’s the Chahu woman’s. Why had Mortier got it in his pocket?’