Pel Under Pressure (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  ‘Why did Mortier have it?’

  She shrugged. ‘He was the one who lived with the Cortot boy, wasn’t he? I gave it to him in case he needed help.’

  ‘Do you know a man called Gilles Miollis?’

  ‘He was murdered, wasn’t he? I think I once had occasion to write a letter to him for the Professor. The Professor’s a dedicated man. I think he’d discovered Miollis was involved with drugs. He had some strange contacts.’

  Pel frowned. ‘I’m sure he did. How about Archavanne? Louis-Arnold Archavanne?’

  She moved limply in the chair. The heat stood in the room as menacing as an assassin. ‘Yes. I know that name. When we moved to the new office, he carried the furniture.’

  ‘He was running drugs.’ Pel’s voice grew sharper. ‘Miollis helped him. So did Nincic.’ He looked at Bakt and then at the Director, then he laid in front of her the sheets of paper he and Darcy had been studying. They were face down. Pel turned one of them over. It was the yellow slip Nosjean had found in Nincic’s flat – the one on which they had found the imprint of the name and address of Alois Hofer in the Nedergasse.

  As Marie-Anne Chahu stared at it tiredly, Pel pushed forward the second sheet. On one side was the list of names Foussier’s wife had written out for Pel, the names of all the men at universities across Europe concerned with the drugs problem. Pel turned it over. On the other side was the beginning of a letter … ‘Ma chère Noëlle, Je suis heureux de t’informer…’ He looked up at Marie-Anne Chahu but her face had suddenly become blank. He reached for a brown envelope and took out one of the photographs Nosjean had sent. It was a picture of a letter addressed to police head-quarters and began ‘Mon cher Sergeant Nosjean …’ and contained the information Nosjean had sought on Cortot. Finally there was a photograph of a note from Lagé’s photographic society’s file that listed the things to be desired in a good photograph: Light. Position. Exposure. Lens. Naturalism. Each paragraph had its own heading, printed in capital letters and each had a few explanatory notes beneath.

  ‘Someone was very generous with time,’ Pel commented.

  While she stared at them, he laid alongside them the note found in Nincic’s flat, warning him of the arrival of drugs and advising him about distribution. To it, Nosjean had attached the envelope in which it had arrived. He looked at Marie-Anne Chahu. She returned his look with a hostile stare.

  ‘Am I supposed to deduce something from these?’ she asked.

  ‘You are,’ Pel said. ‘Look at the “n”s. Noëlle. Nosjean. Nincic. Naturalism. Nedergasse. They’re all the same, aren’t they?’

  ‘Of course. They are all written by the same hand.’

  ‘Whose?’

  She was silent for a while. ‘Professor Foussier’s,’ she said and began to cry.

  Twenty-two

  ‘Mother of God,’ Darcy growled. ‘The arrogance of the damned man! He wrote notes to half the Hôtel de Police! At one time or another he’d been in touch with the whole of the PJ. The bastard trapped himself with his own self-importance.’

  He did indeed, Pel thought. And Didier Darras had buttoned it up long since. He’d been right more than once, in fact. Dead right. Uncannily right. Even about Madame Faivre-Perret. Pel frowned as the thought of his lost date jabbed at his liver and he decided it was a pity he hadn’t borne Didier’s view in mind. Look out for the clever ones, he’d said. Taking notice of him might have saved the police a lot of trouble and himself a lot of telephoning.

  Darcy was still raging on. ‘I expect he thought he was so clever it wouldn’t matter,’ he was saying. ‘We were all so stupid we’d never notice. All those damned degrees! All that assorted knowledge! Languages! Navigation! Electronics! Botany! Ornithology! History! Engineering! Finance! I expect he thought the poor old Flatfoots would never top that in a million years. After all, we only got our background tramping the streets and wallowing in other people’s filth. We’d never catch on!’

  ‘But we did, Darcy,’ Pel said sharply. ‘Because of a forgotten photograph. It wasn’t Tagliacci or Pépé le Cornet who were setting up in our area. They were just trying to muscle into something they’d heard was beginning to look good.’

  ‘It must have made him hoot with laughter when we gave him a bodyguard.’ Darcy was angry, his face red. ‘He set up his own route. And he wasn’t worried about Pépé le Cornet or Maurice Tagliacci, because he could do something they couldn’t do – he could go out and organise it himself. He had a few advantages over those baboons! He could fly an aeroplane, he had the foreign contacts, he could speak the languages, and above all he never needed to touch the stuff himself.’

  Pel waited for him to calm down then he looked at Marie-Anne Chahu again. The muscles of her neck were taut, her face was thin with strain and her cheeks were wet with tears. He drew a deep breath. ‘Ever heard of Alois Hofer?’ he asked.

  She stared at him. ‘Yes,’ she said cautiously. ‘He was always writing for money.’

  ‘What sort of money?’

  ‘Hand-outs. He never worked. He’s the Professor’s sister’s husband.’

  ‘Yes.’ Pel had felt like kicking himself as he had stared at the photograph found in Hofer’s home and recognised the features of Hofer’s wife. The brother-in-law who was dishonest! The brother-in-law who had a brother-in-law of his own in Hungary! Foussier must have started the thing in great glee, but then he’d found he’d raised a monster.

  ‘He might have got away with it all, too,’ Darcy said, ‘if everyone hadn’t wanted more than they were already getting.’ He jerked a hand at Marie-Anne Chahu. ‘Her, too. She led us to him in the end.’

  Pel glanced at him. ‘You were chasing the wrong rabbit, mon brave,’ he said. ‘Though, in the end, it led us down the right hole. He knew everything there was to know about students on drugs. He even wrote a thesis on it years ago. He had a wife who understood medicine, a father and a father-in-law who were doctors, and a brother-in-law who worked for a drugs manufacturing firm. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t find out if he wanted to. He also had expertise on a dozen subjects, including flying. You said it yourself: he was too clever by half. He was even clever enough to have thought up a happy habit to account for sudden disappearances to see his henchmen or when emergencies cropped up – his need to be alone to recharge his batteries. He even knew how to arrange a bomb on his car when we had our eyes on Paris and Marseilles and it was a good idea to encourage us. It was easy for him. He was clever enough to know everything. Nobody was after him. Pépé le Cornet and Tagliacci had never heard of him.’

  Pel’s mind was full of worms as they drove to the Hofhalle. Foussier: Hypocrite, liar, fornicator, cheat, murderer. The accusations pushed through his mind one after the other. Like his sister, he couldn’t cope with his own brilliance. Perhaps he’d even started the thing up in the first place so he could pose as the man who could bring it down.

  He was in no doubt now about what had happened. Foussier had thought it all so easy. He had his brother-in-law, Hofer, to set up the route, and Nincic, who was too fond of money, to supply him with the names of students who came to him looking for drugs. But then it had started to turn sour and when Nincic, who had had to get rid of Miollis, had also started demanding a bigger cut, this time he’d had to do the job himself – with Nincic’s gun. By the time Treguy had blundered in, murder was growing easy and he’d finally been responsible for the deaths of three men. The only consolation was that none of them would be missed.

  The Hofhalle was an ancient building redolent of the old Habsburg Empire. The entrance was magnificent, with a wide curving staircase running up either side of the hall. The place was studded with statues and the steps and balustrade appeared to be of marble.

  ‘Used to be part of the Emperor’s Summer Palace,’ Bakt said.

  Krauss was waiting in the doorway when the car stopped. ‘Third floor,’ he said. ‘The lecture hall’s in the old ballroom.’

  As they started up the stairs, Pel touched Krauss’
shoulder. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’

  On the third floor were two wide double doors, and as they pushed them open, a young man with a beard, spectacles and a great deal of hair put his fingers to his lips.

  ‘Ruhig sein,’ he whispered. ‘Bitte, meine Herren.’

  Foussier was standing on a platform at the end of the room. Under the lights he looked handsome and enormously tall. In front of him was a podium with his notes and behind him a screen showing a picture of a Mongol horseman. He was talking.

  ‘Many of these languages,’ he was saying, ‘are monosyllabic. Chinese, which was once an agglutinating language, is not pure monosyllabic. Some Amerindian dialects are not only agglutinating but polysynthetic or incorporative, as may be seen in such names as “Montezuma” and “Moctezuma”, or even “Montecuzomiaithuica-mina”, which means “When the Chief is Angry he shoots from Heaven”.’

  There was a laugh and Foussier beamed. Then his smile died abruptly as his eyes fell on Pel standing at the back of the hall with Darcy and Bakt. For a moment he paused, then he drew a deep breath and they saw his hand move across his notes. ‘Nevertheless,’ he went on, more slowly, ‘the agglutinating languages form the largest of the three groups. To it belong Japanese, Korean, the Caucasian forms of speech, the ancient Sumerian and Elamite, the Ural-Altoc family, various Amerindian groups and many others.’

  As his hand moved again, Pel moved forward. ‘Stop him,’ he said.

  They were too late. The lights went out and for a moment the room was in darkness. Then a slide flashed on the screen. It was a picture of a Caucasian soldier and, as it appeared, they saw that Foussier had vanished.

  ‘The door at the rear,’ Bakt snapped.

  As they pushed their way down the centre aisle to the dais, there were immediate cries of annoyance and the young man with the hair by the door began to call out angrily. ‘Ruhig sein, ruhig sein! Sich niedersetzen!’

  Following Bakt, they clattered up the steps at the side of the dais. By this time everybody in the hall was on his feet, and the place was filled with angry voices. As they pushed through the door at the back of the dais, the hall lights came on and, by the reflection, they saw they were in a small room full of stacked chairs. To one side, a window stood ajar and, peering out, they saw it opened on to a corridor.

  ‘The stairs!’ Bakt snapped.

  As they pushed back on to the dais and down the steps, hands snatched at them and angry faces turned. A youth grabbed hold of Bakt, who gave him a violent shove so that he staggered back, carrying several others with him. As he stumbled, there was the scrape and clatter of falling chairs.

  As they reached the double doors, they saw Foussier pass. By the time they had fought their way free, he had almost reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘Stop!’ Bakt shouted. ‘Stop right there or I shall tell my men to shoot!’

  Foussier ignored the call and Pel yelled in French. ‘We have the entrance guarded! You can’t get out!’

  As the uproar had started, Krauss had moved up from the ground floor and now, as Foussier hesitated, he began climbing the third flight of stairs with the lumbering run of an overweight man. As Foussier swung round, he saw Krauss for the first time and they glimpsed the glint of metal in his fist.

  Krauss had reached him now and had grabbed his arm, to struggle with him against the balustrade. There was a report and Pel saw a puff of smoke drift away. Krauss’ face, contorted with the struggle, changed and he staggered back, still gripping Foussier and dragging him with him. There was another shot, and Krauss pushed Foussier from him, as though trying to disable or disarm him by flinging him down the stairs.

  As Krauss sagged by the wall, Foussier had staggered back against the low marble balustrade, half turned, off-balance after Krauss’ shove, his body bowed backwards into space. For a moment, his hands flailed the air, searching for something to grasp as his feet slipped away from him and it was his very height that finished him. Transfixed, they saw him drop the gun as his body pivoted over the banister, sliding down the shiny marble under his own weight. As his feet rose, his head went down, and for one last wild second, they saw his eyes on them, agonised and accusing. A strangled shriek burst from his lungs to echo up to the roof of the building and ring round the ancient corridors, then they heard the crunch as his body struck the marble floor of the empty hall. There were shouts and questions behind them as the people in the lecture hall boiled out on to the landing, and Darcy and Bakt went down the stairs in a rush, their eyes empty and suddenly merciless. In the hall below, Darcy bent over the body then, after a moment, looked up and shook his head. Pel saw the gesture as he moved down the stairs. The Hofhalle was full of noise now, everybody talking at once, the landing outside the lecture hall packed with students, all hanging over the banister, staring downwards.

  Nobody seemed to have noticed Krauss in the excitement. He had slumped down on the stairs in a sitting position against the wall, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his chest, blood oozing through his fingers, his head bent forward, his eyes wide open but empty. On the stairs alongside him was the gun that had shot him and, picking it up, Pel saw it was a Browning 7.65 mm – just as Leguyader had said – the same gun that Nincic had used to kill Miollis and then had used on himself, the same gun that had killed Treguy.

  He felt weighed down by sadness. His dinner date and all it meant had shot off into the wild blue yonder. There had been no apology, no excuse, nothing, and he could imagine how he was regarded at that moment in the salon in the Rue de la Liberté. But, as he glanced again at Krauss, it suddenly didn’t seem to matter very much. Whatever happened now, it wouldn’t make any difference to Krauss. Nothing would make any difference to Krauss any more.

  The irony of his death within a few weeks of his retirement was almost too much to bear. Krauss had never been brilliant and he had bored them all to tears with his talk of what he intended to do when he left the force, but the pathos of seeing him crouched there, his chin on his chest, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, was almost too much. There’d be no dinner dates for Krauss. There’d be no fishing in his old age, no visits to Royan, no grandchildren, nothing.

  Somebody had already contacted headquarters and an ambulance had arrived. Two men appeared with a stretcher and stared at Foussier. Darcy waved them away and indicated Pel standing on the stairs. As they began to climb towards him, they looked a little scared and bewildered. One of them bent over Krauss and shook his head.

  Pel sighed again. He had still been hoping.

  Placing Krauss on the stretcher, they laid a blanket over him and tucked it about him, securing him against the slope of the stairs with straps. Finally, they glanced at Pel then lifted the folded end of the blanket and laid it over Krauss’ face.

  Pel followed them as they began to descend in slow, plodding steps, manoeuvring the stretcher cautiously round the corners. Darcy was waiting at the bottom with Bakt, his face taut, his eyes cold. He glanced questioningly at Pel, who shook his head, then turned and stared at Foussier who was still spreadeagled on his back, a small pool of blood beneath his head. There wasn’t an atom of compassion in his expression.

  ‘The bastard,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ Pel touched his arm and headed for the door. ‘Come on, Darcy. I think we’d better let the Chief know.’

  Note on Chief Inspector Pel Series

  Chief Inspector Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel, of the Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciaire, in Burgundy, France is, according to the New York Times, in 'his professional work, a complete paragon.'He is sharp, incisive, honest, and a leader of men and everything else a successful cop should be.'

  Outside of work, however, 'he is a milquetoast, scared of his gorgon of a housekeeper, frightened of women, doubtful of his own capabilities.'

  It should be noted, though, things do change to some degree, and in the course of the series he marries - but readers are left to judge that and the events surrounding it fo
r themselves.

  What is true, is that Pel is 'Gallic' to the core and his complex character makes a refreshing change from many of the detectives to be found in modern crime. Solutions are found without endless and tedious forensic and his relationships are very much based in real life.

  Pel Titles in Order of First Publication

  These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as stand-alone novels

  1. Pel & The Faceless Corpse 1979

  2. Death Set To Music Also as: Pel & The Parked Car 1979

  3. Pel Under Pressure 1980

  4. Pel Is Puzzled 1981

  5. Pel & The Bombers 1982

  6. Pel & The Staghound 1940

  7. Pel The Pirates 1984

  8. Pel & The Predators 1984

  9. Pel & The Prowler 1985

  10. Pel & The Paris Mob 1986

  11. Pel Among The Pueblos 1987

  12. Pel & The Faceless Corpse 1987

  13. Pel & The Touch Of Pitch 1987

  14. Pel & The Picture Of Innocence 1988

  15. Pel & The Party Spirit 1989

  16. Pel & The Missing Persons 1990

  17. Pel & The Promised Land 1991

  18. Pel & The Sepulchre Job 1992

  Further titles are available post 1993 See Juliet Hebden (author)

  Synopses of 'Pel' Titles

  Published by House of Stratus

  These can be read as a series, or as stand-alone novels

  Pel & The Faceless Corpse

  An unidentified, faceless corpse is discovered near a memorial dedicated to villagers killed by the Nazis. Pel is on the case searching for a way to name the faceless corpse. The trail leads him from Burgundy to the frontiers of France, aided by a canny Sergeant Darcy and the shy, resourceful Sergeant Nosjean. Follow the irascible, quirky Chief Inspector on a road to solving the mystery of the faceless corpse.