Pel and the Prowler

by Mark Hebden

  ‘You’ve heard what it’s all about?’ he asked, as he poured a brandy to go with the coffee he had ordered.

  Pel looked up. ‘All what’s about?’ he said.

  ‘There’s been a strangling.’

  ‘So I read. When I was in Amiens.’

  The Chief frowned. ‘Haven’t they told you? There’s been another. Last night or early this morning. It’s just come in. And it’s exactly the same as the one twelve days ago. I think we’ve got a nutter loose in the city. It has all the hallmarks. I’m glad you’re back.’

  Two

  As Pel entered his office, Cadet Martin, who helped with the mail, ran errands and fetched beer from the Bar Transvaal when it was needed, stood up. ‘I’ve got the papers, Patron,’ he said. Martin went through the newspapers like an editor looking for follow-up stories, ringing in blue anything he thought might be of interest and in red anything he felt Pel ought not to miss. It tended to spoil Pel’s enjoyment of his newspaper but there were also occasions when it saved time.

  Claudie Darel was going through a file. Neat, dark-haired and looking like Mireille Mathieu, she gave Pel a small uncertain smile that had a suggestion of nervousness about it and he guessed it was because of the murders. Two murders at such a close interval worried everybody.

  ‘Inspector Darcy?’ he asked.

  ‘Out of the office, Patron.’

  ‘Scene of this murder that was reported?’

  ‘Yes, Patron.’

  ‘And Misset’s been left behind to hang on to the telephone while De Troq’s here to drive me to the scene and fill in the details as we go?’

  Claudie smiled. ‘That’s about it, Patron.’

  De Troq’ was standing in the doorway as Pel finished glancing at the few papers on his desk. As they drove through the city, he handed out what facts he possessed.

  ‘Both the same, Patron,’ he said. ‘Both girls and both in their early twenties. We think they’re the work of the same person.’

  ‘Got the names?’

  ‘Only the first one, Patron. Second one’s not yet identified.’

  ‘I left here on the first of the month. If I remember rightly, Number One happened two days later. Right?’

  ‘Right, Patron. Name of Marguerite de Wibaux, aged twenty-one. Student at the University – Faculté des Médecins. Wealthy family. Father of Belgian origin living at Mezières near the Belgian border. Going steady with another student. Good reports on her. Keen worker. Friendly. Moral. Doc Minet said she was a virgin. No political interests. Never involved with demos. The new one came in only a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘Right, let’s keep them in order, with the first one first. Where was it?’

  ‘She was found in the entrance of that block of student flats in the Rue Devoin. We’ve checked it. Including the ground floor, it has three floors, each with two flats – bedroom, living-room, kitchen, bathroom, you know the sort. They’re all occupied. She lived on the ground floor and, from the marks that were found, she seems to have been killed within a metre or two of the door of her room. As she entered from the street, the Lab. boys think.’

  ‘And this morning’s?’

  ‘In a passage in the Rue d’Enfer. Rue de Rouen area.’

  Pel nodded. The Rue de Rouen area was the oldest part of the city, a district of sagging walls, sway-backed roofs and streets noted for their sharp turns, twists and unbelievable narrowness. American tourists in vast American cars, unaware of the perils of parked vans, were constantly getting stuck there as they tried to about-turn, and the owner of one vast Cadillac had even managed to get the nose of his car in a butcher’s shop doorway and the stern halfway up a flight of stairs so that it had taken the Police three hours to clear the blockage.

  ‘Who found this one?’ he asked.

  ‘Carpenter who has a workshop there. The passage runs between some old apartments to a yard at the back where there are one or two small workshops. The carpenter’s shop. A plumber’s premises. A small metal foundry. That sort of thing. He was going to work. He’s an early starter and he’s usually the first one down the passage.’

  ‘Dates?’

  ‘Marguerite de Wibaux on the 3rd. This other one this morning. Twelve days between them.’

  ‘Sexual?’

  ‘No, Patron. Their clothing hadn’t been disarranged.’

  ‘Robbery?’

  ‘Apparently not. Handbags appear to be untouched and there was plenty of money. In both cases.’

  ‘Method?’

  ‘Strangled. They’d been garrotted. Doc Minet said De Wibaux was attacked from behind and a loop of rope, probably strong clothes line, thrown over her head. She never knew what happened. I gather the new one’s the same.’

  Darcy was standing alongside his car in the Rue d’Enfer, speaking on the radio to headquarters. As he saw De Troq’s car swing into the curb, he immediately switched off. He offered a packet of Gauloises.

  Pel shook his head. ‘I’m giving them up.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Well –’ Pel hesitated and finally took one of the cigarettes ‘ – let’s say I’m cutting them down. I’ve got them down from half a million a day to a hundred thousand. I’m trying now to get them down to fifty thousand.’

  ‘What brought on this rush of blood to the head?’

  ‘Being married,’ Pel explained. ‘Kissing me must be like kissing an ashtray.’

  Darcy managed a laugh but it was strained. ‘How did the trip go?’

  ‘He was guilty as hell.’ Pel leaned forward. ‘Alors,’ he said. ‘We’ve been through the formalities. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. Out with it. You’re worried.’

  Darcy shrugged. ‘Well, Patron,’ he admitted, ‘two murders in twelve days aren’t enough to panic about these days. In some cities they have them in droves. The way things go, it’s a wonder the streets aren’t littered with dead. But even though it’s a bit unusual here, it still wouldn’t have worried me if one had been a strangling and one a stabbing, if one had been a middle-aged shrew who nagged her husband and the other had been in the drugs game. But it wasn’t that way, Patron. They were both killed in exactly the same way and both were decent girls. The people who knew them seem to have nothing but good to say about them.’

  ‘Anybody seen near them?’

  ‘Nobody, Patron. You know this area. It’s full of old yards and alleyways. He could disappear down one of them easily.’

  ‘De Wibaux. Have we still got her?’

  ‘In the morgue, Patron.’

  ‘And the new one?’

  Darcy nodded his head towards a passage across the road. ‘Down there.’

  Above the girl’s head, scrawled crudely on the crumbling brick of the old wall, as if by a sharp stone, was the date, 1940.

  ‘What’s that?’ Pel asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Patron,’ Darcy admitted. He jerked his head at the girl. ‘I can’t see what it has to do with her. She can’t be old enough to know much about that date. Perhaps some kids were in here fooling about.’

  ‘So why 1940?’

  ‘Some date they’d heard perhaps. You know what kids are when they’re talking together. It might not mean anything at all. In fact, it’s crude enough to be 1840 – or even 1949. The figures look pretty scratchy.’

  ‘Or,’ Pel suggested, ‘as if they were done by a murderer in a hurry.’

  He turned to the girl. Her hair was curving about her face in a wide sweep along the grubby paving stones. She was quite small and was wearing a uniform under her coat. She must once have been pretty, though her face was now the suffused puce of someone who had died for want of air. The eyes were bulging and on her cheek was a livid mark, not deep, but deep enough for the blood to well up and congeal in small hard blobs.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ Darcy said. ‘It didn’t get there by accident – when she fell to the ground or anything like that. It was done deliberately with a sharp, pointed instrument
– probably a knife – after she was dead. That’s what worries me. That’s why I think we have a nutter. It seems to be a trade mark. There was one like it on the other girl, too.’

  ‘What is it?’

  They bent together and peered at the dead girl’s face. There were what appeared to be three shallow cuts, two upright ones joined by a third across the middle.

  ‘It looks like an H,’ Pel said.

  ‘Or a W.’

  ‘Signature?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like.’

  ‘Know anything about her yet?’

  ‘She’s Bernadette Hamon. Nurse. She’s a widow. Aged twenty-six. Address, Apartment 2, 41 Rue Philomêne. It’s just round the corner.’

  ‘Hamon.’ Pel frowned. ‘Might it be the initial letter of her name?’

  At the back of the yard the wall had partly collapsed, with a gap in it which left an opening two metres wide which fell almost to the brick surface of the yard. Putting his head through, Pel found he was looking into a yard in the next street.

  ‘Escape route,’ he said. ‘He left that way, I’ll bet.’

  The place was swarming with policemen, both uniformed and plain clothes. In the yard, in the alley, and in the street men were on their hands and knees, going over every square centimetre for anything that might give a clue to the identity of the killer. A policeman was marking the dead girl’s position. Another was making drawings and two more were manoeuvring cameras and lights to get pictures. Doctor Minet, who was bending over the body, looked up as he saw Pel.

  ‘Same as the last one,’ he said. He indicated the livid weal round the throat. ‘Rope. You can see the pattern quite clearly on the neck. There are also bruises behind the neck to show where his fists gripped it and pulled it tight.’ He shook his head and sighed. He was a small, plump, kindly man who loved his fellow human beings, so that death – especially the death of someone young – always upset him a little.

  ‘When did it happen?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Last night,’ Darcy said. ‘She worked at the Children’s Hospital and was on duty there yesterday afternoon and evening. She finished later than usual because there was an emergency, then she stayed behind to take a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the canteen. She chatted for about an hour then collected her things and drove home.’

  ‘That would be about right,’ Minet agreed. ‘Some time just before midnight.’

  As they talked, Sergeant Nosjean approached. Jean-Luc Nosjean had arrived on Pel’s squad some years before, more worried about his expenses than his duties, but, because he was keen, shrewd and imaginative, he was now running the sergeants’ room and taking precedence over more senior men like Lagé and Misset. With his dark, intelligent eyes and thin face, he looked a little like Napoleon on the bridge at Lodi. He offered a sheet of paper. ‘List of what we found on her, Patron,’ he said.

  Pel glanced at it. Driver’s licence. Banker’s card. Bank book showing that she had two thousand francs to her account. Packet of Weekend cigarettes. Book of matches. Comb. Forty-five francs, twenty centimes in notes and coins. Small plastic packet of paper handkerchieves. Ballpoint pen. Holiday brochure with the price for two persons at a hotel in Corsica circled in ink.

  ‘We think she drove home and parked her car round the corner there,’ Darcy said. ‘There’s no space where she lives and there’s a type round the corner who lets her leave it behind his house.’

  ‘Got his name?’

  ‘Robert Josset. We’ll check him. She paid him, of course. She seems to have been walking along here towards her apartment when it happened.’

  ‘Anything to connect this with the De Wibaux girl, apart from the mark on the cheek?’

  ‘Same method, Patron. Roughly same area, too. Within a couple of kilometres of each other.’

  ‘Got the type who found her?’

  Darcy gestured to the passage. ‘Through there. Name of Jacques Charier. He’s in his workshop.’

  Charier was a small man with a crippled foot. His clothes were engrained with sawdust, and he was sitting on a stool alongside a bench carrying a vice and carpenter’s tools. He stood up nervously as they entered.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I swear I didn’t.’

  It had always been Pel’s firm belief that noisy protestations of innocence usually meant guilt. ‘I swear on my mother’s grave’ meant a fear of being found out, and ‘On the life of my unborn child’ meant not only a fear of being found out but of being found out at once. This one was different.

  ‘Nobody’s said you did,’ he said gently, gesturing to the carpenter to sit down. As he did so, Darcy pushed forward another stool and Pel lowered himself on to it. ‘Just tell us what happened.’

  Charier gestured helplessly. ‘I knew her,’ he said. ‘I often saw her when she’d been on night duty. I even met her once or twice in the Bar des Chevaux round the corner. Sometimes she stopped there on the way home in the morning to have a cup of coffee and a croissant. To save preparing it, she said. So she could roll straight into bed. Everybody in there knew her. She’s at the Children’s Hospital. I’ve known her ever since she came to live here. I live in the Rue Manatour, three streets away, and I usually stop in the bar on my way to work. My wife’s dead, and I can’t be bothered to make coffee at that time in the morning either.’

  After a few more questions, they took him back into the alleyway. He kept his eyes averted from the corpse. Pel indicated the number on the wall.

  ‘Seen that before?’ he asked.

  Charier shook his head. ‘No. At least, I’ve never noticed it.’

  ‘Was it there yesterday, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But I’m not certain. I think I’d have noticed it, but I’m not sure. It’s only scratched on, isn’t it, and it’s not very clear.’

  His eyes finally fell on the dead girl and, as he stopped, Pel waved him on.

  ‘She was a nice girl,’ he said in a choking voice. ‘Always smiled at me. Full of life but not pushing. Nothing like that. She was just – well, nice. We said good morning. Sometimes we talked.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t much to talk about but she told me she was going to Corsica for her holidays.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Her boyfriend, I suppose.’

  ‘She’d got one?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It was quite recent. She was knocked over when her husband died. It was leukaemia. Six months after she married. But she was brave. She didn’t let go and gradually she came round. Lately, she’d begun to come to life again and she told me she’d met someone. I was glad for her.’

  ‘Know his name?’

  ‘Yes. She told me. Bréhard. René Bréhard. He’s a doctor at the Hospital. I think she was hoping to get married again.’

  ‘What sort of relationship was it?’

  Charier looked blank and Darcy enlightened him. ‘Were they living together?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Charier seemed shocked.

  ‘Did she bring him home?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so but I don’t know. She didn’t seem the type.’

  ‘And when you found her?’

  ‘I just turned into the passage as I usually did. It’d be about seven-thirty. That sort of time. I leave home at seven, have a coffee and a roll and a glance at the paper at the bar, then come on here. It takes about half an hour. I almost trod on her. She was right there, lying on the ground. She could have been sleeping. Her coat was open a bit so that I could see she was in uniform and I guessed she must have been coming off duty when it happened.’

  ‘Did you touch her?’

  ‘No. I thought at first she’d fainted or something – you know these young girls; they slim a lot. But then I saw her face and went straight back to the bar to telephone. Did I do it right?’

  ‘You did it exactly right,’ Pel said. ‘We might not have to bother you again.’

  Charier shook his head. ‘It’ll not be the same without her,’ he said.
>
  No, Pel thought. It never was.

  Three

  The plumber and the metalworker who occupied the other two small premises in the yard were being interviewed by Nosjean, and Darcy had got his men enquiring in shops, houses and offices in the neighbouring streets and around Bernadette Hamon’s flat, and acquiring a list of the regulars at the Bar des Chevaux who knew her. She had been seen by three different people going to work the day before but by none on her way home.

  Standing by the car as the reports came in, Pel was fighting not to light a cigarette.

  ‘You’ll never do it, Patron,’ Darcy said.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘You’ll get fat.’

  ‘I’ll do exercises.’

  Darcy couldn’t see it happening. Pel’s idea of exercise wouldn’t have made a centenarian pant.

  Some time in the early afternoon they realised they’d had nothing to eat and headed for the nearest bar for a beer and sandwich. They were joined there by Judge Polverari, the juge d’instruction, who was paying a visit to the scene of the crime. He was a small stout man who had married a wealthy wife and liked occasionally to invite Pel to lunch to hear his observations on their common enemy, Judge Brisard. It pleased Pel that now he was married himself he might be able to return the compliment.

  Later they headed for the Hospital to see the dead girl’s fiancé, Doctor Bréhard. Someone had just informed him what had happened and he was sitting in the doctors’ room, a glass of brandy in front of him, staring at the floor.

  ‘How did it happen?’ he asked as Pel appeared with Darcy.

  When they told him, Bréhard, who looked about sixteen, thin, hatchet-faced and dark, put his face in his hands and sobbed.

  ‘Has she any relations in the city?’ Darcy managed to put the question, but all he got was a shake of the head.

  It seemed Bréhard wasn’t going to be much help for a while and they left him in the hands of one of the other doctors. Outside, they were met by a third doctor, a brisk young man called Padiou who led them down the corridor to answer their questions. As far as he knew, Bernadette Hamon had no relations. She came from Arles but her parents were dead and her only other relation was a sister in America.