Pel and the Prowler

by Mark Hebden

  Nadauld nodded. ‘I did. You’d better come and have a look.’

  They climbed the wire fence and followed Denais and his men. The body was alongside the track and it was minus its right leg which had been neatly severed and was lying between the rails. The rest of the body had not been touched by the train and, as they bent closer, they saw the suffused face and the ferocious weal round her neck. This time the scratches on her face were deeper, as if they’d been done in a hurry.

  Pel looked at Nadauld. ‘Know her?’

  ‘No, Chief.’

  ‘Right. We’ll wait for Doc Minet and the specialists before we move her.’ Pel turned to Denais. ‘What’s the procedure in a case like this? We’ll need to make a search and take photographs.’

  ‘We’d better inform the yard. They’ll contact Control who’ll push traffic on to the down line until we’re clear here. That’ll mean it’ll be safe.’

  As they stood in a group alongside the track they heard the sound of a train approaching and Denais gestured. ‘Better get up the bank,’ he said.

  ‘What about the body?’

  ‘It’s clear. It won’t be touched. There must have been several trains past on this stretch since it was reported.’

  It was late afternoon before Doc Minet, the photographers, artists and Lab. technicians had finished and the body could be moved.

  ‘Same as the others,’ Doc Minet said wearily. ‘The train didn’t kill her. She was dead already. She was strangled –’ he gestured ‘ – probably up there in the bushes, then thrown over the fence so that she rolled down until she lay on the verge with her leg across the line.’ He looked haggardly at Pel. ‘You’ve got another, my friend.’

  As the body was lifted to the grass close to the track and the severed leg laid alongside it on a plastic sheet, Pel turned to Darcy.

  ‘See what you can find on her, Daniel.’

  Leguyader, who already had his men spread out searching the approaches to the track, gestured up the bank. ‘He got her under the trees,’ he said. ‘Then dragged her through the undergrowth. You can see the marks of her heels and there’s one of her shoes in the bushes. She must have lost it en route. Probably he was irritated at the way we always find them within hours of him killing them and wanted to make it more difficult.’

  Pel said nothing. Leguyader was noted for a warped sense of humour and there was nothing funny in the corpse of a young girl.

  Darcy looked up, his hands full of the dead girl’s belongings. ‘No handbag, Patron,’ he said. ‘Preferred to use her pockets. All the usual. Lipstick. Eyeliner. Handkerchief. No cigarettes.’

  ‘I doubt if she smoked,’ Doc Minet said. ‘Her fingers aren’t stained and her teeth aren’t smoker’s teeth.’

  ‘Identity papers?’

  ‘Here, Patron. Honorine Nauray. Aged twenty. Shop assistant. Address: 3, Impasse Pezzo, Talant. No driving licence. Two used bus tickets. She obviously didn’t have a car.’

  ‘Girl shop assistants of her age often don’t.’ Pel bent over the dead girl and stared at the livid marks on the grey flesh of her cheek. His eyes turned to Darcy. ‘Do you think those cuts form an N?’ he asked. ‘For Nauray?’

  ‘I’d say an H, Patron.’

  ‘For Honorine?’

  ‘Name of God, Patron, the bastard can’t know them all – first names as well!’

  Pel was silent for a while. ‘The one on Alice Magueri could have been an M – just. It could even have been a rough A. The one on Marguerite de Wibaux, could have been – again just – an M. After all we thought at first it might be a W. But in no way could the one on Bernadette Hamon have been a B.’

  ‘Then they must all be Hs.’

  ‘So what’s the significance? What does H stand for?’

  ‘Hélin?’

  Pel remembered the photograph of the Faculty Ball they’d been looking at not long before. ‘Surely he didn’t know this one as well?’

  ‘Is it sure, Patron?’ Darcy said. ‘He knew De Wibaux and, judging by that photograph, he probably knew Hamon. And who knows where a prostitute plies her business? He probably knew the Magueri woman, too. If you ask me, Hélin’s a bit of a stoat, so he might have been one of her customers and, if he was, how do we know he didn’t know this girl, too?’

  Pel turned to De Troq’ who stood behind him. ‘Get out to this address. Find out where she worked. Find out who she was with last night.’

  As he spoke, they saw Sarrazin climbing the fence. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Pel breathed. ‘Now the panic will start.’

  Sure enough, it did.

  First on the scene, Sarrazin scooped the pool and, being a freelance, offered what he’d discovered to those newspapers who had first call on his services, before passing out a few snippets of information to Henriot and the others and leaving them to find out the rest themselves. The following morning it was plastered all over the daily press and the panic really started.

  Though they had taken the press into their confidence, they had been careful to keep back a few details such as the facial mutilations, and, because people suspected the police were withholding things, wild rumours of horrors began to circulate that the bodies had been found in obscene positions, that the strangler was a cat burglar who could climb drainpipes, that he was a man of enormous strength who worked so quickly no sound was ever heard from his victims.

  There was intense speculation. What kind of man was the strangler? How did he manage to get close enough to his victims to kill without being seen? Could it be even that he was a she? And what were the Police doing that they couldn’t catch him?

  The Police, in fact, were doing everything possible, and they had immediately brought back all the men from other districts whom they’d released as things had quietened down. Now every available man was on the streets to check on anyone who might be out late at night – taxi drivers, barmen, late deliverymen – knowing all the time that it was a pointless exercise because their quarry was probably on the streets for no other reason than that he wished to be. Officers dressed in plain clothes rode on buses, hung around bars, bus stops, the station, and wandered the dark streets, watching passers-by, studying faces, trying to decide if any of them were not what they seemed or were about the streets more than seemed necessary. It led them nowhere.

  New suspects were brought in. Some were men whose names had been sent in anonymously, others were pathetic creatures known to be loiterers, peeping toms, alcoholics. A few of them even turned themselves in, feeling they might have been guilty of the murders during a drunken bout or some sort of blackout. And those people who lived on the fringes of the law began to complain that they couldn’t get on with their business for the activities of the Police who were involved in a case that didn’t concern them.

  A woman found dead in a motel room south of the city sent the police cars screaming down the motorway, but she turned out to be a foreign tourist with a recently broken marriage who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. And a girl returning from a cinema felt she was being followed, and, hearing footsteps behind her, had started to run, only to find that the following footsteps also increased their pace. She arrived home in a state of panic and it occupied two policemen for four hours before Claudie Darel noticed the sound of her own heels on the pavement and worked it out that the girl was running from the echo of her own shoes.

  Honorine Nauray turned out to be different from the other victims. She was no Alice Magueri, but she was no Marguerite de Wibaux and no Bernadette Hamon either.

  ‘Her parents were expecting her home,’ De Troq’ reported. ‘But when she didn’t arrive they decided she was staying with a friend. She seems to have been a bit of a handful. Always out with men – some of them too old for her, they thought – and often claimed to be staying with friends. When she didn’t come home, though, they grew worried and her mother was just about to report her missing when I arrived to tell her what had happened to her.’

  ‘Did they know whom she was with?’


  ‘They thought her boyfriend. Name of André Chatry, salesman, 33, Rue Briogne. But I’ve seen him and he says she stood him up.’

  ‘So why was she out late?’

  ‘The girls in the shop where she worked think she’d got another boyfriend. She’d mentioned meeting a boy in the bus station buffet when she’d gone in for a coffee after work and they’d seen him hanging about outside the shop on one or two occasions. He had books under his arm so they thought he might be a student. They also said she was experienced in sex and boasted of enjoying rousing a man and then refusing him. But there was no alarm at the shop when she didn’t come in because she sometimes pretended to be ill to get the day off. She was fooling a lot of people, it seems, because her mother claimed she’d never had a day off since she started work. I’m going to the university now. I’ve got a description of the student. He had red hair so he shouldn’t be hard to find.’

  This time there had been no message. No scrawled words. No telephoned mutterings. And it left them wondering if the Prowler had got his dates wrong and had killed Honorine Nauray a day or two earlier than he’d intended – on November 7th.

  ‘Perhaps he learned something,’ Pel suggested. ‘That she was going away. Or something of that sort. Perhaps he’d been watching her and intended to kill her on November 9th but circumstances threw her in his path a little earlier.’

  It was a possibility – except for one thing.

  ‘What about Stras-St D?’ Darcy asked. ‘The Cours de Gaulle’s nowhere near the Boulevard de Strasbourg or the Ecole St Dominique.’

  Enquiries showed that Honorine Nauray wasn’t in the habit of frequenting the district round the Ecole St Dominique at all, in fact. Her route from home to her place of work and back again took her nowhere near it and the teachers who ran the school had never heard of her. She had not attended the school and, apart from the possibility that she had a man friend living in that area, they could find no connection between her and the message, and no one in the area had ever heard of her or seen her.

  ‘Which seems to mean,’ Darcy said, ‘that it has nothing to do with the Boulevard de Strasbourg and the Ecole St Dominique. For once, friend Prowler just didn’t leave his calling card.’

  Pel was on the horns of a dilemma. It was necessary for the safety of women living alone to give publicity to the killings, yet publicity always brought sick imitators, like Guillon, and news of spectacular killings could lead to similar killings, so that publicity could do harm even as it helped.

  He was still looking for a common denominator, but there appeared to be nothing beyond the fact that all the women they’d found were unmarried or at least living in an unmarried state without a husband.

  Normally when a crime was committed, the police looked first for people in the habit of committing similar crimes, because criminals were usually an unimaginative lot who followed a pattern. Some burglars broke only into shops. Others preferred to work round blocks of apartments. And pickpockets didn’t go in for burglary any more than burglars went in for picking pockets. But with sex crimes – and, despite the absence of sexual connotations, Pel was convinced the stranglings were sexual crimes – there was every kind imaginable and it was no good going to informers because the Prowler must obviously be working alone. And clearly the reason no clues to his identity had been found was because strangling was only too easy. Pressure on the neck arteries that carried blood to the brain brought unconsciousness in a matter of seconds and required no great strength. Strangling was something to which Pel preferred not to give publicity, in case someone tried it on his friends and neighbours.

  The new murder had brought the pressmen down from Paris in hordes, as well as the television crews with their cameras and microphones and sound recording boxes. Pel refused to have anything to do with them and told the Chief so, flatly.

  The Chief was angry, partly because he didn’t like handling the press any more than Pel did, but chiefly because of the new murder and the lack of progress. Common sense told him it wasn’t Pel’s fault, but he was being leaned on in his turn by other people and it was always a case, when blame was apportioned, that it was handed on to subordinates, all the way down to the office cat.

  ‘The damned man has the whole city by the balls!’ he snarled. ‘The whole city and the whole police force! What in God’s name are we doing?’

  He didn’t really have to ask. Pel was working round the clock, as also – with the possible exception of Misset – was his squad. They were already using every technique of detection available, save clairvoyants and people claiming extra-sensory perception whom, while the American Police didn’t hesitate to use them, European Police preferred to leave alone.

  ‘For the love of God –’ the Chief’s tirade looked like going on all day ‘ – we have every device known to mankind helping us—’

  ‘Except personal radios,’ Pel interrupted quietly.

  The Chief stopped dead in mid-flow and his head jerked round. ‘Personal radios won’t find him!’ he snapped.

  ‘They might save somebody’s life,’ Pel said. ‘If some woman’s attacked and the cop on the scene can’t call in, she could die before help arrived.’

  Pel’s comment effectively silenced the Chief but what he had said was true. Everything that was available was being used and it still brought them nowhere. All police leave had been cancelled once more and every available man was on the streets, though they were finding it hard, despite their uniforms and identity cards, to question women, because apartments and houses remained locked against them due to the fear that was abroad, and they were having to seek the answers through the cracks of barricaded doors. They weren’t the only ones either, because meter readers were not being allowed to do their jobs, any more than were telephone repairmen or delivery men. Even shopping hours were affected because street-corner grocers were finding that women were refusing to shop for their evening meal after the light had gone, and the only people who were doing any real business were locksmiths, ironmongers selling bolts, and kennels which could supply watchdogs. Yet all that had been produced was the astonishing and bizarre, and some of the twisted characters they had turned up from under the stones startled them with the things they’d been up to.

  Ten

  The stretch of the Boulevard de Strasbourg round the Ecole St Dominique was a quiet area close to the city boundary and close to the university. Opposite the school there was a reservoir, enclosed and covered with a grass mound, and a public garden. Further along the road was the sports ground with pitches, skating rink and running track. Just to the south-east lay the buildings of the university, lying along the hillside like white bones in the wintry sunshine. The Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, the Faculty of Sciences, the Faculty of Law, the National School of Applied Agronomic Sciences, the Anti-Cancer Centre. Further north was the Technical College and nearby the military hospital and not far away the Monument des Fusillés, the memorial to those members of the Resistance executed during the Occupation. Sitting in his car, Pel stared hard and long at it. It connected the area somehow with the date 1940, when the Resistance and the shootings had started. And that seemed to indicate that the Prowler was not, as Darcy suggested, a foreigner, but some embittered Frenchman.

  As November 8th waned and November 9th arrived, the men stationed about the place waited and watched. But nothing happened. The streets were dead after midnight and remained dead until daylight when the first motor cars began to appear. The first buses followed, then a few cyclists. Eventually the rush increased as students and lecturers arrived at the university. A few military vehicles headed down the slope from the barracks to the north and a military ambulance or two turned into the military hospital.

  All day Darcy prowled about the area in his car, waiting for the panic button to be pressed, while Pel sat in his office ready to set things in motion when it was. They were all ready and at the first sign of trouble could be on the spot within minutes. But nothing happened.

  The traf
fic remained the same as all the other days. After the first rush, the volume dropped to normal, then increased a little at lunchtime, dropped again during the afternoon, then as darkness approached, began to build up once more. Darcy’s radio was going constantly, receiving reports from the men they had stationed in the area but none of them had anything to report and they all sounded bored. There wasn’t much that was duller than watching nothing happening.

  ‘It’ll be after dark,’ Darcy said. ‘So keep your eyes open.’

  Still nothing happened so that they began to expect it around midnight. But it had turned colder and it was hard to maintain an interest when your feet were frozen and the wind coming down from the Plateau de Langres seemed to be coming all the way from Russia.

  Pel remained in his office until the early hours of the 10th when Darcy arrived, cold, hungry, puzzled and in a bad temper.

  ‘It was nothing, Patron. It didn’t have a meaning, after all.’

  For safety, they rang round the sub-stations to find out if anything had been reported. But it had been a quiet night, even quieter, it seemed, than normal. There were a few drunks, a fight in the Rue Jean-de-la-Huerta, a man who had blacked his wife’s eye for neglecting the children in the Chenove district, a small explosion in the Industrial Zone, and the usual accident reports that had arrived in Traffic. Nothing else.

  ‘I think you should go home, Patron,’ Darcy said. He sounded bitter and frustrated. They had provided for an incident and none had occurred.

  When Pel appeared later in the morning, Darcy was on the telephone again, as if he’d been there all night. Pel was looking a little like something the cat had dragged in but Darcy was spotless, immaculate and full of energy, though he couldn’t possibly have had more than an hour or two of sleep. He was ringing the sub-stations again.

  ‘There’s nothing, Patron,’ he said. ‘It was a hoax. Perhaps the message was on the window long before Alice Magueri was found. Perhaps it just wasn’t noticed. After all, nobody goes in and out of an empty shop. Perhaps it means nothing at all. Perhaps “1940” meant nothing either. Perhaps it was there and Charier and those others who used the yard just didn’t see it. Perhaps they none of them mean anything.’