Pel And The Staghound

by Mark Hebden

For the first time doubt came into her eyes. ‘Always by car. He drove himself locally but, if he was going far, he went in the office car and was driven by the chauffeur.’

  ‘And that car?’

  ‘It’s at the office.’

  ‘Is he sole head of the firm?’

  ‘Of course,’ Pujol said. ‘He entered it when he married Madame. When her father died he took over the reins.’

  Pel finally decided he wasn’t as strong as he thought he was, opened the drawer, took out a cigarette and offered the packet before lighting one himself. Madame Rensselaer’s stolid lack of interest in what had happened to her husband was beginning to worry him. He drew the tobacco smoke down to his socks.

  ‘What about before joining the firm?’ he asked.

  Pujol looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean did he put money in the firm?’

  ‘No,’ Madame Rensselaer snapped. ‘He had no money of his own. When he married me, my father took him in so that our future would be secure. Since then, of course, he’s invested money. My money and money of his own that he earned.’

  Pel took a long pull at the cigarette. ‘Was your husband a university graduate? Had he qualifications?’

  ‘None whatsoever. He was born in a farm cottage at Forzée-le-Grand in Lorraine near the Belgian border. But he was bright and eventually, he moved south to Strasbourg. Then he got a job with Peugeot in Paris and then in the chemical industry in this city. It was then that we met. Very shortly afterwards, we set up house in a small apartment I had.’

  Pel paused, choosing his next questions carefully. ‘When were you married, Madame?’

  ‘April, 1961.’

  ‘Had you any children?’

  ‘One daughter. Marie-Christine.’

  ‘When was she born?’

  ‘1962,’ Pujol said quickly.

  ‘Be quiet, Bernard,’ Madame Rensselaer snapped. ‘She was born in 1961.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been – !’

  ‘Of course she could!’

  ‘But, of course – ’ Pujol’s face was wreathed in a smile, as though he’d just discovered an incredible truth ‘ – she was a premature child, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She was nothing of the sort!’ A pair of cold eyes fastened on the lawyer. ‘I was two months pregnant when we married. I’d been sleeping with François for a year by that time. At first on and off, then regularly.’

  Pujol looked uncomfortable.

  ‘And your daughter, Madame?’ Pel said. ‘Is she married herself?’

  ‘To a good-for-nothing who feels he should have a share in the firm.’

  Pel said nothing and she explained. ‘He thinks that because my husband married me and rose to become head of Produits Morand he should do the same. The difference, however, is that my husband’s a clever man. My son-in-law is not. He’s merely a spiteful boy who sees an opportunity for advancement without too much effort. Doubtless my daughter told him the circumstances of our marriage and he decided he could do the same.’

  Pujol gave Pel an unhappy look. Pel was busy thinking.

  ‘How old are you, Madame?’

  There was a long pause. Pujol looked at his client and then at Pel.

  ‘I am fifty-six.’

  ‘Then you were thirty-seven when your daughter was born and thirty-six, shall we say, when you married?’ Pel hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘Would you say, Madame, that your husband married you for your money?’

  Madame Rensselaer gave him an angry stare. ‘He married me because I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘He had made me pregnant.’

  Pujol gave Pel a triumphant look but it died as Madame Rensselaer went on. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘I suspect he probably decided if he made me pregnant then I would naturally insist on him marrying me. That way it could not be said he was marrying me for my money.’

  ‘I must protest – ’ Pujol rose in his chair and Madame Rensselaer gestured irritably at him to be quiet.

  ‘Did you love him?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘And now?’

  She gave a small movement of her shoulders that precluded the need for an answer.

  ‘Did he have friends who weren’t your friends?’

  ‘We went our own way.’

  ‘Women friends?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A mistress?’

  There was a long pause and Pujol flicked a nervous glance at his client.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘No. None of them.’

  Pel sat back. Now he had the reason why she’d been in no hurry to report her husband’s disappearance. She obviously couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘Did he make arrangements for his disappearance? At the firm?’

  ‘No.’ Pujol frowned. ‘That’s what worries me. Previously, when he’s gone on – er – these short holidays, it’s always been at a quiet time when there was nothing in the balance. Now there are several things he ought to be attending to. The FPSM contract, for instance. It’s overdue for signing and they’re growing concerned. He’s also due to go to London, and there’s a conference in New York in a fortnight. Normally he spends his time before such a trip doing his homework.’

  ‘On previous occasions, you knew where he went?’

  ‘He didn’t encourage questions.’

  ‘In the event of his death, who benefits from his will?’

  Pujol looked pink. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he admitted.

  ‘You’re his lawyer.’

  ‘Nevertheless, he never made a will with me. I was always begging him to. With a stake as big as Produits Morand, I visualised all sorts of problems. I advised him to but he kept putting it off.’

  ‘Could he have made a will with any other lawyer?’

  ‘I’ve tried every one in the city. There’s no knowledge of one. His bank has no knowledge of one either.’

  ‘That means the law will take its usual course and any possessions and holdings in the firm will go automatically to Madame here.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Pujol flushed. ‘Unless —’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless,’ Madame Rensselaer said bluntly, ‘he had some woman somewhere to whom he intended to leave his belongings and who holds a will we don’t know about.’

  ‘There’s no kidnapping involved here,’ Pel said shortly.

  The Chief rubbed his chin and looked at the file Pel had handed him. Despite what he’d said, he’d opened one just in case. ‘There might just be,’ he said.

  Pel disagreed. ‘He clearly married Madame to get an interest in the firm, and now that he’s got it and her father’s dead and can no longer change things, he’s showing that he never had any other interest in her.’

  ‘We still can’t he certain.’ The Chief played with a pencil for a moment. ‘Could he be holed up with a woman somewhere? South of France? Switzerland? Perhaps America? He has the money to go where he likes. Perhaps he’s been maintaining some woman for years and just decided to take a month or two off.’

  ‘A man going to see his mistress doesn’t usually leave his car behind,’ Pel said. ‘He takes it with him. Moreover he doesn’t normally disappear early on a working day. He fails to come home at night.’

  The Chief remained unconvinced. ‘He might turn up,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt it. Personally, I think he’s dead.’

  The Chief’s eyebrows rose. This was something that had apparently not occurred to him. Kidnapping, adultery – they were easily understood. But dead?

  ‘Murdered,’ Pel said helpfully.

  The Chief looked startled. ‘But who’d want to murder Rensselaer?’

  Pel gave a malicious smile. ‘Well, for one,’ he said, ‘his wife might.’

  Six

  At about the time that Pel was leaving the Chief’s office, a car was just leaving Douzay-le-Duc on the north-eastern side of the Plateau de Langres. It was a small grey Renault and it belonged to
a man called Guy Ros. His wife had died the previous year and, because he was a compulsive talker, he had overcome his loneliness by buying a dog.

  It was an English cocker spaniel which he named Marco. It was red in colour, with large fluffy feet, a stump of a tail and long ears which fell in its food and had to be wiped after every meal. It made an excellent companion for Ros and went everywhere with him.

  On this particular day, he had been to Douzay to deliver a wedding present for a niece who was to be married the following month. It was an opportunity to meet people and he went cheerfully. His relations, knowing his propensity for talking, filled him full of food and wine, allowed him to doze in the chair after lunch, then sent him home.

  As the car climbed up to the plateau, he heard the dog, which had spent the whole day in the car, begin to whimper and realised that it had not been allowed out to lift its leg. As he thought about it, he became aware of the wine he’d drunk and realised he needed to lift his own leg. He decided to stop, let the dog have a run and take a walk to get a breath of fresh air.

  The sun was out for a change and the blustery wind seemed to have dropped.

  ‘In a minute, Marco,’ he said to the dog.

  Coming to a crossroads and seeing woods where the dog could enjoy itself away from the traffic, he turned left. After a while, he found a cart track and, stopping the car, let the dog out. It lifted its leg at once, then bolted off into the brown bracken, barking joyfully at its freedom. Following it down the path, he could hear it snuffling in the undergrowth first on one side then on the other, emitting little yelps and whines of excitement. After a quarter of an hour, Ros stopped and sat on a log for a smoke. When he’d finished, he carefully stubbed out the cigarette, remembering all the warnings against fire he saw about the countryside, then whistled for the dog.

  For a long time, he heard nothing and whistled again. There was a small whine from the undergrowth and he noticed that this time it sounded unhappy.

  ‘Marco,’ he called. ‘Come along, boy!’

  The dog emerged at last, its tail down, its eyes enormous. It was limping as if its feet hurt and, puzzled, he bent to look at it. He could see nothing wrong at first, then he noticed that the pads were raw-looking and that merely touching them seemed to bother the animal.

  He picked it up and walked back to the car. As he put it on the rear seat it whimpered with pain.

  Worried, he drove home quickly and was about to examine the dog when he realised that on his jacket, where he had carried the animal, there were two brown marks, almost like burns, where its paws had rested, and he realised that his own finger ends were sore, pink, and itchy.

  With Sammy Belec before the magistrates and now in 72, Rue d’Auxonne, by which appellation the inmates knew the city’s prison, Edouard-Charles Duche was buried in his native village of Bénois de L’Herbue. The case wasn’t closed but no bloodstains had been found on Sammy Belec’s clothing so there seemed nothing to connect him to the murder. The knife had not been found – though that was not unexpected since it was always easy to toss a knife down a drain – but with an open-and-shut case of stabbing there wasn’t much point in hanging on to the corpse.

  Bénois de L’Herbue was a narrow little place just off the N 74 on the lower side of the slope. It was said that the right of the road was entirely Conservative and the left entirely Socialist and that it showed in the wine they produced. Perhaps, coming from the left hand side, Edouard-Charles Duche had had ambitions to cross.

  It was a sung mass, not just a plain funeral, and following Duche’s girlfriend there was a small phalanx of men in black ties and dark suits with black armbands. They were all in their late twenties, all with broad shoulders and hard eyes. In the centre of the group was a younger man and they surrounded him as if they were a bodyguard expecting an assassination.

  His mind working, Nosjean watched them quietly from among the tombstones. It was cold and he wondered how Sammy Belec was coping with prison and whether he was being allowed to use the perfume he so much liked. His eyes followed the figures in black moving among the tombstones. When he died, he decided, it would be a much simpler affair. There’d not be a cortège of hired limousines – chiefly because policemen’s families couldn’t normally afford such ostentation – and there’d be far fewer mourners. His parents. His sisters. Perhaps Odile Chenandier. Someone from the Police Department. Krauss’ funeral, he remembered, had been simplicity itself because Krauss hadn’t had much family and most of the mourners were from the PJ.

  He glanced again at the men in black. They had a nervous air about them and there seemed a lot of whispering going on. If they hadn’t been at a funeral, he thought, he’d have said they were planning to rob a bank.

  Still a little startled at his elevation – without an increase in rank, you could hardly call it promotion – Pel was trying to get down to reorganising his office. It wasn’t easy because there were constant interruptions.

  It had been the Chief’s suggestion that he turned over the muggings in the Cours General de Gaulle to Inspector Goriot, but Goriot was a little piqued at Pel’s advancement and was not being very helpful and, anyway, Pel felt they owed a little to Yves-Pol Aramis – né Paul Dupont – because he’d helped them on more than one occasion. In the habit of sitting in bars waiting for his friends, the police had used him on occasion to keep an eye on someone who might grow suspicious of a brawny young policeman busily reading the newspaper at the other side of the room. When they’d been tipped off about a break-in at Zamenhofs’, the furriers near the Palais des Ducs, he’d allowed them to plant Nosjean behind the counter of his boutique opposite, resplendent in a pale chiffon scarf and a green shirt that had made everyone in the sergeants’ room fall about laughing. Yves-Pol was a good friend and they went out of their way to be helpful, chasing up anybody who decided he was easy meat for a bit of bullying, buying him a drink when they saw him in a bar and generally keeping an eye on him and his premises. To Pel, it was a duty to find out who’d assaulted him.

  Duche’s murder was different. Save for the technical fact that they had to solve it, it didn’t worry them overmuch, while, since Rensselaer could well – despite Pel’s hunch – be with a woman somewhere, so far they weren’t worrying a great deal about him either.

  Watching them from the doorway with Darcy, Pel studied his team with the disillusioned eye of someone who knew every one of their faults. With the exception of Misset, who was far from being dedicated, they were good policemen in that they tried to do their duty, though Lagé could hardly be called a brain and they were all human enough to make mistakes.

  Alain Rodsky was sitting at Lagé’s desk, writing. The old man who’d tried to drown his wife in a bucket was not responding to treatment and he and Lagé were trying to work out a way to bring home to him the seriousness of what he’d done.

  ‘He said he’d do it again if he caught her making eyes at anyone,’ Lagé was saying.

  Rodsky grinned. ‘Why not stuff his head in a bucket of water?’ he suggested. ‘See how he likes it. I’ve always advocated less psychiatry and more short sharp shocks. My department would have you believe molestations are just somebody being playful. Even if you find Armoire à Glace, some clot will speak up for him and they’ll let him off with a caution and a hundred francs from the police funds. They’d probably even decide he was right and pansies need beating up.’

  ‘It gets more difficult,’ Lagé agreed.

  ‘These days,’ Rodsky said, ‘you have to find someone with a cleaver in his hands and the corpse cut up into little cubes on the kitchen table. And even then the psychiatric boys might well say he’s just a disturbed person in need of treatment. You’ll never catch him. He’s too clever. He appears at night and between cars so there are no headlights.’ He nodded towards De Troquereau who was immersed in a file. ‘Is he one?’ Pel heard him whisper. ‘He looks as though he couldn’t lift a wet lettuce.’

  Back in his office, Pel sat frowning for a while, Rodsky’s
words in his mind. ‘Armoire à Glace,’ he said to Darcy. ‘Wouldn’t Misset be the man to handle him? He’s bigger.’

  ‘And stupider,’ Darcy said bluntly. ‘I’ve given the job to De Troquereau.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s not your job any more, Patron,’ Darcy reminded him gently. ‘It’s mine.’

  Pel sighed, feeling that the whole structure of French police work was in danger of falling apart without him running the show. ‘Think he can do it?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s keen,’ Darcy said. ‘What’s more, he’s got the build. If he walks up and down a bit as if he’s waiting to be picked tip, Armoire à Glace ought to spot him at once.’

  ‘Armoire’s big.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be able to handle big assailants.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like him killed, all the same,’ Pel said. ‘We’d probably have what’s left of the ancient régime on our necks.’

  As Darcy left, Nosjean appeared. ‘I’ve just come from Duche’s funeral, Patron,’ he said. ‘Sung mass. All the trimmings. Choirboys. Girlfriend in silver fox furs.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’d say the gang’s still in business?’

  ‘They are?’ Pel looked interested. ‘Without Edouard-Charles? Who’s running it?’

  ‘His little brother, Philippe.’

  ‘What are they up to?’

  ‘I don’t know, Chief, but I dare bet they’re up to something. I’ve been doing a bit of asking around. Duche had also eaten in the city the evening he was killed. At the Moulin-à-Vent. Like Sammy – with his friends. They were probably planning something and were talking it over. He then took a taxi towards his home – I’ve found the driver – but got him to drop him at the Bar de la Descente because it was cold and he felt like a rum. That’s what the driver says he said, but, of course, it’s just possible he was expecting someone who was going to help them in whatever it was they were setting up, and when he found he hadn’t turned up, he headed through the alley towards his home.’

  ‘Go on, mon brave,’ Pel encouraged. ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Yes, Patron.’ Nosjean tried to explain. Duche and Sammy had been at each other’s throats for years. Occasionally, one of their boys suffered an ‘accident’, or had to be whipped into hospital with a broken nose and black eyes from ‘walking into a cupboard door’ – something they always found hard to explain and never wished to talk about – but Sammy and Duche never came to blows. Like two dogs who fancied a fight but were unsure who was going to win.