Pel And The Staghound

by Mark Hebden

  A solitary uniformed policeman was watching the last of the traffic. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses, despite the hour, and they made him look like something out of the Mafia. It was Sous-Brigadier Thibault, who had arrested Sammy Belec, and as Nosjean approached, his sour look changed to one of recognition.

  ‘Sammy Belec,’ Nosjean said. ‘When you arrested him, which clock did you use?’

  ‘I used my watch.’

  ‘Did you check it?’

  ‘Yes. Sammy said it was slow.’ Thibault indicated the travel agency clock. ‘I checked it by that. It goes by station time. It’s never wrong.’

  Nosjean smiled. ‘It was on this occasion,’ he said.

  Pel was in a reckless frame of mind by this time. In his hand he held a glass containing about a bucketful of brandy. Brandy was bad for the incipient ulcer he had long since convinced himself he possessed, but the coffee had been decaffeinated – she had noticed that, too! – and would not keep him awake all night. He was entranced. In a daze he saw not a perfectly ordinary woman opposite him, attractive but far from being a beauty, slim without being skinny, shapely without being overwhelming, but Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Danielle Darneux – as they had been in their youth, of course! – and a few others, all rolled into one.

  He had listened to her entranced, without really hearing what she was saying. His mind was too full of his own thoughts to absorb anybody else’s. He’d started to think of buying a house at Plombières, and a few books on gardening. There were plenty of police pensioners about who’d do the work for him and he rather fancied himself as a country squire. Perhaps even a dog. He’d thought of a dog once before but his experience with Didier’s spaniel had put him off a little.

  As she bent over to push his coffee cup nearer, he found himself looking down the front of her dress and it started him thinking things which he felt that as a good Burgundian he ought not to think. Or perhaps, as a good Burgundian, he ought to think them. It was a little confusing. She was smiling.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I find it very lonely at night.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure,’ Pel said. It was a terrible business being lonely at night. He’d suffered from it ever since adolescence. He hadn’t even had much luck when he’d tried to rectify the matter. One of the girls he’d met, working up to full revs, had asked his name and when he’d said Evariste Clovis Désiré, had fallen out of bed laughing and that had been the end of that many-splendoured moment.

  She was telling him some story now about the old aunt who’d just died.

  ‘She never married,’ she said. ‘She had a man friend but it never developed into anything, which was such a, pity. But he said he believed in platonic friendships and that was that.’ She gave Pel an uneasy look, and he realised she was wondering if he held the same views.

  ‘Men friends are necessary in this world, aren’t they?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Anxious to show enthusiasm, Pel’s head nodded like a kelly doll’s. Of course men were necessary to women. As women were necessary to men.

  He was beginning by this time to work up quite a head of steam. At what moment in the proceedings, he was wondering, should he lay hands on her and bear her to the settee?

  ‘Do you believe in platonic friendships?’

  This, Pel decided, was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Everything hung on his answer, he felt sure, and he was anxious not to be equivocal. ‘It chiefly depends,’ he said cheerfully, ‘on the looks of the woman and the virility of the man. Given good looks and a normal amount of red blood, it would seem wholly unnatural.’

  She seemed to approve but Pel, unable to let well alone, pushed on a little further.

  ‘And, as it happens,’ he said, ‘I’ve investigated a dozen cases where a platonic friendship ended in a grand passion which resulted in one or the other partner getting their throat slit.’

  It had been intended to be witty but instead it sounded crude and she looked at him, a little startled. They’d appeared to be getting along famously, but for the first time she seemed to get a view of the other side of Pel’s life and she seemed wary of him.

  Somehow the conversation, which had been going so swimmingly, had run abruptly off the rails. She was eyeing him dubiously and, working up a polish on his misgivings, he was just trying to think of something that would bring everything back on course when the telephone rang.

  She seemed more than anxious to answer it, as if she’d discovered something about him a ruthlessness, a harshness that she hadn’t expected in the man she’d grown used to. She returned, looking faintly disturbed.

  ‘It’s for you, Evariste,’ she said.

  Pel’s expression slipped to one of irritation as he wondered why in the name of God Darcy should wish to ring him at this time of the night and here. Only Darcy knew where he was and indeed why he was there and it must be something important.

  ‘Pel,’ he snapped into the telephone.

  ‘Darcy, Patron. I think you ought to come in. De Troq’s got Armoire à Glace and Nosjean’s busted Sammy Belec’s alibi. Demolished it completely. The place’s full of lawyers. Judge Polverari’s here with the Chief, and I have a feeling you ought to be too.’

  Pel put the telephone down slowly. His elation at the thought that two of the cases that had been bothering them had been cleared up clashed with the annoyance he felt at the interruption. Why, he wondered, did God have it in for him so? Always, at the most crucial moments, his job interfered.

  ‘I have to go,’ he announced.

  He wasn’t sure whether she was upset or pleased. The evening had been going well until the last few moments when suddenly the atmosphere that surrounded his work had intruded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. But no more. No tears sprang to her eyes. There was no catch in her voice.

  He explained what had happened and when she made no comment, he went on, feeling she didn’t properly understand the intensity of his hatred for people who couldn’t live without dishonesty or violence, and the dedication he showed to his work.

  ‘One of them’s a killing,’ he said stiffly. ‘And killing’s not only poor for the decorum of the human tribe, it also threatens its survival.’

  ‘Isn’t that being rather flippant?’

  Pel’s face was suddenly grim. He was thinking of bodies chopped up and hungry hounds that would eat anything so long as it was flesh.

  ‘If I weren’t flippant,’ he said, ‘I’d be in the madhouse. Murder’s ugly and I see too much of it.’

  Nineteen

  The sergeants’ room was noisy with success when Pel arrived. Bottles of beer were appearing from the Bar Transvaal across the road and the Chief even brought a bottle of champagne.

  It wasn’t every week you had a haul such as they’d just pulled off. After the capture of the Duche gang, it was a triumph that seemed to justify entirely Pel’s new rôle.

  De Troquereau was limping heavily and Nosjean looked worn out. But a visit to 72, Rue d’Auxonne, when Sammy Belec was wanting only to go to sleep, had settled everything. Sammy was suffering from indigestion and in no mood to resist and Nosjean had finally clinched it with a confession.

  Duche would probably still have been alive but for the fact that both he and Sammy had had ideas about Zamenhofs’ at roughly the same time and, anxious to discuss it with their followers, had both chosen the same night to dine in town.

  Panicking without a car after the stabbing and desperate for an alibi, Sammy had run to the main road and, as the bus had appeared fortuitously and slowed down for the corner, its door wide open, its crew indifferent, he had jumped aboard. He had tossed the knife through the open door as the bus had sped down the hill then, realising he had spots of blood on his overcoat, had tucked it down behind the seat and, with the bus ahead of schedule, had jumped off near the Porte Guillaume. Noticing at once the defective clock at the travel agents’, he had been quick-witted enough to realise at once that it presented him with the alibi he needed and,
settling to go to prison on the minor charge of assault, he had walked up to the first person he saw and got himself arrested – at a time apparently when Edouard-Charles Duche was still gasping out his life in the alley near the Bar de la Descente. Leguyader had got a move on and his report, waiting for Nosjean as he had returned, had confirmed that the blood on the coat was Duche’s, while the coat had proved to have fibre strands inside which matched those from Sammy’s suit.

  Noslean and De Troq’ were the heroes. Sammy was finally nobbled and he and the Duche gang had been joined at Number 72 by Rodsky, rather the worse for wear after his encounter with De Troq’.

  ‘I always said you couldn’t trust him,’ Misset pointed out. The air was still noisy with congratulations when Pel walked in. He listened quietly as De Troq’ explained what had happened and Nosjean spread on the table the overcoat he’d collected from the Lost Property Department at the bus station. A faint whiff of Sammy’s perfume lifted to their nostrils.

  ‘It was something Rodsky said about Armoire à Glace’s timing that set me thinking,’ Nosjean explained. ‘Sammy’s was just too perfect.’

  Darcy nodded at the coat. ‘It certainly smells like Sammy,’ he said. ‘Why not find out what perfume he uses and do a check with the manufacturers?’

  Pel nodded and headed for his office. ‘You did well, mon brave.’

  Nosjean stared after him. He’d been expecting promotion. Perhaps even the Légion d’Honneur.

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ he asked.

  Darcy shrugged. ‘Unrequited love, I suspect,’ he said.

  He gazed after Pel. He seemed to be in a cataleptic trance. There was something, he decided, that needed looking into. As he put his head round Pel’s door, Pel was standing by the window, staring out at nothingness.

  ‘Anything wrong, Patron?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘I have received a bullet through the heart,’ Pel said.

  ‘How did the dinner date go?’

  ‘I suspect I made a mess of it.’

  Darcy smiled. ‘Cheer up, Patron.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll rally shortly.’

  Darcy closed the door quietly. Poor old sod, he thought. Despite Pel’s eccentricities, Darcy was fond of him. Several times he’d prevented Darcy putting his foot in it when he’d been over-eager and, though he was always sparing with his praise when face to face, at least, he wasn’t sparing with it in his reports, and both Darcy and Nosjean had benefited by it. He was a good detective; he just didn’t know how to handle his private life. It seemed to Darcy that the voice of experience was needed.

  Everybody remained noisy and excited all next day – even when it came to getting it down on paper, which was enough to put even the strongest man off his food. From his office, Pel listened to it all dispiritedly, still brooding on the night before. He’d written a polite little note of thanks and apologised if he’d seemed crude and got Claudie Darel to drop it in at ‘Nanette’s’. Ever since, he’d been waiting for the telephone to ring with a message of good cheer. Come home, all is forgiven. That sort of thing. But it hadn’t.

  He pawed disconsolately at the papers on his desk. De Troq’s report and Nosjean’s report hadn’t yet arrived and there was only the usual bumph. Statistics. A large folder from the Societé Générale des Fleuves Intérieures which had somehow got into the wrong department. A complaint about the danger of dumping industrial waste. He glanced at the name. Some vet who, he supposed, had had one of his cows poisoned by cyanide or something. He pushed them aside.

  His mind returned to the previous night. He had gone out to his date full of enthusiasm and determined to become somebody’s lover and had returned the usual Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel, frustrated, sour, the same strange mixture of worldly knowledge where criminals were concerned and naïvety where his own affairs intruded, of boldness and humility, ruthlessness and hesitancy. He also, he felt, had a cold coming on.

  At lunchtime, he ate a sandwich and drank a beer in the Bar Transvaal, not daring to try his luck in the Relais St Armand in case he bumped into Madame Faivre-Perret.

  During the afternoon, still brooding, he pushed the papers on his desk around again until it was almost time to pack up work, when he decided he’d better do something about them.

  He managed to unload several of them into the ‘Pending’ tray, realised that the report from the River Board concerned a drowning at Argay and should be sent to the uniformed branch, and was just about to toss the report on the dumping of industrial waste into the same ‘Out’ pile when the words ‘Fond des Chouettes’ caught his eye.

  Sitting bolt upright, he snatched at it and began to read.

  ‘You, too, now?’ The man on the switchboard tried on Darcy what he always tried on Pel. ‘What do I ask for? A tint or a shampoo and set?’

  ‘Listen, copain – ’ Darcy wasn’t Pel and he reacted differently ‘ – just get the number and cut out the funny business.’

  There was an affronted silence on the line and Darcy just caught the end of a muttered ‘ – jumped-up inspectors.’

  When the answer came, Darcy gave his name and rank and asked to speak to Madame Faivre-Perret.

  When it came, the voice was low and soft and for a moment Darcy wondered what he was doing pushing Pel’s case.

  ‘Madame – this is Daniel Darcy. Inspector Daniel Darcy. I’d be grateful if you could spare me a few minutes of your time.’

  The voice became wary. ‘I’m afraid I’m very busy.’ ‘I’d be grateful, Madame. It concerns Inspector Pel.’

  There was a distinct pause compounded of distrust mixed with curiosity.

  ‘Why doesn’t Inspector Pel ring up himself?’

  ‘That’s the point, Madame,’ Darcy insisted. ‘I feel there are things about Inspector Pel you should know.’

  The voice grew cool. ‘He’s been discussing me with his staff?’

  ‘On the contrary, Madame. That’s something he’s never done and, in a group of men where friendships with women are part of normal conversation, even subject to a certain amount of ribaldry, that’s unusual. He’s never brought your name into the conversation nor ever permitted it to be.’

  ‘He hasn’t?’

  ‘Madame, he’s behaved always with absolute decorum, which is why I feel I must speak to you. My chief is very distressed —’

  ‘He is? He has said so?’ There was a sudden concern and Darcy knew he was winning.

  ‘No, Madame. But I’ve known him long enough to know when he is distressed.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a pause. ‘When do you wish to come?’

  ‘There’s no time better than the present, Madame.’

  When Darcy appeared at ‘Nanette’s’, not for the first time he found himself more than a little surprised at Pel’s good taste.

  Despite the spectacles she put on to get a better look at him, Madame Faivre-Perret would have graced any gathering or any home and it seemed to him that in affairs of the heart Pel ought to have the benefit of Darcy’s greater wisdom.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Madame,’ he said slowly, ‘if I seem to be awkward, but I’m appearing in the rôle of advocate on behalf of my chief. He’s a proud type, even a little strange at times.’

  She studied him gravely for a moment then a small smile crossed her lips. ‘He does say odd things,’ she agreed.

  Darcy smiled back, turning on his charm full bore. ‘You have to understand my chief, Madame,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked with him a long time. He’s under a great strain when he’s on a case. He’s a dedicated policeman absorbed in his work. Moreover, he’s one of the best in the business and he’ll go far. But, he’s also a very shy man, kinder than he allows himself to appear. He needs affection. He needs someone to look after him.’

  She looked at him with a bright alert eye. ‘And you’re suggesting me?’

  Darcy turned on his wide smile again. ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘that seems to depend on you.’

  It was late when Pel finished reading and th
e day staff of the Hôtel de Police had vanished. Still he sat, deep in thought. The sergeants’ room emptied, De Troq’, to the surprise of Nosjean and Misset, disappearing with Claudie Darel.

  Reaching for his hat and coat, Pel hurried to the car park and, driving through the city, he stopped outside a large house with a plaque on the wall – Albert Estienne, Vétérinaire.

  He was shown into a waiting room where several people were sitting with small animals – a sick-looking retriever, a cat with a bandaged tail which had obviously been caught in a door, a child with a caged bird. The assistant who showed him in looked curiously at him.

  ‘You’ll have to wait, Monsieur,’ she said. ‘Monsieur Estienne likes to attend to the animals first.’

  It was late as the waiting room cleared and he was called to the surgery. Estienne was tall and slim with a sensitive face and strong slender hands. He wore tweeds under his white coat and had the look about him of a farmer. Pel produced his badge and explained the reason for his visit.

  ‘I wondered when someone was going to take some action,’ Estienne said sharply. ‘Toxic industrial waste should be got rid of in the proper place. It might have been a child instead of an animal.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Pel said.

  Estienne frowned. ‘At first I thought nothing of it,’ he said. ‘But then I read in the paper something about a staghound being poisoned near the Fond des Chouettes by hydrochloric acid—’

  ‘Not poisoned,’ Pel said. ‘Burned.’

  ‘Oh! Well, it’s all the same. There’s too much of this dumping of industrial waste. Lorry drivers trying to get home early who can’t be bothered to take it where it should go. I’m always coming across polluted rivers full of dead fish. Even cattle and sheep that have been poisoned. When I found I had a good case, it seemed to me to be time to report it to the police.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report it at once?’