by Mark Hebden
Estienne looked annoyed. ‘I did. But the officer who took the message didn’t seem to grasp what I was telling him and seemed to think the dog had been run over. It was a cocker spaniel and belonged to a man called Guy Ros and I knew it because it came to me for worming and injections for distemper and hardpad. It was a well-looked-after animal and though the owner’s a bit of a bore, he’s pretty stable so, while I don’t normally get out of bed for pets because pet owners tend to be over-emotional about them, this time I guessed it was serious. Ros had noticed the dog was distressed when he went to bed and during the night he was awakened by whining and yelping outside his bedroom door. The dog was there. Its coat was staring and its eyes were wild. It had been very sick and was clearly in pain. It had done the only thing it knew and dragged itself up the stairs to its master’s room. He wrapped it in an old coat and rang me.’
As Estienne paused, Pel waved him on.
‘I immediately saw that its pads were raw and inflamed and that the hair that grows between them had a burned look. Ros then mentioned that his own fingers were sore and he thought that the dog had run through some sort of fertiliser and got it on its feet, and that he’d picked it up, too, while he was feeling the pads to see what was wrong. When I read about the staghound, I wondered if there were any connection.’
He paused for a moment, assembling his thoughts. ‘The spaniel had acid on its pads and had obviously licked them, because its tongue and the inside of its mouth were raw. Inevitably some had gone down to the stomach.’
Pel leaned forward. ‘Why did you decide it was acid?’
‘The smell. It was quite strong. I decided to dose the animal with an alkaline solution. But it was too late. It grew worse and in the end I telephoned the owner to say I’d have to put it down.’
‘What about the body?’
‘It’s been burned, of course.’
Pel sighed. Normally, what the police suffered from was inefficiency. In this case it seemed to be over-efficiency.
‘Perhaps our laboratory could have discovered what was wrong,’ he said, a hint of reproach in his voice.
Estienne gave a small smile. ‘There’s no need, I can tell you. It was hydrochloric acid. Undiluted hydrochloric acid. Industrial hydrochloric acid. Strong stuff. Before I had the body destroyed, I did a post-mortem. I had no doubt.’
So much, Pel thought sourly, for Misset. He’d have to go.
He leaned forward. ‘You suggested all this had happened near the Fond des Chouettes,’ he said.
Estienne shrugged. ‘Guesswork really,’ he admitted. ‘An attempt to find the acid before anything else was hurt. I worked it out from what Ros told me of his movements.’
‘Do you know the Fond des Chouettes?’
‘No.’
‘The country round it?’
‘A little.’
‘Would you say that a lorry carrying industrial waste could have dumped this acid there? If I remember rightly, apart from the main road into the valley there are only footpaths and cart-tracks.’
Estienne looked puzzled. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed slowly.
‘It probably couldn’t.’
Leaving Estienne’s, Pel drove back to the city and snatched a meal. Then he returned to his office and read Estienne’s report again, checking it with a map of the area. By the time he’d finished, it was late and he sat at his desk, his mind busy, occupied with Guy Ros’ cocker spaniel. It was more than a coincidence and his mind went back to the staghound, Archer. Ros’ spaniel had only had acid-burned pads. The hound had burned its belly, chest, throat, chops, mouth, forelegs, tail, rear legs and ears. As if it had been lying down in it, Leguyader had said. Lying down in it! Wallowing in it! Surely it meant something.
It was time to go home. The thought depressed him and he pushed the files aside without much enthusiasm. Even the little enthusiasm there was dissipated as he halted his car outside his home in the Rue Martin-de-Noinville.
Perhaps Madame Faivre-Perret’s silence sprang from her having seen his home. It looked like a load of old doors and windows dumped in the garden and left to erect themselves. Perhaps, puzzled by his abrupt departure the night before, she’d decided to find out more about him and one look at his home had convinced her she’d be wiser to keep her distance.
As he stepped inside the door, he felt something under his foot. A look of disgust on his face, he went outside again and wiped his shoe on the handkerchief of lawn. It was time Master Didier went home, he decided angrily and he was ready there and then to drag the boy from his bed and fling him out of the door with his dog.
Cleaning up the mess with paper and a coal shovel, he had just wiped the floor when it dawned on him the dog wasn’t in its cardboard carton.
On my bed again, he thought savagely, and bolting upstairs, he stopped dead outside Didier’s room. The puppy was lying there again, its head on its paws, its paws on one of Didier’s slippers, the picture of devotion. It melted even Pel’s cold heart. Then its eyes opened and, without moving its head, it lifted its gaze to Pel and its stump of tail moved. Feeling brutal, he bent and touched the dog’s head.
Then he stopped dead and straightened slowly. Of course! The thing hit him like a blow in the face. Of course! OF COURSE!
Twenty
Pel was feeling better as he drove towards St Julien. After all, who wouldn’t with a police officer alongside him who looked like Mireille Mathieu, all sleek black hair and enormous eyes?
He wanted to interview Retif and he needed someone to act as a witness and write down in shorthand the interview he was about to conduct. Claudie Darel could do both.
In the rear seat was a large woman with thick spectacles who was an expert in deaf and dumb language at the Social Welfare Department. She looked like a badly-set blancmange and might have been deaf and dumb herself because so far she hadn’t said a single word.
Pel didn’t mind directing all his attention to Claudie Darel, however. The rules insisted that when carrying a female in an official car, whenever possible she had to be accompanied by a female police officer. It suited Pel fine. He was becoming very much aware of the new acquisition to his team and even took the trouble to attempt conversation. Already he’d found out that she was pleased to be transferred from Paris.
‘It’s better than just searching drunken women and prostitutes,’ she said. ‘They’re a pretty dangerous lot on the whole.’
‘So are some of my team,’ Pel said grimly. ‘Darcy, for instance. Misset. Even Nosjean at times.’
She laughed. ‘They’re all right. I like them.’
‘Even Darcy?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Inspector Darcy. I can handle him. He’s only friendly.’
‘Platonic?’ Pel asked, fishing.
‘I don’t believe in platonic friendships. Nor does any other woman.’
Pel’s ears pricked. ‘They don’t?’
‘Not likely, sir. A woman’s too emotional to go in for platonic friendships.’
‘I’ve known one or two who claim to have.’
‘You shouldn’t believe them, sir. It’s just self-defence. Perhaps they’re a little scared.’
‘You think so?’
‘I’m sure. Women need security. Platonic friendship’s no substitute for that.’
‘This security? In marriage, for instance?’
‘What’s a woman for but to get married? Men are different. They can get by without it. They can pick up their women where they wish. A woman needs something to cling to, something to hope for. After all, her function’s to get married and have children.’
‘Is that your intention?’
‘Eventually.’
‘Suppose a woman’s a little past having children?’
‘It doesn’t alter her attitude much.’
This was a new angle and Pel digested it thoughtfully, remembering what Didier had said of his own love life: ‘She’ll change her mind eventually,’ he’d observed. ‘They all do. Women are like tha
t. They never say what they mean.’
And here – if he now needed it – was more proof.
It needed courage, he decided. And who better with courage than a good Burgundian like himself? Perhaps Madame Faivre-Perret was seeking to get the position stabilised, so that she knew where she was, so that she knew what his intentions were. Perhaps he hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm – after all, he’d barely started using her baptised name yet and even still stumbled a little over ‘Madame’: perhaps she’d begun to fear he didn’t intend to, that all he was after was a good meal. Perhaps she’d been probing, trying to find out. He needed to press his suit harder. After all, didn’t he come from the land of Bussy-Rabutin, that epitome of the Gallic spirit, contemporary of Turenne, the lover of Madame de Sévigné, author of a scandalous masterpiece, and the man who’d decorated the rooms of his château with the portraits of his mistresses.
His mind as occupied as a stage villain’s, Pel began to work out whole strings of conversations all leading to the same point. Then, knowing perfectly well that backchat never followed expected routes and diversions could carry you miles off course, instead he started working out means of getting the diversions back on the main road, and he was as busy as a traffic inspector deciding how to allow the Tour de France to pass without disrupting the traffic. It was time to get a grip on the matter. Perhaps even on her. He’d probably get a fat lip for his trouble, but it might be worth trying.
In his office that afternoon, Pel stared at the typed report Claudie Darel had laid on his desk. She’d put down in her notebook everything that had been said during the laboured exchanges with Retif and Pel studied it carefully, his spectacles on the end of his nose, cigarette ends piling up in the ashtray alongside him.
Retif’s hut had been a shabby place made of planks and covered almost entirely with old roofing felt to make it waterproof. Its lighting was provided by an oil lamp and its cooking was done on a paraffin stove. There was no heating and water came from a tap in a nearby farmyard. It gave the impression of being entirely black inside because the walls were stained with soot from the stove and the lamp. Along one wall was an old chaise longue covered with dirty blankets, and the whole place stank to high heaven.
The interview had taken a long time and was stumbling and difficult because Retif was not very bright and the woman from the Social Welfare Department wasn’t as quick with sign language as Rodsky had been. Nevertheless, it was all finally set down on paper, everything Retif had said.
He had been faintly apologetic about his home. France, he explained, had not been kind to the Algerians who’d worked for them in Algeria, when Algeria gained independence.
‘You walk through the woods to and from the abbey?’ Pel had asked. ‘Did you ever see anyone up there?’
There had been only courting couples in cars, Retif said.
Once he’d seen Archer, Rensselaer’s hound. There was a fox’s burrow – probably an abandoned one – and the hound was sniffing around it. He’d put a rope round the animal’s neck and taken it home. The following day he’d taken it back to the abbey and Fabre had given him a ten-franc note.
‘Did you ever see Rensselaer watching the abbey from up there with binoculars?’
Retif had shaken his head. No, it had been further down. In the valley. Only in the valley. At the point he’d indicated earlier. It had been in the middle of the afternoon when he’d seen him.
‘What were you doing there at that time?’ Pel demanded. ‘Why weren’t you still at the abbey working?’
Madame Fabre had sent him home early.
‘What about the time when Archer came home with acid all over him? Was that early afternoon?’
No. That had been late. Fabre was at home.
‘Fabre was at home?’ Pel frowned. ‘What has that to do with it?’
Retif gestured, struggling to explain. It was only when Fabre was away that she sent him home early. He didn’t know why, but she always sent him home early when Fabre was away looking at horses.
Did Retif ever see anybody up in the woods with a carboy of acid? Retil’s head-shaking was vehement. No, he’d never seen anyone with acid.
But, on the 16th, the day when Rensselaer had disappeared, despite what everybody said about him not being at the abbey, Retif had seen him? Yes, he had seen him. Madame Fabre, he thought, was not there. At least he’d not seen her until late in the afternoon, and he knew she’d been in the city shopping because he’d seen her drive off in the van.
‘You sure it was Rensselaer you saw?’
Retif was sure. He’d seen Rensselaer talking to someone who was just out of sight inside the stables. He’d been angry, and he appeared to be shouting.
What a pity, Pel thought, that Retif was deaf. Otherwise they might have known what he was shouting about and who he was shouting at.
When Pel finished reading, everybody seemed to have gone home but Darcy, and the Hôtel de Police was quiet. For a while he sat staring at Claudie Darel’s report then he tapped it briskly with the back of his fingers and called for Darcy.
‘Patron?’
‘Tomorrow we’re going out to those woods above the Abbey in the Fond des Chouettes.’ He tossed Estienne’s report across. ‘This Ros type. I want him along, too. You’ll understand why when you’ve read that. We’re going to dig up those woods. Ros will tell us where. There’ll be acid, so we’ll need some experts. Better get in touch with Industrie Chemicale Bourguignonne and get them to send someone along with proper equipment. We want nobody burned.’
As Pel and Darcy drove towards the Fond des Chouettes the following day, in the back seat Guy Ros, well wrapped against the weather, was working out his bitterness about the death of his dog. Behind them were two vans containing twelve men and a great deal of equipment in the shape of rubber boots, gloves and aprons.
As they climbed into the hills, Darcy turned in his seat.
‘Where now?’ he asked.
‘I can’t be certain,’ Ros said. ‘We’d have to go to Douzay where I visited my relations, then work back. I don’t know this part very well.’
Patiently they went to Douzay. There Ros thought it might be a good idea, since they were there, to call on his relations once more. ‘I telephoned them about the dog,’ he said. ‘They’ll like to know the police are looking into it.’
They managed to dissuade him, circled the church and climbed back up the hill over the same route. In the vans behind, the police looked at each other and touched their temples.
As they reached the upland again, Ros gestured at a signpost marked ‘Fond des Chouettes.’ ‘I turned here,’ he said. ‘I remember the sign. I’d had a few drinks with the family and I needed a leak. They’re great ones for drinks there.’
For a long time after they turned, Ros was silent. Then he sat up. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘There’s a cart track along here I took.’
They found the path and stopped the car, and everybody got out.
‘Show us where you walked.’ Pel said. ‘Exactly.’
The policemen and the experts from the two vans had climbed out and were donning rubber boots, gloves and aprons. In the vans were carboys of alkali in case of accidents. Another van drew up and Leguyader and two of his assistants climbed out, then, led by Ros, Pel and Darcy, began to walk along the path into the woods. On either side, well spread out, were six policemen in rubber boots.
For a while they walked in silence, Pel huddled in his coat. ‘We must be somewhere above the abbey,’ Darcy said. ‘A couple of kilometres away. No more.’
Ros had stopped near a hollow and was staring about him. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It was about here that Marco came out of the bushes limping.’
‘Try to be certain,’ Pel said.
‘Perhaps a bit further on then. But it was somewhere round here.’
Pel waited on the path, stamping his feet on the frozen earth, his shoulders hunched, his hands deep in his pockets. Eventually there was a shout from the undergrowth and Darcy, who was
acting as liaison with the searching men, appeared.
‘We’ve found something,’ he said.
‘Get Leguyader.’
Leguyader had no intention of walking about in the cold longer than he need and he and his lab assistants manoeuvred their little van along the track, the wings wrenching at the foliage and the bushes and the young trees.
‘I’m on my feet a lot of the day,’ Leguyader pointed out.
Soon afterwards Darcy returned. ‘Somebody had a carboy of acid up here,’ he said. ‘We found broken glass.’
‘Collect it up,’ Pel said. ‘Got anything to put it in?’
‘Leguyader’s got a couple of drums in the back of the van. We can shove it in one of those and seal off the area until we can collect the rest. There might be fingerprints.’
Pel stood shivering. After a while Ros gave him a cigarette which he accepted gratefully, and eventually, Leguyader reappeared. He and his men were carrying drums.
‘We’ll take samples back and check,’ he said. ‘You’d better get somebody from the sub-station at Douzay to come up here with metal sheets and stones and cover everything up. We don’t want any accidents. Why was it put down? For foxes? There’s a burrow there.’
The light was going by now and the night time cold was beginning to come down, iron-hard and bitter, and they were just on the point of calling off the search when there was a shout from among the bushes.
‘Inspector, I think you’d better come here!’
Pel and Darcy exchanged glances and headed into the undergrowth. A policeman appeared.
‘What is it?’ Darcy asked. ‘More acid?’
‘No, sir. Not acid. It’s under the bush there. I’ve not touched it.’
Crouching, Pel and Darcy peered into the bush. Underneath there were fungi growing and a lot of brown sodden leaves. Among the leaves was a hat.
It was not a country hat, but a city hat, grey with a brim that was turned up all round, the sort of hat that a businessman would wear to go to work. It lay upside down and inside the band could be seen the name of the makers – ‘Durandeaux et Cie’ – one of the most expensive hatters in the city. The back of the hat was torn and there was a black stain that had once been blood.
