by Mark Hebden
‘You’re late,’ he said to Pel.
‘Work,’ Pel explained, laying it on.
‘Come into my office. I’d like a word.’
A whisky bottle appeared and the Chief poured out two good doses. ‘Santé,’ he said.
Pel eyed him uneasily. Something was in the wind, he knew. The whisky didn’t appear for anything unimportant.
‘Know that farm at Tar-le-Petit?’ the Chief asked. ‘The farmer died and his wife moved into a cottage in the village. It’s right alongside the road. I saw it the other night. It’s a wreck.’
‘So I heard. Who owns it?’
‘I heard it was bought by a type called Feray – Lucien Feray. It was an attractive place. Not a lot of land, but enough. Nice view at the back over the valley. I was having dinner up that way the other evening and heard Feray put in an application to pull it down. He wanted to build an estate of twenty de luxe executive dwellings.’
‘I heard that, too.’
‘The application was refused on the grounds that it was of historical interest. Eighteenth-century outbuildings or something. So Feray rented it to a type called Denis Clos. He then put in an application to turn it into a night-club. That was slapped down as fast as the other. So he and Clos turned it into a kennels.’
‘And?’
‘That project went bust. The rumour up there is that Clos hadn’t any money, anyway, and that he was nothing but the front for Feray and that Feray was in with someone else who was interested in the place. When Clos left, Feray closed the place up but vandals got in and wrecked it. So it can hardly be called of historic interest now, can it? The windows have corrugated iron sheeting nailed over them. The door’s boarded up. The roof’s falling in. The outbuildings caught fire and half of them went.’ The Chief refilled Pel’s glass. ‘The rumour up there now is that Feray was working with Clos. They’ve both got records. I took the trouble to have them looked up. The story is that Feray allowed the vandals in. Deliberately. Even sent them in.
Pel shrugged. ‘So they can put in an application to pull it down and build the original set of detached executive dwellings. I was talking to Darcy about this very thing. The Sapeurs Pompiers think that forest fire at St-Etois might have been deliberate – for the same reason. The owners knew they’d never get permission to build there, so they destroyed it. Now they’ll sit on it for two or three years and try again before it’s had time to recover.’
The Chief nodded. ‘I’ve just come from Paris,’ he said. ‘The Minister for the Environment’s concerned. He’s planning legislation to thwart the property speculators. It’s almost a plague along the Mediterranean coast. Arsonists are known to be involved. They’re trying to draft a law to ban the development of fire-ravaged land for fifteen years to stop people building holiday homes for foreign buyers. After all, land’s profitable these days. Imagine sitting on a few hectares of beauty spot that brings nothing in. If it ceases to be a beauty spot and someone buys it for development, you could become very wealthy. The Minister’s ordered a census of all land burned in the last ten years to see what’s become of it. Most of the new developments in the Bouches du Rhône area near Marseilles have been on burnt-out land. And in Var and round St-Trop’. Too many people have started playing golf and there’s too much demand for new courses.’
‘It’s a pity people can’t stick to the old games like boules,’ Pel said.
The Chief grinned. ‘There are over fifty applications for new courses in that area,’ he said. ‘With them, of course, come applications for new housing, because people like to live near their leisure. Houses are followed by supermarkets, garages, restaurants, shopping precincts. A fifteen-year ban would give the forests time to recover. The aim’s to stop the shady developers with the money. Stop them and we’ll probably stop the fire-raisers. Let’s keep an eye on it, shall we?’
‘The fire-raisers?’
‘Vandals would do,’ the Chief snapped. ‘We have them. At Tar-le-Petit. And, if you’re interested, there are three separate applications in the office of the Department of the Environment for new golf courses in our area. One near Tar-le-Petit.’
Pel was frowning as he arrived home. The evening was magnificent. As his car had climbed from the city he could see across the whole sun-bright Plateau de Langres, dramatic against a sky dark with thunderclouds. This, he thought, was Burgundy. Not the tourists’ paradise, the wine tastings round the vineyards, the old châteaux – but the countryside, to true Burgundians like himself the promised land.
Madame Routy, the housekeeper, he decided as he entered the house, would be watching television. Pel and Madame Routy had been enjoying a mutual enmity for more years than either of them cared to remember. She had been his housekeeper before his marriage, and his wife – perhaps realising their need for the adrenalin their dislike stirred up – had taken on Madame Routy with Pel. She had been tamed a little, of course, since then, and only broke out of confinement nowadays when Madame disappeared on one of her business trips. With Madame at home, the house ran on oiled wheels, with fresh flowers and meals of unbelievable splendour. With Madame away, the flowers wilted. There were stale croissants for breakfast and the coffee tasted like shellac, while the evening meal invariably consisted of one of the overcooked and shrivelled casseroles Madame Routy had daily presented him before his marriage.
The television would be turned up to full volume so that it sounded like a rocket blasting off, and she would be sitting in the confort anglais, the best chair in the house, doubtless with a nip of Pel’s whisky in her hand. None of these things did she dare when Madame was about. But when Madame was away, she obviously considered it important to regain all the ground she had lost when she had surrendered authority.
Her eyes icy, she had handed Pel his brief case that morning as if she hoped it contained a bomb. He had heard the television go on, turned up beyond ‘Loud’ to ‘Shattering’ before he had driven out of the drive. Even Yves Pasquier, the small boy from next door, on his way to school, seemed to wince at the sound, while his dog had turned back to the house with its tail between its legs.
As he had expected, Madame Routy was watching television, and not on the small set in her room at the back of the house, but on the big set in the salon that Pel’s wife enjoyed. She was, as Pel had suspected she would be, sitting in the confort anglais. There was a whiff of whisky in the air and when Pel went to pour himself a tot, he noticed it had gone down in the bottle. Being on the mean side – careful, he preferred to call it – he always made a point of noticing where the level was against the lettering on the label. This time it came to ‘Bottled in Scotland’ instead of ‘100% Scotch Whiskies’, which was where Pel had left it the night before.
‘It’s a fashion programme,’ Madame Routy explained over her shoulder without taking her eyes off the screen for a second. ‘You can see better on the big set. I didn’t think Madame would mind.’
Madame, Pel felt, would willingly have offered Madame Routy a view of the fashions while she was watching herself, but she certainly wouldn’t have encouraged it without. But he muttered something about having a headache and slunk off to his study, asking himself for the hundredth time why he didn’t tip up the confort anglais and deposit Madame Routy on the floor with a roar of ‘You’ve been at the whisky again!’
He sighed, wondering why he, who had faced men with clubs and guns, could never find the courage to put Madame Routy in her place. His life before his marriage had been a misery of discomfort and noise. Then an expression of sly malice crossed his face. He would let Madame Routy prepare and cook one of her poisonous dishes and at the last moment say he had to go out and would have to eat in the city, so that she would have to polish off her repulsive concoction herself. It was a ploy he had used on numerous occasions and it always gave him great pleasure.
At just about the time Pel was enjoying the disgusted expression on Madame Routy’s face at his announcement, at Vieilles Etuves to the south, a young man called Robert Flandres
was manoeuvring his car among the trees of the Forêt de Diviot.
He was a smart young man with the sort of profile and teeth Darcy had but, somehow, without the honesty that shone out of Darcy’s face like a searchlight. The girl with him was not his wife. She was his secretary and, like Pel, they had been working late.
It was a fine night and the thunderclouds Pel had seen had passed. They had eaten well and drunk a little too much and the young man was a smooth worker. After a little heavy breathing in the back of the car, he opened the door.
‘It’s a bit cramped in here,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out. It’s warm enough.’
The girl climbed out and sniffed the air. There was a subtle end-of-summer smell. There had been a little rain recently and the forest had the musty smell of decaying vegetable matter, even though the leaves were still on the trees. It was just growing dark and the woods seemed grey and faintly menacing.
‘We’re a long way from anywhere,’ she said nervously.
She knew why she’d been brought there and was not unwilling, but somehow she wasn’t very happy either. She could smell wood smoke – probably from Vieilles Etuves, the small village on the side of the hill that they’d passed five minutes before. There was a loud crack near by and she jumped.
‘Tree,’ Flandres said, putting his arms round her and kissing her. ‘They expand in the heat or something.’
For a while they stood together, Flandres’ hand feeling for the edge of the girl’s skirt. He had thought of everything and produced a thick car rug which he spread on the grass alongside a sheltering hedge of undergrowth. The girl was not exactly starry-eyed and bursting with romance and as she sat down on the rug and the young man joined her, she flapped her hand.
‘Flies,’ she commented.
‘It’s the heat.’
She stared suspiciously at the darkening foliage alongside her and sniffed. ‘There’s somebody here,’ she whispered.
Flandres reached for her. ‘You can smell them?’
‘I can feel it.’
‘Can’t be.’
She wasn’t satisfied and continued to stare about her. Then she gave a nervous little giggle and pointed. ‘That’s what got me going,’ she said. ‘I knew there was something. Someone’s lost a shoe.’
Among the undergrowth she could see a lavender-coloured high-heeled shoe marked with a smear of yellowish mud.
‘I bet she was up to something to leave her shoe behind,’ she remarked.
‘When you’ve got a girl going at full revs,’ Flandres observed cheerfully, ‘she doesn’t always know what she’s doing.’
She gave another giggle and put out a hand to move the shoe away. As she pushed at it, her eyes widened. The young man failed to notice. As he reached lustfully for her again she shoved an elbow sharp as a dagger in his chest. He pushed her down on to the rug, but she struggled free, panting and scared. Brushing her hands aside, he grabbed her again, but she swung her arm back to land a clout at the side of his head that rattled his teeth.
‘What’s that for?’
She was still staring beyond him at the shoe. While he was still rubbing his cheek, she pushed again at it. It didn’t move and she let out a full-blooded scream right in the young man’s ear.
‘Name of God,’ she yelled. ‘It’s got a foot in it!’
Two
When Pel looked into woodland fires over the past five years, he found there had been ten cases in the countryside around, which Chief Lapeur of the Fire Service considered might have been started deliberately. In three cases, it had been found that insurance was the reason and three men had been sent to prison for destroying their own property. That left seven and in three instances it seemed to be a case of protest by villagers against foreign interlopers. The worst case was a three-million-franc luxury home at Lermes-et-Chenês, destroyed when on the point of completion by what appeared to be a home-made bomb. Though nobody was prepared to admit guilt, noticeably nobody had expressed regret, especially when it had been announced that plans to build two other houses had fallen through.
It seemed a good idea to see Judge Castéou, who had been handed the case. Ghislaine Castéou was petite and pretty and was standing in for Judge Polverari who was off sick.
Immediately they found themselves on the subject of foreign buyers. It seemed to crop up every time any two people met together.
‘Of course it’s foreigners,’ Judge Castéou observed. ‘Not them personally, but they’re behind it all. There are hundreds of British buying homes in France.’
‘I can’t imagine hundreds of French buying homes in Britain,’ Pel said.
Judge Castéou laughed. ‘I have relations in the Dordogne,’ she pointed out. ‘The foreigners were just a trickle when they went there. Now they’re a flood. Between thirty and forty houses a day are being sold to British buyers. Even the British who live there are getting worried it’s all going wrong. They’re beginning now to think they’re going to have Costa del Sol developments because they’re getting people now who aren’t buying because they love the Dordogne, but because they’ve decided it’s a good investment.’
‘The Chief,’ Pel pointed out in a doom-laden voice, ‘has it that now they’ve exhausted the Dordogne and the South they’re moving into Burgundy.’
It was decided it might be a good idea to pick up Denis Clos and Lucien Feray. The vandalism at Tar-le-Petit seemed to have potentialities, and a few questions in the right quarter seemed to be in order.
‘Feray’s a big guy,’ Darcy said. ‘His record’s mostly for bodily harm. I can well imagine him being used for that sort of thing. I’ll get Misset to find out where he’s got to.’
‘It might be one way of getting rid of Misset,’ Pel said.
Misset answered Darcy’s summons nervously. He was well aware that he was once more in danger of being returned to uniform.
‘Just be careful,’ Darcy warned him. ‘Feray could react.’
‘I know,’ Misset said. ‘I once had to haul him in for assault.’
‘What happened?’
‘He handed me a black eye.’
Darcy gave Misset a sour look. ‘Not you! Him!’
‘Oh! He was sent down for two months. It would have been three but he told the magistrates that as I was in plain clothes he didn’t think I was a cop.’
Sometimes Darcy didn’t think so either.
‘I owe him one,’ Misset went on.
‘Well, forget it,’ Darcy snapped. ‘Don’t get involved. We want to know what’s going on, not how hard he punches. Find out where he is and who his friends are. When we want him we can take the whole department along if necessary. Even a few tanks and paratroopers. Just turn up where he is and whom he’s talking to. We’ll do the rest.’
They had just started things moving when, two days later, the morning produced the sort of sunshine you can only find in Burgundy, with blue sky dotted with puffballs of cloud. The weather had pulled out all the stops and in the glittering morning air the city had a look of festivity about it that came solely from the golden glow on the front of the buildings and the varnished tiles of the roofs round the Church of Notre Dame. Even the traffic seemed more sedate than usual.
About ten forty-five a large dark blue van that looked as though it belonged to a security concern cruised along the Boulevard Maré chal Joffre, its two occupants wearing crash helmets and what looked like uniforms. It pulled into a vacant space by the kerb and the men inside began to watch the clock on the dashboard. At almost the same time, a grey Citroën pulled into a vacant space some distance behind. There was nothing unusual about either vehicle except that the van was parked outside a bank and the Citroën outside Merciers’, a jeweller’s which catered for affluent customers from the best end of the city.
The street was wide and, being part of a one-way system, should have had a free flow of traffic. But at that time of the day near the bank there was always a little congestion although opposite Merciers’, off to the right, was another w
ide street, the Rue Albert Premier, and because there was no traffic in the opposite direction, it was easy to turn into. The road system had been devised to take traffic away from the banking area, but there was one disadvantage which hadn’t occurred to the planners but had been noticed and passed on to the man in the front passenger seat of the Citroën. His name was Jean-Pierre Orega and, as he watched what was happening further along the street, he decided everything was going according to instructions.
It pleased him to tell his associates that the idea was his. In fact, it wasn’t. He had been told to get on with it, and only the details had been worked out in the shabby house in the Rue St Josephe, in the Arsenal area of the city, that he called his headquarters.
Orega wasn’t a clever man and because of that hadn’t ever managed to stay out of prison long. He still considered himself big time, however, and never wasted much of his life after being given his freedom before he started planning something else. As a result he was regularly returned to 72, Rue d’Auxonne, by which unobtrusive name was known the city’s gaol.
He fished out a Gauloise and stuck it between his lips. His eyes narrowed behind the wrap-around dark glasses he liked to affect. He wore them because he felt they hid his identity and gave him a look of menace. Considering himself a big wheel, he liked to dress and behave with the image, with sharp clothes and, when he could find them, smart wisecracks to go with them. Nothing pleased him more than when he was called on by bigger wheels than he was to perform some coup for them, as was happening at that moment.