Pel and the Promised Land

by Mark Hebden

  ‘A mere conversion from a stable to a gymnasium?’

  ‘It was to be quite a gymnasium. In addition, of course, the lady was a baroness. Doing work for a baroness can be quite a cachet. I thought it might be useful publicity. Unfortunately it seems to have turned out somewhat differently.’

  ‘Were you going to put money into this gymnasium?’

  Charrieri’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Not likely.’

  ‘Do you ever put money into the projects you design?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Charrieri’s answer was brisk. ‘Speculation’s a risky game. You have to be sure you’re on to a good thing.’

  ‘Why did she come to you?’ Pel gestured round the office. ‘I imagine your fees are high and for an alteration from a stable to a gymnasium she could just as easily have gone to an architectural draughtsman. There are plenty who do that sort of thing, I believe. People well able to draw up simple plans for a builder to work from. Perhaps some of your staff do.’

  ‘I’m sure they do.’

  ‘They’d come a lot cheaper than you, I imagine.’

  ‘I’m sure they would. Even Dumanoir could do it. I believe he does occasionally – for things like garden sheds.’

  The comment drew a sour look from the body at the drawing board.

  Pel glanced from one to the other. ‘So why you?’ he asked.

  ‘I can only think,’ Charrieri said, ‘it was because she hadn’t heard of Dumanoir.’

  ‘Were you happy with the arrangement?’

  Charrieri looked puzzled and Pel explained. ‘If your fees are high, wouldn’t you make sure before you did any work that the prospective client could pay? She sounds to me as if she might have been a doubtful starter and I imagine you don’t draw up expensive plans without making sure the money’s available.’

  Charrieri shrugged. ‘That’s true, of course. We usually make a few discreet enquiries. But the work involved in this project was small and she made sure I understood the money was available.’

  ‘But I gather the Baron is virtually penniless. All he’s got is a large property with a garden, a little land, a view, and not much else.’

  ‘That’s what I discovered. But when I pointed this out she insisted she had money. Her own money, she said.’

  ‘Didn’t you think a gymnasium a strange project for a family everybody felt was penniless?’

  ‘I might have done if she hadn’t been so insistent that she wasn’t.’

  ‘The family insist they have no money at all. So where did this money she says she had come from?’

  Charrieri shrugged. ‘When we make enquiries, we don’t go that far,’ he admitted. ‘You do have to take a little on trust. But I did make it clear to her that we’re expensive. She still continued to insist that all bills would be met.’ He paused. ‘Under the circumstances,’ he ended, frowning, ‘I have a feeling they won’t.’

  Pel nodded. ‘Not by her, they won’t,’ he agreed.

  They got little else from Charrieri but they did receive a sidelong comment from the boy near the entrance as they left.

  ‘Don’t let him kid you,’ he said quietly. ‘Of course he speculates. A lot do if it looks good.’

  Pel gestured at the office. ‘Such as this?’

  The boy grinned.

  ‘Did he go in for this gymnasium project?’

  Dumanoir smiled. ‘Shouldn’t think so. You wouldn’t get much out of a gymnasium in the middle of nowhere, would you?’

  Eight

  ‘No question about it any more,’ Darcy reported. ‘She’s exactly who we decided she was. Bronwen Raby-Labassat, née Davis, of Barry, near Cardiff in South Wales. Parents dead. The British police produced a dental report on her.’ Darcy looked pleased with himself. ‘I tried London first but, in view of her name, they suggested trying Cardiff. They found her straight away. They even knew her. She’d been a beauty queen before she started working for that outfit in London where the Baron met her. She even got her name in the paper when she married him. You know the stuff. Local Girl Marries French Nobleman. Sarrazin would have approved.’

  ‘You haven’t had a written confession sent by post by her murderer, I suppose?’ Pel asked dryly.

  Darcy ignored the sarcasm. ‘We searched her drawers and cupboards. Nothing of note. Nothing to indicate what she was doing at Vieilles Etuves. Just a paper with directions in her writing on it.’

  ‘Directions for what?’

  ‘A route. But not to Vieilles Etuves.’ Darcy pushed a small piece of paper at Pel. It read ‘N74 to N6. N6 to Macon. Motorway to Bourg and Nantua. Road runs alongside Swiss border to lake.’

  ‘That seems to make it directions to Geneva or Evian-lesBains. South side of Lac Léman. What’s her interest there?’

  ‘I went to see if the Baron knew. He wasn’t in. Marie-Hélène Gaussac produced a bit more about her, though. On one of her trips into the blue, she went off with the key to that small door near the steps they use. She sent it back in an envelope post-marked St-Flô. That’s on Lac Léman. I asked among the family and learned that she’s also visited Aix-les-Bains, Montperreux near Pontarlier, Annécy and Maisod. Nobody knew why.’

  ‘What’s so special about them?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, they’re all on the edge of a lake.’ Darcy pushed a map of France forward and his finger jabbed at the areas of blue among the green.

  Pel frowned. ‘Antoine Charrieri talked about her having access to money,’ he said. ‘Have we checked her bank?’

  ‘Yes, patron, we have. You know how cagey they are but I leaned on them. There are three payments to her of 10,000 francs unexplained. All in the last three months. That must be the money she meant. Where did it come from? It didn’t come from the Baron. He’s as poor as a church mouse and the bank admitted that he hadn’t got that much.’

  ‘Pay?’ Pel suggested. ‘Was she a high-class horizontale?’

  ‘Ten thousand is a lot of money for that, patron.’

  ‘She was involved in some sort of deal to change the stable block at the château to a gymnasium. God knows what she expected from it. Let’s see if there’s anything else. If there was, it must have gone through the Maire’s office.’

  Sure enough, plans concerning the château had been deposited in Jaunay’s official office. But they referred only to the cottage in the grounds where the Baron lived and indicated the alterations he wished to make. They also showed a second cottage, however – the one on the slopes below the château that contained the barn and cow byre atop the high wall overlooking the road.

  ‘Whose is that?’

  ‘It belongs to the Baron,’ Jaunay said. ‘Josephe Sully lives there.’

  ‘Who’s Josephe Sully?’

  ‘He was a small farmer. Retired now. He had a little land on the hill up to Quétigny and kept a few cows. He always brought them down for the winter and kept them in the byre alongside the cottage.’

  ‘What’s intended there?’

  ‘The Baroness had plans to develop it. She wanted to modernise it. I think she wanted to let it. To holiday-makers. It was one of her plans for making money. We all knew of them. They were always popping up. None were very practical.’

  It seemed to be time to see the Baron again. His pale eyes blank and uninterested, the old man shrugged when faced with the questions and barely looked up from the plank he was sawing. In the end they managed to draw him away and he even offered them wine. The general opinion about it appeared to be well justified. It was vaguely orange in colour and tasted like sludge. The Baron knocked back his own glass without blinking but they noticed Marie-Hélène Gaussac refrained from drinking.

  ‘This project of the Baroness’ over the stable block?’ Pel asked. ‘What was she trying to do, do you think?’

  The Baron shrugged. ‘Make money, I expect,’ he said. ‘She was always trying to think of ways of doing that. Chiefly because we never had much. We have the château, of course, but that eats it, it doesn’t make it.’

 
‘She’d been to an aerobic studio in Dijon,’ Marie-Hélène interrupted and the Baron nodded. ‘She went regularly. Perhaps she thought she could set up something of the sort here?’

  ‘In Faux-Villecerf? It’s miles from anywhere. Who’d come?’

  The Baron shrugged again.

  ‘What about the cottage? The one by the road.’

  ‘She wanted to make it earn money. But old Sully’s lived there all his life. His father was living there when I was a boy. I’m not going to throw him out.’

  ‘Would your wife have?’

  ‘She’d have tried.’

  ‘And this cottage. Your cottage. It’s shown in the plan in the Maire’s office. What were you intending?’

  ‘I was going to repair the roof. Perhaps an extra room. That’s all. I enjoy living here.’

  ‘Don’t you like the big house?’

  ‘No. But it’s my duty to preserve it for my son when his time comes.’

  Pel had seen the Baron’s do-it-yourself efforts. They hadn’t improved anything much. ‘So you moved out?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. With Marie-Hélène. She’s always looked after me. We were always – comfortable – yes, comfortable – together. I set her up in an apartment in town when I was pushed into marriage. Soon afterwards she married, too. We tried to play fair, you see. Then Marie-Hélène lost her husband and when it became clear my wife was ill and wouldn’t recover we started again.’

  ‘What about your second wife?’

  The Baron looked puzzled. ‘I suppose I married her because I thought she had money and that it would save the estate.’ He gave a wheezy laugh and Pel caught a blast of bad breath. ‘She thought I had money.’

  ‘And Marie-Hélène?’

  ‘She stepped aside again. She’s a noble person. I returned to her when I found my wife had male friends. My wife didn’t worry. She was a small-town woman and it pleased her to have a title. She was always going into things with other people’s money. She opened a boutique in the city with money put up by a Thomas Legendre, a man she’d met. It didn’t work. She knew nothing about buying and selling clothes and neither did he. I suspect the gymnasium was something of the same sort.’

  ‘Whose was that money?’

  The old man didn’t bother to answer. He seemed to have lost interest and merely shrugged.

  It seemed to be time to try to find out about the Raby-Labassats from some source other than themselves.

  For some time Pel debated how to go about it and in the end came up with the name of Baron de Mougy. De Mougy and Pel were old friends and old enemies. Pel had recovered jewellery his wife had had stolen and had consulted him in the case of a murder when the victim had been a German they’d believed to be an SS officer who had terrorised the district during the war.

  As a young man De Mougy had been one of the leaders of the Resistance and he had known everything worth knowing about every man and woman under his command. Pel had a feeling he would also know everything there was to know about the aristocracy of the region. He was clever and didn’t miss much that went on.

  He was a tall man with a face like a hatchet, handsome but ice-cold. He didn’t like Pel any more than Pel liked him but they had a wholesome respect for each other and, at least, his wine was worth drinking. He wasn’t mean with it either. The bottle that was brought out – not by the Baron but by a manservant – had a label that made Pel’s hair stand on end at what it must have cost.

  ‘Raby-Labassat,’ Pel said.

  De Mougy looked up. ‘Know him,’ he said. ‘Decayed place at Faux-Villecerf. Old family. No backbone.’

  There was one thing about De Mougy. He didn’t waste words. And ‘No backbone’ was never something that could ever have been said about him. He was growing old now but he was still as hard as iron. And despite being on the run from the Germans for most of the war, he had somehow never once allowed his own splendid château to become run-down. De Mougy was a survivor. Raby-Labassat was a born victim.

  ‘Know anything about him?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Understand he’s having a bit of trouble at the moment.’

  Well, if a murdered wife was a bit of trouble, then, yes, Raby-Labassat was having a bit of trouble.

  ‘Ever meet his wife?’

  ‘Yes. Damn fool.’

  De Mougy’s wife wasn’t a damn fool. She was younger than De Mougy, beautiful and clever, and it was rumoured De Mougy had acquired her by rescuing her father from bankruptcy.

  ‘Is there money?’ Pel asked.

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve tasted his wine.’

  It seemed a good enough reason.

  ‘There must have been money once.’

  ‘There’s none now.’ De Mougy gave Pel a hard look. It was like being skewered with a rapier. ‘He once asked me if it would cost much to have his place renovated. If you have to ask how much a thing like that costs, then obviously you can’t afford it. They didn’t keep an eye on their money. It pays to keep an eye on your money. They put theirs into the wrong things. They even tried to get away with their taxes. They thought the government wouldn’t notice. But they did. They have ways of finding out. Property’s the thing. Property’s the only thing that increases in value. So long, of course, as it has the approval of the government. France’s riddled with bureaucracy and you can’t get anywhere without it.’

  ‘What about the children? Have you met them?’

  ‘Half-wits. One of them plays in a band. The daughter’s a Marxist lunatic. Only one of them with a worthwhile job. And he’s not much to write home about. My son’s got a degree in agronomy ready for when he takes over the estate from me.’

  Darcy turned up Thomas Legendre, the man who had gone into the clothing business with the Baroness. He was a small effeminate man she had met in a bar. His mother had just died and, having inherited a little money, he had hoped to invest it in something profitable. He had listened to the Baroness’ arguments and gone into the boutique business with enthusiasm. Instead of making a fortune, he had lost his inheritance and was now working in the toy department of the Nouvelles Galéries in Dijon.

  ‘I thought I could trust her,’ he said. ‘She was full of ideas and said she knew all about it. But she didn’t know what to order or how to order or when to order.’

  No wonder, Pel thought, that clothing shops turned out to be full of flimsy summer fashions while it was still hurling down sleet and snow in early spring, and thick autumn fashions with tweeds and heavy collars as the summer reached its peak in a heat wave.

  It was obvious Thomas Legendre wasn’t a suspect.

  They didn’t seem to be moving forward very fast but then they had an unexpected stroke of luck. The cops at Faux-Villecerf were still keeping their ears and eyes open as instructed and were passing along small titbits of information, none of which were of much help, until Morelot, the sous-brigadier, remembered picking up a man called Arnaud just before the Baroness had disappeared. He had bumped into him almost accidentally late at night on the edge of the Baron’s land. He had immediately assumed he was doing a bit of poaching. There was game on the few remaining hectares belonging to the Raby-Labassats and it was not unknown for one or two of the shiftier inhabitants of Faux-Villecerf to remove them occasionally. Arnaud had appeared before the magistrates on a charge of trespassing.

  ‘Actually,’ Morelot told Darcy, ‘I might just have ticked him off and sent him home, because the Baron couldn’t care less who walks across his land. But he used lip to me and he’s a nasty piece of work, anyway – up to all sorts of things. So I thought I’d teach him a lesson. You have to do it now and then to keep the place in some sort of order.’

  Darcy knew the feeling. He’d been a uniformed cop on the streets himself once. ‘I found him among the trees,’ Morelot continued. ‘He said he was hiding because the Baroness was about. At two o’clock in the morning? I thought he was just making excuses and ran him in. But now the Baroness’s dead I
wondered and asked him again about it. He says he heard her voice and saw a car parked among the trees and thought she was in it with one of her boyfriends. I thought I’d better pass it on.

  ‘It was a good idea. Let’s go and see this Arnaud.’

  Arnaud was working in the garden at the back of his house. It was a small dwelling at the end of the village street, built of the local stone.

  ‘Alardie Arnaud,’ Darcy said. ‘We know you well.’ He’d taken the trouble to check with Records.

  Arnaud looked like a dog threatened with a bath. He was a small man with a cap that clung to the back of his head as though it were nailed there. ‘That’s over,’ he growled.

  ‘Not necessarily. You were recently picked up in the early hours of the morning on the Baron’s land.’

  ‘I admitted it. I hadn’t much choice.’

  ‘What were you after?’

  ‘Cement.’

  The reply startled Darcy. A pheasant, a chicken – that would have been normal enough. But cement! ‘Cement?’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘Why cement?’

  ‘To build a bit on the back of my house.’ Arnaud gestured and, turning, Darcy saw he had built a wall and was on the point of installing a door frame. ‘The Baron was doing it, so why not me? I thought I’d build a kitchen and bathroom and make the present kitchen a bedroom and make the living-room bigger. We nearly sit on each other’s knees to watch Dallas.’

  Darcy studied him. ‘This cement: Did you know of some you were going to pinch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you pinch it?’

  ‘No. That idiot, Morelot, came along.’

  Darcy paused. ‘Did you know where there was a store of it or something?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. He’d got a lot.’

  ‘Who had?’

  ‘The Baron. He had it stacked away.’

  ‘And it was while you were prowling around after it that you ran into Sous-Brigadier Morelot?’

  ‘No. He ran into me.’

  ‘Why were you hiding when he found you?’

  ‘I saw this car.’