by Mark Hebden
Brochard explained what had happened. ‘To make matters worse,’ he said, ‘he’d stacked bags of chemical fertiliser in the wrong place and some were split. I know the stuff. It would knock over an elephant. I reckon he’s actually been feeding the clippings and fertiliser himself to his animals by accident for ages. No wonder the sheep died. He was even poisoning his daughter’s horse with it. We could probably charge him with making fraudulent claims against the Guillemard Assurance Company. He claimed his ewes were prize Larzacs but they’re nothing of the sort. And they’re all suffering from braxy.’
‘What in God’s name is braxy?’
‘A sort of gastro-enteritis, usually caused by bad farming methods.’
Pel studied Brochard’s smooth face, impressed.
‘I’ve passed all the information to the insurance company,’ Brochard ended. ‘I expect they’ll want to talk to him. I marked the report “No action necessary”’.
Pel stared after him as the door slammed.
‘As I said,’ he remarked slowly to Darcy, ‘that young man has hidden depths.’
Having sorted out the business of the poisoned ewes to his satisfaction, Brochard completed the paperwork and sat back. It was late and he was in need of a drink. He decided on the Bar du Destin. Charlie Ciasca would be there. Their meetings had been going on at intervals all through the business with Barthelot’s sheep.
The bar was full and a football match on the television was claiming the rapt attention of most of the customers. Charlie Ciasca was studying the drawings in her sketching pad. She was a very busy girl and so far all their meetings had been rushed, so that Brochard had not got very far.
‘When are we really going to get together?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There are always hundreds of other females around when I call at your flat.’
‘Hundreds?’
‘Well, several. Why can’t we be alone sometimes?’
‘Where?’
‘We could go away for a weekend.’
She grinned. ‘My brothers would be on to you like a couple of thunderbolts.’
‘What have they got against me?’
‘They protect me.’
‘What from?’
‘Men like you. They once beat up a man for molesting me.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t go in for that sort of thing.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Well, I’m not fanatic about it, but they are.’
‘Are they tough?’
‘They have bolts sticking out of their necks. Like Frankenstein.’
‘What do they do for a living? Are they night-club bouncers?’
‘No. They run a boat on Lake Geneva.’
‘You mean Lac Léman.’
‘I mean Lake Geneva. I told you: I’m part Swiss and the Swiss call it Lake Geneva.’
‘What do they use the boat for? Fishing?’
‘The fishing’s not all that good. They do trips. For tourists.’
It seemed that, with an Italian capacity for disaster, Papa Ciasca’s business was always teetering on the brink of collapse and the family were heavily dependent on the ancient boat his sons, Jean-Jacques and Gabriel, plied for holiday-makers. During the day it was used for trips about the lake and at night to haul tourists from the Swiss side of the lake where, with good Swiss thrift, the casino limits were low, to the French side where they were considerably more generous.
‘It’s one of those things like a small bâteau mouche,’ Charlie explained. ‘It’s covered with glass with twenty rows of seats. Forty francs round the lake. No wind. No spray on your face. You think you’re a sailor but it’s like being in a floating conservatory.’
‘Do they make much money?’
She gave him an odd look. ‘Not at that, they don’t,’ she said.
As Brochard had left, Pel had sat back. It was always satisfying to see a case wrapped up. It was a perpetual war, and each little case was a campaign.
Nosjean’s garage at Genois with its list of hot cars had also been terminated and reached the paperwork stage.
‘Will you pull it off?’ Pel asked.
‘Judge Castéou thinks so,’ Nosjean said. So do I. Mind you, I think Giraud, the type who owned the place, wasn’t in it on his own. I asked him and he swore no one else was. But I think he just didn’t have the courage to say so. So he carries the can.’
‘Why do you think someone was pushing him?’
‘Because he’s not talking and the solicitor who’s representing him is Dugusse. I expect you remember him, patron.’
‘I remember him. He was the late Maurice Tagliatti’s mouthpiece.’
‘And Maurice was a gangster. I reckon Dugusse has been put up by whoever’s leaning on Giraud. He’ll make sure Giraud goes down. To put him out of the way. So nobody talks to him. So that whoever’s behind him will be able to fold up the operation. So nobody will dig any deeper.’
‘And who do you think was behind it?’
‘Maurice Tagliatti’s old outfit. That’s why Dugusse is in it.’
‘What we left of Maurice’s old lot transferred their allegiance to Carmen Vlaxi.’
‘That’s right, patron.’
With Nosjean’s case tidied up, apart from the Baroness Raby-Labassat there was only Orega and the gang who had relieved Merciers’ of their trays of rings. They were due to appear before the magistrates and the chances were that they would cease to trouble the police for a while.
Pel frowned. By this time he was certain that Orega’s little affair had also been backed by Carmen Vlaxi. Orega was a hit and rush type with not much finesse. His fingerprints had been all over the glass top of the jewellers’ counter and in the stolen car they had used. But there was one man still free – the fifth man Nosjean and De Troq’ had noticed – and he surely fitted in somewhere.
Pel didn’t like things to be incomplete. Was this fifth man the liaison between Orega and whoever was behind him? Either way he must be a crook.
But who was he? They still didn’t know.
The Bar Transvaal behind the Hôtel de Police was crowded. Among the customers were a number of cops because it was a handy place to get a beer and sandwich when there was no time to take lunch. Pel had often eaten breakfast there in the days before his marriage, when Madame Routy’s shellac-tasting coffee had revolted him. His beer seemed to lie heavy on his stomach and he wondered if he had an ulcer coming on.
‘Bronwen,’ he said to Darcy. ‘Who do you put your money on?’
They had investigated old Sully’s relations and come up with nothing. Most of them lived up near the Belgian border and hadn’t heard of the murder. They hadn’t even been aware that the old man was still alive. Of course, in village communities, there were always probably a few loose ends somewhere that nobody knew about and Faux-Villecerf might well be full of aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces who could find in the old boy’s precarious circumstances good reason for a grudge against the Baroness.
Darcy didn’t think so, however. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he argued. ‘If it had been the Baron who died it would have been straightforward. His family all want to get their hands on his property. One because he thinks that as the next baron it’s his right. Another because he feels the house is draining away the family fortune. The daughter because she’s in debt to the tune of 20,000 francs. I checked and she is. It comes to the same thing in the end with all of them. Greed.’
There was no point in worrying about alibis. Too much time had elapsed and Minet and Cham couldn’t agree on when Bronwen had died. They knew she’d been missing for six weeks and four days but she could have been killed at any time during that period.
‘And this cash she told Charrieri she had,’ Pel said. ‘Where was it coming from?’ His mind was prowling about like a caged leopard, frustrated, angry. Real life police work was never like the stuff you saw on television. It didn’t consist of intuitive flashes and violent chases. It involved
checking and re-checking and that was sometimes as exciting as watching grass grow.
There was something wrong with the whole case, he decided. They even had the wrong victim, he felt. If it had been the Baron who was dead, he might have understood and looked more deeply into his family. But the Baroness could be dead for an entirely different reason. Because, for instance, one of her boyfriends had raised an objection to her acquiring another boyfriend. So who were her boyfriends? And this gymnasium she was planning – where did that fit in? And where was the money coming from? It seemed certain she had none and the three payments into her account, amounting to 30,000 francs, wouldn’t cover a lot of work. So somewhere behind her there had to be someone who was loaded.
It might be a good idea, Pel decided, to have a word with his wife’s cousin Roger, who lived in Lyons and was about the sole relative on either side of the family whom Pel could stand. Cousin Roger was an accountant and, despite his inclination to drink too much and too often, was surprisingly astute. He was also a confirmed smoker who didn’t even want to give it up, so he and Pel had a lot in common.
He broached the subject over drinks before dinner. Madame Pel always liked to know what he was engaged on and even on occasion made suggestions that were helpful.
‘Why would a woman as attractive as this Bronwen want to marry someone as old and silly as the Baron?’ he offered as a starter.
Madame didn’t waste much time on that one. ‘They’d been married fourteen years,’ she pointed out. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t quite as old and silly then.’
Since Pel was never one for seeing relatives, when he finally got around to suggesting the visit, she almost choked over her cassis. She had so many relations, Pel was convinced that laid end to end they would have stretched the length of Burgundy. And they all had money which they liked to leave to Madame when they died. Only Roger, a plump, genial man, seemed to be without any.
A telephone call brought a shriek of delight from Roger’s wife. ‘Be sure to bring Pel!’ she yelled down the telephone. ‘Roger likes him.’
Pel did the driving on the way down. As he drove he tried to explain what was worrying him.
‘It’s all connected somehow to this building speculation that’s going on,’ he said, gesturing angrily. ‘I’m sure of it. There are foreigners trying to acquire land in Burgundy. For building. Who are they? And what’s behind it?’
‘It’s usually money,’ Madame replied, and since she understood money, Pel was inclined to agree with her.
They had decided to avoid the motorway and stick to the country roads but near Tournus the Highways Department had dug a trench across the road and seemed prepared to defend it against all comers. The faces of both motorists and workmen suggested war was about to break out. Pel fidgeted as they waited, gesturing angrily as he argued about money. As he restarted and moved off without looking, there was a shout of ‘Assassin!’ from a man climbing down from a bulldozer who had to leap for his life into the trench.
As Madame Pel had feared, the visit to Cousin Roger turned out to be very liquid and very noisy. Roger’s house was full of children, all at the age when they made enough noise for the Battle of the Marne, got in everybody’s way and ate enough for a zoo. There were also three dogs, six cats, four budgerigars and a tank full of tropical fish into which Roger invariably emptied the dregs of his glass.
‘It makes them skittish,’ he liked to explain.
After a heavy lunch and enough wine to float a battleship, Pel got Roger on one side down the garden where they both lit up and puffed away in an aura of Régie Tabac smoke as if they were in danger of being arrested for it.
‘What is it this time?’ Roger asked. ‘Why have you come to see me? I can’t imagine any man in his senses suggesting a Sunday visit to relations without a good reason when he could be dozing in front of the television. I wouldn’t.’
Pel sniffed. ‘I want some advice,’ he admitted. ‘You’ve heard of this case we’re handling at the moment. The Baroness Raby-Labassat. There’s money involved somewhere. She claimed she had some and she hired Antoine Charrieri, the architect, to draw up plans for a gymnasium.’ ‘You can die of heart attacks in gymnasiums,’ Roger said gravely. ‘I wouldn’t want one. Would you?’
Pel shuddered. ‘She not only had plans drawn up,’ he pointed out, ‘but she intended, it seems, to go ahead with it. How? As far as I can tell, she had no money of her own. So where would it be coming from?’
‘Boyfriend? Somebody who thought she could make money from a gymnasium and was prepared to back her.’
‘How do you make money from a gymnasium at Faux-Villecerf? The people there work all hours God sends in the fields and vineyards. They don’t need a gymnasium for exercise. Their whole lives consist of exercise.’
‘People from the city? From Dijon? Auxerre? Dole? Beaune?’
‘Why go all that way? There are gymnasiums everywhere these days. The world’s gone crazy on gymnasiums. Everybody’s doing exercises. Jogging—’
‘Do you jog, Pel?’
‘It would kill me. So who would advance money?’
‘There are always people,’ Roger said. ‘Greedy people would advance money to anyone so long as they had a guarantee that it would double. My father used to say that thirty per cent profit was a good profit. Nowadays they expect a hundred, even two hundred. Haven’t you noticed how many millionaires there are in their twenties? Once upon a time it took a man until he was fifty.’
‘The money,’ Pel persisted. ‘Who’d supply it?’
‘There’s the Scoroff Finance Corporation. They’d advance anything to anybody so long as there was something in it for them. There’s the Société Caterin Frères. They’re known to be willing to back wildcat schemes. There are plenty of those people around. There’s even a new one – a Spaniard who’s suddenly popped up. Name of Carmen Vlaxi.’
Pel’s head jerked up. ‘Would he go in for this sort of thing?’
‘In my opinion he’d go in for anything. I think he’s a crook.’
‘I know he’s a crook,’ Pel said. ‘But I didn’t know you knew.’
Eleven
It seemed wiser to let Madame do the driving on the way back and the following morning, Pel was still heavy-headed when he reached the Hôtel de Police. Having made his mark there, he repaired at once to the Bar Transvaal for black coffee. Back in his office he found Brochard waiting to report to him. Pel regarded him with acute distaste. He had been hoping for a quiet half hour. But Brochard was cheerfully indifferent. And it was a long story.
Brochard had spent his weekend on the shores of Lac Léman. One day, he felt, he would be truly welcomed in the Ciasca home and he looked forward to evenings of lustful dalliance on the settee while the family was out taking tourists about the lake. He had an aunt in Evian for whom he had suddenly discovered a warm and abiding affection because she had a spare room where he could stay overnight on his visits to Charlie.
When he had been introduced to the family it had finally dawned on him why she was so heavily protected. He had begun to assume their morals were stiff enough to make Martin Luther seem a lecher, but he had finally realised that Charlie was the family’s pride and joy. She was the one who had been educated, the one child with some skill who had managed to get a good job. With her beauty and brains, they felt they could get her married off to someone with better prospects than an enquiry agent for an insurance company, which was what they thought Brochard was. Money and influence, they felt, might postpone the penury that was always threatening them, in a way they clearly didn’t think Brochard could. The two brothers were always around to make sure she didn’t put a foot wrong and compromise the scheme.
It had finally come to a head on his last visit in an argument with them all involved.
‘We are responsible for our sister,’ Jean-Jacques had pointed out firmly.
‘An admirable attitude,’ Brochard had admitted.
‘And we do not trust you. You have been seeing other women
.’
‘Have I?’ Brochard said. ‘I’ve been missing something. Where?’
‘We haven’t seen them but we expect to.’
Charlie snorted and gestured at Jean-Jacques with a flurry of fingers that came direct from Italy and contained not one whit of Switzerland. ‘You have the imagination of a pile of sand,’ she said contemptuously. ‘One of these days I’ll disgrace you by running off with someone from across the lake. Even perhaps a Swiss.’
Brochard hadn’t let the family put him off. He’d been told by Mamma Ciasca he could call for Charlie and he was determined not to back down. The house where the family lived stood back from the road at the end of a scraggy lawn that was never cut. The front door was open and it was Italian scents – cheese and olives and ravioli and uncorked wine – that came out at you with the smell of ancient stone. The area was full of Ciascas who had followed the original bearer of the name to Switzerland. They had finally settled on the French side of the lake in a rip-roaring Italian untidiness that made the austere orderliness at the other side of the lake look like a hair shirt. A baby was crying in the next building and someone was playing a piano and singing – and holding top notes until they begged to be allowed to go free.
The Ciascas and their relations, it seemed, were as much a colony as the British and the Dutch who were bothering Pel. In spite of the influence of Swiss efficiency and cleanliness, their personality had managed to stamp itself across the whole area. It had originally been more accommodatingly French than Swiss but by this time it also had a touch of riotous Italian in the background.
As he rang the doorbell, Charlie appeared, all large eyes and spiky lashes. She grinned at him.
‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Busy,’ Brochard said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Making enquiries.’ Brochard played the martyr to get her sympathy. ‘Things don’t always go right.’