by Mark Hebden
Copyright & Information
Death Set to Music
First published in 1979
Copyright: Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1979-2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Mark Hebden (John Harris) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
1842328913 9781842328910 Print
0755124804 9780755124800 Pdf
0755125002 9780755125005 Mobi/Kindle
0755125207 9780755125203 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.
He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.
He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.
Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.
One
It wasn’t a day for thinking of death.
After a series of heavy downpours that had left the place chill with damp, it had suddenly become warm – a day for thinking of young girls in their summer dresses, of children playing with dogs, of old men dropping steel spheres in the dust under the trees in a long slow game of boules; of summer air full of acrid cigarette smoke and the smell of vegetation burning in busy back gardens.
Inspector Pel ought to have known better. He’d been at the game long enough never to take things at their face value, and he ought to have realised that fate has a habit of doing sneaky things; that, with the windows open and even a faint breeze to take away the heat, it was a perfect morning for him to find himself dragged out of his comfortable office to stand on his feet until they felt as if they belonged to six other men – all cripples.
The sun in that part of France has a special quality of gold in it, and that morning it was streaming through Pel’s window like the glory of the Lord. Across the city, the pale stone of the Palace of the Dukes, no longer a prestigious home but a mere headquarters for the local authorities, was glowing in the sunshine and the sound of the traffic was muted. Beyond the nearby wall, he could see a tiled roof, varnished and patterned in the manner for which the province was so rightly famous. Below, the parking area alongside the railway track was brilliant with the colours of parked cars.
The city had been the provincial capital since the Dark Ages and its rulers had challenged even the kings of France. If it seemed at times to belong to the Grand Siècle and the era of Louis XV and XVI, in out-of-the-way corners or behind the blank facades of its narrow streets there were still mediaeval relics that gave it a feeling of historical continuity. It was a heart-warming city and a place to cheer even a misanthrope like Pel.
Sitting at his desk, staring at a pile of dossiers, he was trying his best to be bad-tempered. Thin-faced, dark-eyed and intense, being bad-tempered was one of Pel’s few pleasures. He was unmarried, so there was nowhere he could work out his frustrations except in the office. Even at home he was bullied by his housekeeper.
He smoked too much, he knew, and had often tried to be like Maigret and take to a pipe. But it left him with a sour mouth and – because of the paraphernalia it necessitated him carrying around – bulges in his clothes. Being neat enough to dislike sagging suits, instead he worked his way regularly through packets of Gauloises, trying to persuade himself, despite the evidence to the contrary, that they couldn’t possibly do him any harm. He’d been told that, although they were strong, they contained less saltpetre than other cigarettes and that it was saltpetre that caused cancer, though it still didn’t alter the fact, as he well knew, that they contained enough tar content to asphalt the N71 from Dijon to Châtillon.
He sighed, knowing he was weak, and lighting up his third since he’d arrived, he dragged down the smoke so deeply it looked as if it were about to emerge through his ears, out of the ends of his sleeves and trouser bottoms, even through his flies. The depth of the breath he drew in nearly made his eyes fall out but, as he waved away the smoke, he sat back, relaxed and alive again. He had been handling four cases at once – two assaults, one rape and the dubious death of an SNCF employee called Giulle at Marsonnay, and they had so occupied his attention for the last month he’d been keeping them all in the air at once like a juggler with his oranges. He now felt worn out.
Pel liked to feel worn out – it made him feel he was succeeding at his job – but at last he could see the end of the cases. All but the death of the railwayman, Giulle, had suddenly cleared up very happily and he was looking forward to the whole weekend free of work, to enable him to get over it, to sleep and relax. It was Pel’s firm conviction that he was a poor sleeper and needed to catch up when he could. In fact, he didn’t need much sleep and woke every morning at 5.30 as if to an alarm.
He took another drag at the Gauloise, wondering if he ought to let himself go mad enough to enjoy his lunch, and what he ought to order for the sake of his health. Like every adult in France, he had learned all about his anatomy at school and now spent most of his waking hours considering how best to keep it in proper working order. Perhaps tomatoes in oil, he decided placidly. To lubricate things. With an omelette and a small carafe of wine and a coffee to follow, which, unhappily, would not be decaffeinated. Then a calm afternoon browsing through reports and an early departure for home, with perhaps a pernod and an energetic game of dominoes at the Café de L’Est on the way for exercise. Maybe even a wild bout of boules. Despite the awesome prospect of having to face the wrath of his housekeeper, Madame Routy, life, he thought, might just – with a little push – be worth living for a while.
The door opened and Sergeant Darcy’s head appeared.
‘Yes?’ The word came out as a bark and Pel’s placid air disappeared like a puff of smoke in a high wind.
Darcy didn’t turn a hair. Chiefly because everyone else refused to work with Pel, Darcy had been his assistant for a long time now and he knew how to handle him. Sometimes, even, he considered his superior a pain in the neck. How much better, he often thought, if their positions had been reversed and he’d b
een the inspector and Pel the sergeant. On the other hand, of course, everybody knew that the police force – like the army – was run by its sergeants and with Pel as a sergeant it would have been God help the Fourth Republic.
‘Trouble,’ he said.
Pel pushed his spectacles up on his forehead. ‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked.
Darcy shrugged. ‘The duty dogsbody took it. Between two chapters of a dirty book he was reading and a few thoughts on his girlfriend, I suspect. It looks like a big one.’
‘Well, go on, spit it out.’
‘I’m trying to be laconic,’ Darcy said calmly. ‘You always say that when you ask for a report you don’t want poetry readings. It’s murder.’
Pel stared, his dark intense eyes seeming to Darcy to go red with anger. ‘I was looking forward to a quiet weekend,’ he pointed out coldly.
‘Sorry, Patron. So was I. But the Commissaire dropped it on us.’
‘How did he know I was free?’
‘Sixth sense, I expect. It’s at Aigunay-le-Petit; 6 Chemin de Champ-Loups. Off the Rue Clement-Rémy.’
‘Who?’
‘Woman called Chenandier. Somebody demolished her with a heavy instrument.’
‘Demolished?’
‘That’s what it sounds like.’
‘Merde alors!’ Pel flung the dossiers aside without looking where they went and they slid off the end of the desk and fell to the floor in a flutter of sheets of paper. Darcy stared at them but made no attempt to retrieve them. Pel glared at him.
‘Well, pick them up!’
‘Certainly, Patron.’ Having forced the request, Darcy cheerfully scooped the papers into a jumbled pile and placed them back on the desk. ‘I’ll get Nosjean to sort them out as we leave.’
‘Nosjean’s an idiot. He’ll probably flush them down the lavatory by mistake.’
Darcy smiled placatingly. ‘He tries hard, Patron. He’s still a bit inexperienced. And he’s in love.’
Pel was not inclined to make allowances – not even for Nosjean’s love life. ‘Put a bomb under his backside,’ he said. ‘Wake him up. And if it’s experience he wants, he can take over that death at Marsonnay – the railwayman, Giulle. I’m too busy. Especially now. Tell him to ask around.’
‘Yes, Patron.’
Pel had put out his cigarette, jabbing it savagely in the ash-tray. Just when he was enjoying it, too, he thought bitterly, extracting the utmost from his martyrdom. ‘Well, come on,’ he snorted. ‘Get going. What about the car?’
‘Waiting, Patron.’
‘Photographers? Fingerprints? Doctor? Laboratory?’
‘All laid on, Patron.’
Unable to find anything to complain about, Pel pushed his chair back with a scrape and stalked out of the office, his spectacles still up on his forehead, flattening the thin dark hair he scraped close to his skull. Darcy followed him, dumping the pile of tangled reports on Nosjean’s desk.
‘You’re to sort that lot out, mon brave,’ he said pontifically to the pink-faced young man who gaped at them. ‘And make sure you get ’em right or he’ll have you back pounding a beat in no time.’
‘Who?’
‘Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel himself. No less.’ Darcy rolled his eyes. ‘Désiré,’ he said. ‘Désiréd one! Dieu!’
As he dimbed out of the car at Aigunay-le-Petit, Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel was firmly convinced that God had it in for him.
To start off with, he carried a burden which would have made the Garden of Eden seem like a cold day in the mountains. Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel. He’d often wondered what his mother and father had been thinking when they’d chosen the names. Evariste, Clovis, or Désiré on their own might have been all right, but together they were enough to make a man feel ill. He sometimes even wondered if they were the reason he’d never married. After all, he’d often thought, any girl looking misty-eyed across the pillow, all pink and pleased with herself, to ask ‘Isn’t it about time I got to know your name?’ and getting ‘Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel’ as an answer, would more than likely fall out of bed laughing. In fact, one had and Pel had never been keen to repeat the performance.
And this morning – now – he felt as if the depression he’d been so valiantly fighting off from the minute he’d got out of bed was crowding in on him again because he’d picked up the details en route and didn’t like the sound of what he’d heard. Attacks with blunt instruments were messy and usually necessitated tiptoeing round the corpse like a cat on wet pavements, while everyone in the department, the whites of their eyes showing like a startled foal’s at the horror, got themselves on edge over the amount of blood there was about. Attacks with heavy instruments were never neat and tidy and the blood went everywhere – on the walls, the furniture, the carpets, even on the ceiling. They were untidy affairs and, a tidy man at heart, Pel didn’t like untidy murders.
Aigunay-le-Petit was just outside the city to the south-east in the sloping vine country through which a tributary of the Saône meandered in vast loops among the rushes and willows. It was a large village made up of old farms, sagging stone walls and lopsided barns with ancient beams; but interpersed here and there among them were modern houses built since the war. They reminded Pel uncomfortably of the house he lived in himself, and because of it, that he was underpaid, had a long time to go for his pension, was sufficiently unattractive to the opposite sex to have remained unmarried, had no children to look after him in his old age, and no prospects of ever having enough money to provide for that old age. As his bitterness welled up and he considered himself neglected, he felt much better.
The Chemin de Champ-Loups was a narrow cul-de-sac with an unmade surface, heavily overhung with large trees and bushes. It joined the end of the Rue Clement-Rémy and grew narrower and narrower until it became merely a footpath that continued past a footbridge which crossed a stream, then went on to emerge among the bushes lining the edge of the main road that finally went up to Langres.
The policeman at the gate of Number 6 stepped aside as they swept past. The house was an old building of grey stone with wisteria and ivy growing over a wrought-iron porch. Long shuttered windows reached to the ground and, beyond, Pel could see a gravel path and a garden sloping gently down to the stream that glittered among a thick brush of reeds and willows. The house was set back from the road up a short winding drive ankle-deep in crushed pebbles that had made a luxuriously expensive crunch as the car edged across them.
There were three vehicles parked at the back of the house. A grey Renault, an old Deux Chevaux and a rather shabby British Mini.
A police sergeant was inside the hall. He looked harassed and not a little green.
‘Whose are all the cars?’ Pel demanded.
‘Madame’s,’ the sergeant said. ‘The housekeeper’s and the daughter’s.’
‘See that they’re not touched. Where’s the body?’
The sergeant gestured and Pel noticed that he hung well back as though he had no desire to be confronted once more by it.
‘It’s enough to make you throw up in there,’ he announced.
‘Anybody in the place when it happened?’
‘Just the daughter and a housekeeper, sir. The housekeeper sleeps on the third floor in a sort of suite under the eaves. The daughter has a flat with a separate entrance on the end of the house.’
‘Well, stop looking as if you’ve lost your trousers and let’s have ’em somewhere I can talk to ’em. What about the husband?’
The sergeant made an effort to pull himself together. Clearly he liked messy murders no more than Pel. ‘He’s away on business,’ he said. ‘He’s a wine exporter. In Paris, I gather.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘We don’t know for certain yet, sir. But it looks as though it was during the night. She was in her nightclothes. It looks as though she heard something and came down to investigate and found an intruder. I think there are some things missing.’
‘What sort of things?’
/>
‘Jewels probably.’
‘Well, say so,’ Pel snapped. ‘“Things missing” could mean anything from kitchen utensils to virginities. How do you know?’
The sergeant stiffened. ‘I had a quick look round–’
‘Carefully, I hope.’
‘Of course, sir. But I thought there might be someone else upstairs, hurt or dying.’
‘And was there?’
‘No, sir. But I found a drawer open in the bedroom. It might just have been where she kept her nail files, but on the other hand she might have had jewellery there, too. It’s the sort of drawer she might use. There’s a lock with a key in it.’
Pel nodded. ‘Check it,’ he said.
‘Right, sir.’
‘Find out. Exactly.’
‘Yes, sir, of course.’
As the sergeant disappeared, Pel turned to Darcy, ‘You’d better check up on the husband,’ he said. ‘Get him down here. And don’t rely on that sergeant too much. He doesn’t know what time of day it is. He’ll stand around with his mouth open like one of the carp in the Tuileries gardens. You’ll have to do things yourself.’
Two
The body was in the salon, an elegant room with a grand piano and a Louis XIV escritoire. The shutters were still closed so that the light was faded and greenish-looking, and the curtains moved slightly in the breeze that was coming in from the garden through the open french window. The stereo was still turning at the dead end of a record of Rigoletto. Pel switched it off and the clicking stopped.
‘How long has this been on?’
Darcy put his hand on the machine. ‘All night by the feel of it,’ he said dryly. ‘Orchestrated murder.’
Pel stood in the centre of the room. It had once been a calm attractive place but at that moment it looked vaguely like a slaughterhouse. Which, in a way, it was.