Death Set to Music

by Mark Hebden

‘I expect it was rubbish. The English aren’t very fussy.’ Pel sniffed at his stew. ‘I think they took it from the pig bin,’ he observed coldly. ‘And I ought to have had Vittel water, not wine. Better for the inside. Make a check on Madame Chenandier, Darcy. See if she had a lover.’

  ‘Think she did?’

  ‘It’s a guess. Women who have themselves photographed as often as she did usually have a high opinion of themselves. And women who have high opinions of themselves like to be admired.’

  ‘Aren’t we the philosopher?’

  Pel looked up under his eyebrows. ‘The trouble with you, Darcy,’ he growled, ‘is that you air your opinions too much. It’ll do you no good. There are other sergeants in the office, you know, all itching to be transferred.’

  Darcy set about his food without much worry. Everybody in the office – from the lowliest man on traffic duty – knew Pel, and most of them preferred to remain where they were, even if it were only directing traffic. He felt his job was quite secure.

  Four

  The sun’s heat seemed to intensify as the day drew out. The breeze dropped and, as the light took on the bronze colour of late afternoon, the temperature rose. Pel’s temper rose with it because by this time he’d been on his feet all of eight solid relentless hours and they were hurting him. Besides which, because of the temperature, he’d had an extra beer after lunch and was convinced now that he was going to get indigestion. He hadn’t got it yet but he firmly expected to before long and had even felt it wise to take a couple of bismuth tablets in case.

  ‘Good for the stomach,’ he explained to Darcy, making a mental resolve not to touch another drop until he was safely home and behind his own table.

  When they returned to the house, the juge d’instruction had arrived to take a look at the scene of the crime. He was a young man called Brisard and new to the game. Pel had long since realised he was a little afraid of him and had been quick to take advantage of it.

  ‘How are you getting on, Inspector?’ Brisard asked uncertainly.

  Pel shrugged.

  ‘Will there be an arrest, do you think?’

  Pel shrugged again and Brisard looked nervous.

  ‘Are you moving fast enough?’ he asked.

  Pel looked coldly at him. Brisard was an unhealthy young man – tall but pear-shaped, with large hips and buttocks which gave his figure a curiously feminine line. He had an office in the Palais de Justice that was always full of flowers and photographs of his children, which Pel suspected were there more for show than anything else. He had little love for Brisard and never hesitated to show it.

  ‘How fast am I expected to move?’ he asked. ‘I only arrived a few hours ago.’

  Brisard tried to put things right. ‘I understand your problems, of course, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I regret it if I appear to be chivvying you.’

  Just try, Pel thought sourly.

  ‘But you have to understand that I’m being chivvied in my turn by the Director of Prosecutions. He likes to get things moving.’

  Pel gave his eloquent sniff, looking like a man pushed to the limits of endurance. Napoleon after Waterloo had looked the same. ‘It’s easy when you don’t budge out of your office,’ he observed.

  The body had disappeared by this time, together with most of the technicians, and the house was silent. Odile Chenandier had vanished to her own flat and Madame Quermel was in the kitchen preparing herself a lunch of bread, tomato and cheese. She had a nervous look on her face, and seeing Pel watching her, she found him a bottle of beer.

  ‘I don’t feel like eating much,’ she said. ‘Not after what’s happened.’

  Pel nodded, thanked her for the beer and wandered off. The house was still, with the shutters drawn against the sun, and he paused at the bottom of the staircase, looking up, a frown on his face. There was a picture of Philip the Bold on the wall – a copy of one he’d seen in the Palais de Justice – and a series of miniatures, mostly of men in uniform dating from Napoleon through the period of the Franco-Prussian War. Judging by the blunt potato faces, he put them down as ancestors of Chenandier rather than his wife.

  He frowned and began to prowl about the ground floor, staring at the furniture as if it might tell him a story; as if, almost, he were demanding that it tell him a story. Darcy was sitting at the desk in the study writing in his notebook and he looked up as Pel appeared. Pel was staring at the floor with such intensity he looked paralysed.

  ‘What’s up, Patron?’ he asked. ‘Disillusionment setting in?’

  ‘Judge Brisard’s been pestering me.’

  ‘You don’t like him, do you?’

  ‘He has the soul of a pile of sand.’

  Darcy grinned. ‘I bet you sent him away feeling he’d been picked over and sorted out to within an inch of his life.’

  Pel almost smiled and Darcy’s grin grew wider.

  ‘I bet you pulled the legs off flies when you were a boy, Chief,’ he said.

  ‘We need a few malcontents in this world,’ Pel pointed out. ‘What did Doctor Minet have to say?’

  ‘The usual: Multiple injuries. Laceration of the brain. There’ll be a report.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘He won’t be precise. He says somewhere between ten p.m. and midnight.’

  ‘What was she hit with?’

  ‘Minet isn’t prepared at this stage to be exact but he said it wasn’t short and blunt like a hammer. He thought a long narrow weapon. Heavy, of course. Could have been a poker.’

  Pel walked into the salon, carefully avoiding the bloodstains, and stopped by the fireplace. There were fire tongs, a shovel and a brush there, hanging on a four-hooked stand. The fourth hook was empty. Pel studied the stand for a moment then, using his handkerchief, he picked up the shovel and weighed it in his hand. It was of burnished steel and seemed as heavy as a girder.

  ‘There’s a poker missing here,’ he said, returning to the study. ‘It’ll be a heavy one, too. Get someone out here and get him to set up a search for it in the stream and in those bushes on the other side. Whoever did her in might well have thrown it over.’

  ‘Right, Patron. I’ll attend to it. Who do you want? Nosjean?’

  Pel shook his head. ‘He’d probably get lost himself.’

  ‘He gets around like a guided missile when he starts.’

  Pel pulled a face. ‘Try Lagé. He’s a married man and growing fat. He’ll take his time. It’ll make for a better job.’

  As Darcy disappeared towards the telephone, Pel lit a cigarette and moved through the french window into the garden to smoke it. Studying the house, he drew in the smoke, wondering uneasily what it was doing to his lungs. Bending, he studied the paving by the french windows. There was a clear mark of dried blood there, and another, he saw, on the edge of the grass, as though someone had stepped in one of the puddles of blood just inside the door and tramped it outside.

  ‘Leguyader!’

  The lab technician’s head appeared through an upstairs window. He was a small intense-looking man who resembled Pel even to the tart tongue.

  ‘This blood outside? Is there any more?’

  ‘Just that on the paving there, and a bit on the gravel and a mark on the grass. Apart from that, nothing.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Leguyader took the same view as Darcy.

  ‘That he went out that way, probably in a hurry – probably even running, so that he put his foot on the edge of the grass there – then went down the drive to the front entrance and into the lane.’

  Pel studied the mark again. ‘What did it? Boot? Wellington? Wader? Snowshoe?’

  ‘Could have been anything. Naked foot or a galosh even. There’s no clear print. I’ve had it photographed, but there’ll be nothing.’ Leguyader sounded almost pleased.

  Pel straightened up and examined the door. There was no sign of a break-in but that was not unusual. So much had been written and spoken on television about how to get into a house with a spring lock,
every burglar in France had perfected the technique. Even little boys knew how to do it and sometimes did. All the same, with Chenandier away in Paris, it was unusual that there’d been no bolts on the door, or a chain in place. But was it? Aigunay-le-Petit wasn’t Paris or Marseilles. People living in country districts didn’t expect burglars.

  Though they sometimes got them.

  Pel threw away his cigarette and stared round him. The stream that ran past the bottom of the garden had been made into a decorative pond, crudely built up with stones and flowers among the reeds. It hadn’t turned out very well. The French were never very good gardeners. His own efforts looked like those of infants in arms on the beach at Royan, and even his lawn looked like the stubble in a wheat field.

  He pushed his thoughts aside and concentrated on the stream. Beyond, in the distance, he could see the ground rising towards the high lands of the Doubs. Wondering if the intruder had come across the fields and into the garden that way, he found a rake and with the handle tested the depth of the water. At its deepest it was well over a metre and at its shallowest two-thirds of that depth, running over pebbles and large stones. The intruder couldn’t have come that way, he decided, or there’d have been water in the house and wet prints. He felt the water with his hand. It was clear and icy cold and he guessed it came down from the hills.

  He frowned as he wiped his fingers, and decided to visit the neighbours.

  The next-door houses were both smaller than the Chenandier house, one of them old, the other modern and ugly. He tried the modern one first, and was shown by an elderly daily help into the lounge. He could hear children playing in the garden.

  As the help disappeared, her place was taken by a small woman with dark eyes and hair, a plump woman with the look about her of a fat brown partridge. When he explained who he was and what he was doing, her large eyes became larger with shocked horror.

  ‘I’m Madame Germain,’ she said. ‘Ernestine Germain. We’ve known the Chenandiers ever since we came here seven years ago.’ She gave a nervous little smile. ‘I say “known” but that’s not really true, because I don’t think Madame Chenandier approved of us building alongside them. Our house isn’t quite as imposing as hers and I think she felt we destroyed the tone of the neighbourhood.’

  ‘What about Monsieur Chenandier?’

  ‘I think he was quite indifferent. He said “good morning” occasionally and once gave me a lift into the city when my car had broken down but for the most part he ignored us.’

  She offered him a glass of wine and he was just about to shake his head when he changed his mind.

  ‘A small one,’ he condescended, uneasily remembering at the last moment his decision not to overload his stomach.

  When it arrived, it was big enough to drown a cat in. Taking a wary sip, he looked up.

  ‘What about your husband?’ he asked. ‘What did he think of Madame Chenandier?’

  She smiled. ‘He didn’t like either of them very much. He makes plastic moulds and he has an office in Dijon and a small factory in Arles. He’s away a lot down there. Everything he’s got he’s made himself with his own efforts and he hadn’t much time for Monsieur Chenandier who started with inherited money and an inherited house; he had none at all for Madame Chenandier. Though it’s awful to say it under the circumstances, he thought she was a snob.’

  ‘Did you hear anything unusual last night?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ She paused. ‘That is, I heard her playing opera at one point. Was that when it happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pel said. Murder set to music, he thought. Going out to Verdi’s arias. Death to ‘La donna è mobile’. ‘What time would it be?’

  ‘I didn’t notice. Latish. I always heard her when she played the stereo. She liked to play it loud. She sometimes sang to the piano. My husband couldn’t stand it and always used to slam the windows rather obviously.’

  ‘Did you hear any cars last night? Anything like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘See anyone in the lane?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘See anything in the house next door?’

  She indicated the window. ‘If you look, you’ll see we couldn’t see anything even if we tried. The trees are in the way. Madame Chenandier even planted more when we first built the house, to stop us looking into her garden. It was like a notice saying “Keep out. Propriété privée.” It’s the same from upstairs. You can’t see a thing. You can’t from the Layes – the people on the other side.’

  ‘You know the Layes well?’

  She smiled. ‘No. I was invited there when we first arrived. But I didn’t seem to fit in. We don’t give parties or play cards and our children are much younger. It was a solitary visit–’ she smiled again ‘ – to be shown round the house, I suspect. And then no more. We just didn’t fall into the pattern. I think the two families felt it was their lane and rather resented it when we arrived.’

  Pel paused, thinking. ‘Did you ever see anybody going in or out of the Chenandier house?’

  ‘Only the housekeeper or the daughter. That is, apart from the Chenandiers themselves. And there was a brother and a gardener who came most days.’

  ‘No others?’

  ‘Only the tradesmen.’

  ‘No – er–’ Pel paused ‘ – no single men, perhaps, who made a habit of visiting during the day when Monsieur Chenandier was out?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You think she might have been that sort?’

  Pel frowned. ‘I have no opinions at all yet,’ he said. ‘I’m merely trying to find out.’

  She gave a little tinkling laugh, as if she enjoyed scandal at the expense of her superior neighbours. ‘Well, I heard stories in the village. The postman said he’d seen a man there once or twice.’

  ‘Did he know him?’

  ‘No. He just saw a figure through the window.’

  Pel nodded and, leaving, walked slowly down the lane to the old house on the other side of the Chenandiers’ mansion. Outside was a big grey Mercedes and he realised with a shock that it was late enough in the day for the owner to have come home from his office. The family were taking apéritifs in the lounge – mother, father and two youngsters.

  He introduced himself and was received with polite curiosity and shown in.

  ‘Drink?’

  May God be merciful, Pel thought.

  He was placed in a deep armchair and handed a Pernod. It was as imposing as Madame Germain’s glass of wine.

  ‘It’s a big one,’ he said nervously.

  ‘Mustn’t have people saying we’re mean,’ the man observed. ‘I’ve no doubt you’ve had a tiring day.’

  Much more of it, Pel thought, and he’d go home exuding the sweetness and light of a cat in a sack. ‘A bit,’ he admitted.

  ‘I’m Laye,’ the man went on. ‘Gérard Laye. My wife, Hélène. My two children, Emile and Anne-Marie.’

  Pel nodded and sipped at the drink, wondering how his stomach stood up to what it had to accept in the line of duty.

  ‘I’m trying to find out,’ he said, ‘if anyone heard or saw anything last night. Any sounds? Any cars arriving?’

  They shook their heads and Laye gestured. ‘You can’t see much from here,’ he said. ‘And they always kept themselves to themselves.’

  Pel nodded and, glancing through the window, saw that the garden, though smaller than the Chenandiers’, was much the same type, with the stream at the bottom beyond the lawn, and a view of fields at the other side of the willows.

  He became aware of the family watching him, with a sort of wary dislike. Madame Laye was a handsome woman with an expressionless face and a tight mouth that seemed to indicate constant irritation, and he wondered what sort of dissensions tore at this family.

  He opened his notebook. ‘We’d better get the record straight, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘I’d better have all your names and so on.’

  Laye’s eyebrows rose. ‘Are we suspects or something?’

  ‘Of course not, Monsieur.
But if my men need to ask more questions, it helps them find you more easily.’

  Laye shrugged. ‘You have our names. My children are students.’

  ‘And you, Monsieur?’

  ‘Engineer. We have an office in the city and a small factory on the Troyes road. We manufacture car accessories. Mirrors, fenders, hub caps. That sort of thing. We also have a small welding firm at Bazay, together with an office. It’s not much. Two or three men. We’ve also got a garage on the Lyons road. Two brothers called Orbeaux who look after our vehicles and cars and do odd jobs for us. A few friends and neighbours use them, too. They’re cheap and don’t fuss.’ He smiled. ‘They’re probably not very honest either, but that doesn’t matter. They do what we want.’

  ‘That the extent of your business interests, Monsieur?’

  ‘No. I also have an interest in a car hire group. It’s a nationwide thing; we get so much competition from the Americans these days a lot of us got together and put money into it. We all run separate firms but they’re all inter-connected. I have one here, one in Lille, one in Nantes, one in Lyons and one in Paris. I’m the major shareholder and what I say goes.’

  ‘Names, Monsieur?’

  ‘Here it’s Action Autos. You’ll know it, I expect. In Lille, it’s Marc Ourgane Garages; in Nantes, Zip – that’s all, just Zip; in Lyons, its Langrin Garages; in Paris, Luxe Cars. We hire them with or without drivers.’

  ‘And you spend your time where, Monsieur?’

  Laye shrugged. ‘Moving about between them all. Sometimes here, sometimes there. Mostly here – in the city.’

  ‘How well did you know the Chenandiers?’

  Laye glanced at his wife. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and handsome, a good head taller than his wife.

  ‘I didn’t know them at all,’ Madame Laye said. ‘We were friendly, that’s all.’

  ‘I hardly exchanged a word with them,’ Laye agreed. ‘Chenandier was often away and Madame Chenandier kept very much to herself.’

  The boy shook his head. The girl shook hers, too, almost too forcefully, then she rose. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and left the room.