Death Set to Music

by Mark Hebden

‘Anything wrong, chérie?’ Madame Laye asked.

  ‘No.’ The door closed and Laye smiled at Pel. ‘Youngsters,’ he said. ‘They don’t have much time for adults these days. Perhaps it’s because you’re a policeman. She’s at the university and they don’t seem to like the law at the university.’

  Having more than once stood on the end of a line of uniformed men while students hurled chunks of paving stone at them, Pel was inclined to agree.

  He addressed Madame Laye. ‘Ever see any visitors during the day?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m often out during the afternoons. My husband’s at work and the children are at the university. I keep the afternoons for myself.’

  ‘Doing what, Madame?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Playing bridge,’ she said.

  Five

  Pel was in a mellow mood when he reached home that evening. Having once started, it was hard to stop and he had taken a Pernod with Darcy and eaten an omelette aux fines herbes with tomatoes and a little chopped ham, which he’d felt would do his stomach no harm and probably settle all the drink he’d swallowed. The fact that he’d probably shortened his life by several years by the number of cigarettes he’d smoked didn’t occur to him, and he was feeling in just the mood to relax with a little quiet reading.

  Reading was a pleasure to Pel, and one of his chief joys were English thrillers. Somehow the English seemed to do them better than French writers and, with an older sister who’d married an Englishman at the end of the war, he’d often visited England and learned to speak and read English well – something that often stood him in good stead now that inflation had allowed the Americans to occupy Europe.

  He was almost – but not quite – smiling as he opened the door. The house was depressingly small and, erected since the war when the art of construction had been set aside for quick profits, had walls that were paper-thin and contained a built-in soundbox. And at that moment the soundbox was shuddering to the noise coming from the only living room the place possessed.

  Pel’s brows went down in a scowl. It seemed that Madame Routy was watching television.

  As he appeared in the doorway, she looked up. ‘Cowboy film,’ she announced. ‘Burt Lancaster.’

  ‘It sounds like the siege of Paris,’ Pel snorted.

  She sniffed. ‘I don’t hear so well,’ she said airily, turning back to glue her eyes once more on the galloping horses and the men in large-brimmed hats.

  ‘You couldn’t turn it down a little bit, could you?’ Pel suggested, but she didn’t seem to catch on. Perhaps, Pel thought, she not only didn’t hear so well, she was actually stone deaf.

  ‘After this it’s a circus,’ she said.

  Pel’s heart sank. ‘You’re going to watch the circus?’

  ‘But of course!’ Given a chance, Madame Routy would have watched television from getting up to going to bed. It was only during the period when she was doing the housework that Pel considered there was any peace in the house, and then he was usually in his office. ‘After that there’s a play. It’s about the Free French in London during the war.’

  ‘There’ll be bombs?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so.’

  In desperation, Pel looked round for somewhere to sit down. Madame Routy was stretched on the settee with her feet in the only decent chair in the room – what Pel called le confort anglais – so that he had to sit down in a French armchair that was notable chiefly for its hardness and the impossibility of finding any joy in its clutches. He stared desperately at the television.

  ‘Le gunfight,’ Madame Routy announced brightly, gesturing at the screen.

  Pel glared savagely at Burt Lancaster, wishing to God someone would blow his head off so that there’d no longer be any point in watching the film or even in showing it. But it didn’t work out that way. Burt Lancaster, as usual, came off best and, as they carried away his victim, Pel resigned himself to an evening of noise and chaos and an early departure to his bed – which, as it happened was situated directly above the television, so that he’d have to lie between the sheets, totally unable to read because every word from below would be audible, and quite unable to sleep for the same reason. It looked like being a dreary night.

  During the evening, in desperation, Pel took refuge in a bar down the road. There was a television even there, blaring in the corner, so that the announcer made it difficult for him to concentrate on his beer.

  ‘Laborde s’avance. Il contrôle le ballon très facilement–’

  It was a football match between Reims and some Spanish team and everybody in the bar hung over the zinc counter, staring at the screen with their mouths open and their eyes out as if on sticks, listening to the blast as if they were all stone deaf.

  ‘A Roda, à Cevedola, à – mais non, Mathieu l’a pris–’

  Pel glared at the barman. ‘How long does this go on?’ he demanded bitterly.

  ‘About another half-hour,’ the barman said. ‘It’s a good match, isn’t it?’

  Pel thought it was murder. Brooding over the fact, he recalled that, all things being normal, he would have been looking forward to the weekend off. Everybody else had their weekends off. Even Madame Routy.

  He sat out the match, hoping for peace when it finished, but as soon as the football stopped, one of the young men who’d crowded the bar to watch, pushed a coin in the juke box and a pop group which seemed to be armed not merely with guitars and drums but also with bombs, cannon, rockets and a whole chorus of mad ferrets to give backing crashed out with the thunderous tumult of a dam breaking. Pel finished his beer in disgust and left.

  It was only when he was in the street that he began to wonder if noise was one of the reasons why no one had heard anything unusual in the Chemin de Champ-Loups the previous night.

  If Madame Chenandier had been playing grand opera on the stereo, it was probable she’d not heard the intruder enter, and equally probable that, if she were in, the housekeeper, used to the sound of music from downstairs, had not really noticed it and had therefore probably not even heard anyone moving about. It might be a good idea, he thought, to pursue the idea the following morning, and he decided to ring Darcy.

  He went back into the bar and asked for the telephone and a jeton to use it. Darcy answered and for a while Pel could hear scufflings and even whisperings and he decided in disgust that Darcy was probably in bed with a girl.

  ‘Sure, Patron,’ he said cheerfully when they’d sorted out who was to handle the instrument. ‘I’ll be there first thing. Waiting outside so that nobody nips away.’

  Pel walked home in silence, deciding the world was a wicked place and that it was no wonder he spent half his life involved with crime.

  When he got home, the television was still blaring out. He’d been right. The play about the Free French did include the blitz on London and he went to bed in a fury wondering how long it would be before he changed his role as detective for that of murderer, with Madame Routy as the victim.

  It was only while he was brooding on Madame Routy’s possible fate and the joy he’d have felt at being the ultimate director of her end that it occurred to him that no self-respecting burglar ever made a habit of entering a house where a record-player or stereo was playing music, whether it was pop, sentimental or operatic – at least not without doing a bit of checking first. It was one of the rules of the game. You even pulled the curtains and switched on the radio to discourage them.

  So that – and he sat up in bed, for the moment unaware even of the crashings from the salon below – whoever had murdered Madame Chenandier could not have been a common or garden intruder but someone who was well aware of her predilection for making loud musical noises and was prepared to take advantage of it. Perhaps even someone who was well known to her, which would more than account for the absence of signs of breaking and entering.

  The idea occupied his mind for so long, it was only when he decided to go to sleep that he realised that the bathroom taps were runn
ing and Madame Routy was in there, apparently – for she was a noisy individual even when she was being quiet – throwing toothglasses and nailbrushes at the wall, and that, blessed relief, the chaos downstairs had finally come to a halt.

  Darcy was waiting in the Chemin de Champ-Loups the following morning when Pel arrived. He was smoking a cigarette and looking like a cat that had been at the cream.

  Pel scowled at him, still occupied with thoughts of his ruined weekend. Darcy never seemed to get upset about extra work, taking his pleasures – usually women – where he found them, making no plans but always sufficiently well organised to be able to find entertainment when he needed it.

  ‘Have a good night?’ Pel asked sourly, remembering his tussle with Madame Routy.

  Darcy grinned and moved the flat of his hand backward and forward. ‘So – so,’ he said.

  ‘Blonde or brunette?’

  ‘I’m a sucker for redheads.’

  ‘You’ll end up with a bad back and a worn-out prostate.’

  Darcy grinned. ‘What a beautiful death!’

  ‘Who’s on duty?’

  ‘Everybody. Lagé, Misset, Krauss and Nosjean. Nosjean’s bleating, of course. He had a date and he didn’t fancy giving it up.’

  ‘He’d better make up his mind whether he wants to be a detective or a traffic cop.’

  Darcy grinned. ‘He’s just young. He hasn’t learned yet to cope with the inroads it makes into his sex life. I checked with Estelle Quermel’s relations at St Antoine, by the way – an aunt and an uncle. She didn’t go there. Nor would I. They had the sort of faces that would curdle milk. They don’t approve of her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Chiefly, I gather, because they didn’t approve of her mother either. The whole family deployed themselves round the room with me in the centre, while they told me what they thought of her.’

  ‘What did they think of her?’

  ‘They think she’s Chenandier’s mistress, not his housekeeper.’

  ‘It’s an idea. Why did they think that?’

  Darcy smiled. ‘Only it seems because her mother was some chap’s mistress, too, and they felt it ran in the family.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That was the only reason they could offer. When I pointed out that she’d been married, they said, “Ah, but she’s not now. She’s a widow.” If you could like that lot, you could like tarantulas.’ Darcy paused and cocked a thumb at the house. ‘For your information, Patron,’ he ended, ‘he’s back.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Chenandier. He arrived on an early train. He said he saw about it in the papers.’

  Pel stared through the window. It was a tranquil day, the sort he’d always enjoyed in Vieilly where he’d grown up, walking across the fields looking for trompettes de mort, the shy black mushrooms that grew under the leaf mould at the roots of trees along the edge of the woods. There were a lot of afforestation areas at Vieilly and, thinking about it now, remembering the winding road, the distant view of the river and the long slopes of the Côte d’Or topped by dark patches of trees, he wondered why he never saw it these days.

  ‘Do you want to see him, Patron?’ Darcy asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  ‘Have you questioned him?’

  ‘I reserved that pleasure for you, Patron. However, I did check with the bank. She did draw that money all right: 3,000 frs.’

  Pel frowned. ‘Well, it wasn’t in her handbag, was it? So where did it go?’

  ‘The murderer?’ Darcy suggested. ‘He must have taken it, I expect that’s what he was after and she interrupted him. That and the jewellery that’s supposed to be missing. Find who’s got those and you’ve got your man.’

  Chenandier was in the hall, staring into the salon, across the door of which Darcy had fixed a tape the night before. He was a tall, well-built man, good-looking in a rude healthy sort of way that managed to impress without the advantage of correct features or fine eyes. His nose was shapeless and his hair colourless, but there was something about him – strength perhaps – that had a strong appeal. He was wearing a well-cut suit of a fine check, suede shoes and a spotless white shirt. In build and style he looked remarkably like Laye, his next-door neighbour. He’d apparently just arrived and his suitcase was still in the hall.

  He looked worried and uncertain and turned quickly as Pel appeared.

  ‘I’m Hervé Chenandier,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got back.’

  ‘Pel. Inspector Pel. I’m in charge of the inquiry.’

  Chenandier gestured. ‘This is a terrible thing, Inspector. She was only forty-three, and she was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known. She’d never have done anyone any harm. Why did they do it?’

  His words tumbled over themselves as his thoughts spilled out, and as he spoke, he moved about the hall, clasping and unclasping his hands and beating the fist of one into the palm of the other.

  ‘What in God’s name happened, Inspector? Why should anyone do this to my wife? Was it some intruder she bumped into? It might have been, you know, because the house’s full of things that could be stolen and I’m well enough known in the city here. People must have been aware of them. I read about it in last evening’s paper in Paris. I came back as soon as I could.’

  ‘What time would that be?’ Pel asked.

  ‘I caught a train at six o’clock this morning.’

  Pel blinked. ‘It must have been in the papers before that,’ he pointed out.

  Chenandier nodded agreement. ‘It was,’ he admitted. ‘Last night. I just didn’t see it. I was out on the town. I don’t enjoy sitting in a hotel. I dined out and went to a show. When I came back, I got ready for bed and decided to read the paper before going to sleep. As soon as I saw the story, I rang for my bill and started to pack. I’d just missed the late night train, though, and had to wait on the station for the first morning train. I got in only an hour ago.’ He gestured. ‘This is awful, Inspector,’ he went on agitatedly. ‘Why did they do it? Was it an intruder? The paper said so.’

  Pel shrugged. ‘The papers always talk through a hole in their heads. So far, I don’t know.’ He glanced at Chenandier, deciding he was sufficiently in control of himself to be matter of fact. ‘You realise, of course,’ he went on, ‘that I’ll have to ask you a lot of questions?’

  Chenandier stared for a moment. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me,’ he admitted. ‘Am I a suspect?’

  ‘Everybody’s suspect for the moment,’ Pel admitted. ‘Most will be eliminated pretty quickly, but, you understand, we have to ask questions and take statements if only to verify what other people say.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Chenandier seemed to accept the situation calmly. ‘I suppose so. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Your movements since you left here chiefly.’

  ‘That’s not hard.’ Chenandier rubbed his forehead, thinking. ‘I left on Monday morning.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By car.’

  ‘All the way to Paris?’

  Chenandier grimaced. ‘When I go to Paris,’ he said, ‘I prefer to go by train. Cars are nothing but a nuisance up there. I leave mine in the Rue Charles-Briffaut near the station, and pick it up on the way back. I’ve done it many times. I’m sure the attendant will remember it was there.’

  Darcy caught Pel’s look and made a note to check.

  ‘Go on,’ Pel said. ‘About Paris.’

  Chenandier gestured. ‘I arrived in the afternoon. I dropped my bags at the hotel–’

  ‘Which hotel?’

  ‘Meurice. Avenue de l’Opéra. You can check, I’m sure. Then I did some business. I dined with my customer – I’m sure he’ll remember – name of Croxley, an Englishman with an office near the Meurice – and returned late to the hotel.’

  ‘And Tuesday?’

  ‘Business in the morning. Man called Chasse. Business lunch. I dined alone in the evening.’

  ‘Proof, Monsieur?’

  ‘I was in a restaurant in t
he Rue Jacob. La Plume Galante. I’ve been there before. They know me. I booked a table. Wednesday was much the same. I dined in the evening with a customer. Chap called Legendre. He has a business in the Rue Otéro. You can check with him.’

  ‘What about Thursday, the night your wife was killed.’

  ‘I did some business with a man called Coquibus. He’s a wine exporter, Rue Jacques-Prud’hon. Thursday evening I dined alone. Friday morning I think I had breakfast in a bar. Coffee and croissants. I sometimes do if I get up early.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Thursday evening. Where did you dine?’

  Chenandier frowned. ‘I thought you’d ask, of course, but thinking about it, I find I can’t remember, Inspector. Sometimes I like to walk and I just set off and dine where it takes my fancy.’

  ‘Can’t you remember the name of the restaurant?’

  ‘I think it was in the Boule Mich’. Though it could have been St Germain-des-Près. I had a few drinks. I was feeling a bit low and went at the apéritifs a little too hard. I honestly don’t have a clue. I remember walking away afterwards and finding myself in the Place St Michel before going back to my hotel. In the end I took in the show at the Bobino.’

  ‘Were you with anyone who could verify that, Monsieur?’

  Chenandier placed the torn-off half of a ticket on the table. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I found that in my pocket and thought I’d better keep it to show you.’

  ‘Why, Monsieur?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did you think I’d want verification?’

  ‘Well–’ Chenandier gestured ‘ – nobody wants to admit they think they’ll be suspected, do they? It’s a sort of private conceit, I suppose. It sounds like admitting guilt. But I knew it was within the bounds of possibility and I thought I’d better keep it.’

  Pel rubbed his nose, wishing everybody would think as far ahead as Chenandier. ‘And last night?’ he asked in a flat voice.

  ‘Last night I dined in the hotel restaurant and took in another show.’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Yes. I go to the theatre a lot when I’m in Paris. It’s better than sitting in a hotel room. I often go two nights running.’