by Mark Hebden
‘There’s Hardy, too,’ Pel reminded him gently. ‘The junior minister in Paris.’
‘And the type he bought the yacht at Ste Marguerite from. They’re all in it together. But there’s something missing, Patron. We can still only guess. We have everybody in the scenario but Rochemare, when he ought to be in. And if he is in it, then why did he bring you into the case? That was his doing and if he is invovled, he must have known you’d turn something up.’
‘He probably had to bring me in, Pel pointed out. ‘Because I was the one who found Caceolari. A senior police officer. If I’d not been a cop or even if I’d been an unknown cop he might have hushed it up. But he knew I’d not let it rest, so he had to put on a show and hope nothing would get past all those silent island tongues.’ Pel paused. ‘Not much did, did it?’
Nelly had cooked the evening meal and, because De Troq’ was coming, she’d decorated the table with flowers. She’d borrowed the Duponts’ Renault to go into the hills to collect them and they surrounded the candlestick and the centre of the table and each place setting. She’d cooked a joint of veal and a tarte aux fraises, and produced one of the Vicomte’s bottles of wine; though the flowers tended to get in Pel’s way when he liked plenty of room for his eating, he couldn’t help complimenting her on them.
‘They’re magnificent,’ De Troq’ agreed and she blushed with pleasure.
‘I often did it at the château when they had a dinner party,’ she said. ‘The housekeeper said I was good at it. The Baroness de Mor once got me to go to the mainland to do it for a special party she was giving.’
‘I’ve heard of Baron de Mor,’ Pel said. ‘Who is he?’
‘A friend of the Vicomte’s. Well, not so much him as his wife, the Baroness. She often came. She was the Vicomte’s friend really.’ Nelly looked disapproving. ‘A very good friend. She often stayed at the château on her own. Her daughter, Isabelle, was at school with the Vicomte’s daughter, Elodie, and she was a bridesmaid when Elodie was married.
Actually, the party was for her and it went off very well. She was delighted with the way things went. She was the one who gave me this.’
She took off the gold bracelet she wore and handed it to Madame who read out the inscription. ‘To Nelly with thanks. Isabelle Addou.’
Pel sat up abruptly. His mind was like a filing system and this was also a name he’d heard before somewhere. ‘Addou?’ he said. ‘Addou? I know that name.’
‘Yes,’ Nelly said. ‘She married a financier called Addou.’
‘Who did?’
‘The Baroness de Mor’s daughter, Isabelle.’ De Troq’ was sitting up, too, now. ‘Addou, he said in a choked voice. ‘The type Hardy brought that boat from, Patron. At Ste Marguerite.’
‘Le me have a look at that!’ Pel took the bracelet and studied it then he looked hard at Nelly. ‘And who did the Vicomte’s daughter, Elodie, marry, Nelly? Anyone we know?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Nelly shrugged. ‘A man called Marcoing. But it didn’t work. She didn’t have a lot of luck and she wasn’t a very happy girl. She divorced him within three years and married the Comte de Jarnoux.’
‘And does that marriage work?’ Madame asked.
‘I don’t think so. Not really. She often talked to me. She was often lonely. She was the only child and her mother was always away.’ Nelly was at her informative best. ‘They were married here on the island. Quietly, of course, because of the divorce. My boy friend says he gets his name in the papers a lot because he’s in politics. She met him through the Addous. He was a friend of Monsieur Addou’s.’
She realised Pel and De Troq’ were staring at each other and stopped dead. ‘Have I said something wrong?’ she asked. ‘Have I been giving away secrets when I shouldn’t?’
‘Name of God, no!’ Pel said briskly. ‘Sit down, Nelly. Have some wine and tell us more about this Comte de Jarnoux. What else do you know?’
Nelly looked puzzled. ‘Nothing, Monsieur. Only about the wedding.’
‘Did your boy friend say whether the Comte de Jarnoux’s rich?’
‘Oh, yes. Very rich. Richer than her first husband. He has a cement works in Picardy somewhere. Near Amiens, I think. But we knew that because all the cement for the new harbour and the hotel came from there. They say Rambert arranged it. They say he made a lot of money.’
‘Judging by the amount they used,’ Pel said, ‘I’d be surprised if he hadn’t. Was the Vicomte involved in it?’
‘Elodie told me they did a lot of business together. She also told me she didn’t think the marriage to the count would work either and was thinking of divorcing him, too. She said she could afford it because her father had left her a lot of property on the island. I thought she meant the château but she said it was in addition to that, so it must have been the hotel and a few other things. At Muriel, I thought.’
‘Bit of a hypocrite, our Vicomte, isn’t he?’ De Troq’ said. ‘Supporting the islanders on the one hand, and on the other hand part of a financial group developing the place against their interests. If he lied about that, perhaps he lied about a few other things, too. They must have been making a fortune between them. Perhaps even one each.’
‘Oh, I don’t think the Vicomte needed money,’ Nelly said earnestly, the habit of loyalty strong in her. ‘He always had plenty. I don’t think the Comte de Jarnoux did either, for that matter. He had plenty long before they built the harbour. His family owns a timber company in Marseilles and another company in Perpignan. Sulphur or something, my boy friend said.’
Pel had sat bolt upright. ‘What was that you said?’
‘Sulphur.’ Nelly looked worried. ‘Are you sure I’ve not said something wrong?’
‘No, no! On the contrary, you’ve just produced a link we’ve been trying to find for days.’
‘Is it involved with your enquiries, Monsieur?’
‘It could be.’ Pel looked at De Troq’. ‘I don’t suppose your boy friend told you about bribes being pushed around, too, did he?’
De Troq’ was looking uncertain. ‘Patron, it can’t be,’ he warned. ‘We’ve been looking for the link all this time and here it was, on our own doorstep all the time. Coincidences don’t come like that.’
‘Sometimes they do.’ Pel took a sip at his wine and, with a guilty look at his wife, treated himself to an extra cigarette – extra to the extra one he’d just had. ‘When I was a young cop I knew a girl who was taking a holiday in Paris when she was picked up by a type for whom she fell pretty heavily. She agreed to go away with him but as she was walking down the Champs Elysées with him a car that had been hit by a taxi went out of control, mounted the curb and killed him. She was still sobbing her heart out when a cop who’d appeared told her she was the luckiest girl alive. The guy was Alain Delacroix. You might have heard of him. White slaver. His technique was to get girls to go away with him. After that nobody ever heard of them again. What’s more interesting is that the car was driven by her brother, who didn’t even know she was in Paris. If that isn’t a coincidence, I’ve never seen one. Perhaps this is another.’
When the police boat appeared again three days later, in the cabin with Inspector Maillet was a man from the Paris fraud squad investigating Hardy, the deputy to the Minister at the Bureau of Environmental Surveys. Hardy was still wriggling to great effect and difficult to pin down, but, though he produced new and ingenious explanations every time the fraud squad produced incriminating documents, they were not letting go.
‘Sulphur,’ Mailett said at once. ‘You were dead right. Hardy’s been receiving subsidies that should have gone to private producers of the stuff, to compensate them for holding on to their stocks for government use. They’d been earmarked for industry in the event of an emergency.
‘But–’ the fraud squad man took up the story ‘–he hasn’t been paying them and instead, in fact, has been accepting cash from one or two producers – including some you’ll know – to say nothing about what’s been going on. And whil
e the subsidies weren’t paid and the producers didn’t hang on to their stocks but sold them for profit, other poorer quality sulphur that was being bought by the government for something else entirely and paid for by an entirely different department, was being hived off to make up the missing stocks.’
‘It sounds complicated.’
‘It’s intended to be complicated. It has to be complicated. That’s how they work. And these days they’re helped by the speed of communications and travel. A man can set up a company here in the morning and be setting up another in New York the same night. Fraud’s always with us. Because, for one thing, the public loves the crooks. It laps up their lavish life styles and human greed makes fraud easy.’ The fraud squad man had a distinctly cynical attitude to his fellow human beings.
He turned over a few sheets of paper from his brief case and looked up. ‘The contracts Hardy arranged,’ he went on, are quite illegal. Some of the profits went into a new company in which he had an interest, Addoujarnoux du Sud – the directors should be fairly obvious – and the sulphur which was being stored in place of the missing stocks came from the Sulphur Company of Perpignan – at a price considerably less than that with which it was sold to the government. As a result, a tidy sum of money’s been going into the accounts of Hardy, Addou, Jarnoux and one or two others such as an entrepreneur by the name of Johann, who runs a firm in Switzerland, and a type called Hoff, who’s involved with Addou in a few other things we’re interested in.’
‘Such as the murder of a shady financier called Boris de Fé, shot in Marseilles two years ago?’
‘Such as the murder of a shady financier called Boris de Fé shot in Marseilles two years ago.’ The fraud squad man smiled. ‘We think Johann works for Tagliatti and we’ve noticed also that he represents the Vicomte de la Rochemare as his agent for olive oil and a few other things. The money they got out of the deal’s been used to buy shares in a big new plate-glass manufacturing combine owned by a type called Kern, which has recently gone public, so it’s been pretty successfully hidden.’
‘Any of them glass manufacturers?’
‘Not one. They’re all money boys. Operators. Manipulators. Clever ones. But not quite clever enough, because we found out what they were up to.’ The fraud man sketched a small modest shrug. ‘It’s getting harder for them, of course, because there are stricter laws and regulations governing financial markets these days. But there are also new investment vehicles and technical innovations and if things have improved for us since Stavisky brought down the government – two governments – in 1934 with his bogus municipal credit bonds, they’ve also improved for them. No matter how hard we try, there’s always another loophole. And it seems Hardy’s the boy to find it. He refuses to admit anything, of course, and still claims the money he’s been using came, as he claimed originally, from an American friend called Elliott. But Elliott’s the guy who put “chic” into chicanery and his activities won’t stand much investigation. We’ll break them all down eventually. Paris already have Hardy, Addou and Elliott and Perpignan have Jarnoux. Tagliatti, of course, is safe in Switzerland and we can prove nothing on him, while Hoff seems to have vanished to South America. I’m here to pick up Rambert and your friend, the Vicomte.’
Pel sat up sharply. ‘Not yet,’ he said vigorously. ‘Not just yet. I have a little bone to pick with the Vicomte before then.’
Twenty-two
There was a need for care.
Undoubtedly the Vicomte de la Rochemare’s finances had benefited considerably from the activities of Hardy, Addou, Jarnoux, Rambert and the others. But that didn’t mean that he himself had worked the deal. There were plenty of people involved in his affairs, including the accountants who acted for his companies, his stockbrokers – and Tissandi.
Tissandi was tall and elegant. So, come to that, was Ignazi. Had they – one of them – or both – been using the Vicomte’s name and funds to make themselves fortunes? Like the Vicomte, they were both in the habit of visiting Paris and the mainland regularly on the Vicomte’s business, and all three regularly moved about along the south coast of France, into Italy, only forty kilometres east of Nice, to the French islands of Corsica and Elba, and the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Sometimes their trips took days. Was one of them the mysterious tall man who’d been seen with Hardy?
It was pretty clear that Jean-Bernard Fleurie, who had once worked in the packing department at the château, had been the link between whoever was operating there and Tagliatti. Either Tagliatti had used him to bring in the man who was operating the château end of the line, or the man at the château – Tissandi or Ignazi or the Vicomte – had used him to recruit Tagliatti to get rid of the drugs they were bringing into the island in the japanned boxes. And Doctor Nicolas had guessed what was going on because his own son had died while he’d been on drugs, which was why he’d been so willing to pass on his suspicions to Pel.
Everything began to hang together because Jean-Bernard knew Riccio, and Riccio knew Tagliatti, and Tagliatti must have known that Riccio knew Tissandi. It wouldn’t have taken the gang long to realise that some of their profits were going astray. Doubtless it was Riccio, Maquin and Oudry who took the doctored Rapido Minis to the mainland, and, if they’d been putting a few aside for themselves, it wouldn’t take them long to become aware that some of them, thanks to Jean-Bernard and his friends, were going missing. Jean-Bernard had even compounded his stupidity by boasting of it to Riccio.
A word in the ear of Tagliatti’s deputy in Marseilles would give Riccio and his friends the go-ahead at once to remove Jean-Bernard and his friends. And that would not only have pleased Tagliatti but would also stop up the small private leak Riccio had organised. And that would have meant that, so long as Tagliatti didn’t also learn of Riccio’s private little fiddle, everybody, apart from Jean-Bernard and his friends, would be delighted with the way things had turned out. All very satisfactory. Having learned, however Tagliatti was doubtless at that moment biting the carpet because of the rotten low-down treachery of faithful followers like Riccio and taking a long hard look at a few more of them with a view to having them bumped off, too. It suited Pel. Anything that gave Tagliatti ulcers and removed a few of his friends saved the police a lot of trouble.
As it happened, Tissandi had just left for the mainland for a few days to attend to some business of the Vicomte’s.
‘He’s using the Vicomte’s boat,’ Ignazi explained. ‘He’ll bring the Vicomte back with him. ‘It’s faster than the ferry and doesn’t break down as often.’
And doubtless, Pel thought, doesn’t make it’s passengers so seasick.
They persuaded Maillet and the fraud squad man to hang on a little longer. It took some doing because they were afraid the news of the arrests in Paris and Perpignan couldn’t be kept quiet much longer, but the following day a message arrived to say that Tissandi was back.
‘We had him watched,’ they were told. ‘We’re still in the clear. When do you move?’
‘This evening,’ Pel said. ‘He’ll be out on the estate during the day. We’ll wait until we’ve got him indoors. He has an apartment at the back of the château. He’ll be there.’
They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the way things were to go, then they ate an early meal with Madame. Because it was Nelly’s day off and her boy friend had arrived on the afternoon boat, Madame had cooked filet aux olives and opened another of the Vicomte’s wines. It went down particularly well under the circumstances.
As they finished, they pushed their chairs back. It had been raining a little and a few small puddles lay on the verandah and on the road outside. Madame stared out at the darkness, her face concerned. She had put on a new dress she’d bought at one of the little boutiques by the harbour, and a pair of new and expensive high-heeled shoes in an attempt to make it an occasion, though Pel suspected that the truth was that she was worried sick. It made him feel warm. He hadn’t had anybody apart from his squad worry about him for years.
As she stared out, she saw De Troq’ on the verandah checking his gun and she looked at Pel in alarm.
‘Have you got a gun, too?’
He nodded. ‘It’s usual.’
‘Will you be shooting?’
‘Not if I can help it. I couldn’t hit a pig in a passage.’
‘Aren’t you afraid?’
‘Being afraid’s one of the reasons I’ve survived so long.’
She looked at him in silence for a while before speaking. ‘Is it nearly over?’ she asked.
‘Nearly,’ Pel promised.
‘Can we go home then?’
‘As soon as we’ve done the paper work.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘At first I thought it exciting but suddenly I’m not so sure. Besides, at home there’s so much to do.’ She managed an uncertain smile. ‘Ought I to put a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator to celebrate?’
Pel nodded. ‘I should make it two,’ he said.
‘With the boys from Nice, there’ll be a lot of us and policemen were never behind the door when it came to drinking.’
As they drove along the harbour, they saw the island’s yellow postal van parked near one of the bars. The driver, a new man who had taken Babin’s place, was standing alongside it talking to one of the policemen who’d come from Marseilles.
They’d changed the face of the place in the short time they’d been there, Pel decided. Especially considering that he’d only come for his honeymoon. Still – a half smile crossed his face – on the Ile de St Yves, everybody did two jobs, didn’t they? Even, it seemed, Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel.
The three Nice cops were waiting for them. They were still in their hiking clothes but Pel noticed that they were ominously patting bulges in their belts and he knew they were armed. As they climbed into the car, De Troq’ drove up the hill towards the château. There was nobody about and, stopping some distance away, they dropped the three Nice men among the trees.