Pel & The Predators (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  ‘I ignore it,’ she said unhelpfully. ‘I’m too old to worry. When we were young smoking was fashionable and everybody smoked. Showing off a little, I suppose, Monsieur Pol—’

  ‘Pel, Madame.’

  ‘Of course. So I’ve smoked all my life and I’m not going to give it up now. Would you like one? Nobody comes in here.’

  ‘What about your daughter? Won’t she mind?’

  ‘She’ll never know. I blow the smoke up the chimney. Draw your chair nearer.’

  For once Pel lit up with a feeling of reassurance. Madame Caous seemed remarkably fit despite her bad habits.

  For a moment or two, they happily blew smoke up the chimney then Madame Caous looked up, her eyes bright and interested. ‘Do you find it hard trying to give it up, Monsieur Pol?’

  ‘Madame, I find it agonising.’

  ‘They say you put on weight if you stop. I managed it once but it started me eating sweets and taking quick nips at the brandy. I decided I’d exchanged lung cancer for bad teeth and cirrhosis of the liver. Would you like a drink, Monsieur Pol?’

  She crossed to a table by the window and returned with a jug of lemonade. ‘They make it for me every day,’ she explained. ‘I don’t like it, of course, though the water has a nice bouquet, and it’s very good for the intestines.’ She smiled over the top of the jug at him. ‘But then, everything – even Vichy water – is good for something, isn’t it? I often wonder how we manage to die. The only trouble is, it’s rather dull and I pour most of it on the flowers.’

  Giving Pel a mischievous smile, she half-filled two glasses which she placed on the table. ‘Those are for my daughter to find,’ she pointed out. ‘So she won’t ask questions. We’ll have my home-made wine.’

  Producing two more glasses, she unearthed a dusty bottle from the back of a cupboard and poured two measures. It took Pel’s breath away.

  ‘Madame,’ he gasped. ‘This is powerful stuff.’

  She gave a little laugh. ‘I add brandy,’ she admitted. ‘To give it body.’

  Pel tried another sip. It made his blood race and sent his temperature soaring but he was thoroughly enjoying himself. It was possible, he decided, to ruin your health and have fun at the same time.

  Madame Caous made herself comfortable and looked at him. ‘Now, Monsieur Pol, what is it you wanted?’

  He explained what he was involved in and asked a few questions about Lucies’. She responded with bright-eyed enthusiasm.

  ‘Our workshop was the best in the region in those days,’ she said. ‘Certainly in Burgundy. Perhaps even in France. But my brother Georges, who knew everything there was to know about the business, was killed at Verdun. And then Louis died of the Spanish ’flu and that killed my father. I tried to continue but, of course, I hadn’t been trained as he had. He knew Lalique and Fabergé. He knew where to find his craftsmen and, when he’d found them, he could talk to them as a craftsman himself.’

  Pel produced the photographs he’d obtained from Le Bihan of the necklace worn by the girl found in the sea at Beg Meil. ‘Do you recognise that, Madame?’ he asked.

  She gave a little sigh. ‘Of course. These heart necklets were one of our specialities. Like Fabergé’s Easter eggs. I sold many of them. Queen Alexandra of England bought one. They were very delicate, and she liked delicate things after the heavy state jewellery she had to wear. The Queen of the Belgians had one also. They’re enchanting, don’t you think?’

  ‘No more enchanting than you, Madame.’ Pel was overcome with gallantry.

  She looked up at him, delighted, tiny and frail as Dresden china. ‘But like our chains, Monsieur Pol,’ she said, ‘these days a trifle worn with age.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve no idea who bought this one?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. It must be at least sixty years old. We made a great many of them, and many were sold to jewellers in other places. We even exported them – to England and Holland and Spain – and unfortunately there are no longer any records.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘They went to the city archives when we closed down and they were destroyed by a bomb during the war. Even so, they wouldn’t have revealed who bought our pieces.’

  ‘So there’s nothing you can add to what we already know?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, though my memory is really very good when it concerns those days. It’s what happened yesterday that I forget. I remember my father and my brothers quite distinctly but I have difficulty recalling my grandchildren. My father was the same. He could remember nothing of the war which killed his son, but he could remember everything of the war of 1870 which took place when he was a young man. It’s one of the curiosities of growing old.’

  Four

  Despite the pleasant day out they hadn’t moved much further forward, and had found out nothing about the dead girl. Notices and descriptions had been posted outside all police stations and substations but little had come of them. A letter containing all the information they had unearthed to date went off to Inspector Le Bihan and, since their only real clue dated back over half a century, it didn’t seem to Pel that they were ever going to be able to help a lot, and he assumed that the query would end up gathering dust and finally, at the bottom of the file of those that remained unanswered, would eventually be forgotten. But two days later Claudie Darel appeared in his office with the morning mail, looking more like a young Mireille Mathieu than ever. Pel smiled at her, he wasn’t good at smiling and it made him look as if he were suffering from a migraine, but everybody smiled at Claudie Darel and Pel was no exception.

  ‘Inspector Darcy has a customer,’ she said.

  Pel glanced at his watch. He had hardly been sitting down more than three minutes and his breakfast – yesterday’s croissants and Madame Routy’s coffee, which tasted more like paint stripper than an early morning beverage – was still giving him indigestion.

  ‘Already?’ he said. ‘The shop’s only just open.’

  ‘She’s from St. Etienne. She came up here yesterday and stayed the night.’

  Pel sensed the woman’s business might be important. People certainly didn’t normally travel from as far as St. Etienne and spend the night in a strange city just for fun.

  ‘Tell Inspector Darcy to send her along.’

  As Claudie vanished, Pel rose and walked up and down his office, enjoying the feel of it. It was a new one to go with his promotion. Bigger desk. More comfortable chair. Better carpet – choice of blue, fawn or rust for higher ranks. View over the city these days, too, instead of over the railway track. Even a fan. The people who had designed the Hôtel de Police, having heard of solar heating, had put in large windows to draw as much warmth from the sun as possible to cut down the cost of fuel. Unfortunately, they’d overlooked the fact that the city got more than its fair share of sunshine in a normal summer and the clouds had only to part for an hour for the place to become a greenhouse, so that the police authority had had to dig deep into its pocket to provide fans for its senior officers.

  He turned as the door opened. The woman being shown in by Claudie had cold expressionless eyes, a pale face, a mouth as engaging as the peephole in the door of a prison cell and a bosom like the north face of the Eiger.

  ‘Madame Charnier,’ Claudie said.

  ‘Sidonie Charnier,’ the woman added.

  Pel pushed a chair forward. ‘Why do you wish to see me?’

  ‘I don’t wish to see you in particular.’ Madame Charnier obviously prided herself on her forthrightness. ‘I came to see anybody who could help me. I was taken to see—’ she gestured vaguely in the direction of Darcy’s office ‘—another policeman. He thought you ought to see me. I don’t know why he couldn’t deal with it.’

  Sensing difficulties, Pel had fished out a pack of Gauloises and extracted one automatically before he realised what he had done. Guiltily he pushed it back, placed the pack in his drawer and closed it hurriedly, sitting with his knee against it so he couldn’t change his mind.
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  ‘You’d better tell me what it’s all about,’ he said.

  ‘It’s about my sister,’ Madame Charnier said. ‘She’s disappeared.’

  Immediately Pel knew why Darcy had passed the woman on. Either he suspected the missing sister was Le Bihan’s dead woman or he hadn’t liked the look of Madame Charnier. Darcy was inclined to be choosy about women.

  ‘Her name, Madame?’

  ‘Pigny. Dominique Pigny. I was Sidonie Pigny before I married.’

  ‘Have you reported her disappearance to Missing Persons?’

  ‘I’ve only just decided she’s disappeared,’ Madame Charnier said sharply. ‘She hadn’t disappeared three weeks ago because I had a letter from her saying she was coming to see me.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘I don’t have one. She was always on the move and as soon as I’d got one address down, she’d moved to another.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  ‘I have photographs.’

  There were two photographs, one a studio picture taken in the days when presumably Dominique Pigny had been a little younger, with her hair short and neat and well coiffured. The second had been taken later and was an enlargement of a snapshot. It indicated a young woman who, to put it as mildly as possible, had a roving eye. She was grinning at the camera as if she were daring the photographer into some amorous misadventure – sexy, bold, even dangerous – but the neat coiffure was gone now and the hair was grown long and framed her face like curtains.

  ‘It was taken about a year ago,’ Madame Charnier said. ‘I had it enlarged. That’s how she looked when I saw her last.’

  ‘It seems a good picture,’ Pel observed.

  ‘I wouldn’t have brought it otherwise,’ Madame Charnier said bluntly.

  Pel said nothing. Forthrightness, he decided, was sometimes a euphemism for rudeness. He sat back and drew a deep breath. ‘You’d better tell me about her.’

  ‘She was a drop-out,’ Madame Charnier said in matter-of-fact tones. ‘I can’t think why she was affected like this. I never was.’ Pel could well believe it. ‘We were well brought up at home. Strictly even. My parents demanded responsibility. My children are the same. I believe in obedience and duty. If there were more of it, there’d be less crime.’

  Pel was entirely in agreement but he had a feeling that Madame Charnier’s idea of obedience and duty would have made her a better cop than a mother.

  ‘She never seemed to settle,’ she went on. ‘She was clever but she never did anything with her ability.’

  ‘Was she unhappy?’

  Madame Charnier frowned. ‘Anything but. It was disgusting the way she lived. She had no conscience. She was wild. Sometimes I even wondered if she were unbalanced.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She once got a job as cook on a trawler out of Concarneau.’

  ‘Concarneau?’

  Pel’s mind immediately started clicking away like mad because Concarneau was only a few kilometres from Beg Meil.

  ‘We were born in Quimper and lived there until my father’s job took him to St. Etienne. I was fifteen. She was a year younger. She worked in a circus for a while. She even tried drugs. Soft drugs first. Those cigarettes they smoke. She tried to get me to have a go, but I refused.’

  ‘You were very wise, Madame.’

  ‘Eventually, she tried heroin.’ Madame Charnier looked up and Pel saw her eyes were unsympathetic and he wondered why she was so concerned. ‘But she overcame it. She was arrested in Valence for stealing. She worked for an antique dealer and, because she needed money for drugs, she stole a silver goblet and tried to sell it. When she was caught, it frightened her and she agreed to take a course to overcome the habit. She did, of course. I’ll admit that. When she set her mind on a thing, she always succeeded.’

  ‘Where was she living?’

  Madame Charnier shrugged. ‘I don’t know. In this area, I think.’ Once she mentioned Arne, and there’s an Arne on the way to Langres. I looked it up.’

  ‘Do you think she was living there?’

  ‘All she said was something about going there. Some man, I expect. She was always after men. But I didn’t hear her properly and when I asked what she’d said, she pretended she hadn’t said anything.’

  ‘Did she ever mention Arne again?’

  ‘No. And she always posted her letters in different places. They were postmarked Dijon. Or Châtillon. Or Langres. All this area, but always different. As if she were deliberately hiding from me.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  Madame Charnier sniffed. ‘She never wanted to be part of the normal decent life. I often tried to tell her about her behaviour but she’d never listen. She left home originally because she quarrelled with my parents’ discipline. When they died within a few months of each other she stayed with me for a while, but all the time she seemed to be driven by the wish to be different from everybody else. She resented people interfering. It caused rows. At home we called her Dominique la Panique. But she kept in touch. Telephone calls. Letters. Always cheerful. Only someone unaware of the meaning of sin could have been like that. And then—’ Madame Charnier frowned and sat up straighter ‘—then three weeks ago she telephoned to say she was coming home. She said she wanted to talk.’

  ‘What did she mean by home?’

  ‘ My home. When our parents died, I took over the house, of course.’

  ‘By agreement with your sister?’

  ‘There was no question of an agreement. I was married, she wasn’t, so it became mine.’

  ‘Were you looking forward to the visit?’

  Madame Charnier frowned. ‘She was a troublemaker.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She tried to take my husband from me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I hit her. She left him alone after that.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘He came home.’

  Pel didn’t pursue the line. It wasn’t hard to believe that Madame Charnier had enough power of personality to have persuaded her erring husband it would be wiser to mend his ways.

  ‘So. It seems there isn’t much love lost between you, Madame. Why do you wish her to be found?’

  Madame Charnier looked at him coldly. ‘Because she’s my sister and it’s my duty. Besides, she owed me money.’

  ‘Much?’

  ‘I lent her some to live on. I never saw it again and I suppose now I never shall.’

  ‘But she was coming home? Despite this business with your husband? You forgave her?’

  ‘No. It was just my duty not to abandon her. For some reason, my children liked her. She was good with them, I admit. Perhaps she should have had one of her own.’

  ‘Had she any men friends at the moment?’

  ‘I think there was one.’

  ‘Do you know where he came from?’

  ‘Somewhere over in the north-west, she said.’ Madame Charnier’s hand gestured vaguely.

  ‘Brittany for instance?’

  ‘It might have been.’

  ‘Did she ever go back to Brittany, Madame? After you left there. Apart from this job she took?’

  ‘We used to go back there in August. My parents took a house.’

  ‘At Beg Meil?’ Or Concarneau? That area.’

  ‘No. Further east at Carnac.’

  ‘But she knew Brittany?’

  ‘I suppose so. Though we stopped going there before I married.’

  ‘Had she been back recently?’

  ‘I think she had. My children received a postcard a few months ago from Concarneau. But she was always moving about. There was also one from Lyons. Why do you ask?’

  Pel sighed. ‘Could you describe her, Madame? Apart from the photographs.’

  ‘She looked a little like me. Same colouring. Same skin. But she looked a lot younger. I don’t know how she did it, the life she led.’ Madame Charnier seemed to be consid
ering the unfairness of fate. ‘She was slimmer, of course, and smaller.’

  ‘About one hundred and sixty centimetres?’

  ‘About that. I’m a hundred and sixty-four.’ Madame suddenly looked like a bird dog that had found a scent. ‘You know where she is?’

  Pel held up a hand and fished in his drawer for copies of the photographs Inspector Bihan held. He rejected the ones of the dead girl and instead laid the one of the Lucie necklet on the desk.

  ‘Do you know this necklet, Madame?’

  Madame Charnier frowned. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Was it your sister’s?’

  ‘I saw her wearing it.’

  ‘Do you know where she got it?’

  ‘Some man, I expect. It looks expensive. More expensive than she could afford. More than I could afford. Is it expensive?’

  ‘I would say yes.’

  Madame Charnier shrugged, then suddenly woke up to what the necklet implied, as if it had slipped past her notice until that second. ‘Where is this necklet?’ she asked. ‘Why isn’t she wearing it now? Where’s my sister?’

  Pel drew a deep breath. ‘I think, Madame,’ he said slowly, ‘that your sister is dead.’

  Five

  Pel was feeling a little worn when he called Darcy in. Madame Charnier had borne the news she’d received without emotion. It was almost as if she’d been expecting something of the sort and regarded it as just retribution for a sinful life.

  Against all the rules he’d been trying to force on himself, he opened his drawer and extracted a cigarette. The hardest part of police work, he decided, wasn’t necessarily facing armed criminals.

  He drew on the cigarette for a while, convinced it was another nail in his coffin. ‘Know anything about Arne?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘A bit,’ Darcy said. ‘I met a girl once who came from round there. Next village, I think it was – Violette. I drove her home a few times. It’s on the edge of the hills. Near Châtillon. Agricultural. Cattle chiefly. Only around a hundred or two inhabitants. Plus the château.’

  ‘What château?’

  ‘Château d’Ivry. Home of the Comte d’Ivry de Queyel.’