by Mark Hebden
The train was late and he moved down the platform slowly, eyeing the girls, then, tired of waiting, he strolled to the entrance of the station. The forecourt was full of cars containing people waiting to meet relations.
Heading for the bar, he ordered a beer. Misset liked his beer and it had long since given him a belly and blurred what had once been good features. Over his drink he tried to chat up the barmaid but she had a boyfriend further along the counter who was much younger than Misset and she wasn’t interested.
Back on the platform, he pushed through the growing crowd. The arrival of any train always ended in a shoving match and this one was late. The waiting travellers were already growing restive and ill-tempered and he noticed a little man in a light-weight brown suit run through with gold threads standing in one of the telephone booths in the entrance. He seemed to be nervous and Misset wondered whom he was waiting for – his mother-in-law, too, perhaps, or his boss’ wife, his girlfriend, his mistress. Perhaps even, he conceded with the broadmindedness of one who could see any possibility – a mere male.
An official hurried past, trying to look as if he were invisible, and Misset asked him what had happened to the train. The answer was brusque.
‘Un défaut électrique,’ he said. ‘In the Morsard tunnel.’
Misset’s heart sank. Name of God, he thought, a hold-up in the Morsard tunnel! It would mean hours of waiting and his mother-in-law arriving hungry, thirsty and in a foul temper, ready to find fault with everything. There was as much chance of persuading her that the fault wasn’t his as there was of trying to teach a cow to dance the polka.
An hour and a half later, with the city lights beginning to throw a glow in the sky, the platform was jammed with people. The southbound train from Paris which should have followed the one held up in the Morsard tunnel was also delayed by this time and there were now two lots of waiting passengers and they were beginning to eye each other with the blank hostility of bank robbers.
Misset found a wall to lean against and opened his newspaper. There was another financial crisis looming, he noticed, and somebody had robbed the Baron de Mougy. Misset knew about that because Pel, Darcy, De Troq’ and several others from Forensic and Fingerprints had shot off to attend to it. Misset was pleased he hadn’t gone or he’d still have been there, his feet aching and nowhere in sight to buy a drink. On the foreign page, China was accusing Russia, someone was passing counterfeit notes along the border and a Russian agent had defected to the West with a secret file that threatened to blow sky-high the whole network east of the Iron Curtain.
As he lowered the paper, the signals indicated that the train was due at last, and there was a movement towards the edge of the platform. There wasn’t a railway official in sight.
‘You never know,’ one of them had said to Misset as he’d hurried past, ‘they might take it into their heads to lynch us.’
The train swept round the curve into the platform and there was an immediate and ominous surge forward. The little man in the gold-thread suit began to push through the throng with a desperate look on his face that suggested he was afraid of missing someone. The train arrived with a howl like a banshee and the riot started at once. People on the platform were determined to get to their seats and began scrambling aboard even before the train had stopped, and the corridors were jammed with passengers trying to get into compartments that hadn’t yet been evacuated. Suitcases were passed through windows and an argument in a second class corridor turned into a screeching bedlam.
Over the heads of the struggling people, Misset vaguely thought he saw his mother-in-law. Advancing warily, he found himself in a shoving match at the door of one of the first-class compartments where a stout stubborn man about to descend had met a stout stubborn man about to climb aboard. Around them a minor riot was building up. A fist flew, somebody poked somebody else with an umbrella and officials started shouting as they tried to bring order.
Misset caught sight of the little man in the gold-thread suit fighting his way forward, then he lost him again as a pile of suitcases was knocked off a trolley. A hat box rolled across the platform and fell on the line and more luggage was knocked between the carriages by the feet of the struggling mob. It was then that Misset saw the woman at the window. She was pleading for help and pounding on the hat of the man in front of her who was trying as hard as she was to get out.
‘Mon mari!’ she was wailing. ‘My husband!’
She was in her middle thirties, he judged, was dressed in black, with a scrap of black lace on her head, and she had the sort of red hair and green eyes that made Misset go weak at the knees. At once several of the men around her stopped shoving but Misset was nearest and her appeal was to him.
‘Help me,’ she begged. ‘Help me! My husband!’
She was speaking in heavily-accented French.
Never behind the door when it came to helping damsels in distress, Misset yanked a couple of elderly gentlemen out of the way, and the woman, pressed from behind, burst on to the platform like a pip from an orange, dropping her handbag and gloves and losing a shoe as she arrived.
Misset scrambled for the handbag and gloves as she struggled to slip the shoe on again, clinging to his arm as she hopped on one leg.
‘My luggage,’ she said. ‘My husband! Please get my husband!’
Misset thrust the handbag at her and looked round, expecting to see some short stout foreigner advancing through the skirmish.
‘My husband,’ she said again, gesticulating beneath the coaches.
Misset stared. On the line were two or three suitcases and a brass-bound box.
‘Down there,’ she said.
Deciding that she’d been travelling so long that she’d slipped her trolley, Misset fixed his glasses firmly on his nose and looked round for help. He had no intention of climbing under a train but if she wanted the box off the line she was good-looking enough to have it.
He got hold of an official who was trying to bring some order by the carriage door and indicated the box. A porter appeared and the official nodded and summoned two or three more officials. One of them went to the engine and another to the end of the train, and, assured finally that the train wasn’t likely to decapitate him by moving off, the porter slipped to the track and began to throw the lost luggage to the platform, the suitcases first.
‘My husband,’ the girl said, gesturing furiously.
‘For God’s sake,’ Misset said, ‘where?’
‘In the box,’ she snapped.
The porter’s head popped up, his eyes like saucers. ‘In the box?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why doesn’t he travel in a compartment like everyone else?’
‘Oh, please! He’s dead! Those are his ashes!’
Misset’s jaw dropped and he stared at the porter who ducked out of sight once more. When he resurfaced, the uproar on the platform had stilled. The word had got around and the presence of death seemed to have brought everyone to their senses.
The scrap of lace on the woman’s head was over her face now and it dawned on Misset that she was in mourning. The crowd opened up for her and the men, still a little ruffled, stood silently with their hats in their hands.
The box was heavy and the porter slammed it to the platform with relief. The official winced at the bang and Misset saw a few scowls.
‘Sorry,’ the porter apologised. ‘No disrespect. Heavy, that’s all.’
The official gestured and the porter regained the platform. Reverently he laid the box on a flat trolley.
‘My luggage,’ the woman whispered.
A leather valise and two white suitcases, a little oil-smeared, appeared, were passed awkwardly hand-to-hand by men holding their hats across their chests, and were finally placed alongside the box.
The woman looked about her helplessly and, as Misset stepped forward, to his surprise she took his arm.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you.’
‘Taxi,’ Misset said imperiously
, and the little procession started off like a cortège down the platform, first the porter pushing the trolley, then the woman with Misset. What a way to come home, Misset was thinking. On a trolley with a bunch of suitcases, as if you were a lot of dirty washing.
Nobody else seemed to think it odd, however, and hats came off along the platform in a shower as they moved to the exit. There was a taxi waiting and, as the box was placed gently in the boot, Misset gave the porter a walloping great tip he couldn’t afford and helped the woman in.
‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ she said. ‘You have been very kind. I can manage now.’
Because she looked defenceless and was beautiful enough to make a strong man sob, all Misset’s gallantry came to the surface. He brushed her protest aside.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, without even thinking. ‘I’m a policeman. I’ll see you safely to where you’re going.’
‘I have a suite reserved at the Hôtel Centrale,’ she said.
Even as he turned to pass on the address to the driver, whose face also now wore an expression of extreme solemnity, it registered on Misset’s mind that the Hôtel Centrale was no tourist hotel and the girl was obviously no tourist.
The driver fished under the seat and put on a peaked cap he probably hadn’t worn for years, and the taxi moved off. Vaguely Misset felt there ought to be sorrowing relatives and the smell of lilies but instead there was the scent of Dior perfume and the girl beside him, curiously exciting even in her silence. He swallowed uncertainly, feeling like a mourner himself especially with the porter and the railway officials standing alongside holding their caps to their chests.
It was as the car swung out of the station towards the Porte Guillaume that he caught a last glimpse of the man in the gold-thread suit bursting like a bomb through the throng and staring about him before running backwards and forwards across the station forecourt looking for a taxi. Then, as he disappeared into the moving mass of people, Misset’s eyes fell on a woman in a fawn coat staring about her hostilely, and he remembered with a shock that his knight-errantry had made him forget all about his mother-in-law and the job he’d arrived at the station to do.
As the taxi drew up outside the Centrale, Misset jumped out, his mother-in-law pushed hurriedly to the back of his mind. Misset had the gift of pushing to the back of his mind anything that worried him. Dusk had arrived and the city was covered with a gaudy velvety purple slashed with the red, green and yellow of neon signs. The woman in black had said nothing since they’d left the station. With the occasion as sombre as it was, it obviously wasn’t the time to make conversation, but in the dark interior of the taxi Misset had a feeling that her brain was racing and that her thoughts were more than merely contemplative. She seemed different suddenly, no longer in need of help. In fact, there was an air of marked self-assurance about her that gave him a startled feeling that her defencelessness had all been part of an act.
As she followed him from the taxi, he noticed that the black lace was up off her features again and secured by a comb, so that it looked more like a neat small hat now than a mourning veil. Her face was pale and expressionless but there was something about her eyes that was anything but lost.
As the taxi driver opened the boot, a small army of porters appeared under the direction of a major-domo dressed like a general, who began to direct operations with the aplomb of a traffic policeman.
‘Vocci.’ The girl gave her name briskly and with no trace of helplessness. ‘I have a suite reserved.’
‘Of course, Madame.’ The major-domo jerked a hand and the hotel porters descended on the luggage. The taxi driver, his cap off, was lifting the wooden box to the pavement, his face rigid with an expression of sorrow. The hotel porters failed to notice his solemnity and picked up the box cheerfully, their reverence for what was inside not very deep.
‘Steady with that!’ Misset moved forward quickly, bristling with officialdom. ‘It’s–’
‘Thank you, Monsieur!’ The woman’s tone was peremptory and cold and cut him off sharply.
Misset felt flattened. Suddenly she didn’t seem in need of assistance any more and there was no longer the slightest sign of distress on her face. ‘If there’s anything I can do, Misset’s the name. Detective-Sergeant Josephe Misset. You can get me at the Hôtel de Police. Perhaps I can–’
‘I don’t think so, Monsieur. Thank you for your help.’
Misset stopped dead again. He could see the box containing the ashes standing in the hallway of the hotel with a suitcase on top of it, almost as though it were just another piece of luggage.
‘Thank you,’ she said again, more firmly, and as Misset stepped back she swept into the hotel.
The taxi driver was still staring at the large tip he held in his hand, then he shrugged and turned to Misset. ‘What do you do with a thing like that?’ he asked, indicating the brassbound box. ‘Stand it on the mantelpiece with an inscription on it?’
Four
When Pel returned to his office there was a message for him to see the Chief. In the Chief’s office was a squarely-built man in a blue suit with his hair cut en brosse.
‘This is Inspector Briand,’ the Chief introduced.
As they shook hands, Pel eyed Briand warily, wondering what was about to appear.
‘Briand’s from Paris,’ the Chief said. ‘From Counterfeit Currency.’
Briand produced a list from his pocket with the masterful dignity of an Italian customs official sorting through a caseful of lingerie. ‘There’s been a sudden rash of counterfeit dollars,’ he said. ‘It started first in Belgium, Holland and Lorraine but since then they’ve started to appear in Alsace and Champagne and now here in Burgundy. I know local Crime Squads usually handle this sort of thing but it’s pretty big so we’re dealing with it. So far it’s merely an enquiry. We don’t know where the notes are coming from but they’re large notes and they’re troubling my department.
‘It’s possible that the money’s made in France,’ he went on. ‘But,’ he added with the sort of shining French honesty that always started a guilt complex among visiting foreigners, ‘we don’t think so. It could also be a deliberate coup by a German or an Italian Syndicate. On the other hand it could be a much smaller affair operated by tourists.’
Pel sniffed. He didn’t think much of tourists either.
Briand frowned. ‘We can’t overlook the possibility and we’re therefore visiting every police headquarters and issuing warnings. If you should spot large quantities of new notes, perhaps you’d inform us because, with the French border touching on Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Italy, we have our work cut out.’
‘I think we should have a look at it, Pel,’ the Chief said slowly and without enthusiasm. Like the heads of all provincial forces, he didn’t like people from Paris arriving and telling him what to do. It was always the same. They asked assistance and ended up issuing orders.
‘Perhaps,’ he suggested to Pel, ‘we could arrange to visit the hotels, the tourist organisations, the travel bureaux, the information centres and the exchange offices and banks. I think we’d better have one of your men. Whom can you spare?’
Pel was nothing if not cunning. ‘We’ve got that hold-up at Quigny,’ he said. ‘The Baron de Mougy. It’s a major crime with a lot involved.’ And if they didn’t sort it out, he thought, the Baron de Mougy would start using his influence to make sure that a few heads would roll. ‘I think it’s a gang job and Marseilles or Paris is involved.’ He paused, trying to look helpful when in fact he was just being crafty. ‘Perhaps they could have Sergeant Misset, though. I think I can spare him.’
The Chief caught on quickly.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Misset. He can keep his finger on things. We can just catch him before he goes off duty.’
Misset couldn’t believe his ears. A free hand! Just walking round the city paying calls at offices which, for the most part, employed women – young women at that!
It didn’t take him lo
ng to convince himself that he’d been chosen because of his fine male presence and his gift for getting along with girls. Even Pel admitted Misset’s skill with women.
Besides – Misset grinned to himself – it would provide him with a good excuse to see Madame Vocci again. He’d discovered her gloves in his pocket where he’d stuffed them during his rescue act at the station, and had been looking for a chance to return them.
The receptionist at the Hôtel Centrale fell for Misset’s smile, as they all did, but she was thoroughly confused.
‘Madame Vocci?’ she said. ‘We have no Madame Vocci here. Only a Mademoiselle Vocci.’
Misset adjusted the dark glasses, trying to appear masterful and, looking over her shoulder at the hotel register, managed to catch an interesting glimpse down the top of her dress.
‘You sure?’ he asked. ‘She arrived a few hours ago. She had her husband in a box.’
She stared at him as if he were mad. ‘A little while ago,’ she said. ‘That’s right. Mademoiselle Vocci.’ With a long white finger she indicated the name on the fiche d’hôtel she passed across.
Misset found the woman from the station reading Elle in the lounge. She was no longer in black, and she looked up as he stopped alongside her. A flicker of recognition passed across her face but her expression didn’t alter and he had the feeling she hadn’t expected ever to see him again.