by Mark Hebden
He kissed his wife and headed for the door. Madame Routy was waiting with his briefcase. She held it as if she hoped it contained a bomb.
Taking it, Pel emerged into the sunshine as cautiously as if he were appearing for a High Noon confrontation with a baddy with pistols in the main street. He didn’t like mornings very much. On the whole he didn’t like afternoons a great deal either.
Despite being called to the Hôtel de Police in the middle of the evening, however, he had suffered no pangs of resentment at finally getting rid of Misset. Misset was the most troublesome member of his team and on more than one occasion had been within an ace of being returned to traffic duty. At least, for a while he was out of Pel’s hair and they could get on with the job without fear that he’d bungle it.
He’d heard Major Chaput’s story and was happy to let him share Misset with Briand of Counterfeit Currency. Somehow, some instinct – no more – made it hard to believe what he’d been told. Beautiful spies! It only happened in novels. Besides, he had no wish to be involved with spies. His job was stamping out crime – the more crime was stamped out, the better he was pleased – and it was none of his brief to get involved with international to-ings and fro-ings.
From time to time, of course, the Secret Service did turn up in their diocese and wasted their time looking for something that didn’t exist. Last time it was an American sergeant who had gone missing in Germany and was believed to have crossed into France with secret documents. But there had been no case in spite of the top priority classification given to it. No secrets. No spies. Nothing. Just a lot of work with nobody really knowing what they were after because the people who were employing them refused to tell them anything beyond a lot of hazy names and addresses that had caused them to tramp around for days until they’d finally been told the alarm was false. The American sergeant hadn’t disappeared with secrets at all. The secret documents had been put in the wrong file and the American sergeant had fallen into a dam after celebrating too well.
No, he decided, let the people in Paris handle the spies. If they didn’t see through Misset within twenty-four hours the French Security System wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. They might even, he thought with some pleasure, recruit Misset and send him to Moscow.
The last thing he wanted was interference from Paris. Burgundy – on this Pel was adamant – was for Burgundians – not for members of Security or Counterfeit Currency. They didn’t understand Burgundy. They expected Burgundians to behave like Parisians, who always felt that Paris reflected the whole nation and that anywhere else was pioneer country. They regarded people who returned to Paris from the provinces, in fact, as if they were as daring as Christopher Columbus, and were lucky to have survived the experience. For outsiders, Pel had little love and at the moment there wasn’t just one outsider, there were two. The damned place was being invaded.
When he arrived at the Hôtel de Police Claudie Darel was waiting for him. Her first words made his face grim. The hospital had telephoned. Madame Huppert had died during the night.
When Darcy appeared he looked like a Chasseur Alpin spruced up to do a guard of honour for the President. Pel took the smile off his face.
‘Madame Huppert died during the night,’ he said.
Darcy frowned. ‘So now,’ he said, ‘instead of an assault with an offensive weapon, we’re investigating a murder.’
Pel nodded. That always made things different. ‘We’d better get out there,’ he said. ‘What about De Mougy? Found anything?’
Darcy nodded. ‘He’s been losing a lot. He was in Monte Carlo recently and he lost heavily. He’s also been backing losers at the races, and a couple of companies he invested in–’ Darcy tossed a file on the desk ‘–those are they – have just folded. And–’ Darcy’s smile came back ‘–that jewellery was insured, Patron. Heavily. Think he’s working a fast one? He was pretty calm.’
Pel shrugged. ‘We’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt, of course, because he’s influential and wealthy enough to take a few losses without panicking. All the same, if he is trying to defraud the insurance company, we’ll haul him in, influence or no influence. What do the insurance people say?’
‘They’re sending down their best man from Paris.’
Name of God, Pel thought. Another one! Soon, they’d be falling over them in the street!
With the sun out, the Hupperts’ gloomy old-fashioned house managed to look more cheerful.
As Pel stepped inside the yard, the guard-dog came to life at once. As it leapt forward, the chain sprang taut, almost throttling it. It danced around, barking as if it were crazy. Pel stared at it, white-faced. ‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘I shall bring my gun and shoot that thing.’ He paused. ‘At least, I would if I thought I could hit it.’
Huppert was in his shirt sleeves in the kitchen drinking coffee. He looked pale and shaken, and they found he’d heard from the hospital. With him was a woman who was standing by the stove. She was older than Huppert, blonde, heavy-featured and with a lowering presence that made Pel feel ill-at-ease. Huppert introduced her as Connie Gruye.
‘She lives next door,’ he said. ‘She’s come in to give a hand.’
The telephone went and Madame Gruye went to answer it, and returned almost immediately. ‘It’s the undertaker,’ she said. ‘He wants to make some arrangements with you.’
Huppert rose. ‘Forgive me,’ he said to Pel.
The woman placed two glasses on the table, poured wine into them and gestured to Pel to drink. It tasted like iron filings and he wondered if she made it with the leftovers from the forge.
Huppert seemed to be doing a lot of arguing on the telephone and Pel became heavily aware of Madame Gruye’s presence in the room. She said nothing, as though she’d never been in the habit of saying much.
‘Did you see the intruder?’ Pel asked, more in an attempt to break the silence than anything else. ‘From your window next door perhaps.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Did you hear him?’
‘No.’
Pel sighed. It was heavy going but he struggled on.
‘I suppose the dog woke you.’
‘No.’
‘It looks a good guard-dog.’
‘It is. It nearly bit your Inspector.’
It nearly bit me, Pel thought. The woman was staring at her feet and for a moment Pel decided she’d gone to sleep standing up.
‘But perhaps I wasn’t awake,’ she said as if it were an afterthought. ‘And it woke me, and by the time I’d come around it had stopped barking. Or Monsieur Huppert had managed to shut it up.’ It was quite an unexpected speech.
‘Doesn’t it shut up for you?’
‘No.’ They were obviously back to square one. ‘Only for her.’
‘Her? Madame Huppert?’ Pel tried a little light-heartedness. ‘I expect you’re afraid of it,’ he said. ‘They always know when you’re afraid.’ They certainly always knew with him.
‘It wants shooting,’ she said.
Pel looked up, startled to discover such a brooding personality was capable of so much anger, so much emotion.
‘You don’t like it?’ he asked.
‘I hate it. Everybody does.’
‘Why does he keep it then?’
She gestured to the hall where they could still hear Huppert talking into the telephone. ‘He says it keeps intruders away.’ Her face lifted unexpectedly in the ghost of a smile. ‘It didn’t keep this one away, though, did it?’
Men were still carefully searching the place, going through the yard and the forge as if with a fine-toothed comb.
‘How did he get into the yard?’ Pel asked.
Bardolle gestured. ‘He broke the chains on the gates. Then he cut a piece of the grille out of the door of the forge.’
‘What with?’
‘There are bolt-shearers in the forge. Then he reached through the hole he’d made and slipped the bolt.’
When they went back into the hous
e, Huppert was in the kitchen again. He had his jacket on now.
‘How’s the arm?’ Pel asked.
‘Better. Still stiff. Still stings a bit.’ Huppert’s gloom returned. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he said heavily. ‘My wife almost ran this place. I’ll have to rethink the thing through now, because she was the expert. I only attended to the details.’
‘Tell us again what happened.’
Huppert sighed and, watched by the woman, tried to explain. ‘I heard the noise,’ he said.
‘What did you do?’
‘I called to my wife to come down because there was a man in the yard.’
‘Why?’
‘To telephone the police.’
‘And then?’
‘I grabbed a towel and put it round my neck. As a scarf. It was cold. Then I grabbed the gun.’
‘In your hand?’
‘Not at first. I put on the belt with the holster. Then I went outside to the forge.’
‘With the yard light on?’
‘No.’
‘I’d like to have a look at the forge,’ Pel suggested. ‘Do you feel like showing us round?’
Outside Darcy counted the marks the bullets had made in the brick walls of the rear of the house and the forge. There were five of them.
‘The sixth hit my wife,’ Huppert said heavily.
‘He wasn’t exactly a good shot, this intruder,’ Darcy observed quietly to Pel. ‘He must only have been standing by the pump there. And why shoot, anyway? If he’d kept quiet, he might not have been noticed because it would be dark there without the light.’ He looked at Huppert. ‘What happened then?’
‘He went into the forge,’ Huppert said. ‘I went after him. I fired. Twice. And he fired back. One of them hit me.’
Darcy frowned. ‘I wonder what he was after? What’s made here isn’t easily carted away.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t that he was after,’ Pel said.
Huppert didn’t think it was either. ‘Who’d want to steal a wrought-iron gate?’ he asked.
‘What about the pay for your staff? It’s today, isn’t it?’
Huppert sighed. ‘Connie’s let everybody know what’s happened and not to come in. She’ll take their pay to them later in my car.’ His sigh came again. ‘Perhaps I should pay them by cheque. But just try to suggest it. The types who work for me are old-fashioned and they like to feel the weight of their wages in their pocket.’
‘How often are they paid?’
‘Every fourteen days. They decided that. Some people pay every month.’
‘Any enemies you know of?’
Huppert pulled a face. ‘None.’
‘Then why should someone want to take a shot at you?’
‘Ask me another. I can only think he got inside thinking he might find something of value and when I appeared he panicked and shot at me.’
‘He – if it was the same man – came once before,’ Darcy said. ‘He didn’t find anything then, so why come again? Burglars don’t operate that way.’
Pel was sniffing round the workshop now. It contained all manner of things to do with the business. ‘Show me where you were standing when the shots were fired?’ he asked.
Huppert led the way across the yard. Pel followed, keeping well out of reach of the dog. Huppert stopped by the back door of the house. ‘I was here,’ he said. ‘I suppose I must have just come out of the door.’
‘What’s through there apart from the kitchen?’
‘Nothing. Just the house. The office, of course. It’s next to the kitchen.’
The telephone went again and Madame Gruye’s head appeared in the office window. ‘It’s the florist’s,’ she said. ‘They want to know what you want.’
‘I think you should know,’ Darcy pointed out, ‘that the burial might have to be postponed until the body’s released. It might take time.’
Huppert gave him an agonised look. ‘Is that what happens?’
‘Usually.’
‘I’d better tell them.’
As Huppert vanished again, Bardolle was staring about him, frowning. ‘There was no trace of fingerprints or footprints, Patron,’ he said. ‘No sign of the intruder. As far as I can make out, he took his time, too. After he got through the gates, he searched the forge until he found the bolt-shearers. Then he cut a hole in the grille leading to the yard itself, then – it doesn’t make sense, Patron – he put the bolt-shearers back in their place. He must have. They’re there and we’ve checked the bite. It matches the mark. Then, when Huppert heard him, instead of disappearing as he ought, he hid in the forge. Huppert followed him and when Huppert was inside he came to life and fired at him. Twice. Only then did he disappear.’
‘No fingerprints on the shears?’
‘Nothing, Patron. He used gloves.’
Pel was standing by a bench. Hand tools lay about on it and a vice was bolted to one end. Pel stared at the floor. It was black in colour, and seemed to be compounded of dirt, soot and grease in equal quantities. Near the bench, close to the vice, there were marks that looked as if they were made by chalk. An attempt had been made to erase them but they were still visible. Two of the marks were arcs, about the size of the toe of a boot and just in front of the right hand one was a straight line with right-angled marks at each end. There were other chalk marks, the width of a man’s hand apart, on the bench.
‘What are those?’ he asked.
Bardolle shrugged. ‘I asked. Huppert said he thought someone had been making something. Measuring. That sort of thing. And he made them to save measuring over and over again.’
‘Did he say what he was measuring?’
‘He couldn’t remember. They’re all craftsmen here and all have their own way of doing things.’
Pel studied the marks. ‘They don’t look all that old,’ he commented.
‘That’s what I said. He said they could be for anything – they make all sorts of things.’
When they returned to the office, Madame Gruye had vanished and Huppert was just replacing the old-fashioned telephone. The place looked untidy, with disordered piles of papers, bills on spikes, an ancient typewriter, and a large square out-dated reel-to-reel tape recorder connected by means of laboratory clamps to what appeared to be a homemade spring-operated wooden pedal attached to a cable. At the other end of the cable a strip of plastic with a hole in it had been slotted over the old-fashioned tumbler switch on the flat deck of the machine. Pel was staring at it, puzzled, when Huppert explained.
‘Tape recorder,’ he said. ‘For letters.’
‘What’s that operating it?’
Huppert gestured. ‘It’s a device we made. We had the tape recorder. It was my wife’s. She used to like to record music and talks from the radio but then she lost interest, and when we decided it would be easier for Connie here to do letters from a tape recorder instead of having always to take them down in shorthand first, we decided to use it. If I sit down here–’ he suited the act to the words ‘–and press the foot pedal, it works this cable which is attached to this piece of plastic which slots over the switch and moves it back and forth so that it works the machine. Look.’ He pressed his foot on the wooden spring-operated pedal and the small piece of plastic over the switch of the tape recorder moved to set the reels moving. Huppert’s voice spoke.
‘To Messrs. A. Canon and Company. You have the address, Connie, in the file. Dear Sirs, In answer to–’
As he lifted his foot, the machine stopped.
‘It’s never let us down,’ Huppert said.
Pel was staring at the old tape recorder as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. It seemed to bear out Darcy’s opinion that Travail des Metaux Huppert was a Mickey Mouse outfit.
Huppert seemed to feel it needed more explanation. ‘We’ve been using it like that for twelve years,’ he said. ‘It’s big and bulky but Connie likes it. She’d probably walk out on me if I got rid of it.’
‘Is she that important?’
Hup
pert shrugged. ‘She’s worked here longer than I have. She worked for the original owner and very nearly became a director. She knows where all the contracts are and so on. I’d be lost without her.’
Pel was still examining the ancient device.
‘Did your wife type?’
‘Not very well. She used to work in the factory before I married her. She’s – she was – clever at working metal.’
Pel’s eyebrows rose.
‘People took any trade they could get when things were difficult,’ Huppert explained. ‘But she had a bit of a gift for it. When the other girls left to get jobs they thought were more suited to them, she stayed on. Bit of an inventor, too.’ Huppert gestured at the device attached to the tape recorder. ‘That was her idea.’
‘How many people do you employ here?’
‘I told you. Twenty. I could have grown bigger but I preferred not to. We’re not very important.’
‘Trust them all?’
‘They’ve all been with me a long time. All except for Garcia. He turned up six months ago and asked for a job. I’d just lost an old boy who’d retired so I took him on. Thought I might as well stick to a round figure of twenty. He’s all right.’ Huppert held out his hand, palm down, and moved it from side to side. ‘Nothing special. But far from useless.’
‘Know anything about him?’
‘No. He just turned up. He lives in a caravan at Talant.’
‘Full name?’
‘Emmanuel Garcia. You don’t think–?’
‘I don’t thing anything at the moment. I’m keeping an open mind.’
‘Why would he want to shoot me?’
‘I didn’t say he would want to shoot you. I haven’t even spoken to him. Is there any reason why he might want to shoot you?’
After all, Pel thought, he could be a long-lost cousin. He could be the lover of Madame Huppert. He could be a man whose sister Huppert had seduced. He could even be a maniac. There were a thousand permutations you could think of if you tried. They didn’t have to make sense. Especially judging by the rubbish you read in the papers.
Nine