Pel Under Pressure (Chief Inspector Pel)

by Mark Hebden

  ‘Old examination questions in Slav languages,’ Darcy said disgustedly. ‘Did you see any money change hands, or anything that might have been drugs?’

  Misset grinned. ‘Nothing. I was by the radiator in the corridor when the kid came out and I managed to crash into her. Sent her flying. Even managed to uptip her handbag. It was one of those open canvas things and the whole lot came out.’

  ‘Whole lot of what?’

  ‘Make-up. Handkerchief. A few coins. Eight one-hundred-franc notes–’

  ‘That’s a lot of money for a student,’ Darcy said.

  Misset shrugged. ‘Some of them aren’t badly off, and some are careful with their grants, and it is the beginning of the month. There was a lipstick, a pair of specs not in a case, one of those things they do their nails with, a notebook–’

  ‘Anything that might have contained drugs?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Could she have stuck them in her pocket?’

  Misset grinned. ‘This one, mon brave, didn’t have a pocket. She had one of those sheath dresses on. Fitted like a skin. I managed to get my hands on her for a second.’ Misset grinned. ‘Not bad either.’

  ‘What about the books? Anything between the leaves?’

  ‘Couldn’t have been. I sent them skating down the corridor. It would have fallen out.’

  Darcy frowned. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She gave me a dirty look, picked her stuff up and headed for the lift. That’s all. Disappeared round the corner. I heard the doors go. When I got there, the light had gone out.’

  Darcy was worried. Was Marie-Anne Chahu running something? It didn’t seem possible. Women as poised as she was didn’t go in for drugs. Sex, yes, but not drugs. And why so many students?

  It all seemed depressingly normal. Students were always seeking questions from previous papers to guide them in their studies, and the obvious place to pick them up was from their professor’s assistant. But why not at the University or Foussier’s private office? Why at La Chahu’s flat?

  With his shrewd eye, Darcy had not failed to notice also that the girls all seemed cheerfully normal. Working on the carpet with his bag of tools, he watched them appear round the corner from the lift, disappear into La Chahu’s apartment, reappear two minutes later and vanish round the corner back to the lift. It seemed perfectly straightforward behaviour and what was more they all seemed bright young creatures, well endowed with busts, behinds and legs. For the life of him he couldn’t imagine why girls like that, in the full flush of youth, desirable, ripe for love and obviously of a type to attract males like wasps round a jar of jam, should go in for drugs.

  He decided to rope in the doorman. His name was Joachim Salengro and he was as mealy-mouthed an old rogue as Darcy had thought on first meeting him.

  He winked and placed a finger alongside his nose. ‘Sure, I’ll keep my eyes open,’ he said, standing in the doorway of his office to brush his plum-coloured suit. ‘There isn’t much goes on round here that I don’t know about.’

  Darcy gave him a cold look. ‘You didn’t know about this,’ he said.

  Fourteen

  What, Pel wondered, should he do about Madame Faivre-Perret? Darcy was right of course. She was a source of information that ought never to be neglected. Burgundy was wine, and wine made the city wealthy. In addition, there was the railway, metallurgy, farm produce, printing, glass, chemical and other industries. Even mustard. The city’s mustard was famous and, Pel suspected, it added its mite to the place’s prosperity.

  And with the wealth and prosperity came the need to spend. There were shops in the city that catered for expensive tastes and, situated midway between Paris and the South, it was a splendid centre for women’s fashions. And with women’s fashions went hair, and, so Pel had been told, women talked under hair-driers.

  But surely not about gangsters! He could hardly expect to pick up tips about Tagliacci or Pépé le Cornet or anyone who was being used by them. Nevertheless, Darcy seemed to feel that in the apartment of Marie-Anne Chahu there were secrets that could be of help to them, but since they had no good reason to demand a search warrant from Judge Polverari, it seemed to leave him no option. It was worth trying, he decided. They could lose nothing.

  For a long time he continued to hesitate then, quite deliberately, he lit a cigarette and, drawing in the smoke, allowed it to drift round his lungs and sinuses and the various other tubes in his chest and head. It was like running a flue brush through them. Feeling better and more confident, he took out his list of telephone numbers, staring at the names, his finger on that of Madame Faivre-Perret. To an outsider it was just a name. To anyone who knew her, it meant a woman no longer young who was running a hairdressing business because she was a widow. To Pel it meant all the delights of civilised living after Madame Routy’s more homely ministrations.

  Madame Faivre-Perret had an office decorated in pink, green and white that seemed to suggest luxury and the sort of exotic delight that Pel, a bachelor attended only by a disgruntled housekeeper – who, he suspected, resembled the harpies knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror – had never in his life experienced. Of course, he told himself firmly, he was going to see her only on police business. Nothing else. Certainly not because he wanted to go and see her.

  But would she see him? There had been only one previous occasion and then she’d provided information that Pel had wanted, gleaned from the chatterings of her customers as they submitted to the attentions of her assistants. After that, he’d decided he wasn’t in the same league and had never telephoned again. He had often thought he might, but he had always put it off and by this time he hardly dared.

  ‘Inspector who?’

  He couldn’t bear the thought of that reply in answer to his ‘This is Inspector Pel.’

  But there was information to be obtained. There was police business in front of him.

  He picked up the telephone, demanded the number, brushed off a fatuous enquiry of the man on the switchboard who fancied himself as a joker and asked if he wanted a shampoo and set, and sat back to wait.

  The voice in his ear came so unexpectedly it made him jump. ‘Geneviève Faivre-Perret speaking.’

  ‘This is Evariste Pel.’ Pel’s voice came out as a croak and he had to clear his throat to make himself heard. ‘Inspector Pel, of the Police Judiciaire.’

  He waited for the ‘Inspector Who?’ bit, but it didn’t come.

  ‘Oh, hello, Inspector!’ There seemed to be genuine pleasure in the voice. ‘Where on earth have you been?’

  ‘Busy,’ Pel mumbled. ‘A lot of work. I’m having to crave your assistance once again. There’s information I need.’

  ‘I see. Why haven’t you been to see us for so long?’ Suddenly Pel was also wondering why.

  ‘We don’t get many enquiries of this kind,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Surely you don’t have to be making an enquiry to call in to have a cup of tea?’

  ‘I don’t?’ Pel’s heart thumped.

  ‘We make coffee or tea all day. Women under driers need to quench their thirsts. What can I do for you? I suppose you wish to be discreet, so please feel free to come and see me.’

  Pel put the telephone down. He felt as if he’d just run from the Place Darcy to the Place des Ducs at full speed, dodging the buses all the way. He couldn’t imagine what had been so exhausting.

  He stood up, jerked his jacket straight and pushed his shoulders back. Why should he be so unnerved? His ancestors had marched with Philip the Bold. They had defied the Kings of France. They had probably even been with Vercingetorix at Alesia when he’d stood up to Caesar. His shoulders sagged. And they’d probably also been marched off as prisoners and slaves to Rome when Vercingetorix had been beaten. His shoulders came up again. But they’d probably also been freed because of their courage and intelligence, and made their name there. For all he knew he had Italian cousins.

  ‘I’m going home,’ he told Darcy as he left the office.
>
  Reaching the house in the Rue Martin de Noinville, he braced his shoulders for Madame Routy’s insults. She was sitting in a deckchair in the garden. He saw her eyes open for a fraction of a second as he appeared, then she closed them again hurriedly, feigning sleep. She obviously had no intention of dragging her fat backside out of the chair to do anything to help.

  Going to his room, he took out his best suit. It was a dark charcoal colour, and was the one he kept for when they made him President of the Republic or something. With it he tried a new deep blue shirt he’d had sent for Christmas. His sister was married to a draper and sent him a shirt every winter. Being conservative in taste, he’d always assumed they were part of her husband’s stock that they couldn’t sell, but since the triumphant result of wearing the last one, he had changed his views.

  He put on the shirt, and with it a deep wine-coloured tie. He decided he looked rather good.

  ‘Monsieur Pel – ?’

  Swinging round, flushing, he saw Didier standing in the doorway.

  ‘Yes, yes?’ In his embarrassment at being caught admiring himself, Pel’s voice was sharp.

  ‘I was wondering–’ Didier had a book in his fist that Pel saw was a history of the Napoleonic wars ‘ – what was the “mot de Cambronne”?’

  ‘The word of Cambronne?’

  ‘I’ve heard the older boys at school talking about it. They say “The word of Cambronne to you” to each other. I wondered what it was.’

  ‘The word of Cambronne–’ Pel coughed and delivered up the polite fiction that had gone down in history ‘ – came when Cambronne was asked by the English at Waterloo to surrender. He said “Le Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas.”’

  ‘That’s eight words.’

  ‘Yes – well–’ What Cambronne was reputed actually to have said was ‘Merde’, but Pel felt he could hardly pass that on to a small boy. He was just trying to find a way out of it when Didier noticed the dark suit and blue shirt and began to grin.

  ‘You’re going to see her?’ he asked.

  ‘See who?’

  ‘The one you went to see last time I was here. You got yourself dressed up as if you were going to a party at the Elysée Palace.’

  Pel flushed. ‘I’m on police business,’ he said firmly. ‘Sometimes it’s necessary to be dressed up. It depends who you’re going to see.’

  Didier stared at him for a moment, still smiling. ‘Does she like you?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her. The one you’re going to see.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pel said stiffly. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I’ll bet she does.’

  ‘You speak from experience, no doubt.’

  ‘Yes. You get to know that sort of thing. They always pretend not to be interested, but they are really.’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ve found it with Louise Blay, anyway. You don’t have to mess about. You have to tell them what you think and they usually go along with you.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘Oh, always.’

  Pel studied the boy solemnly. ‘I wish, mon brave,’ he said, ‘that I had your experience.’

  Leaving the house, he drove back into the city, careful not to get oil from the car door on his sleeve. Pel’s car shed oil as a road sprinkler sheds water. Parking at the Hôtel de Police, he walked to the Rue de la Liberté where the hairdressing salon was situated. The girl who met him at the door didn’t ask his name and he could only assume she’d been warned to expect him.

  Madame Faivre-Perret was in her office. It was up two flights of stairs and to Pel it seemed almost as if he were going to bed. The windows looked over the old roofs towards the Palais des Ducs. Madame Faivre-Perret raised her head as he appeared.

  ‘Inspector, how smart you look!’

  Pel bridled with pleasure.

  ‘I think you’ve dressed specially to see me.’

  ‘No, no!’ he protested. ‘Not at all!’

  But he’d rather have died than appear in the suit he normally wore for work. Pel’s working suits all looked as if they’d been run up by a man with one arm during the dark period of a thunderstorm, and, since he considered he was grossly underpaid and couldn’t afford new ones, they all had baggy knees, saggy behinds and curling lapels.

  She listened to his explanation, smiling. ‘The first time I saw you, I remember,’ she said, ‘you were trying to roll cigarettes in the Relais St Armand. Do you still roll your own?’

  It had been a period when Pel was making one of his determined efforts to cut down his smoking. Since then he’d decided to let his vices wash over him, even if it meant an early demise, and as she pushed a box of cigarettes forward, he selected a Gauloise. Drawing the smoke down gave him confidence. It also made him cough violently.

  The tea tray arrived and she poured for him. After Madame Routy’s slapdash methods and the thick crockery she insisted on using in case she broke it, it was the height of luxury.

  ‘Now,’ she said. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘Do you know a Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Chahu?’ he asked. ‘She appears to be not without money–’

  ‘And you thought she might be one of my clients and you wish to know more about her?’

  ‘I know quite a lot already,’ Pel said. ‘She’s a personal assistant to Professor Foussier.’

  Well-shaped eyebrows rose. ‘She’s a lucky woman. He’s an attractive man.’

  Pel felt gnawings of jealousy. Nobody had ever called him an attractive man.

  ‘She has a flat,’ he said. ‘In the new block near the Place Wilson. I wish to know who pays for it.’

  She smiled knowingly. ‘Doesn’t she?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Pel said. ‘Not on the wages she must get.’

  That night Darcy was also involved with enquiries with a female. His attentions however, were rather more earthy and the fact that he was still working an eighteen-hour day didn’t put him off in the slightest

  The breeze was heavy and warm, and the mosquitoes seemed to have come out in millions, so that it occurred to him he could have picked a better place to park his car than close to the lake at St Philibert. He had chosen a spot well shaded by trees, but unfortunately there was a stagnant pond close by and they were homing in, in squadrons, brigades and phalanxes.

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘Yes?’ As Darcy moved Angélique Courtois moved with him.

  ‘No girl can give her mind to a thing like this when she’s being eaten alive.’

  ‘I can’t shut the window,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘It’s too hot.’

  She pushed his hand away and scratched a growing puff of flesh on her knee where she’d been bitten. The linen dress she wore had ridden up more than a shade.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to be engaged. I told you.’

  ‘Why don’t you wear your ring then?’

  Her shoulders moved. ‘It’s inclined to be a bit inhibiting.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a thing in common with him,’ Darcy said.

  ‘Oh, I have. When you get to the point of getting engaged you’ve usually talked about it.’

  Darcy was silent for a while. ‘You’ll need a lover,’ he said briskly.

  She giggled. ‘I will? Why?’

  ‘Every wife needs a lover. I mean – your husband dozing in front of the television wearing yesterday’s socks and last week’s beard. You’ll need someone to fill the gaps, if only to massage your ego.

  ‘Won’t my husband?’

  ‘All he’ll want is a quick tumble to help him sleep after a hard day, and there you’ll be, warm, pulsating flesh, reeking of perfume. You don’t choose a lover, you know, for his sense of humour or his IQ, and he won’t ask you to nurse him through a dose of flu. Any woman who can manage on a husband alone has rigor mortis coursing through her veins.’

  She was shaking with laughter. ‘He’s jealous. As hell. And he’s a farmer’s son.’

  ‘Un moujik.�
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  ‘He’ll probably shoot you. I know he’s got a gun.’

  ‘Come to that,’ Darcy said, ‘so have I. Only I don’t use mine on birds and rabbits that can’t shoot back.’

  There was a long silence and she shifted uncomfortably. ‘We ought to go somewhere else,’ she murmured.

  ‘Cars aren’t very comfortable,’ Darcy agreed.

  ‘We could go to my flat.’

  ‘Talking about flats,’ Darcy said, ‘how is it that Marie-Anne Chahu has such a big and expensive one?’

  ‘Are you still going on about that?’

  ‘It’s my job to go on about things like that.’

  ‘Can’t somebody do it for you?’

  Darcy smiled. ‘About five days ago, I suggested to my chief he might. But he doesn’t move very fast with women. How does she do it?’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose her family pays for it. Her father runs a furniture shop in Brittany. They couldn’t afford that sort of money and he’s careful, I understand.’

  ‘Does she earn a good wage?’

  ‘Better than me. But not enough for that.’

  ‘Is there a man?’

  ‘If there is, she keeps it pretty dark. I’ve never seen anyone there.’

  ‘Could it be Foussier?’

  ‘The way he dashes about, I should think he never has time. I’ve often been to her apartment to collect things or take files and I’ve never seen any sign of him. Perhaps she just likes wealth.’

  ‘Perhaps she needs it,’ Darcy said. ‘For reassurance. When you talk about Bretons being careful, you mean they’re mean.’

  ‘Well, she had to work hard. She told me. She got herself a place here at the University when she was quite old – at least twenty-four.’ Angélique spoke with the assurance of youth.

  ‘That’s when Foussier spotted her. He told her she could do better than study to be a teacher of East European languages so he brought her in to help him.’

  ‘Does she speak East European languages?’

  ‘Yes. Three. It’s useful in her job. The Prof was dead right. She does make more money than she would as a teacher.’

  ‘But not enough to pay for a flat in the Maison Joliet.’ Darcy frowned. ‘Or to put down the cash for a Triumph. Certainly not both. Is she on the game?’