Pel and the Predators

by Mark Hebden

  ‘Name of God!’ he yelled. ‘Lay off that accelerator! Look at me!’

  By this time both of them were growing anxious and their anxiety was making them angry. As the young man began to curse in words that startled the woman, in her own anger she responded bitterly.

  ‘There’s no need to talk like a peasant,’ she said.

  The young man sourly brushed the dirt off his suit. ‘There’s a village down the road,’ he said. ‘I’ll get someone to come up with a tractor and a rope.’

  ‘They’ll be in bed. Suppose they won’t come?’

  The young man looked worried. ‘We’ll have to walk home.’

  ‘Do you realise how far it is? And what do we do about the car?’

  The young man was now beginning to experience a distinct sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. If they didn’t reach home some time during the night – and if they had to walk they undoubtedly wouldn’t – questions would be asked. And that would be awkward because the car was his boss’ and the woman was his boss’ wife.

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said, aware for the first time that one of his clever little schemes had gone wrong.

  The woman had the torch now and was shining it along the ditch, in the forlorn hope of finding stones or a log to thrust under the rear wheel to give it sufficient purchase to drive out of the ditch.

  ‘Wait!’ Her voice was suddenly urgent and shrill with a note of panic and she began to back away from the car, the torch still held in front of her.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she said and the way she said it brought the young man leaping to her side.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She gave him a stricken look, partly fear, partly anxiety.’ ‘There’s a man there,’ she breathed. ‘And he’s dead!’

  Twenty

  Pel slept fitfully, his mind a whirl of details. The Pigny and Celine cases were beginning to get on top of him, he realised, and, unable to put them from his mind, he reached for the whisky bottle because Doc Minet had once told him that people who took sleeping pills would do better to try that. In the early hours he woke, saturated with sweat, startled at the amount he’d drunk.

  Coming to consciousness the following morning, he peered warily over the sheets, expecting to see the day rushing at him. But the room was quiet and he even began to feel a little better. Then the Pigny and Celine cases came back at him and he heaved in bed, knowing he ought to go to work but feeling like a schoolboy with a sniffle who hadn’t done his homework properly and was pretending to be more sick than he really was.

  In the end, he rose, and moving slowly, went downstairs. He was later than usual and Madame Routy had already disappeared to the shops. She had placed his cup and saucer on the table and left the coffee pot on the cooker. The coffee tasted like being hit in the face with a wet football so he started to make himself a fresh cup with instant powder, feeling that no matter how bad it was, it would inevitably be better than Madame Routy’s. He was standing in the kitchen, holding a piece of soggy croissant, when the telephone went. It was Madame Faivre-Perret.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ she demanded at once. ‘You should be in bed.’

  He meekly promised to go back to bed at once and not move for forty-eight hours.

  ‘And just see that Madame Routy makes you some good appetising food. Something light but tasty.’

  He promised, knowing full well that whatever Madame Routy attempted, it would inevitably turn out as a casserole as heavy as lead.

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I’ll go as soon as I’ve finished my coffee.’

  He didn’t know what was coming.

  He was still in the kitchen when the telephone went again. He crossed to it, moving like an old man, and stood holding the telephone in one hand and his soggy croissant in the other.

  ‘Patron—’ it was Darcy’s voice ‘—we think we’ve turned up Jo-Jo la Canne!’

  ‘What?’ Pel almost choked as a fragment of croissant went down the wrong way.

  ‘Forêt de Diviot. In a ditch covered with leaves and old branches. Found by a type called Yves Cerussier, who happened to be out there with his boss’ car and a woman called Husson who happens to be his boss’ wife. They’re looking pretty sick, because it looks as though he’s going to lose his job and she’s going to lose her husband. Jo-Jo was shot.’

  ‘I’ll be down. Hold everything.’

  ‘Hang on, Patron,’ Darcy said. ‘Are you fit? I only rang up to let you know what was going on. I can handle things.’

  Pel stared at the telephone as if he expected a toad to jump out of it.

  ‘I said hold everything,’ he snarled. ‘Pick me up in ten minutes.’

  He scrambled upstairs, falling over his dressing gown cord, and washed and dressed at full speed. His head felt as if the side was dropping off but the knowledge that things were happening bore him up.

  Darcy appeared within minutes and, picking up enough spare cigarettes as they left the city to last Pel through a siege, they headed for Sombernon. The police had already placed a screen just to the rear of the Peugeot which still stood with one of its rear wheels overhanging the ditch. Cerussier and Madame Husson were sitting in the car belonging to the police brigadier from Sombernon. They were no longer on speaking terms. Around the Peugeot were police, fingerprint experts and men from the forensic laboratory. There was even a reporter and a photographer who had materialised from nowhere and, quick to sense a scandal, had whipped off a few useful pictures of Cerussier and Madame Husson.

  As Pel approached them, they were both sunk into gloom, Cerussier wondering what story he could tell his wife, what story he could tell his employer, and finally what it would be like without a job. Madame Husson was wondering how much blame she could throw on Cerussier and whether her husband would believe it if she suggested she’d been abducted? She thought it most unlikely.

  Pel studied them for a moment then walked to where Doc Minet was gingerly moving leaves and twigs and small branches. In one spot they had been heaped up into a pile and Minet was carefully picking them up, almost one by one. In the ditch, still half covered, was the huddled body of a man. There was blood across his face and one of his hands as though he had clutched at his wound in the moment he died. He was dressed in a cream-coloured suit with a dark blue shirt and a white tie. Beneath him lay a walking stick with an ivory handle.

  ‘That’s Jo-Jo all right,’ Darcy said.

  ‘What happened?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Two bullets,’ Doc Minet decided. ‘Both entrance wounds in the left side of the head. I can’t tell you the calibre yet but it looks like a 6.35mm. He was shot here. There are wheel marks right alongside the ditch there.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About forty-eight hours ago, I’d say.’

  Policemen from the Sombernon substation and neigh-bouring villages were combing the undergrowth for anything that might be a help. The brigadier in charge had laid a large handkerchief on a flat stone and had the contents of the dead man’s pockets spread out on it.

  ‘Wallet containing fifty francs,’ he said. ‘A few coins. Handkerchief. Cheque book issued by the Crédit Lyonnais bank in Rochefort. Penknife. Car keys. What looks like a house key. Cigarettes. Lighter. And that’s about all.’

  ‘Get in touch with Crédit Lyonnais,’ Pel said. ‘Tell them it’s a murder enquiry. We need his address.’

  By lunchtime, with Yves Cerussier and Madame Husson in their respective homes at last, both engaged in long explanations of what they’d been up to, Pel was outside Jo-Jo la Canne’s address in Rochefort. His mother, it seemed, had been in hospital for over a year and he had taken rooms to be near her.

  The apartment was a bachelor affair with no feminine touches, many dirty dishes in the sink and a lot of dust. Jo-Jo la Canne might have been a bit of a dandy when he was out and about but at home he lived a slovenly existence.

  His landlady who lived on the ground floor didn’t hold a very high opinion of hi
m. ‘He owes me rent,’ she said. ‘When I asked him for it two nights ago he said he was just on his way to collect some money that was owing to him. He used my telephone to talk to someone and went out saying he’d pay me next morning. He never came back.’

  There was no indication of whom it was Jo-Jo had met, but when Lagé, Misset and Debray tore the apartment apart, it revealed small quantities of hallucinatory drugs and a letter which indicated that, in addition to his other activities, Jo-Jo had been the salesman for the manufacturer, who appeared to be a research student using one of the laboratories at the university. There were names and addresses, even a run-down on methods.

  By late afternoon, in addition to the landlady’s, Prélat, of Fingerprints, had found the dabs of Jo-Jo, one or two unknowns and three students at the university who by this time were answering questions at the police station.

  As might have been expected, Jo-Jo hadn’t been in the habit of eating at home and his dustbin, which hadn’t been emptied for weeks, contained nothing more than a few scraps of paper, among them the torn fragments of Dominique Pigny’s identification papers and driving licence, and two crumpled press cuttings. Carefully, Pel spread the cuttings out on the table. One was the same as the Xerox copy he’d had made in Concarneau concerning the death of Madame Cochet. The other concerned the funeral of a wealthy cancer patient in Lyons by the name of Raoul Zeller, of 41, Avenue Maréchal Lebrun. Like the identification papers and the driving licence, they had clearly come from Dominique Pigny’s handbag, which Jo-Jo la Canne, never one to miss an opportunity, had doubtless sold or given to a girl friend.

  ‘Now, why,’ Pel asked, ‘was she interested in an old woman called Simone Cochet in Concarneau and a man in Lyons suffering from terminal cancer called Zeller?’ He sniffed and pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead. ‘And did Jo-Jo give her that necklet?’

  ‘Could he afford it, Patron?’ Darcy asked. ‘And would he have that much taste? If Jo-Jo had wanted to buy a girl something of that value, I’d have said it would be big and vulgar.’

  Returning to the Hôtel de Police, they found that yet another of the minor thorns in their flesh had been cleared up. Brochard had been having another go at Madame Argoud, from Roumy, who had tried to hammer her husband’s head flat with a brass candlestick. After days as silent as a Trappist monk she had suddenly blurted out the reason.

  ‘It was because he snored,’ Brochard said. He was young and inexperienced and he looked faintly bemused. ‘She said she’d listened to him for fifteen years and suddenly she decided she was sick of it.’

  It was another victory – only a small one, true, because the thing they were really after now was the identity of the person with whom Jo-Jo had spent his last hours alive – but a victory nevertheless, and, feeling like death again now that the excitement had died, Pel was just considering going home when Lagé appeared.

  ‘We’ve found the gun that shot Jo-Jo, Patron,’ he announced. ‘The army turned up with a mine-detector and found it down a rabbit hole. It’s an MAS 6.35mm with the initials “OF” scratched on the barrel.’

  ‘Who in God’s name is “OF”?’ Pel growled. ‘We’ve got no one we’re interested in with those initials.’

  That night, Pel knocked himself out with a sleeping pill, and woke the next morning feeling as if he were trying to drag himself up out of a bed of treacle. He felt dreadful and he knew he hadn’t kept his promise to Madame about taking care, but there was a feeling in his bones that they were on the brink of something, and, being Pel, he couldn’t bear the thought of somebody stumbling on it before he did.

  Aimedieu picked him up and drove him to the office, his mind still busy. If Jo-Jo la Canne had killed Dominique Pigny accidentally, as was still very possible, then his panic was understandable. But had he? You didn’t wait for three days in a lay-by to have an accident. And if it weren’t an accident, then why had he killed her? And, having done so, why had Jo-Jo himself been killed? And by whom?

  Sitting at his desk, he chewed over the details. It wasn’t easy, because his cold was beginning to make him feel as if everything about him was clouded.

  Leguyader and Doc Minet appeared just before lunch, looking like twin angels of doom.

  ‘Marie-Josephe Danot,’ Leguyader said. ‘Known as Jo-Jo la Canne. His clothes tell us very little but there’s one thing we know with certainty: He didn’t get out of the car that took him to where he was found until he was pushed out. And then he went head-first, which suggests he was already dead. There are no traces of leaves or soil from the Forest of Diviot on his shoes so we think he was picked up somewhere – perhaps arranged by that telephone call of his – and driven to the forest on the grounds that it was lonely and they wouldn’t be recognised. Also, of course, because when dead he wouldn’t be found for some time. It’s a pity for whoever murdered him that Cerussier happened to choose that spot for his romp with Madame Husson.’

  Minet produced a plastic bag containing a small fragment of misshapen metal. ‘6.35 bullet,’ he said. ‘From Jo-Jo’s head. There were a lot of 6.35s about after 1945 and a lot disappeared into private cupboards. This one was held up against Jo-Jo’s head, because there are scorch and powder marks. The entrance wound’s in the left temple and there’s another through the hole of the left ear. That one came out through the right temple, taking off part of the side of the skull and face. Since the entrance wounds are on the left side, Jo-Jo was probably a passenger in the front seat and was shot twice in rapid succession by the driver. It would be very easy. Unlike the British, who are crazy and drive on the wrong side of the road, the steering wheels in our cars are on the left side of the car, so, if the driver was right-handed, which most people are, all he had to do was bring the weapon from his pocket and it would be over before Jo-Jo knew what was happening. There are no signs of a struggle. No broken nails. No bruises. After he’d shot him, I think the driver simply reached across the body, opened the door and pushed him out. If the car was parked with its wheels on the edge of the ditch – and judging by the tyre marks it was – then he’d fall into the ditch and it would be a simple matter to cover him with dead leaves and drive away.’

  Leguyader shuffled a group of photographs he’d brought along. ‘That’s a picture of the bullet taken from his head. And that’s a photograph of a bullet fired from the gun found in the rabbit hole. They match.’ He indicated the plastic bag. ‘Find the owner of that gun,’ he said, ‘and you have the man who killed Jo-Jo la Canne.’

  As Doc Minet and Leguyader vanished, Pel lit a cigarette. His cold – only he could get a cold in the middle of summer, he decided bitterly – was growing worse and he was hoping for the rest of the day to be quiet so he could snatch himself back from the jaws of death. But the door had hardly closed when Darcy appeared. He was red-faced with hurrying.

  ‘Arne,’ he said. ‘I was checking on Philippe Duche with the foreman for that farm the château runs, and he let it drop that a man who answers to Crussol’s description was there not long before Dominique La Panique disappeared.’

  Pel peered at him, alert despite watering eyes. ‘With the girl?’

  ‘On his own. He said he’d come to buy potatoes. He’ll need seeing, Patron. I’ll get my car.’

  Twenty-one

  Bardolle was waiting just down the street from Crussol’s house.

  ‘He’s in,’ he said.

  The door was opened by Crussol who, for a change, looked clean. He was dressed in a dark suit and was struggling to knot a black tie round his neck.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said at once. ‘Can’t stop now.’

  ‘You can stop for ten minutes,’ Darcy snapped.

  ‘There’s a funeral come up. It was my day off but they’ve called me in. We’ve got to box a stiff.’

  He was about to close the door when Bardolle took a hand. Placing an enormous fist on Crussol’s chest, he pushed him back into the house and closed the door behind them. Although Crussol was taller, there appeared to be more of Bardolle an
d Crussol sighed and gave way. Leading them to the garage, he began pouring beer at once. Jesus was still raising Lazarus from the dead but Lazarus’ feet seemed to have changed shape and even appeared to be deformed.

  Pel came to the point at once. ‘Arne,’ he said.

  Crussol seemed to shrink. ‘What about it?’

  ‘You were there around the 10th of last month. We have a witness.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be me.’

  Pel produced the map they’d found in the white Mercedes and indicated the circles round Mongy, Arne and Benodet.

  Crussol looked scared. ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just asked.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, it came from a car driven by one Jo-Jo la Canne, a petty gangster, thief, con man and suspected murderer – now dead. Dominique Pigny was living at Arne just before she died.’

  Crussol shook his head violently. ‘I didn’t know.’

  Pel’s finger rested again on the map. ‘Benodet’s next door to Beg Meil where she was found dead. Mongy’s where you met her in the café. Rather a coincidence, I think. Can you explain it?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘What about this man who was seen at the château? The one who looked like you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be me. I’d be at work.’

  ‘We’ll check with your boss.’

  Crussol seemed to panic. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I did take the day off about then. I’d been working too hard. Probably got psillicosis from hacking away too much at stone. You can get it, you know. I needed a day in the country. I might have gone there. Just wandering about. You know how you do. But I didn’t know Dominique was living there. It would be just by chance.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, my friend,’ Darcy said.

  ‘Look—’ Crussol lifted his hands as if warding them off – I’ll tell you what happened. It was Dominique’s idea.’