by Mark Hebden
‘There’s a sergeant at Auxerre,’ he said, ‘who knows some-thing about this sort of thing.’
‘A sergeant?’ Pel’s eyebrows rose. ‘A police sergeant?’
‘Yes. I met him once at a sale.’
‘Buying things?’ Pel said. ‘On a sergeant’s income?’
Polverari smiled. ‘No. Just looking. Advising. He’s actually a bit of an expert.’
‘How did he come to be that?’
‘Well, his family’s an old one.’
‘So’s mine. Goes back to Adam.’
Polverari smiled. ‘But he grew up with objets d’art around him. I gather they’re all gone now, but he seems to know a little about it. Name of De Troquereau. We’ll get the Chief to have him sent down here to help us.’
Satisfied with his morning’s work, Pel headed back to his office. There was a drizzling rain falling on the city, dulling the famous enamelled roofs and making the spires dim in a misty outline. Nobody seemed to be wanting him and as he reached his office he made a point of not ringing to find out if anyone had been enquiring. It gave him ten minutes on his own to read the newspaper.
It was full of a new scandal that had broken in Paris. A brothel had been raided for contravening the laws, and an Under-Secretary to the Minister of Defence called Philippe le Bozec had been found there. Since he was supposed to be a young politician of great morality and integrity the newspapers were having a ball, especially since also a member of the Russian Embassy was known to have been in the habit of visiting the place, too. It gave Pel a lot of pleasure. He didn’t like politicians, regarding them merely as a necessary evil, and to find one in trouble always delighted him. He was surprised, nevertheless, to find the police had managed to find a good enough reason to lay on a raid. Most brothel owners knew the law inside out, certainly sufficiently well to know how to avoid getting into trouble, and he could only suppose that the presence of the Russian from time to time had set them wondering if it were being used as a posting house for secrets.
The newspapers were enjoying themselves enormously, and Le Bozec’s resignation was being demanded – as much from the point of view of morality as security. Considering the standard of most newspapers, it seemed to Pel a little ironic, because alongside the picture of Le Bozec was a picture of a half-clad girl being led away by a policeman, and it wasn’t there to indicate Le Bozec’s low moral tone so much as to titillate the great sporting public with a glimpse of what he’d been up to, which was much more exciting.
They were also busy slating the Russians again. Embassy officials, guests in France, were expected to behave with decorum, they claimed, and anyway, there were far too many of them. ‘La Grande Fraude,’ the headline screamed above a long screed demanding the heads of a few Russian attachés.
‘A swindle is being practised in France,’ Pel read. ‘A great deception. It is to be hoped that the Russian ambassador is a generalissimo of the first order because he has a veritable army of military men at his command. There are too many Russian officials in France and too many of them are military experts…’
Pel was enjoying himself. He liked a good political scandal, because he was convinced that only by getting rid of every ambitious politician in the world – and quite a few unambitious ones as well – was there any hope for the future. Most politicians, he felt, seemed to behave like Judge Brisard, with whom he’d been conducting a running fight for two or three years now. When his job demanded a juge d’instruction it was always Pel’s first object to get Judge Polverari if possible, because he was round and fat and cheerful, while Judge Brisard was tall, earnest, humourless, hypocritical, and behaved as if a steam roller had run over his personality.
Happy in his dislike of Brisard, he shook the paper and made himself as comfortable as his chair would permit. Standard issue for the offices of inspectors, it was hardly ‘confort anglais.’
Bombs, he noticed, his eyes casting over the columns beneath the funereal black of the headlines. A rash of letter bombs in Paris. Believed, it was claimed, to be sent by a breakaway group which wanted to free Brittany from the rest of France. The whole country, like the whole world, seemed to be full of breakaway groups. Everywhere would-be politicians with dreams of power were trying to split up large units into the dangerous smaller units the statesmen after two world wars had tried to get rid of. He wondered if he couldn’t form a breakaway unit himself, its sole purpose to leave Madame Routy behind.
The Tour de France was also off to a good start, he noticed, and the favourite was a Belgian by the name of Camille van der Essen, a Dutch rider in the style of Merckx and Zoetemelk. As a distinctly non-sporting type, the information left Pel as cold as if the newspaper had announced ‘Today happened.’ All that Pel knew about the Tour de France was that it cluttered up the roads, filled the television and the newspapers, and seemed to be the only talking point for a matter of three weeks. With the Russians poised to swallow the democratic world, the Chinese multiplying so fast they could march past – so Pel had been told – a million abreast for ever without ever coming to a stop, and terrorists from one end of the world to the other throwing bombs that maimed innocent men, women and children, the result of a race involving a hundred-odd cyclists – like the result of a football match – seemed of small moment. To Pel the Tour de France merely meant twenty-one days of cycling, and that, of course, meant twenty-one days of it on television, of which Madame Routy would doubtless watch every single kilometre.
Folding the paper, he looked at his desk. There was a long screed from the Chief about a series of frauds being investigated by the electricity authorities. His assistance was not being asked because most of the offences were in the north and out of their area, but what had been discovered was set out for everybody in the Hôtel de Police to see, to take note of, and be alert for. People had been tampering with meters and there seemed to have been an epidemic so that the electricity authorities were wondering if someone had devised a scheme to make the fraud nationwide. Probably the Russians, Pel decided cheerfully, as a means, like drugs, of undermining the national character ready for the big take over.
Meanwhile – Pel sighed and put the paper aside – the art robberies. In 1962 there had been a rash of robberies from châteaux which had so irritated the French police that a special squad had been set up in Paris, and the gang had been arrested. With the precautions that had been taken since, however, it had been assumed that such art robberies – chiefly from châteaux classés, châteaux to which the public were admitted and therefore subsidised – would stop, because the owners had begun to forbid photographs inside as a means of preventing would-be robbers identifying the objects they were after. Guide books had also been reprinted so that they were deliberately vague about which objets d’art were the valuable ones, and guides had been instructed to avoid pointing out in their spiels those things which might attract the attention of thieves.
Forcing visitors to leave their cameras at the door had had the result, in addition, of course, to the side-effect of forcing them to buy photographs and slides – a useful extra source of income – of making it more difficult to obtain pictures of individual items of value. This had been expected to put a restraint on art thieves but, despite all this, an entirely new rash of robberies had started – four so far in Pel’s area alone – and the police were growing worried. The case at St Sauvigny was the latest and, though it could, of course, have no connection with the châteaux robberies and be merely the work of one individual who had simply taken a fancy to the missing panel, on the other hand, it could well be the work of the gang who had been subjecting the châteaux to their ministrations. If it were, Pel decided, then they were well organised and well advised.
Could there have been an artist involved, he wondered. A man clever with a pencil, his sketch pad hidden inside his guide book, could well put down all the details of an object d’art, together with its exact location, so that the experts could come along later and knock it off.
As he co
nsidered the possibility, there was a tap at the door, and he looked up, expecting one of his team with a query. Instead it was Inspector Pomereu, of Traffic.
Pomereu was a thin, sallow man with a sharp alert expression. He had a reputation for missing nothing and it seemed that he was making a point of living up to it.
‘We’ve had an accident,’ he said. ‘On the hill down from Destres. A Renault 6 ran over the edge and landed upside down. It’s burned out. We’d like you to look into it.’
‘Is it anything to do with me?’ Pel asked.
Pomereu gestured. ‘It might be. The driver was found dead nearby. He’d been badly burned, but it wasn’t that which killed him. It was multiple injuries. Doc Minet has the report. And he must have been going down that hill as if the hounds of hell were after him, because his car leapt the barrier and landed a good five metres out into the field below.’
‘That’s a dangerous hill to drive fast on,’ Pel agreed. ‘Full of curves.’ Pel knew it well. It terrified him every time he was obliged to drive his ancient Peugeot down it, because he was convinced his brakes would give and he’d end up in the bar at the bottom. Going the other way, he was afraid the engine would give and he’d have to park and walk back to the bar to telephone for help. That bar had become an obsession with Pel.
Pomereu was agreeing. ‘Yes, it is dangerous,’ he said. ‘And there are skid marks to show that he must have been swerving pretty wildly as he was going down it.’
‘Drunk?’
‘Not according to Doc Minet. There was alcohol in his stomach but not enough to make him do something as mad as that. Two or three small brandies.’
‘Two or three small brandies produce a state of berserker in some people. Me, for instance.’
‘Not in this chap,’ Pomereu said. ‘He was normally a reasonably sober chap, I gather, but he liked a drink occasionally when he was pressed.’
‘And was he pressed?’
Pomereu permitted himself the luxury of a smile. ‘That’s where you come in,’ he said.
‘It’s still Traffic’s problem, surely?’
‘Not quite,’ Pomereu said. ‘You see, there were other skid marks on the road, too, which don’t match the ones from the Peugeot. We’ve checked them carefully and had the Lab on to them. We’ve decided they were made at roughly the same time.’
‘And – ?’
‘And if they were, then it raises another question: Was he being chased?’
‘And if he was, why?’
‘Exactly.’ Pomereu seemed pleased that Pel had arrived at the point so quickly.
Three
The road north from the city climbed slowly upwards through the outer suburbs, through the area where the big houses gave way to small houses, then to an admixture of garages and occasional small factories. Eventually, it began to climb to a flat plain, bare and treeless, where a small aerodrome lay by the side of the road, the small Cessnas, Rallyes and Centre Ests standing in lines of brightly-coloured aluminium. It then began to climb again, through a long double avenue of ancient trees, until finally and suddenly it began to descend in steep dangerous curves to the valley of the Epreys. More than one car had gone off the road here, some into the deep ditch alongside under the high bank that rose to the plain, others over the edge on the other side into the sloping fields that bent their way down to the river. Because people seemed determined to kill themselves, the authorities had put up a heavy steel guard fence but there were still a few who were clever enough to charge it at full speed and leap their cars over it to drop into the fields and roll down, over and over through the thick grass, leaving behind them an assortment of fenders, headlamps, wheels and bodies.
Pel stared at the bent rail and rubbed his nose. On the road, above Pomereu’s car, a police patrol car was parked with its light flashing, its crew staring down at the wrecked vehicle which still lay on its side below them, its paint blackened, its roof crushed, its fenders bent, its wheels out of true. It lay like a dead animal in the grass, one wheel-less axle like an amputated stump sticking up in the air. Doors hung open and the grass around was scorched in a brown circle where the flames had licked. There were still a few small wisps of smoke and the air was acrid with the smell of burnt rubber. Several metres higher up the slope was a deep scar in the turf.
‘That’s where he landed,’ Pomereu said. ‘We reckon it’s almost five metres out from the road. That’s quite a jump, considering he had to get over the guard rail. He must have been going at quite a speed.’
They climbed back to the highway. Pomereu’s men had placed tapes and warning signs to keep passing cars clear, and they walked slowly up the road studying the black scorched rubber marks. Towards the top of the hill they stopped. Pel lit a cigarette, coughed heavily once or twice, got properly into his stride so that he sounded like a consumptive, then drew a deep breath, feeling much better.
He held the packet out to Pomeren, who shook his head. ‘I don’t smoke,’ he said.
‘I wish I didn’t,’ Pel said.
‘You’ve only to give your mind to it.’
Pel gave Pomereu a bitter look. He’d been giving his mind to it for years, ever since someone had first publicised the fact that it caused cancer. He still hadn’t managed to reject the habit and was convinced that at any moment he would be carted off to hospital, his lungs charred, ready to gasp out his last.
Pomereu was gesturing down the hill and they started to walk slowly back again to where they’d left the cars. ‘You’ll notice,’ Pomereu observed, ‘that in every case where a corner appears, there are marks, as though he went into it at full speed. You’ll notice also, however, that there are second sets of marks doing the same, as though a second and larger car was also descending at full speed.’
‘Perhaps they were having a race,’ Pel said.
‘People are stupid enough.’ Pomereu was a humourless, pedantic individual who had a great contempt for his fellow men. ‘But I doubt it. Not here.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Type called Cormon. Claude-Achille Cormon. Bachelor, aged forty-one. Lived with his sister, Eugénie Clarétie, of Evanay-sur-Rille. She’s a widow and he had rooms in her house.’
‘Queer?’ Pel asked. ‘Was he a queer?’
‘Why?’
‘Bachelor aged forty-one.’
‘Some bachelors aged forty-one are perfectly normal.’
‘I know that,’ Pel said, sourly aware that he, too, was a bachelor approaching forty-one. ‘But most bachelors aged forty-one don’t end up dead in a burned-out car which gives every indication of having been chased at high speed.’
Pomereu considered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not queer. A bit of a loner, though. Quiet type. Not given to drinking. Though, as I’ve said, when pressed, he’d have a brandy or two.’
‘What do you mean by “pressed.”’
‘Work. That sort of thing.’
‘No women friends?’
‘None his sister knows about off-hand.’
‘Enemies?’
‘Sister knows of none. She thinks he gambled too much. Mind, she’s a bit stiff. Pillar-of-the-church type. Doesn’t hold with drinking and gambling. She says this is why he was often short of money.’
‘Was he short of money?’
‘She says so. Other times, though, he seemed to have good wins because he seemed to have a lot.’
‘Know where he gambled?’
‘No.’
‘We’d better find out. Where did he work?’
‘For a type called Louis-Napoléon Pissarro. Runs a small manufactory in the city. At least—’ Pomereu paused ‘–he worked for him up to six months ago, then he said he wanted to leave because he’d got a better job at double the wages. Pissarro couldn’t better that, so he left. His sister doesn’t know where the new job was but she thinks it was somewhere in Montbard.’
‘Didn’t he ever tell her?’
‘No. It seems they didn’t get on all that well. She was a good churchgoer. He neve
r went. But she was his sister and she felt it her duty to look after him.’
‘We’d better go and see her,’ Pel said. ‘What about the tyre marks. The second set. Do they tell you anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Not even the size of the car?’
‘Nothing, except that it was bigger.’
Pel nodded. ‘I’ll go and see Doc Minet on the way back,’ he said. ‘And find out what he has to offer.’
Doctor Minet had quite a lot to offer, including the remains of Claude-Achille Cormon. Considering he had a delicate stomach, Pel never enjoyed seeing the dead – especially since most of the dead he was concerned with were violently dead. Sometimes, however, there was no choice and the problem was one that always had to be faced.
Cormon’s face, hands and the front of his body had suffered most. The hair had been burned away and the face was unrecognisable, an ugly mass of charred flesh clinging to the bone of the skull. The burned and blackened fingers were curved, the shrivelled tendons drawing them into hooks like claws.
‘The clothing of the upper torso was almost completely burned away,’ Minet said, ‘though bits of it still clung to the legs.’
‘Go on,’ Pel encouraged, lighting a cigarette to kill the smell.
‘Extensive burns, broken ribs, broken legs, fractured skull, broken collar bone, broken pelvis.’ Doc Minet shrugged. ‘I’m not going to put them in medical terms because I don’t suppose you want me to. But that’s what he had in lay terms. But it wasn’t that he died of.’
‘It wasn’t? The burns?’
Doc Minet was a small round plump man who drew little pleasure from the corpses he saw on the slabs in his laboratory. On the other hand, they didn’t depress him much either, because he was a cheerful smiling man who enjoyed tormenting Pel and his colleagues by making them wait for what he’d discovered.
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.