by Mark Hebden
Pel scowled. ‘Well, come on, then,’ he said. ‘What did he die of?’
Doc Minet made him wait just a little longer. ‘Have you ever done any hunting?’ he asked.
‘A bit,’ Pel said. ‘Not much. I see enough that’s dead without contributing to the numbers.’
Doc Minet smiled. ‘Ever shot anything big?’
‘Such as?’
‘Deer.’
‘You’ve shot deer?’ Pel looked at Minet with admiration. ‘Who’re your wealthy friends?’
Minet smiled. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Algeria. Before it was given independence. I was born there. I lived there as a young man. There were a few buck in the south. Occasionally we used to go shooting. We always carried a knife so we could polish them off if we only wounded them.’
Pel studied Minet with interest. He’d always had the impression that they’d have been given the coup de grâce with – another shot in the head. When he said so, Minet shook his head.
‘Waste of a bullet. Expensive things, bullets, in those days. A good big pocket knife was just as good.’ He lifted his hand and touched the back of his head where the neck joined the skull. ‘Just up here there’s a soft spot under the skull. It’s even more marked in a four-legged animal. We used to slip the knife in there. It was instantaneous.’
Wondering where it was leading, Pel frowned. Doc Minet smiled.
‘The hunter’s thrust, it was called,’ he said. ‘They probably call it other things in other places, but where I lived that was its name.’
‘And?’
‘Someone gave Cormon a hunter’s thrust.’
‘What!’
Pel’s eyes widened and Doc Minet went on cheerfully, pleased at the effect he’d produced. ‘There was blood on the body, of course,’ he said. ‘There were a lot of cuts and injuries. Broken limbs. Compound fractures. But there were no cuts on the head and I wondered where the blood there had come from. There wasn’t much, so it seemed to indicate that it came from the fatal wound, because when the heart stops pumping the blood stops flowing. I found an incision a centimetre and a half wide and eleven centimetres deep. It went upwards under the skull into the brain.’
‘In other words, he wasn’t dead when the car stopped rolling?’
Minet smiled. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I think he actually pulled himself out of the flames. There were grass stains on his knees and bloodstains on the grass. He dragged himself clear, but someone followed him and killed him.’
‘With a knife?’
‘Perhaps they intended to do it some other way originally. Perhaps as they followed him down the hill they decided they could polish him off by driving him off the road. But, after he crashed they found him quite clearly alive and, in my opinion, despite the injuries he’d received, capable of recovery, so they killed him.’
Pel sat down, his hands toying with a packet of Gauloises. He took out one of the cigarettes, stuck it beween his lips and offered the packet to Minet.
‘I don’t,’ Minet said.
Pel’s head jerked up. ‘You used to,’ he accused.
‘I’m trying not to.’
‘How do you do it?’
‘With a lot of agony. So far I’m holding. I can’t guarantee it, however, so don’t tempt me. There’s only one way to stop and that’s have none about the house.’
‘If I had none about the house,’ Pel admitted gloomily, ‘I’d probably smoke the tufts off the carpet.’ He stared at his cigarette, small, dark and intense-looking. ‘This Cormon,’ he went on. ‘If what you say is right, it was sheer cold-blooded murder.’
Doc Minet shrugged. ‘That’s what it looks like,’ he agreed.
‘Why? Most murders are much less premeditated than that. But here they seem to have been chasing him, tried to kill him by making him crash his car and, when they failed, did it with a knife. Why not with a gun?’
‘Perhaps they didn’t have a gun.’
‘Then they’d need to know this method of killing, this hunter’s thrust of yours.’
Doc Minet smiled. ‘That would seem to be the case,’ he agreed.
Pel was frowning when he returned to his office. He was smoking and scowling at his blotter when Darcy put his head round the door. Pel waved him to a chair and pushed his packet of cigarettes across.
‘No thanks, Patron,’ Darcy said.
‘Don’t say you’ve given up too?’ Pel felt betrayed. Darcy was a good honest cigarette smoker who remained undeterred by the dire warnings about cancer, asthma and all the other associated diseases.
Darcy grinned. ‘No, Patron. I’ve just finished one.’
Pel pushed forward a sheet of paper. ‘Claude-Achille Cormon,’ he said. ‘Lived with his sister, Madame Eugénie Clarétie, of Evanay-sur-Rille. Aged forty-one. Bachelor. Now dead.’
‘Pomereu’s stiff?’ Darcy asked.
‘Yes. Find out about him, Darcy. He was murdered.’
Darcy’s eyebrows rose. ‘Was he now? How?’
‘What Doc Minet calls a hunter’s thrust. A knife under the skull.’
‘I thought he was killed in a car crash.’
‘He ought to have been. But he wasn’t. He was still alive and, what’s more, he was still conscious and trying to drag himself away. Somebody found him there and murdered him while he was helpless. I want to know why. That sort of murder’s usually prompted by something big that we ought to know about. Something as big as drugs.’
Darcy glanced at him. They had both been severely shaken not long before to find a growing drug ring in the city that had prompted murder.
‘Try the bookmakers,’ Pel suggested. ‘He seems to have been a bit of a gambler. Sometimes he lost heavily but at other times he did well and had money in his pocket.’
‘Think there was doping going on?’
‘If there was, why kill him here? We have no major stables in the area. He also doesn’t ever seem to have wandered far from home and doesn’t seem to have frequented the tracks. I want to know about him, Darcy.’
‘Right, Patron.’
‘How’s Misset doing with that art theft at St Sauvigny?’
‘He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going, Patron. If it had two legs, a bust and a behind and wore lipstick, he’d find it at once. He doesn’t even know where to start.’
‘What about the expert who’s supposed to know all about this sort of thing. Has he arrived yet?’
‘End of the week, Patron. He’s involved in a fraud case.’
‘Send Misset in.’
Misset was growing fat, Pel noticed, as the sergeant appeared. He’d never been the brightest member of Pel’s team and it would have pleased Pel to get rid of him, because Misset was also inclined to be lazy, over-familiar with women witnesses, and forever asking for time off to look after his growing family. But, since Sergeant Krauss had been shot dead not long before, they’d been shorthanded. Everybody in police work seemed to be shorthanded, Pel felt. Every civil service department in the world seemed to be overstaffed except the police, and with recruits not coming up to standard lately, recruiting was temporarily in abeyance and they were having to wait.
‘The art theft,’ he said. ‘Making any headway?’
Misset shrugged. ‘Patron, I don’t know anything about art. I wouldn’t know a Louis XV commode from a piece of pudding.’
‘I gather it’s not a Louis XV commode we’re looking for,’ Pel growled. ‘Nor a lost piece of pudding.’
Misset gestured. ‘No, patron, but that’s what this dame seemed to spend all her time talking about.’
‘Which dame?’
‘This Madame de Saint-Bruie. Runs an antique shop in the Rue de Lyon at Chagnay. I saw the priest-in-charge at St Sauvigny but I couldn’t make head or tail of what he said, so I went to this Saint-Bruie dame. She was just as bad.’
‘Why didn’t you spend an afternoon reading it up?’ Pel asked.
‘Reading it up, Patron?’ Misset’s face was blank.
‘We have
an excellent library in this city,’ Pel pointed out coldly. ‘We also have a university which in the past has never hesitated to give us the benefit of its knowledge and experience. Two or three hours in the library there might have made all the difference. Even an hour or two at home with a book.’
‘Patron, at home I don’t have time to read books.’
‘The trouble with you, Misset,’ Pel snapped, ‘is that you never have time for anything. Your family life prevents you being a policeman. Normally it’s the other way round: Being a policeman normally prevents a man having a family life.’
‘Well, seeing his kids is a father’s right, Patron.’
Pel glared. He’d used up his ration of good humour for the day. ‘This world’s full of people demanding rights,’ he snapped. ‘But nobody ever seems to accept the responsibilities that go with them. Send Nosjean in.’
Sergeant Jean-Luc Nosjean was slim and dark and still very young. Though Pel would have died rather than admit it, he considered him, with Darcy, to be one of the bright members of his team. In fact, both Pel and the Chief considered Darcy and Nosjean to be head and shoulders above all the other sergeants in the Hôtel de Police. After a harsh introduction when he had bleated constantly about the hours he worked, Nosjean had settled down well and these days, like Darcy, he was never overcome by the prospect of putting in overtime. He didn’t always go by the book, but he had ideas. If he had a failing, it was that he tended to fall too heavily for any pretty girl who happened to cross his path. There was one on whom the sergeants’ room had been betting for a long time, Odile Chenandier, whose father Nosjean had helped send to prison, but of late the sergeants’ room had been wondering if they’d picked the wrong horse, because Nosjean’s attentions seemed to be straying in the direction of a librarian by the name of Louise Rodier, who was not only intelligent but also managed to look like Charlotte Rampling.
‘How’s your love life, Nosjean?’ Pel asked as Nosjean halted in front of his desk.
Nosjean looked startled. ‘Patron?’
‘Misset’s seems to be getting in the way of his work.’
Nosjean grinned. ‘Mine bothers me from time to time, Patron,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s never got in the way of work.’
Pel came dangerously close to beaming at Nosjean. ‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ he said. ‘How busy are you at the moment?’
‘I’m in court tomorrow, Patron. That break-in at Vence. I’ve also got a few enquiries to make about the assault at the Relais St Aubyn, and there’s that stabbing in the Rue Royale.’
‘You’re busy then?’
Nosjean grinned. ‘I don’t call that busy, Patron.’
This time Pel actually did beam at him. Nosjean was perhaps his favourite sergeant because he was as clever as Darcy and never answered back or pulled Pel’s leg. According to Pel, the only person who was entitled to answer back or pull legs was Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I want you to work with Misset. Inevitably, that will mean you doing all the thinking, so make sure Misset does all the leg work.’
Nosjean smiled.
‘Do you know anything about ecclesiastical art treasures?’ Pel asked.
‘Not a thing, Chief.’
‘Then what would be your first move?’
‘To go to the library and read it up, Patron.’
Pel eyed him. It was more than likely he would also enjoy half an hour’s chat with Charlotte Rampling, but at least he could be relied on to do the reading too, and, what was more, he’d absorb what he’d read. Misset would merely enjoy the chat with Charlotte Rampling.
‘Do that,’ he said. ‘Then get down to St Sauvigny. See the canon in charge. It seems to be way above Misset’s head. I understand we have help coming at the end of the week in the shape of a police officer – no less – from Auxerre who’s supposed to be an expert. He’ll doubtless be as fat and lazy as Misset, so make sure you pick his brains well.’
While Nosjean headed gleefully for the library, wondering what he could tell Odile Chenandier if he could get round Charlotte Rampling and found it necessary to put off their date for the following evening, and Darcy settled down at the telephone to ring round every bookmaker in the district for what they knew about Claude-Achille Cormon, Pel headed for the Bar du Destin, which was a dark little place he favoured because no one knew him there but the landlord.
As he sipped a coup de blanc, he wondered about his own love life. Unhappily, it didn’t seem to be making much headway.
For some time now Pel had been bored with his private existence. Mostly it seemed to be organised for Madame Routy’s convenience. She had been wished on him some time before when his last housekeeper, also a widow, had announced that she was marrying again. Pel’s younger sister, who lived at Chatillon, had found him Madame Routy and now Pel was stuck with her. He couldn’t shift her and was aware that gradually she was taking him over.
He sipped his wine again, enjoying the flavour. What would they do, he wondered, without wine to push the blood through all those little veins and things? Pel was convinced that his veins never worked properly, which was why he always felt the cold so much in winter.
He brooded for a while, staring at his glass. There was an alternative to Madame Routy, of course, and Madame Routy was well aware of it so that of late her sullenness had multiplied. In fact, Pel was convinced she had a supercharger fitted to the volume control of the television. Most nights when he returned home it sounded like a re-run of the storming of the Bastille. Unfortunately, Madame Routy’s alternative, who went by the name of Geneviève Faivre-Perret – also a widow who ran Nanette’s, the beauty salon in the Rue de la Liberté – and Pel were having the greatest difficulty in getting together. The last time Pel had tried, with a dinner all arranged at the most expensive hotel in the district, he had found himself stuck in Innsbruck with a dead drug-pusher and a dead Sergeant Krauss, and things hadn’t been quite the same since.
He was aware that with a little effort on his part he could probably bring things back to normal. Red roses would have worked wonders – long stalks, of course, and an uneven number. No Frenchman in his senses would have sent ten or twelve, because an odd number was always more intriguing – but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to make the move.
Was he all that keen, he wondered. Or was he afraid of giving up his cherished independence? The one thing he certainly wasn’t afraid of giving up was Madame Routy and, unless he accepted another housekeeper – always assuming he could pluck up the courage to get rid of Madame Routy, of course – the answer seemed to be marriage. And Madame Faivre-Perret, as he’d discovered by a little private detective work out of office hours, owned a splendid little villa near Talant that made Pel’s house in the Rue Martin-de-Noinville look like a dog kennel. She also possessed a flat above her hairdressing establishment and a cottage near Trouville. Clearly she had more money than Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel and it put him off a little.
Nevertheless, there were times when Pel longed for an efficiently-run home that wasn’t dominated by the television, where the food was eatable and there wasn’t a lumpish Madame Routy sprawled in the best chair. There was another aspect to it, too, of course, which he hesitated to admit to himself. It had occurred to him more than once that the answer to that one was to take a mistress. Other people did. The things some people did with their spare time, in fact, it was amazing they survived the night. Unfortunately, there was an element of prudishness in Pel that precluded such a step. He’d been strictly brought up by parents who believed neither in divorce nor in promiscuity, and it had rubbed off. It was a pleasant idea to toy with, he decided, but somehow, not one he felt he could follow up, though sometimes his loins ached with the thought of a woman and he was terrified by the feeling that he was growing old.
When he returned to the office, Darcy was just putting on his jacket to go home. He was carrying on a heavy affair with a girl whom he’d met during their last case. She worked at the U
niversity and, blessed with a sense of humour and a great gift for fun, made a pleasant change from her predecessor, Joséphine-Héloïse Aymé, who was a Norman and had in her enough of the berserker Scandinavian blood that had peopled the province hundreds of years before to enjoy throwing things at Darcy. Since Darcy was the intermediary between Pel and the rest of the Hôtel de Police, he often had things thrown at him metaphorically and it made a pleasant change not to.
He looked at Pel with amused eyes. Daniel Darcy had a great gift for enjoying life. He was a hard-working policeman, modern as a rocket to the moon, and he took his pleasures as he found them, worrying not at all that he was sometimes on duty eighteen hours in a day. Pel always looked as though he worked twenty-five hours a day and, Darcy considered, had no idea how to run his life.
All the same, he was a good policeman who had more than once saved an over-enthusiastic Darcy from putting his foot in it and Darcy regarded him with considerable respect if only for that. At that moment, however, Darcy decided, the poor old bastard looked as if, like Atlas, he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
‘Our friend Cormon,’ Darcy said. I’ve telephoned round. The bookies know him. He was a regular loser.’
‘No wins?’
‘Not here. He picked losers so often he was a bit of a joke.’
‘Where did he pick his winners then?’ Pel asked.
‘Perhaps the periods when he was in the money weren’t the result of winners,’ Darcy suggested. ‘If he was up to something fishy, for instance, he’d hardly tell his sister, would he? The obvious thing to tell her was that he’d won the money on a horse.’
Pel nodded slowly, his mind whirring. ‘I think we ought to see this sister of his,’ he said. ‘Also this Louis-Napoléon Pissarro, who used to employ him. After all, who’s more likely to know about him than his employer?’
Four
Nosjean and Sergeant de Troquereau from Auxerre got together at once.
De Troquereau was a small man, lean and slim like Nosjean and roughly the same age. He was precise-looking, with delicate, almost effeminate features, a small straight nose, large pale eyes and a neat head covered with crisp, curling hair immaculately cut. He looked about sixteen.