by Mark Hebden
She was tall and thin with a frigid, expressionless face, and her living room showed her attachment to the Church, with crucifixes and pictures of Christ. A Bible was noticeably prominent, and religious pamphlets were stuck into the frame of the mirror hanging over the dresser alongside the table.
Her home was one of a row of stone-built cottages in a small cul-de-sac in the village of Evanay-sur-Rille. Next door was an épicerie and further along what looked like a disused stable, on which were posters advertising the Tour de France and a few enthusiastic comments in chalk from the village youth about its favourites – Van der Essen, Aurelian Filou and Jo Clam.
Madame Clarétie clearly hadn’t much time for her brother. When Darcy arrived she was preparing lunch and was cutting up a baguette with a long slender knife held in her fist like a sword, and she gestured angrily with it under Darcy’s nose.
‘I always said he’d bring disgrace on himself, the way he behaved,’ she said.
Her brother, Darcy thought, had brought on himself more than merely disgrace.
‘It was in the paper,’ she went on. ‘I read it in La Bien Public.’
She ought perhaps, Darcy thought, to have read it in France Soir and France Dimanche. They gave you much better value for money. The men who covered the district for the press had appeared outside Pel’s office clamouring for a story and the cautious outline devoid of too many details they’d been offered had been seized on joyously. What hadn’t been supplied they’d made up, and France Soir had gone to town with a splendid account, in gory detail, of how Cormon had met his death in his burnt-out car. There was only one thing wrong with it. Pel hadn’t made known what Doc Minet had told him and all they could do was make a lot of song and dance about the dangers of the descent from Destres.
‘What did your brother do for a living?’ Darcy asked.
‘My brother was an instrument maker.’ Madame Clarétie gestured at a portrait on the sideboard round the frame of which a piece of black crêpe had been draped and fixed in place with pieces of sticking plaster. ‘That’s him.’
‘I suppose,’ Darcy said, ‘that we couldn’t borrow that, could we? For identification purposes. We’d copy it and let you have it back at once.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’ She frowned. ‘This would have killed my mother. He was often in dubious company – even as a boy. Once he disappeared for two whole years. I don’t know where to. He lived with her until she died, then, since my husband had also recently been called to meet his Maker and I was in need of money, he moved in with me here.’
‘It had its advantages, of course,’ she went on without waiting for Darcy to ask another question. ‘Without him, I could never have got into the city and he occasionally ran me in on his day off so that I could do a little shopping. This place has nothing more than a small draper, which sells only the crudest of clothing for agricultural workers and their families – and I’ve always been more than that.’
‘How long had he worked for Louis-Napoléon Pissarro?’ Darcy asked.
‘About eight or ten years. But I think he was always underpaid because he never seemed to have any money. Of course–’ Madame Clarétie’s face was thin with disapproval ‘—he wasted most of it on gambling and last year he seemed to grow restless and said he’d decided on a change. He gave in his notice and moved to Montbard.’
‘Where in Montbard?’
‘I don’t know. It wasn’t my business so I never asked, and be never told me. As far as I can make out, it was a similar place to Pissarro’s. He said his wages had doubled.’
‘Did he have any special friends?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Women friends?’
‘It might have been better if he had. A wife would have kept him on the straight and narrow. When he went to Paris I suspect he got up to all sorts of things.’
‘He went to Paris?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Why?’
Madame Clarétie’s lips tightened. ‘To enjoy himself, I suppose.’
‘Not on business?’
‘That’s something I don’t know about. It was something that was fairly recent. He became very secretive.’
‘In what way?’
‘He never talked about what he was up to. He received telephone calls occasionally.’
‘Did you ever take them? When he wasn’t here, for instance?’
‘Once or twice. When I asked who it was they always said it didn’t matter, they’d ring back.’
‘What about acquaintances? Did he have many of those?’
‘Well, he must have had some, because of the telephone calls.’
‘Did you ever ask him who the telephone calls were from?’
‘Sometimes. He just said they were from work.’
‘Why would the people at work want to telephone him at home?’
‘I don’t know. He wasn’t that important. He did once say it was some secret gadget he was working on. Perhaps that’s why he went to Paris.’ She spoke as if going to Paris was going to the moon. ‘He used to be satisfied with this part of the world but I suppose his extra money went to his head.’
Something, Darcy decided, certainly went to Cormon’s head.
‘I shall have to search his room, Madame,’ he said. ‘Would that be possible?’
‘Will it make a mess?’
‘Not if you help me.’
She seemed far more concerned with disorder than with her brother’s death but she grudgingly helped. There seemed nothing very unusual. Cormon’s bank book showed a steady rise and fall that looked, Darcy thought, like the working of a yo-yo. Sometimes there was a lot in it, sometimes there was almost nothing. There was also a file of notes of electrical gadgets and a few sketchy drawings. He picked them up.
‘I’d better take these, Madame,’ he said. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Are they valuable?’ she asked.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Then you might as well. Why do you want them?’
‘We’ll have them checked. They might tell us what your brother was working on. It might give us a lead.’ Darcy turned over one of the sheets. On the back was a half-finished pencil drawing of a church, that had been scribbled across with figures. Here and there on it were dabs of coloured paint.
‘Was your brother an artist, Madame?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said.
‘This his work?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. Mostly he drew plans for radios. That sort of thing. All wires and valves. He was always tinkering with radios and working out where to put things.’
‘That was the sort of drawing he did?’
‘Yes. He was very good at it.’
‘But nothing like this?’
She stared hard at the drawing. ‘It looks vulgar,’ she said.
‘It’s a church.’
‘I don’t think my brother would draw anything like that.’
Montbard wasn’t very far off Darcy’s route back to the city. It was a little town on a hill, old-fashioned with narrow-gutted buildings and a hump-backed bridge. There was scarcely any water in the river but there was still enough for two intent men to be trying to fish. All Darcy knew about the place was that at Montbard was born the Comte de Buffon, naturalist, keeper of the garden of Louis XVI, and husband to a wife who was said to have ‘no neck any more, her chin making half the journey, her breasts the other half, as a result of which her three chins reposed on two soft pillows.’
His first visit was to the library to get a list of all the manufacturers in the place, then to the police station where he begged the use of the telephone to ring round to find out which of them knew Claude-Achille Cormon.
None of them did.
It was a wonderful way to make a living.
Meanwhile, Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel, still not on speaking terms with Madame Routy, had left without breakfast and headed for the Bar Transvaal near the Hôtel de Police where he ate a croissant a
nd drank a cup of coffee in gloomy silence. It was admitting defeat, he knew, because even as he’d climbed into his car, he’d heard the television come on and the raucous tones of the man who was describing the antics of the hundred-odd masochists who were riding in the Tour de France.
At the office, he found Judge Brisard waiting for him.
‘This business at Destres,’ the Judge said. ‘I’m handling it.’
Pel sighed. Why, he wondered, did God have it in for him so? While there was a perfectly good Judge Polverari, with whom he got on splendidly and whose one joy in life – because he had a rich wife and no worries over money – was to take Pel out to expensive meals and fill him full of wine and brandy, why did he have to work with Judge Brisard?
Polverari was small, fat and jolly and believed that vice was good for the soul so long as it was kept well under control. Brisard was tall, pear-shaped with a large behind and women’s hips, a gloomy face and a clear dislike for Pel that was well and truly reciprocated. He was young and pompous and, while posing as a good family man – pictures of his wife and children were always on his desk – to Pel’s knowledge, he had a mistress somewhere near Beaune who was the widow of a police officer. When he’d been young and new to the game, Pel had bullied him unmercifully but by this time Brisard had learned a few tricks himself and, being a judge, took advantage of the fact to get a little of his own bark. He hated Pel. Pel hated him. It was a good working arrangement.
‘Polverari’s mother-in-law died,’ Brisard said. ‘He’ll be away for a few days. I’ll need to know a few facts.’
Pel gave them to him and he sat back and began to make suggestions.
‘Have we brought in this sister of his yet?’ he asked.
‘There didn’t seem much need to,’ Pel said.
‘She might have had reason to do away with him.’
‘Even if she did,’ Pel pointed out, ‘she hardly seems the type to go scrambling in the dark down what’s virtually a vertical grass bank to where her brother was dragging himself from a blazing car with enough broken bones to make him to all intents and purposes jelly, and shove a knife blade into his brain under his skull. Even if she knew how.’
Brisard clearly hadn’t thought of that. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘like all the rest, she should be brought in. I may be able to discover something that you’ve missed.’
Pel’s eyes glittered and the silence became menacing. Pel was determined not to be more helpful than he could manage and Brisard tried to push the affair a few steps more.
‘What are your plans?’ he asked.
It was Pel’s job to work with Brisard, but most judges behaved like Judge Polverari and did no more than keep an eye on what was going on. Judge Brisard liked to think he knew more about police work than the police.
‘I have still to see Louis-Napoléon Pissarro,’ he said.
‘Who’s he?’ Brisard decided to be amusing. ‘He has a name of unsurpassing splendour. A king, an emperor and a painter of the first order.’
‘He was Cormon’s employer until he left to take another job,’ Pel said coldly. ‘He may be able to tell me something about him that we don’t know already.’
Brisard quite failed to notice Pel’s annoyance and went on, blithely self-important. ‘I understand Sergeant Nosjean’s handling the art theft at St Sauvigny.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d better see him, too. Everybody connected with these two affairs, in fact. Until Judge Polverari returns, I’m keeping an interest in his cases. I might be able to help Nosjean. I have many friends among the priesthood. It’s important for a judge to set an example, and I’m regularly at church.’
Judge Brisard, Pel felt, was sometimes so concerned with God’s love he was inclined to forget human love which, after all, was only a manifestation of the same thing, and his concern with his future in the hereafter seemed rather a waste of time. God wasn’t that stupid, Pel felt, and would choose His own candidates for celestial bliss. And they wouldn’t all be churchgoers either. There might even, he thought darkly, be a bishop or a judge or two who’d get a shock when the time came.
As Brisard vanished, he sat staring at his blotter for a while. He was not a very important-looking man. On the slight side, with dark hair he brushed close to his skull, he suffered from a tendency to be self-denigratory. Nevertheless, he’d been a policeman a long time and knew all the ins and outs of the game. In recent years the law had become more difficult as do-gooders leaned over backwards to stop policemen harming criminals – they didn’t seem to worry overmuch about the criminals’ victims – and more and more the police had come under the influence of the Palais de Justice. It wasn’t possible to quieten Brisard by evading the rules but there were other ways.
For a moment, Pel looked like a snake about to strike. If Brisard wanted to see everybody, he decided, then, very well, he would see everybody. If he wanted work, then that was what he was going to get. Brisard would find people queuing up outside his door to be interrogated. Pel hoped it would interfere a great deal with his work, stop him getting home to meals on time, and prevent him paying the calls Pel knew he paid to the woman near Beaune.
Nevertheless, he made certain that he wasn’t laying himself open to charges of obstructiveness.
‘Judge Brisard expressed a wish to see everybody connected with the case,’ he told the Chief.
The Chief looked startled. ‘Everybody?’ he said.
‘Everybody.’
‘What in God’s name for?’
‘He thinks he may be able to elicit information that it’s beyond my powers to acquire.’
The Chief stared hard at Pel. He didn’t like Brisard much either, but he was supposed to be a responsible official.
‘You two feuding again?’ he asked.
Pel was all innocence. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But, knowing Judge Brisard, I felt I ought to follow his instructions to the letter.’
The Chief frowned. ‘Well, I know he’s a bit pernickety,’ he agreed. ‘Perhaps you’d better do as he says. Are there likely to be many?’
‘It’s more than likely.’
The Chief grinned. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘It’s a protest you’re registering, I suppose. Well, handle it your own way. Let him have them.’
Louis-Napoléon Pissarro was a big man with greying hair, shoulders like an ox, the ruddy face of a farmer and enough gold teeth to dim the sun. His factory, Pièces de Rechange Pissarro, was a small affair of three large sheds in the centre of the city, tucked away behind a garage and close to the Hôtel Central. When Pel arrived he was reading L’Equipe with a pencil in his hand and his feet up on his desk. Behind him were pictures of Louis-Napoléon Pissarro on horseback, holding a rugby ball, and sitting on the stern of a fishing boat with the name, Annick, painted on the transom just below his behind.
‘Named after my wife,’ Pissarro explained. ‘She’s a Breton. Daughter of old Aloïs Hyaric, of La Roche-Bernard. He sat in the House of Representatives for the Villaine district there until he died two years ago. We still have a house which belonged to her mother on the coast at Penestin that we use in the holidays.’
In the picture he was holding a fishing rod and a fish that looked big enough to have swallowed Jonah – and several brothers, too, if necessary. Alongside it were more pictures – of Pissarro skiing, swimming, rowing, sailing, even hanging over the edge of a cliff on the end of a rope, complete with ice pick, crampons and climbing clothes. Outside the window stood a heavy old British Bentley with a strapped bonnet and copper exhaust.
‘Bit of a sportsman,’ Pel observed dryly.
Pissarro smiled and waved to a chair. ‘Always keen on sport,’ he agreed. ‘You name it, I’ve had a go at it. That’s my car outside. Old, but I’ve had it specially tuned. Once drove at La Mans and once very nearly played for France at the Parc des Princes. At the moment I’m just reading up the chances in the grande boucle – the Tour de France. You interested in sport?’
Pel’s idea of a good
day’s athletic endeavour was a quiet afternoon in the sun with a fishing rod – it didn’t matter much about the fish – dominoes in the Bar Transvaal, or, for really fierce activity, a game of boules. He shook his head.
‘You don’t know what you’ve missed,’ Pissarro said enthusiastically. ‘I’ve got the winner this year. Maurice Maryckx. He’s going to wear the yellow jersey this time.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ Pel said. ‘I thought it was going to be Van der Essen or Jo Clam.’
‘They’re nothing but wheel-suckers, opportunists, limpets. They let others make the pace and tag on behind.’
‘Isn’t that the idea?’
‘It’s not bike-racing. They might be good downhill but anywhere else they ride like a postman. This man Maryckx is another Coppi, another Merckx. He’s the one with the kilometres in his legs.’
Pel was well aware that speculation as to the winner was the favourite pastime of Tour enthusiasts and he waited patiently for Pissarro to get it out of his system.
‘There are fewer than two hundred real riders in the world,’ Pissarro went on, ‘and Maryckx is one. They call him “the cannibal” because he devours opposition. They’ll be coming through our area this year, you know; round Aurelles and over the top to Bagneux-les-Doles. Stage Nineteen. They stop the night at Morny and there’s a feeding point at Boine. That’s a good place to watch, if you’re interested.’
‘I’m not,’ Pel said discouragingly.
Pissarro was not put off. ‘Feeding points are always considered good places for breakaways,’ he went on. ‘It’s my guess Maryckx will have established a substantial lead by that time. He’ll be first home and first over-all. I shall be at Boine to see him pass, then drive up to Paris for the finish,’
Pel continued to listen quietly, letting him have his head. You could often learn a lot by letting a man have his head.
‘This year,’ Pissarro went on, ‘a group of us have got together to finance a team – Pis-Hélio-Tout. So look out for the diamond-decorated green jerseys. Bit too expensive for one firm, of course, so there are twelve of us involved. I make sprockets of course. Twenty-two- and twenty-four-toothed. Some of the riders like them. I also make above-standard crank arms – longer than normal – which the sprinters use. We make other things, too, but those give us an interest and a reason for taking part.’