by Mark Hebden
Frowning, he called for Darcy and gestured at the chair at the opposite side of his desk.
‘We’ve heard a lot about little black boxes,’ he said. ‘About the size of tape cassettes.’ He tapped the newspaper in front of him. ‘Bombs,’ he said. ‘Letter bombs.’ He paused and went on slowly. ‘This reverser switch of Robinson’s: Has someone got hold of it and are they using it to manufacture letter bombs? It would be about the right size, wouldn’t it?’
Darcy frowned. ‘Cormon, Patron?’ he asked.
‘It crossed my mind. Let’s have another check on him. See what he did with his spare time in addition to losing his money on horses. He went to Paris occasionally. There’ve been bombs in Paris. Was he supplying the trigger mechanisms? Let’s find out if he had any connections with any subversive organisation that might be responsible for this latest rash. After all, Lyons isn’t at the other end of the world and they’ve had them there.’
As Darcy vanished, Misset put his head round the door. ‘That Pissarro type, Patron,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the report from Durois of the Chamber of Commerce. It seems that he’s not quite what he seems to be.’
‘What does he seem to be?’
‘Well, Durois did a quick sniff around and it seems Pissarro’s not as wealthy as everybody thinks he is. He has debts.’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘His are substantial. He also has a woman in Annonay, near St Etienne. Name of Adrienne Morcat, 17, Rue LouisVinneroy. It seems also that he’s been overspending – ’
‘Backing his fancy in the Tour de France, doubtless.’
‘Not just that, Patron. It seems he likes girls. Any girls. That type has to wear monogrammed pyjamas, so his wife will know when he’s in her bed. The general impression is that he’s clever all right, but that he’s a big talker and enjoys showing off.’
‘I think,’ Pel said, ‘that we’d better go and have another talk with Louis-Napoléon Pissarro. Even his name sounds too good to be true.’
As Misset vanished, the telephone rang. It was the Chief.
‘How did your trip to London go?’ he asked.
‘So-so,’ Pel said. ‘I’ll be putting in a report.’
‘I shall want to talk to you about it before then. In the meantime I’ve something to show you. Just come in here a moment, will you?’
The Chief was standing by his desk when Pel arrived, looking at a small black box from which wires protruded. With him was another man, small and stout and bald.
‘This is François Coppet, Pel,’ the Chief said. ‘When you pay your electricity bill, he’s the type who collars the money.’ He gestured at the box on the table. ‘He brought this in.’
The box meant nothing to Pel and he peered at it uncertainly as if it might leap off the desk and bite him in the leg.
‘We were lunching together and got talking,’ the Chief went on. ‘And this thing cropped up.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know what you’d call it,’ Coppet said. ‘We haven’t given it an official name yet. We call it “Mirror”, for reasons I’ll explain. We’re trying to keep it as quiet as possible.’
‘What does it do?’
Coppet smiled. ‘It defrauds us. That’s what it does.’
The Chief leaned across the desk. ‘You’ll have read in the paper of these meter frauds, I suppose?’
Pel nodded and Coppet gestured. ‘They’ve been private prosecutions,’ he said.
Pel poked at the black box, wondering what it had to do with him.
‘We’ve been having a lot of meters tampered with by householders and apartment owners,’ Coppet said. ‘It’s my job to check these things and track them down. Quite clearly, their meters were being interfered with and we brought them before the courts. Electricity meters, of course, as you’ll imagine, are well sealed against people trying to tamper with them if only because of the danger – but we continued to get the frauds, though we never managed to find out how they were worked until recently. Nobody talked. Then two months ago we had a case out at St Antoine-du-Val – a farmer called Defournay. His current usage of electricity was half what it normally is and we investigated. He said it must be a faulty meter and offered to pay anything that was necessary. But his wife took our man on one side and produced this. She was suffering from a crisis of conscience and couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. When we tackled her husband, he admitted it was a device for reversing the meter.’
Pel’s head jerked up. ‘Reversing it?’
‘Back to half of what he’d used. Since he normally had a heavy load, we were already suspicious.’
‘You’d think he’d have a bit more sense,’ the Chief said. ‘A little less, and he could have argued they were economising.’
‘Well—’ Coppet shrugged ‘—the device seems to be not all that easy to control. It turns the meter back pretty fast, you know. In effect, with this thing they can actually put it into reverse. It’s what I would call an extremely sophisticated device. And it’s not the only one. We’ve discovered several others, all more or less based on the same principle. There’ll be other prosecutions.’
‘How does it work?’
Coppet smiled. ‘That’s something I’d rather not reveal. We’re keeping it secret for obvious reasons and we decided to give it the code name, Mirror, so that nothing’s given away. Enquiries are being made by our investigators all over the country. Somebody’s been flooding the rural areas with these things and they’re so simple we obviously can’t reveal details.’
Pel poked at the black box. ‘Much loss of revenue?’ he asked.
‘About twenty million francs,’ Coppet said. ‘Apart from that, the public should be warned about the extreme danger of electrocution that exists. You don’t tamper with all that many volts without danger. In the north of France fifty-six thousand spot checks have been carried out in a twelve-month period and at least two thousand cases have been reported. In Defournay’s case, the reading had been reversed by eleven kilowatts an hour. That means, if you ran twenty-two single-bar fires for an hour there would be a nil reading on the meter with one of these things attached.’
Pel was growing interested and his eyes were sharp and shrewd. ‘This man you found with it – Defournay – where did he get it?’
‘He said it was brought to him by a man who used to work for him. I don’t believe him, of course. I think it was the man who’s making them. He attached it to the meter on four or five days every month. The rest of the time he kept it hidden in the barn.’
Pel’s nose was within inches of the black box now and Coppet laughed.
‘Don’t get too near it,’ he said. ‘If I attached it to your watch it would start it going backwards.’
‘You’ve been worried by gadgets, haven’t you, Pel?’ the Chief asked. ‘Are you interested?’
‘Yes.’ Pel nodded, his mind ticking away like a time bomb. ‘In fact, I’d like to borrow that for a while, collect Darcy and go to see this farmer of yours to find out where he got it?’
‘Can you?’
Pel sniffed. ‘I ought to be able to,’ he said.
Sixteen
Defournay was a short, sturdy man whose farm was situated at the bottom of the slope at St Antoine. It didn’t look a particularly efficient farm. The buildings were ramshackle, the fences were broken and the stone buildings in need of repair.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said heavily.
As they sat at the kitchen table, Madame Defournay produced a bottle of white wine and glasses, and they stared at the black box Pel had placed on the table.
‘I told him not to touch it,’ she said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen.’
‘Be quiet, woman,’ Defournay growled. ‘I didn’t realise it would work as it did. I didn’t intend the damn clock to go racing backwards like that, I thought we could just say we’d been economising. Save a few francs.’
‘It’s still dishonest.’
‘Yes – well—’ Defournay scowled
and started to light a pipe. ‘Everybody tries to do the government down, don’t they, Inspector?’
Pel lit a cigarette and sat back. ‘Where did you get it?’ he asked.
‘This type came round with it.’
‘Which type?’
Defournay shrugged. ‘I don’t know his name. He showed me how to attach it and switch it on. I didn’t believe him. So he made it work and, sure enough, the meter went into reverse.’ Defournay sighed. ‘He must have been cleverer with it than I was, though, because when I did it, it raced back as if it had gone mad.’
‘Have any of your friends got any of these things?’
Defournay was wary. ‘I know of one or two.’
‘Then,’ Pel said, ‘you’d better advise them to get rid of them quickly. The authorities are on to them and anybody who seems to be using less current than he was last year will be investigated pretty sharply.’
Madame Defournay nodded and Defournay gave her a sullen look.
‘You could have gone to prison,’ she said. ‘Instead of just a fine.’
‘Not if I’d learned to use it properly,’ Defournay grumbled. ‘They haven’t found old—’ he stopped dead and gave a sheepish grin ‘—not yet, anyway. I’ll go and tell him this evening.’
Pel didn’t smile. ‘I think you’d better,’ he said.
Defournay leaned across the table, his lined face interested. ‘It’s clever, though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘How does it work?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pel admitted. ‘And if I did I wouldn’t tell you. Neither would the electricity authorities. It obviously wouldn’t be a good idea.’
‘Have you come to arrest me?’
‘I’ve come to find out where you got it.’
‘This type came. I told you.’
‘What did he tell you about it?’
‘He called it a reverser. He said it would reverse the current or something so that it flowed the other way. Perhaps that’s not what he meant but I’m no electrician. He told me to attach it at odd times and not to do it all at once.’
‘How much did you pay him?’
‘Five hundred francs. It seemed a lot but he said they weren’t cheap to make, but that the price would be saved in two quarterly bills.’ Defournay grinned. ‘If I hadn’t been caught, it would, too.’
‘And he never mentioned his name?’
‘Would you? I think he wanted to keep it dark.’
‘Suppose it had gone wrong? How could you have got in touch with him?’
‘That was a chance I had to take. He wasn’t risking his neck, I suppose. At first I thought I’d been a fool and there’d been some sleight of hand or something, but when I attached it, it worked. I didn’t argue. Not then, anyway.’
‘Was his name Cormon?’ Pel asked.
‘He never mentioned his name.’
Pel gestured and Darcy fished in his briefcase to produce a copy of the picture he’d taken from Madame Clarétie’s sideboard.
‘That him?’
Defournay studied the picture. ‘It might be. It’s always difficult in black and white. He had a reddish face. It doesn’t show here. And his hair was fair.’
‘Fair hair often shows dark in a black and white picture,’ Darcy pointed out.
‘Then it could be him. Except that he looks younger in that.’
‘He was younger in this,’ Darcy said. ‘It was taken ten years ago.’
As they headed back towards the car, Pel lit a cigarette, offered one to Darcy, and stopped to light them. Dragging the smoke down to the soles of his shoes, he let it leak slowly out, then, coughing like a tubercular in the last stages, he waved his hand as it hung about his head and gestured at Coppet’s black box.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ he wheezed.
‘I think so, Patron,’ Darcy said.
‘Gadgets.’ Pel’s breath gradually returned. ‘Robinson’s reversals. It’s quite a nice-looking little gadget, isn’t it? A reversing gadget. Properly made. Neat plastic case. Dial. Everything. Not home-made.’
‘Do you think Robinson was making them, Patron?’
‘No.’ Pel shook his head. ‘But I think Pissarro might have been.’
When they returned to the Hôtel de Police, however, and Darcy made a discreet telephone enquiry for Pissarro at his works, he learned that he wasn’t there.
‘He left early.’
‘Where for?’
‘Home, I suppose.’
Trying Pissarro’s home, they were answered by his wife. There was the sound of children’s voices in the background and constant cries of ‘Tais-toi!’ from her as she told them to be quiet.
‘He’s away on business,’ she said.
‘Where, Madame? Do you know? This is Produits Mercurie. We have a query.’
‘I’ll make a note and let him know you rang. I expect he’ll be in touch. He’ll be home before the weekend. He’s gone to St Etienne. He has a customer there.’
Darcy put the telephone down and looked at Pel. ‘He’s gone to see his poule, Patron,’ he said. ‘That Madame Morcat.’
Pel smiled. ‘He might get a surprise tomorrow when we turn up. In the meantime let’s have a watch placed on his house in case he returns unexpectedly. Who’ve we got?’
‘There’s Lagé and Misset. Nosjean could help at a pinch.’
‘Leave Nosjean,’ Pel said. ‘He’s busy. Get Misset and Lagé on the job. Then see the Chief and tell him what we’re up to and ask if we can borrow from Inspector Goriot’s squad. You and I’ll interrupt Pissarro’s tête-à-tête with Madame Morcat in the morning.’
As they left the office, the telephone rang. His feet aching, Lagé had just entered with another batch of pictures. He had long since come to the conclusion that taking photographs in hot streets was a mug’s game. In fact, he was beginning to wonder what he ever saw in photography. It was expensive, the equipment he carried was heavy, and at his age he’d have been much wiser going fishing.
He listened to the telephone ringing for a while, trying his best to ignore it, but he was too conscientious and in the end he picked it up.
The voice at the other end belonged to a police sous-brigadier called Quiriton who was ringing from St Denis-sur-Aube, and Lagé hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.
‘I don’t know anything about a yellow Passat estate,’ he said. ‘Whose is it? Has it been stolen?’ The telephone clattered in his ear again and Lagé allowed his photographic equipment to slide from his shoulder to the table. ‘Hang on, I’ll make a note of it. What are you ringing about? We haven’t lost a yellow—’
He felt the telephone gently removed from his hand and looked up to see Nosjean.
‘It’s mine,’ Nosjean said.
As Lagé thankfully disappeared to the dark room, Nosjean listened quietly.
‘Thank God there’s somebody there who knows what I’m talking about,’ Quiriton said. ‘Was it you who was enquiring about a yellow Passat estate?’
‘Yes, it was. You found it?’
‘No.’ The man at the other end of the wire laughed. ‘But one of my men reported a car similar to the one you want round here.’
The arrest of Jacqmin and his own connection with it had involved Nosjean in a great deal of work, so that he’d almost forgotten the châteaux thieves. Now, however, he was on the alert at once. ‘When?’ he said.
‘Two nights ago. I’ve just seen his report.’
‘Get the number?’
‘No.’
‘Naturally.’ Nosjean felt bitter.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Quiriton protested. ‘He wasn’t all that stupid. He’d been out on a break-in at the pharmacy at Liffol. Kids after drugs, I think. It’s easier to pick them up at country pharmacies than in the town. He was there until late and was returning home at one in the morning when this Passat came out of a side turning, nearly hit him, and shot past. He cursed a bit but didn’t intend to do anything about it – after all, there hadn’t been an accident – t
hen he remembered we’d been told to look out for a yellow Passat estate, and the lateness of the hour made him wonder. You don’t get many cars at that hour round Liffol – there’s nothing to take them there – so he decided to chase it. But by the time he’d turned, it was out of sight, and he never saw it again. It must have nipped down one of the side lanes.’
‘No identifying marks?’
‘He noticed it had some big dents in it. The front was bashed in and there was another mark on the side. Different ages, as if the owner was a bad driver and made a habit of running into things.’
‘Well, that’s a help. Did he see who was in it?’
‘He thought a kid with long hair. Said it looked a bit like a mop.’
‘That all?’
‘That’s all.’
The description didn’t seem to fit Pierrot-le-Pourri, his friend, Poupon, or anybody else Nosjean had been investigating either.
‘Have you got any châeaux classés round there?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got Lebouchon-Roy.’
‘Big?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything valuable in it?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ Quiriton chuckled. ‘The only antique I know anything about is my grandmother’s armchair which is in my parlour. It’s not pretty but it’s damn comfortable. I can find out.’
‘Don’t bother.’ Nosjean was wondering whether he ought to go down to St Denis but he decided in the end that the fact that a yellow Passat was around didn’t really mean a thing.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I have to slip to Paris. There are a couple of bright boys I’m watching there, I’ll go and check on their alibis. It doesn’t sound like them, but you never know. If you spot this car again or anything suspicious, let me know. In the meantime, keep your eye on the château.’