by Mark Hebden
‘Paris is watching him.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s what the Chief says. They’ve got a line on his movements. They know he wasn’t in his apartment the night Cormon was killed.’
‘I expect he was here removing Cormon from the scene.’
Pel was angry enough to bite the heads off nails. ‘Send Misset in! He should be cut into strips and fed to the pigs.’
Judging by the look in Pel’s eye, Darcy decided he probably would be.
By the time Misset left Pel’s office he was pale, shaken and wishing he’d joined the Sanitary Department instead of the police.
‘In the name of God,’ Pel snarled, glaring at the door, remembering Robinson’s kindness and determined to work out his anger on someone, ‘I’d get rid of him if we had anyone to replace him. But we haven’t. We’ve been functioning one short ever since Krauss was killed. Tell the Chief I’m coming to see him.’
The Chief listened to Pel’s tirade calmly but he wasn’t the slightest bit put out.
‘Krauss’ replacement is being selected at this moment,’ he said. ‘We’re taking care. He’s got to be good. The fault, in any case, didn’t lay with Krauss’ absence. Inspector Goriot filled the gap very adequately. The fault lay entirely with this man, Misset, from your team.’
In which, of course, he was dead right. It was hardly Pel’s fault that Misset was stupid and careless, because he’d not chosen Misset himself, but there was no answer and the ultimate responsibility rested on the shoulders of the head of the section – Pel.
‘Has it raised problems of security?’ the Chief asked coldly.
‘God forbid,’ Pel said. But he wasn’t so sure, all the same.
‘I think you’d better find Pissarro,’ the Chief said.
‘What about Rambot – or Dagieff or whatever his name is? We ought to be picking him up too.’
‘Leave him alone,’ the Chief advised. ‘He’s obviously in close touch with the Russian attaché and if they’re together the Russian will immediately claim diplomatic immunity and that’ll throw a spanner in the works straight away. Leave it to Paris.’
‘A man’s been killed! Two! Three, if you include the man in Paris.’
The Chief shrugged. ‘You’ll not get far if the Soviet Embassy’s involved. We need to catch them red-handed. Then, at least, the Government can raise a storm about what they’re up to and demand that a few of them be sent home. The Press has been howling for weeks that there are too many, anyway. Just don’t stick your neck out without orders. Let the Ministry handle it. That’s what they’re there for. Paris has him under a twenty-four surveillance. Just pick up Pissarro.’
Back in his office, Pel sat staring furiously at his blotter. France was a thousand kilometres long and roughly the same distance wide and – thanks to Misset’s carelessness – somewhere inside its frontiers at a spot unknown to Pel was Pissarro, who now seemed to hold the key to all their questions.
‘Suppose,’ Darcy suggested, ‘that this time it wasn’t Rambot.’
‘What do you mean?’ Pel growled.
‘Well, Cormon’s murder sounds like the work of Rambot. Somebody cold-blooded with a lot to lose. But Robinson was killed by somebody else – somebody different – somebody with a lot to lose but more likely to be ham-handed enough to use an iron bar.’
‘Pissarro?’
‘Why not, Patron? He was in debt. And he was keeping two households going and needed money.’
‘Yes, he was.’ Pel frowned, deep in thought. ‘That house of his at Daix,’ he said slowly. ‘What was it called? Ker Boukan, wasn’t it? That’s a Breton name. His wife’s a Breton from La Roche Bernard, and he said they still have a house belonging to her mother at Penestin that he visits.’ He stood stock still, staring at his feet, his mind racing. ‘And Brittany borders on the Loire near Las Rochelets where Malat, that bar owner who reported the naval vessels in and out of the Loire, was found murdered. His place was at Le Pornichet just to the west.’ He snapped his fingers, suddenly excited.
‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘Le Bozec represents Muzillac just to the east of there and Pissarro’s father-in-law sat in the House of Representatives until two years ago for Villaine next door! Don’t tell me Pissarro didn’t know Le Bozec!’ He looked at Darcy, his eyes bright. ‘Even De Fransecky was stationed only a few kilometres away at St Nazaire. All within a stone’s throw of each other! All on the same doorstep!’ He slapped the desk. ‘They knew each other! They must have done! I’d bet my salary on it. They probably even met in Malat’s bar. If it wasn’t Rambot who got rid of Malat, it must have been one of them. It’s Pissarro who’s got Robinson’s gadget!’
Obtaining a warrant from Judge Polverari, they tore Pissarro’s house apart. His wife was in tears and it jabbed at Pel’s liver to see the fear in the eyes of his children. But it had to be done. It wasn’t the job of the police to be sentimental. Pissarro had been playing a dangerous game and, unfortunately, not only Pissarro but his family, too, had to suffer for it.
They lifted the carpets, removed the floorboards, and went through every drawer, every bookshelf, every tin and packet in the kitchen. They found nothing. Back at the Hôtel de Police, tired, exhausted and angry, they rang the police at Châlon-sur-Saône. On Pel’s instructions, they had been taking Jacqmin’s house apart, too, and they had also found nothing, any more than the police at Annonay, who had been stripping the home of Pissarro’s lady friend, Madame Morcat.
‘Any sign of Pissarro yet?’ Pel asked.
But Pissarro hadn’t been seen in Annonay and they could only leave instructions that he was to be arrested if he did turn up. Frustrated and angry, Pel had just slammed down the telephone when he remembered something Pissarro had said. Jumping to his feet, he stuffed cigarettes into his pocket and started yelling for Darcy to get the car.
‘Boine,’ he said. ‘Head for Boine!’
‘Boine, Patron?’ Darcy looked worried. ‘It’s bang on the route of the Tour de France. It’s even a feeding point. We won’t want to get snarled up in that lot!’
‘We’d better not,’ Pel grated.
‘But why Boine, Patron?’ Darcy swung the wheel and changed gear to head out of the parking area. ‘That’s nowhere we’re interested in.’
‘Yes, it is. It’s where Pissarro is.’
At Euchatel, policemen were standing in a line across the road. As the car approached, one of them stepped forward and held up his hand.
‘You can’t come this way, my friend,’ he said.
‘I think I can,’ Pel snapped. ‘I’m Pel, Police Judiciaire.’
The policeman looked through the window. Pel was far from an impressive figure and the policeman thought he was someone trying it on to get a good view of the Tour.
‘And I’m the President of the Republic,’ he jeered. ‘Turn round.’
Darcy produced his badge and the policeman flushed, leapt to attention and waved them past.
‘Go by Blitterans, sir,’ he said. ‘That way you’ll miss the barriers. Straight on, down the hill to the right, on to the main road, fork right to Jean-de-Bresse, then right, then left, and up the hill to Verne. After that the signs are clear to Boine.’
‘Got that?’ Pel said as Darcy drove on.
‘No,’ Darcy said. ‘Have you?’
‘No.’
They took the turn on to the main road as instructed, forked right, right again, then left – and found themselves in a farmyard. Darcy swore. Pel waved a hand. ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘No need to get in a temper.’
Backing out, they wandered down a lane or two and turned up outside Jean-de-Bresse, hard up against a barrier placed there by the police: ‘Route barré. Tour de France.’
Darcy glared at it through the windscreen. ‘Shall I shift it, Patron?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Pel’s teeth were clenched but he was hanging on to his temper. ‘We’re well ahead of them. Just keep calm. If we disrupt the Tour we shall have the whole o
f the French press down on our necks and our image is bad enough without being accused of spoiling the great sporting public’s interest in the all-important question of who’s the fastest cyclist in France.’
As they headed down the hill and turned right, a farmer was just driving out of his gate in a battered Renault.
‘Which is the way to Boine?’ Darcy yelled.
‘Follow me,’ the farmer yelled back. ‘I’m going there myself.’
He let in the clutch and jammed his foot on the accelerator so that the Renault shot away with spinning wheels, a shriek of tyres and a cloud of dust. Darcy hurriedly reversed and set off after it but it had already disappeared.
Pel was scowling as they asked the way again. ‘You’re better going over the top,’ they were told.
But ‘over the top’ was blocked by an enormous road-roller.
‘You can’t come this way,’ the driver announced.
Darcy climbed out of the car. ‘Police Judiciaire,’ he said furiously. ‘We’ve got to get to Boine. We need to pass.’
‘Well,’ the driver of the roller said. ‘It’s no business of mine and I can reverse down there to let you go, but you’ll probably disappear from sight in a hole that’s been dug for a new water main. It goes right across the road. It’s closed for the rest of the morning.’
Beginning now to grow worried, they sped back the way they had come and found themselves once more at the barrier outside Jean-de-Bresse.
This time all Pel’s frustration burst out of him in an explosion of rage. It contained all he felt about Misset and his everlasting newspaper reading, everything he felt about Pissarro and his self-important gestures, everything he felt about Madame Routy and her interest in the television, even everything he felt about the Tour de France and the national obsession with sport. As the valve went, the rage came out like steam.
‘God damn and confound it to everlasting hell,’ he raged. ‘Get it out of the way!’
Under a sky that was showing an ominous purple darkness, the whole hillside at Boine was covered with vehicles as locals and tourists climbed banks and walls to get a good view. There were adverts for Le Vélo, Le Monde Sportif and La Vie Au Grand Air, but the village carried no mention of Clam or Van der Essen. Instead the walls were plastered with the name of one of the more obscure members of Clam’s team, who came from the neighbourhood and was firmly expected to lead the column up the main street of his own village.
They had arrived only just in time and the first publicity cars were already flinging out free gifts of cigarettes and ball point pens to the spectators, who were waiting four deep, carrying flags and wearing coloured caps. Following them came the mattress cars, the rice-package cars, the chocolate and drink cars, then six jeeps, two sexy white cars with half a dozen sexy white model girls, insecticide cars with giant flies on their roofs, a car decked with ribbons like a wedding limousine, a car like a buffalo, a car like a zebra, a fire engine, an old car dispensing balloons, and a bus in which a bank was operating for the benefit of the Tour employees and followers. Everybody in the vehicles seemed to be dressed in bright-coloured overalls, and they were tossing out caps, posters, car stickers and lollipops. Loudspeakers by the dozen were filling the air with their harsh-tongued spiel, each drowning the one next door. Even the Post and Telephone van driver was crooning a jingle in an iron voice until the radio car of ITT-Océanic began to announce that Van der Essen had a four-minute lead. To the dazed locals it was like an invasion from outer space.
As the circus vanished, there was a lull and business at an ice cream van among the crowd began to pick up, then, as motor cycle outriders began to appear the ice cream ceased to be a matter of interest and everyone began to crane their heads again.
A wedding procession walking back from church pushed in alongside a flock of nuns beneath a banner announcing ‘Jo Clam, you are the strongest,’ and three generations of one family waited outside their door on kitchen chairs, a fourth, a woman at least eighty years old, hanging out of an upstairs window with a pair of field glasses.
An excited ‘Les voilà!’ set everybody staring down the valley then the motor cycle police appeared, and finally at the bottom of the hill as they turned from a down-gradient to an up-gradient, the cyclists came in a tyre-squealing nightmare – grey and rainbow-striped jerseys, orange and carmine jerseys, blue and gold, chequered, diamond-patterned – and began to agonise uphill. As they turned, pedals touched and two riders came down, bringing with them a whole group of cursing, sweating men.
The feeding point was on the brow of the hill, a banner announcing ‘Contrôle de Revitaillement’ snapping in the breeze. Here, for a kilometre, team officials waited with musettes, small bags of food, ready to hand them to their riders to be slung over sweating shoulders for distribution into the pockets of racing jerseys. In a bar an Italian reporter was shouting into a telephone at the speed of a race commentator, only to go purple and throw up his hands in fury as he discovered he’d been disconnected.
As the riders laboured upwards, standing on their pedals, their faces tortured, one of the spectators, excited to the point of hysteria, tried to give his favourite an illegal push up the hill, and for his trouble was hit smartly over the head with the plastic water bottle normally attached to the bicycle frame so that he fell back in the arms of laughing friends. Another man, trying to throw water on his favourite, let go the bucket by accident and instead of helping, brought his man down and limped away with a black eye from the resultant scuffle with his supporters in the crowd. The Tour, Pel felt, was well up to form.
As the riders swished by in the growing purple light of the approaching storm, they were greeted with christian names. Their teams and the firms they represented were announced on the backs and fronts of their jerseys, Italians advertising French products, Dutchmen advertising British cycles. Patriotism always ran a little thin in professional cycling.
Empty water bottles and musettes were exchanged for full ones as the flood of riders swung by, taut-bodied men wearing black shorts, golfers’ gloves and huge wrist-watches. Jerseys caught the light as they whipped past in a dazzle of colour, followed by the television and radio vehicles beaming reports to the national press, support cars with rear doors cut away for a mechanic to lean out with a screwdriver to a cycle even as its rider bowled along, ambulances, medical wagons, repair wagons, team cars carrying spare frames and wheels, first aid kits, water bottles, Dutch cigars, burgundy, armagnac. A desperate rider with a bursting bladder flung his machine down, disappeared into the hedge to pee, then scurried back clutching a fresh water bottle thrust at him by one of his team.
The police were holding back the usual lost and baffled motorists who were trying to reach a destination on the other side of the route and keeping the excited crowd out of the way. As Pel pushed forward, Pissarro’s bulk was clear but to Pel’s surprise he was already heading back towards his car.
As Darcy took his arm, he looked at Pel, his gold teeth showing in a wide smile. ‘Come to watch the race, Inspector?’ he asked.
‘I’m arresting you,’ Pel said.
‘What for?’
‘Suspicion of being involved in robbery, for a start, and very likely of being involved in murder, conspiracy and one or two other things.
Pissarro’s face went blank. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ he said. ‘Who’ve I murdered?’
‘I suspect Doctor Robinson, and very probably Cormon. Because of a small gadget they’d both been working on.’
Pissarro smiled. ‘I’ve got nothing of Robinson’s.’
The last exhausted cyclists arrived, eyes dull, heads nodding, legs rubbery, the very last – called the Red Lamp because he was the warning to following cars – driven onwards by the car balai, a vehicle with a broom attached to its cabin because it was supposed to sweep up those riders who were forced to abandon. As it passed, the sky, which had turned now to a smoky grey, seemed to part and large drops of water began to spatter down.
It was pou
ring as they took Pissarro to one of the police vans and made him undress. What he said was right enough. He had nothing on him that bore the slightest resemblance to a tape cassette such as they were looking for.
Pissarro looked amused. ‘Wrong, Inspector?’ he asked. Pel frowned.
‘I was only watching the race, you know,’ Pissarro went on. ‘My man, Maryckx, has just passed. He’s not as far up as I thought he’d be and I don’t think he’s going to pull it off now. Not unless he becomes jet-propelled. He’ll finish up in the thirties and that won’t win him any prizes.’ He sighed. ‘However, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Can I go now?’
‘No.’ Pel gestured to Darcy. ‘Warn Judge Brisard and get someone to lock him up. And tell them not to make any mistakes. We don’t want another stunt like Misset pulled.’
Darcy frowned. ‘What do we charge him with, Patron?’
‘Brisard’ll find something.’
‘He’s supposed to be innocent until he’s proved guilty.’
‘Not in my book,’ Pel snarled. ‘I’m a policeman. With me he’s guilty until he’s proved innocent.’
Twenty-two
‘What did Brisard say?’ Pel asked.
Darcy sat down at the other side of Pel’s desk. ‘He asked what we were going to charge him with? What proof had we?’ Darcy looked worried. ‘Patron, we have no proof. His fingerprints weren’t on the iron bar or anywhere in Robinson’s workshops.’
‘He was wearing gloves,’ Pel said. ‘Everybody reads enough about crime these days to know that.’
‘We’ve found nothing incriminating. He had nothing on him. He said he was watching the race and that’s what he seemed to be doing. Just handing out musettes to his team. He’d certainly not got Robinson’s gadget.’
Pel scowled. Surely, he thought, the Lord God of Hosts wasn’t going to do it across him at this stage of the proceedings. ‘Somebody’s got the damned thing!’ he said. ‘Have you tried Paris? What’s our friend Rambot up to?’