‘I wouldn’t drink too much Pernod if I were you, Tom. Have a cup of tea instead.’
His wife seemed to read his thoughts.
‘Too much of it isn’t good for you. They passed a law in France against absinthe drinking because it drove people mad and was bad for the birth-rate, and then people started drinking Pernod, which is very potent if you take too much. I heard that a man who’d drunk seven Pernods the other week, undressed himself stark naked on the promenade here, and thought he was at home in his bedroom. When the gendarme interfered the man accused him of stealing his pyjamas.’
‘Good Lord! Who’s been educating you?’
‘It was a man I met in the Post Office while you were in Cannes.’
‘Sounds like a dirty old man, too.’
‘As a matter of fact, he was very nice. He was about your age and looked like you. A professor of Sanskrit, he said he was, at Montpellier.’
Littlejohn eyed his wife, who was still good looking, and felt a strange pang of jealousy. It was absurd. The sun and all the anis drinks of the morning. He felt irritated and off-colour with everything.
‘I think I’ll get myself some snakeskin shoes like those Dorange had on. They looked light and cool.’
He’d no intention whatever of buying snakeskin shoes with pointed toes, but he felt somehow he ought to assert himself after the professor from Montpellier and his Sanskrit and his Pernod.
The telephone rang again.
‘Shall I tell them you’re out?’ said the landlord.
‘No. Let ‘em all come. After all, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? To be made a mug in all this heat ‘
It was M. Joliclerc.
‘Will you take an apéritif with me in Cannes? There’s something I want to show you first. Five-thirty at the Place Reynaldo Hahn, near the town casino? You have a conveyance to get you there?’
Yes, Littlejohn had a conveyance; the landlord’s jeep which had been placed at his disposal. Probably another relic of the Resistance.
He made peace with his wife.
‘It must be the heat. We’ve a treat in store tonight. Dinner at nine o’clock at the T.T.A. place. Probably means Teetotal Travellers’ Association…quite a rest from Pernod.’
It was five o’clock and the day seemed to be drawing in. There was a rosy glow in the west already and the distant mountains of the Esterel were etched sharply against the sky. A real picture-postcard scene. The beach was strewn with sunbathers, and scantily clad women and muscular hairy men were romping in and out on the fringe of the sea. Two yachts on the way to the Lérins and a luxury liner putting out to sea from Cannes. The camel stood, drowsy and bewildered, on a hillock got up to look like an oasis and the Arab who owned it was smoking with the photographer, both looking as if they didn’t care whether they got any business or not. They waved at Littlejohn as he passed in the jeep.
The examining magistrate was waiting in the Place Reynaldo Hahn. He still wore his black suit, but to show he was relaxing, he had put on a white panama. In spite of the heat, he looked cool in his stiff get-up, sitting in his little Citroën with a background of masts and white sails, and with the boatmen and loafers of the quay eyeing him and his car and wondering what he was doing there. He greeted Littlejohn like an old friend.
‘I wanted to take you a little run along the coast and show you something. It will perhaps enable you to understand my point of view.’
The Inspector didn’t know what Joliclerc was getting at, but the night was young and anything was better than a long evening with the teetotallers at Bagatelle.
‘We’ll go for a drink to Théoule. It is a pleasant drive.’
They took the road out of Cannes in the direction of St. Raphaël, and ran along the coast until they joined the Corniche d’Or, the twisting shelf of good road which follows the sea all the way. They might have been on a picnic, for most of Joliclerc’s conversation consisted of going into ecstasies about the view and the beauties of the coast.
He certainly had something to boast about. Looking back across the sweep of bay, they could see Cannes, with La Californie rising behind it and all the villas on the hillside basking in the sun. Beyond that, Golfe-Juan and Cap d’Antibes. It looked like the posters you see in tourist offices advertising the Riviera. In spite of the traffic whizzing past them on the road, the place was peaceful. More yachts floating about the sea, family parties sporting on the beaches, little cafés with coloured awnings and parasols and painted chairs and tables. Above the road, villas built on terraces on the porphyry rock, with masses of pink and red geraniums, bougainvillaea, hydrangeas blooming in the gardens, and sheltered by palms, olives and lemon trees.
Littlejohn felt tired. He didn’t want to go back to the town. Just to loll on one of the easy chairs in a café, with a long drink and the view of the blue water in front of him.
‘Here we are.’
Joliclerc had drawn up at a curve in the road where there was a convenient pull-in. Above their heads the rock face rose sheer from the road for a good twenty-five feet and then, on top, another villa with green shutters and white walls. Set in the rock-face was a white tablet which the examining magistrate gestured that Littlejohn should examine. M. Joliclerc removed his panama like somebody in church.
To the Martyrs of the Resistance.
Near this spot on 10th July, 1944,
The following patriots gave their lives
For France and Liberty.
Then a list of names. Littlejohn ran his eye down them. Halfway, he paused. Joliclerc, Michel.
He turned to his companion, who was standing there, lost in thought, his body stiff, like a ramrod. Cars were still streaming past and now and then one of them hooted at the two men to warn them not to step back. The magistrate seemed oblivious of everything.
Littlejohn gestured in the direction of the tablet, but before he could speak, M. Joliclerc explained.
‘My son…It killed his mother. Now, I’m quite alone.’
William Dawson again! It explained why Joliclerc didn’t want any outside interference in his inquiries about the Alderman’s death. It also put the examining magistrate on the list of suspects with a vengeance.
Littlejohn might have been thinking aloud.
‘I didn’t kill Dawson, of course. But you won’t understand how he is connected with that tablet. Let’s find a drink.’
They cruised back to Theoule and found two easy chairs in a café perched on a terrace over the bay. Below, a group of men were playing bowls in a little garden. When one of the men saw that Littlejohn was interested, he started to show-off, flinging his ball with a flourish and challenging his opponents in a loud voice.
‘Deux Pernods… Deux.’
They were at it again! The clear greenish liquid in the long glass and the ice-water which turned it milky as you poured it in.
A man had drunk seven Pernods and then undressed himself on the promenade at Juan-les-Pins. Littlejohn smiled to himself. Still the holiday feeling; still the lack of inclination to cope with William Dawson and his stab in the back.
‘William Dawson was a liaison officer between the maquis and the English mainland. He saw to the arrival of weapons. He was parachuted into the encampments several times and went back by plane. We had a small airstrip there. We were in the mountains…’
M. Joliclerc was slowly telling the tale already told to Littlejohn by Dorange. The Inspector let him go on. Behind them the great range of the Alpes Maritimes stretched, with the sunshine of coming evening lighting up the peaks, some of them snowcapped.
‘It is very wild and safe. The enemy were helpless against the mountains. We drilled and prepared for the day…’
M. Joliclerc pulled out a cigarette packet, offered it to Littlejohn, and then took out a battered Gitane himself and lit it.
‘. . . There were dangerous missions, of course. That, for example…’
He flapped his hand over his shoulder in the direction of the memorial.
‘It was in preparation for blowing-up the Corniche d’Or, if necessary. There were to be American landings along the coast near St. Raphael. If the enemy tried to move troops from Cannes along the roads, they were to be blown-up. They were to be mined in advance. The party, including my son, was despatched for that purpose. The enemy learned of it beforehand and waited and wiped them all out. The mission was betrayed by a woman, who learned of it from Dawson. It seems he was in love with her, but she loved a collaborator.’
They sat there quietly sipping their drinks. Difficult to imagine that only ten years ago the Germans were officially in occupation but already on the run. And M. Joliclerc and his likes soldiering in the mountains and then descending to make it hot for them as the allies landed from the sea.
‘So, you see why I have particular interest in Dawson. The comment of his friend…the man in the white cap…the mention of Vallouris. That was Dawson’s nom de guerre. It helped me to identify him.’
And then something happened to Littlejohn. A party of four at the next table. A man and his wife and two children. They were speaking English and had asked the waiter for tea. Then they began to talk about the way tea was made in France and the price they charged for it.
‘All the same, I do like my cup of tea at tea-time,’ the woman said and the rest began to chaff her about insisting on bringing England away with her.
It shook Littlejohn out of his lethargy. He even imagined William Dawson packing his bag and joining the motor coach in the little, probably the one-eyed town in the north of England, where he was a J. P. and an Alderman. He felt a bit sorry for Dawson. After all, Dawson himself hadn’t blown the gaff on the maquis. He’d trusted a girl with whom he’d fallen in love and she’d let him down.
Littlejohn didn’t see the sea and the sweep of bay backed by hills in front of him. Instead, he conjured up an imaginary Bolchester, with the town hall and courthouse, where Dawson did his daily jobs, and the crowd of teetotallers he’d gathered together to bring out to Cannes where he served in the war. It must have been the Pernod at work again, for Littlejohn could imagine the temperance drinks and the slight disgust some of them showed at so much wine and apéritifs knocking around in France. Perhaps odd ones even slipped away now and then and knocked-back a Dubonnet or a Cinzano out of sheer devilment.
‘So you see why I’m particularly interested in Dawson’s death. It may be an act of revenge, or it may not.’
M. Joliclerc took it for granted that Littlejohn was still waiting for more information.
‘You know, of course, sir, that Scotland Yard, acting for the Foreign Office, have asked me to keep an eye on the case. Just in the event of the crime being thoroughly investigated.’
‘Are you suggesting that it won’t be?’
‘You did mention, you know, that the file would soon be closed.’
The examining magistrate cleared his throat.
‘That was just to…I will confess it, just to prevent you or your companions interfering. Of course, I shall use every effort. But the field is so vast, if it is an act of revenge, that we may never solve the problem. This morning, however, Nice telephoned to say that the Prefect had issued instructions that you were to be kept informed. I assure you of my utmost cooperation. Another Pernod?’
‘If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll have a glass of beer.’
He felt almost aggressively like a beer now; something to tone him up instead of put him in a stupor. He even felt eager to get to Bagatelle among the teetotallers and start investigating the case from the angle of Dawson’s behaviour before his death.
Littlejohn realised he didn’t know a thing about Dawson except that he’d been a contact-man for the maquis in the war and had somehow let them down. What about Bolchester ? Was Dawson married? Was he a big shot, a popular figure in Bolchester? Did he keep a shop, or a works, or a pub there? And was he straight or crooked?
‘I spent the rest of the day after I saw you, taking statements from Mr. Dawson’s English companions, his compatriots. I have the dossier in my office at the town hall. You may see it if you wish.’
Littlejohn took a good swig of his Alsatian beer.
‘I’m dining with them this evening. I’ll question them, too, and then, if you don’t mind, I’ll compare my own with your notes. That should help. Needless to say, my findings are at your disposal, too, M. le juge.’
‘Thank you. That will be a great help. I’m afraid some of the people at Bagatelle didn’t quite understand our methods in France. They were a bit timid in some cases and, in others, obstructive. Especially the ladies and Monsieur Marriott, who kept asking for the English consul to be there.’
Littlejohn could imagine it! The aggressive official questioning, the solemn face of M. Joliclerc, the fact that in France the examining magistrate was all-powerful during his inquiry which was made without lawyers or any outside help for his victims. ‘We, Marcellin Joliclerc, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Examining Magistrate appointed by the Parquet de Cannes…’ He was the boss and the Inspector could see him trying to intimidate the obstinate teetotallers at Bagatelle. Especially any middle-aged spinsters of independent means who happened to be among them.
The English party at the next table were paying their bill and gathering up their traps. The boy, who looked about fifteen, took a photograph of the rest standing with the bay in the background. Littlejohn could imagine them later in the year showing the picture. ‘That was us at Theoule…’
‘Good-bye,’ he shouted after them, and they looked surprised and replied. As they entered their car, the Inspector heard the boy say, ‘I’m sure I’ve seen his photograph in the paper somewhere…’ and he kept looking back until the car turned the corner and was gone.
They returned the way they had come. Although the sun had not quite set, there was a cold breath in the evening air. People were beginning to pack up from the day’s pleasures. Bathers putting on their wraps, children protesting as their parents yanked them from their business on the beach, fishermen taking in the nets which had been drying in the sun, men going home on bicycles holding fishing rods aloft and with strings of livid fish hanging from their handlebars. Through the windows of the restaurants on the way home you could see the empty tables with clean cloths ready for the evening meal.
‘What time did Dawson die, M. le juge?’
Now that the ice had been broken and his ideas and purposes confessed to Littlejohn, Joliclerc talked quite freely.
‘I got the report just before I left to meet you. Dinner at Bagatelle takes place about nine; Dawson left there about ten, according to what his compatriots say. His body was found by the workman at the casino at just before eleven. Dawson could not have been there long, for, although very ill, he was conscious and groaning. Had he been there any length of time, he would have died from loss of blood and shock. That is as near as we can get to when Dawson was stabbed.’
The magistrate pronounced it ‘Dayson’, and only then with difficulty. It would have been discourteous to correct him, but Littlejohn instinctively wanted to do it.
‘I’ll show you where they found the body, Inspector.’
They were back in Cannes, and there was the Croisette. Expensive cars gliding along, people taking a quiet stroll before dinner, a few late birds drinking on the terraces of the elegant hotels. The little Citroën dodged its way past the limousines and stationary cars to Palm Beach and the magistrate parked in front of the gardens there.
A little square with a roundabout sprouting palms in the middle. A neck of land jutting out, with the sea on its two flanks, the one nearest Cannes more elegant than the other. Cafés along one side and the trim and fashionable Palm Beach casino on the remaining one. The bars were just lighting-up. BOB’S BAR…CHEZ SAMMY…LA POTINÈRE. The beach farthest from Cannes was a homely affair, a bit shabby, but a place where you could bring the family and sunbathe and sport around without having to pay for the fun as you had on the expensive pitches adjoining the Croisette. Between the beach an
d the casino, a stony plot of land used for parking cars and where they unloaded goods for the side-door of the restaurant.
‘It was here they found Dawson.’
Just under the casino wall which adjoined the plot. The sort of place where in England you’d find a notice, Tip No Rubbish.
‘The place was thoroughly examined, but the knife was not found. Dawson may have been brought here by car after the crime had been committed elsewhere.’
‘Is it likely he might have been involved in a quarrel, say with the rowdy element of the town, and got killed that way?’
M. Joliclerc shook his head emphatically.
‘No, Inspector. Cannes is a very orderly place, even in the poor parts. There might be some quarrelling and even blows, but no knife-play, I assure you. The police have the place properly cleaned-up and under control.’
The magistrate seemed jealous of the reputation of his town, as anxious as the Syndicat d’Initiative to assure you that Cannes was the spot to come to for a safe holiday.
‘But what was the Alderman doing here at that time of night? It seems a long way out of town, M. Joliclerc.’
‘Not really. Bagatelle lies on this side of Lower Californie and this is one of the nearest beaches to the villa. About half an hour’s good walking from Bagatelle. It is quite reasonable to assume that Dawson was followed here. He might just have stepped off the road to look at the water-edge. It is dark and quiet where they found him. Would you like to speak to the man who discovered the body?’
‘Yes, I may as well.’
They entered the sumptuous hall of the casino. Thick carpet on the floor, bright lights, and masses of flowers all over the shop. The air was thick with the exotic scent of them.
The rooms were empty but lit up and waiting for the night’s visitors to the gala dinner and the gaming-tables. A large dining-room all ready, set with shining glass and napkins folded like bishops’ mitres. A dais at one end with music stands and a big drum. Jimmy Madden’s Band.
Death in Room Five (A Chief Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Page 4