The Penny Thief

by Christophe Paul

  “The suspect has entered the main door.”

  “How is the surveillance of the back door going?”

  “I’m at my post, and I haven’t moved the entire night. Everything’s calm here.”

  “Keep an eye out! I don’t want any surprises.”

  Lenoir was nervous—what had Pierre-Gabriel and Henri been talking about in there for almost three hours? It was a lot of time, too much time. It was likely that everyone would sleep that night except them. He had a feeling things were about to take a turn for the worse.

  Henri Pichon entered the elevator in the building where Pierre-Gabriel and Tash lived. It seemed like the hoax had worked, all thanks to Tash. He remembered what she had said when she saw him in the hospital after he woke up from the coma with dirty hair stuck to his skull and the part on the right: he reminded her of her husband. Only the glasses were missing. He’d designed his entire plan around her observation. Even the rain had been on his side.

  Pierre-Gabriel had slightly darker and shorter hair than Henri, but these aren’t things that catch your eye if you don’t expect them. And nobody had any reason to suspect that Henri Pichon had usurped the identity of Pierre-Gabriel de La Valette.

  A bit of Aunt Odette’s hair gel, a lick of the comb to leave a perfect line on the right, the tortoiseshell glasses. He’d taken out the lenses, pressing hard with his thumbs, otherwise everything looked distorted and he got dizzy. The other man’s clothes were tight at the shoulders and short in the legs, not to mention the shoes, and he felt icky putting them on. But he dressed up in Pierre-Gabriel’s clothes and raincoat and spent a while practicing his headache and staggering in front of the mirror in his aunt’s room, and it was all set. Pierre-Gabriel had come back to life.

  Everything relied on preparing a plan that was perfectly orchestrated within a possible reality.

  A harmonious melody, the kind you would hear in a luxury store, announced his arrival at the desired floor. Henri stepped out of the elevator, turned the hall light on, and oriented himself. At the front door, with his hands in latex gloves and the key out, he had a sudden feeling of embarrassment. Not for Pierre-Gabriel, because strangely enough, he didn’t feel any remorse for taking the man’s life—maybe that would come later on. He’d see. But he felt embarrassed for Tash, for getting involved in her private life, seeing her things, the objects that surrounded her every day, which she had surely chosen with love or for some special reason.

  He gulped, opened the door, and entered. It occurred to him that there could have been an alarm. He froze, but nothing happened. There was no alarm, and he immediately understood why when something stroked his leg, giving him the fright of his life. A flash, and his memory told him that Tash had a cat named Émeraude. He was still in a cold sweat when he flicked on the light in the apartment hallway. He took a quick tour of the apartment to be sure he wouldn’t get any further surprises, and then he started. First he gave the cat some water and searched the cupboards for cat food—the little critter hadn’t eaten for one or two days, he was sure.

  Once that was resolved, he opened the top part of the hallway closet, the place where he would have stored the suitcases. There was only a bag full of clothes, which fell to the ground and spilled. As he picked it up, something seemed strange. Male clothing all crumpled up, how bizarre. He was going to put it back in its place when he noticed some dark spots on the white fabric. Blood. On the cuffs of the shirt and the jacket. The clothes from the crime—but which one, Garibaldi or Maillard? It didn’t matter, he was taking it. He left the bag on the ground.

  He found a garish blue suitcase in the master bedroom closet. He flung it on the bed and started opening closets and drawers, taking out what he thought was best and trying to respect Tash’s privacy when he opened one of her drawers. Once he completed the task, he closed everything up and took the suitcase to the entrance. He had a sudden insight: the toiletry case. He went to the bathroom, seized everything that seemed masculine, and stuffed it in the suitcase.

  A visit to the cozy dining room allowed him to find the lists of his programs and Garibaldi’s travel bag with the work notebooks and the laptop, which he took the time to check.

  He said good-bye to Émeraude after leaving her enough food for a month; cats knew how to ration. Then he left, closing the door carefully, loaded everything in the elevator, and went straight to the basement: Where else would Pierre-Gabriel keep his car? And there it was. He pressed the button on the key, and the car revealed itself to him with a little whistle and lots of lights. The bright side of technology. He opened the trunk and looked inside, then pulled out the golf bag, which was too bulky. Now there was enough space. The golf bag landed in a trash container at the end of the garage.

  You won’t be needing these anymore, he thought.

  Back at the car, he loaded everything he’d brought into the backseat. He adjusted the driver’s seat and the side mirrors to suit him, cautiously not saving the settings, and pulled out. He didn’t find the remote to the garage door, but it opened on its own as he approached.

  “A car is emerging from the garage,” said the detective. “It’s him!”

  “Take a photo!”

  “Done!”

  The two cars crossed Paris again under the incessant rain, retracing the road covered by the taxi earlier.

  Twenty minutes later, Henri parked on the edge of Place Émile Goudeau, a few feet away from the entrance to his building.

  It was almost three in the morning.

  “He just got out of the car, and he’s entering Pichon’s building again.”

  66

  Henri Pichon entered his house and took the glasses off—they were bothering him. His own “corpse” was prepared for act two.

  Another mummified roast beef waited by the entrance to the room. If you touched it, it was obvious it contained anything but a human body, but visually, on a rainy night, it looked the part. The corpse was composed of the hallway rug, tightly rolled up and tied, and the legs were made from two bedside rugs that had received the same treatment. The head was a little bag with several pieces of clothing. Pierre-Gabriel’s jacket, pants, shoes, and other items were placed here and there so that they could be removed easily without undoing the parcel.

  He practiced how to carry it in front of his aunt’s mirror, without turning on the light. It looked pretty real.

  He put on the glasses again, picked up the “corpse”—which was probably heavier than a real one—closed the door carefully, and went down the four flights of creaking stairs.

  He arrived downstairs and stood for a few seconds behind the door in the shadow of the entryway. Now everything depended on Lenoir’s morality—would his integrity as a detective and former policeman weigh more and motivate him to arrest the man carrying a body, or would the balance tilt toward his desire for millions of pennies, encouraging him to let the man go on his way?

  He breathed in deep and opened the door—the show was about to commence.

  Lenoir had passed another interminable fifteen minutes, the detectives were expecting him, and he was on the brink of a heart attack, swimming in a sea of questions.

  “The front door is opening, and he’s coming out. Fuck!”

  “What? What’s happening?” asked Lenoir, who couldn’t see anything from his office.

  “He’s carrying something on his shoulder. He can’t carry the umbrella; he’s closing it. It’s one of those covers to store overcoats in the closet in summer—my wife uses them. Looks like what he’s carrying is quite heavy, and he’s struggling with it. He’s lurching and has to stop every two steps. I would say it’s a body.”

  “Fuck! Now I see what he was doing in there for two hours. He’s dispatched him. Son of a bitch, I’m going to—”

  “Shall we stop him, boss?”

  There was a moment of hesitation, and Lenoir was thinking as fast as he could. P
ierre-Gabriel, despite being in agony, was intelligent. He wouldn’t have killed Pichon without extracting the destination of the money, and he’d taken two hours to interrogate him. It was worth it to wait and see. There would always be time to arrest him later.

  “No, we’re going to follow this through to the bitter end. Are you taking photos?”

  “Yes, I haven’t stopped.”

  “Perfect. You have your phone chargers, right?”

  “Always.”

  “When one of the phones is full, upload the shots to the cloud and I’ll retrieve them. And meanwhile, continue shooting with the other one.”

  “He opened the trunk and is trying to put the body in. It’s quite a struggle—the rain is pouring down. That’s it, he managed. His glasses have fallen to the ground, and he’s picking them up. Looks like they didn’t break. He closed the trunk and is heading to the driver’s side. He’s stopped; the effort probably made him dizzy. That’s it, he’s in.”

  A few minutes went by while Henri Gabriel Pichon de La Valette took a moment to recover. He leaned his head on the headrest, his shoulders exhausted. The rain was falling harder, interfering with the vision of the two detectives. Henri really was resting—carrying that parcel had not been easy. But he was happy, and Lenoir had taken the bait. His greed had been stronger than his morals.

  “He’s starting the engine, and we’re off,” said the detective in the car.

  “Don’t lose sight of him, and don’t let him escape.”

  The car went directly to La Défense, skirted it, and from there went to Carrières-sur-Seine, a district some five miles away from Paris. After taking a few turns, as if he were struggling to find what he was looking for, he parked on a cement esplanade opposite a ruined three-story building that used to be a large factory. It was still raining, but less violently. He stepped out of the car, opened the trunk, and just about managed to pull out the long “corpse,” which he dropped to the ground. He dragged it as well as he could to the oxidized door, turned the handle, and disappeared inside.

  “Shall we go after him?”

  “No, keep to your post and don’t let him see you. You’re going to give me the GPS coordinates, and I’m going to go there personally.”

  Once he’d gone past the factory door, Henri stopped for a few seconds to catch his breath. His raincoat was soaked, the gel was rinsing out, and some rebellious strands of hair were sticking up.

  Here he was on familiar ground. This factory had been abandoned for more than thirty years and had been the playground of all the kids in the neighborhood, even back when there were still a gate and a guard. From then until this day, one of his schoolmates lived a little further ahead. A month ago, the old friends had met up at a barbecue and nobody had been able to resist the temptation of an excursion to the old factory. So Henri knew where he was going.

  He picked up the heavy corpus delicti, turned on a small flashlight, went to the end, walked into a narrow hallway, and climbed three stories on the wide staircase. Once he was up there, he chose a little room that looked cleaner than the others, deposited the parcel on the ground, and undid it. He had left the bag of clothes and Pierre-Gabriel’s other items in the trunk while he pulled out the “corpse” with difficulty.

  He left the carpets on one side in a visible place—there was no better hiding spot than in full view. He folded Aunt Odette’s cover, reducing it to a small ball, and stuffed it inside an old plastic bag on the ground that contained empty, stinking food cans and milk cartons. He abandoned it to one side.

  He quickly returned to the hall on the ground floor where the entrance and bathrooms were, pulled out the tube of hair gel and the comb, and applied himself to the reconstruction of his disguise before going back “onstage.”

  Half an hour later, Pierre-Gabriel showed up again, diminished and weak. He rested for fifteen minutes in the car before driving to join traffic on the A13 toward Normandy.

  Three hundred and fifty miles and almost five hours of rain later, Pierre-Gabriel arrived at the walled city of Saint-Malo and parked opposite the ferry docks. There were still twenty minutes to go before the gates closed, and he presented a piece of paper to the ferry operator, who let him through. He had a reservation. The detectives didn’t. From that point, there were departures to many different destinations.

  Henri was looking around. He needed the detectives to get on board.

  “Leave the car on land and get on the ferry. You can always buy the ticket on board, even if they make you pay a supplement,” commanded Lenoir.

  67

  Almost an hour and a half later, after numerous visits to the bathroom due to the tilting of the ferry, passengers disembarked at the port of Saint Helier, the capital of the island of Jersey. It was one of Europe’s main tax havens, located in the United Kingdom off the Norman coast of France.

  The luxury car descended with Pierre-Gabriel at the wheel. There were no taxis in sight, the rain was lashing down, and they were going to lose track of him. But the car stopped at the end of a dock so that the driver could pose a question to a uniformed operator who gesticulated a lot, trying to explain something. As soon as the car drove off, the detectives walked quickly to reach the man before he left.

  “Good morning. Where can we rent a car?”

  “A bit further ahead—you’ll see it right away.”

  “Thanks a lot. And one more thing, what did the driver of that car ask you a minute ago?”

  The man seemed to hesitate for a second, but a hundred-euro note fixed that.

  “He wanted to know where the Somerville Hotel is.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Just there,” said the man, pointing through the curtain of rain to a spot on the other side of the bay. “It’s the big white building that looks like a palace. It’s a very good hotel, probably the best on the island.”

  “Thanks again.”

  Henri Pichon proceeded after talking to the dock operator, not losing sight of the two detectives in his rearview mirror. They had gotten the message, and as soon as his car was far enough away, they hurried toward him. The island was small, and they would have found him easily, but he didn’t want to waste time. He accelerated toward the hotel.

  The Somerville was a high-end four-star resort with all kinds of facilities. He’d made his reservation the day before, same as his ferry. He’d worked hard on the script of his play, and he didn’t want anything to be left to chance.

  He left the car in the hotel’s private parking lot, pulled out the suitcase from the backseat, opened the trunk, then put the clothes he’d taken off Pierre-Gabriel and what he’d found on the floor into the little sports bag. He had trouble closing it. The suitcase joined the rest, and he closed the trunk.

  He immediately took the lists and Garibaldi’s travel bag and went to reception.

  Ten minutes later, he was in a sumptuous suite on the fourth floor, with a fireplace, a whirlpool tub, and a stunning view. It was clear from his attitude that Mr. Pierre-Gabriel de La Valette wasn’t feeling well and needed to rest. He’d left his car keys at reception; they’d bring them up with his luggage right away.

  He had just finished setting up Garibaldi’s laptop on the little round table in the large room when a member of the hotel staff knocked on the door. They delivered all his luggage in exchange for a generous tip—now they would remember him, no doubt.

  After a good shower in the plush, carpeted bathroom and half an hour of work on the stolen computer, where he’d set up Pierre-Gabriel’s new emails, he took his phone and entered a number he’d read off the screen.

  “Good morning, sir. We’ve received your funds and your email. Your repayment is available, and you can come and collect it whenever you wish.”

  “Thank you. I’ll drop by at some point today.”

  After hanging up, Henri looked at Pierre-Gabriel’s watch sitting on his own
wrist. It suited him—what a shame to have to get rid of it. Ten thirty in the morning. He went back to the computer.

  He’d diverted four million euros during compensation transactions on the previous day, moving them from the accounts of risk provision at the bank. These were delicate accounts, especially because their content wasn’t completely clear. Henri knew that the bank would act discreetly to avoid having to give explanations. He had wholly implicated Pierre-Gabriel, but they would take a few days to figure that out.

  When he’d checked the wallet of his namesake, Pichon had found a receipt from a bank account at a branch located on Jersey. He’d looked into it immediately—it was a major English bank that had no special agreements with his own bank. It seemed the account was still active, but there had been no transactions for more than seven years, and it had a miserable balance.

  The advantage of using the nocturnal compensation of the transactions was that the funds where available first thing the next day.

  Now it was Morgane Duchène’s turn. After reading her name in the email received by Maillard on his cell phone just before the attack, Henri had deduced without any difficulty that she was the person who had participated in the murder of Silvano Garibaldi. He quickly accessed the bank system and put her office computer and email under surveillance. He didn’t take long to discover the booking to Mexico for this afternoon, nor to guess that she was taking the hefty contents of her bank account with her.

  The blonde must have made her move by now.

  68

  When the detectives arrived at the sumptuous Somerville Hotel, Pierre-Gabriel’s car was in the parking lot.

  One of the detectives kept watch in the rental car while the other went to book a room. They had decided to take turns resting and being on lookout.