The Penny Thief

by Christophe Paul

  Finally, he approached the cliff extremely carefully. He had to decide on the ideal place for his final scene, so he could escape without being noticed. The two detectives, hidden behind the bushes and the stone wall, didn’t dare come closer for fear of being discovered. The rain didn’t allow them to see clearly, and the photographs were going to be shit.

  On the edge of the precipice, Pichon made a huge swinging motion with the backpack containing the evidence, pretending to throw it far away so that it would disappear. But in reality, he threw it in such a way that it fell on a rock sticking out six feet below. The drop was at least 150 feet to the crags, shaken by the waves.

  Then he slid down the edge of the cliff for the grand finale of his play, and when he was out of sight, he quickly took off the jacket and the raincoat in a single move, picked up a stone, wrapped it up, and threw everything as far away as possible. Luckily they wound up in the foamy rocks, beaten by the sea. The shoes, which he’d taken off moments before the bag, followed the same trajectory. Then he took off the glasses, broke them so that it would be easier to put in the lenses, and threw them near the backpack.

  Henri Pichon experienced a feeling of liberation. Pierre-Gabriel had died a second time. He was definitively gone, down there floating in the effervescence of the waves, caught between the reefs. He almost felt the need to say a brief good-bye prayer, even though he wasn’t a believer.

  Now he needed to get out of there unseen. He opened his little travel bag, pulled out a raincoat and gray waterproof pants, which he usually wore on cycling excursions, and got dressed. He called emergency services with Pierre-Gabriel’s cell phone and gave them the position indicated by the GPS on the phone, saying he’d slipped and was in a dangerous spot. He left the phone on the ground and skirted the cliff, hunched over and protected by the hedges, as the rain grew heavier and heavier.

  73

  Lenoir glanced again at the photographs where Pierre-Gabriel was exiting Pichon’s building, then leaned on the wall to rest. Afterward he looked at the pictures where Pierre-Gabriel was carrying the heavy parcel, when his glasses fell to the ground and he picked them up, checking whether they had broken. The detective knew that he was missing something, but what?

  “There’s no reflection!” he said suddenly, his voice victorious.

  “What?” asked Morgane, who was sitting nearby, bored and lost in thought, fighting a terrible headache.

  “On Pierre-Gabriel’s glasses.”

  “Mine don’t have one either; they have antireflective coating.”

  “The lenses don’t have drops of water, either.”

  Morgane drew near, her curiosity piqued and her mouth pasty. The photos were bad quality and not very clear because of the rain. It was difficult to see at first what Lenoir was saying, but then he zoomed in.

  “You’re right,” said Morgane. “Looking at the photograph like this, I might even doubt that it’s Pierre-Gabriel.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not 100 percent. Let’s look at some other ones.”

  They went over all the photographs Lenoir had, but Morgane couldn’t say for sure if it was Pierre-Gabriel or not. There was too much rain, and it was too pixelated, because they were taken at night without a flash.

  “Do you think it could be Pichon?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only seen Pichon three or four times in my life, and I remember him being fatter and taller.”

  “I’m calling my men, and I’ll get them to approach him. We have nothing to lose.”

  He picked up his phone as it started ringing—it was one of his detectives.

  “What’s up, anything interesting?”

  “Pierre-Gabriel de La Valette is dead.”

  “Fuck! Don’t hang up.”

  He put the call on the speakerphone and said, “So our suspect is dead! Or did he disappear?”

  “For now, he’s missing. At about 2:30 p.m., we were near La Falaise on the north side of the island, watching him: he disappeared after throwing a bag off a cliff, probably to get rid of evidence. He didn’t appear again, so we decided to go closer—then the police arrived. It seems that Pierre-Gabriel, after slipping, called them to ask for help. We identified ourselves as detectives. When we looked down, we realized there was something wrong, because there was a backpack hooked on a rock sticking out a few feet, and further down, in the reefs, something floating, perhaps a body.

  “The police called the fire department, but it was stormy; to make matters worse, the tide was rising, and the fire department took some time to arrive. They managed to recover only the remains of a raincoat, a jacket, and a shoe. In the jacket, they found the wallet, an envelope with a lot of money, and the room key from the hotel.”

  “OK, so there’s no body,” Lenoir said, pensive.

  “No. Just a minute, they just found the cell phone among the rocks, and I think it’s not a very dangerous place. At least, not somewhere you’d fall.”

  “I want you to go to the ferry immediately; I want you to look for Henri Pichon. Fast.”

  And he hung up.

  “What’s going on?” asked Morgane, worried.

  “I think we’ve been tricked,” answered Lenoir.

  74

  Pichon took half an hour to walk the three miles that separated him from the tiny port of Charrières de Bonne Nuit on the northeast side of the island. On the way, he managed to get rid of the hair gel and recover a more Henri Pichon appearance.

  It was pelting rain. The small port consisted of an imposing dyke that sat well into the sea, breaking the tide from the north. The rest was inhospitable rocks, seaweed, and cement bordering a small open cove. The few existing houses were empty during this season, or that’s how it seemed.

  He was about to get to the end of the hill leading to the dock when an older man, with the appearance of a fisherman and a face sculpted by the winds, stepped down from a large, rusty, old-fashioned off-road vehicle.

  “Mr. X?”

  “Yes,” said Henri, smiling.

  “Do you have the money?”

  Henri opened his raincoat, took out an envelope from the inner pocket, and gave it to him. The man checked the contents.

  “You’ve made a mistake—there’s more here than what we agreed on,” he said, handing back a bundle of bills.

  “A little something for your trouble,” said Henri.

  “A deal is a deal,” said the man, insisting.

  Henri put away the money, perplexed. Some people should learn. Henri was worried about the state of the sea.

  “Do you think it’s prudent—”

  “Son, this is a storm, not a tempest. Get in, and we’ll be in Carteret in an hour. My cousin is already waiting. Get in there; it’s more sheltered,” he said, jumping on the bridge of a large, old blue-and-white fishing boat, which was broken and smelled of the sea and other things best left unexamined.

  The man turned promptly and walked to the control cabin.

  Soon the diesel motors started in a cloud of black smoke, and the entire hull vibrated softly. Two other men, similar to the captain, came out of nowhere and untied the ropes, and the fishing boat slowly drifted away from the breakwater to leave the cove.

  An hour later, they were tying up at the end of a dock in the commercial port of Carteret.

  The captain shook his hand, wished him a good journey, and helped him jump on land. Pichon took that moment to slip the bundle of money the captain had returned back into the pocket of his large yellow jacket.

  The boat sped away, leaving Henri alone.

  Another man in a nice suit approached him.

  “Mr. X?”

  “Yes,” said Pichon, thinking there was little risk of making a mistake, because he was the only person who had come off the fishing boat and the only person on the dock at that moment.

  They le
ft the port and walked for a long time until they reached a white commercial van that had seen better days.

  “Would you rather drive, or shall I take you?” the man asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  They set off. This man was a cousin of the captain of the fishing boat, who was a cousin of the waiter on the ferry. It had all been a coincidence. While he sipped hot coffee to recover his strength after the tremendous night, being watched from afar by the two detectives, the waiter had proposed that Henri go fishing with his cousin for a modest price and gave him his telephone number.

  With the ferry, he would have had to wait until seven thirty, then take the train or rent a car, leaving a paper trail.

  Four hours later, the cousin of the fisherman and the ferry waiter dropped him off in Carrières-sur-Seine near the abandoned factory.

  Pichon waited until dark, checking in case there was any movement, and entered through a side window.

  He went straight to the third floor and retrieved Aunt Odette’s plastic coat bag and duct tape, then returned to the first floor. He opened the coat bag in the middle of the hallway in front of the main door, laying down inside it. He switched off his phone, put it in his pocket, wrapped his ankles with tape, and covered his mouth with a piece of tape, worrying about how it was going to hurt when they pulled it off his two-day stubble. Then he did the same with his wrists—it didn’t matter if it wasn’t perfect—threw the tape far away among the junk, and closed the zipper. Now he had only to wait. He had prepared an anonymous email with a full account of events, including Lenoir’s photos, which would be sent automatically at ten that night from a public server, addressed to the criminal brigade of Paris, attention: Superintendent Loiseau.

  75

  Superintendent Olivier Loiseau was on the front page of the newspapers and on the radio and television. He was the man who had solved and exposed a murder in Poitiers and a brutal attack on an important director of a renowned French bank that had had four million euros diverted the previous day—the money was recovered fully, down to the last penny. Loiseau had also saved the life of a poor programmer kidnapped by mistake and abandoned in an old factory in the suburbs of Paris.

  The culprit had paid with his life, falling from the cliffs of the tax haven of Jersey while trying to destroy the evidence. The whereabouts of his accomplice, a woman with short dark hair, were still unknown—but not for long, promised the outstanding media superintendent.

  The case had collateral damage, such as the cautionary arrest of the representative of a well-known detective agency who had been leading a parallel investigation for some obscure reason that was sure to be revealed soon. The bank tried to justify why the diversion had not been revealed publicly, and especially how it was possible to divert so much money without having systems in place to avoid it. The bank’s customers began asking: Is our money safe?

  Everything had worked out as planned. The superintendent and his men came to liberate Henri at eleven that night. They wanted to transfer him to a hospital to be examined, but Henri refused, asking to be taken home so that he could have a shower and rest. The superintendent accepted, and the two policemen returned him safely while Loiseau was taken by private jet to Jersey, invited by the island’s authorities. A little publicity before the summer never went amiss, even if it came from a police case.

  A room at the Somerville Hotel was a gold mine of evidence. The great Superintendent Loiseau performed brilliantly, quickly piecing together every single element, thanks to his thorough investigation (and details he received in an anonymous email, which he had naturally not mentioned to anyone).

  When Pichon arrived home, twelve chimes from Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre announced midnight. He showered, shaved, and changed. When he was ready, he took the keys to Garibaldi’s garage, along with the plastic key ring, out of their hiding place and went out to the street through the garbage courtyard to lose any possible surveillance. He retrieved his car from a private garage on Boulevard de Rochechouart and got to Poitiers in record time.

  Garibaldi had collaborated on several projects with the bank, working closely on some of them with Pichon. They were never very close, but they did hold each other in high esteem. Although it didn’t fit with the strength projected by his appearance, the giant had an intense phobia of being attacked and had decided to protect his home. Henri had been there once to help the colossal redhead install a closed-circuit security network, so he knew that on the top of a closet in the main room, there was a series of discs piloted by a small computer, which collected recordings from eight cameras around the house, two of them outdoors. The giant could watch what they recorded live on his TV screen.

  Henri didn’t stay at Garibaldi’s for more than ten minutes, but he was lucky that the old woman across the road had fallen asleep at her post in the armchair. When he left, he put the key under a brick near the fence that was under construction.

  At nine in the morning, he was back and examining the security tapes. After much thought, he decided it wasn’t convenient for Morgane to rot in jail, despite what she had done—she knew too much, and besides, he had a more productive plan reserved for her.

  He had thought long and hard about the whole issue. He assumed part of the blame, since he had created and abused his little game at the bank. He had diverted pennies without getting caught, like a child pulling a string to see how far it can stretch without breaking, and he had not been very intelligent. But during those two decades, he had not caused any harm to anyone either.

  Greed had done the rest, and Jean-Philippe Maillard, Pierre-Gabriel, Morgane Duchène, and Herbert Lenoir’s greedy ways had got the better of them! But not Henri, and perhaps that was because he had the key to the treasure trove.

  Pierre-Gabriel was dead, Lenoir was under investigation and could lose his license, Maillard would never be the man he once was, and Morgane had lost everything. Now there was a video that incriminated her, a video where she could be seen taking off a short brown wig and later participating like a tigress in the brutal murder of Garibaldi.

  Henri pressed the “Send” button from Maillard’s cell phone. It would be its last use, and now he would turn it off and destroy it before throwing the pieces away in various trash cans around Paris. One last message from Maillard to his official lover, Morgane Duchène, asking her to please take care of him when he came out of the hospital, with love and dedication, until his last days. And if perchance Morgane were feeling hesitant, a little video attachment, called “Vacation in Poitiers,” should do away with any objections.

  76

  It was Sunday afternoon, and Henri smiled happily as he gazed at Tash sleeping naked. He hugged her, hoping they wouldn’t be separated again.

  That same morning, after Henri returned from disposing Maillard’s cell phone in the trash cans of Paris, he heard a knock on the door—he had been waiting for this visit and hoped he wasn’t mistaken.

  He opened the door to a beaming Tash, who was holding Émeraude in a travel bag. She set the cat on the floor and flung her arms around Henri’s neck, giving him the third most passionate kiss he had ever been given—it was becoming a habit, and he liked it.

  Superintendent Loiseau was the first to call Tash early in the morning to apologize for harassing her with the story about Pichon, then announcing the disappearance of her husband and the accusations that weighed on him.

  Loiseau, who was back from Jersey and had not slept all night, asked her to do him a favor and allow him to inspect her apartment without the unpleasant intervention of a judge.

  Tash accepted, and on the way she picked up Émeraude, whom she hadn’t seen for four days.

  “I thought I was going to find her starving, because Pierre-Gabriel never took much care of her, but she was half-dead on the floor, completely knocked out from indigestion. She would have burst at the seams if there had been any more food left in the bag.”

  “I
thought cats knew how to ration food.”

  “Not Émeraude—she must be the only cat in the world who eats whatever is put in front of her. I don’t know how Pierre-Gabriel thought up such an act of cruelty. Unless he did it to get back at me. From what Loiseau has told me, anything is possible.”

  “That’s terrible! I hope she gets better,” said Henri, a little embarrassed about his mistake.

  “I took her to the vet, and they purged her. In a few days, following a strict diet, she’ll be good as new.”

  Tash raised Émeraude’s bag to Henri’s eye level so that he could see her. The cat was lying down, sleeping peacefully.

  Henri invited Tash into Aunt Odette’s waxed home, and they sat peacefully on the quaint English sofa with a floral print, surrounded by hundreds of decorative objects resting on Breton white doilies. Tash looked at the reduced-size Impressionist reproductions on the walls, adorned with thick rococo golden frames that had turned green over the years. She sighed.

  Henri hastened to say, “All of this is going to disappear, and we’re going to renovate the apartment completely.”

  “I see you’ve started already—the rug in the hall has disappeared.”

  “Yes, I . . . gave it to a homeless man who was sleeping downstairs.”

  There was a silence, and Pichon returned the conversation to the superintendent’s visit to Tash’s apartment. “How was Loiseau’s inspection?”

  “Fine. First he made me sign a paper to give him authorization, then he went through everything, always in my presence. He asked if I’d noticed anything strange, but I said I hadn’t. Everything seemed normal. He showed me photographs of some of Pierre-Gabriel’s belongings that weren’t evidence for the investigation to see if I wanted them back.”

  “Anything special?”

  “He told me, off the record, that Pierre-Gabriel had increased his life insurance to one million euros on Thursday and that because his fall could be considered accidental, the payout will be multiplied by two. Do you realize we’re going to be millionaires?”