Pel and the Faceless Corpse

by Mark Hebden

  ‘At least he shows initiative.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let him fool you.’ Piot’s smile grew wider. ‘Now he’s big and fat. But when he was young he was just big. He was taken prisoner in 1940 and he escaped. He killed a guard dog and a guard, and on the way back a German policeman. He arrived home fit and well and promptly joined the Resistance!’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I was in the Resistance, too.’

  ‘You don’t look old enough.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was sixteen and a half when the war ended. But I had my moments, too. I fell for a girl I met cycling. She was pretty, she was French, and she was friendly. I discovered later she was in the pay of the Germans. I was lucky. I was warned about her in time.’

  ‘Your family have always lived in these parts?’

  Piot’s smile was warm. ‘I’m a Burgundian. Anybody with a name ending in “ot’s” a good Burgundian.’

  Pel sniffed. He was a good Burgundian too, and proud of it. He was so Burgundian, in fact, that when foreigners, talking of wines, mentioned Bordeaux, he was inclined to ask ‘What’s that?’

  He rose and moved round the table to the side farthest from the fire. With all the sweaters he’d put on, he was beginning to feel a bit like a boiled turkey.

  ‘Ever see Grévy with anybody around here?’ he asked.

  Piot got the point at once. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The police called occasionally on enquiries, because this place is lonely, and they sometimes arrive to ask if we’ve seen someone in the woods they’re looking for.’

  Pel’s mind went at once to the four men who’d murdered the police at St Symphorien. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No. Though sometimes I bump into Emile Heutelet. He owns L’Hermitage, the farm adjoining my land. He’s retired now and his sons run the place. But he doesn’t enjoy doing nothing so he does deliveries for the wine warehouse at Savoie St Juste. He calls at outlying farms en route to see old friends and take an occasional glass of wine.’ Piot paused. ‘And, so it’s said, because he’s a handsome man still, to indulge a little with a wife when her husband’s away.’

  ‘Anybody else ever come here?’

  ‘Perhaps another garde forestier or someone from one of the other estates. Farm machinery agents trying to sell something. Pumps, tractors. That sort of thing. We get them as well. But not many. It’s one of Madame Grévy’s complaints that she never sees anyone.

  ‘Does she have boyfriends?’ Pel asked. ‘When her husband goes to the bar?’

  Piot shrugged, his eyes suddenly blank and shuttered. ‘You’d better ask her,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ Pel pointed out.

  ‘I still think you’d better ask her.’

  Three

  Orgny stood at the bottom of the winding hill that came down from Butte-Avelan and, like so many places in that part of Burgundy, it had a lost look, full of old crooked buildings built of heavy timbers and enormous grey stones. Yet its few shops were up-to-date and there was a garage and a hotel with a large bar where, if the landlord was in a good mood and it wasn’t too much trouble, you could put up for the night. It had been exactly the same for generations, cut off from the mainstream of events, so that the names on the new gravestones in the churchyard were the same names that were in the old registers, families which had been born there for centuries, receiving their Confirmation and their first Communion there before marrying and finally dying and being buried there. Only nowadays, with motor cars and television, was it beginning to change and its people getting the itch to leave.

  There was a lot of snow at the bottom of the hill, as if it had drifted on the wind, and Darcy almost slid into the village. The street was empty except for the owner of the bar, red-nosed and muffled to the eyes, who was sweeping the pavement outside his door.

  Driving into the Maine, Darcy swung his car round the side past the police office and parked at the back alongside a small Renault which he recognised as belonging to Massu’s constable, Weyl.

  ‘They’re both out,’ a voice called as he climbed from the car and, looking up, he saw a man in the garden adjoining the police parking area.

  ‘I know,’ Darcy said.

  ‘There’s been a murder.’

  Darcy looked at the speaker, who was standing by a chicken run, holding a bucket of seed. At his feet a few scrawny birds pecked.

  ‘How do you know?’ Darcy said.

  ‘They told me as they went. If you want to use a telephone, you can use ours. I’m the postmaster. Georges Vallois-Dot.’

  Darcy studied him for a second. He was a tall man, gangling, moustached and spectacled, who stooped from years of bending over a desk. His face was pale with the pallor of a man who spent his days indoors, and he had an uncertain air as though he had never in his life been sure of himself.

  ‘They always use our phone if theirs goes out of order,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s official, you see. The post office. Government, just the same.

  As Darcy turned away, the postmaster spoke again. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  Darcy gave him a cold look but it didn’t seem to put him off and he went on chattering in his nervous manner as he tossed handfuls of seed at the chickens.

  ‘We’ve never had anything like this before here,’ he said. ‘Accidents occasionally. Sometimes a lorry runs away coming down the hill. Those heavy ones, pulling trailers. They come down the bypass flat out, to get up speed to go up the other side and if someone just happens to come out from the village, wham, they jack-knife. It’s a wonder nobody’s killed. You’re very welcome to use our telephone. I shan’t listen.’

  ‘You won’t get a chance, mon vieux,’ Darcy smiled. ‘I shan’t be using it. I have the key to the sub-station.’

  The Chief wanted to know all the details and the Proc asked if they’d arrested anyone, while the Palais de Justice, who seemed not to possess a map, wanted to know exactly where it was and how to get there. By the time Darcy had finished and returned to Bussy-la-Fontaine, Pel was ready to leave. There were policemen everywhere by now and the press had arrived – the usual lot, Sarrazin, the freelance; Henriot, from Le Bien Public; and Fiabon, from France Dimanche and Paris Soir, looking for something juicy.

  ‘Is it anything to do with the murder of those two cops at St Symphorien, Inspector?’ Sarrazin asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Pel said. ‘See Massu. He can tell you all we know.’

  Darcy appeared from the car. ‘Where to, Patron?’ he asked.

  Pel gestured. ‘Let’s go and see this farmer – Heutelet. He may have heard or seen something.’

  Nosjean was in the back of the car, waiting for a lift back to the city, and he was dragging on a cigarette as if his life depended on it.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Pel asked. ‘Got the cafard? Or is it just your girlfriend?’

  Nosjean shifted uncomfortably. ‘Girlfriend, Patron.’

  ‘Chucked you again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pel eased himself into his seat. ‘I thought this time it was deathless,’ he said.

  ‘It was.’ Nosjean sighed. ‘But last night she said it was finished.’ The fields of L’Hermitage, the farm next door, touched against Piot’s forest land. It was a big farm, well run, with cared-for approach roads and borders, and well-repaired buildings. Emile Heutelet was still a handsome man with a strong body, white hair and a ready smile, and since retirement, with the farmhouse now occupied by his two sons and their families, he lived in a wing at the back with his wife.

  ‘I heard no shots,’ he said. ‘But you could hardly expect me to, could you? We’re in a valley here and Bussy-la-Fontaine’s high up. Sound plays funny tricks. When you’re three storeys up you don’t hear the noise of the traffic. It’s the same when you’re three storeys below. Sound doesn’t go round corners.’

  ‘See any strangers about?’

  ‘No.’ Heutelet gestured. ‘You can’t get out here without a car, so it’s always b
een quiet. That’s why I was chosen to run the Resistance during the war.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘For two years. We’ve not had as many people here since 1944, when the Germans looted Baron de Mougy’s château at Sainte Monique. They hid the stuff in the woods up here somewhere.’

  Pel had heard the story. ‘Was it ever found?’

  ‘No. The woods were full of German police and they did a lot of digging but nothing turned up.’

  It seemed sense, while they were there, to call on Laco Matajcek who owned the land called Vaucheretard on the other side of Bussy-la-Fontaine. If he was close enough to try to steal its land, he was probably close enough to see someone about.

  Vaucheretard was about a hundred feet higher on the next hill, and just that much colder. The snow had changed to rain and it was sluicing down when they arrived. The place looked like a derelict heap of bricks and timbers dumped by out-of-work builders; Pel took one look at it and promptly lit a Gauloise. This was no time for worrying about cancer, he decided, and the roller machine was best left in his pocket.

  Matajcek opened the kitchen door at their knock but he obviously had no intention of asking them in. Standing in the rain, Pel put his questions, but for replies received only monosyllables. Matajcek had seen nobody, never did see anybody, and never wanted to see anybody.

  Beyond him, through the curtain of rain drops from the lintel, they could see into the kitchen. It contained a long, old-fashioned sofa covered with filthy blankets, and even at the door they caught the stink of dirt, decaying food and chickens.

  ‘How about Madame Matajcek?’ Pel asked. ‘Would she perhaps have seen anyone?’

  Matajcek, a square-shouldered man with pale piercing eyes, had the flat face of a Russian moujik, and his expression showed a clear resentment at their presence and a hostility towards Pel he did nothing to hide.

  His wife wasn’t there, he told them in a thick Slav accent, and when they persisted, he admitted only that she had gone, so that it finally dawned on them that she’d probably gone off with another man, and that perhaps it was from this fact that Matajcek’s resentment sprang. No man welcomed questions when his wife had just run out on him.

  As they left, Pel’s nose wrinkled, and Massu smiled. ‘He’s not known for washing a lot,’ he said.

  ‘What does he live on?’ Pel asked.

  Massu’s big shoulders shrugged. ‘A few cattle, a few pigs, a few chickens. He grows his own foodstuff and spends all his time here. Just goes occasionally to Chatillon for tools, or to Orgny or Savoie St Juste for paraffin or coffee – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Know him well?’

  Massu scowled. ‘I tangled with him once or twice. Over Heurion’s boundary, for instance. He once threatened me with a shotgun.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He ended up flat on his back.’

  Back at the Hôtel de Police, Pel stalked to his room. Almost at once, the telephone rang. It was Brisard, the juge d’instruction, wanting to know what was happening.

  Brisard was an interfering busybody who couldn’t leave things alone. Inflexible, guided by principles, and determined to be determined, he always failed to be because he was a weak character.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ Pel said. ‘We’ve only just heard about it.’

  ‘I’d better go up there and have a look round.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pel said. ‘You had.’

  Perhaps Brisard would get wet feet, he thought, and, with a bit of luck, pneumonia and die. He didn’t like Brisard. He was a tall overweight man, young for his office, who laid heavy stress on his devotion to his family. Pel knew it was all eyewash because he’d once seen him in Beaune with a woman who’d turned out to be the widow of a police officer.

  ‘Is there nothing to identify the victim?’ Brisard asked.

  ‘So far, nothing, judge. Underclothing and socks. That’s all.’

  ‘Who put you on to it?’

  ‘The garde. He was found on private land.’

  ‘Is it worth having the garde brought in?’

  ‘Not yet, judge. It’s too early.’

  ‘If only that place could talk!’

  If only people could manage to talk, Pel thought bitterly.

  As he put the telephone down, it rang again immediately. This time it was Doctor Minet.

  Pel could just imagine him at his marble slab, busy at the autopsy. He was cheerful and brisk and liked to chain-smoke as he worked. Sometimes Pel had to be present when he carved up the cadavres that came in, and he always stood well back, nauseated and trying not to look.

  ‘Our friend in the Forêt d’Orgny,’ Minet said. ‘Dead about eight hours, I think.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Fair complexion. From the north probably. Certainly not a Meridional.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Six wounds in the head. You saw them. I don’t have to describe them. None of them killed him. It was cutting his throat that did that.’

  Pel was silent for a moment. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘Tattoo mark on right forearm.’ Minet sounded pleased with himself. ‘Old wound in left calf. Looked like a bullet wound.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Oh, mon dieu! Thirty years. Forty perhaps. From the war, I imagine.’

  ‘There must have been a hundred thousand Frenchmen wounded in the war,’ Pel said flatly. ‘Of which I imagine perhaps ten thousand were hit in the leg. That doesn’t help us much. Is that the lot?’

  ‘Well preserved,’ Minet went on. ‘Probably good-looking in his youth. The nose isn’t disfigured and it’s neat. Good jaw-line. That’s about all I can tell you. Fair hair, slightly reddish, but now going grey. Blue eyes. About one metre eighty tall. Well-built. Running to fat, but just according to his age.’

  ‘Teeth?’

  ‘His own.’

  ‘I’ll send Nosjean over for the details. Perhaps some dentist will know who he is. And have that tattoo photographed and sent to the Lab, will you? What about the bullet?’

  ‘We found two altogether. One in the ground. One in the remains of the skull. I’ve sent them to Ballistics. I think they were from a Mathurin-Walther .38.’

  ‘Like mine?’

  Minet chuckled. ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’

  The weather continued to improve during the evening, but even at that you could hardly have called it good. The temperature rose a little and the sleety rain effectively cleared the grey slush from the streets. By late afternoon the city was no longer beautiful under its mantle of white and was just cold and cheerless, the lights from the shops reflected on the black and shining pavements.

  Darcy’s check on the forestry workers proved a dead loss. The Langres firm had stopped using them three years before and Sordet Brothers at Chatillon only employed four, all of whom had a cast-iron alibi. Even the photographs of the dead man’s tattoo that Nosjean brought back from the Lab showed very little. It consisted of a curve with, above it, the remains of two straight lines ending in what looked like double circles. Beneath it was what appeared to be the remains of a number from which they could just make out an 0. Or was it part of a 6, or a 9 or even an 8? Or could the marks even have been letters?

  ‘Anchor?’ Darcy suggested, staring at it over Pel’s shoulder. ‘With the name of a ship? Could he have been a sailor?’

  ‘In Burgundy?’ Pel asked. ‘You’re about as far from the sea here as you can get in Europe.’

  ‘He might have been a sailor during the war, Patron. He’s about the right age.’

  ‘He might also be one of that lot from St Etienne who shot those cops. They’ve nothing to lose now, and Doc Minet thinks it was done with a .38. Two .38s are missing.’

  ‘We’re two hundred kilometres from St Etienne, Patron.’

  ‘Two hours’ driving time,’ Pel scowled. ‘No trouble at all.’

  ‘But why undress him and blow his head to bits? Why cut his throat?’

  It didn’t stand up and even P
el had to accept it.

  ‘Besides,’ Darcy said. ‘Men of his age don’t go in for robbing banks. They don’t move fast enough. You have to be nippy on your feet for that.’

  As Pel sat back and took out his little cigarette-making machine, Darcy pushed a packet of Gauloises across. ‘Why not have a real one?’ he asked.

  Pel made a great show of ignoring him. ‘Get on to Missing Persons,’ he said. ‘Find out if anybody fitting the description we have has vanished from home.’

  ‘It isn’t usually men of fifty-odd who disappear from home,’ Darcy said dryly. ‘It’s usually kids. Young girls.’

  ‘You’ll know something about that, of course.’

  Darcy was unmoved. ‘I’m a great one for breaking up homes,’ he said.

  He was only boasting, of course, because he always seemed to know exactly when to back off, something that stirred the envious Nosjean to cataclysms of bitterness.

  Pel was bent over his little gadget of rollers and rubber. The operation took a great deal of time and Darcy watched, fascinated.

  ‘Is it because you’re afraid of cancer or for the exercise?’ he asked.

  Pel gave him a sour look. ‘I’ve nearly given them up,’ he said. ‘I’ve cut them down a lot.’

  ‘What to?’

  Pel sighed. ‘About twenty million a day.’

  Pel drove home slowly in the dark. He’d tried ringing Leguyader to find out if the Lab had discovered anything, but Leguyader, while prepared to work flat out if necessary, wasn’t prepared to accommodate anybody that much, and Pel felt frustrated.

  It was not an uncommon emotion with Pel. Though he was one of the most successful detectives outside Paris or Marseilles, he suffered from a permanent feeling of failure. His car was old, his house was falling down, nobody loved him because he’d never married and had no family, he was approaching his pension and was still only an inspector living in abject poverty and great discomfort. The fact that he’d stacked away his wages over the years with the parsimony of a peasant, investing them carefully for his still far-distant old age, completely failed to be taken into account. According to Pel, Inspector Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel was a sad case.