by Mark Hebden
‘It has to come off,’ the younger Ponsardin said.
‘Of course, mon vieux,’ his brother observed coldly. ‘That’s obvious.’
‘We need tools.’
‘That again is obvious. Unless you can get at it with your teeth.’ The younger Ponsardin stared round wildly. The car was his and his brother was always contemptuous about it – despite the fact that he never hesitated to take a lift in it. His eye fell on a small blue Renault down the road. It was on the grass under the trees, barely visible in the lights of their car, and they could see there was a man in it.
‘I’ll go and ask him,’ he said.
His brother stared at the car. ‘Better you than me, mon brave,’ he said. ‘He’s probably got a woman with him – probably, even, somebody else’s woman.’
‘Well, we’ve got to do something. And his car looks new. Perhaps he has some tools.’
‘Perhaps even he has an engine.’
The younger Ponsardin ignored the insult. ‘If he hasn’t,’ he said, ‘he might give us a tow to the top of the hill. It’s downhill all the way from there to Orgny.’
‘What do we use for a tow rope?’ his brother asked. ‘Or perhaps it’s your intention, mon brave, that I clutch his rear axle with one hand and your front axle with the other and swing between them with my feet on the fenders.’
The younger Ponsardin allowed himself a dirty look and set off walking. Reaching the car, he struck a match. Vallois-Dot was in the driver’s seat, leaning towards the side of the car with his head at an angle, his spectacles crooked on his nose. Ponsardin didn’t recognise him at first and decided he was a commercial traveller sleeping off the wine he’d had at dinner, and was worried about waking him. But at least there was nobody else in the car and he was more worried about what his brother would say if he didn’t. He tapped on the glass.
The man in the car didn’t move and, then, Ponsardin saw a black trickle of what looked like dried blood along his throat. Moving warily to the other side of the car, he recognised Vallois-Dot, whom he knew well, and saw that he had burn marks on his right ear, and blood on his face which had run down and round his throat as his head leaned to the left, to show in the small dried trickle on the left side of his neck that he’d seen from the other side of the car. His flesh was grey and his right eye, unlike his left, was still open, staring in mad fashion at Ponsardin.
Ponsardin’s jaw dropped. ‘Oh, mon dieu,’ he said and set off running.
Goaded by anxiety and the fact that the murderer might still be lurking in the trees, the Ponsardin brothers had pushed the Deux Chevaux to the brow of the hill. It was a long way, but the body in the blue Renault provided the extra incentive and, jumping in, sweating profusely, they had coasted down the hill to Orgny.
Massu moved fast. As his car had swung out from in front of the Maine, he had run into Darcy’s car as he’d left the post office. Vallois-Dot had not been at home and his wife had had no idea where he’d gone, and Darcy had been on the way to contact Massu to ask if he knew what it was all about. The screech of brakes had brought the two cars to an abrupt stop, but with no damage other than a broken wing lamp on Massu’s Renault van.
When Pel arrived, lights had already been rigged up and Massu and Darcy were waiting for him, looking frozen.
‘This one,’ Darcy said, indicating the body, ‘was involved in the other one – the murder at the calvary.’
Pel looked at him quickly. ‘Why do you say that, mon brave?’
‘Because he knew about it. He knew about it before I did.’
‘He did?’
Darcy told him of his meeting with Vallois-Dot when he’d gone into Orgny to report the murder at the calvary.
‘He knew about it before I got down there. I’ve asked Massu and he says he didn’t tell him before they left. Neither did Weyl.’
‘Perhaps he listened in on the telephone,’ Pel said. ‘It’s a manual exchange. Was he a nosey type?’
‘Judging by the way he tried to pump me, he was.’
They examined the body carefully. The Orgny postmaster had been shot through the head, and the gun appeared to have been placed in the hole of his right ear.
Pel stared at the body, frowning deeply, while Judge Polverari sniffed about nearby.
‘Don’t you think we ought to find a telephone?’ he asked. ‘And suggest to the Chief that he puts out another statement to the Press that’s a lot firmer.’
‘Hold it a little while, Judge,’ Pel suggested. ‘Let’s have a talk with his wife.’
Vallois-Dot’s wife was a small woman. She’d been preparing for bed when they arrived and, agitated because her husband was out late, had assumed at once that they’d arrived to tell her he’d been hurt in a road accident. Standing under the harsh light of an electric bulb in a flat glass shade, her face was strained and terrified. She and her husband had no children and she had helped him in the post office as a paid servant of the government.
‘What am I going to do now?’ she wailed. ‘They won’t allow me to stay here. I’m not qualified. I’m only the clerk. I shall have to leave the house and I’ve been here all my married life.’
‘Had your husband any enemies?’ Pel asked her.
‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
That was something Pel had heard said of more than one murdered man and it didn’t mean much.
She had no idea what her husband had been doing on the hillside where he had been found. He had set off for the warehouse at Savoie St Juste to get a few bottles of wine for a party they were to give for her mother’s birthday.
‘There was no sign of wine in the car,’ Pel pointed out. ‘So he obviously didn’t go there. Did he receive any unexpected telephone calls?’
Madame Vallois-Dot dabbed at her eyes. He was always receiving calls, she said. Official ones. But she hadn’t noticed any that were unofficial. She wasn’t normally even in the post office except when her husband was busy, when he pressed a bell to summon her. Then, because the exchange wasn’t automatic, she handled the telephone.
Pel paused to let her get her breath. ‘Were there any letters he didn’t let you read?’ he asked.
No, she said. Her husband was a straightforward man who spent most of his spare time in the garden, chiefly making fires.
‘What of?’
‘Garden refuse. Cartons. Old papers. The refuse collection’s not very good here. They let everything blow everywhere.’ Through her grief, Madame Vallois-Dot tried hard to look important. ‘You can’t do that with government papers – not even in a village post office. I saw him burning a blanket the other week.’
Pel glanced at Darcy. ‘When?’
‘A week ago. A fortnight ago. I’m not sure.’
‘Can you be more certain?’
‘Well, it was soon after all that fuss up at Orgny.’
‘Was it your blanket?’
‘No, it wasn’t. It was an old one. Brown. I don’t have brown blankets. Mine are white. And I wash them regularly. Not like some people.’ Madame Vallois-Dot sniffed. ‘We have a bit of pride.’
Pel jerked her back to the line of questioning. ‘This blanket,’ he said. ‘Did your husband say where it came from?’
‘He said he’d used it in the chicken house. It was an old army one he’d found by the roadside some time ago. He used it to catch the feathers while he was plucking and cleaning the birds, and it was beginning to smell.’
Pel rubbed his nose and stared at his feet. ‘What else did he do with his spare time?’ he asked.
‘He always behaved himself.’ Madame Vallois-Dot drew herself up. ‘Not like some people. Sometimes he went across to the bar in the evening or when we closed at lunch time. But not often. You can’t afford to drink much on a postmaster’s salary.’
‘Who were his friends?’
She looked bewildered. ‘Nobody special. He didn’t belong to any societies and he had no special interest. Just his job and the house and garden and the chickens. And me. That’s
all. He was a very quiet man. They’d just be the people he met when he went in the bar, I suppose. The farmer along the street. The manager of the warehouse. Monsieur Heutelet. The landlord. Jean-Pierre Ferrier, who runs the garage. Sergeant Massu, of course, and Jean-Phillippe Weyl, his constable; the sub-station’s at the back of the post office and our bit of land adjoins the yard where they park their van. The baker. Albert Grévy, from Bussy-la-Fontaine. Most of the people in the village, I’d say.’
‘Monsieur Piot?’
‘Yes, of course. Monsieur Piot. He often went in the bar. I never saw him with anyone else, though. He didn’t go to football matches and he didn’t look at other women.’
Georges Vallois-Dot appeared to have been a paragon of virtue. But there was obviously a flaw in his character somewhere for someone to want to shoot him.
‘Had he been worried lately?’ Pel asked.
She sighed. He hadn’t been his usual self. He’d been quiet, brooding a little, but she had no idea why. Sometimes he had snapped at her, and that wasn’t normal. ‘He adored me,’ she said. Of course, her husband wasn’t really a happy man. Being a postmaster wasn’t much of a job and the Vallois family had once had money. At least, she thought they had.
‘He often felt his life was wasted here at Orgny,’ she said. ‘He felt he ought to have tried to do something else.’
What, Pel wondered. Smuggling? They weren’t far from the Swiss frontier. Some other sort of illicit deal? Madame Vallois-Dot’s next words made him realise it was probably nothing of the sort.
‘I think he was frightened,’ she said.
‘What of?’
She shrugged. She didn’t know, but she’d noticed he had been like this for about a fortnight.
‘He rang the Hôtel de Police,’ Darcy said. ‘From a call box somewhere. He said he had something to tell us. Perhaps he heard something on the telephone, as he connected sombody up.’
If he had, she said, she had no idea what it was.
‘What about the night of the 13th?’ Pel asked. ‘Do you know where he was that night?’
At first she thought he would have been watching television, but then she remembered that one night he had gone across to the bar.
‘It might have been the 13th,’ she agreed. He had been out late and she had been angry with him when he returned.
‘That was the night of the murder at Bussy,’ Pel said quietly. ‘Did he say where he’d been?’
She shrugged. ‘He just said he got talking and forgot the time.’
While Pel and Darcy were occupicd the next day at Orgny with Doctor Minet, Leguyader and the rest of the tribe of experts, Nosjean was busy with another of his visits to the hospital.
Bique à Poux looked frailer than before and it was Nosjean’s firm opinion that it was because he was having to wash and shave, keep regular hours, and above all, because he was living in the overheated atmosphere of the hospital.
‘When are they going to let me out?’ he wailed.
‘When you’re better,’ Nosjean said, though privately he’d heard from Catherine Deneuve’s younger sister that the old man’s condition, if anything, was worse rather than improved. It was Nosjean’s opinion, in fact, that authority, in the shape of Doctor Minet and Judge Brisard, ought to have had more sense. Heart or no heart, they were killing the old man by depriving him of the things he’d had most of his life – freedom, fresh air, and dirt.
‘Are they keeping me here because of that murder?’ Bique à Poux asked.
‘Which murder?’
‘The one at the calvary.’
‘What do you know of that apart from what you heard in the Bois Carré?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Were you at the calvary before you went to the Bois Carré?’ The old man’s eyes dilated, then became narrow and wary. ‘No.’
Nosjean eyed him. ‘I think you were,’ he insisted. What made him say it, he wasn’t sure, but he was suddenly certain that the old man was on the point of a confession and that a little shoving would produce it.
‘I was only there for a little while,’ the old man said. ‘Because I heard the voices in the field.’
‘What were you doing there, anyway?’
‘After rabbits.’
‘At the cross?’ Nosjean’s eyebrows went up. ‘I’d have thought the edge of the wood would have been a much better place. Rabbits live on the edge of fields, not deep in a wood. Especially under pine trees. Nothing grows under pine trees. Rabbit colonies don’t spread there. They go where there’s food. Why were you at the cross? Come on, let’s have it.’
The old man shifted uneasily. ‘I was waiting,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘What for?’
‘Nothing. Just waiting.’
‘You don’t “just wait” in the middle of a wood in the middle of the night for nothing.’
‘I do. I often do. I just wait and listen to the sounds of the animals – the night animals. Listening to the trees. You can hear the grass growing and the buds opening in spring.’
Nosjean could well believe that this was one of the old man’s gifts, but this time he felt he was lying.
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘I went back to my camp.’
‘Do you often prowl round like that?’
‘Yes. I told you. I see some funny things. I once saw Matajcek counting his money.’
‘What money? He never had any money.’
‘He did this time.’
‘Matajcek?’ This was news, because, judging by the condition of his home, Matajcek hadn’t enough money to rub two centimes together.
‘He did this time,’ Bique à Poux insisted again. ‘He had a lot.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t count it. But he had it in piles.’
‘Notes?’
‘Yes. And some of them were big ones. He had it spread out under the lamp in little stacks.’ Bique à Poux paused and ended with a rush. ‘There was another man with him.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No.’
‘What was he like?’
Bique à Poux considered before answering. ‘Not the sort of man I’d have fancied meeting in the woods after dark,’ he said.
Nosjean drove back to the Hôtel de Police in a thoughtful mood. It was raining again and there was snow in it that smeared across the windscreen of his car.
Pel was sitting in his office with Darcy. They were both wet through and they looked tired. Pel had the cigarette roller on the desk and was concentrating on making a cigarette.
‘They say you get the hang after a while,’ he was saying.
‘You’ve had it a fortnight,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘And they still look as if you’d picked them out of the litter bin.’
They listened to Nosjean’s story with interest and Pel looked at Darcy, who shrugged.
‘What do we know about this Matajcek?’ he asked.
‘Nothing much, chief,’ Darcy said. ‘Except that he came here just before the war when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia.’
Pel gestured at Nosjean. ‘Check with the banks at Orgny and Savoie St Juste. See if Matajcek has an account. Then get half a dozen men from the uniformed branch and get out to Matajcek’s place and take it apart. Look for disturbed earth. He might have been the sort to bury his money. Peasants don’t trust banks. If there is money and it’s a lot, I want to know where it came from. Is Lagé still near his bed?’
‘Yes, Patron,’ Nosjean said. ‘I had a word with him after I left Bique à Poux. Matajcek’s still unconscious.’
‘Right. Off you go.’
Nosjean was lucky. He found out after only five minutes on the telephone that Matajcek had an account with Crédit Lyonnais at Savoie St Juste, so he drove out there at once and demanded to see the manager.
In the best tradition of bank officials, the manager was inclined to be unhelpful about private accounts, but when Nosjean produced his badge, he finally produced Mat
ajcek’s file.
‘He has an account of one hundred and forty-five thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three francs,’ he said. ‘With a little more for interest.’
‘One hundred and forty-five thousand francs!’ Nosjean whistled. He couldn’t imagine himself ever having one hundred and forty-five thousand francs in the bank. It was true Matajcek wasn’t a man who went in for a wild life but, with half a dozen cows, half a dozen pigs and a few chickens, Nosjean couldn’t see him even making a profit after he’d fed himself. He certainly hadn’t spent anything on clothes because there wasn’t even a wardrobe at Vaucheretard – nothing but an old coat, a hat and a pair of down-at-heel banana-yellow rubber boots by the back door.
It seemed a good idea to collect his six uniformed men and get out to the farm.
The check on the teeth of the victim found at the calvary had got them nowhere, and the general request for a check on commercial travellers occupied with the border areas had also produced nothing.
However, the sergeant at Savoie St Juste claimed to have seen a car resembling Vallois-Dot’s Renault near his sub-station on the evening he’d been killed.
‘It was in the square near the telephone box,’ he said.
‘See Vallois-Dot?’ Pel asked.
‘I don’t know him. He wasn’t in the car, though. I’m certain of that. He might have been anywhere.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Evening. He was supposed to be visiting the warehouse, wasn’t he?’
‘The warehouse closes at six,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘What was the time when you saw his car.’
‘Nearer eight.’
‘That’s when he telephoned me.’
All it indicated with certainty was that Vallois-Dot, who had a government telephone at his disposal, which he’d doubtless used for his own purposes on more than one occasion, had chosen to use a public call box – and a public call box at Savoie St Juste, when he could have used the one at Orgny. Why?
‘There’s one thing,’ Darcy said. ‘Whoever did him in wouldn’t know he’d been in touch with the police. He must have gone straight from the phone to meet whoever it was who killed him, up there where he was found.’