by Mark Hebden
Only Darcy’s discovery of the map of Bussy-la-Fontaine at Dôle seemed to suggest a lead.
‘That former secretary of Piot’s,’ Pel said. ‘What do you make of her?’
‘Beautiful,’ Darcy kissed his fingertips.
‘As a suspect, I mean.’
Darcy shrugged. ‘Hard-headed. Enigmatic. Clever. In bed, too, I’ve no doubt, because she has an experienced look in her eye.’
‘How do you know?’
Darcy smiled. ‘I have one myself.’
Pel frowned. ‘Take another look at her,’ he suggested.
As Darcy left, Pel studied the notes he’d made on his blotter. Grévy, he’d written. Madame Grévy. Emile Heutelet. Bique à Poux. None of them seemed to fit somehow. Matajcek was just the type, he felt, but he couldn’t have killed Vallois-Dot, and somehow he felt that the attack on Matajcek had nothing to do with the other case. But why didn’t Madame Matajcek contact them? The information that she was being sought had been in the newspapers for days now and she must have seen it.
There was, he decided, something still missing somewhere.
Darcy set about watching Marie-Claire Jacquemin quite simply by watching Piot first.
He parked his car on the high land at Butte-Avelan just beyond Bussy-la-Fontaine where he could look down without being seen on to the road past the entrance to the drive. At six-thirty in the evening, he saw Piot’s Mercedes pull out and head towards the east. Putting his car in motion, he set off after him. He hadn’t a cat in hell’s chance of keeping up with a Merc in a Peugeot, but there was a lot of traffic on the road that slowed Piot down and he was able to keep him in sight long enough to realise he was heading for Dôle, as he’d expected.
At Dôle, he prowled round the town until he saw the Merc parked outside a restaurant, so he halted across the road, had a word with the policeman on duty in the square who wanted to pull him in for parking, and sat watching from behind a newspaper.
At nine-thirty, Piot reappeared and, as Darcy had expected, he was accompanied by Marie-Claire Jacquemin. She was clinging to his arm, looking up at him and laughing.
They climbed into the Merc and set off out of the centre of the town. Darcy followed. On the outskirts, there was a neat white house in a tidy garden and they swung into the drive and went inside, Marie-Claire Jacquemin opening the door with a key from her handbag.
Finding a well-shadowed place under the trees, Darcy pulled up his collar and sat back to watch. It was going to be a long cold wait, he decided.
It was. He was there until next morning.
As he watched Piot drive away in the growing daylight, he decided that the ramifications of the thing were growing and, as usual, with everybody trying to hide their misdeeds, they were all lying like lunatics. Piot obviously wasn’t digging dams. And Marie-Claire Jacquemin wasn’t just running his works for fun, but so that he could spend his time at Bussy-la-Fontaine. Was Grévy involved too? After all, Darcy had seen him on the digger and surely Piot would never trust him with the chance of finding the loot unless he were. And where did Madame Grévy fit in?
Probably nowhere, he thought bitterly. Probably none of them did. All sorts of things appeared to have malevolent meanings until a case was cleared up, when they turned out to be quite innocent, purely coincidental or just dirty little affairs that just happened to have come to light.
It seemed to be time to find a bar for breakfast.
Marie-Claire Jacquemin was surprised to see Darcy again when he turned up at her office, and this time not half so pleased. She looked at him like a housewife at a broken-down washing machine, and he noticed also that Danielle Delaporte was no longer in the office next door.
‘I don’t like the police coming here to pump my employees,’ Marie-Claire Jacquemin snapped.
Darcy was unmoved. ‘The police have to do their work,’ he said.
‘I could have you turned off these premises,’ she said.
Darcy smiled. ‘And I, mademoiselle, could very probably have you arrested.’
‘What for?’
‘Conspiracy.’
She sneered. ‘Conspiracy to do what?’
‘To rob the Baron de Mougy.’ He gestured at the wall. ‘You discovered the original of that map in a book which had belonged to him and, instead of returning it to him, as you should have, or at least showing it to him, you passed it on to Paul-Edouard Piot who promptly started to dig up Bussy-la-Fontaine for the loot from the Baron’s place that he felt sure was marked on it. If he were to find it, it would be stealing by finding and you would be involved.’
Her face fell.
Darcy smiled. ‘I even suspect that your friend, Piot, paid court to the Baronne and got her into bed at your instigation. To find out what he could about it. Am I right?’
Her cheeks reddened. ‘What proof have you?’
‘Well, contrary to what you told me and what you tell other people, you’ve never broken with him.’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Then what was he doing in your house – and doubtless in your bed – from nine-thirty last night until seven-thirty this morning when you left for work and he went in the direction of Butte-Avelan?’
She flushed. ‘You were watching?’
‘I wish I could have got closer.’
‘You’re nothing but a damned voyeur!’
Darcy smiled. ‘It’s one of the pleasanter perks of police work. We often do it. Especially when the woman’s as attractive as you are and we think someone’s telling lies. What were you getting out of it? A cut if they found the loot?’
While Pel had been visiting the Baronne and Darcy had been watching Piot and Marie-Claire Jacquemin, Nosjean had been tearing Matajcek’s farm apart. It had gone on all the previous day and well into the evening.
That morning, the men working during the night had been relieved and Nosjean, after slipping into Savoie St Juste for coffee and rolls, had returned to supervise.
It was bitterly cold again and the sky was leaden. The earlier frost had brought down a lot of leaves and they lay now, brown and withered, on the frozen mud, the branches above stark against the iron sky.
Cold and bored, Nosjean had helped about the farm for some time and in the end had wandered off into the woods. They’d all been so busy searching the farmhouse and so much had happened, nobody had properly checked Bique à Poux’s hideout. It had been his intention to do it long since, but the discovery of Vallois-Dot’s body had thrown things out of joint a little and it seemed now was a good time to put things right.
Leaving his men busy round the farm buildings, he walked through the trees to where Bique à Poux’s camp lay. It looked exactly the same as before – spartan and curiously lonely and damp-looking in the icy mist, now that it was unoccupied and the fire was dead. It seemed to be full of empty bottles and opened cans and there were tracks of mice and small woodland animals, as though, in the absence of its owner, they’d come exploring for food. There was a saw in the lean-to, he noticed, an axe, a butcher’s cleaver, and a thin knife, all sharp; and as he poked about, he noticed there were a great number of feathers, some of them black and white like the feathers of Matajcek’s Marans. There were also a lot of chicken bones – wing bones, leg bones and breast bones.
Nosjean smiled, deciding that at least he’d found the identity of the chicken stealer who’d been bothering the district. Then, opening the tent and turning over more rags, he found himself staring at a parcel carefully wrapped in old clothing. Unfastening it, he found a plastic sheet, and, unfastening it further, found inside a deadly, long-bladed knife of the sort issued to commandos during the war. Alongside it was an old and heavy British Colt .45 revolver, four of its chambers full of bullets.
He turned the two weapons over in his hands, holding them carefully with a handkerchief. Unlike the rest of the camp, which was as filthy as Bique à Poux had been, they were carefully cleaned and lightly oiled, and as he worked the chamber of the revolver, it moved easily.
> Nosjean thought for a while, then went on exploring. Almost immediately, he found three more bullets in a tin. But they didn’t fit the heavy Colt and he realised they were .38 calibre like his own gun. Putting them carefully in a small plastic bag which he took from his pocket, he poked around a little more, suddenly excited, and almost immediately found a blue paper band printed ‘1000 Francs’, and rubber stamped ‘Crédit Lyonnais, Firmin’. He stared at it, frowning, then, moving things around more hurriedly, found a bundle of old magazines and papers. Among them was an ancient copy of Le Bien Public of 1976, containing a report of the murder of one Jochen Peiper, a German ex-SS colonel who’d been living in France and been found shot dead in his burning bungalow. The local police had put it down to suicide, but Nosjean – come to that, everybody else in the force – had assumed when they’d heard of it that someone had taken the law into their own hands. Peiper had led the Kampfgruppe Peiper in the Ardennes breakthrough in the winter of 1944/5 and been tried at Dachau for the massacre of American prisoners. Sentenced to be hanged, because of irregularities in the trial instead he’d been imprisoned until 1957, and someone, either French or American, had appeared to have disagreed even with that verdict. The case had been closed without an arrest, chiefly, Nosjean suspected, because nobody was talking and the police weren’t pushing too hard.
Nosjean remembered the case well, but it was surprising to find it here, carefully kept among Bique à Poux’s papers. Then, turning the old papers and magazines over, he suddenly realised he was looking at pictures of another man over and over again – laughing in a car, walking, talking to German officers – and he realised that they had been cut from German military magazines, from Le Bien Public, and other daily newspapers. Their dates were all 1944, and this time the man in the pictures appeared to be known as Sturmbannführer Heinz Geistardt.
For a long time Nosjean stared at the papers, then at the cuttings about Peiper, wondering where the connection lay. He knew there was a connection and, feeling he’d found something important, he decided it demanded another visit to Bique à Poux. Wrapping up the weapons and tucking the papers away, he set off through the trees at a half-trot to Matajcek’s farm.
What he found when he reached it startled him enough to put all thoughts of another visit to the hospital out of his head.
His men had turned up another body.
This time it was a woman and it was wrapped in a blanket and had been found behind the barn. Scraping away leaves and noticing a patch of earth which appeared, under the recent pounding rain, to have sunk below the rest of the land, the sergeant in charge had realised it was roughly the same shape and size as a grave and had instructed his men to dig. The body had been found only four feet below the surface. It was dressed in shabby clothes and was in an advanced state of decomposition.
Pel stood near the farmhouse door with Judge Polverari, Doctor Minet, Misset, Darcy, and Sergeant Massu, who was telling them what he knew about Matajcek’s wife.
‘Came from Gray, I believe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know for sure, though, because Matajcek didn’t encourage visitors, and when she came to Orgny shopping she always seemed ashamed of her shabbiness and kept to herself.’
‘She seems to be aged around fifty,’ Minet said. ‘Would that fit?’
Massu’s dark head nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was about that.’ In fact, there were no problems of identification. When the body was lifted out, it was found still to have a pinafore round its waist and, though the pinafore was black with the seepage of water and soil, it had not rotted and in the pocket was a woman’s purse. It was an old-fashioned leather purse and it contained nothing but a few centimes and the identification papers of the owner – Yvette Matajcek.
‘Matajcek’s wife,’ Massu said.
It wasn’t even hard to decide how she’d been killed, because the back of her head was crushed, and it appeared she’d been hit by something hard and heavy.
‘Like Matajcek,’ Darcy pointed out.
‘It was just a hunch.’ The sergeant who’d dug up the body was obviously pleased with himself.
‘No sign of anything else?’ Polverari asked.
‘No money, sir, if that’s what you mean. This place’s full of holes where you could stuff it, and you’d have to pull it down stone by stone to find them all. I reckon it was built two hundred years ago. There are gaps behind the beams and between the walls, and the birds have built nests in some of them, and the rats in others. You can’t see into them and you can’t get your hand in.’
It was while they were talking that Nosjean managed to tell Pel what he’d found at Bique à Poux’s camp.
‘I think we’ve found the chicken stealer, for a start, Patron,’ he said. ‘And we might have something else, too.’
He fetched the commando dagger and the revolver from his car and laid them on the kitchen table, together with the three rounds of .38 ammunition and the bank slip.
‘Those cops at St Symphorien had their pistols taken,’ he said. ‘They were .38s, and the bank was Crédit Lyonnais at Firmin.’
Pel picked up the bank label and studied it carefully, staring at it as if he expected invisible writing to appear. Was Matajcek involved in the hold-up at Firmin? Was he part of the gang, and was that where the money that Bique à Poux had mentioned had come from, the unexpectedly large sum in his account. Had he been using his farm as a headquarters for them for some time or as a staging post for their escape? Had he been attacked because he’d wanted to back out of the affair or because they’d feared he might give them away?
‘Ring Firmin,’ he said to Nosjean. ‘Check with the cashier of the bank. Find out if any of the robbers corresponded to Matajcek’s description.’
‘Right, Patron.’
‘Then go and see Bique à Poux. He said he saw Matajcek with a lot of money. Ask him if he saw anything else. And find out where he got this slip and these rounds of ammunition. You might also ask him, while you’re at it, what he was doing with a .45 Colt and a dagger honed sharp enough to shave himself. Perhaps he was the man who did all that throat-cutting he talked about.’
The bank wasn’t very helpful. The cashier had seen the four men who’d held them up, but he’d been too scared to take in much. But he was certain that none of them was as old as Matajcek.
‘They were young,’ he said. ‘In their twenties or thirties. This guy of yours must be much older.’
‘Sixty-three to be exact,’ Nosjean said.
‘Not the age for a bank robber. And they didn’t wear the sort of clothes you say he wore. They wore tight trousers, jeans probably, and windcheaters.’
‘Colours?’
‘Various. There was a blue one with those red and white stripes down the sleeves that everybody has these days. There was a red one, too, I noticed, with black lines down the sleeves. The others –’ the clerk frowned ‘– the others I can’t remember. Dark, I think. Black or navy blue.’
Putting the telephone down, Nosjean stared at it for a while, then, acting on a hunch, he picked it up again and rang the criminal investigation department at St Etienne.
‘These four chaps who robbed the bank and murdered those cops,’ he said. ‘Have you anybody lined up?’
‘Yes, we have,’ he was told.
‘Any names?’
‘Yes. Gaillard, Jean-Marie, and Calet, Henri. They’re locals and they’ve disappeared. They have a record of this sort of thing further south. They’ve been working Marseilles and we think they might have picked up a few friends.’
‘And the other two?’
‘One’s a Spaniard called Cossio, who was operating down Perpignan way and also seems to have disappeared. He’s been seen around with Gaillard and Calet. The other we don’t know much about – but we’ve got a name: Jesensky. He’s believed to be a Russian or a Yugoslav or something.’
‘Czech? Could he be a Czech?’
‘Could be. Not much’s known about him.’
Nosjean put the telephone down a
nd sat thinking. It didn’t seem to be just a coincidence that one of the gang of four men who’d robbed the bank at Firmin and then murdered two policemen as they escaped was possibly a Czech and that Matajcek was also a Czech and had worked on the wood-cutting at Bussy-la-Fontaine. He wondered if Matajcek had been the brains behind the gang.
He took his theory to Pel, who eyed him speculatively. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘One day you might make a good detective.’
Nosjean smiled. ‘Thanks, Patron,’ he said.
Pel frowned. ‘But don’t let it go to your head,’ he advised. ‘It won’t be just yet. Try Bique à Poux again.’
Thirteen
The old man was pathetically pleased to see Nosjean.
‘When are they going to let me out?’ he asked.
‘Soon.’
‘I’ll escape if they don’t.’
‘Why are you so keen?’ Nosjean asked. ‘Why not get better first?’
‘I have to get home.’
‘Why?’ Nosjean asked. ‘Because you’re scared someone will root around your camp and find something they shouldn’t.’
He knew at once from the old man’s face that he’d touched a raw spot. Bique à Poux seemed to withdraw at once.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve nothing up there people can’t see any time.’
‘Not even a .45 revolver, a commando dagger, three rounds of .38 ammunition and a bank slip marked “1000 francs” and stamped “Crédit Lyonnais, Firmin”?’
The old man seemed to cower on his pillows, and Nosjean leaned closer.
‘Where did you get the .38 ammunition?’
‘I found it.’
‘Where?’
‘On Matajcek’s land.’
‘Where?’
‘Just outside the farmyard. I think someone had dropped it.’
‘And the bank slip? Did you find that at the farm?’
‘No. Further in the forest. I picked it up. It was just lying there.’
‘What would it be doing there?’