by Mark Hebden
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about the dagger and the revolver? Where did you get those?’
‘I got them after the war. There were hundreds lying around. The British parachuted them into France by the plane load after the invasion. Everybody had one.’
‘What were you going to do with them? You also had an axe and a butcher’s cleaver. Both sharp. What were you using those for?’
‘For firewood. Chopping firewood.’
‘Then what was the dagger for?’
‘Skinning rabbits.’
‘I don’t believe you. The blade’s too thick, and you have a thinner knife with a shorter blade. Much better for skinning rabbits. Not so bad for cutting throats, too, come to think of it. You didn’t do it, did you?’
‘No! Never! I swear!’ The old man’s protest came as an agonised bleat.
Nosjean decided he was telling the truth. ‘What about the revolver?’ he asked. ‘Had you a licence?’
‘No.’ The word was a whisper.
‘What was it for?’
‘I used it to shoot rabbits.’
Nosjean grinned. ‘If you hit a rabbit with a thing that size, mon brave, ‘there’d be nothing left of it.’
‘There’d be enough for me.’
‘Come on, old man,’ Nosjean said more sharply. ‘I don’t believe you. Were you carrying either of them when you were at the calvary that night?’
‘No! No!’
‘And who’s Heinz Geistardt?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why do you keep his pictures then? And why keep the pictures of Jochen Peiper?’
‘He was an SS man.’
‘I know. Peiper was here in France, wasn’t he? He was murdered. A year or two back. Was Geistardt here, too?’
‘He may have been.’
‘You know damn well whether he was or not. I can check easily enough.’
‘Well, yes, he was.’
Nosjean’s heart thumped. ‘Did he have anything to do with you?’
‘It was him who sent me to Poland to work under the Compulsory Labour scheme in 1943.’
‘And you were going to shoot him?’
The old man seemed to dissolve. ‘He sent me to Poland.’
‘He’s the reason you were waiting at the calvary the night of the murder, isn’t he?’
The old man’s head jerked forward in a nod.
‘How did you know he was going to be there?’
‘I heard him say so.’
‘When?’
‘Three nights before. I was in the woods by the road. He was in a car.
‘What car?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see. There was no moon that night. He was talking to someone about the de Mougy silver and they arranged to meet. He said he knew where it was and the other man wanted to know.’
‘Did he mention any names?’
‘No. But I know he had a woman somewhere.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw him with her. One day when I was in Savoie St Juste buying paraffin.’
‘You recognised him?’
‘I could never forget him.’
‘What was her name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How old?’
‘Fifty-ish. I heard he had a girl round here when he was here in the war.’
‘Go on. What else do you know about her?’
‘Nothing. Except that when he was here in the war, she was only a kid – eighteen or nineteen. That age. He liked them young, they said.’
‘What was he doing back here in Burgundy this time?’
‘Perhaps he was after the loot. They pretty well sacked the de Mougy home, didn’t they? They cleared it of silver. They even took the old Baronne’s jewels.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘They said it went to Germany. But I think it’s buried in the woods up there.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I just do. Willie told me.’
‘Who’s Willie?’
‘I don’t know his other name. He was a German. He was a bit simple. He was a waiter in the German mess at the château. He was killed by the Resistance in 1944, I heard. He told me before I was sent off to Poland. It was worth a fortune. They cleared the place out. Then the Gestapo heard about it. Probably they wanted it themselves. By that time they were beginning to quarrel among themselves because it was obvious they were going to lose the war and they were trying to get everything they could to take home.’
Armed with Nosjean’s information, Pel went to the Palais de Justice to see Judge Polverari.
It was always a good idea to work with the Palais de Justice. Once, you could do as you pleased and nobody said anything, but new laws and new decrees had changed all that, and nowadays all too often there was bad feeling between the two departments.
Fortunately, Polverari was cheerful and broadminded and always helpful.
‘Think this one’s connected with the others?’ he asked.
Pel shrugged. He knew nothing – yet. It seemed too big a coincidence, but there were such things as coincidences.
‘We’d better have a talk,’ Polverari said. ‘Come and have lunch with me.’
He chose a place in the centre of the city, well known for its food. Just across the aisle four middle-aged businessmen, all fat, were going through the ritual of a four-hour lunch. It was clear from the look of them that they weren’t going to rise from their seats until it was time to return to their offices for afternoon tea.
Pel sipped a vermouth because it was too early for brandy or whisky and Polverari ordered coq-au-vin. Unfortunately it was an off day and the meal wasn’t as good as they’d expected. When it arrived Polverari examined it closely. ‘This isn’t chicken,’ he said.
‘Yes, Monsieur,’ the maître d’hôtel insisted, fixing the judge with an intimidating eye. ‘That’s a wing.’
‘Looks more like a cow’s hind leg,’ Polverari said briskly. ‘Perhaps it was a flying cow. Change it.’
It was changed. Pel was deeply impressed, feeling he’d never have dared – not in that restaurant – to accuse them of negligence. He’d have eaten it, its size notwithstanding, despite it sticking in his throat, despite being a Frenchman and above all a Burgundian, whose compatriots had a reputation for seeing they got the best.
Judge Polverari was quite unmoved. He was small and so shrunken he looked as if he’d been laundered too often, but his appetite was hearty and he was totally indifferent to what people thought of him.
‘They should try harder,’ he said loudly so that everybody in the restaurant could hear and Pel cowered as the maître d’hôtel fixed him with a bitter glance. ‘It’s no wonder the owners of these old restaurants where nobody eats lunch in less than three hours are having to bow to the times and convert them into snack bars.’
The discussion on the murders was brisk. Unlike Brisard’s, Polverari’s comments were the comments of a man full of confidence and experience. He didn’t badger Pel to solve the case on the spot, and was sympathetic, helpful and full of ideas, most of which were sound. They drank far too much wine and enough black coffee to keep Pel awake for a year, then Judge Polverari insisted on double brandies – twice.
It was magnificent but it left Pel feeling dreadful, and as he returned to his office his thoughts on the murder were sluggish. Why dump the damn man at the calvary, anyway, he thought, when there were quarries handy in the area, and almost every farmer in the district had constructed a dam on his land for his cattle? For a special reason? And if there were a special reason, then it had to be connected with the calvary? And the calvary was connected with old hatreds, long enduring hatreds that ought to have died.
Something at the back of his mind stirred, something that had crossed his consciousness some time before. He’d forgotten it in his interest in Piot, Marie-Claire Jacquemin and the Baronne de Mougy, but now it came back, insidious and insistent, connected with Vallois-Dot and th
e dead man at the calvary. Somehow, this time, it made more sense.
It touched on something else, too, something uneasy and frightening that went a long way back.
Darcy was in the outer office, staring at his notebook. He had a list of everyone who’d been in the bar at Orgny the night of the murder of Vallois-Dot.
‘Practically every male in the village,’ he said. ‘And quite a few females, too.’
Among the plethora of names Pel noticed those of Grévy and Heutelet. Piot had also called in for a drink for a few minutes, and even Massu and his constable, Weyl, had leaned against the bar and taken off their kepis to down a beer.
‘Everybody,’ Pel said bitterly, ‘except the President of France.’ He found it difficult to settle to work. His indigestion was turning into an ulcer, he felt sure, he had a thick head, and would doubtless feel worse the following morning. He pushed away the pile of reports on his desk, struggled to roll a cigarette, threw it into the waste paper basket unsmoked, and went to the door. Darcy looked up.
‘You busy?’ Pel asked.
‘A bit, Patron. I’m going out to Savoie St Juste to see if they know anything about Madame Matajcek. She used to do her shopping there. They might know something.’
‘You can drop me at Heutelet’s place.’
It was raining again as they drove out of the car park and the sleet in it stuck to the windscreen. Pel huddled in his coat as they drove, muffled up to his nose, deep in thought.
‘Penny for them, Patron?’ Darcy offered.
‘I was just thinking,’ Pel said gloomily, ‘that I’ve caught Brisard’s cold.’ He gestured at the road. ‘Turn off to Bussy-la-Fontaine. I want to go there first.’
His mind was still bothered by something he couldn’t put his finger on – something he’d seen but not absorbed, and he sensed that it was at the calvary that he’d find it, because it seemed to have been with him right from the beginning.
Leaving the car by the house, they walked to the calvary. The area was still taped off but there were no longer any police there.
Stopping in front of the calvary, Pel stood with his collar turned up, his nose in the scarlet muffler he was wearing, his hat down over his eyes. The day was grey, the sky leaden with more snow to come, and the silence was intense, so intense that a branch, cracking suddenly in the cold, made him turn quickly. Then he heard the harsh cawing of crows over the higher ground and the sound made him more than ever aware of the atmosphere of the place, and terribly conscious of having overlooked something. A detective had to try every possibility on the board, and he’d missed one.
Watched by Darcy, he took a step nearer the cross to stare at the plaque. ‘Fusillés par les Nazis,’ he read. ‘7 September, 1944.’ Below it were the names in alphabetical order and from the bottom of them the name, Vallois-Dot, leapt out at him.
Patrice Vallois-Dot.
That was it!’
He’d noticed the names when he’d first arrived at the calvary to investigate the murder of the unknown man, but he’d not read them carefully enough for them to register in his mind. Then, when the postmaster had been found dead, his subconscious had been trying to pass on the connection to him, the fact that the same name was on the calvary where the first murder had occurred.
Frowning, he bent to study the plaque.
‘Dominique Louhalle, Légion d’Honneur,’ it said and lower down, after a slight gap, there were eight other names:
Jean-Marie Cirois
Armand Duval
Edouard Evangeliste
Pierre-Thomas Grandcamp
Antoine Hugo
Richard Poupon
Roland-Andre Sanz
Patrice Vallois-Dot
Standing in the glade of the forest, with the grey mistiness of the year’s end about him, cold and cheerless and dark, Pel was chilled by the old bitterness. He’d been only a small boy at the time of the Occupation and could remember remarkably little beyond the presence of men in strange uniforms who spoke a foreign tongue. He’d been protected by childhood from the talk of killing and by the fact that in Vieilly, where he’d lived, there’d been very little show of resistance, anyway, chiefly because there had been few safe places for the Maquis to hide. What resistance had occurred in Burgundy – and because it was the last place the Germans had evacuated in their retreat beyond their own frontiers, it had never been strong until the last months of the Occupation – had occurred in the high lands and thick forests of the Côte d’Or.
It had been a time of edgy nerves hidden by stiff faces and blank expressions, a striving for defiance if only to keep some measure of pride. It hadn’t been the running battle you read about in books of memoirs. Most of those engaged in it had been mere boys who’d fled to the woods to avoid being sent to Germany to work. They’d lived for months in camps in the trees, lacking everything but spirit, and their weapons had been rusty firearms from farmhouse walls, dynamite stolen from quarries, and a few old grenades too dangerous to handle.
In the south round Grenoble and in the Hautes Alpes it had been different. Until France had been totally occupied by the Germans you’d even been able to see British films down there, and it had always been easier to organise against the future. In the north little could be done until the Germans had been busy with the invasion.
He stood staring at the monument a little longer, then he walked back to the car.
‘Turn up anything along the border?’ he asked as Darcy started the car. ‘Anybody think our man might have come from their area?’
‘Nothing, Patron.’
Pel was thoughtful for a while. ‘Isn’t there a bureau in Germany,’ he asked, ‘run by the Jews for the investigation of Nazi war crimes?’
‘I’ve heard of one.’
Pel frowned. ‘Find out where it is, and ask them if they know anything about this Geistardt Nosjean turned up.’ He paused. ‘You might also try the German police. They’re pretty helpful. Give them all our facts and tell them we think our man might just have been a German.’
‘Might he, Patron?’
Pel nodded. ‘He might,’ he said. ‘He just might.’
Fourteen
Massu’s van with its broken wing-lamp was standing outside the Heutelet farmhouse when they arrived. Inside, in front of a roaring fire, Heutelet was sitting with his feet up on a stool, holding a magazine. He seemed to have been dwelling on a series of photographs of scantily-clad girls. Massu, holding his notebook, overflowed the chair he was sitting in and, as they entered, he looked up and his black eyes flashed.
‘Just trying to find something out about Madame Matajcek, sir,’ he explained.
Heutelet seemed to consider the arrival of three policemen all at once a cause for celebration and he produced a bottle.
Pel sat back. His mind was busy. Nine dead people, he remembered. Eight men and one woman. Louhalle, Duval, Cirois, Evangeliste, Grandcamp, Vallois-Dot, Hugo, Poupon and Sanz.
He became aware of Heutelet staring at him and realised he’d been lost in his own thoughts.
He started back to the present. ‘The Resistance,’ he said. ‘During the war. You were in it.’
Heutelet smiled. ‘I ran it.’
Pel nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You ran it. So what do you know about the calvary at Bussy-la-Fontaine?’
Heutelet exchanged glances with Massu, then he shrugged. ‘It was put up in 1947,’ he said. ‘They raised the funds locally. It was dedicated by the bishop. They were putting up a lot of those things in those days and the bishop was always at it.’
‘The names on it. Nine of them. What happened to them?’
Heutelet shrugged. ‘The Germans left them lying there. In a row. Like butchered pigs. The local people carried them down and put red, white and blue ribbons on the coffins. There were hundreds of mourners, and a tricolour, but a German officer tore it down and said they were only gangsters.’
‘What about the relatives?’
Heutelet’s eyes grew angry. ‘What about
them? They had their grief. They wept.’
‘Where are they now?’
Heutelet shrugged again. ‘Some of the women remarried and moved away. Some died. It’s a long time ago.’
‘Go on. Let’s have details.’
Heutelet thought for a while. ‘As far as I know there are only three left in this area: Madame Duval. She never remarried. She has grown-up children and grandchildren now. Vallois-Dot’s wife died, but his son ran the post office at Orgny. He’s the one who –’
‘I know who he is,’ Pel said. ‘There can’t be that many people called Vallois-Dot round here.’
Heutelet nodded his agreement. ‘No. The other’s Grandcamp. His wife died but he had a son and a daughter. The daughter married an American after the war and went to the States. The son runs a travel agency in Dijon. Near the station. The rest – ’ Heutelet’s shoulders lifted in another shrug.
For a while, Pel sat thinking. Three relatives of the nine dead Resistance fighters – Duval, Grandcamp and Vallois-Dot. And now Vallois-Dot was dead. That left two. In addition there was Grévy, who’d murdered a German in his escape from Germany, Piot, whose father had been killed by the Germans, and old Alois Eichthal – Bique à Poux – who, according to what he’d told Nosjean, had cut a throat or two to get back home.
He looked up at Heutelet. ‘Ever heard of a man called Geistardt?’ he asked. ‘Heinz Geistardt?’
Heutelet frowned. ‘I knew a Heinz Geistardt,’ he agreed. ‘But that was a long time ago.’
‘Yes,’ Pel said. ‘It would be.’
‘He was an SS man. He was involved in that butchery on the Vercors massif, I heard.’
‘Describe him.’
Heutelet did. The description seemed to fit the body found at the calvary.
‘Tell me more about him.’
‘He was a cruel bastard.’ Heutelet frowned. ‘He seemed to enjoy cruelty. He was the one who shot those nine people at Bussy-la-Fontaine. There are a few plaques on the wall in Dijon he was responsible for, too. Students mostly. Kids. He was always our main target. But we never got him.’
‘Suppose he happened to come back?’ Pel asked. ‘Would someone try to get him?’