Pel and the Faceless Corpse

by Mark Hebden

  ‘She terrified me.’

  ‘Did the child ever turn up again?’

  ‘I never heard of it.’

  ‘Do you have a photograph of her?’

  ‘I had but –’ She turned and waved a hand vaguely at the heaps of old furniture behind her. They knew exactly what she meant. It was there somewhere, under the debris, but the chances of ever finding it were negligible.

  ‘A pity,’ Pel said. ‘It might have helped. Is that all you know about her, Madame?’

  ‘There’s nothing else to tell.’ The old woman shrugged. ‘She came into my life like a rocket and went out of it the same way. Despite her faults, I admired her very much – especially later.’ She peered again at Pel. ‘I’m sure you’re not well, you know. Let me give you a little dose for it.’

  Pel looked at Darcy in alarm as she began to dig into a cupboard.

  ‘It’ll probably turn you into a frog,’ Darcy whispered.

  The old woman straightened up with a dirty glass and a bottle of wine. Into the glass she poured a little of the wine, then added a few drops of a yellowish liquid from a medicine bottle.

  Trying not to breathe in, Pel swallowed the drink. The old woman smiled.

  ‘It’s also good for croup and worms,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got those by any chance, have you?’

  Pel spent the rest of the journey to the city in a state of extreme indignation and nausea, munching bismuth tablets as if he were a drug addict.

  They called at a bar for a café-fine but they didn’t serve coffee decaffeinated and they also seemed to be saving fuel, so that it was as cold as the North Pole.

  ‘We’d better get on,’ Pel decided hurriedly. ‘We’ll call on Grandcamp on the way.’

  Maximilien Grandcamp’s travel bureau was by the Porte Guillaume near the station. It was big and thriving, and Grandcamp, a plump red-faced man who looked as though he made a habit of living well, looked prosperous, confident and cheerful, in complete contrast to Madame Duval and Madame Vallois-Dot.

  ‘I doubt if I’ve ever stopped to think about my father,’ he admitted. ‘I never really knew him and I just remember that suddenly I hadn’t got one. One night he went out, I remember, and never came back. But I don’t think it bothered me much after a while. I was too young for it to have much impact. I went to the funeral, of course, and saw all the red, white and blue ribbons. The Germans were there, I remember. That’s about all.’

  Pel was silent a moment. ‘Georges Vallois-Dot,’ he said. ‘How well did you know him?’

  Grandcamp thought for a moment then smiled. ‘Not very well. He’s dead now, isn’t he? Am I being interrogated because of that?’

  Pel didn’t answer the question. ‘How did he regard the Germans? Do you know?’

  ‘Vallois-Dot? He hated them.’

  ‘His wife said he never showed any signs of dislike, that he’d forgotten everything that happened.’

  Grandcamp pulled a face. ‘A man would in front of his wife, wouldn’t he? But you have to remember I was at school with him. He hadn’t forgotten them then.’ He frowned. ‘But he was a quiet chap – the sort who didn’t say much. I think he detested his job –’ he smiled ‘ – I don’t think he thought much of his wife, either, come to that, but I imagine he never let her know. He wasn’t the type.’

  ‘Do you have any feelings about the Germans?’ Pel asked. ‘After all, they shot your father.’

  Grandcamp shrugged. He could see no point. After all, the Louhalle Group his father had been with had killed a lot of Germans, and in any case it was too many years since for him to feel much.

  There was a long pause. A traffic snarl-up had formed round the stone archway outside and the hooting of horns drowned the ringing of telephones and the chattering of the girl assistants in the office. A policeman stalked past the window, hatred in his eyes behind the dark glasses he wore, picked his way through the jammed cars and started pointing, blowing his whistle and waving his baton. Intimidated, the traffic began to move at once.

  Pel watched, quietly approving. He looked at Grandcamp. ‘Ever heard of Heinz Geistardt?’ he asked.

  Grandcamp swung round in his chair. ‘Should I have?’

  ‘He was the man who had your father shot.’

  Grandcamp frowned then shrugged again. ‘I’d rather forget it,’ be insisted stubbornly.

  He’d always had it drilled into him by his mother, he said, that he should never forget but as he’d grown older there had been a different feeling and he’d preferred to let the matter drop.

  Pel nodded agreement. ‘Know anybody who would know Geistardt?’ he asked.

  Grandcamp shrugged. ‘There was a woman, I heard. I don’t know where she lived. But my mother was always talking about her. She said he had a woman somewhere.’

  ‘A Frenchwoman?’

  ‘Yes. Only a kid, I believe. Eighteen or nineteen. My mother detested the very thought of her. It always seemed to me, though, that she should have been pitied. I expect, with France as it was then, the Germans were the only people who had any money. Patriotism’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Some people can endure all sorts of horrors for it. To others it doesn’t mean a thing.’

  At the Hôtel de Police everybody had gone home but Nosjean, who was in a state of extreme agitation.

  ‘The old man’s bolted,’ he said.

  ‘What old man?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Bique à Poux.’

  Pel was unmoved. ‘Well, there’s only one place he’ll bolt to,’ he said. ‘His hideout. You’d better look there.’

  In fact, they didn’t have to look even that far because as they talked, the desk called to say the hospital had telephoned that Bique à Poux was back.

  ‘Voluntarily?’ Pel asked.

  ‘Not likely. He’s got a black eye and a cut lip.’

  ‘Who brought him in?’

  ‘Sergeant Massu, from Orgny. He found him leaving the city. He was on his way in to Traffic.’

  ‘Go and see him, Nosjean,’ Pel snapped. ‘And while you’re at it, inform Sergeant Massu that I’d like to see him. No sergeant from a sub-station’s going to take it into his head to beat up one of my witnesses.’

  As Nosjean vanished, Pel sat down at his desk and pulled a notebook forward.

  ‘How do you feel, Chief?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘All right,’ Pel said.

  ‘How about your head? No little bumps growing at the front?’

  ‘Little bumps?’

  ‘Horns. The medicine.’

  Pel glared, but to his surprise he realised that his incipient cold seemed not only to be better but that he also felt extraordinarily fit.

  As Darcy vanished, he stared at his notes. Things were beginning to grow more clear to him. Whoever had shot the man at the calvary seemed to have shot him because he was a German and responsible for the deaths of the people whose names appeared on the shrine. So who was the murderer? Not Vallois-Dot, because he was dead. And Madame Duval was eaten with bitterness and didn’t seem the type to go in for killing – whatever that meant – while Grandcamp claimed indifference. But Vallois-Dot had clearly been involved. Had he panicked, hoping that, because Geistardt was a wanted Nazi, the police would understand, and because of this had been killed in his turn to quieten him?

  It was worth following up. Picking up the telephone, Pel called the police department at Grenoble and asked to speak to someone who could remember what had happened on the Vercors massif. It took some time because they were all too young, but in the end they unearthed a man working in Records who’d retired and was now employed as a clerk. He had it firmly in his mind.

  ‘The people of Grenoble won’t forget that for generations,’ he said.

  The Maquis had set themselves up in the hills. They had decided that since the invasion had started it was time to make a move. They had hung out flags and sung the Marseillaise, and for days they’d thought they could defy the Germans. But in the end the Germans had sent in gliders and armour, and then
the SS and the Gestapo had gone to work. Men had been shot and tortured. One woman had been raped seventeen times with a doctor holding her pulse. Another, a Maquis officer, had been disembowelled and left to die with her intestines wound round her neck.

  ‘It was as bad as Oradour,’ the ex-policeman said. ‘That was slaughter. This was deliberate torture.’

  ‘Who was responsible?’

  ‘Nobody ever knew. We thought a man called Geistardt was involved, but when he was brought to trial after the war, they couldn’t make the charges stick. He got a seven-year sentence, cut to four for good behaviour. The crimes he’d been charged with weren’t major ones and when more evidence turned up later he’d served his sentence and disappeared.’

  Pel was thoughtful as he replaced the telephone. While he was staring at his blotter, Darcy appeared.

  ‘The German Ministry of Justice in Bonn have been on the phone,’ he said. ‘The Commission they set up in Ludwigsberg for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes still want Heinz Geistardt. Despite the fact that he got away with it at the war crimes trial, to them he’s still a murderer.’

  Pel was silent for a moment then he pushed the papers on his desk around. ‘If it was Geistardt at the calvary,’ he said, ‘what was he doing on the Butte-Avelan? Was he hiding from the Jews? After all, they didn’t hesitate to snatch up Eichmann and sentence him to death.’

  ‘Perhaps he was just here on holiday,’ Darcy suggested.

  ‘Here?’ Pel said. ‘Where there are no resorts and there are men who’d give their right arms to meet him again?’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t consider what he’d done serious,’ Darcy suggested. ‘At Nuremburg they admitted shootings without trial without turning a hair. It didn’t even seem strange to them. They’d been ordered to do so. That was sufficient. They’d just obeyed orders.’

  ‘But they didn’t protest either,’ Pel said. ‘Do the Germans know where Geistardt is?’

  ‘He was last heard of in Switzerland,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘But he’s since disappeared. It’s thought to Argentina.’

  Pel frowned. ‘Or to Burgundy,’ he said.

  Sixteen

  The thing was beginning to get on Pel’s nerves. After considering it an affair that concerned Orgny and the countryside around, he had thought wrongly for a while that it was a mere domestic bitterness; now he realised that it did concern Orgny after all, but not in the way he’d first thought. It was deeper than that and he felt himself neck-deep in old hatreds and a bitterness that was suffocating. Having been only a boy during the war, he’d never realised the emotions it had engendered. Now it seemed to be welling up again, filling the valleys with fury.

  It seemed to be time to go to the man who might really know the truth, and he rang the Baron de Mougy and arranged to meet him at the château at Ste Monique.

  The Baron was much more formidable than his wife, a cold-eyed man almost two metres high, thin as a lathe with a frame that was still all muscle and sinew despite his age. Pel remembered he’d been a champion fencer, a dead shot and a ruthless and murderous Resistance leader, and decided he wouldn’t like to be Piot if he discovered the liaison with his wife.

  ‘Inspector Pel,’ he said. ‘Police Judiciaire.’

  The Baron sniffed, as if he considered policemen a proletariat invention that couldn’t possibly have any connection with himself.

  ‘Wasn’t there a Pel who was police commissaire for Avignon in the Twenties,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard of him.’

  He was so condescending Pel disliked him at once. ‘There was a Pel who murdered his wife in Paris,’ he said flatly. ‘Felix-Albert Pel. Cut her up and burned the bits in the kitchen stove. It was at the time when Boulanger was trying to become President of the Republic. There were a lot of funny things happening in those days.’

  De Mougy gave him a quick look but he didn’t say anything and, with him effectively put in his place, Pel laid down the map of Bussy-la-Fontaine that Darcy had obtained from Dôle. ‘Have you seen this before, Monsieur le Baron?’ he asked.

  The cold eyes glittered. ‘Of course.’ The words were clipped and sparse like the Baron. ‘Heutelet telephoned me.’

  Pel’s eyebrows lifted. ‘About this?’ he said.

  ‘No. About something else. He said he’d explained about that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pel agreed. ‘He did.’

  ‘Then why ask me?’

  ‘Merely as a check, Monsieur. What is it?’

  The Baron frowned. ‘It’s a map we put out to confuse the Germans during the war.’

  ‘Did it confuse them?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘Were you in the château here when they were in residence?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘In the woods.’

  He wasn’t exactly forthcoming, Pel thought, and he was having to dig out the facts with a trowel.

  ‘Where, Monsieur?’ he asked.

  ‘At Illy.’

  ‘What about the Germans here?’

  The Baron’s thin mouth moved. ‘We shot a few,’ he said.

  ‘What about when they looted your château?’

  ‘We shot a few more.’

  Pel hesitated for a moment. ‘Did you ever recover any of the loot?’ he asked.

  ‘Just one silver plate.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It was found in a ditch near Bussy-la-Fontaine – Piot’s place.’

  ‘Does Piot know?’

  ‘I imagine so. Everybody else does. It was returned to my father.’

  ‘Did you do anything about it?’

  ‘We searched Bussy-la-Fontaine after the war. Monsieur Heurion was most helpful.’

  ‘But you found nothing?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘No sign?’

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘Did you ever learn where it all went to?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Had you no idea?’

  ‘I heard later it was on Heutelet’s land. Or on that lout Matajcek’s.’ The Baron’s broad shoulders lifted.

  ‘But you don’t know for sure?’

  ‘Of course not or I’d have claimed it.’ Ask a silly question, Pel thought.

  ‘Did you ever meet a German called Geistardt?’ he asked.

  The cold eyes flickered. ‘Fortunately for him, no.’

  ‘You knew who he was?’

  ‘Yes. Sturmbannführer Heinz Geistardt. He was a murderer. It was my dearest wish that I might meet him.’

  ‘What would you have done if you had?’

  The Baron blinked. ‘Shot him,’ he said. He sounded as if Pel ought to have known.

  Pel’s thin dark face melted in a smile. ‘That’s what Heutelet telephoned about, isn’t it?’ he said.

  The Baron frowned. ‘Yes,’ he snapped.

  ‘Because he’d heard Geistardt had been seen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He never paid for his crimes, did he?’

  The Baron shrugged. ‘American-British soft-heartedness. They lean over backwards to explain away the acts of criminals.’ He seemed to be warming up at last and his face had reddened. ‘But for them we should have hanged the lot – guilty or not. But, of course, Britain and America were never occupied. The Dutch and the Norwegians would say the same as us.’

  So had Heutelet, Pel thought.

  ‘What do you know about Geistardt?’ he asked.

  The cold eyes were full of anger now. ‘He was a murderer and a torturer of Frenchmen.’

  ‘In addition to that.’

  ‘Could there be more?’

  ‘There might be. I need to find out. I would appreciate your help.’

  The Baron considered. His nose wrinkled as if Pel were a bad smell. ‘He was a characterless monster’ he said. ‘What can one say about a mere boy?’

  ‘He was a boy?’

  ‘Twenty-two or three. No more. I suspect he had influence with Himmler to be so important. H
e was the sort who tortures puppies or pulls the wings off flies. The school bully who enjoys seeing the smallest children weep.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Fair-haired. Blue-eyed. Tall. Not sturdily built. But I imagine he wasn’t a weakling.’

  It all fitted the description of the corpse, Pel thought. He seemed to be getting somewhere at last.

  ‘What else do you know about him?’

  ‘He was a swindler.’

  ‘Oh? In what way?’

  ‘Every way you can think of. He made people hand in their papers then charged to get them back. He operated a protection racket round the bars. And round the farms. If you didn’t pay, you found your animals commandeered. He extorted money from my father by saying that his paintings would go to Germany. They went anyway.’

  ‘Anything else? Characteristics?’

  The Baron’s mouth curled in a sneer. ‘What would you call these but characteristics?’

  ‘I need more, Baron.’

  ‘He was sadistic. He enjoyed torture, I think. He was also a womaniser. And always with young women. Girls almost. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. That age. I think he enjoyed their terror.’

  ‘Would you know anybody he might have had occasion to visit?’

  The Baron’s mouth twisted in contempt. ‘I can’t imagine him being welcomed anywhere.’

  ‘What about the women you mentioned?’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare. In any case, they all moved away after the Liberation. I’ve no doubt they decided it was safer. It wasn’t entirely their fault, I realise, but not everybody knew that.’

  Pel persisted. ‘Wasn’t there one courageous enough to stay and face people?’

  De Mougy paused. ‘There was a woman.’

  ‘In Orgny?’

  ‘You know one such?’

  ‘I might,’ Pel said.

  The Baron shook his head. ‘No. Not in Orgny. She lived in Savoie St Juste. She went away but she came back.’

  That was what Bique à Poux had said. Pel leaned forward. His mind was on Madame Grévy. ‘Do you know her name?’

  The Baron sniffed. ‘Who would forget the name of a woman who went with a man like Geistardt? Yes, I do. It was Charpentier. Denise Charpentier.’

  Pel was surprised. This was a name they’d not heard so far. ‘And she fraternised with Geistardt?’