Pel And The Touch Of Pitch

by Mark Hebden

  ‘I’ve come to do my breathing exercises,’ Pel pointed out stiffly.

  ‘That’s what I call it,’ Cousin Roger said. ‘Actually, I’ve come for a quick drag.’

  For the first time, Pel felt warmth for the family. At least one of them showed signs of being human. He accepted a cigarette with gratitude.

  Cousin Roger gestured towards the house. ‘They’re like a lot of mad hamsters,’ he said.

  It was true the argument was coming noisily from every window.

  ‘It sounds like an Italian street riot,’ Cousin Roger went on. ‘Are you looking forward to this walk they’re going to take?’

  ‘No,’ Pel admitted.

  ‘Me neither. Walking makes my feet ache. We’d better walk together.’

  Lying back on a grassy bank under a sky as blue as it could only be blue in Burgundy, they studied the leaves and watched the smoke curling up.

  ‘Great ones for parties, this family,’ Cousin Roger commented. ‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pel waited for the usual silence that followed such an announcement. People tended to sneer at cops because they stood up to be shot at by terrorists or have their heads broken by rioting students, even, since they were paid so little, because they were always assumed to be corrupt.

  It didn’t come.

  ‘I always fancied being a cop,’ Cousin Roger said wistfully. ‘Instead I became an accountant. It bores me silly. Should I have heard of you?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Pel conceded.

  ‘Pel, Pel—’ Cousin Roger frowned ‘—got you! You’re becoming quite well-known. Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel.’

  Pel had been enjoying the admiration. Now he frowned. He had been blessed at birth with a label that was enough to make a man worry rats and, because he’d not been old enough at the time to object, it had become a source of playground hilarity at school and acute embarrassment while chasing girls as a young man. His wife had cottoned on to the fact within weeks of their marriage and had settled for calling him simply ‘Pel’. At least, you couldn’t muck about with that.

  Cousin Roger turned his head to study his companion.

  ‘Live around here?’ he asked.

  ‘Leu.’

  ‘Funny, that.’ The conversation was quiet and undemanding and went with the weather, the smell of grass and the hum of bees. ‘We live at Lieu, near Lyons.’

  ‘Isn’t Lyons where there’s some fuss going on at the hospital?’

  ‘Fiddling. Somebody’s been at it.’ Roger drew a deep breath. ‘Gather everybody from Paris to Marseilles is coming this afternoon. Even Claude Barclay. He has a house here somewhere. Met him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s a big shot round our way, too. Has an apartment in the city. Lot of interest in business there. We act as his accountants. His house here’s just over the hill, I believe. Cost a lot of money. Great one for charities, too. Welfare homes for old soldiers. He was one himself. He did well in Indo-China in the Fifties. Junior minister in the government. Keen on education, believes in straight-up, true-blue youngsters. He’ll have no problem getting re-elected for Yorinne next month.’

  Pel shrugged. ‘I gather the seat’s so safe he doesn’t have to do any canvassing.’

  ‘Good job. He bores the pants off most people.’

  Cousin Roger sat up and carefully stubbed out his cigarette. There was no one in sight. ‘I think,’ he suggested, ‘that perhaps we ought to join the others. Are you busy just now?’

  ‘No,’ Pel said. ‘Things are pretty quiet. Nothing much’s happening.’

  Pel had often been wrong and he was wrong now because, even as he followed Cousin Roger into the sunshine and the waist-high grass, things had already started happening.

  In the woods outside the village of Suchey not ten kilometres away, two small boys were looking for bait for a fishing expedition they were planning for the following day at the dam of a farmer called Gaubert. The dam was situated out of sight of the farm and the two boys had taken fat perch out of it on more than one occasion.

  They were always careful, of course, to leave their bicycles where they couldn’t be seen but were nevertheless handy for a quick getaway in the event of the farmer appearing in any of the neighbouring fields. Since Farmer Gaubert had stocked the dam with perch for the benefit of himself and his sons who also liked fishing, it was as well to be prepared and Jean-Pierre Deniaud and Paul Guyot had worked hard at their scheme. Like many small boys, they already had the makings of expert con men and knew exactly what to do.

  The bait they were after was maggots, the larvae of flies that laid their eggs on the carcasses of dead animals, and they were hoping to find, as they had on other occasions, the body of a dead pigeon or a dead rabbit.

  ‘Keep your eyes open,’ Paul Guyot said. ‘They’re hard to spot in the undergrowth.’

  ‘You think I’m blind, copain?’ Jean-Pierre Deniaud jeered. ‘I’ve been hunting bait as long as you have.’

  ‘And keep your eyes open for Gaubert, too,’ Paul warned. ‘He’s not all that old and he moves fast.’

  ‘He’s got nothing on us.’ Jean-Pierre grinned. ‘The rods are with the bikes and there’s no sign of what we’re doing. We’re simply walking through the woods.’

  ‘It’s private property, all the same. Don’t forget that.’

  For a long time they pushed through the ferns and brambles and fallen trees, then Paul shouted.

  ‘Hé! Jean-Pierre! Here! I’ve got something!’

  There was no sign of the body of a rabbit or a pigeon but there were certainly maggots – a seething mass of them on a mound of rough sods of turf loosely covered with beech cuttings a few feet from the footpath.

  ‘Mother of God,’ Jean-Pierre said. ‘Thousands of them!’ They started to pull the beech cuttings aside, and then the turf. ‘Whatever it is,’ Jean-Pierre observed, ‘it’s big. And it stinks.’ ‘Perhaps a cow. Perhaps Gaubert had to kill one. Broken leg. Something like that.’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t think so. Dead cows get sold for dog meat or cat meat.’

  ‘Not if they’re diseased, mon brave. Perhaps it’s a dog. Too old to work any more. You wouldn’t sell a dog to – hé!’

  Paul looked up.

  Jean-Pierre had suddenly fallen silent. ‘Paul,’ he said. ‘Come over on this side.’

  Paul rose from where he was scooping maggots and soft turned earth into a jam jar and moved towards his friend.

  ‘What’s that?’ Jean-Pierre said, pointing.

  There was a long silence before Paul replied. ‘It’s somebody’s arm. You can see the fingers. I think we’d better shove off.’

  ‘We ought to tell the police,’ Jean-Pierre urged. ‘That’s a man. Or a woman. Or something.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell the police,’ Paul insisted. ‘They’ll want to know what we were doing here.

  ‘We were walking.’

  ‘And collecting maggots. Why were we collecting maggots?’

  ‘We’re interested in maggots, that’s all. We’re entomologists.’

  ‘They’d only have to ask around to know we’re not. What they’d find out would be that we like fishing, and that Gaubert’s dam’s just over the hill. He’d murder us.’

  ‘Not if the police were in on it. He wouldn’t dare. I’m going to report it.’

  ‘It’s tricky.’

  Jean-Pierre frowned. ‘Not half as tricky as not reporting it,’ he said.

  Two

  The party at Bois Haut started at midday with drinks in the courtyard. Just outside, beyond the pigeonnier, tables were set in the sunshine for fifty guests.

  ‘They’re coming from Paris, Lyons and Marseilles,’ Madame Pel said cheerfully. ‘Even Great-Aunt Béatrix, who hasn’t moved from home for years.’

  By the time the fiftieth guest – the Maire of Mergneu – had arrived, Pel was already wondering how soon they could decently depart. From time to time he slipped into the trees with Cousin Roger to smoke
a quick cigarette. Not because it would have offended anyone – everybody else was smoking like factory chimneys – but they’d both promised their wives they’d try harder to give it up.

  Around 4p.m. when lunch finished and the flow of wine diminished to a trickle, one or two children belonging to locals were riding bicycles – brought along, with one eye to possible boredom, in the back of cars. Among them were the infants of the Maire of Mergneu, a young army officer, and a woman teacher Uncle Georges-Louis has his eye on. The old men were playing cards in the shade and on the boules court a mixed game involving what appeared to be four or five thousand arguing people was in progress.

  Madame touched Pel’s arm. She had wisely made no attempt to draw him into the family conversation and now she put her hand in his.

  ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself?’ she asked.

  Pel sniffed. ‘The children are interesting,’ he allowed.

  ‘We can leave after lunch tomorrow. Besides, they’ll all be going to bed early. They tire easily at their age.’

  As she drifted away, Cousin Roger appeared from the boules court. He had been going hard at the wine.

  ‘The best player of the lot’s the Maire’s wife.’ He indicated the large earrings she wore. ‘I think it’s the radar screens in her ears. She uses them to get the range.’ He gestured at a tall man who had arrived too late for the pre-lunch drinks and missed being introduced. He wore a grey suit with a blue tie and a pink shirt, and had the regulation inch of cuff showing. His shoes were immaculate and his hair looked as if he visited his barber once a week. He was shaved to the bone and was handsome and slim. Pel, who was anything but tall, far from handsome and inclined to a pot belly, disliked him on sight.

  ‘Got the chic type?’ Cousin Roger asked. ‘It’s Claude Barclay. Deputy Barclay himself, Member for Yorinne and national hero. It’s in all the books. Called with his class to the colours, ended up as a young officer in Indo-China and when the Vietcong besieged Dien Bien Phu he was one of the few who came out with some honour.’ He pulled a face. ‘He gets his name and face in the papers a lot.’

  ‘He probably makes sure he does,’ Pel suggested.

  Cousin Roger nodded. ‘Goes in for impassioned speeches. I heard him once. I reckon he could make a visit from a plumber sound earthshaking. I’ve never really liked him much.’ His speculative glance was inclined to be a little tipsy and his comments unconsidered. ‘He looks shifty.’

  Pel warmed to him again. Barclay, in fact, looked anything but shifty. But that was the sort of opinion bigots were made of and Pel saw he would have to admit Cousin Roger into the Society of Bigots, of which he was president, secretary and sole member. Cousin Roger seemed to have the right instincts.

  ‘He goes in for pictures,’ he was saying now. ‘Renoir, Manet and that lot. Kids’ comics are about the limit of my appreciation of art. Still, it must be nice to own a lot of valuable daubs. I think that’s why he’s a friend of Georges-Louis.’ Cousin Roger was clearly not intending to give much away in the manner of warmth. ‘I hear he picks his brain on what to buy.’

  Pel smiled. ‘Perhaps he ought to listen more carefully,’ he said. ‘I heard recently he picked a dud.’

  By the time evening arrived and the locals had departed, lethargy was setting in. It was pretty inevitable, considering the amount of food that had been eaten, the wine that had been drunk, and the temperature of the day, and Pel was just wondering if they couldn’t go to bed when his wife announced that they’d been invited to drinks at Courtois-Saint-Seine. Pel didn’t fancy drinks anywhere except in his own home, but he didn’t object. To anyone else he would have objected at the top of his voice but he was prepared to accept – occasionally, anyway – that his wife had a right to be considered in the scheme of things from time to time.

  ‘What’s at Courtois-Saint-Seine?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘Claude Barclay’s home. He has a big house there. It’s twelfth century.’

  Pel wasn’t very keen on the twelfth century. It took him all his time to cope with the twentieth.

  ‘He’s converted and modernised it,’ Madame encouraged, wary of the look in his eye. ‘He’s an architect, of course, as well as a financier. And there are some superb paintings.’

  The whole tribe of them set off in motor cars through the low knuckled hills of the Plateau de Langres, to draw up in the courtyard of Barclay’s home at Courtois. It wasn’t a château but it certainly wasn’t just a house. The main street of the village had come into being in the days when the grain of the district had been carried away in carts by teams of horses and was wide enough for six pairs of Percherons or a mule train to turn with ease. The house, which had probably been built by some wealthy medieval grain merchant, looked as if it had been fortified to withstand the attacks of robber barons.

  The street was virtually empty, though there were a couple of old men sitting on chairs outside a bar down the road, and a voice, appearing through an open window somewhere in an item from Gems from the Operas, rose to a high-pitched level – dead on note, however – and made all the heads turn.

  ‘Madame Boileau,’ Uncle Georges-Louis said. ‘Practising. She used to be on the stage.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘Lives over there.’

  ‘There’ll be drinks,’ Barclay was saying as they moved into the courtyard. ‘Served by my good Gefray.’

  He gestured at a manservant in a white coat who appeared as they approached what appeared to be the main door, a huge square affair of heavy oak studded with bronze. Barclay gestured, however, at a smaller door set in the base of what had once been a turret and as they passed through it he spoke to the manservant and the door was closed behind them and the huge bolts of square wrought-iron were slid home.

  ‘Frightened we’ll steal the silver,’ Cousin Roger whispered, and his wife hurriedly shushed him to silence.

  They were shown into a long room which seemed to be solid brown stone dimly lit by hidden lights. Although it was not yet dark, all the shutters were closed and bolted.

  ‘Trying to simulate the atmosphere of a siege,’ Roger observed and again his wife hastened to shush him to silence.

  The manservant appeared with bottles and glasses, followed by a maid with a tray of delicacies. The young man was tall, dark and handsome and the girl was blonde and pretty.

  ‘Monsieur Barclay not only likes to be surrounded by beautiful paintings,’ Cousin Roger observed, ‘he also likes to be surrounded by beautiful people.’

  ‘Where’s his wife?’ Madame Pel asked.

  ‘He doesn’t have one. He’s a bachelor.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘But not for the reason you’re thinking. There’ve been plenty of women in his life. Especially when he was younger and had just come home from Indo-China.’

  More interested in architecture than Pel, Madame drifted off and for a moment he was alone.

  Somewhere ahead of him, Barclay was extolling the joys of owning valuable paintings, to ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the women whose eyes were more on Barclay than on the pictures and, for the most part, indifferent silence from the men. So far there had been too much of Barclay and too little of his wine and, after trailing round what seemed about fourteen storeys and being shown into at least a couple of hundred rooms, all dimly lit to show twelfth century living with twentieth century décor, Pel began to grow bored and managed to slip back to the hall. He had intended going outside for a quick cigarette but all the doors and windows on the ground floor seemed to be still locked and bolted.

  ‘Frightened we might escape.’ Cousin Roger appeared alongside him.

  Just above their heads, at the top of the stairs they could hear Barclay still explaining the virtues of his home and, by inference, as he dwelt on the improvements he had made, of himself. Two more bored men drifted down to the wine bottles and Pel stared through the windows at the assembled cars outside. It pleased him, remembering they belonged to Madame’s relations who had no one to leave their money to but Madame, to notice th
at they were all large and expensive.

  ‘I think,’ Cousin Roger said, ‘that we should bully someone into giving us a drink.’

  Seeming to know a trick or two, he took the manservant to one side. ‘You’ll be the good Gefray,’ he said.

  The manservant nodded and smiled.

  ‘Then how about a drink? Architecture’s thirsty stuff and I’m sure your boss wouldn’t wish me to suffer.’

  Gefray had had orders not to dispense the drinks without the presence of Barclay, but Cousin Roger slipped him twenty francs and a bottle was opened. For a while they managed to enjoy themselves.

  Cousin Roger nodded at an attractive blonde woman in a yellow dress that accentuated her figure and showed off her bronzed skin. She wasn’t one of the party and seemed close enough to Barclay to be intriguing.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked Gefray.

  ‘Madame Pouyet, Monsieur.’

  ‘Sister?’

  ‘Er – no, sir.’

  ‘Cousin?’

  ‘Not exactly, Monsieur.’

  ‘No relation?’

  ‘No, Monsieur.’

  Roger turned to Pel. ‘That seems to make her his girl friend,’ he said softly. He eyed the woman. ‘Well, she’s worth having as a girl friend, I suppose, if you like that sort.’

  The sun was beginning to grow golden as the telephone rang. An admirer no doubt, for Claude Barclay, Pel thought. To his surprise, the manservant, who answered it, turned to him.

  ‘Inspector Pel, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Chief Inspector,’ Pel said stiffly.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  Pel was surprised. Nobody could have known where he was. It was the weekend and, apart from unusual circumstances, Pel wasn’t on duty at weekends. Weekend duties were for lesser mortals who had to sit by the telephone, reading the weekend papers and catching up on odd bits of clerical work.

  He picked up the instrument, staring at it as if he expected it to bite him. ‘Pel,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Patron.’ Immediately he recognised the voice of Darcy. ‘I rang Bois Haut. They said you were at this number.’