Pel And The Touch Of Pitch

by Mark Hebden

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I think he’d been a soldier. He’s a big chap and I imagine he was in good condition physically. Straight – no sign of stooping. Teeth well attended to – while in the army, for instance – but neglected after he left it. Arm broken. By a bullet or something while on active service? Tattoo – that’s a thing soldiers go in for – 179, garlanded like a badge. The number of his regiment?’

  ‘It’s a start,’ Pel admitted. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Prélat’s hoping to get a fingerprint. If he does and our friend has a record, we have him. Leguyader’s going through his clothes now. He should be here at any moment.’

  In fact, Leguyader appeared as Doc Minet left. Leguyader was head of the Forensic Laboratory and he and Pel had been conducting a private vendetta for years. Leguyader liked to announce either that he had found nothing – which was no help at all to Pel – or that he had found a vital clue so that he could boast that it was he, not Pel, who had solved the mystery. This time it was the former.

  ‘Nothing important,’ he said, poking his head round the door. ‘Grey suit. Not expensive. Someone had been through his pockets.’ He smiled. ‘Tailor’s tab on the jacket. Bomli, of Lyons. It won’t be much help. Bomli is a department store. They sell hundreds of inexpensive grey suits every year.’

  As the door closed, Pel rose, clutching the Liste des Avocats et Juristes Français, which lay on his desk. Immediately the door closed, it opened again and Darcy appeared. He looked startled.

  ‘You about to hurl that at me, Patron?’ he asked.

  ‘Not you. That lunatic, Leguyader.’

  ‘Ah!’ Darcy understood at once because the Hôtel de Police had been taking bets for years on which of the two would be the first to crack under the strain and murder the other. ‘What’s he got on our friend?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a tailor’s tag on the jacket. Bomli, a department store in Lyons. That won’t tell us much.’ Pel paused, tossed the List of Advocates and Barristers on to his desk, lit a cigarette hurriedly to calm himself and looked again at Darcy. ‘What have you found?’

  ‘With luck, our friend in the woods.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Name of Jules Arri.’

  ‘How did you perform that miracle?’

  ‘Not quite a miracle, Patron. Not yet. I’m not certain even, but I got in touch with Missing Persons and they said they’d had a report from Brigadier Foulet, who runs the station at Valoreille about a type called Jules Arri, who was reported missing about a week ago. He’s a bachelor, it seems, and looks after himself. But a couple of old dears–’ Darcy glanced at his notebook ‘–name of Yvonne and Yvette Ponsardin – go in to clean the house for him. They hadn’t seen him for a couple of days and saw that his bed hadn’t been slept in. They occasionally prepare food for him but a casserole they left hadn’t been touched so they thought something might have happened to him and reported it to Brigadier Foulet. He took a look round and passed it on to Missing Persons.’

  ‘Why did these two women think something might have happened to him? Couldn’t he be visiting relatives?’

  ‘They don’t think he has any. Besides, he’s a very correct sort of chap, it seems. Quiet. Keeps to himself. Good at looking after himself. Mends his own clothes. Keeps the house clean. Never fails to let them know if he’s going away. Very much a man of routine.’

  ‘As an ex-soldier might be?’

  Darcy’s eyebrows rose. ‘Have you got something, too, Patron?’ Pel told him what Doc Minet had found. ‘Where does this Jules Arri work?’

  ‘Foulet doesn’t know. But he said he didn’t seem to lack money. He thought he had some sort of small private income.’

  ‘Such as an army pension?’

  Darcy smiled. ‘Patron, I think we might have found him.’

  ‘I think it might be time to go to Valoreille to see what we can find.’

  Valoreille was only a few kilometres from the city, a village of grey stones and ancient beams tucked away among the first hills to the north. Brigadier Foulet, who was in his office going through papers, leapt to his feet at once as he saw Pel.

  He was young, ambitious and clearly eager to please. He had shown admirable sense in reporting the absence of Jules Arri so quickly, but he knew very little about him because he was a newcomer to the village. However, he suspected that Minet’s guess that Arri was an ex-soldier was probably correct.

  ‘Walked very straight, sir,’ he said. ‘Kept himself to himself. Very self-dependent.’

  It wasn’t difficult to establish that Arri had been a soldier, because an enquiry at the post office revealed that he was in the habit of collecting an army pension there once a month.

  ‘I think he must have been a regular non-commissioned officer,’ the postmaster said. ‘I was a regular myself and I get an army pension, too, and his was a lot bigger than mine. I worked it out that he was probably a sergeant and that he’d done his full time.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about himself?’

  ‘Never. I sometimes tried. Two old soldiers sort of thing. But he never said much.’

  ‘Did he go in the local bar?’

  The postmaster stared at his fingers for a while then he shook his head. ‘Once or twice when he first arrived, I gather. But never since.’

  ‘Somebody upset him?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He just stopped, that’s all. He was friendly enough, but then it stopped.’

  ‘That’s odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is a bit. Old soldiers like talking. Especially about themselves and what they’ve seen and done.’

  ‘Ever difficult? Any complaints?’

  ‘Never. He was always polite. Always said good morning. But that was it. Nothing more.’

  They enquired round the shops and found that Jules Arri rarely did any shopping in the village, not even at the épicerie where they might have expected him to have bought food.

  ‘Let’s have a look at his home.’

  Arri lived in a small cottage on the edge of the village, one of two standing close together. The garden was well-tended and the house well-painted, all indications of a man brought up to routine, self-respect and cleanliness. As they halted outside, a small round woman with straggly grey hair and a torn pinafore appeared from next door with a key. Just behind her appeared another woman who might almost have been her shadow.

  ‘I did the cleaning,’ the first woman said. ‘I’m Yvonne Ponsardin.’

  ‘Madame?’

  ‘Mademoiselle.’

  ‘And I’m Yvette,’ the other woman said. ‘Also Ponsardin. I’m her sister.’

  ‘We never married.’

  ‘Nobody asked us.’

  Pel backed away a little. ‘You knew Monsieur Arri?’ he asked.

  ‘We cleaned for him,’ Yvonne Ponsardin said. ‘I did it one day…’

  ‘And I,’ Yvette Ponsardin chimed in, ‘did it the next.’

  ‘Except, of course, when there was anything special to do.’

  ‘Then we both did it.’

  It was like a cross-talk act.

  ‘Did you know him well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He didn’t talk much and kept himself to himself.’

  Pel frowned. ‘Seems to be a bit of a mystery man, this Arri,’ he commented to Darcy. He turned to Yvonne Ponsardin. ‘Was there anybody who knew anything about him?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘I know he came from Champagne, because he told us so.’

  ‘About five years ago,’ Yvette Ponsardin added. ‘He bought the cottage outright. He wasn’t an old man.’

  ‘In the prime of life, I’d say.’

  ‘An army pension’s hardly enough to live on, on its own,’ Pel pointed out. ‘So he must have worked. Where? Do you know?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘We only know he went out every evening.’

  ‘Night-watchman, was he?’

  ‘We don’t think so.’

/>   ‘If he went out at night he might have been,’ Pel said.

  ‘He could have been a croupier at a gambling saloon,’ Yvonne offered. ‘I expect he got around a bit.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ her sister suggested, ‘he was a bouncer at a night club. A heavy. Perhaps he was with the gangs.’

  ‘We don’t have any gangs here,’ Pel said.

  ‘No. But they turn up now and then, don’t they?’ The old ladies read their newspapers, it seemed.

  ‘What time did he leave home?’

  ‘Six o’clock to six-thirty.’

  ‘We usually saw him drive off as we were sitting down to our meal.’

  ‘What about coming back?’

  ‘Early morning. We never saw him.’

  ‘But his car was always back when we got up.’

  ‘So he could have been a night watchman.’

  ‘He could have been a gangster.’

  There were no photographs, nothing to indicate relatives, nothing even to indicate what Arri did in his spare time, though Darcy turned out two or three books that were mildly pornographic from the back of the wardrobe.

  ‘Doesn’t mean a thing, of course,’ he observed. ‘I suppose he had to have something to amuse him.’ He moved the clothes about and eventually turned to Pel. ‘Seen this, Patron? A uniform. It wouldn’t fit our boy but I expect he left the army some 37 years ago and put a bit of weight on.’ He touched the stripes on the sleeves. ‘Sergeant. 179th Regiment.’

  ‘We’d better check with the regimental historian,’ Pel suggested. He turned to the two women. ‘Did you know he’d been in the army? Did he talk about it?’

  ‘Never. But we guessed.’

  ‘Did you do anything else for him, apart from cleaning the house?’

  ‘Occasionally we cooked a casserole and left it for him.’

  ‘Did he cook himself?’

  ‘We never saw any dirty pans. And he never bought food in the village. Just petrol for his car.’

  Jules Arri seemed to be a blank. His home left a picture of a large, self-dependent, faceless man whom nobody knew. There was nothing in the drawers or cupboards that revealed anything at all. Pel removed a plate from the kitchen cupboard. It had a pattern of gilt and rose. ‘Nice plate,’ he pointed out. ‘Especially for a bachelor.’ He glanced at Mademoiselle Yvonne. ‘This came from a very expensive dinner set. Are there any more?’

  They found six of the plates, all different sizes and patterns but all expensive-looking and all chipped. Pel stared at them, frowning. ‘What did he do all day?’ he asked.

  Mademoiselle Yvonne shrugged. ‘In summer he worked in the garden a bit.’

  ‘So where did these plates come from?’

  ‘Bought cheap, Patron?’ Darcy asked. ‘Damaged lot?’

  ‘An old soldier?’ Pel ran a finger over a minute chip along the edge of a rose and gold plate and handed it to Darcy. ‘Let’s have it checked. We might find out why he has them.’

  The two old women, who were muttering in a corner, came to life suddenly. ‘Sometimes,’ Yvonne said, ‘there were plastic boxes which had contained cooked food. As if he bought it somewhere ready-cooked and brought it home.’

  ‘He liked his wine, too,’ her sister agreed. ‘We saw the bottles when he put the dustbin out for collection.’

  Darcy, who had been sniffing around outside, put his head round the door. ‘Have a look at this, Patron,’ he suggested.

  By the back door, the dustbin was full to overflowing. Cats had obviously been around because some of the contents were scattered. But what interested Pel were the bottles standing alongside. There were two large champagne bottles, a Mumm and a Piper Heidsick, as well as five empty wine bottles, all of excellent quality.

  ‘Expensive taste for an ex-sergeant,’ Darcy commented. ‘And if these are what he’s drunk since the dustbin was last emptied, he’s shoving it away a bit. It must have cost him a fortune.’ He turned to the two women. ‘Did he have a car?’

  ‘Yes. It was usually in the garage but it’s not there now.’

  ‘What sort was it?’

  ‘It was grey.’

  ‘With four wheels.’

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  ‘Yes. It was grey with four wheels.’

  ‘With a bit of a dent at the back. It wasn’t new.’

  ‘But it wasn’t old either.’

  ‘Did he appear to have money?’

  ‘He banked with Crédit Agricolaire just along the street. They might know.’

  The clerk at Crédit Agricolaire was a young man with long hair and an immaculate suit that made Pel feel disreputable. He also had a stubborn streak and considered the affairs of Jules Arri of no account to anyone but Jules Arri and the bank.

  Pel didn’t hesitate. ‘Get the manager,’ he said.

  ‘He’s just gone out for a coffee.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The bar next door.’

  ‘Get him.’

  The manager arrived in a lather of indignation. ‘You’ve no right to do this,’ he snapped.

  Pel flipped his identity card at him. ‘Police Judiciaire,’ he said. ‘I have every right. I want information on one of your customers.’

  The manager looked worried, then he gestured at a small glass-surrounded cubicle. ‘In here,’ he said. He turned to the clerk. ‘Let’s have Monsieur Arri’s statement, Edouard.’

  The statement showed that Arri possessed a not insubstantial sum of money.

  ‘It’s a good account,’ the manager said. ‘He puts it away regularly and rarely draws it out. Just a couple of times a year. When he goes on holiday, I suppose.’

  ‘How did he pay it in? By cheque?’

  ‘No. Always cash. Once a fortnight.’

  ‘Did he ever tell you where it came from?’

  ‘We don’t ask. It’s none of our business.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever chat with him?’

  ‘He didn’t encourage chatting. We normally know about our customers – where they work, what their affairs are, what their families consist of. It’s impossible not to. When you see them almost every week, sometimes more, inevitably you mention the weather, ask how they are. It leads to small confidences. You learn their background.’

  ‘But with Arri, never?’

  ‘Never. Nothing. He said good morning and that was all. You might ask at the garage opposite. I’ve seen him buying petrol. Perhaps they know.’

  They did.

  They knew not only the make of Arri’s car, they also knew the number, 1111-AR-41.

  The garage proprietor gestured at a Peugeot 205 standing on the forecourt. ‘Like that, it was,’ he said. ‘And in damn good condition. That’s for sale. Fancy buying it?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’ Pel glanced about him. ‘Not big, this car of his, Daniel,’ he said to Darcy. ‘But in good shape. Like his house. Simple. Not short of money but not flashy either, so it doesn’t sound as if he’s in some sort of racket. Probably just adding to his pension with some job that sounds as if might be a night-watchman or security guard.’

  The garage proprietor couldn’t help on that score. He had no idea what Arri had done with his evenings, though he’d heard stories that he ran a gambling club.

  ‘I didn’t believe them,’ he admitted. ‘There aren’t any round here. We don’t go in for them. I haven’t seen him around lately, mind – or his car. Not for a week or so, I should say. Perhaps longer.’

  Pel nodded and glanced at Darcy. ‘That’s just about the time Doc Minet says he’s been dead. I think, Daniel we’re going to have to find this car and then find out where it went to of an evening.’ He gestured to Foulet. ‘Telephone Inspector Pomereu of Traffic,’ he said. ‘Give them the number and the description and tell them to keep a look out for it.’

  They returned to the Hôtel de Police eager to put out a description of Arri and his car, only to find that the car had already turned up and was at that moment under guard. It had been spotted in the car park of a superm
arket at Varagne which, of course, was as big as the Parc des Princes and just the place to leave a car if you wanted to lose it for a few days.

  ‘It’s been there all the time,’ Pomereu said.

  There was no car park attendant but there were always cars there, sometimes overnight, and the old man who wandered round the area collecting trolleys had noticed the Peugeot 205, Number 1111-AR-41. Realising it had been there over a week, he had wondered if it had been stolen and telephoned the local police. The local sous-brigadier, doing a check, had just been brusquely informed that Brigadier Foulet, of Valoreille, had telephoned a minute or two before to say that it was a car Pel was seeking and that he’d better put a guard on the vehicle at once. Pomereu looked triumphant.

  ‘It’s the one you’re looking for, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is. Let’s have Fingerprints go over it for dabs.’

  ‘Already being done,’ Pomereu said. ‘In the meantime, I’ll check with Records to see if we can find the owner.’

  Pel sighed. ‘I’m not so sure it’s necessary now,’ he said slowly. ‘I think we know.’

  Five

  Sitting at his desk, Nosjean stared at the papers in front of him. The lady estate agent had seemed more than ever indifferent lately.

  Of course, he admitted to himself, there was always the possibility that she didn’t want to see him. After two evenings out together, perhaps she’d decided he wasn’t what she was seeking.

  With the sun on his face, Nosjean could see his reflection in the window, because beyond it was the roof of the General Hospital and it acted like a mirror. Staring at himself, Nosjean decided he looked normal enough. Thin intelligent face. Honest. Good-looking in an earnest sort of way. What was wrong with him? Impulsively he picked up the telephone and dialled the number of the Agence Immobilière Lafaye.

  ‘Mademoiselle Julie Colin,’ he said.

  There was a couple of clicks then the voice of Julie Colin came on the line.

  ‘Jean-Luc Nosjean here.’

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said. ‘How nice to hear from you. Where’ve you been?’