Pel And The Touch Of Pitch

by Mark Hebden

  ‘What about the rest of the boys?’

  ‘I’ve got De Troq’, Lagé and Bardolle asking questions in the Place Saint-Julien area. Brochard’s seeing Ennaert, the owner of the Citroën, again and asking questions round the Rue Souf to see who knew it would be in its garage. I’ve heard that the DST boys are on their way from Paris.’

  ‘So have I, God help us. Under the circumstances, you’d better take over the Arri file because I’ve not the slightest doubt they’ll want the red carpet out and all the top brass dancing attendance on them. Perhaps, even, you’d better get De Troq’ on to it, too; then, if they expect you to be involved as well, he can look after Arri.’ Pel looked hard at Darcy. ‘It’s going to be hell,’ he said.

  The DST men arrived late in the morning, blank-faced men who gave remarkably little away. There were six of them, four in a big Peugeot who were obviously the dogsbodies and did all the hard work, and two others in a Citroën who were clearly the men who did the thinking, the co-ordinating and the making of decisions.

  ‘Lamiel.’ The speaker was a tall thin man in a grey suit with grey hair, and a frozen grey face that made him look like a corpse due for interment. ‘Jean-Pierre Lamiel.’ He gestured at his companion, a shorter thickset man with his hair cut en brosse. ‘Thomas. Armand Thomas.’

  There was no indication of what rank they held, even if they held any rank at all, Or whether they were police or army or secret service, but they immediately called a conference which Pel and Darcy were requested to attend.

  ‘A statement will have to be issued, of course,’ Lamiel said at once.

  ‘Why?’ Pel asked.

  Lamiel gave him a cold look, as if he were something he’d picked up on his shoe. ‘Because a statement must be made. Barclay’s a member of the government.’

  ‘A junior minister.’

  ‘He might have known things.’ Lamiel looked sourly at Pel. ‘Besides, he spoke out very strongly at that conference on terrorism in Paris.’

  ‘So did a dozen others.’

  Lamiel frowned. ‘Indeed. But they’ll be thinking of reprisals. They always do. And perhaps Barclay was the one most available and most vulnerable. We’ll find out. We’ll be working together.’

  ‘With whom in charge?’ Pel asked.

  The Chief held his breath. He had a great regard for Pel but he could never trust him to hold his tongue.

  ‘It’s all rather delicate,’ Lamiel said. ‘This is your area. We’re visitors and we try not to put the local forces’ backs up. But…’

  But, Pel thought, supplying the qualification he knew was on its way, the DST would be running the show and everybody else would be taking orders from them.

  It didn’t come out quite like that but that was what it meant. ‘It’s only a question of drawing lines’, Lamiel said, ‘and, after all, terrorism makes it very clear that sometimes toes have to be trodden on. It’s unreasonable, even sheer bad management, to allow the other side to seize the initiative with the sort of international organisation they always have with all its bang-up-to-date devices, while we…’

  ‘How do we know they’re terrorists?’ Pel asked. ‘How do we know they have an organisation behind them with up-to-date devices?’

  ‘The kidnap of a junior minister by terrorists is an international incident.’

  ‘If it is terrorists,’ Pel went on, plugging away at his theme. ‘We’ve no proof yet and the chance of being kidnapped has lately become a daily risk with the rich.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that where a member of the government’s involved,’ Lamiel snapped, ‘it’ll turn out to be terrorists or activists of some sort. Especially with an election due. What messages have been received?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘None at all? Who’s claimed responsibility?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘No demands for a ransom or the release of hostages?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There must be some.’

  The Chief suppressed a smile. Good old Pel, he thought. Trust the little bugger to hold his own. There were times when the Chief found Pel a pain in the backside, especially when he was standing up for his rights or for his beloved Burgundy, but at least he never let anybody ride roughshod over him. He had been watching Pel for years now conducting his vendetta with Brisard, and there were times when he would happily have encased them both in a concrete block and dropped them in one of the lakes in the nearby Jura. But – and it was a big but – if nobody pushed Pel around, sure enough nobody would be pushing the Chief around. All the same, he thought warily, these men from Paris had a lot of power and it would pay to tread cautiously.

  ‘No fingerprints?’ Lamiel was asking.

  ‘None. Fingerprints say they were using gloves.’

  ‘Obviously professionals.’

  ‘That’s what we decided.’

  ‘And that indicates a well-organised gang. Still, let’s not get hysterical.’ Pel gave Lamiel a look of sheer disbelief. He was the last person in the world to lose his cool. ‘I shall be going back to Paris soon, but I’ll be leaving Thomas here to keep an eye on things…’

  ‘Will he want accommodation?’ the Chief asked. ‘We can provide it.’

  ‘We prefer to find our own.’ Lamiel’s words were a snub and the Chief recognised them as such and was once more all for letting Pel have his head.

  Lamiel placed a card on the table. ‘That number will contact me. Or if not me, then Thomas.’

  ‘At once?’ Pel asked.

  ‘At once.’

  Pel didn’t believe him. Nobody was that clever, or that available.

  ‘I expect some sort of message will come before long. When it does, we’ll be able to analyse the paper, the writing or – if it’s a typewriter – the type. We’ll be putting on a cinema show for your people. We’ve got a lot of film of known terrorists and dissidents so we’ll let your boys have a look at them.’ Lamiel’s smile was forced. ‘It all adds to the gaiety of nations.’

  And, Pel thought, to the gloom of the local cops.

  Eight

  Nosjean had a lot of useful contacts, one of them a man called Jean Aubineau, who was the manager of the insurance company, Assurances Mutuelles, near the Porte Guillaume. They had had a good working arrangement since Nosjean had been instrumental in breaking a big car insurance fraud which had done the city insurance companies out of a great deal of money.

  Nosjean was still a little bemused by what had happened with Mijo Lehmann in the hotel at Avignon. It had not been planned – it had just happened – but his life seemed to have changed quite considerably as a result. Suddenly it seemed to have some meaning. Going to Mijo Lehmann’s apartment, he had found a meal waiting for him and a bottle of wine on the table.

  ‘We can afford it,’ she had said.

  ‘We’, he had noticed, as if she expected him to stay there. He shied a little at the thought of it but after spending the night in her bed he was feeling much more relaxed about it. She had assured him she didn’t want to tie him down – though he knew she did – and he had started to make plans to move his belongings and give up his own apartment. He knew it was the first step and that things could happen along the way, but Nosjean had suddenly thrown caution to the winds. Why not, he had thought. He was only young once and he felt he could keep it quiet from his sisters.

  He was still a little broody when he called in at Aubineau’s office. There was a girl in there who looked like Charlotte Rampling he’d been eyeing some time before. He saw now, as she showed him into Aubineau’s office, that she was only a pale shadow of Charlotte Rampling and obviously only half as intelligent as Mijo Lehmann. With a sigh, he accepted he was smitten at last.

  But Nosjean was a good policeman and didn’t allow extraneous things like girls to stand in his way. His eye well on the ball, he put to Aubineau an idea that had occurred to him. Explaining the case he was on, he asked if there had been any cases of insurance paid out for lost paintings.

  Aubineau’s
eyebrows shot up. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t. Are there?’

  ‘Yes. One a couple of months ago. Type called Yvon Macus. He’s not with us. He’s with Gau Assurances, but of course, we all know what goes on. It was in Le Bien Public.’

  Sure enough, when Nosjean went round to the newspaper office, there it was in the file, the story of two old masters being lost in a fire that had destroyed a house. There was even a picture of the owner, Yvon Macus, who looked a pretty shifty sort of individual – though that might have been the newspaper photograph, of course. You could never believe what you saw in a newspaper.

  ‘Thank God they were insured,’ Yvon Macus was stated to have said.

  It might, Nosjean thought, be a good idea to see Yvon Macus. Especially as the Hôtel de Police had been in a constant uproar since the kidnapping of Barclay. With the arrival of the DST men, the Chief and Pel were going about with faces like thunder and everyone else from Darcy down to young Didier Darras was flapping around in a panic. The DST people had stirred up a hornets’ nest and Nosjean, thankfully not involved, had no wish to be part of it. An hour or two outside the office, as things got wound up for the day, seemed to be a good idea.

  Yvon Macus appeared to be bearing up well. The photograph hadn’t lied and he looked as shifty in the flesh as he did on paper.

  ‘They were worth a lot of money,’ he said. ‘Fortunately I insured them.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Six months before.’

  ‘Just in time,’ Nosjean said. ‘You were lucky.’

  Macus smiled. ‘You’re telling me I was.’

  ‘For how much?’

  ‘Half a million, the two.’

  ‘Has the insurance company paid up?’

  ‘Not yet. I’m expecting their cheque any time.’

  ‘They were genuine, of course?’

  Macus looked shocked. ‘Mother of God, nobody’s arguing about that, are they?’

  ‘Didn’t the insurance company?’

  ‘Why should they? I had authentications for both of them. They accepted them without question.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘There was a Rembrandt—’ another Rembrandt, Nosjean noticed ‘—and a Van Gogh.’ And, Nosjean thought, Van Gogh, with all that thick paint, wasn’t all that difficult for a good painter to copy. Just get the brightest paints you could find, slap them on with a shovel and you’ve got a Van Gogh. Doubtless there was more to it than that but it was a noticeable fact that there seemed to be more fake Van Goghs about than any others.

  ‘Do you have the authentications here?’

  Macus gestured. ‘Oh, yes, of course. I photocopied them for the insurance company.’

  He took Nosjean into his study and fished in a drawer. Producing a leather document case, he pulled out two papers. One referred to a painting called Man in Yellow Trousers by Rembrandt and the other to a Van Gogh called Cornfield at Arles. They both said much the same thing, that the painting in question accorded with all the known grandeur and style of Rembrandt – or Van Gogh – then there was a fulsome sentence or two about the artist’s skill and a suggestion that they had been painted during the artist’s great period. They were roughly the same, the words differing only slightly and they had a familiar ring to them. Nosjean wasn’t surprised to see they were signed by his old friend, Professor Solecin, of the Musée Fervier in Lyons. It seemed to be time to see Professor Solecin. First, though, it seemed a good idea to contact Gau Assurances. Sure enough, they told him on the telephone, they were preparing to cough up. They had no reason to doubt the authentication.

  ‘I think they do it on a computer,’ Nosjean observed to Sergeant De Troquereau as he sat in the sergeants’ room, also keeping quietly out of the way of the panic created by Lamiel.

  De Troq’, who as well as being a cop was also a baron, even if a poverty-stricken baron, was reading the documents of the Arri case which Darcy had turned over to him. Being a baron, he knew a bit about art – until his family had gone bust, there had been quite a lot of it around the family home – and he listened with interest.

  ‘If the computer says it’s right’, De Troq’ agreed, ‘they drop to their knees, touch their forehead on the ground and pay up. I once wrote an article on the de Troquereaus for a magazine and they paid twice. When I wrote and told them, they told me not to worry, it was too difficult to sort it out when the computer got the name wrong – or the operator programmed it wrongly or something – and it was easier to pay a second time. In the end I kept both sums.’

  Nosjean grinned. ‘Think our own computer might show if our friend, Yvon Macus, has a record?’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to give it a go.’

  Nosjean did and to his delight he found that Macus did have a record. He was shown to have been involved in a blaze at Riom in the Auvergne where he had opened a gift shop which had caught fire. He had claimed a figure of 50,000 francs for his stock but the insurance company hadn’t paid up. Apparently he hadn’t argued.

  Wondering why, Nosjean telephoned Clermont Ferrand where the police knew all about Macus. It seemed he had had other little fires here and there before and the insurance company in Clermont Ferrand which had dealt with this one clearly had a computer which worked.

  Nosjean decided he had stumbled on something important.

  ‘This is big,’ he told De Troq’.

  ‘Crime often is,’ De Troq’ agreed.

  ‘Unfortunately, you can’t tell the goodies from the baddies. Some are cheating, some just want a picture because they like pictures, and some, if they’re important like Vacchi or Barclay, refuse to press charges because, if they do, they might be shown to have behaved stupidly, which is bad for their image. The rest are all small time dealers and gallery owners who specialise in junk.’ He paused. ‘As well as a copyist somewhere who makes the pictures and some old boy who knows a bit about it to write authentications which sound good but are really valueless.’

  De Troq’ smiled. ‘I reckon’, he said, ‘that you’ve been playing at it up to now. You’ve brushed the fringe of it but not gone deeply into any of the cases we’ve come up with. So why not pick on one and chase it right back. See if any of the names you’ve bumped into pop up more than once. If they do, offer it to the courts. It ought to be enough to frighten the rest off.’

  ‘For a bit anyway.’

  ‘For a bit,’ De Troq’ agreed. ‘But long enough for the police to turn their attention to other less important things like rape, arson, murder, terrorism and kidnapping.’

  When Lamiel had disappeared about his business and the Chief was seeing him off the premises with a brandy, Pel waited in his office, knowing Darcy would be along eventually.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of Lamiel. Terrorism could be seen differently by different people. When Europe had been occupied by the Nazis, the use of terrorism against them had been applauded, and even De Gaulle – admittedly safe in England – had accepted Churchill’s dictum that Europe should be ‘set ablaze’. But anti-terrorism was a difficult job because the man who was a terrorist in one country was a freedom fighter in another, and those whom the French considered important were doubtless well down the list in other countries. It was a pity they couldn’t all get together and do with them what countries had done with pirates in the eighteenth century and condemn the lot – not only the terrorists, but those who hid them, lent them money and succoured them when they were hurt.

  Unfortunately, there was a lot of talk these days about human rights and the efforts to silence the freedom-loving people of the world. Pel was inclined to think that fire should be fought with fire because a man dead in the street was still dead, no matter who had killed him or for whatever reason, but these days force begat force, violence begat violence, destruction begat destruction, and even the anti-terrorist business seemed to have got a little out of control in recent years with the anti-squads sometimes as dangerous as the terrorists themselves. Enormous sums of money were being spe
nt on things that seemed well able to feed and sustain themselves, and without doubt people were occasionally taken for a ride by ambitious politicians, civil servants, soldiers and policemen making good jobs for themselves out of the misery.

  Opening the day’s newspapers to see what the press had on the case, he saw the appropriate items had been ringed in coloured pencil by Didier. It was something started by Cadet Martin, who had behaved as if he were the editor of Le Monde, and it had been inherited by the new incumbent.

  France Soir was now suggesting Barclay had been involved in behind-the-scenes work and was trying to make out he was the éminence grise behind the President. France Dimanche had gone overboard even more completely and was suggesting he hadn’t been kidnapped at all but had quietly disappeared on government business of a secret nature. They quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the Englishman, Lawrence of Arabia, both of whom, they suggested, had not died but had vanished quietly to carry on underground activities abroad. Le Bien Public, being local, country and conservative, simply reported the facts.

  Lamiel returned late in the afternoon and immediately called a conference. While he had been away, his deputy, Thomas, had seized a group of offices for their special use and had installed their own clerks, typewriters, telex machines and telephones, some of them with direct lines to Paris. It had meant several of the inhabitants of the Hôtel de Police having to move out, and the grumbles could be heard almost to the Palais des Ducs.

  Lamiel looked tired. There had been a bomb incident in Paris where the front window of the Air France office had been blown in, and several passers-by cut by flying glass. Lamiel’s presence had been needed and, though he didn’t like him, Pel had to feel a certain amount of sympathy for him.

  Lamiel opened the conference by saying he had been meeting with his superiors and other important personages in Paris. He made it sound as if he’d had a heart-to-heart with the President, and had them sitting in rows in the lecture room listening to him like a lot of schoolboys.