Pel And The Touch Of Pitch

by Mark Hebden

Eventually, Lagé stopped the car and gestured. Set at the end of a short sanded drive among the trees were a set of gates, large, decorative, cast-iron gates, secured with a heavy padlock, with the sign alongside them ‘Manoir de Varas’ and underneath another sign ‘Propriété privée’. The grounds seemed to be surrounded by a double-strand barbed wire fence and there were notices every fifty yards, ‘Propriété privée’, ‘Chasse gardée’ and warnings that trespassers would be prosecuted.

  ‘They seem to like their privacy, Patron,’ Lagé observed dryly. Vallefrie lay in the fold of the hills, a small village clustered round a church with an overdecorated tower and a tall spire, set at the side of a dusty village square where half a dozen men were playing boules, watched by several children and two old women. Lagé halted the car and they produced a photograph of Arri. None of the men playing boules had ever seen him before. Nor had the old women. The children insisted on getting in on the act, too, but they also had never seen Arri. They tried the three bars, the one hotel the village boasted, and finally the police station. The sous-brigadier in charge, like everyone else, had never seen Arri but he promised to show the picture around and let them know if anything turned up.

  ‘You’d better let that lot at Arbaçay have one as well,’ he said to Lagé. ‘But you’d better mark it in big letters. They’re a bit slow on the uptake.’

  ‘Well,’ Pel said, as they climbed back into the car, ‘it doesn’t look as if Arri worked there. If he had, someone would surely remember him. He’d apparently been doing the job for around five years and if he’d been doing it in Vallefrie, he’d have been noticed. Let’s try Arbaçay.’

  Arbaçay was almost a copy of Vallefrie except that the church looked more careworn, and the village square, instead of being surrounded by horse chestnuts, was surrounded by clubbed acacias. The result was the same. Nobody had ever noticed Arri.

  ‘Have you tried Vallefrie?’ the sous-brigadier in charge asked. ‘Not that they’d notice, of course. That lot never notice anything.’

  It seemed there wasn’t a lot of love lost between the constabulary of the two villages.

  Pel was frowning as he returned to the car. ‘Well, nobody saw him in Vallefrie or Arbaçay,’ he said. ‘But he was dropped by Clenot’s cab somewhere between and, according to what he told Clenot, he went nightly. He was picked up in the city and brought out here. So where did he go? If it wasn’t Vallefrie and it wasn’t Arbaçay it must be somewhere between. Let’s have a look around.’

  It took them a long time but no one at the few scattered farms had ever seen Arri.

  ‘That only leaves the Manoir de Varas,’ Pel said. ‘So what could he have been doing there?’

  The sous-brigadier at Vallefrie couldn’t imagine. ‘They keep themselves to themselves,’ he said. ‘They don’t seem to employ anyone from the village.’

  ‘The place’s closed up at the moment. Where are they?’

  The sous-brigadier shrugged. ‘I heard they’d gone to the States. Someone telephoned to inform us it would be empty from the 20th of last month. We can’t get in but we take a look at the gates as we pass. That’s all we can do. They don’t seem to expect more.’

  ‘This Madame Danton-Criot who owns the place: where does she get her money? Do you know?’

  The sous-brigadier shrugged. ‘She’s a bit of a mystery. But she seems to have plenty. They entertain occasionally. Cars have been seen going in there. Big ones, as though their friends have money, as I suppose they must have, to be friendly with a set-up like that. But nobody from here visits them.’

  ‘What about food? Don’t they have deliveries?’

  ‘They’ve got an estate wagon. It goes into the city.’

  ‘What about vegetables?’

  ‘They’re not supplied from here. I’ve heard they have a few interests in the food trade so perhaps they supply themselves from their own sources.’

  ‘Ever been in there?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Know anything about it?’

  ‘I’ve heard they’ve got a pitch and putt golf course, a tennis court, saunas, a squash court, a solarium, a swimming pool. They must have a lot of money.’

  ‘What about Monsieur Danton-Criot? What does he do?’

  ‘Nobody’s ever met him. Our people have noticed a man driving in there occasionally. Other men, too. And women. But only as they were passing, so they never got a good look at them.’

  ‘Families?’

  ‘They didn’t seem like families.’

  ‘When was the last time cars were seen going in there?’

  The sous-brigadier shrugged. He couldn’t be certain but he thought about three weeks before. Since then the gates had been kept closed.

  ‘Can you fix the exact day?’

  The sous-brigadier couldn’t but he thought it was around the time the body had been found in the woods at Suchey.

  ‘That’s odd, don’t you think?’ Pel asked. ‘Because the body was that of a man who seemed to come regularly to this area and then vanished. I’m interested in this Madame Danton. I’d like to know who she bought the house from?’

  ‘It belonged to the Baron de Lisé,’ the sous-brigadier said. ‘It was open to the public for a while but he was old and he ended up gaga and had to go into a nursing home, so the family sold the place to pay for it. He’s dead now.’

  ‘And the family?’

  ‘Emigrated to the States. Toumelins’, the estate agents, might be able to tell you something about it. I remember seeing their board outside when the place was being sold. They’re in the city so you’ll know them better than I do. Perhaps you could try them.’

  Toumelins’ didn’t know a great deal.

  ‘We only acted as local agents,’ Alain Toumelin, the owner of the firm, said. ‘We’re not big enough to handle a place like that. It was sold through us for a firm in Paris.’ He sent for files and pawed through them on his desk. ‘Firm called Garniers’. They might help, though not much more than we can, I imagine. We knew everything that went on. It’s owned by a Madame Danton-Criot.’

  ‘What about Monsieur Danton?’

  Toumelin shrugged. ‘I never heard of Monsieur Danton.’

  ‘So who paid the money over? There was a lot, surely.’

  ‘Oh, sure. It was an expensive property, and they’ve spent a lot of money on it since. Put in tennis courts and saunas and a swimming pool and so on.’

  ‘Who spent a lot of money on it?’

  ‘Madame Danton, I suppose.’

  ‘She must have a lot.’

  Toumelin frowned and pawed among the files again. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I don’t think it was Madame Danton who actually paid the money over. It seemed to be a consortium of some sort.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘We have only one. A man called Dupont. Edmonde Dupont. He’s a Belgian, I believe. Millionaire, I was told by Madame Danton.’

  ‘So why did he buy it for Madame Danton?’

  Toumelin shrugged. ‘Well, all the cheques were signed by this Edmonde Dupont. And they were honoured all right. The money was there and it was properly paid over. From the Banque Française du Commerce in Paris. But I was worried until it was, because I felt that Dupont wasn’t his name.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when Madame Danton was here, she let slip the name Rykx. She called him Bernard Rykx. Twice. It made me wonder if he were hiding his identity. Naturally, I was concerned about the money, but it was properly paid over and went into the estate of the Baron de Lisé, so I never thought about it again. Perhaps at the back of my mind I thought she’d confused him with someone else. But now – well, you’ve started me thinking about it again.’

  ‘So why did this Edmonde Dupont or Bernard Rykx buy the house for Madame Danton? Is she his mistress?’

  Toumelin smiled. ‘I wouldn’t mind having her for my mistress. She’s very beautiful.’ He smiled again. ‘But, no. I’m happily married to a small plump woman who makes me very
content. I’m not serious. I don’t know. It’s none of our business and millionaires can afford to indulge their fancies, can’t they?’

  ‘Do you have a key?’

  ‘Not now. We handled them, of course, and showed people round. Most of them took one look and backed off. It was in a pretty poor state. I gather it isn’t any longer.’

  ‘And this Monsieur Dupont-Rykx. Did you ever see him?’

  ‘Only once. Madame Danton did all the inspecting.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Short. Squarish. A lot of curly black hair. Big moustache. Wore dark glasses all the time as if his eyes were bad.’

  Or, Pel thought, because he didn’t want to be recognised. It seemed a good idea to check up on Monsieur Dupont-Rykx. It might even be a good idea to check up on Madame Danton.

  Returning to the Hôtel de Police, Pel telephoned the sous-brigadier at Vallefrie and Arbaçay and told them that between them he expected them to keep an eye on the Manoir de Varas.

  ‘Discreetly,’ he pointed out. ‘Don’t stop outside and try the gates. I just want to know when there’s someone in residence. As soon as you see signs of life there, let me know.’ He paused, remembering the obvious rivalry between the two places. ‘And no non-co-operation,’ he added. ‘I expect intelligence.’

  Fifteen

  When they returned to the Hôtel de Police, they found that Claudie Darel had taken another step forward.

  ‘Barclay,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve found something, Patron. He seems to have been involved in a bit of dirty work in Marseilles as a student. With a girl called Denise Darnand. She was on the streets. Came from a good family but went wrong somewhere along the line. It’s not in the main files. I found it in the supplementary files, which are much briefer. A man found himself in her bedroom and was approached for money.’

  ‘Blackmail? Photographed without his trousers?’

  Claudie smiled. ‘It looks like it, Patron.’

  Pel’s eyebrows rose. ‘Barclay was involved in that?’

  Claudie shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not certain, Patron. It made me wonder, when I found it wasn’t in the main files – and if it is Barclay of course – if he somehow managed to have it extracted.’ She made a gesture with her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Bribed some cop?’

  ‘Or the civilian employee running the records department. It was before computers so there’d be a human element involved. Marseilles dug out the facts for me. A civilian employee by the name of Auguste Loget was sacked for passing information from police files. He was working with a blackmailer called Risse. The note in the supplementary files dealt with a student called Achille Barclay, aged nineteen, which would be the right age. There was only one entry and I could find no other reference to Achille Barclay. But it seemed interesting so I went to the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Mulhouse, where Barclay was born. There it was, Patron: Achille Claude Barclay. If it was our Barclay, when he was questioned either he deliberately gave only one name or the cop who looked at his identity card was lazy enough to write down only one.’

  ‘What happened? Were they charged?’

  ‘They got away with it. The man who accused them said he’d paid over 20,000 francs for the photographs, but they’d kept the negatives and when they tried again he went to the police. The police got nowhere. No negative or camera was found and the photographs didn’t even match the girl’s room. The police thought they’d changed the decor and furniture. When Claude Barclay first stood for the House of Assembly it was just about the time when the civilian employee, Loget, was arrested for selling information from the files.’

  ‘As if Barclay had dropped the “Achille” and had realised his misdemeanour could be an embarrassment to him as a politician.’

  ‘And paid to have it removed from the files, but forgot the entry in the supplementaries.’ Claudie shrugged. ‘I can’t be certain of any of it, though, Patron.’

  The touch of pitch. Here it was again. Had Barclay got his finger in an unwholesome pie? But Marseilles was renowned not only for its bouillabaisse and vociferous fishwives. The old Phoenician city teemed with jobless immigrants, drug traffickers, white slavers, gang bosses, prostitutes, and the castaways from other countries. It had long been a crossroads of crime, and if a man wanted to get involved with under-the-counter dealings, Marseilles was just the place to find an opening.

  ‘If Risse was Rykx,’ Pel said slowly ‘as he might well have been, a lot connects up.’ He paused. ‘I wonder what happened to the girl – Denise Darnand. Dig a bit deeper, Claudie. And while you’re in touch with Marseilles, I’ve another job for you. I want a list of brothels and the madames who run them. The police will know them. I want the name of the most respectable and intelligent and preferably the one with the longest memory.’

  Claudie looked puzzled. ‘Right, Patron. And what do I do with them?’

  Pel had the grace to look sheepish. ‘Give them to me. I’m going down there to pay a visit.’

  ‘Patron,’ it was Darcy’s voice on the telephone from the set of offices Lamiel had set up, ‘we’ve picked up that type, Journais, who we think reported on Ennaert’s car.’

  ‘Can I see him?’ Pel asked. ‘He might be involved with Arri.’

  ‘Slip down, Patron. I’ve got him with me now.’

  Journais looked very much as Arri must have looked. He was very tall, Pel noticed immediately, tall enough to be responsible for the pushed-back seat in the Citroën used in the kidnap of Barclay. He also looked strong and seemed to possess a degree of pride in himself.

  He admitted at once that he had been on the Loire fishing. He had a pension from the army, he said, and had worked for a while with a security firm, but the job had fallen through and he was now entirely dependent on his pension until he could get another job.

  ‘Which’, he added, ‘isn’t going to be easy at my age.’

  He seemed frank and cheerful but he refused point-blank to agree that it was he who had passed on the information about Ennaert’s car. ‘It could have been anyone round there,’ he insisted. ‘Everybody knew what he got up to. When we saw him arrive on Friday with a girl and put his car away, we all knew we shouldn’t be seeing him again until Monday morning. They always arrived with a box full of groceries, a few bottles of wine and a bottle of whisky. We called them Ennaert’s weekends.’

  ‘Ever meet a man called Barclay?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘The politician?’ Journais shrugged. ‘I’ve seen his picture in the paper, that’s all.’

  Sure, he said, he knew all about unarmed combat, because he’d been taught it in the army but he’d never met Jules Arri.

  ‘Same background as yourself,’ Pel pointed out quietly. ‘Soldier, 179th Regiment.’

  Did he detect a flicker of the eyes?

  ‘I was in the Paras,’ Journais said. ‘We didn’t have much to do with the Line regiments. We thought we were a superior lot. We were, of course.’

  ‘Arri was at Dien Bien Phu. Were you in Indo-China during the trouble there with the Vietcong?’

  ‘Half the French army served there at some time or other.’

  ‘But you never met Arri or Barclay? They were both out there.’

  ‘I wasn’t at Dien Bien Phu. I’d served my time by then and I was home.’

  Pel nodded. ‘Karate,’ he said. ‘You were good at it?’

  ‘We all were.’

  ‘Ever heard of a blow across the throat. Something that would destroy the voice box, damage the larynx and flood the throat with blood?’

  Journais’ eyes had narrowed. ‘Of course. It was a standard blow in unarmed combat.’

  ‘Your army experience got you a job in security?’

  ‘Yes.’ Journais had visibly relaxed as the subject of karate was dropped.

  ‘With whom?’ Pel rapped.

  Journais was at a loss for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Sécurité de Bourgogne.’ He paused. ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘That’s the firm.’ />
  ‘You don’t seem very sure.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Then why did you hesitate? I’d have thought a man would know at once whom he worked for.’

  For the first time Journais showed signs of agitation. ‘I did know. It was the way you tossed the question at me. It was just that I wasn’t ready for it, that’s all.’

  ‘Right. Daniel, telephone Sécurité de Bourgogne. We can soon check.’

  Journais suddenly seemed worried. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t work for Sécurité de Bourgogne?’

  ‘No. Well, you see, it was a sort of secret.’

  ‘So where did you work?’

  Journais now had a desperate look. ‘Actually I didn’t work at all.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No. I didn’t have a job. But I pretended to. For the wife’s sake. I didn’t like to tell her I was unemployed. So I pretended I had a security job and used to drive off.’

  ‘Night or day?’

  ‘Well – night.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I drove into the country and slept in the car.’

  ‘Funny you were never noticed. Where did you drive?’

  ‘Just around.’

  ‘Out Arbaçay way?’

  Journais looked scared, then angry and Darcy rose and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘Just answer the question.’

  Journais drew a deep breath. ‘Sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘Did you ever give a lift to this man?’ Pel pushed Arri’s photograph across the desk.

  Journais stared at it for a moment; his mind seemed to be seething. ‘No,’ he said at last.

  ‘I think you did,’ Pel said. ‘I think you picked him up.’

  ‘No.’

  Darcy leaned forward. ‘We have a truth serum,’ he said. ‘Would you like a shot? They say it does things to your balls.’

  They hadn’t got any such thing but it was enough to make Journais look alarmed.

  ‘You did know him, didn’t you?’ Pel asked.

  Journais swallowed. ‘No,’ he insisted.

  ‘Then why were you so interested in Ennaert’s car?’ Darcy asked.