by Mark Hebden
He stared at his drink gloomily. It wasn’t every day a man got himself thrown over by the girl he had expected to marry – the fact that he had persistently ignored her for other girls was conveniently overlooked – and he decided that getting drunk might be a good idea. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible at that moment because officially he was engaged on enquiries about the garage hold-up at Regnon.
The Hôtel Central wasn’t Nosjean’s usual stamping ground, but in his present mood he was feeling reckless and was half-hoping to bump into a librarian who looked like Charlotte Rampling, whom he’d once met in the Texas Bar. As he brooded, the telephone on the reception desk rang. The clerk answered it, looked at Nosjean and held up the instrument. The voice that came to him was that of Inspector Daniel Darcy, Pel’s deputy and Nosjean’s immediate senior.
‘You doing anything at the moment?’ Darcy asked.
Bitterly Nosjean wondered what he could possibly be doing, with Odile Chenandier in the arms of another man. ‘What’s on?’ he asked.
‘We’re pretty busy here,’ Darcy said. ‘There’s been another break-in at the supermarket at Talant. That damned place ought to get guard dogs. De Troquereau’s on that, and Lagé’s investigating an indecent assault at Roën.’
‘There’s always Misset,’ Nosjean pointed out.
‘Misset went to Paris this morning on some business for the Chief. Something to do with some missing gelignite at Dom. He should have been back by this time but he hasn’t reported in. I expect he’s at home and keeping quiet.’ Misset wasn’t among the more ardent members of Pel’s team. ‘Either way, that only leaves you and me. And since the Old Man’s taken the day off for a change, I’m on call here. There’s been an attempted break-in at the quarry at St Blaize.’
‘How do you break into a quarry?’ Nosjean asked.
‘There’s an explosives store.’ Darcy’s voice was cold. ‘And somebody fired a shot at the watchman.’
Nosjean sighed. Occupying himself with other people’s troubles, he decided, would stop him brooding about his own.
‘I’ll get out there,’ he said.
When he reached the quarry, he found Lamorieux in a bad temper but surprisingly unconcerned.
‘Kids,’ he said as Nosjean climbed out of his small red Renault and fished out his notebook.
‘Why do you say that?’ Nosjean asked.
‘It’s always kids. They were at the hut where we keep the detonators. It’s separate from the explosives bunker. Safety measure. If it hadn’t been kids they’d have gone for the gelignite.’
‘You seem pretty certain.’
‘Well, they were small, weren’t they? It was almost dark but I could tell they were small.’
‘What did they take?’
‘A tin of detonators.’
‘No jelly?’
‘No.’
‘They could blow their fingers off with detonators.’
‘They could. But they won’t. They know as much about detonators these days as you do.’
‘If it was kids, why did they shoot at you?’
‘Not at me. Over my head. They did it to frighten me. Panic, I expect.’ Lamorieux shrugged. ‘I suppose one of them had got hold of his father’s .22 and it went off by accident.’
‘You seem remarkably calm about it.’
The night watchman stuck out his chest. ‘That was nothing,’ he pointed out. ‘I was under fire a few times in the war. I was taken prisoner in 1940 but I escaped and joined the Resistance.’
Nosjean looked about him. Something seemed to be missing.
‘Wouldn’t it help,’ he asked, ‘if you had a dog?’
The night watchman scowled. ‘I’ve got one,’ he said. ‘It’s locked in the lavatory. I’m wondering whether I ought to shoot it. It ate my supper.’
Two
Vieilly didn’t amount to much as a place – not even on Bastille Night, when most places looked better than normal. Surrounded by thickly wooded hills, it lay in a dip in the land and contained two banks, one or two small shops, four bars, a garage, a police substation, a mairie as solid as a fort, and an ancient church which, with the mairie, occupied the wide main square. It also sported a hotel which at first glance appeared to be far too big for the population but was explained by the fact that it had a splendid dining room well known throughout the district. Vieilly’s only real claim to fame, in fact, was that it was the birthplace of Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel, and though that wasn’t sufficient to get it in the guide books, it was enough for Pel to make quite a song and dance about it, because alongside him as he strolled along the village street in the last of the light was the woman he hoped to make his wife.
‘It means a great deal to me,’ he said, showing off a little.
The truth was he hadn’t been near Vieilly in years, and his presence there wasn’t because of his connection with the place at all, since his parents were dead and his two sisters, both older than he was, had married and left the district. It wasn’t even because of any sentimental affection for the place; sentiment claimed only a small part of Pel’s make-up. He was there, in fact, for the very simple reason that he had been checking up on a few recent events in the area and, being a little on the mean side, had thought he might kill two birds with one stone.
Following the disappearance of the detonators from the quarry at St Blaize, radio, television and newspaper warnings had been put out appealing for their return. Nothing had happened and it had been assumed that, as usually occurred in these cases, whoever had taken them had not had the courage to own up and they were now at the bottom of the river.
Pel, however – being Pel – was beginning to wonder if they were. It had not escaped his notice that when the gelignite had been stolen a few days before at Dom, as at St Blaize the thieves had been disturbed and detonators had not disappeared with it. It seemed to demand a few more enquiries, especially since in recent weeks there had been a spate of pamphlets, emanating, they knew, from the University, demanding a free Burgundy, whatever that was. As a good Burgundian, Pel entirely sympathised with the idea of an untrammelled and dominant Burgundy – after all, he had never been able to see the point of the rest of France – but the phenomenon troubled him. The world was full of freedom movements whose more enthusiastic supporters had got into the habit of throwing bombs about, so that it was not beyond reason to suspect that the stealing of explosives from Dom and the stealing of detonators from St Blaize could be connected. After all, the country was full of the fag-ends of other people’s pogroms and the old colonial empire, and just lately many Africans, driven from their homelands by independence or the dictatorial set-ups that had followed independence, had started turning up in his territory, many of them aggressively hostile. And since he had to visit the district to check the activities of the sous-brigadier who ran the substation at St Blaize, it followed naturally that he should suggest to Madame Faivre-Perret that they should take dinner at the Trois Mousquetaires at Vieilly.
The meal was good and Pel was in a mood of euphoric self-satisfaction as he went to fetch his car round to the front door while Madame Faivre-Perret powdered her nose. Across the square a bar was being set up for the Bastille Night celebrations. There was to be dancing in the open air and the band was just erecting its amplifiers. Pel shuddered as they reminded him of life with Madame Routy.
He watched them for a while, memories of Bastille Nights in his youth running through his mind. He drew a deep breath, full of nostalgia, smelling the wood smoke of long-dead fires, hearing the long-gone calls of children and dogs across the sunlit fields and the slow talk of old men playing boules on the dusty footpath near the river.
He was still absorbed with his memories as he turned away and, not looking where he was going, crashed into the young man, also deep in thought and also not looking where he was going, who swung round the corner from the car park to the hotel.
Nosjean was a good policeman – sometimes too ardent for everyone else’s comfort – but at le
ast he had ideas and the thoughts that had occurred to Pel about the shooting at St Blaize had occurred to him, too, though they had arrived from an entirely different direction.
Like Pel, Nosjean wasn’t satisfied that children had been responsible for the theft of the detonators and, making enquiries, had come up with the information that, on the night of the shooting at St Blaize there had been another incident at Porsigny-le-Petit where it seemed a woman had been slightly wounded. Because St Blaize was a substation of the main police station at Buhans and Porsigny was a substation of the main station at St Yves, the reports that had been made out had not been seen by the same police inspector and it was only by accident that Nosjean had spotted them at the Hôtel de Police.
A few quick enquiries had shown that the woman at Porsigny, who had not been very much hurt, had been hit by a bullet at the end of its trajectory. She had herself picked out the bullet, which was only just below the skin, and had thrown it away, so it had not gone to the forensic science department for assessment as to size and type, and she had not even bothered to go to hospital. But – and this was the point that intrigued Nosjean – it seemed her wound had been inflicted at just about the same time as Lamorieux’s ‘children’ had been taking a pot shot at him at the quarry. Studying a map, Nosjean had worked out that a bullet fired at the quarry could just about have come to earth where Madame Colbrun had been wounded, and it was for this reason that he was in Vieilly. He had had another interview with Lamorieux then, pursuing his idea, had dug out Madame Colbrun.
To his surprise she had taken the same view as Lamorieux.
‘Kids,’ she said. ‘They’re always getting hold of guns People should be more careful and keep them locked up.’
‘These “kids”,’ Nosjean pointed out, ‘took a pot shot at Lamorieux, the night watchman at the quarry at St Blaize.’
She sniffed. ‘Lamorieux’s a bit of an old gasbag,’ she said. ‘To listen to him you’d think he won the war on his own.’
‘Did you see anyone?’
Madame Colbrun cast her mind back. While she had been sitting in the shadows at the side of the road beside her bicycle, a car had passed. She had still been sufficiently shocked not to think of stopping it and it was only when it was vanishing from sight that she had come to life and called out.
‘There was a car,’ she said.
‘What sort of car?’
‘I didn’t see.’
‘Going fast?’
‘Fairly fast.’
‘See the occupants?’
‘Not really.’
‘Which way was it going?’
‘Towards the city.’
‘From where?’
‘St Blaize direction.’
‘It might,’ Nosjean said, ‘have contained the people who shot at Lamorieux and hit you.’
Madame Colbrun looked at him contemptuously. Nosjean was still young and looked even younger than he was. She didn’t consider him very experienced.
‘That was kids,’ she said. ‘With a .22. After rabbits. Somebody ought to do something about them.’
Nosjean had thought about the two incidents a lot and it occurred to him that it might be a good idea to have a search made for the bullet Madame Colbrun had taken from her thigh. She had shown it to her family then, with the indifference of a countrywoman to whom guns were not unfamiliar, had tossed it through the kitchen window into the bushes outside. He had a feeling that it would turn out to be something different from the .22 Madame Colbrun thought it was, in which case it would indicate something more than children. Nosjean suspected, in fact, that it had come from a handgun, and country people didn’t use pistols or revolvers for shooting rabbits. He decided to do something about it the following day.
It was late when he stopped his car in Vieilly and he was hungry because he had had nothing since breakfast but a beer and a sandwich at the Bar Transvaal opposite the Hôtel de Police. Remembering that the hotel at Vieilly was supposed to run a good kitchen, he had decided to blow part of his wages on a good meal. It might, he thought, take his mind off Odile Chenandier.
He lit a cigarette and was deep in thought as he turned the corner to the hotel entrance. Crashing into the man coming towards him, he reeled backwards and looked up to find himself staring at his superior officer.
Pel glared at him. It didn’t please him to bump into members of his team when he was engaged in one of the rare romantic interludes that entered his life. What made it worse was that Nosjean was smoking and Pel had been struggling all evening not to. Pel’s struggle with his smoking had reached epic proportions and he was fighting manfully – if not to give it up, at least to cut it down from two million a day to five hundred thousand. He had struggled with twitching nerves all through the meal to avoid lighting up and had managed right to the moment when Madame Faivre-Perret had drawn out her own small case and offered him one. Having snatched at it like a starving man grabbing for a crust, to see Nosjean happily puffing away at what seemed the largest and most vulgar cigarette in the world was no help at all.
Slight, intense, a junior edition of Pel himself, Nosjean had drawn back, his jaw dropped.
‘Patron!’
‘What’s happened?’ Pel asked.
‘Happened, Patron?’
‘Who wants me?’
‘Who wants you?’ Nosjean was confused. ‘Nobody wants you, Patron.’
‘Then why did you track me down here?’
‘I didn’t track you down, Patron.’ Nosjean’s confusion increased. ‘I was making a few enquiries and just stopped here on my way home. It’s my night off and I thought – well, I thought I might as well. There’s going to be dancing later and a bit of a procession.’
Pel studied him. He had always found Nosjean an honest young man and perhaps the most imaginative member of his team. Nevertheless, Pel had an inbuilt reserve that prevented him wishing to share Madame Faivre-Perret with the rest of his staff. Madame Faivre-Perret had arrived unexpectedly in Pel’s life and, for almost the first time, after a great many mistakes and a great deal of interference from his job and her relatives who had a habit of dying just when he had made arrangements to see her, he had got her alone. He preferred to keep it that way.
‘It’s odd you should come the night I happened to be here,’ he said coldly.
Nosjean blushed. Like most of the Hôtel de Police, he had been following Pel’s romance with interest. Like everybody else also, he was all for it succeeding, if only for the fact that it might improve Pel’s temper.
‘It wasn’t intentional, Patron,’ he insisted. ‘I promise you. I was going to have a meal here, that’s all. Are you?’
‘We’ve had our meal,’ Pel said. ‘I was doing a bit of checking on those stolen detonators at St Blaize.’
‘I was doing the same thing, Patron,’ Nosjean admitted. ‘A woman was wounded at Porsigny about the same time.’
‘How did you discover that?’
‘Accidental, Patron. Porsigny comes under St Yves and St Blaize under Buhans. They weren’t on the same report and nobody noticed.’
This, Pel decided, was something that appeared to require his attention. He studied Nosjean, and, accepting that as usual he had been using his brains, he tried to make good his earlier sharp reprimand by smiling. He wasn’t used to smiling and it made him look as if he was suffering from indigestion.
‘Give my regards to Mademoiselle Chenandier,’ he said.
‘Odile Chenandier’s not with me,’ Nosjean said stiffly. ‘I’m on my own.’
‘Pity to waste such a warm evening.’ Pel was feeling almost genial. ‘You should have brought her.’
Nosjean gave him a grieving look. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘She’s busy arranging her wedding.’
Pel’s smile widened. The Hôtel de Police had been taking bets for some time on Odile Chenandier.
‘Congratulations, mon brave,’ he said.
‘They’re not in order, Patron,’ Nosjean explained through gritted teeth. ‘It
’s not to me. It’s a type in the tax office who works regular hours. I think she might have waited.’
Pel decided Nosjean was asking rather a lot, considering the number of Catherine Deneuves and Charlotte Ramplings who had engaged his attention. He put his hand on Nosjean’s shoulder. With his own affairs secure for the first time in his life, he felt he could spare a little sympathy.
‘I’ll leave it to you, mon brave. I’m off now. Tomorrow, come and see me and we’ll compare notes on what we’ve found out.’
Collecting Madame Faivre-Perret, he moved towards his car and was just about to open the door when a policeman approached him, touching his hand to his képi. Every policeman in Burgundy, to say nothing of a few in other provinces, had got to know Pel. Many of them had had occasion to feel the length of his tongue and this one was trying hard to look alert and on his toes.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to wait just a moment.’
Pel’s eyebrows lifted and the policeman stiffened nervously.
‘We’ve just stopped all the traffic,’ he explained. ‘For the children’s procession, you understand.’
Pel frowned. In his view, the only person allowed to make demands was Clovis Evariste Désiré Pel.
‘It’ll only be for a quarter of an hour or so, sir.’ The policeman looked as if he’d been set in plaster of Paris. ‘Perhaps you’d care to have drink. I think we could find you one in the substation.’
Pel tried to imagine Madame Faivre-Perret sitting in the substation drinking a quick brandy out of the thick glasses they kept in the cupboard there. ‘I think we’ll watch the procession,’ he said.
Inevitably, the procession took rather longer than the quarter of an hour that had been predicted, and the minute princesses, clowns, pierrots and pierrettes continued to fill the roadway as they jostled and shoved their way towards where the Maire was handing out lollipops. Pel and Madame Faivre-Perret watched, Madame with a maternal smile on her face, Pel with a blank expression because, if there were one thing he didn’t like, it was being delayed when he was on his way somewhere.