Pel and the Bombers

by Mark Hebden

  His eye fell on the remaining members of Inspector Goriot’s squad. Aimedieu: Little more than a boy and still shaken by the events of the previous night. The only witness still on his feet, he was a Meridional like the dead Randolfi and a good man by all accounts. Brochard and Debray: Both pale-haired, pale-eyed northerners from the Lille area who had somehow drifted south to Burgundy, they were said to be great friends but were curiously anonymous with their light colouring. So far, they’d achieved little to give them a reputation. Well, Pel thought, they’d now have a chance to show what they were made of.

  As for the rest: They had the whole force to call on. The Chief had made that clear at once. When policemen were murdered, all the stops were pulled out, otherwise people got the impression that policemen could be killed with impunity. An extra dozen men had been drafted from Uniformed Branch to work in plain clothes. If they were any good, two of them would find themselves on Goriot’s squad, when he was fit enough once more to run a squad. They all looked. incredibly young, mere boys, and Pel could only think it was a sign of his increasing age.

  He gestured at Darcy who stood up.

  ‘You know why you’re here’, Darcy said briskly. ‘Three men have been murdered. All colleagues of yours. Randolfi, Desouches and Lemadre. Two others have been wounded. Inspector Goriot and Sergeant Durin. There was also a woman, whom we haven’t yet identified. In addition, a boy was murdered at Vieilly and there may well be a connection. Five murders in twenty-four hours. It’s our job to deal with them, so you can expect little in the way of rest until we’ve nailed who did them, and not much in the way of sit-down meals. You’ll be snatching your sleep when you can get it, probably even here on camp beds, and most of your meals will be stand-up affairs at bars. So get that clearly into your heads from this moment.’

  Misset, whose growing family provided what he considered a splendid reason why he should be treated differently from anyone else, raised his hand slowly.

  Pel knew exactly what the question was going to be. ‘No,’ he said, and Misset flushed and lowered his hand.

  ‘Because of the casualties,’ Darcy went on, ‘Inspector Goriot’s squad will work in conjunction with mine. Nosjean and De Troquereau will be running the show at Vieilly. Inspector Pel and myself will be running the enquiries in the city. Debray will work with Nosjean and De Troq’. Brochard and Aimedieu – because he’s the only one who was at the shooting in the city – will work with Inspector Pel and me, as will Misset and Lagé. Claudie Darel will handle things here with Cadet Martin and keep in touch with both parties. The others will be split as we find necessary. For the moment, two will work with Nosjean and De Troq’ and the remainder in the city. We can also count on Uniformed Branch for further help if necessary.’

  As he sat down, Pel rose, his eyes still moving over them.

  ‘The police killings,’ he said slowly. ‘It would seem to me at first glance that we’re not dealing with professionals. Professionals would be cleverer than this and would never go to all this trouble to get at Zimbach’s safe, because a raid on a bank’s a lot easier and getting rid of jewellery’s difficult and always pretty unprofitable. I think they’re a new group with a grievance. The world’s full of people with grievances: Everybody whose wife’s nagged at him, everybody whose girlfriend’s refused to go to bed with him, everybody whose mother-in-law’s being difficult. They all set up a new outfit and plant a new bomb. So we’re looking for amateurs, but if we turn up a few professionals, so much the better. Comments?’

  There was none and Pel looked at Doc Minet. ‘Anything on the boy at Vieilly?’

  Doc Minet sighed. ‘Cause of death,’ he said. ‘Asphyxia Condition of lungs confirms it. Manual strangulation had been tried but I don’t think he died from that. I think whoever did it became aware that he was still alive after trying strangulation and killed him by pushing his face into the loamy soil. Time of death, around ten-thirty in the evening.’

  ‘Was it sexual?’

  ‘We’ve taken samples and swabs, but I think not. I’ve also taken fingernail scrapings and all the usual. He hadn’t been interfered with. It doesn’t look like a sexual attack.’ Minet paused. ‘On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that his attacker didn’t intend a sexual attack. It’s possible he suggested it and the boy rejected him and tried to run away, and his attacker brought him down and killed him in a panic in case he told someone. We have no means of knowing.’

  Pel frowned. Most attacks on children were sexual. There had been cases where children had been killed because they’d stumbled on a crime, but even then death was usually accidental – bonds tied too tightly, a gag too large, a blow that was too hard – and most other attacks were by depraved or twisted people bent on satisfying their lusts.

  He turned to Nosjean. ‘Check all known homosexuals,’ he said. ‘And all known sexual deviates – rapists, sadists, clothes slashers, exhibitionists, the lot. Check mental health and nursing institutions for new patients or escapees, and evaluations of any patients recently released. Enquire at prisons about new admissions and at dry cleaners about clothes. And let’s remember that if our murderer’s a psychopath he blends indistinguishably into the normal populace. He has no visible guilt and no evident motive.’

  Grenier, of Photography, offered a large pile of pictures. Pel glanced at them and passed them to the Chief, who also glanced at them and passed them on. Leguyader, of the Lab, had nothing new to report. ‘Soil in his fingernails,’ he announced. ‘Also in his eyes, nostrils and mouth. It bears out what Doc Minet says. Somebody held his face down in the soil. There was an imprint. We’ll take a cast.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘We have his clothes. I expect we shall find something to indicate where he’d been, but nothing that could identify his attacker. At least, not until we find the attacker. He wasn’t clutching a handful of hair or a marked handkerchief.’

  The Chief glanced at Pel and frowned. Leguyader’s sarcasm was well known but sometimes it was out of place.

  Prélat, of Fingerprints, shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No weapon–’ the shrug came again ‘–therefore no fingerprints.’

  ‘Nothing on the boy himself?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘How about you, Nosjean? Has he been identified yet?’

  Nosjean opened the notebook resting on his knees. The membership card for the gymnasium near the Place Wilson had done the trick. ‘De Troq’ went to see Georges Martinelle, who runs the place,’ he explained.

  Pel’s eyes switched to De Troquereau, who had also opened a notebook. ‘It isn’t a big gymnasium, Patron,’ he said. ‘Used only by children of the well-heeled. Only a few members. Martinelle supplied the names and addresses of them all. I visited them. The boy’s called Charles-Bernard Crébert, aged thirteen, son of Paul and Régine Crébert, of 113, Rue Barbisey. That’s in the Avenue Victor-Hugo area. They reported him missing this morning.’

  ‘Anything known about him?’

  ‘Wealthy parents. Spoiled child. Martinelle opened the gymnasium when he retired from the army. He said the boy had the makings of a gymnast. It’s the thing these days. Martinelle didn’t like him much but he can’t afford to offend parents and he was giving him extra private lessons. He paid, of course.’

  Pel turned to Nosjean again. ‘What about the parents? Seen them yet?’

  ‘Only to inform them about their son, Patron.’ Nosjean frowned. Jobs like that often came within the compass of a policeman’s work and they were never pleasant.

  ‘What did you make of them?’

  ‘Much the same as De Troq’ says of the boy, Patron. Wealthy. Bit spoiled themselves, I’d say. I got the impression that the boy was difficult at times.’

  ‘Did you question them?’

  ‘We only established the identity about an hour ago. I’ll be going out there shortly. De Troq’s going to see Martinelle again.’

  ‘Right, Darcy, let’s have it. Tell them what we know so far about the other busine
ss.’

  Darcy did so, giving them all that was known on what had happened in the Impasse Tarien, what had been found in the wrecked house, and what had been seen afterwards.

  ‘Two men,’ Pel said. ‘Supporting another. Followed by a woman who was obviously nervous and frightened. It looks very much as though it was an attempt to break into the safe at Zimbach’s, the jeweller’s. They obviously had explosives but whether these were to blow the safe at Zimbach’s we don’t know until the experts have finished, though we have to consider they were preparing explosive devices for use in the streets. Certainly nothing was taken from Zimbach’s because Inspector Goriot arrived before they could get at the safe. However, we know that the men we’re looking for are ruthless and very dangerous.’ He turned to Darcy. ‘What did you find out at the Palais des Ducs?’

  Darcy scanned a piece of paper. ‘There are several possibilities, Patron, but none of them important enough for bombs, until next month when the President appears in the city to open an exhibition of Burgundian art at the Palace.’

  ‘Got the date?’

  ‘I have, Patron.’ Darcy’s face was bleak. ‘We have four and a half weeks.’

  Pel was silent for a moment then he looked at the assembled men again. ‘If that’s the reason for the explosives,’ he said, ‘then we have a time limit. But that doesn’t mean carelessness, so tread warily. We want no heroics. This is a team job and we’re not expecting anyone to grab the lot on his own. Claudie Darel will be watching everything that comes in and the telephone will be manned twenty-four hours a day. In the meantime, we have one lead. We’re looking for a car. Pale blue, make unknown, number beginning 9701-R. We’re also looking for a frightened woman and a man who appears to have been injured, probably shot.’

  ‘Who by?’ Aimedieu asked quietly, blushing like a choir boy as he did so. ‘None of us did any shooting. We never got a chance. There were bodies all over the floor before anybody got his gun out. I’ve checked, Patron. The Inspector didn’t use his gun and neither did Durin, and I’ve looked at the guns of Randolfi, Lemadre and Desouches. They hadn’t been fired.’

  ‘Good point,’ Pel said. ‘I think, then, that we have to assume that the wounded man was hit by accident by a bullet from one of his friends.’ He gestured. ‘It makes little difference. He’ll still be needing a doctor.’

  Five

  Standing once more in the wrecked house in the Impasse Tarien, Pel stared about him with Darcy. Debris littered the floor – broken plaster, splintered woodwork, dust and soot that had accumulated for years in the ancient chimney. What plaster remained was chipped where bullets had gouged holes in it and there were blood splashes on the walls and, where they could be seen beneath the debris, on the bare floorboards.

  As they worked, an army captain, one of the explosives experts from the barracks in the Rue du Drapeau appeared. In his hand were several wide-barrelled felt-tipped pens such as you could buy in plastic packets at the Nouvelles Galeries for a few francs. The ink cores had been removed and the containers stuffed with explosive. They had been tied together with wire, with wire wool threaded round their caps, and a sheet of transistors soldered to a tuft of the wire wool.

  ‘Good as a steel drum for this kind of explosive,’ the army man said. ‘It’s not gelignite, of course. It’s the home-made stuff. When they’re sealed, the pressure built up inside when it goes off is tremendous. I think they were assembling them here.’

  ‘What for?’ Darcy asked. ‘To blow somebody up?’

  ‘Normally they’d use a drum filled with jelly in a sewer for that. Or a couple of kilos strapped to the exhaust of a car.’

  ‘They’d have a job getting a bomb like that close to the President,’ Pel said. ‘Perhaps they had alternative plans. Perhaps it won’t be explosives, and these things were to be set off just to create confusion.’

  They moved about the wrecked building, staring sombrely at the places where Randolfi, Lemadre and Desouches had died. It was a sordid little place of cracked plaster, peeling paint and broken floorboards. Shelves and cupboards had collapsed and the empty bottles which had littered the kitchen lay about in broken shards. The windows had gone and the shutters hung crookedly from broken hinges.

  ‘They must have been mad to think they could get away with hammering without being heard,’ Pel growled.

  ‘Some of these people,’ Darcy pointed out, ‘don’t have much grip on reality. They got into Number Eleven, which is the last house in the cul-de-sac, and started living there. Then they knocked a hole through the back wall into the yard and through the wall of the yard of Number Ten. They’d just started on Zimbach’s wall when Desouches turned up.’

  In Number Eleven the kitchen table was set for a meal, with a coffee pot, a plastic bottle of stale milk, and dirty mugs. An open tin of meat was going bad in the heat.

  As they studied them, Prélat of Fingerprints appeared from upstairs. ‘I expect the place was full of fingerprints,’ he said, stretching his shoulders. ‘But we’ll not find much after the explosion.’

  Studying the tools that had been left behind, Pel picked up a hammer. ‘What about this?’ he asked, gazing at the varnished handle. ‘It would give good prints.’

  ‘There’s nothing, Patron,’ Prélat said. ‘I don’t think it’s been used and if it was, it was used by someone wearing gloves – workman’s gloves, I’d say.’

  Pel frowned. He was studying a pale oval mark on the handle where a label had been removed. ‘Let’s have a check on it, all the same,’ he said to Darcy. ‘Misset can do it. It’ll keep him out of mischief. It looks brand new and the label probably gave the name of the supplier and was taken off in case we found it after they’d finished with Zimbach’s and asked who bought it. After all, people don’t often buy hammers. We might get an identification.’

  While Pel and Darcy were studying the wrecked house, the police were deploying their forces about the city. The garage hold-up at Regnon had been sorted out quickly and a man was in for questioning about the assault at Auray-sur-Tille, and now police had been brought in from Dôle, Chatillon, Auxerre and Avallon – because there was a chance that the local men were too well-known – and they were out in the streets in a variety of disguises, their ears to the ground, haunting the bars and cafés, their heads cocked and listening. Police were also at barriers on every road out of the city, stopping motorists and checking their cars. Others were digging into all known corners, looking for the missing car, or checking up on anybody who might have been involved and quite a lot who might not, in case they’d heard anything in the shady underworld they inhabited.

  Nobody had, of course, and there was a great deal of indignation at the killers. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ one man told Lagé, ‘you can shut up shop at the Hôtel de Police. There’ll be no crime here until this lot’s sorted out. There are too many Flics about.’

  The experts soon came up with proof of Darcy’s theory that the criminals were after Zimbach’s safe, and one of the bullets dug out of the plaster matched several of the bullets taken out of the dead policemen and the dead woman, who had finally been identified as a Madame Héloïse Lenotre, from Lyons, who had been visiting her brother in that part of the city where the shooting had taken place. She was in no way connected with the crime.

  The following day Madame Colbrun, from Porsigny, found the bullet she had dug out of her thigh and brought it in to the Hôtel de Police. With what had been happening in the city, Nosjean had never been able to organise the search he’d intended, so Madame Colbrun had done it for him. It matched the bullets dug out of the wreckage of Number Ten, Impasse Tarien, and the bullets dug out of Madame Lenotre and the dead and wounded policemen, and confirmed what they’d believed all along – that the detonators from St Blaize had been stolen for no other reason than to set off the gelignite stolen from Dom.

  The obvious first calls were on known dissidents and Darcy set up visits to them all. For the most part they were desperately poor, unhappy and maladjust
ed.

  There were plenty of refugees who had arrived penniless in France who had made a new life for themselves. One or two of them were actually doing very well, thank you, but, honest or not, on the whole, their attitude was not one of defeatism. The bitter, the angry, the sad, were all victims of their own temperaments, and Darcy rejected them as suspects.

  He was well aware of methods. Terrorism these days was transnational with respect to communication and a few other things, and it didn’t matter a damn what each individual terrorist organisation was after, at bottom they were all after the breakdown of law and order. The British had the Irish problem. The French had believers in Breton, Basque, Corsican and now Burgundian freedom. The Italians and the Germans had their own particular burdens in the form of the Red Brigade and the Baader Meinhof. The Turks, the Iranians and the African countries also contributed a few, and most of those in Darcy’s diocese, who weren’t so defeated as to be lethargic, belonged to one or another of them.

  Out of the whole lot, however, there was only one who really meant much to Darcy – one Tadeuz Kiczmyrczik, a Pole who had arrived in France during World War II with a bitter hatred for Russia, which over the years had changed course and was now for any form of government which seemed sane and non-anarchic. He lived with a Czech woman by the name of Anna Ripka, in a narrow-gutted flat near the Industrial Zone, that was filled with ugly furniture piled with books by Marx, Lenin, and a few others. Darcy was shown in by a small round-faced young man with glasses and a broad smile. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’m Jaroslav Tyl. Anna’s out doing the shopping. The old man’s resting. He isn’t well.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Darcy growled. ‘Because I’d like to see him. Get him up.’

  ‘Can’t you leave him alone?’ Tyl asked. ‘He’s got a lot on his mind.’

  ‘Not half as much as I’ve got on mine. Fetch him.’