Pel and the Bombers

by Mark Hebden

  ‘He didn’t seem interested,’ she said. ‘He was a sullen boy, not a particularly nice boy, in fact, though that seems a dreadful thing to say now he’s dead. The other boys seemed to think there was something odd about him.’

  ‘What sort of odd?’

  ‘Well,’ she paused, troubled ‘–they seemed to think he wasn’t – well – wasn’t like normal boys.’

  ‘A latent homosexual?’

  ‘I suppose that’s what they felt. But that again’s something one ought not to accuse the dead of.’

  ‘It’s not a crime these days,’ Nosjean pointed out. ‘Besides, it’s cropped up already.’

  ‘Well–’ she shrugged ‘–there may be something in it. On the other hand, there may be not. They’re hardly of an age to be experienced in these things.’

  ‘They’re aware of them, all the same.’

  ‘I suppose they are. But if Charles-Bernard had been up to something that day, I’m sure somebody would have noticed it. In fact–’ she dazzled Nosjean with a smile ‘–why don’t I get them to write an essay on anything unusual they noticed that day. It would be a good exercise for them and it might help you.’

  Nosjean frowned. ‘They’d make things up.’

  ‘I don’t think so. And one or two might have noticed what young Crébert was up to.’

  ‘Will they do it?’

  She smiled again. It made Nosjean’s heart slide about beneath his shirt like aspic on a hot plate. ‘For me they will,’ she said. ‘They’ll do anything for me.’

  Nosjean wasn’t surprised. He would have, too.

  Eight

  Inevitably, every newspaper in France had got in on the act by this time. Every one of them had a man in the city or at Vieilly or even both. The headlines were as they’d expected:

  TERRORIST ATTACK IN CITY. THREE POLICEMEN MURDERED.

  Le Bien Public’s headlines were startling but sane. After all, you couldn’t much play down what had happened. France-Soir’s sub-editors had done rather better:

  THREE POLICE KILLED. BUTCHERY IN EXPLODED HOUSE.

  France Dimanche had come off best:

  FIVE KILLED IN HOLOCAUST. POLICE SLAUGHTER.

  Pel tossed it aside. The impression was that the butchery had been done by the police and the affair out at Vieilly had hardly been noticed, just a paragraph lower down – on the same page so that it would be clear to readers what a violent world they lived in – BOY FOUND DEAD. MURDER SUSPECTED. Whoever did it, Pel thought sourly, would be understandably bitter that he hadn’t had a better press.

  Television tackled the affair from a different angle. Since nothing had yet been turned up, the big television names were wanting to know why it was that policemen had been killed in such large numbers and were suggesting that it was the fault of the men at the top for not being on the ball. It was all part of the game, and the procedure with television was less to give news than to make comments and stir things up.

  There were still crowds outside the Hôtel de Police. Information was pouring in – people who thought they’d seen the car they were seeking, people with tips about men who were known to use guns – and the police were combing the city for anyone known to have used violence on other occasions. But clues were sadly lacking.

  Nobody had slept for days but at least, little by little, they kept adding to the descriptions – odd words and half forgotten fragments from the memory of those who’d seen the murderers escaping – and an appeal had gone out. To hotel keepers and people who let rooms, asking about strangers, especially those who had no luggage; to householders asking them to try to remember if a neighbour had gone out unexpectedly at the appropriate times; to hairdressers asking for men who wanted their hair dyed.

  Meanwhile, the police had suddenly found themselves popular. It was a phenomenon which didn’t occur very often and Pel was prepared to use it to the limit. People were even coming forward with money for the families of the dead men, and local café and bar owners were rallying round to send in drinks and food for anyone working overtime in the Hôtel de Police.

  When the funerals were held, half the city turned out. The thing had been well organised and the three cortèges met near the Place Wilson and headed slowly down the Cours de Gaulle towards the cemetery. The three hearses, followed by the limousines containing the family mourners, were watched by an enormous crowd which lined the grass verges five deep. How many of the watchers were mourners, how many there to register their protest at the killings, and how many merely morbid sightseers, Pel couldn’t say. He rode with the Chief, his face grim, his eyes on the crowd. It was an old trick – watching the spectators in the hope of spotting someone who could well have done it – but, of course, it never led to anything and it didn’t now.

  The city had not been mean about the ceremony. There was a sung Mass and the funeral cars were decorated with black and silver drapings, with more round the door of the church inside the cemetery where the priest waited, a red-faced young man who looked almost as if he could have been a policeman himself with his strong features, large hands and the stout boots that showed beneath his cassock.

  The weather had changed unexpectedly and the heavy clouds made the hundreds of memorials to bourgeois dead a drab stretch of marble reaching away in the mist. In front of the plastic flowers inside the dirty glass domes and the stones inset with glass-covered photographs, the road was lined with more people. All morning men had been unloading wreaths, and the chapel entrance was patched with damp where the rain had blown in, its interior full of the intoxicating smell of the flowers piled against the altar steps.

  Among the trees policemen in plain clothes stood in groups, their eyes expressionless, missing nothing. As Pel moved inside, the only illumination came from the long flames of the candles near the coffins standing in the body of the chapel, watched over by nuns reciting the rosary as the mourners filed past, dipping their fingers in the holy water to cross themselves.

  Randolfi’s parents stood with his wife, their faces frozen and bleak. Desouches’ father supported his mother, propping her up with a hand on her elbow. Lemadre’s widow was hard to distinguish beneath the black veil, but Pel could see the handkerchief balled in her hand and hear the occasional sniff as she fought with her tears. Behind them, people pushed quietly to their places as pall bearers, led by the master of ceremonies, quietly laid the late wreaths down.

  The choir sang a Requiem Pel had once heard on the radio. The church was full of officials and behind him he could hear occasional bouts of coughing and the creaking of chairs. A child started sobbing and its mother took it out, her heels ringing on the stone flags. The De Profundis was played, then the choir started. The strong smell of incense swept over everybody as the procession moved outside, the coffins in front, followed by a choirboy carrying a silver cross and the priest with his head down over his prayer book. From among the family vaults, more people watched as they passed, then quietly moved forward to join on the end of the procession as it moved to the open graves where the clods of earth lay like wounds on the green turf.

  The pressure was kept up. Information continued to come in but it was never the information they wanted and there was nothing positive to go on. Tracker dogs and men with walkie-talkies were still out searching and a large reward had been offered, supplemented by more offers from city businessmen who believed in law and order.

  The whole area was being turned upside-down. Messages were sent out to all forces to investigate anyone who had been brought in for theft, because the men they wanted might have gone into hiding and been forced to steal to stay alive, and to all employers to check new employees. Then De Troquereau spotted a man fitting one of the descriptions they had, who seemed to be acting suspiciously. As De Troq’ approached, the man realised he was being followed and jumped on a bus heading up the Rue de la Liberté. Failing to catch the bus, De Troq’ had to grab a taxi, but the taxi became stuck in the traffic, so he got the driver to pass a message by his radio to his base, which
passed it on to the police, and as the man dropped off the bus at Talant, he was met by a police car.

  But even as hands reached out for him, he wriggled free and ran, and in no time reinforcements were pouring into the area where he had disappeared and every road was guarded. A police cordon was thrown round the district and every man on the streets was stopped to prove his identity. The local children enjoyed it all immensely and had to be shooed away as they tried to climb into the radio van that was working with the men on their two flat feet. Dogs arrived to search the district and, as expectant crowds waited outside, even pushed through the Church of Ste Marie as Mass was being said. Eventually the wanted man was traced to a block of flats at Fontaine and there the hunt was called off when they became certain he wasn’t the man they wanted and that, anyway, he was no longer in the area.

  The reward was increased again and more information came in, together with a variety of theories: The killers must surely be hiding in a hotel, protected by a woman; they must be in Paris, which because of its size was always the best place to disappear. Hairdressers were checked, especially when one of them became suspicious as a manly-looking woman asked to have her hair cropped short and dyed. Though she matched the description of one of the men they wanted, she turned out to be a perfectly respectable matron.

  While the enquiry was going on, three bright young gentlemen at Chenove decided it might be a good time to turn to crime because the police would be too busy to worry about them. But a small boy, standing in a doorway, saw them pulling stockings over their heads and, as they vanished into the offices of Fabrications Métaux Français, he telephoned the police. The three men were picked up as they reappeared and the small boy became a hero for a day or two.

  By this time the wanted posters were resulting in hoaxes. Suspects were reported everywhere in the city. Most of the sightings were made in good faith, but a few were from drunks or practical jokers who found themselves very quickly inside 72, Rue d’Auxonne, which was the name given to the local prison. A clairvoyant claimed to have seen the body of one of the suspects in a wood, and when they searched a body was there all right but it was that of a man too old to have been one of the wanted men, and he had cut his throat.

  ‘All the same,’ Darcy asked, ‘how the hell did she know he was there?’

  A pilot leaving the airport alerted the police about one of his passengers but when the aeroplane was met in Paris the passenger turned out to be a German businessman, while three men reported to be behaving oddly as they climbed on to a train turned out to be a group of young executives who had drunk too much at a business lunch.

  Then a woman claimed to have seen one of the wanted men in a woman’s lavatory and the red-faced police officer sent in to check discovered it was truly a woman. Another woman, who turned out to be slightly round the bend, said the suspects were in her bedroom. They had to investigate but, as they’d suspected, they weren’t, while a man spotted wearing a comic mask proved to be the proprietor of a toy shop testing his wares. Finally a railwayman joined the practical jokers at 72, Rue d’Auxonne, when he terrified a taxi driver by claiming to be one of the suspects.

  Every postbag brought letters – typewritten, handwritten, badly spelled or perfectly phrased, on stiff parchment-like paper or pages torn from exercise books. Someone had to go through them all. Most of them concerned the police shootings but there was one indignant one – ‘Why is there so little in the newspapers about the murder at Vieilly?’ It seemed as if someone considered the police victims were getting too much publicity. There were others suggesting that the shootings were a set-up by the Ministry of the Interior as a means of proving the police were needed, which everybody knew was a lie; that they had been committed by a variety of neighbours who appeared to be on bad terms with the writers; one even suggesting that they should look into the President of the Republic, who was a politician and therefore not to be trusted any further than he could be thrown. Most of them were clearly the work of crackpots.

  Still the information came in. The suspects were reported to have stolen sandwiches off picknickers in a layby on the N7, to be drinking beer in a bar at Sémur. A man sleeping in a parked car was ringed by armed policemen only to turn out to be waiting for his wife. Every call on the telephone was acted on and each incident was marked on a giant map. There were still no signs of the guns which had been used to do the killings but many illicit weapons were returned to the Hôtel de Police by scared owners, some even left anonymously in parcels on the doorstep. A tip led to a reservoir which was searched by frogmen without success and on another occasion police boarded a train on which two men had jumped at the last moment as it left the city. It was stopped en route and searched without revealing anything, while four naked ladies in a strip club operating illegally at Nancy were surprised by detectives acting on a tip that the men they wanted were hiding above it.

  All the time, Pel had his eye on the date. The days were slipping past and he was beginning to grow worried. It had been suggested that the President’s visit to the city should be put off but the idea had been firmly rejected by the Elysée Palace in Paris. The President of France didn’t expect to be assassinated and it was up to the police to see he wasn’t. Which was fair enough but didn’t really help much.

  Pel left the office feeling old. By this time he had hardly been out of the Hôtel de Police for days and he needed a break. He had smoked so many cigarettes he felt his inside was charred, he had been home only to change his clothes and take a bath, and his feet ached with standing. Cautiously, half-expecting a rebuff, he telephoned Madame Faivre-Perret and suggested they should meet for a meal at the Relais St Armand, which lay roughly between her premises and the Hôtel de Police.

  ‘I just feel I need to talk to someone about something other than murder,’ he said heavily.

  She seemed pleased to see him and waited for him to kiss her cheeks. Managing it without disturbing her hair or knocking her eye out, he reflected he was becoming good at it.

  ‘I could be called away,’ he warned.

  ‘It’s something I’ve come to expect,’ she admitted. ‘It’s a sick world.’

  True enough. Even their own province, Pel decided bitterly, hadn’t been behind the door where terrorism was concerned. It wasn’t really a new phenomenon, anyway, and the Dukes of Burgundy, never exactly saints, had often been involved in sudden death. Despite his record for courage, Philip the Bold had not been much filled with fellow feeling, while Philip the Good, for all his splendid achievements, had had an ability to strike dismay into his neighbours’ hearts – if only with his thirty-three mistresses and twenty-six bastards. Even the holy St Bernard, who liked to remind popes and kings of their duties, must have been a bit terrifying with his aptitude for calling a spade a bloody shovel.

  They ate almost in silence because there were few plans they could make and Pel’s mind was too full of the killings. Madame didn’t seem to mind and sat quietly beside him in a way that he found surprisingly comforting.

  When he reached his home in the Rue Martin-de-Noinville it was late and he was feeling depressed. For once it wasn’t because his car had started making curious noises in the engine room, that his house looked like a pile of old doors and windows just dumped down and left to erect themselves, or that his front lawn looked like the stubble of a not very well cared for wheat field. It wasn’t that he knew that Madame Routy would be just watching the end of something on the television, with the volume control turned up as far as it would go. It wasn’t even that the room would be shabby and ill-cared for, or that Madame Routy would have done as little as possible for her money, because all these problems had changed since Pel and Madame Faivre-Perret had reached an understanding about their future.

  At least, he could see an end to his discomfort. It was rather the load of work that had fallen on his shoulders and the thought of three dead policemen and the evil people who could see no way to obtain their ends except by violence. That, and the fact that in the m
ortuary was the cold body of a young boy, murdered at an age when he was probably just beginning to find life exciting.

  As he expected, the television was roaring away so that the very foundations of the house were shaking.

  ‘Turn that thing off,’ Pel growled.

  Madame Routy ignored him. She was absorbed in what was happening on the screen and she had grown accustomed to ignoring Pel.

  ‘Turn it off,’ he said more loudly.

  She stirred herself enough to answer him. ‘I’m just watching the end of this,’ she said. ‘It’s a play.’

  ‘Turn it off!’ Pel roared.

  She glared at him. ‘I have a right to a little entertainment when my work is finished,’ she said.

  But she turned the switch. ‘If I’m not allowed a little pleasure at my age–’ she began.

  ‘I’m not interested in your pleasure,’ Pel snarled. ‘Three policemen and a woman are dead and two others seriously wounded, and a boy’s been strangled at Vieilly. I need peace to think.’

  As she disappeared, he realised with amazement that for the first time since she had arrived in his sphere of influence – or was it since he had arrived in hers? – he had had the nerve to lay down the law. It must be Madame Faivre-Perret’s encouragement, he decided.

  Then he shook his head. No, it was just that he had too much on his mind. Murders didn’t usually come five at a time.

  He poured himself a brandy, noting as he did so that Madame Routy had been at it again, and sat down facing the blank screen of the television. Upstairs, he could hear Madame Routy throwing things around in a monumental huff.

  He tossed back the brandy without tasting it then stared at the glass, wondering where it had gone to. Pouring himself another, he sat down again and tried to put his tired thoughts in order. The road blocks, the searches, the questioning had produced nothing.