Pel and the Missing Persons

by Mark Hebden

‘People don’t empty their pockets to go wandering along the motorway in the dark.’

  ‘They probably do if they’re drunk.’

  ‘Was he drunk?’

  ‘He’d been drinking. You can smell it. Whisky. I can check the amount later.’

  ‘Fingerprints been taken?’

  Prélat, the Fingerprints expert, standing just beyond the glow of lights, shook his head. ‘Not yet, patron.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Sixty-five to seventy,’ Cham said. ‘About that. Probably senile. He must have been a bit confused. His waistcoat’s inside out and unbuttoned. His shirt and jacket are buttoned in the wrong holes. He’s not wearing socks. I’d say he was old and perhaps ill. But he was tall and I imagine good-looking when he was young. I reckon we should be looking for somebody’s elderly father.’

  What they’d found seemed to be an accident and accidents weren’t Pel’s line of business. They belonged to Inspector Pomereu, of Traffic, who turned up just as Pel was preparing to leave.

  ‘I’ll look after the details, patron,’ Darcy offered. ‘You take my car. I’ll get a lift back with someone.’

  But Pel was reluctant to leave and stood watching as the tape measures came out and distances were set down; as photographs were taken; as Cham stared up and down the motorway, deep in thought, making calculations in his mind.

  ‘What sort of vehicle are we looking for?’ Pomereu asked.

  ‘Squarish bonnet, judging by the injuries,’ Cham said. ‘He’s been hit on the head by something with a corner to it and then again by something long and narrow. One of those arms that hold protruding rear mirrors on trucks, perhaps? So it was a heavy vehicle, but not so heavy it couldn’t go fast. Not a truck, I’d say.’

  The radio in Darcy’s car began to squawk. He leaned over and spoke into the microphone. Slamming it back into place, he crossed to where Pel was standing, huddled in his coat against the wind and the rain.

  ‘Another raid by the Tuaregs, patron. All night garage at Saint-Blas. That’s just north of here. It could have been them who did this – in a hurry, heading down the motorway to make their getaway.’

  The wind dropped during the night, and the next morning was bright but cold enough for Pel to look like a polar bear wearing woollies. He already had Cham’s description of the victim of the motorway. It had been on his desk when he arrived. ‘Height – one hundred and eighty centimetres. Slightly built. Age sixty-five to seventy. Thinning grey hair. Blue eyes. False teeth. Narrow nose. Appendicitis scar. Arthritis in joints.’

  It was difficult to know which of the two cases that had come up to go for first – the hit and run or the hold-up at Talant – so they left Cham to complete his checks on the motorway victim and went to Talant.

  As the manager of the supermarket had suggested, Madame Folieux, the old lady whose car had been almost run down, was able to tell them nothing.

  ‘It was a car like mine,’ she said.

  ‘What sort have you got?’

  ‘I don’t know. My son bought it for me. He had to go to North Africa for a year on business, so he put me on the telephone and bought me a television and a new car.’

  ‘What sort is it, Nosjean?’ Pel said.

  Nosjean grinned. It was a tiny Peugeot 205.

  ‘Well, it was the same colour,’ she said.

  The car used in the raid on the all-night garage at St-Blas had been found abandoned at Goray just off the motorway. There it was, a Peugeot 604, standing in the square underneath the trees.

  ‘Get anything from it?’ Pel asked.

  ‘A lot of fingerprints, patron,’ Prélat said. ‘But it’s my guess they all belong to the owner and his family. There are too many for them to belong to the Tuaregs.’

  ‘Whose is the car?’

  It turned out to belong to an architect in Dijon and it had been stolen from outside his office in the Rue Général Leclerc. It was undamaged.

  ‘Village cop found it,’ Nosjean reported. ‘From what Cham said, I’d have expected smashed headlights, a dent or two, a spot of blood. But there’s nothing. It’s clean. It wasn’t the car that killed the old boy at Mailly-les-Temps. Prélat says there are marks that indicate they were using gloves.’

  ‘That fits with what the girl at Talant said. How about the till there? Did he find anything?’

  ‘A single print. But badly smudged. I’ve put it into the computer but I don’t expect anything. I feel certain they’re youngsters and new to the game, though it’s only a hunch.’

  Pel nodded. He had a great respect for hunches when they came from someone as bright as Nosjean.

  ‘It looks as though we’ve got to think again about the old boy on the motorway,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if Cham’s come up with anything new.’

  Cham had.

  When Pel arrived in his office, he was just taking off his coat. He had been down the motorway again to look at the scene of the previous night’s incident.

  ‘What were you expecting to find?’ Pel asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Cham shrugged. ‘Something, perhaps.’

  ‘Isn’t that Forensic’s job?’

  Cham smiled. ‘Probably it is. But two heads are always better than one.’

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘I don’t know. There wasn’t much blood. I noticed that last night. That’s why I went to have another look. There should have been some and I’d have expected to see signs of smearing if he’d been dragged or flung along the road for instance. Something like that. I’d have expected to find traces.’

  ‘What’s all this leading to?’

  ‘Not to. From. It’s leading from the way I’ve been thinking. I’m having second thoughts. He was hit by something, that’s a fact. I found tiny fragments of glass embedded in his scalp. That indicates headlights. His skull was fractured. He also had two broken legs. I’d have expected more if he’d been hit by a fast-moving car. Broken shoulders. Broken neck. Heavy grazings on the face. After all, a fast-moving car hitting a man would break bones to start with, then there would be more broken when he hit the road after being flung into the air. There would also be multiple grazing and contusions.’

  ‘And there aren’t any?’

  ‘Nothing that would fit with a fast-moving car hitting him. There was one other thing. As I’ve said, he had two broken legs. Both tibiae. And both in the same place. And that’s odd. You’d expect in a hit and run for them to be broken in different places. But they weren’t. I think his legs had been run over.’

  ‘Run over?’

  ‘One of his shoes was wrenched off – it’s disappeared – but there are also tyre marks on his trousers. Below the knee. I’ll let you have photographs. I think you can identify the type of tyre even.’

  Pel frowned. ‘How does a hit and run driver manage to run over a man’s legs? They usually knock them flying.’

  ‘I don’t think now it was a hit and run,’ Cham said doggedly. ‘He was run over by a car, certainly, but he must have already been lying in the road. Drunk, perhaps? He had a fair percentage of alcohol in him and he smelled of whisky. His hair especially. Why his hair? You don’t imbibe it through the ear. But he hadn’t drunk enormously. Enough to make him sloshed but not enough to be paralytic. Certainly not as much as I’d have expected. Do you want the exact amount?’

  ‘In the report.’ Pel didn’t believe in clouding his thinking by having too many details too early in a case.

  ‘There were also traces of nembutal in the stomach. Sleeping tablets, I expect. You’re not supposed to take those with alcohol but old people sometimes do. They take them and forget what they’ve done and take another. That’s probably what he did. It would be enough to make him confused. It begins to look as if he was staggering about and fell down and was hit by a car, but though his legs were broken they weren’t compound fractures. There was no perforation of the flesh by splintered bone, which I’d have expected if he’d been hit by a fast-moving car. There was one other thing: when we removed his
clothes, we found he wasn’t wearing underwear. No vest. No underpants. Just shirt, trousers, waistcoat and jacket. All with empty pockets. Shirt and jacket buttoned up wrongly, waistcoat unbuttoned and inside out. No socks. One shoe.’

  ‘Any laundry-marks on his shirt?’

  ‘No. None. He either did his own laundry or took it to a laundrette.’

  ‘Unless some neighbour did it for him. Go on.’

  ‘Suit – good quality. You can tell by the finish. It wasn’t off the peg at Nouvelles Galeries. It was made by a good tailor. Probably in Paris.’

  ‘How do you know it was probably from Paris?’

  ‘When I qualified, my father took me to his tailor and had me a suit made. It was a wonderful suit. Cost him a fortune. I dropped a tin of paint down it decorating my house when I got married six months later. Ruined it.’

  ‘Did it have the tailor’s name in it?’

  ‘Of course it did.’

  ‘Not yours, the man on the motorway’s.’

  ‘Oh! It had had one but it had obviously come away. The remains of the stitching were there. It was an old suit. A very old suit.’

  ‘So what we’ve got is a man of sixty-five to seventy who could afford – once upon a time, anyway – to wear good suits, probably made in Paris.’

  ‘That’s about it. He must have driven to where he was found, too, so his car’s around somewhere, waiting to be picked up. Where he was found isn’t near anywhere. It’s between Mailly-les-Temps on one side of the motorway and Ponchet on the other. But not near enough to either for him to have walked from one of them – staggered would be nearer, because he appeared to have been drinking a lot. Perhaps he found he was too drunk to drive and decided to leave his car and walk it off.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To wherever he was going.’

  ‘Nothing at all in his pockets to indicate who he was?’

  ‘No.’ Cham frowned. ‘Just a one-franc piece, a few centimes, a dirty handkerchief, and inside the lining of a jacket pocket a bent card which indicated he was a member of the Club Atlantique de Royan.’

  ‘Club Atlantique de Royan? That’s on the east coast and miles away. It sounds like one of these summer things where they get people doing exercises on the beach. It won’t be going at this time of the year.’

  ‘It looks like an old card.’

  ‘Plastic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any fingerprints?’

  ‘Prélat says a few. But they’re smeared, and one on top of another. He picked up two. Both the same. They’re the dead man’s. I suspect it’s one he used some time when he was on holiday and it was tucked away in the lining and was overlooked when his pockets were emptied – deliberately in my view.’

  ‘Is there a name on it? These clubs usually demand the owner signs them, like banker’s cards.’

  ‘There’s no signature on this one. But there is a number – 579.’

  ‘Any year?’

  ‘No year. It’ll mean looking up number 579 for a few years back.’

  ‘Charming.’ Pel sighed. ‘Well, we’ll check. We’ll check at Mailly-les-Temps too. It’s the nearest place. He might have done his drinking there and wandered off in a stupor. Perhaps his home was the other side of the motorway and he was drunk enough not to worry about crossing it.’

  ‘There’s just one more thing,’ Cham said. ‘If he was lying flat in the road – as he must have been to get his legs smashed as they were, how did he get the head injuries?’

  ‘Could the car that ran over his legs have thrown him up underneath? So that his head came into contact with the underside? It might have, if it were travelling fast.’

  Cham frowned. ‘In that case, I’d have expected to find oil in the wound,’ he said. ‘Grease. Dried mud. The sort of things you get from under a car. There was nothing to indicate that was what happened. There were two indentations in the skull. Something more solid than a glass headlight hit him, something hard and heavy. Then something else like an attachment on a car. Yet there are no flakes of paint around the wound as I’d have expected.'

  Yet’ – Cham frowned, puzzled – ‘there were slivers of glass as if he had been caught by the headlights or the windscreen. The injuries just don’t seem to match up. And why no underwear or socks?’

  ‘We’ll get the local radio to put out a story. We’ll need to know if anybody saw this type lying in the road. There couldn’t have been many cars at that time of night but somebody might have spotted him.’

  ‘I’ll bet we don’t get much,’ Cham said heavily. ‘If somebody did see him, they’d ignore him. They’d think he was a dummy shoved into the road by a hold-up merchant to persuade someone to stop so he could step out from the darkness and stick a pistol up their nose. Or they’d think he was a drunk, and who’d want to pick up a drunk? When you’d got him in the car he’d want to start a fight with you or be sick all over the back seat.’

  Pel sighed. It was true enough. You didn’t normally find people lying around on a motorway, except when there’d been a million-car pile-up in the fog and then you found you were knee deep in stiffs.

  Four

  Nobody was missing from Mailly-les-Temps. Nor from Ponchet, on the other side of the motorway. And no one appeared to have noticed anybody drunk or getting drunk enough to collapse and be run over. Finally, no motorist had appeared who claimed to have seen the body lying on the road.

  Perhaps it just happened that the dead man had fallen on the motorway just in time to be hit and no one had seen him until the cruising police car had found him. On the other hand, perhaps someone had seen him and, scared of the things that happened to motorists who stopped to offer help to stranded travellers, had preferred to ignore him.

  ‘So where did he come from?’ Pel surreptitiously reached for a cigarette from Darcy’s packet that lay on his desk. Darcy saw him and gave the packet a push. Pel sighed, deciding he was weak-willed and probably even feeble-minded. Anybody who was willing to smoke himself to death couldn’t be all there.

  ‘Could he have been put out of a car?’ Darcy asked. ‘Gangsters getting rid of an unwelcome friend? They’re the only types I can think of who would empty a man’s pockets deliberately. On their way from Paris, for instance, to confer with allies in Marseilles. They do that these days, patron.’

  They did indeed. In the old days of horse travel you could reckon your killer, even if he were only the driver of a hit-and-run horse and cart, couldn’t have travelled far from his crime in twenty-four hours. Nowadays you could kill someone in Paris and be in Marseilles a few hours later. Even, for that matter, in America. Travel was so fast these days, alibis where minutes or hours counted were hard to break down.

  ‘It would account for the head injury, patron.’

  ‘Not quite. Cham says there was glass in the wound. And that’ – Pel frowned – ‘that seems to take us back to a car headlight or a car windscreen. Cham thinks he wasn’t dragged by a car – as he would be, for instance, if his clothes snagged on something – and he says there wasn’t a lot of blood where he was found.’

  ‘Which seems to indicate that he didn’t die there, patron. Those injuries to his head would certainly have produced blood. And if it wasn’t on the motorway, where was it? There was no rain to wash it away. That, patron, seems to indicate he was killed somewhere else.’

  ‘And that,’ Pel said firmly, as though it were something they had been working towards for some time, ‘seems to indicate that what we’ve got isn’t a hit and run at all. It’s murder or manslaughter.’

  As they talked, there was a tap on the door. It was Claudie Darel. Both of them smiled at her. Everybody in the Hôtel de Police smiled at Claudie, though by this time everybody had given up hope of winning her.

  ‘It’s De Troq’, patron,’ she said. ‘He’s with Nosjean in Volnay-le-Grand. They were called there by the local police brigadier. They’ve got a man there. He’s admitted hitting the man on the motorway with his car.’

 
; Pel and Darcy stared at each other. Hit and run after all! Back to square one.

  His name was Emile Jourdain and he was an estate agent. He had been to a family celebration at Poitonne and had had too much to drink. His friends had tried to persuade him to stay the night but he had insisted on going home. He was a middle-aged man with a fat flabby body, two or three chins and watery eyes. He looked the sort of man who drank too much.

  De Troq’, slightly built, neat and handsome, met them at the door of the substation and jerked his head in Jourdain’s direction. ‘He’s not one of the Tuaregs,’ he observed. ‘Those boys move fast and I don’t think this type could move fast if he tried.’

  ‘Where’s Nosjean?’

  ‘Morbihaux. We think one of the cars that were used in the Talant hold-up’s turned up. We’d worked out one of them must have been a souped-up Citroën 19 and there was one standing in the square at Morbihaux underneath the wall of the church. The owner of the bar reported it. It’s been there for three days – ever since the Talant hold-up, I imagine. We’ve asked Fingerprints to have a look at it. There’s also an old boy who uses the bar who remembers seeing another car there before it appeared. We think that one might have been the car the Tuaregs changed to from the getaway car.’

  ‘Is it a firm identification?’

  ‘Not by any means, patron. The old boy noticed a Ford Sierra 2000 parked under the trees. It was there all day. Next day on his way to the bar he noticed it had gone but near where it had stood was the Citroën 19. We’ve checked it. Stolen in Latou. No fingerprints. It belongs to a lawyer there.’

  ‘And the Sierra?’

  ‘Fawn-brown. They produced a lot that colour. The old boy didn’t think to take the number because at the time he didn’t think anything of it. Later, he wondered if somebody had driven into the square in the Citroën and left it there and driven away in the Sierra. It’s what we think the Tuaregs have been doing. Nosjean’s checking if something of the sort was done after the St-Blas hold-up and the other places. He’s also checking if the Sierra’s been seen anywhere else. It might give an indication of where they operate from.’