Pel and the Missing Persons

by Mark Hebden

  ‘Busy?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re always busy.’

  ‘Too busy to telephone?’

  Darcy managed to look contrite. ‘You’d be surprised what a rotten world it is.’

  ‘It’s the television,’ she observed cheerfully. ‘That and porn videos. Your time must be very full.’

  Darcy frowned at the teasing. He was at the peak of his ability but somehow he felt things weren’t as right as they should be. He had always felt he knew how to manage his life and Pel didn’t, but now that Pel had married he seemed to have settled down. He was as miserable as ever as a cop and just as relentless in his crusade against criminals, but there was a comfortable core to him these days that Darcy felt he ought to have, too – and didn’t.

  Nobody had given Pel much hope of success at the time he had first met his wife in the Relais St-Armand because he had always been regarded in the Hôtel de Police as a dead loss where women were concerned. But Darcy had seen the possibilities in the Widow Faivre-Perret and had put his oar in occasionally to help the affair along. It had been well worth it, too, because nowadays there were occasional days when Pel wasn’t in a bad temper. He looked at Angélique Courtoise and wondered if she had chosen the Relais St-Armand because of what it had done for Pel.

  ‘Why didn’t you ever get married?’ he asked.

  She looked at him and smiled. ‘I very nearly did,’ she said. ‘If you remember, when you first appeared on the scene I was about to be. At least I was engaged. You managed to persuade me my fiancé wasn’t suitable.’

  ‘You didn’t argue much. Did you ever have anything in common with him?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t a cop and I was working for Professor Foussier at the time, so I suppose I did a bit. I must have. After all, we got engaged.’

  ‘It didn’t last long.’

  ‘Not after you turned up.’ She looked shrewdly at him. ‘Is something worrying you?’

  ‘Probably.’ Darcy paused. ‘A type called Goriot.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘A detective inspector. He was one of those who were injured in that explosion in the Impasse Tarien. He’s recently been declared fit and he’s back shoving his nose into things. He doesn’t like me.’

  ‘Does it worry you?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘I didn’t think you worried about anything. Not even me.’

  Darcy reached out and laid his hand on hers. She gave him a grateful look.

  ‘That’s why I keep turning up,’ he explained. ‘Because I don’t have to worry about you.’

  ‘You might have to one of these days,’ she said seriously. ‘I’m twenty-eight now. It’s a nervous age for a girl. She begins to feel she might miss the bus. And buses keep coming past, you know. Good-looking buses with big cars and lots of money. They seem to need reassurance, too.’

  Five

  Misset’s enquiries hadn’t progressed much. In fact, they had stood quite still. Chiefly because Misset found the Bar de la Petite Alsacienne of much more interest than Aloïs Ferry whom his neighbour, Raymond Jouet, had accused of damaging his garden.

  The barmaid was watching two men playing billiards. She kept looking sideways at Misset and he felt she was interested in him. She’d been eyeing him sideways a lot lately. She was wearing a yellow dress with a plunging neckline that gave him a view down her front almost to her navel every time she bent to pick up a glass, and she seemed to be aware that he’d noticed.

  He wondered what it would be like to be married to her. There should be tests for marriage, he felt. You had to have a test before you could drive a car; you ought to have one before you got married. Misset had thought he was marrying a Deux Chevaux and had found he’d married a tank.

  Someone had put a coin in the juke box and it was clattering away to the strains of what sounded like ‘We go up the stairs. We go up the stairs.’ There should also, Misset thought sourly, be a juke box where you could put in a coin and get five minutes’ silence.

  The girl behind the bar looked up again. She had eyes like a spaniel, big and brown and damp-looking. Her mouth looked soft and warm – Madame Misset’s mouth was like a rat trap – and it intrigued him. Though not half as much as her bust. Misset couldn’t take his eyes off her bust and had even started to fantasise about it. It was much more interesting than Jouet’s garden.

  He sighed and decided he’d better do something. Finishing his beer, he headed for Jouet’s house. The same two cars he’d seen before – Councillor Lax’s and Senator Forton’s – were parked along the road. They were seeing a lot of each other lately, he decided. They must be up to some funny financial business or something.

  Jouet’s garden looked no better. If anything it looked worse. The brown patches Misset had noticed on the lawn seemed more numerous than before and appeared to be spreading into each other. Before long the lawn would be one large bare patch. The flowers didn’t look very healthy either. But Misset could find nothing to connect to the damage that was being done, and Ferry had noticed him prowling around and was becoming hostile. He was doing something to the engine of the ancient blue Peugeot as Misset halted.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’ Misset asked as they met at his front gate.

  Ferry looked round, peering through his thick spectacles. ‘What’s what I do for a living to do with atomic fall-out or whatever it is you’re investigating?’ he demanded.

  Misset improvised rapidly. ‘There’s some theory that men can bring home noxious substances on their overalls,’ he said. ‘They pick them up at work and they get scattered as the man takes the overalls off.’

  ‘I don’t wear overalls.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Ferry gave Misset a long hard look full of suspicion. ‘You’re pretty nosy for a government inspector,’ he said.

  ‘Government inspectors are nosy,’ Misset agreed. ‘It’s their job. You have to be.’

  ‘Who’s your boss?’

  ‘Chief Inspec…’ Misset stopped. ‘Type called Pel,’ he said. ‘Evariste Pel.’

  ‘Tells you what to do, does he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Runs the show? Responsible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lives round here, does he?’

  ‘Leu. Big house there. Married a woman with money. She runs that beauty parlour in the Rue de la Liberté. What sort of truck do you drive?’

  Ferry shrugged. ‘Usual sort. You know, four wheels – those round things – and a steering wheel.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘Trudis.’

  Trudis was a large transport firm covering the whole of Eastern France and one of their main bases was in the city. Ferry gestured. ‘They use everything from eight-wheelers with trailers to small vans for delivering light-weight packages.’

  ‘Which sort do you drive?’

  ‘One of the little ones.’

  ‘Make much money at it?’

  ‘Not these days.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve been stood off. Shortage of orders.’

  In Pel’s office they were taking another look at the dead man on the motorway. They still didn’t know who he was but the fact that the case had been taken over by Judge Castéou confirmed that they no longer regarded him as just another item in the Chief’s Missing Persons enquiry.

  The number on the card found in his pocket had produced nothing. The police in Royan, as they had expected, had informed them that the Club Atlantique was nothing but a small affair operating from a hut on the beach, with a bar and a couple of showers, and that its members were usually holiday-makers in the town for the month of August.

  ‘Geriatrics trying to get their bellies off,’ they said. ‘You know the types. They do an hour’s gentle exercise, then leave the beach at lunchtime to fill up again with food and wine and go home at the end of the month weighing exactly the same as when they arrived but feeling they’ve done themselves good. The club used to close down for the winter but people have got into this
callisthenics business in a big way lately, and it goes on these days with a few locals during the winter.’

  ‘Telephone?’

  ‘They haven’t got one. They’ve just moved into a new place. It’s an old barn, I think, and they’re still putting the roof on and the windows in.’

  ‘So,’ Pel asked as Darcy put the telephone down and they sat back. ‘Who is he?’

  It was a good question. The man on the motorway hadn’t come from Mailly-les-Temps or Ponchet and nobody had reported an abandoned car which could possibly have belonged to him. So where had he come from? And why had he such severe head wounds, in which glass splinters as if from headlights had been found, if – as Jourdain insisted – he’d been lying flat on the motorway when he’d been hit? According to Cham, the broken legs were explainable, the head wounds were not.

  ‘I can only think,’ Darcy said, ‘that somehow he was hit by a car while he was stooping or on his knees – drunk – and that caused the head injuries. This spun him round and he landed flat on his back. Then, while he was lying there, our friend, Jourdain, ran over him.’

  ‘In that case,’ Pel asked, ‘where’s the blood? There was little on the road. And who hit him the first time? Jourdain can be charged with being drunk in charge and with failing to report an accident. But he can’t be charged with manslaughter. In which case, who can? He obviously didn’t do it himself. And who in God’s name is he?’

  ‘He wasn’t young,’ Cham said. ‘But he was reasonably well preserved, though he had false teeth. They were still in his mouth, incidentally.’ He frowned. ‘Which also is odd,’ he continued. ‘I’d have expected if he’d been hit on the head by a car moving at speed they’d have been jerked out of his mouth. It’s not hard to lose your dentures by accident. In fact, it’s remarkably easy. I had an uncle who played a practical joke on a friend while boating on the lake at Evron and it was so successful and he laughed so hard his false teeth fell into the water.’

  ‘I once saw a man at a symphony concert,’ Darcy added, ‘who was so bored and yawned so hard his dentures jumped out. Made a hell of a clatter when they hit the floor.’

  ‘Which,’ Cham said, smiling, ‘is why I don’t understand this type’s dentures still being in place. He was struck a blow on the side and back of the head, it seems by a car travelling at speed. That would be enough to knock anybody’s dentures out.’

  ‘Eyes, too, I reckon,’ Nosjean murmured.

  Pel was thoughtful. ‘We have a lot of odd factors here,’ he said. ‘This business of the teeth. The absence of socks and underwear. The shirt buttoned up wrongly. The waistcoat inside out. Let’s keep all these things to ourselves. Just in case. They’re not to be included in anything that’s handed out to the press. What else do we know of him?’

  ‘I found an appendicitis scar and a kidney op. scar,’ Cham pointed out. ‘Numerous scars on his wrists.’

  ‘Suicide attempts?’

  ‘I’d say not. They seem to run the wrong way for attempts to slash a vein. There was one other thing. I noticed also he had flat feet.’

  ‘I think I’ve got flat feet,’ Pel said.

  ‘The knuckles at the root of the big toes protruded,’ Cham went on. ‘A condition known as hallux valgus. There was only one shoe – the left – but I noticed the sole was built up slightly on the inside. That gave me a clue. It was an attempt to help him walk on the outside of the foot. There’s probably a similar build-up on the missing right shoe. It indicates flat feet, which is a deformity in which the arches of the feet are impaired. It’s caused generally by long periods of standing and is often found in policemen, waiters, domestic servants and hospital nurses. Come to that, so are varicose veins and piles.’

  ‘They say Napoleon suffered from piles,’ Darcy said.

  ‘It was that long walk all the way back from Moscow.’

  Cham grinned. ‘It used to be much more common in the old days, due to the lack of proper diets, which affected the bones, but we’ve overcome that problem these days. It’s also liable to occur after a fracture of the ankle and it causes pain along the under and inner part of the foot.’

  ‘No wonder my feet ache,’ Pomereu muttered.

  ‘It should be treated early by massage and exercises. Patent supports are sometimes worn but they simply stretch the tendons and ligaments further.’

  Pel was listening quietly to the exchanges. ‘This built-up sole,’ he said. ‘It would have to be done by a shoe repairer, wouldn’t it? Let’s try a few, Daniel. One might have his address.’

  Pel was right and Lagé was put on the job. He was growing fat but he was always a willing worker – so much so, Misset often got him to do his work. Lagé was easy-going and never complained, but he was patient and one of the best they had when it came to long-winded enquiries. As it happened, this one started off well. He found the shoe repairer who had built up the sole of the dead man’s shoe late in the afternoon. His shop was in the St-Alban area of the city and he recognised the shoe at once.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s my work.’

  ‘What was the name of the owner?’ Lagé asked.

  The shoe repairer dug out the book of stubs that went with the tickets he handed out as he took in work. ‘Here it is. “Build sole up.” Dupont’s the name. I’ve got it here.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘I don’t ask the address. They’ve got the ticket for confirmation when they collect the shoes.’

  ‘What about first name?’

  ‘I don’t ask that either. After all, we’re only repairing shoes, not setting diamonds in platinum.’

  The weather changed at last and the sun finally came out. The sun in that part of France had a special quality of gold in it and as Pel and Darcy left for Lyons it was shining as if it had God’s blessing in it.

  They stayed in Lyons all day. As he had been involved with the policemen charged with accepting bribes, Pel was questioned about them, and Darcy was a witness in an assault case. They had driven down in Darcy’s car and, after his stint at the police headquarters, Pel joined Darcy in court where he’d been awaiting the verdict. The judges had only just left, together with many of the lawyers who had been watching from the well to see how their elders and betters put their case, and it was late as they set off home. They sank a quick beer and ate a hurried snack at a brasserie nearby before heading back up the motorway in the darkness of the evening towards Nadauld’s booze-up at the Bar Transvaal.

  The pale stones of the Palace of the Dukes, once a prestigious home for a family who had defied the kings of France, now only a headquarters for the local authority, glowed in the glare of the floodlights. As they entered the Hôtel de Police car park, they bumped into Lagé. He was just trudging from his car wondering if he’d got flat feet, too, and he passed on his information briskly to Pel.

  ‘It’ll be worth following up,’ Pel agreed. ‘In the meantime we’d better head for the Bar Transvaal.’

  As they talked, they heard the wail of a police siren just starting up from the front of the building.

  ‘Something’s up in there,’ Darcy said. ‘There seems to be a lot of panic going on.’

  ‘Later,’ Pel suggested. ‘We started at six this morning. I think first we’d better go along to the celebration and drink the health of Nadauld and Sergeant Gehrer.’

  As it happened, there was no celebration and Nadauld’s health had taken a distinct turn for the worse.

  The Bar Transvaal was surprisingly empty for a celebration. There wasn’t a single policeman there when they had been expecting a crowd.

  ‘There was a telephone call from the Hôtel de Police,’ the proprietor explained. ‘And they all shot off.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me. Nadauld said something about a bomb at the airport. I’d laid in extra stock for the party. What do I do with it?’

  ‘Better try drinking it yourself, mon vieux,’ Darcy suggested as they headed for the door.

  In the Hôtel
de Police the man on the front desk looked harassed and every telephone bell in the place seemed to be going. As they entered, they met Nosjean and De Troq’ heading for their car. Nosjean enlightened them.

  ‘Nadauld’s been shot,’ he said. ‘They’ve rushed him to hospital. It looks bad. Gehrer and two others were hit, too – one of them Aimedieu.’

  ‘Name of God,’ Darcy said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘A bomb went off at the airport.’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Yes. The airport staff thought we ought to know and Nadauld, Gehrer, Aimedieu, and Gehrer’s successor, a type called Lotier, shot off in that VW open tourer of Gehrer’s. The next we heard was a panic call saying they wanted reinforcements and that Nadauld had been wounded. I think he’s in a bad way. All four were hit.’

  ‘What did they do the shooting with? A machine-gun?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like. I’m on my way now. De Troq’s heading for Marix-sur-Larne. The Tuaregs have struck again. They held up a coach-load of Dutch tourists and relieved them of their wallets, jewellery and passports.’

  Pel frowned. The area seemed to have come to life with a vengeance. ‘Who’s in charge at the airport?’

  ‘Goriot. He happened to be here when the call came. Forensic, Fingerprints and Photography have been alerted. Doc Minet’s still down with flu so it’s Doc Cham again. I was just heading after them and leaving De Troq’ to handle the Tuaregs.’

  Pel made up his mind quickly. ‘You go with De Troq’,’ he suggested. ‘It’ll need more than one. They’ll all have to be interviewed. I’ll go to the airport.’ He turned to Darcy. ‘Get everybody out, Daniel. It seems we’re going to need them. Then get somebody to sit on the telephone and follow me.’

  As Nosjean, De Troq’ and Darcy vanished, Pel headed for his office to stock up with cigarettes. His campaign to stop smoking seemed to have gone with the wind. As he left again, the Chief appeared, coming in like a bull wondering which china shop to ravage.