Pel and the Missing Persons

by Mark Hebden

  ‘Any descriptions?’

  ‘They were so shocked they could only give the vaguest descriptions. We’ve issued them to the press, of course.’

  There was just one clue. One of the tourists had noticed that the carrier bag into which he had tossed his money had been marked with red lettering and it had the name ‘Talant’ on it.

  ‘It was obviously one of those they used when they robbed the supermarket there,’ Nosjean said. ‘It doesn’t prove much, though, beyond that they were the same gang and that they’ve turned their attention to other means of earning their living.’

  ‘Is that all?’ the Chief asked.

  ‘Not quite. There was a bit of a scuffle. One of the women tried to resist and her glasses were knocked off. One of the Tuaregs trod on them. By accident. He picked them up and handed them to her. Trying to do a Claude Duval highwayman act. Bags of politeness, chivalry and apologies for damaging them. They were bent and the right lens was broken. I’ve passed them to Prélat in case there are fingerprints on them because the fingerprint from the till at Talant was no good. Too smudged. We might just get one from the glasses.’

  ‘Any theories?’

  ‘I still believe they’re first-timers who’ve found an exciting way of making money. In all their hold-ups they’ve used stolen cars – more than one – and switched from one to another until they picked up their own, which we now think might be a fawn Sierra 2000. But we’ve noticed that in all their earlier hold-ups, the cars they used were stolen from places like Lyons, Amiens, Auxerre, Strasbourg. The last three times they’ve been lifted here in the city. Two in the University district. They’re probably growing over-confident – or just lazy. I’d like to have someone watch the area.’

  ‘University’s a big district,’ the Chief said.

  ‘We could have someone prowling round. They might spot some youngster in a fawn Ford Sierra.’

  ‘What have you in mind?’

  ‘Claudie Darel. With another woman detective to alternate with her.’

  The Chief looked at Pel.

  ‘It could work,’ Pel said. It had worked before. There was the famous case of the young cop who had arrested a driver for not wearing a seat belt and been startled to discover he’d picked up one of the most wanted men in the country.

  ‘Very well,’ the Chief said. ‘We’ll give it a try. Set it up. I’ll ask for a uniformed policewoman to help out.’

  Nosjean and De Troq’ were chiefly intrigued by the fact that in their hold-up of the Dutch tourists, the Tuaregs had carried the loot in a plastic carrier bag from the supermarket at Talant.

  ‘That supermarket has the strange ability to be involved with us about once every other month,’ Nosjean said. ‘If it isn’t a break-in or a fire or a fight, it’s a carrier bag containing loot and bearing its name. Let’s go and have another word with that girl who got the gun stuffed up her nose.’

  Janine Ducassis seemed to have recovered well from her ordeal, particularly as the manager, also recovering, had praised her and made her a till supervisor. Her job was no longer to sit at a till and take money, but to collect notes when the tills became too full and convey them to the office accounts department.

  They found her sitting at a desk counting money and she beamed at them as they appeared. Carefully – the manager had obviously chosen well – she finished the counting, put the money in the safe and motioned them to a couple of unoccupied chairs.

  As they sat down, the manager’s secretary, Pascal Dubois, entered with a cup of coffee. She seemed surprised to see Nosjean and De Troq’ but Janine Ducassis gestured.

  ‘I think we can run to two more cups, Pascal,’ she said. ‘Decent ones. Not from the machine.’

  By the time the coffee came and Pascal Dubois had left again, they had been through all the rules and regulations governing the giving away of plastic carrier bags.

  ‘Except,’ Janine said, ‘that I didn’t give him one. They’re free with fifty francs’ worth of goods. Below that you have to pay for them. Twenty centimes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he paid, did he?’ De Troq’ asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He just reached under the counter and helped himself to several. From the other side.’

  ‘So he knew where they were?’

  ‘He must have done. He didn’t fiddle around searching for them. He didn’t even look.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him before? I mean, could he have made a point of coming in to case the joint? I expect he did at some point – or someone did – but had you ever noticed anyone of that sort?’

  Janine Ducassis hadn’t. Nor had she ever before noticed anyone in the store wearing Canadiennes such as the robbers had used.

  ‘And I didn’t see their faces,’ she said. ‘They had these scarves over them. Tied tightly. Like motor cyclists. And dark glasses. Did you get any fingerprints?’

  ‘One,’ Nosjean said. ‘Not a very good one. What about the girl who left her key in the till? Did she get the sack?’

  ‘Yes.’ Janine Ducassis nodded. ‘Monique Vachonnière. It’s against the rules to leave the key in the till. You have to collect it at the office and sign for it and even if you leave your till for a minute, you take it with you. But I’d seen Monique do it before. More than once.’

  ‘What’s her address?’

  ‘She lives on the housing estate at Talant. Rue Marcel-Sembatte. I don’t know the number, but it’s only a short street. You could find her at the Supermarket Sport at Chenove. She got a job there. Filling shelves.’

  The Supermarket Sport at Chenove was smaller than the one at Talant and they found Monique Vachonnière, who was plump and spectacled and nervous, busy stacking packets of washing powder on the shelves from a huge trolley. The manager had to be approached and he was wary.

  ‘Police?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want to see her? Has she a record?’

  ‘She hasn’t a record,’ Nosjean said. ‘But she was at the supermarket at Talant when it was robbed and we’d like to speak to her.’

  ‘Was she involved? You have to be very careful whom you employ these days.’

  Well, Nosjean thought, in a way she was involved, but it seemed it was carelessness rather than criminal intent.

  In the end the manager gave his permission for them to talk to the girl and she took them to a store room, where they leaned against the cartons of washing powder to interview her.

  ‘I wouldn’t have left the damned till,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But Pascal Dubois once told me it was all right for a few seconds. I had to. I’d had a cup of coffee and – well, you know. The tills can’t be opened in a second. But that man opened it straight away so he must have known how to. I was just coming back and I saw him. I was paralysed and started screaming when Janine started. I told the manager what Pascal had said but she said she didn’t and, of course, he believed her rather than me. She’s better looking. It cost me my job. Filling shelves isn’t as good as handling cash.’

  It didn’t lead them very far but they still had the Ford Sierra that the old man had seen left at Morbihaux which appeared to have been swopped for the car used in the hold-up. Claudie had managed to see a similar car briefly heading past the Faculty of Science in the area of the University, containing a man and a girl. They were a handsome couple and not at all what they were looking for, but it seemed worth while keeping a look-out for them. It was late in the evening and the girl just might have been Janine Ducassis.

  Seven

  The weather continued to improve. The heat mounted until it seemed like midsummer and the city glowed with the glory of the Lord. Pel’s cold seemed a little better and it only needed a miracle to put him right.

  As he drove to work through the ancient villages, he drew a deep breath because he loved the uplands outside the city, rich and golden in the summer, bleak in the winter. In the same way he loved the busy streets of the city itself, the magnificent buildings, the varnished roofs. Even the quiet cafés on the outskirts w
here, in an atmosphere of red wine and Gauloises, old men played dominoes or a slow game of boules, the players solemnly measuring the spheres with stalks of grass, watched by children or women resting their legs after shopping.

  His buoyant mood didn’t last long after he entered the Hôtel de Police. Darcy was on the telephone to the Missing Persons Bureau and he remembered they were still struggling to establish the identity of the man on the motorway.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there has to be a reason for all this modesty. Here we have a man whom nobody knows found dead on the motorway. Why is it so hard to come up with his name? We’ve tried Fingerprints but he’s obviously not a criminal because his dabs aren’t on record.’ He paused. ‘If nothing else, he’s one of the Chief’s Missing Persons. We don’t know who he is and neither, it seems, does anybody else, so he must be. And if someone who’s missing is found dead, the relatives should know, though it isn’t our job to inform them. That’s the duty of the Bureau of Missing Persons. But this might be murder and that makes it different.’

  Lagé’s discovery from the shoe repairer at St-Alban had led inevitably to the city doctors.

  ‘If his feet were bad enough to have his shoes built up,’ Darcy suggested, ‘it seems to indicate he’d seen a doctor about them. He might, of course, have made the decision on his own but it seems to suggest medical advice. I’ve got Lagé going through all the doctors in the area now to find if any of them made the recommendation.’

  Meanwhile Nosjean and De Troq’ were trying their new angle and Claudie Darel was following Janine Ducasssis wherever she went. It was easy to see the tills of the Talant supermarket from outside through the glass doors. A prowl around the place would give the Tuaregs the layout and they could easily have waited for the correct moment to strike by watching from a car. Unless – and it was a possibility – some sort of signal had been given from inside. The wave of a coloured handkerchief could have indicated the absence of officials or customers from the area of the tills and check-out desks, and they had begun to suspect by this time that this was exactly what had happened because it seemed more than fortuitous that Monique Vachonnière had been away from her till at the time of the raid.

  Janine Ducassis drove a tiny Fiat Panda and Claudie and the policewoman lent by Uniformed Branch, looking like two housewives returning from shopping, followed her home in an unmarked car. She lived with her parents in an unpretentious house near the Arsenal, down a dusty street where the male inhabitants seemed always to be playing boules as she arrived and had to pause to allow her to pass. She seemed to be all she claimed to be – a hard-working till supervisor with a responsibility.

  Then, as Nosjean checked through his files late in the evening, the man at the front desk rang through to say there was a man to see him.

  ‘Name of Philibert,’ he said.

  Nosjean looked puzzled. ‘Philibert? Who’s he?’

  He turned out to be the owner of the bar at Morbihaux who had reported the presence of the fawn Ford Sierra that had been parked near the church on the day of the hold-up at Talant. There had been so much arguing going on in the bar about the car, its colour, its make and its number, Nosjean had concentrated chiefly on the old man who’d first noticed it and had barely noticed the man behind the bar.

  ‘We’ve remembered about it,’ Philibert said. ‘We’ve been arguing about it ever since. It came from Garages Europe Automobile.’

  ‘Here? In the city?’

  ‘Well, it might have been Garages Europe Automobile in Paris. They’re a big group. But somebody remembered there was this sticker on the rear window. You know how garages stick them on when they sell a car. I always make them take them off mine when I buy one. I tell them if I want to advertise anything on my car I’ll advertise my own bar.’

  ‘Go on,’ Nosjean encouraged before he got carried away.

  ‘Well, one or two saw the car and everybody thought different. Even about the colour. Was it grey or fawn or brown? In the end we decided it was fawn. Nobody could remember what the sticker said either, but then another car with the same sticker parked outside the bar yesterday – two sales representatives from Metaux de Dijon – and everybody remembered. It was Garages Europe Automobile.’

  It was as good as having the number of the car and it didn’t take them long to establish from Garages Europe Automobile the names of everyone who in the last three years had bought a Ford Sierra 2000 from them. The colour reduced it further, and, finally, they pinned the car down to a Jean-Philippe de Rille. His address was given simply as Montagny.

  ‘Where in Montagny?’

  The directories solved the problem.

  ‘Fancy address,’ De Troq’ commented. ‘The Manoir. That’s all. Sounds expensive.’

  ‘Some crooks have expensive ideas,’ Nosjean said drily.

  When Pel arrived in the Hôtel de Police next morning there seemed to be a lot of loud voices in the sergeants’ room. The loudest belonged to Aimedieu who had planted himself in the middle of the floor as if he were defying anyone to try to shift him. ‘I’m back,’ he was saying defiantly.

  ‘Did Goriot send you?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘I sent myself.’

  ‘You haven’t had orders to report back here?’

  Aimedieu’s face was that of an angelic choirboy and at the moment it was a very stubborn and angry choirboy. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Then you’d better return to Inspector Goriot, hadn’t you?’

  Aimedieu scowled. ‘I’ll resign first,’ he announced. ‘That damned man doesn’t know how to treat his subordinates. I’m on the Old Man’s team.’

  ‘The Old Man’s temper’s not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’

  ‘The Old Man’s all right,’ Aimedieu said stoutly.

  ‘Not long ago you couldn’t stand him.’

  ‘Well, now I can. He doesn’t nag. And you know what he’s up to.’

  ‘Do you?’ Darcy said. ‘I never do.’

  ‘All the same, either I work with someone else or I quit.’ Aimedieu’s stubborn expression crumbled as he stared at Darcy. ‘For God’s sake, sir, have a word with the Old Man for me.’

  Pel listened quietly to Darcy.

  ‘I’ll see the Chief,’ he said.

  ‘And Aimedieu?’

  ‘Tell him he’s back on my squad.’

  ‘Who takes his place with Goriot?’

  ‘He can have Lacocq. Last in, first out. That’s how the unions think. Besides, Lacocq’s a placid type and not likely to complain much. He also isn’t as smart as Aimedieu. Point out, of course, that like Aimedieu, it’s only temporary. If Goriot wants a team, he has to pick them himself. I’ll arrange it with the Chief.’

  Pel was still thinking about Aimedieu when word arrived that one of the city doctors had turned up the mysterious ‘Dupont’ whose name they’d acquired from the shoe repairer. A doctor called Billetottes claimed to know him.

  ‘I’ve got a Dupont with flat feet on my books,’ he said.

  Because things were quiet, Darcy decided to look up Doctor Billetottes himself. It gave him the opportunity to drive about the city. Darcy regarded the city as his back garden and he liked to know what was going on in it. He often drove round it after midnight when the streets were deserted and everything was silent. Every now and then he liked to stop and wait as if he were listening to it breathing. He never knew what made him stop and why he chose the places he did, but he liked to watch the bars closing and keep an eye on the people going home. He never got involved – that was the job of the men in uniform – but he liked to get the feel of the place.

  Doctor Billetottes was an enormously fat man who refused to consider talking until they both had a drink in their fists.

  ‘Jean Dupont,’ he said. ‘That’s his name. He’s one of my patients. I saw him about two months ago.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘I haven’t got one. Not a proper one.’

  Darcy frowned. ‘That’s unusual, isn’t
it?’

  ‘I suppose it is. But he’s a bit of a mystery man.’

  ‘That’s our impression. How come you haven’t an address?’

  ‘He gave me the address of the Hôtel Central. Said he was staying there.’

  ‘Right. I’ll get it from there. Did he come often?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Know anything about him?’

  ‘He’s a widower. That’s all I know. He came on my books about five years ago.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Seventy-eight.’

  ‘We were told between sixty-five and seventy.’

  ‘He’s in pretty good shape.’

  ‘Not now, he isn’t,’ Darcy said.

  ‘Why not? Has something happened to him?’

  ‘Yes. He died.’

  There was a long silence. ‘Well,’ Doctor Billetottes said, ‘I must say that’s a surprise. I’d have given him another ten to fifteen years. Last time I saw him he seemed fit enough.’

  ‘Well, he’s not now. What did you see him about?’

  ‘His feet. They were flat. So flat they were curling up at the ends. He took to sitting down a lot.’

  Darcy seemed to have found their man. ‘I expect he developed good sitting bones instead,’ he said.

  Doctor Billetottes laughed. ‘He didn’t just sit down for the sake of sitting down. He played cards. He loved cards.’

  ‘Who did he play with?’

  ‘God knows. Neighbours, I suppose. Women. He liked women.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Things he said. He said he was here to see a woman. That was why he was staying at the Hôtel Central. He’d done it before, he said. I got the impression that he’d been in the habit of following them about. What happened to him? Heart attack? I wouldn’t have expected it. He had a heart like a trip hammer.’