by Mark Hebden
‘They’re all dubious characters?’
‘I wouldn’t trust them.’
‘What about Dupont?’
‘He wasn’t like them. He was different. He came out here about a year ago and stayed at the hospice. One night he came into the village and played cards. Those old ratbags couldn’t keep their tongues still and the next night I found him on my doorstep. After that he came regularly. He used to tell them at the hospice he was going for a walk, but he went to the bar, played cards for a bit to find out if I was at home and, if the coast was clear, then he came here.’
‘Then went back to the hospice?’
‘Unless he went to Isolde Dusoin.’
‘Did he pay you?’
Madeleine Reine looked at Pel as though he were stupid. ‘You don’t think I went on this game just for love, do you? Are you going to arrest me or something?’
‘We’re not the vice squad. He’s been found dead.’
‘I read about a Jean Dupont. I wondered if it was him. I’ve been a bit scared.’
‘Why?’
‘I wondered if I was involved somehow. I don’t think I am.’
‘Except that you might just have been the last to see him alive,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘Did he see you on the night of the twelfth?’
‘No. But he came the night before.’
‘Was he drunk?’
‘Not when he came here. He wasn’t sober – you know what I mean – but he knew what he was doing. Name of God, he did. I’ll say that about him. He knew more about it than some of the young ones who come.’
‘Was he generous?’
‘He paid well and he always left a good tip. He always seemed to have plenty of money on him.’
‘Did he talk much? About himself?’
‘He said he had a daughter and was going to leave his money to her. He said he had some. A lot, he said. And a few nice little things about the house that were worth a bit. Pottery, he said.’
‘Did he always carry money?’
‘He seemed to. I warned him once or twice about it. I told him he ought to put it in the bank, not carry it around with him. I was thinking of that lot in the bar. He just laughed. But his wallet was always bulging. I think he was worth a bit.’
Pel nodded. ‘I think so, too, madame.’
They came away with Pel still feeling he had missed something somewhere. He had stumbled on some item that had slipped his mind when he ought to have noted it and forced it to stick.
‘He seemed to like women all right,’ he mused, his mind churning.
‘Making love’s one of the few sports you can go in for with flat feet,’ Darcy said.
Pel wasn’t satisfied. The thing at the back of his mind that he felt he ought to know about and didn’t still nagged at his consciousness and failed to improve his temper, which was roused to irritation by Darcy’s flippant remark.
‘The night he was found dead,’ he said slowly, ‘he was in pyjamas. So before he left the hospice he must have put his clothes on. If so, why did he put them on the way he did? Was he that drunk? And why did he forget his underclothes? And why was there nothing in his pockets and where are the pyjamas he wore? Those we saw hadn’t been worn. Finally, if he were trying to go home, why didn’t he take his keys with him?’
Madeleine Bas Jaunes’ information about the three old men proved correct. Cardier had been accused of stealing lambs, Espagne had been before the courts for fraud but had been found not guilty – a note in the file suggested that the case had been bungled by the police – and Siméon had not one mark against his name for robbery with violence but two. He had been picked up in Dijon some years before, while in his forties, after a break-in, and there was another mark against him for an incident in Paris ten years before that for hitting the owner of a bar with a bottle.
‘Just the sort to do for Dupont,’ Pel commented.
‘They could have waited for him as he left Madeleine Yellow Stockings. What’s her background?’
Enquiries revealed that Madeleine Yellow Stockings was an artist’s daughter. She had had a good education and had worked in Paris as a model. Though she didn’t have a record, she had had more than one boyfriend who had.
‘She seems to like that sort,’ Darcy said. ‘She could have put the old bastards up to it.’
Pel pulled a face. ‘Why did he go to that place at Lugny, anyway?’ he asked. ‘There were no young women jumping up and down there. No girls. Just old people on their way out.’ He pushed papers around and picked one out of the pile. ‘I’ve been checking with the health department. They know the place. They investigated it a few years back. They considered Madame Weill was too old to have a licence and insisted she hired somebody younger to run the place. She took on a woman called François, but she didn’t stay long, and when she left the woman who took her place was Madame Sully, the present one. The François woman went to a nursing home in Lyons. She might be worth talking to. She might even be able to supply Madame Weill’s address. It seems to me we ought to know it. I think we ought to find her. And I think we ought to know a bit more about Dupont. Not the man on the motorway. Not the man who played cards at Lugny and went to Madeleine Bas Jaunes’. The one he used to be.’
They seemed to have covered every possibility, so, sitting in his office, smoking himself cross-eyed, Pel began to go over again the things they had already looked at. He was a great believer in chasing the details round the reports that landed on his desk. Still bothered by the nebulous something at the back of his mind that just wouldn’t come to the front, he had a feeling that the masses of words might just throw it up.
They didn’t, and in the end, he decided that the house in Dôle that Dupont had owned might suggest something. They had already been through it once but nothing had appeared to have been disturbed and they hadn’t lingered. It might just be worth a second visit.
Madame Chappe agreed to give them the key and they stood in the silent hall and stared about them. The house was a much more imposing place than the one at St-Alban and looked as though Dupont had kept it as a prestige home, uncared for, with dust sheets over the furniture. There were a few pictures – ‘Quelereils,’ Madame Chappe had pointed out, ‘not Duponts’ – and a few valuable items, but nothing that seemed to be of the same sort of value as the missing porcelain.
There was a safe but it was locked and suddenly it seemed necessary to see inside. Madame Chappe hadn’t a key so they got in touch with the manufacturers in Lyons and during the afternoon one of their representatives arrived with a bunch of keys.
There seemed to be nothing of value inside – no money, no jewels, no more valuable Meissen ware – nothing but dusty brown paper parcels containing packets of folded paper tied with string and pink tape.
Pel took one of them out and studied it. ‘Briefs?’ he said. ‘Legal briefs?’
‘I’d have thought his firm would have insisted on keeping those,’ Darcy said.
The name of the firm Dupont had worked with was written on the bottom of the briefs in old-fashioned script. It was a lawyers’ office, Boissard, Lacroix and Adéo. There seemed to be little else in the safe but the dozen or so briefs, which were clearly a hangover from the days when Dupont had been an advocate.
Pel spread them out on the table like a hand of cards. They had been typed on thick paper almost like parchment and had been folded for so long they were difficult to open. They appeared to concern cases in which Dupont had appeared.
‘Why did he keep them here?’ Pel said.
Darcy was already on the telephone. As he slammed the instrument down, he turned. ‘There’s no Boissard and no Lacroix,’ he said. ‘Just a Julien Adéo, who was a junior partner at the time when Dupont was at his peak. They say the briefs should be in their office archives and they want them back.’
‘Eventually,’ Pel said. ‘When we’ve looked at them.’
There were thirteen of the briefs and one of them, they noticed at once, concerned the murder of the Comtesse
de Perrenet. Attached to it were letters and notes.
‘Get Claudie to look up the files,’ Pel said. ‘It would be interesting to see how they compare with the brief.’ He flipped a packet of papers with his thumb. ‘These are love letters from the Countess to a man called Louville.’
Struggling with the stiff paper, they opened another of the briefs.
‘Patron,’ Darcy said at once. ‘That’s the Marival-Midi brief. That was the case where all those financiers went to gaol.’
He picked up a letter and saw that it was signed ‘Henri Massières.’ There were other letters attached to the brief and one of them, he noticed, was addressed to a Madame Emilienne Coty.
‘Patron,’ he said. ‘Coty! Massières! Those are the names of two of the women I met when I was chasing this blasted Dupont type round the country. Was he chasing them because he was fond of them? Or was it because he’d been involved with them during the time when he was practising law?’
Pel shrugged. ‘Perhaps both,’ he said.
Julien Adéo, the only surviving partner of the original firm of Boissard, Lacroix and Adéo, was a plump, pink man of sixty with iron grey hair and a cheerful manner. Darcy managed to see him at the Law Courts and arrange for him to meet them. He was just about to re-enter the court to hear a verdict and was adjusting his black gown as the red-robed judges filed in.
‘This evening,’ he said briskly. ‘My chambers. Must go now. I’m involved in this.’
As they sat down opposite him that evening, he was quite blunt about Dupont.
‘Didn’t like him,’ he said. ‘Didn’t trust him. He was brilliant – no doubt about that – but there was something shifty about him.’
As Pel spread the brown packages across the top of the wide desk he occupied, he eyed them indignantly.
‘He must have stolen them,’ he said. ‘After his own premises were burned down in 1971. I suppose the fire destroyed all his records so he lifted ours. By rights they should be in our archives, though “archives” is rather a grand title for a set of shelves in the cellar filled with brown paper packages containing old deeds, documents, briefs, letters and what have you. Normally, they lie about anyhow in the office like dead bodies on a battlefield and nobody knows where anything is, but when they’re finished with and they’ve been sorted out, they’re like soldiers on parade, indexed and cross-indexed under the name of the client and the lawyer handling them, and kept in the strong room which is our name for a cellar with a thick door and a good lock. That’s where these should be.’
He offered to glance through the briefs and the papers that were attached to them and give his opinion on them.
‘But it’ll take time,’ he admitted. ‘In the meantime, I suggest you see his old clerk. That’s his writing on the bottom. I’m only playing detective – and good fun it seems to be, too! – but it might be worth your while to see this old boy. Name of Aristide Guérin, now retired and living with his daughter in Saumur. Clerks know more about their masters as a rule than their partners in practice and I suspect he will, too.’
Aristide Guérin’s daughter had an apartment close to the Cavalry School and they found Guérin sitting in a sunny window looking out over the school’s exercise area.
‘I always sit here,’ he said. ‘I can see the horses when they bring them out. I served in the cavalry once. I love the horses.’
He had many of his diaries from the office where he had worked for Dupont.
‘All that nonsense about someone threatening his life,’ he said. ‘There was nothing to it. There never is. It often happens when a man gets sent to prison.’
‘He went to the trouble of buying a second house at St-Alban all the same,’ Darcy pointed out.
The old man smiled. ‘To get away from his wife,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t stand her. She was a De Sassenzac. Very old family. It was a prestige marriage, to help him in his profession. They said, in fact, that he got her by lending her father money when he was in financial difficulties. She was stuffy – and he was always inventing excuses to avoid being with her. The house at St-Alban was one. She was in the way, you see. He liked women.’
‘He seems to have liked cards, too.’
The old clerk smiled sadly. ‘Yes, he liked cards. That’s what finished him really. He started with bridge but he played all games. Piquet. Poker. I often had to fetch him out of a card game to appear in court. He was his own worst enemy.’
‘Have you a list of the cases he was involved in?’
‘No. But I can remember most of them. There was the Marival-Midi finance thing. That made his name. Then he defended in the Comtesse de Perrenet murder. And the Gauchat murder. He did well. It didn’t last long, though. To use an old expression, he couldn’t carry corn. It went to his head. He had women. He played the horses. We once had to fetch him from Longchamps when the races were on. Finally, things got too much for him and the big briefs stopped coming. Then the Christian Democrats adopted him as a candidate.’
‘Was he elected?’
‘Oh, yes. Impeccable background. Nothing was known of his gambling and his women, of course. It came out later when he resigned. The usual problem. He had other affairs more pressing than politics.’
‘Women again?’
‘And cards.’
‘But he wasn’t without money?’
‘Oh, no! He made a lot of money. He continued to appear in small cases.’
‘What happened?’
‘He grew lazy and started manufacturing evidence. Nothing was proved but it got around. It finished him. He disappeared. Such a pity. He was clever. But he just couldn’t handle fame or wealth.’
‘Or women.’
‘Or women.’
‘But he still had money. Right up to the end. Plenty apparently. He started acquiring it again. Where from?’
The old man smiled. ‘I have a strong suspicion that he might have been using information obtained during his cases.’
‘He was extracting money from former clients?’
‘He’d gone a long way down.’
‘Know who they were?’
‘No, monsieur, I don’t. But he’d have plenty of choice. He always encouraged his clients to tell him everything, so he could defend them more ably. Especially women. Doubtless one or two talked too much.’
‘Was there anyone else involved?’
‘There was, monsieur. One of the clerks. A junior. An unpleasant young man called Degré. I think he mixed with criminals. In our line, one had to at times – over briefs, you know – and I think my master used the information he picked up. Together they must have been a formidable team.’
When Julien Adéo appeared, he had looked through the briefs.
‘With increasing interest as I read,’ he admitted. ‘We were involved in all of them. They all seem to have been successful – Dupont was a good advocate – but it seems to me, reading the notes and letters attached to the briefs, that he wasn’t a very honest advocate.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It seems to me that more than once he suppressed evidence which by law should have been produced and even occasionally bribed witnesses.’
‘Perhaps it’s a good job he’s dead.’
‘Perhaps it is. And not just for that reason. The Law Society would have been after him for that, but there were other things that would be more likely to be of concern to the police.’
‘Such as what?’
‘Well, you have perjury for a start, conspiracy, and a few other things connected with the presentation of the cases. But they were a long time ago and perhaps the police wouldn’t be prepared to pursue them. On the other hand, there was one aspect that, if he’d still been alive, they would certainly have been anxious to pursue.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Blackmail.’
‘You mean he was blackmailing former clients?’
Adéo shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not a policeman but I am a lawyer and that’s what it looks like.’
‘Doing what?’
‘That isn’t clear. But there’s a suggestion that homosexuality was involved. Someone must have been paid handsomely to admit a thing like that. Dupont seems to have hung on to the knowledge. I think he blackmailed Louville. The boy’s dead now.’
Pel sat back. He wasn’t often surprised but every day threw up a new and unusual story.
Adéo was tapping another of the parcels now. ‘The Marival-Midi case,’ he said. ‘This is an earlier one where he prosecuted. Five financiers went to jail. But it seems there were another five who should have and didn’t. Names: Muller, St-Minde. Coty. Thoresse. Massières. Three of them are dead now. Only Coty and Massières are still alive. They must be pretty ancient now.’
‘And supported by their wives who are business women,’ Darcy said.
‘You know them?’
‘I’ve met them. Was he blackmailing them, too?’
‘I suspect so. There are other names. A Madame Bapt. A Madame Guignard. I suspect they’d been having affairs and Dupont found out about them. Perhaps they went to him for advice and he gave it. But he remembered their names and used them later. They even seemed to have stopped paying him; but that, I suspected, was because their husbands died, so that it didn’t matter any more. I checked the records and there they were all right – dead. Edouard Bapt. Maxime Guignard. They’re in the city records.’
‘I don’t think our friend, Dupont, will be missed,’ Pel said.
Adéo smiled. ‘There are another one or two. Gustave Bloomfelt. Richard Roche. Mean anything to you?’ Adéo tapped the other parcels. ‘And these others?’ he said cheerfully. ‘I think they’re all finished now. Dead, like Messieurs Bapt and Guignard. They’d have no more value. Only Gilles Massières and Coty are still alive. I checked that, too.’ He beamed. ‘In this firm we are noted for our thoroughness.’