by Mark Hebden
Thirteen
They had finally turned up something that seemed to be of value, a motive that might account for Dupont’s appearance dead on the motorway. He’d been a mystery man like Yves Pasquier’s vengeful Count of Monte Cristo. He hadn’t been a count, but he’d made people pay for their misdeeds. He’d probably done it for mischief and spite as well as for money, and the Meissen figurines had more than likely been payment to keep quiet about what he knew rather than fees from someone he had defended.
And if he’d sunk to the blackmail of former clients, one of them might easily have turned on him in a fury of desperation and got rid of him. It seemed necessary to know more about the cases he had handled. The cases from his days as a prosecutor didn’t seem to have much bearing on what they were after, but the cases where he had defended, where facts and details might have been kept back, could be a mine of information.
A study of the Liste des Avocats et Juristes Français gave Dupont’s background. Born at Clermont-Ferrand, educated there and at the Sorbonne, he had obviously shown promise at an early age and shot to the top of his profession. His better-known cases were listed – the defence of Louville in the Comtesse de Perrenet murder, the Marival-Midi financial scandal, and several others.
As they’d half-suspected, neither Madame Massières nor Madame Coty was willing to talk. They admitted their husbands were alive but were far from being willing to admit they had ever been involved in any scandal.
‘My husband,’ Madame Massières said, ‘is an old man and very sick and I’m not having him worried.’
A check on the two women indicated that both of them made a habit of going in for health and beauty treatment – how else did they keep their looks and their figures? Madame Coty even made money from it, and it seemed more than likely that one or two other women Dupont had been interested in had been the same.
‘Was he blackmailing them all?’ Pel asked. ‘When he dodged about the country visiting these health and beauty centres, was he just looking for his victims? He’d know about them, of course. Without doubt they’d bared their souls to him at some point during the cases involving their husbands. Was his technique to pretend to be interested in them and then produce his demands?’
Going to the Palais de Justice, they dragooned Claudie Darel’s boy-friend, Bruno Lucas, into producing for them a complete list of Dupont’s cases. Every single one of them. He must have been through all the Law Society’s records and all the records of the courts, but there it was, right from the beginning of his career. As they began to peruse it slowly, Darcy sat bolt upright. ‘Siméon,’ he yelped. ‘What’s this? Adenne Siméon!’
They persuaded Lucas to dig a little deeper and he came up with a dusty file. ‘Robbery with violence,’ he said. ‘1959. It was a wages snatch.’
‘Siméon?’ Pel said frowning. ‘Is he involved too? It’s too much of a coincidence.’
They went to see Adéo again in search of the young man, Degré, who had worked with Dupont in his under-the-counter activities. Adéo knew exactly where he was.
‘He’s in gaol,’ he said. ‘For fraud. I handled the case. It was a great pleasure. He once got away with a lot of our clients’ money.’
Going to 72, Rue d’Auxonne, they found Degré to be a smooth, smiling man who obviously hadn’t much of a conscience.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I remember the case. Siméon had Emile Dustrenau prosecuting him but Dupont wiped the floor with him. One of their witnesses, who was a security guard, had a record and I found it. Dupont produced it. It threw doubt on his evidence and demolished Dustrenau’s case completely. Siméon finally pleaded guilty to conspiracy and got away with three years.’
‘Where was this wages snatch?’
‘Marseilles. Bit before your time, I reckon.’
Marseilles police pushed them a few steps further.
‘There were three of them,’ they said. ‘This Siméon was one of them. Two of them disappeared. We heard they’d gone to South America. Only one – this Siméon – was picked up. But all we could pin on him was conspiracy and he got away with a short sentence. He claimed the other two had swindled him out of his share.’
‘Was the loot recovered?’
‘No. It disappeared.’
‘I suspect we might have found some of it.’
Faced with the facts, Siméon was silent for a while. ‘Where did you get all this?’ he asked eventually.
‘The records,’ Pel said. ‘It’s all there. It always is. Odd, isn’t it, that your defence counsel should appear here and start playing cards with you?’
Siméon shrugged. ‘He was good at cards.’
‘Did he know you?’
‘Not at first. Later.’
‘Was he blackmailing you?’
‘He tried. But I didn’t do for him. I’m too old these days even to tweak anybody’s nose.’
‘Where were you the night he disappeared from the hospice?’
‘Here.’
‘Playing cards?’
‘Yes.’
‘With Dupont?’
‘He didn’t come that night.’
‘He left the hospice at 11 p.m. Where were you at that time? Still here?’
‘No. I’d left.’
‘Anybody confirm that?’
Siméon indicated the man behind the bar. ‘He will.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Home.’
‘Witnesses?’
‘There aren’t any. My wife left me years ago.’
Pel looked at the others. Guilt was written all over Cardier’s face.
‘I was in the woods,’ he said.
‘Doing what?’
‘I had a gun.’
‘Why?’
‘There are pheasants there.’
‘Not yours, I take it.’
‘They belong to a guy called De Belloguet. He comes from Paris. He doesn’t live here.’
‘I thought he might not.’ Pel turned to Espagne. ‘And you?’
Espagne gestured at Cardier. ‘I was with him.’
‘No other witnesses?’
‘No, just the two of us.’
‘Get anything, did you?’
‘No.’ Cardier’s answer was sullen. ‘This silly con fell over a root and his gun went off. We had to leave in a hurry.’
Pel turned back to Siméon. ‘I’m surprised Dupont didn’t recognise you at once. After all, he defended you over that wages job. And when he did, he guessed you still had the money, didn’t he?’
Siméon sighed. ‘What are you going to do?’
Pel lit a cigarette. ‘Take you in,’ he said. ‘All of you.’
They brought the old men to Judge Castéou’s office for questioning.
‘We have to hold them,’ she decided. ‘The case against them’s too strong. Especially Siméon. Do you think they could all have been involved?’
‘It would require more than just Siméon to carry Dupont so far from Lugny.’
‘In that case, the others must have known of Siméon’s part in the wages snatch. Could they be the other two in it?’
‘The names are different.’
‘They could have changed them. They obviously know Siméon’s part in it. Do you think we ought to have Madeleine Bas Jaunes in as well?’
It was decided to leave Madeleine Bas Jaunes alone for the time being but the local cops were told to keep an eye on her movements and for the moment the three old men were their best bet yet.
‘Three of them,’ Darcy said. ‘Regular partners at cards with Dupont. All with records – two official, one unofficial. And they knew who he was and why he was there. They also knew about his money and the porcelain figures because, before he realised who Siméon was, he’d boasted about them. A few more enquiries might show they were with Siméon in Marseilles.’
When they returned to the Hôtel de Police, Goriot was laying down the law about the explosion at the airport and the death of Nadauld.
‘It was an attemp
t to capture the gate,’ he was insisting. ‘It must have been. Why else was there more than one man?’
‘Was there more than one man?’ Pel asked from the doorway.
‘If there wasn’t’ – Goriot whirled angrily – ‘who fired the shots? The one that killed Nadauld and three others that wounded Lotier, Gehrer and Aimedieu. It must have been an attempt to take over the guardroom.’
‘Why in God’s name would they want to take over the guardroom?’ Pel snapped. ‘When I did my military service, the guardroom contained cells, a rack for rifles, beds for the guard to sleep on between shifts and fire buckets for army wrongdoers to scrape and paint and, when the paint was dry, to scrape again prior to painting again.’
Pel remembered those buckets only too well. He had not distinguished himself as a soldier and he had seen all too much of the interior of the guardroom. ‘I’d have thought the armoury would have been their objective,’ he observed. ‘Or one of the aircraft. And terrorists are a bit more sophisticated these days. They’d have used semtex, not a home-made bomb.’
‘I still think we should bring in Philippe Duche,’ Goriot insisted. ‘If it wasn’t an attempt by a gang, it was done by one man with a weapon capable of firing four shots in rapid succession. And there’s only one man I know of round here who had access to a machine-gun of some sort: Philippe Duche. His brother was known to have one. Doubtless he had one as well.’
Goriot’s constant obsession with the belief that Philippe Duche was involved in the attempt on the airfield worried Pel. He seemed to have gone completely over the top and he had a feeling he ought to see the Chief about what was happening, because Goriot was unsettling everybody. Nerves were on edge and there was a lot of bad temper.
Yves Pasquier was playing boules on his own at the edge of Pel’s drive when he arrived home.
‘Caught the Tuaregs yet?’ he asked as Pel climbed from his car.
‘Not yet.’
‘Somebody knows who they are.’
‘Yes,’ Pel agreed. ‘I’m sure somebody does.’
‘But they’re not telling, are they?’ Yves Pasquier looked grave and determined. ‘I’d tell. I’d always tell. I’m going to be a cop when I grow up so I’d always try to help.’
‘You, mon brave,’ Pel advised soberly, ‘would be much wiser if anything happens to keep your head down in case you get hurt.’
It was nice to know that someone supported the police, all the same. The general view was that, in between taking bribes, they were there just for protesting students to pelt with stones.
Pel’s worry showed so much through Mahler and the aperitifs that his wife expressed her concern.
‘Something on my mind,’ Pel admitted.
‘Work?’
‘Goriot chiefly.’
Finally deciding to do something about it, he made up his mind to see the Chief, but when he arrived at the Hôtel de Police the following day, they had what seemed to be another murder on their hands.
‘Mother of God,’ he said furiously. ‘Why can’t they come one at a time? Who is it? Anyone we know?’
‘I doubt it, patron,’ Claudie said. ‘He’s English. Or to be exact, since he was born in Edinburgh, he’s a Scot.’
‘Kilts and everything?’
Claudie smiled. ‘No, patron. Yachting gear. He arrived in the barge port last night. Name: Duff Forbes Mackay. Aged thirty-two. Bachelor. Address in Edinburgh. Teacher of maths at a school there. Found stabbed.’
‘How does a Scottish teacher of maths come to be stabbed here?’ Pel asked. ‘Inform me.’
‘Lagé took the call,’ Claudie said.
‘Let’s have him in.’
Lagé was engaged in typing out the report, bashing the typewriter with two fingers as if he hated it. He probably did, because it was one of the machines that had grown so old the girls in the typing pool refused any longer to use them, so that they were considered just the job for the ham-fisted, two-fingered typists of the sergeants’ room. Lagé was wearing his fingers down to the elbows with the details.
‘One of the tourist barges, patron,’ he pointed out. ‘Barges Touristiques Bourgignonnes. You know them. Tour the canals. French cooking every evening. Burgundy with every meal. Visits to vineyards. It’s quite a thing these days. They fly here and take the barge to the south of Châlons, and fly home from Lyons. Another lot fly to Lyons and join the barge there to bring it back here. They fly home from here. They’re run by a crew of three or four who double up as waiters, cooks, barmen and bargees.’
‘Right,’ Pel said. ‘We’ve set the scene. What happened?’
‘They had a party. Some time during the night–’ Lagé glanced at his notebook, ‘one a.m. to be exact – one of the people on board by the name of Alex Aloff, who’s the manager and captain of the barge, telephoned for a doctor. One of the group – there are usually fifteen or twenty – had been found unconscious in his bunk, surrounded by blood. Doctor Duvain attended, but by the time he arrived at the barge port, which was where the barge was moored for the night for the change-over tomorrow, the man Duff Forbes Mackay was dead. The doctor examined him. As he was a bachelor he was in a single cabin. Doctor Duvain found a stab wound to the left groin and decided he’d been the victim of an attack. He might have been. The barge port’s not exactly in the best part of the city. He telephoned the police. I went along and found there had been a bit of trouble between this Mackay and another man – by the name of James Duart – over one of the girls in the crew.’
‘Do they mix?’
‘They all go out together at night. The crew set up visits to bars and night clubs and the girls tend to dance with the single men. It’s quite obvious they get a bit of a percentage from the places they go to for taking the tourists there, but I think that’s normal enough. The party last night consisted of seven couples, two bachelors and two single girls, and in addition there were two men and two girls from the barge crew. It was their last night and the tourists were due to fly home today. The next group have just arrived to take their places and the barge’s due to head south immediately they’re aboard.’ Lagé smiled grimly. ‘They won’t be going,’ he ended.
Pel listened carefully.
‘They’re pretty boozy dos,’ Lagé went on. ‘With a lot of arranged wine tastings and visits to places like Clos Vougeot. This one was a particularly noisy affair and a few words were exchanged over the girl, Marie-Claude Darc. Fists were swung. Nobody was hurt but there was a bit of yelling and the man who runs the affair, this Alex Aloff, decided it was time to get them all back to the barge. But tempers cooled and they started drinking again and the tiff was forgotten. Mackay disappeared and they all apparently went to their bunks.’
Lagé had found it very difficult getting the facts because none of the tourists spoke much French. One of them claimed to and offered to act as interpreter but his French turned out to be as bad as Lagé’s English, while the French crew of the barge were saying as little as possible in case they were blamed for the fracas. It was their duty, it seemed, to keep the week light and airy and avoid difficulties, but Marie-Claude Darc had allowed herself to be caught emotionally between the two young Scots. She was saying nothing and the others were trying to back her up.
‘I found,’ Lagé said, ‘that one of the men, this James Duart, the one involved in the quarrel, saw the victim shortly before he disappeared but he’s now locked himself in his cabin and refuses to come out. He doesn’t appear to trust French police. I also found a bloodstain on the adjoining cabin door – Mackay’s – and decided it might be murder.’
‘And now?’
‘The barge’s been impounded. Brochard’s watching things. The group have been moved to a hotel until they can be questioned, and the new group, which has just arrived, are also in a hotel and are not allowed to proceed with their holiday.’
Where’s the body at this moment?’
‘Still aboard the barge, patron.’
‘We’d better go and see them. Will we n
eed to bring in De Troq’? He speaks English.’
‘I doubt if he speaks English like these people do, patron. They’re all Scots.’
De Troq’ was brought in, nevertheless. The interpreting wasn’t as easy as it usually was, but De Troq’, who usually had the answer to everything, went about it slowly and carefully, and between them all they managed to make some sense of what they heard.
The barge was empty apart from two policemen and the crew who had to live aboard, but ashore all hell was breaking loose. There was one group of tourists, the dead man’s, yelling that they wanted to go home, and another, which had just arrived, yelling that they wanted the holiday they had paid for. In addition, the crew were loudly demanding their wages and there were three travel agents, one French, two English, all wanting to know what the blazes was going on.
There was a crowd watching from the quay. There would have been a crowd there if the body had been in outer space. Some of them were women still in their nightclothes with dressing-gowns over them, their hair still in curlers, who had appeared from the houses around. There were a few men, too, and the smell of Gauloises lay on the scented morning air. Inevitably it drove Pel to light one and he coughed for a while with a noise like a blocked sink. A shutter in one of the nearby shops went up with a roar. A dog lifted its leg against a bollard. It couldn’t have been more normal.
Leguyader’s men from the lab had finished going through Mackay’s possessions and the photographers had completed their work. The mortuary van was waiting on the quayside for the body and Prélat’s Fingerprint boys were still going over the cabin for fingerprints.
‘Duart’s fingerprints are there,’ Prélat announced. ‘But then, so are everybody else’s.
It wasn’t difficult to explain why. The tourists had visited each other’s cabins, to lend books, to borrow books. The women had become friendly and visited each other when the men were in the bar. There had been no visiting after dark, however. Everybody seemed certain of that.
Doctor Cham was also on the barge. ‘It’s a funny one, patron,’ he said. ‘The wound’s in the man’s groin and that seems a funny place to stab someone. Unless his assailant was going for the stomach and missed his aim. It’s also not a particularly deep one but it was enough for him to bleed to death.’