by Mark Hebden
Despite Pel’s worries, there seemed no alternative to charging the three old men from Lugny with murder. Everything pointed to them and, despite their protests of innocence, they admitted Dupont was blackmailing Siméon.
They were just on the point of completing the case, when Madame François, the woman they so much wanted to interview, finally turned up. Since Darcy was no longer around, Pel went to see her himself and took Aimedieu along as witness to anything she had to say.
She was a woman in her middle forties, far from unattractive. She obviously liked the look of Aimedieu and invited them in at once.
‘He looks just like my son,’ she said warmly, and five minutes later there was coffee and brandy on the table.
‘Madame Weill,’ Pel tried.
‘Her!’ Madame François said.
Pel caught the contempt in her voice at once.
‘Why do you say it like that, madame?’ he asked.
She flapped her hand in a derogatory gesture. ‘She wasn’t interested in nursing,’ she said. ‘She was just an old crook who wanted the money she got from the inmates. Most of them were pretty well off and were willing to pay, but they got a raw deal and she made a lot of money. Unfortunately for her, the Health Department decided she was too old to run the place and insisted she should get a young assistant. It turned out to be me.’
‘You didn’t stay long.’
‘There was always too much for one person to do and I insisted on help. She didn’t like that because it cost money, but she got a woman called Sully. She wasn’t very experienced and, in the end, I quit. I heard she took over.’
‘We’re trying to get in touch with Madame Weill,’ Pel said. ‘She seems to be on holiday at the moment and Madame Sully doesn’t know where she lives.’
‘She should. The address was in the house book. Everybody’s address was. Old Weill put her daughter’s address in because she liked to take long holidays.’
‘We don’t seem to have seen this address book. Would Madame Weill have taken it away with her?’
Madame François shrugged. ‘She might have. She was up to all sorts of tricks. Perhaps there was something in it she didn’t want seen.’
‘What, for instance?’
‘Well, we entered all drugs in there.’
‘Could she have been selling drugs?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised about anything she did.’
An elderly woman running a drugs racket! It wasn’t new but it was unusual.
‘Would you have any idea of her daughter’s address?’
‘It was in a place called Pierrepol. It’s near Saint-Trop’. I used to telephone because she liked to know what was going on.’
‘Madame Sully doesn’t seem to.’
‘Well, I told you. She’s not experienced and I bet old Weill could pull the wool over her eyes easily. If I were you I’d get in touch with Madame Weill’s daughter. Her name’s Luciano and Pierrepol’s small. The local police would know her.’
Eighteen
Doctor Cham had spent a lot of time thinking of the cases he was involved in. By this time they included Colonel Boileau. He sat at his desk staring at the contents of a line of kidney dishes he had spread across its top. In one of them were splinters of glass taken from Colonel Boileau’s face. In another was the shard he had removed from the wound in the groin of Duff Forbes Mackay. In another were splinters from the Dutch tourist’s spectacles, broken when they had been trodden on – as they now knew – by Tassigny in the hold-up at Marix. In a fourth dish were the splinters taken from Sergeant Gehrer’s eye – like those in Boileau’s head, blunt and square but as dangerous as a bullet when flung at full speed. In the last tray was the tiny splinter of glass he’d taken from the head of the man found on the motorway, Achille-Jean Quelereil-Dupont, known as Jean Dupont.
They intrigued him. Some of them had similarities. Some were different from the others. All were puzzles, some solved, some not.
He decided to go and see Leguyader, head of the Forensic Laboratory. He didn’t like Leguyader, who was an old bore and liked to correct people and blind them with science but, it had to be admitted, he was good at his job.
Leguyader heard what he had to say, then reached for his white coat. ‘We’d better look into this,’ he said.
Pel was surprised to learn that a deputation consisting of Leguyader and Doctor Cham was anxious to see him. He had been just about to contact Madame Weill’s daughter, and he put down the telephone reluctantly and stared suspiciously at the two of them as they entered his office. He was always wary of visits from Leguyader, but the fact that he had requested an interview suggested something important was in the wind. Pel fully expected it to be a complaint about procedure. Someone, he felt sure, had been contacting Leguyader without going through the proper channels. Leguyader was a stickler for the proper channels of communication. But it was nothing to do with procedure. It wasn’t even anything to do with blinding them with science. It was about glass.
‘Glass,’ Leguyader said.
‘What about it?’
‘Glass,’ Leguyader said, ‘is a term which covers a wide range of substances that differ widely in chemical composition and physical properties, but which possess the essential characteristic of having cooled from a state of fusion to become solid without crystallisation. Most commercial glasses can be regarded as mixtures of silicates. Window and plate glasses are usually made by fusing silica with substances which differ from those used in flint glass, which is used in cut crystal glassware, and heat-resisting glass. They’re coloured if necessary by adding metallic oxides to a colourless base.’
‘What are we getting at?’ Pel asked.
Leguyader held up a hand for silence. It was one of his more infuriating traits that he believed everyone was eager to hear what he had to say. ‘Plate glass,’ he went on, ‘glass used for car windscreens, crystal glass and glass for bottles, which are made these days by machine instead of being blown individually, are all different. They also break differently. When shattered, windscreens break into small thick pieces, almost like cubes, though there are among them tiny, sharp shards. Bottle glass tends to break into long slivers, often dagger sharp. Headlight glass is different again.’
Pel shifted in his seat. ‘Am I here to listen to a diatribe on the manufacture of glass?’
‘No,’ Leguyader agreed sourly. ‘You are here in the interests of justice.’
Pel scowled, put firmly in his place, and Leguyader smiled.
‘I know you consider me a bore,’ he went on and Pel’s head jerked up because this was something he had never expected to hear from Leguyader’s lips.
‘So do I you,’ Leguyader said calmly. ‘But give me your attention. It’s usually worth while.’
Pel had to admit that it was and since Leguyader, instead of stamping out in a rage at Pel’s comment, had been willing to admit himself a bore to make him listen, doubtless what he had to say might produce something.
‘Cham and I have worked together over this,’ Leguyader explained, ‘so if you find it tedious, you’ll have to blame him, too.’
Cham grinned and everything suddenly became easier.
Leguyader indicated the kidney dishes Cham had brought along, covered with transparent film and laid out in a row.
‘From left to right. Splinters from Colonel Boileau’s face. The shard of glass removed from Duff Forbes Mackay’s groin wound. Fragments from the spectacles of the Dutch tourist held up by highway robbers at Marix. Splinters from Sergeant Gehrer’s eye, removed by the eye surgeon and preserved by Doctor Cham. In the last dish the splinter Cham found in the wound in the head of Quelereil-Dupont.’
Pel was listening now.
‘They’re all different kinds of glass,’ Leguyader went on. ‘The glass from the car Gehrer was driving and the glass from the car that hit Colonel Boileau are practically the same – probably even from the same manufacturer. The splinters from the Dutch tourist’s spectacles are of finer glass. F
inally, the splinter from Quelereil-Dupont’s head wound: one would have expected to find it was the same glass as that found in the wounds of Sergeant Gehrer and Colonel Boileau. But it isn’t. Because it isn’t glass from a car. We didn’t examine it too closely at first because we assumed it came from a car’s headlight. A great mistake, because it didn’t. It’s not the same sort of glass at all. We’ve checked it with various glass manufacturers. Three of them, They all gave the same opinion, despite the minute size of it. It didn’t come from a car. It came from a bottle.’
‘A bottle?’ Pel leaned forward. ‘He was hit with a bottle?’
‘Not a wine bottle because the glass is colourless and wine bottles are usually green. Not a gin bottle either because they’re often green, too. Not brandy, because they’re usually brown unless they’re half bottles containing cheap brandy, in which case they’re often clear, like the one that supplied the shard that killed Duff Forbes Mackay. A vodka bottle? Litre size, for example?’
‘A full one,’ Cham put in. ‘An empty one wouldn’t be heavy enough to cause the injury he received. It must have weighed around a kilo.’
Pel sat in silence for a moment, then he looked up and even managed a smile at Leguyader. For a moment Cham thought he was going to embrace him.
‘You’ve said I think you a bore,’ he announced. ‘And that you think I’m one. Doubtless we’re both right. However, and I’ve admitted it before, there’s nobody better at your job than you are. I think, between you, you’ve just solved another mystery and I’m grateful.’
‘Has he solved another mystery, patron?’ Aimedeu asked as Leguyader vanished.
‘More than one. And with a few splinters of glass.’ Pel shrugged. ‘I know he likes to think we couldn’t function without him and, unfortunately, that’s true because he’s the biggest bore this side of the grave. But he is good at his job.’ Pel paused. ‘Am I a bore, too? He said so.’
Aimedieu grinned. Yes, he thought, Pel was a bloody bore occasionally. Especially when he went on about being ill and not being able to give up smoking. But, like Leguyader, he was good at his job.
‘Bore?’ he said loyally. ‘Not you, Chief.’
Pel studied him gravely. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
Within half an hour Pel was talking by telephone to Madame Weill’s daughter.
‘My mother doesn’t live here.’ Madame Luciano sounded surprised at his request to speak to her mother. ‘She runs a nursing home at Lugny in Burgundy.’
‘They tell me she’s visiting you and has been for some time.’
There was a long silence before Madame Luciano spoke again. ‘I haven’t seen her for six months,’ she said.
She was puzzled and insisted on flying from Marseilles immediately, while Pel decided to delay the holding charges he’d been about to make against the three old men, and await her arrival. Later that day, the thing that had been bothering him for so long became clear. He’d finally remembered where he’d seen Madame Sully before.
He looked at his wife as they sipped their aperitifs. ‘You remember,’ he said over the Mahler, ‘when we ate at the Relais St-Armand a little while ago, there was a woman there who caught your attention.’
Madame had no recollection of the incident. It had been so long before, it had completely slipped from her mind and Pel had to struggle to bring it back.
‘Blond woman going grey,’ he said. ‘With a big dark man. Curly hair. She wore a red polka-dot dress you said came from your boutique. She had a handbag you said also came from your place. And a hair style you said was one of yours. You said Sylvie Goss did it.’
Recollection came. Seeing it was important, Madame turned down the Mahler. ‘I remember,’ she said.
‘Would it have been an expensive dress?’
‘We don’t sell cheap dresses.’ Madame smiled. ‘Snobbery being what it is in the clothing and perfumery business, if you don’t charge a lot, they think the goods are inferior. Sell cheap dresses and you have failure. Sell expensive ones and you have a runaway success on your hands.’
Pel was frowning again. ‘I ask because I wouldn’t have imagined the woman who was wearing it drew the sort of salary that enabled her to buy at your place. Or buy handbags of the quality you sell. What about the hair style?’
‘I remember it. Sylvie did it. I recognised her style.’
‘Would that be expensive?’
‘Our hair styles don’t come cheaply either.’
Bertholles, the carpet shop, were also helpful. Sure, they said, they had sold a carpet to the Hospice de Lugny. Not a very good one but the hospice hadn’t been particular. They just wanted some floor covering and they hadn’t quibbled about the quality or the colour. It had been delivered within a few days.
‘What happened to the old carpet? The one it replaced?’
‘We’ve got it here. There’s a bad stain on it. Someone’s spilt a bottle of red wine on it. There’s nothing worse for carpets. They must have had a party. It smelled of whisky.’
Soon afterwards Records came back to Pel. They exchanged names for a while then Pel tried one more.
Records were silent for a moment or two, and there was the sound of paper being moved. ‘There’s a record,’ they said. ‘Both for fraud. Both in Amiens. And, if you’re interested, she still seems to be active. We’ve been approached by the bank. Crédit Industriel. They wanted to know much the same as you. We didn’t tell them anything because our records aren’t for public use. But they did say she’s trying to negotiate a loan to buy a big house in Toulon. The name given is Weill. Any use to you?’
‘I think it might be,’ Pel said.
As he put down the telephone, Claudie appeared. ‘There’s a Madame Odebert to see Inspector Darcy,’ she said. ‘She’s wanting to report a disappearance.’
‘Inspector Darcy’s not here. Give it to Aimedieu. He can deal with a Missing Persons report.’
Claudie hesitated. ‘I think this one might be more than just a Missing Persons report, patron,’ she said.
‘It’s my father,’ Madame Odebert said. ‘Henri Lefêvre. He’s disappeared and I’m wondering where he is. Then I read about this man being found on the motorway and that he’d been at that hospice at Lugny. My father was there.’
Lefêvre had gone into the hospice at Lugny for a matter of six months.
‘My husband’s a professor at the University,’ Madame Odebert said. ‘He got the opportunity to exchange with a professor from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Naturally, he wanted me to go with him. My father, who’s eighty-four and lived with us, didn’t want to be in our way and he said he’d go into the hospice for the six months we were away. It seemed all right to me. It seemed comfortable and when we left he seemed happy and had money available. He’s quite wealthy. But then we stopped getting letters and I grew worried. In the end my husband thought I should fly home and make enquiries.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve been to the hospice. He isn’t there. They said he left three months ago. They say he announced that he wanted to go home. Well, he might have, but it seems very unlike him, and none of our neighbours has seen him.’
As Madame Odebert left, Pel picked up his cigarettes, slipped them into his pocket and stood up.
‘Aimedieu.’
As Aimedieu appeared in the doorway, Pel gestured. ‘Get in touch with Inspector Turgot, of Uniform,’ he said. ‘He knows what I want. I’ve talked to him. We’re going to Lugny.’
When they arrived at the hospice, there were three or four elderly people sitting in chairs in the sun on the lawn. They looked up with interest, as though they welcomed any diversion from their boredom.
‘Have they found him?’ an old woman asked. ‘They said he was in the river and that he was a solicitor who’d defrauded his clients.’
‘He was found ages ago,’ an old man corrected. ‘Some men from the village did for him.’
The youth, Bernard Sully, met them at the door. He was still
working on the steps with a trowel and a bricklayer’s hammer. He studied them with his blank eyes and vacant expression. At Pel’s request he summoned his parents.
Like the old people outside, they’d heard that Siméon, Espagne and Cardier had been taken in for questioning.
‘Have they been charged?’ Madame Sully asked.
‘Not yet. There are a few things to sort out still. Siméon has a record and they knew Dupont had money and valuables in his house. After he was killed, it was decided to take him to the motorway and leave him there so it would look like an accident. They were in a hurry.’
‘They must have been, the way they buttoned up his clothes.’ Bernard Sully spoke excitedly. Then he stopped abruptly, his eyes wide and shocked, and there was a dead silence. Pel stared at him.
‘Where did you learn that?’ he asked. ‘It’s not general knowledge.’
Sully was staring at his wife, then his eyes turned to his son. ‘You stupid bastard,’ he said.
As he lunged for the boy, Pel stuck out his foot. Sully stumbled over it and crashed into a small side table which collapsed into matchwood under his weight.
The boy watched dumbly, his eyes uncomprehending; then, as Aimedieu dragged out the handcuffs and wrenched his father’s hands behind his back, he came to life. Swinging round, he burst through the open french windows. But, as he stepped on to the terrace, two of Turgot’s men appeared from behind the door. As they grabbed his arms, he gave a strangled shout like that of a captured animal.
‘Take him away,’ Pel said. ‘Don’t be too hard on him.’
That bomb at the airport.
Things had been stirring for some time in Misset’s not over-alert mind. As he watched Ferry’s house from outside the Petite Alsacienne he saw the upstairs window – the window of what Ferry called his study – open, and a cloud of white powder tossed out. It landed on the garage roof below and was promptly swept by the breeze in the direction of Jouet’s garden.