Pel Among The Pueblos

by Mark Hebden

  ‘So there’s nothing very odd about him disappearing and her not knowing where he is?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, patron,’ Darcy agreed. ‘except that she says his passport isn’t in his desk where he normally keeps it.’

  ‘So he’s abroad then. Did she know where?’

  ‘No, patron, she didn’t. But she thought it might be Mexico.’

  Three

  When Darcy appeared the next day, he was in a frustrated mood. He had been trying to find Jacqueline Hervé but she seemed to have had no friends save the dead Navarro, and he had been unable to find the property Navarro was reputed to have given her.

  ‘I’ve tried the estate agents, patron,’ he said. ‘I thought she might be there. But none of them knows anything about it. I’ve also tried the lawyers. I got nowhere. So it’s either registered under a different name, or else Navarro just handed her the deeds which he’d had changed to her name by some lawyer somewhere outside this area.’

  ‘Or else,’ Pel suggested, ‘it’s just a rumour and he didn’t give her any property.’

  ‘Or that,’ Darcy agreed.

  ‘What about Donck? Have you heard anything of him?’

  ‘Still looking, patron. I’ve heard he was seen in St-André de Nidon. I’ve got enquiries going there. We’ll turn him up.’

  Nosjean followed Darcy into Pel’s office. He was carrying a thick folder of paper, which turned out to be the reports on the cars stolen from the car park at Métaux de Dijon.

  He looked puzzled. ‘I think we’ve got a funny one here, patron,’ he said. ‘You remember the rash of stolen cars from the car park at Métaux de Dijon? Well, it seems that the insurance companies were the first to notice it. They have a get-together occasionally when they sink their business differences and chat generally about what’s happening in insurance, and it seems they’re a bit worried about the number of times they’re having to pay out for stolen cars. What’s odd, they say, is that none of them has ever been reported found. They’re blaming us.’

  Pel frowned. ‘Have you checked the list of stolen cars?’

  ‘Yes. What they say seems to be correct. We have no record of them. And what makes it odd is that cars stolen from other places such as Radiocommunication, the hospital, Lait Bourguignon – all big places employing a large number of people with large car parks from which cars are obviously stolen from time to time – occasionally later turn up. In the last three years 57 cars have been reported stolen from Métaux de Dijon and not one’s been turned up. In the same period, of the 17 taken from Radiocommunication 10 were later found – taken away by kids or someone whose own car wasn’t running for some reason or other and helped himself. At the hospital 12 cars disappeared, of which nine were recovered. It’s odd that more were taken from Métaux de Dijon than anywhere else and that none of them were recovered. I got the figures from the insurance people.’

  ‘Do Métaux de Dijon have supervision on their car park?’

  ‘They have a man who keeps an eye on it, but not full time, and they don’t admit responsibility. It’s just a wide area of asphalt and they maintain that the cars left in it are the employees’ responsibility, not theirs.’

  ‘Did Métaux de Dijon learn of these thefts? Were any reported to them by their employees?’

  ‘No. They didn’t expect them to be reported to them but they thought someone might have made a complaint. But when they checked they found no one did.’

  ‘That’s odd, isn’t it? With that number. Didn’t the men’s union report it and ask for supervision? It would be unlike them to miss an opportunity like that. No strikes? No sit-ins? No demonstrations? After all, demonstrations have become an international disease. I’d have expected a protest march down the Rue de la Liberté on a Saturday.’

  Nosjean smiled. ‘Nothing like that, patron. Inspector Pomereau, of Traffic, went to see the union officials, but they said nobody had complained to them. They’d heard about the stolen cars but in every case the owner had preferred not to make a complaint.’

  Pel sniffed. Pel’s sniff had a great ability to convey his thoughts. This one conveyed grave doubt. ‘What are your thoughts?’ he asked.

  ‘I have a suspicion someone somewhere’s working a racket.’

  After expressing his suspicions, Nosjean’s first move was to contact one of the city motor-insurance firms – Assurances Mutuelles, near the Porte Guillaume. He chose that particular one because he happened to have his eye on one of the girls who worked there. She looked like Charlotte Rampling and any girl who looked like Charlotte Rampling always immediately caught Nosjean’s eye and he’d spotted her while making enquiries about a set of stolen porcelain. Sometimes he struck up an acquaintance with a girl who looked like Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren – once even one who looked like the young Brigitte Bardot – but it was always the ones who looked like Charlotte Rampling who kept his interest the longest.

  She exchanged a few warm words with him and took him in to see the manager, a stout man called Jean Aubineau with a mandarin moustache and dark spectacles which made him look like a gangster from an American film on television. He explained that the question of the missing cars had first arisen quite casually at the meeting of insurance operators a week or two before.

  ‘Groupe Druot mentioned it first,’ he said. ‘Then Gau Assurances mentioned that they’d had some, too. All from the car park at Métaux de Dijon. So had we. When we got talking about it, it seemed everybody had and that seemed odd enough for us to contact the Hôtel de Police. We felt perhaps they weren’t doing their job.’

  ‘Is it new, this rash of thefts?’

  ‘At Métaux de Dijon? Yes and no. But the number’s increased. In the last three years there were 57. The three years before there were only 31. The three years before that only 24.’

  ‘So is all crime,’ Nosjean pointed out. ‘What about in the past? Were they reported then?’

  Aubineau frowned and glanced at a notepad. ‘They seem to have been. Why would they stop reporting them?’

  Nosjean shrugged. ‘Do you always pay out on a stolen car?’

  ‘If it’s insured for theft, of course. Most of them are, but sometimes they’re recovered after they’ve reported them stolen, so then we don’t pay out. But as you can see, there’ve been more than ever lately. And –’ Aubineau gave a frustrated gesture ‘ – none have been found.’

  ‘What do the company say?’

  ‘What you’d expect. It’s not their responsibility. That’s normal enough. It’s the same with other firms. They agreed to put a watch on when we mentioned it to them but with 900 cars, it’s very difficult. It seems the cars disappeared without being noticed. Nobody saw any cars leaving the car park with unidentified drivers.’

  ‘The owners all claimed on insurance?’

  ‘Yes. They were all insured for all the usual. Damage, theft and so on. One or two fairly recently, which seems suspicious.’

  ‘And all were paid out?’

  ‘Yes. We certainly did, and when this thing came up we got our heads together and found that all claims had been paid out by other insurance firms.’

  ‘What sort of cars were they on the whole? New? Old? Expensive?’

  Aubineau shrugged. ‘Like most factory-workers’ cars. Not new. But most of them seem to go in for good-quality cars, because a lot of them are mechanics or fitters or engineers and they service them themselves and they know a good car when they see one. If not, they have mates who’ll do the job cheaply in their spare time.’

  ‘Value?’

  Aubineau shrugged. ‘Around 35,000 to 40,000 francs. That sort of figure. Their cars are in good shape on the whole but, often they’re not new. Some even are old.’

  ‘What about the cars reported stolen?’

  Aubineau grinned. ‘Just past second-best. They’d been bought second-hand mostly, as I say, and the owners had had them two or three years. In several cases they were thinking of changing them. Value depreciated to around 25,000 francs.
Perhaps a bit more. About that.’

  ‘What about new cars with a value of around 50,000 to 60,000 francs or more? How many of those disappeared?’

  Aubineau seemed surprised at the question then he frowned. ‘Since you mention it,’ he said, ‘none.’

  ‘But there were some new cars in the car park, surely?’

  ‘There must have been.’

  ‘Then that’s odd, isn’t it? Why steal an old car when there were new ones to be taken?’

  Aubineau shrugged. ‘Perhaps the new ones are harder to get into.’

  ‘Are you in constant touch with other motor insurance companies?’

  ‘Most of the time. One of us is always claiming against another. You know how it is. A man’s in collision with another car and claims insurance. So does the other driver. So we get our heads together to decide if one of us can claim against the other. Where it’s a case of admitted or clear responsibility, that insurance company pays up. It saves time.’

  ‘So could you contact all these colleagues of yours in the business and ask them to let you know next time they have a claim for a stolen car from Métaux de Dijon? So I can look into it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘In the meantime –’ Nosjean touched his nose ‘ – keep it under your hat.’

  Nosjean was frowning when he went to visit Inspector Pomereu of Traffic. Pomereu had had a man watching the car park at Métaux de Dijon for some time now in the hope of catching some persistent thief, but he hadn’t seen anything untoward.

  ‘Mostly the cars seem to have disappeared during the night shift,’ Pomereu explained.

  ‘That makes sense,’ Nosjean said. ‘When it’s dark a man could walk into a big car park like that and help himself, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Not if he’s working there, he couldn’t. He’d be missed from his bench. And no matter what shift he’s on, at this time of the year it’s hardly dark except in the very middle of the night.’

  ‘Would some man who couldn’t start his car take a workmate’s car to get home?’

  ‘Well, he might, but I’d have thought he’d arrange for it to be found later, and my man didn’t spot anything.’

  ‘Are the cars checked as they leave?’

  ‘When the gates are opened the whole shift stream out. Several hundred cars. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Perhaps they ought to be, all the same.’

  Pomereu gave a small chilly smile. He wasn’t a man given to much humour. ‘I suggested that to Métaux de Dijon. The reply I was given was, “Try to hold up the home-going crowd at the end of a shift and there’d be a riot.”’

  ‘Even when cars are being stolen?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Is your man discreet?’

  ‘We brought him in from Callou-sur-Ille, so he’s not known.’

  Pomereu’s second-in-command produced the list of stolen cars which Traffic carefully kept up to date. The number reported stolen from Métaux de Dijon seemed very small.

  ‘Is this all?’ Nosjean asked.

  ‘All that have been reported. I expect there were more but we can’t do much if they’re not mentioned to us.’

  ‘If my car were stolen,’ Nosjean said slowly, ‘the first thing I’d want is to have the guy in court so fast he’d be breathless, and I’d report it straight away to the police. Why didn’t these types?’

  Pomereu joined in. ‘As a matter of interest,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard they’re having a similar problem at Nantes. At the metalworks there. Compagnie Française de Produits Métallurgiques. It’s another big outfit like Métaux de Dijon. Could it be a gang working the country?’

  ‘It might well be,’ Nosjean agreed. ‘And it might be bigger than we think. I’ll warn other forces to take a look at their lists of stolen cars and where they were stolen from. Let me know if you get any more from Métaux de Dijon.’

  They seemed to have lost Marc Donck, and Jacqueline Hervé had become the subject of a nationwide search. As the days passed they were coming to the conclusion that Donck had bolted with his mysterious companion straight for Paris and had boarded the first aircraft out of France. No sign of him had been turned up, and Jacqueline Hervé was the greater worry because she might have been abducted or even murdered, and police throughout the country were on the look-out for her. Her picture had been televised and sent to all police stations but nothing had been heard.

  ‘It’s not unknown for people to disappear,’ Pel admitted. ‘I read recently of a type who walked out on his wife and stayed away for seventeen years, then simply returned and took up where he left off.’

  ‘And she let him?’ Darcy’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘As far as I can make out.’ Pel frowned. ‘There could be a thousand and one reasons why she’s disappeared, of course. If she was Navarro’s sidekick as well as his mistress, she’s probably none too honest herself. She probably helped herself to property of his – jewellery, valuables, bonds, that sort of thing – and took the opportunity to bolt.’

  ‘She didn’t take the money in the drawer in the room where he was shot, patron. And there was a lot.’

  Pel admitted the fact, but there were reasons why she might not have, probably some of them none too easy to explain. After all, she hadn’t been in Paris where she had said she was going to be.

  So where was she? Had she, despite what the housekeeper said, been in the house all the time? Had she heard the shots and rushed in to see what had happened, seen Navarro dead and been too scared to go any further? But that seemed to suggest something very odd. Because if she were in the house, why had she taken the trouble to announce she was going to Paris?

  ‘And,’ Darcy asked, ‘why didn’t she raise the alarm?’

  As the days passed, it began to look as though Pel’s estimate of Jacqueline Hervé was right and she’d bolted with valuables of Navarro’s. She was probably whooping it up at that moment in Miami or the Seychelles, probably merely St-Trop’.

  Unless, of course – and the more he thought about it, the bigger seemed the possibility – she had disappeared with Marc Donck. The coincidence was very marked. They had both disappeared at the same time and nothing had been heard since of either. It was something they had to bear in mind, especially since it grew more and more to seem as if Marc Donck had made it safely out of the country, so that he would now become just one more statistic, one more digit under ‘Unsolved Crimes’.

  It was pointless losing sleep over it. There were plenty of other things to lose sleep over. The usual muggings. A couple of break-ins. A fraud case in Lyons, where the Lyons police had demanded their help and which was complicated enough to have occupied Pel for some time.

  Then one day Darcy burst in. ‘We’ve found Donck’s hide-out, patron,’ he said. ‘He has a flat in St-André de Nidon. I sent Brochard and Morell over there at once in the hope he might be there. They haven’t rung in, so I think we ought to go, too. It’ll probably give us some clue to where he is.’

  Marc Donck’s flat was above a butcher’s shop and Brochard and Morell were waiting in a car outside when they arrived armed with a search warrant signed by Judge Brisard.

  ‘He’s not here, patron,’ Brochard said. ‘According to the butcher there, he hasn’t seen him for around a month.’

  ‘Since he knocked off Navarro,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘All right, let’s get inside.’

  ‘The butcher has a key, patron,’ Brochard said. ‘It’s actually his flat.’

  The flat told them very little. Clothes still hung in the wardrobes. There was food in the cupboards and even a bottle of sour milk in the refrigerator, which seemed to indicate that Donck had left in a hurry. They searched all the usual places, all the drawers and cupboards and under the mattresses. As they worked, Pel poked his nose into the bedroom. Items of women’s clothing hung in the wardrobe, and there was a nightdress under the pillow.

  ‘He obviously had a lady friend,’ he said. ‘Do we know who she was?’

  Brochard shrugged.
‘The butcher says he’d seen a woman but he didn’t know her.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Tall and fair,’ he said.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘He didn’t look very hard, patron. He says it was none of his business.’

  ‘It might be a good idea to find who she is and pick her up. She could probably tell us where Donck’s got to.’

  They examined the pillows, turned back the carpets and checked for loose floorboards that might conceal a hiding place for something that would give a clue to where Donck was. Finally they checked the curtains and took out every book Donck possessed. The shelves indicated his interests and they were by no means those of an ordinary thief. There were novels, histories, dramas, discourses of various kinds – the reflection of the mind of an intelligent educated man.

  ‘No wonder they called him the Bookworm,’ Darcy said. He fished out one of the volumes and began to study it. Then he frowned and held it up. ‘Notice this, patron?’ he said. ‘L’Intervention Française au Mexique, 1861 – Charles Blanchot. The French Intervention in Mexico, 1861. Published 1911. It seems Donck was also interested in French diplomacy over there.’

  It was puzzling. Nothing appeared to have been stolen from Navarro’s home and they had found nothing in Donck’s flat which could be traced to Navarro – nothing, in fact, to connect the man they suspected of murder and his victim, save for a book which showed they had a mutual interest in the French intervention in a foreign country over a century before, an interest they seemed to share with the victim’s brother-in-law, an ex-professor of history with a reputation for somewhat shady dealings connected with research.

  As they worked, Brochard, who had been going through every scrap of paper in an over-full waste-bin from under the sink, appeared.

  He wasn’t looking very happy because the waste-bin hadn’t been emptied for some time and the weather was warm so that it had a very ripe smell attached to it. He had its contents on a newspaper in the kitchen and had been pawing through them with great distaste.