by Mark Hebden
‘There’s a bullet wound in his shoulder,’ the policeman said. ‘It didn’t kill him, though. It was the grenade did that. I found at least seven wounds.’
Tagliatti was wearing a cap, white linen trousers and a heavily checked sports jacket, not the normal smart lightweight suit he preferred, with the white hat and the red handkerchief in his breast pocket.
Pel stared at the corpse for a while, unmoved. People who lived by violence couldn’t complain if they died by violence, and, if nothing else, the death of anybody like Maurice Tagliatti couldn’t do anything for the police but help them.
Doc Minet appeared. ‘No need to tell you the cause of death here,’ he said.
‘In the case of the driver, gunshot wounds. This chap – fragments from a grenade.’
‘That would be about it.’
Prélat, of Fingerprints, was going over the car when they returned to it. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘Except the driver’s dabs.’
Leguyader, of the Lab, held one of the cartridge cases with a pair of tweezers. ‘Nine-millimetre,’ he said. ‘British. Probably from a Sterling.’
Pel called over the boy with the ear-muffs. ‘You found them?’
The boy nodded.
‘See anything odd?’
The boy shook his head.
‘No strangers?’
Another shake of the head.
‘What happened?’
The boy indicated the tractor. ‘Going to the lower pasture. Found ’em.’
‘Hear anything?’
The boy merely indicated the ear-muffs. He seemed to be suffering from oral constipation. Pel decided he’d leave him to Darcy.
As they talked, a white British Range Rover with dark windows came roaring down the hill from Lordy. It stopped with a screech of brakes near the crowd of spectators, sending several of them scuttling for safety.
Pel recognised the driver as Cavalin, one of the group he’d see with Maurice Tagliatti a few weeks before. One of the men behind him, large, fat and hostile-looking, held a gun. Seeing Pel, Cavalin gestured and the weapon vanished at once.
‘Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’
Pel indicated the stalled car and Cavalin’s eyes flickered. ‘That’s one of our cars,’ he said. ‘Was Maurice–?’
‘He’s not in the car,’ Pel said. ‘He’s up there in what’s left of the hut.’
Cavalin swallowed hard. ‘Is he–?’
‘He’s dead.’
Cavalin walked towards the wrecked hut. When he returned, his face was stiff. He glanced at the body of the driver hanging half out of the Peugeot.
‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said.
It might be terrible for Maurice’s organisation, Pel thought, but it wasn’t a terrible thing for the police, and he wondered instinctively how much Cavalin was involved.
He was one of the linchpins of Maurice’s organisation, possibly heir to the throne, and the thought crossed Pel’s mind that he might even have been responsible.
In Maurice’s society, it wasn’t unknown for the boss to be removed rather suddenly – especially if he grew lazy, old and too ambitious – so that someone with new ideas could take over. There were quite a few varieties of treachery in the world Maurice Tagliatti had inhabited and Cavalin was probably not as upset as he was trying to convey.
‘You got here quickly,’ he said.
Cavalin shrugged. ‘I thought something had happened.’
Pel eyed him narrowly. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Yes. Why did you think something had happened? You, couldn’t have seen it.’
Cavalin shrugged. ‘One of the boys heard shooting.’
‘It might have been somebody after a rabbit.’
‘It didn’t sound like that sort of shooting.’
The large fat man with Cavalin was scowling. ‘They should have let me go with Maurice,’ he growled.
‘Who should?’ Pel asked.
The fat man lifted his head. ‘Maurice should. I usually did. But this time he said he wanted to go alone. I knew he shouldn’t have.’
‘Why shouldn’t he have? Was he in danger?’
‘Maurice was always–’ Pel detected a faint move of the head from Cavalin and the fat man stopped dead. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t in danger. But I was always with him when he went anywhere. But not this time. I wish I could find the son of a whore who did it. I’d kill the bastard.’
Pel studied him mildly. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘I noticed you had a gun.
The fat man studied him for a moment then he nodded. ‘I’ve got a gun.’
‘Which you always carry?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d better let me see it.’
There was a long silence then Cavalin spoke.
‘Let him see it,’ he said.
The fat man handed over the gun. Pel studied it. ‘Swiss ninemill.,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a licence, have you?’
The fat man looked as if he hadn’t the slightest idea what a licence was, and Pel handed the gun to Darcy.
‘Confiscated,’ he said shortly. ‘No licence.’
The fat man stared hard at him, then glanced at Cavalin and again there was that faint move of the head.
‘Jim’, Cavalin said, ‘tends to go over the top a bit.’
‘That his name? Jim?’
‘Yes. Jim Peneau.’
‘Thought a lot of Maurice, did he?’
‘He gave me a good job,’ Peneau said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Looking after him.’
‘In what way?’
Peneau began to suspect he was on dangerous ground again and his hand moved dismissively. ‘Fetching and carrying. Running errands. That sort of thing.’ He scowled at Pel. ‘Maurice had a lot of people who didn’t like him,’ he said.
Pel nodded. ‘I’m sure he did. I was one.’ He looked at Cavalin. ‘What about Maurice’s wife? I’ve heard she doesn’t spend much of the year with him.’
‘No,’ Cavalin agreed. ‘She skis in the winter. She has a chalet in Switzerland. She goes to St Trop’ in the summer. She also goes to Deauville. She likes sailing and has friends there.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Here. At the Manoir.’
‘Why?’
‘It just happened that way.’
‘Who’s going to tell her?’
‘I expect I will.’
‘How will she take it?’
Cavalin drew a deep breath. ‘I doubt if it will break her heart.’
‘Like that, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be coming to see her. Inform her.’
‘I’ll tell her to hold herself in readiness.’
Pel looked quickly at Cavalin but his face was grave and serious.
‘Did Benjamen Bozon always drive Maurice around?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Why was he driving today?’
‘Because’, Cavalin said, ‘the chauffeur who usually handles this car – Bernard Guerdon – was sick. Some sort of stomach upset. Asked if he could have the day off. Maurice gave it to him, of course. He liked his people to be happy. Benjamen often drove for us.’
‘Where were they heading?’
Cavalin shrugged. ‘Personal shopping? I don’t know. Maurice didn’t tell me everything.’
‘Why wasn’t Maurice using the Cadillac? He usually used the Cadillac.’
Cavalin shrugged again. ‘He used any car that was available. Perhaps the Cadillac was being serviced. There are plenty of others.’
Pel scowled. People like Maurice Tagliatti always had plenty of cars to choose from while honest cops drove battered old Peugeots. Pel himself had driven a battered old Peugeot until he had managed to marry a wealthy woman who had insisted on him having a car with secure doors that wasn’t likely to dump her in the gutter every time it went round a corner.
‘Bit pointless, I suppose,�
� Darcy observed, ‘asking if Maurice had any enemies.’
Cavalin shrugged. ‘In business, there are always enemies.’
‘Especially in Maurice’s business,’ Pel said. ‘Any new ones just lately? Connected, for instance, with the move up here from Marseilles.’
He wasn’t deluded. Somebody had bumped off Maurice for a good reason, and in the world Maurice inhabited, he felt, that reason could only have been vengeance. Somebody wanted him good and dead.
He glanced at the car again. The day was warm and the spilled blood had attracted flies. The air was already full of their hum.
‘Where were you at the time?’ he asked.
Cavalin looked surprised. ‘What are you suggesting?’ he said. ‘I was up at the Manoir. At my desk. Attending to Maurice’s business.’
He gestured, apparently recovered from the shock already. ‘You can leave all the arrangements to me, of course. I’ll inform the relatives and arrange for the interment.’
Les Tarthes, the Roblais farm, was on the slope of the hill overlooking the valley. From the gate, you could see the main road winding up the hill as far as Perrenet-sous-le-Forêt.
The farm was an old place with ancient buildings of huge stones and heavy timbers but a lot of it seemed to be falling into ruins. As if old Roblais, who owned it, hadn’t a centime to his name. Pel suspected he was worth quite a bit, nevertheless. French farmers were a law unto themselves and were always far wealthier than their clothes and their sparsely furnished homes suggested. A peasant background led to a frugality of living that might not produce comfort but certainly produced money in the bank.
‘Been here long?’ Pel asked.
‘All my life.’
‘Father here before you?’
‘And his father. And his before him. And his before him. Father to son.’
Pel indicated the valley. You could see the Manoir of Lordy, Maurice’s place, down there, with its wide lawns, slate mansard roofs, and the windvane over what had once been the stables.
‘New neighbours,’ he observed.
Roblais nodded.
‘Spoken to them yet?’
Roblais shook his head and Pel began to see where the son had acquired his taciturnity.
‘City types,’ he said and Roblais nodded.
‘See anything going on down there?’
‘Cars coming and going. That’s all.’
‘Any strangers in your fields? In the woods round here?’ Shake of the head.
‘Know anything about them?’
Roblais shrugged. ‘Funny lot,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Wear suits.’
Roblais was wearing corduroy trousers, heavy boots and an old windcheater greasy with dirt. A cap, so old its peak was fringed with wear, sat at an impossible angle on his skull, but Pel noticed it didn’t move when he shook his head. Probably it was nailed on. Country types had thick heads. He decided to leave old Roblais to Darcy, too.
Three
By this time the specialists were busy, the photographers, the scientists and liaison officers, the fingerprint men and the scene of crime men, all of them cataloguing the minutiae of death. The media had been fed their share of meaningless facts. Darcy, an expert at it, had faced the reporters and to half-baked questions had given half-baked answers. The main briefing had been held. Eventually over fifty men would be involved, both uniformed and plain-clothed, because, even though the victims were Maurice Tagliatti, known mobster, and his driver, they still had to hold a proper inquiry. Murders could not be allowed to occur in the Republic of France without an effort to track down the killers. Though the police had never had any love for Maurice Tagliatti and his kind, they nevertheless had to push that point from their minds and pick up the guilty parties.
The thought engaged Pel’s mind quite considerably. What, he wondered, had been going on at the Manoir de Lordy? And how had Cavalin managed to arrive on the scene so quickly? Was he responsible? Had someone tipped him off about what had happened, so that he could appear, concerned and agitated about the death of his boss?
‘He was too concerned, I reckon,’ Darcy suggested. ‘Too agitated. The only thing going round in his mind was “Are we safe? Is it safe to go on doing what we were contemplating?” Because they were contemplating something, Patron. They have something up their sleeve. They’re still trying to look innocent.’
They stared at each other, frowning. It wasn’t a conference. The conference would come later. This was a pause in the proceedings to draw breath, think up tactics and offer ideas, while the technical men cleared up the scene of the crime.
As Darcy pushed a packet of cigarettes across, Pel eyed them gloomily. ‘I’d just given up,’ he said bitterly. ‘It must have been the shortest period of abstinence ever.’ He helped himself, dragged the smoke down to his socks, went into a coughing session, and immediately felt better. ‘We were dead right the other day,’ he wheezed. ‘To go and see Maurice.’
‘It doesn’t seem to have done a lot of good,’ Darcy observed.
‘So who was after him?’
‘Cavalin? Had he ambitions to take over? They call him the Dauphin, don’t they – the heir to the throne? Or is it Maurice’s wife? De Troq’ told me he saw Maurice dining out with his secretary in the city the other day. She’s a Yugoslav or something. Perhaps Maurice had grown tired of his wife and she didn’t like it.’
‘We’ll have Cavalin in.’
‘You’re wasting your time, Patron. He’ll have an answer for everything.’
What Darcy said was correct. Cavalin would have gone over every detail of the killing by this time and be ready for whatever came up. Pel sighed. ‘What about the other things we have on the books?’
Darcy opened the file he held on his knee. ‘There’s a new one. A woman advertising her house for sale. Some type appears and asks to look round it. The next thing she knows she’s locked in the lavatory and he’s ransacking her jewellery box. I’ve got Bardolle on it. De Troq’s still with his fraud case. Nosjean’s still tying up that art racket. I’ve told them not to get too involved in case we need them. Oh, there’s one other case: some Italian who lives here – name of–’ Darcy glanced at a pad by his arm. ‘Giovanni Soscharni – reported by the library to be damaging their books. They didn’t know who it was so I got Misset to sit in the reference room. I expect he went to sleep but he seems to have wakened up in time to see this Soscharni doing a bit of scribbling and brought him in. He said he disagreed with what the book said.’
He ought, Pel thought, to be made an honorary member of the Bigots’ Society. It was a newish organisation, with Pel as secretary, treasurer, president and only member.
‘He’ll go up before the magistrates,’ Darcy said. ‘Meantime, I gave the Lordy cops instructions to keep an eye on Maurice’s place, and radio in if anybody leaves in a hurry.’
‘They won’t,’ Pel said. ‘They’ll lie low for a while.’
‘Not if what Maurice was up to was urgent,’ Darcy suggested.
There was still the Chief to fill in. The Chief liked to know the facts. The Palais de Justice had already been informed. Judge Brisard was handling the case – much to Pel’s disgust, because he couldn’t stand Judge Brisard any more than Judge Brisard could stand Pel. It was a long-standing enmity and, with Pel ahead on points at the moment, he didn’t worry about offering much in the way of information.
The Chief was a different kettle of fish. He’d been a working cop himself, a big man who’d once been a boxer and had had a reputation as a young policeman for settling minor criminals with a clout round the head. He’d gone off the previous day to a conference in Paris and had just returned. He was puzzled by the news about Maurice Tagliatti.
‘It can’t be Maurice,’ he said. ‘I saw him in his car – that big Cadillac he uses – sitting right outside the Hôtel de Police as I returned. There was a chauffeur and he was in the rear seat. Right opposite the door as I drove in. Sergeant Olivier on the front desk saw
him too.’
Pel sat up, his eyes narrow. ‘What was the time? Exactly.’
‘Five o’clock.’
‘It was five when I was called from the Bar Transvaal. Maurice had just been killed. So if Maurice were killed out at Lordy about five he could hardly have been here in the city.’
‘It was Maurice,’ the Chief insisted. ‘Or, at least, it looked like Maurice. He wore that white hat he likes to wear. And a blue lightweight suit.’
‘He was wearing the white hat and the lightweight suit when I saw him a few weeks ago,’ Pel agreed. ‘But it wasn’t Maurice you saw. Maurice was lying among the wreckage of a hut near Lordy with a bullet in his shoulder and full of bits of hand grenade. He was wearing a checked jacket and a cap.’
The Chief looked puzzled. ‘There seems to be more to this than meets the eye. What are you intending?’
‘I could sit back and enjoy it,’ Pel said. ‘We could even insert a few lines in the Thanks column of Le Bien Public. “The Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciaire are grateful to whoever it was who bumped off Maurice Tagliatti near Lordy today…”’
The Chief grinned. ‘All the same, a major crime’s been committed,’ he said portentously. ‘We mustn’t rest until the perpetrator’s been found. No matter who his victim is. Maurice was obviously up to something.’
Pel had to agree. Somebody had wanted Maurice dead, but Maurice had been engaged in something shifty enough at the time for him to wish to appear to be elsewhere. Otherwise, why had the man the Chief had seen been wearing Maurice’s suit and hat? The Chief was no fool and if he said he’d seen Maurice then, since Maurice was dead near Lordy at the time, what he had seen had been Maurice’s double. And if he’d seen a double it must have been arranged by Maurice for some reason of his own. And it had worked. Or nearly. Only the fact that Maurice was being bumped off at Lordy prevented it being accepted that he was in town. Someone had known what was in his mind, however, and had tipped off the men who had killed him. And that seemed to indicate that the tip-off had come from among his own followers because no one else could have known his intentions.
The Chief was still frowning. ‘I even mentioned it to Olivier,’ he said. ‘We talked about it because we’d both known him since he was a young tearaway. We both certainly thought it was Maurice.’