by Mark Hebden
Madame Pasquier gave a mirthless laugh.
The boy was sitting up in his bed, his right hand in the air, two fingers extended in the small boy’s traditional way of pretending to hold a pistol. He was just taking aim at the door when he realised Pel was standing in front of him.
‘Having trouble with gangsters?’ Pel asked.
The boy grinned. ‘I’ve just bumped one off.’
‘Can I come in?’ Pel sat on the end of the bed.
‘Have you caught those types in the car?’
‘It usually takes a day or two.’
‘Did it help? What I told you.’
‘Oh, it will. I thought I’d come and have a chat. It’s secret, you see.’
‘What is?’
‘What you told me. There are some things policemen like to keep to themselves. Because if they get out, they warn the criminals we’re after them. And the trouble is, if anybody says anything, in the end it gets to the newspapers and they publish it. And that means that everybody knows about it. Do you understand?’
The boy nodded. ‘It’s always best to keep something up your sleeve, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘That’s about it. And this information about there being three men in another car and you having seen them, that’s one of these things. Nobody else knows you got a look at them.’
‘They were talking.’
‘Who were?’
‘These men. If you remember, it was hot and the car windows were open. And it was going very slowly as it passed me. I could hear them. Ever so plainly.’
‘Oh?’ Pel sat up. ‘What did they say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I thought you could hear them quite plainly.’
‘I could. But I couldn’t understand them. They weren’t speaking French.’
‘They weren’t?’
‘I think it was English.’
‘English?’ Pel sat very still for a moment. What in the name of God had they got into? ‘Do you understand English?’
‘I’m doing it at school.’
‘And–?’
‘I don’t understand it.’
‘Then how do you know they spoke English?’
‘When they came out of the bar, one of them said, “We’ve got him!” That’s English, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Do you speak English?’
‘A bit.’ Pel had an older sister who had married an Englishman and he’d picked up enough to get by. ‘Did they say anything else?’
‘Well, I didn’t get to hear them much. But the other one said, “Make it fast!”’
‘That was all?’
‘Yes. just then the Peugeot came past and the Citroën shot away. If they were saying anything after that I didn’t hear it for the engine. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you about it. I was so busy telling you what I saw, I forgot what I heard. After all, it wasn’t much. Is it any use?’
‘It might well be.’
If nothing else it seemed to indicate that Pel’s visit to Pépé le Cornet had been pointless. If Maurice Tagliatti’s assassins spoke English the chances were that Pépé wouldn’t know them because all Pépé spoke was French.
He got the drawing identified as satisfactory and rose to go. ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ he said. ‘More than you realise. But this makes it more important than ever that we keep it to ourselves. You mustn’t say a word of what you know to anyone.’
‘I told Maman. I told Papa.’
‘I think they’ll keep it to themselves.’
‘Are they after me?’
‘You’re perfectly safe. But only if you keep it all a secret.’
‘You can rely on me, Chef.’ Yves grinned. ‘Found out about boules yet?’
The daily help, Madame Rouot, lived alone and when Pel arrived she was just putting a scarf round her head to go to see her daughter at the other end of the village. Yes, she said, she had listened to what Yves Pasquier had told her but, no, she hadn’t told anyone else.
‘Daughter?’
‘I haven’t had the chance.’
‘Neighbours? Postman? Grocer? Nobody like that?’
She had told nobody.
‘Keep it that way,’ Pel advised. ‘I don’t want it to get around. What about your husband?’
‘I wouldn’t tell him if the Archangel Gabriel arrived in the kitchen. I divorced him three years ago. That’s why I have to go out to work.’
Madame Pel was also warned. ‘Madame Routy doesn’t talk,’ she pointed out.
‘She did when she worked for me,’ Pel said.
‘She doesn’t now. If I tell her not to say a word, she won’t.’
Pel couldn’t understand how his wife could produce such loyalty in Madame Routy. He had never been able to.
‘I had a check run on Vlaxi, Patron,’ Darcy said. ‘He was in Spain at the time. His mother died.’
‘It wasn’t him.’ Pel explained what he’d learned and Darcy’s jaw dropped.
‘English?’ he said. ‘They were English?’
‘That’s not what I said. I said they were speaking English.’
‘Same thing. They’d hardly be speaking English if they were Polish.’
‘They might if they were Americans.’
Darcy conceded the point. ‘If Maurice is involved with Americans, whatever it was he was in is big. Americans like things to be big.’
‘We don’t know they’re Americans. They might be English.’
‘Come to think of it,’ Darcy admitted, ‘it fits. I’ve been checking Maurice’s telephone bills. He seems to have had a lot of foreign calls.’
‘When?’
‘April and May. I expect he was setting up whatever it was he was interested in. He’d also been to the States and the Middle East in the last month or two.’
The barman at Lordy confirmed what Yves Pasquier had said. ‘I never saw them before,’ he insisted. ‘They came in and had a few drinks. They were foreigners and they asked if they could give our telephone number as they were expecting a call. It was no skin off my nose so I said yes. They turned up again the next day and were drinking at the bar.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Nothing much. Then the telephone went and one of them answered it. He said “Okay!” That’s all. “Okay.” Then they ran outside and I heard one shout something to the other. I don’t know what it was. Then the car disappeared.’
His description of the car matched the boy’s but he hadn’t studied the men much.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘they were medium height, medium build.’
‘Medium faces, too, I suppose,’ Darcy said sarcastically.
‘Well, they both had noses and they both had eyes and ears. Two legs. Two arms. All the rest.’
‘How were they dressed?’
It was like dredging a river for lost property. But they had learned that the men were foreigners. English, the barman thought, and they were dressed in trousers and lightweight windcheaters – the barman hadn’t noticed the colour. One was blond – he’d noticed that – and the other was dark – he thought. And that was about it. Their faces seemed to have been so nondescript as to have been anonymous.
‘I think’, Pel said bitterly, ‘that if Brigitte Bardot walked past some people they wouldn’t notice. Let’s contact Paris, see what they know about Englishmen and Americans in France.’
They didn’t come up with much – just a few names that had popped up many times before. It certainly seemed that, in addition to the refugees from half the world’s pogroms, France these days contained fragments – more than fragments, colonies – from every nation in the world. Most of the English, however, were middle-aged to elderly people who felt they could live a little more happily without the rigours of a northern winter, and there were no reports of the sort of people who would wipe out a couple of gangsters with a sub-machine gun.
Pel’s conference had a subdued note. Prélat, of Fingerprints, had found dabs on the car that had c
ontained the murderers of Maurice and Bozon. Most of them belonged to the owner or his family, but there were one or two others that couldn’t be identified.
‘Two men,’ Prélat offered. ‘One with a scar across the thumb. I’ve tried the national computer. Nothing.’
‘Which means’, Darcy observed, ‘that they probably are English.’
Pel studied the photographs which lay on his desk showing the Peugeot with its two victims. He looked at Minet, who shrugged.
‘Seven bullet wounds in the driver, Bozon. Throat. Head. Shoulder. Any of those in the first two places would have been fatal. The passenger, Maurice Tagliatti – one. But four other wounds. Three in the face, all of which would have been fatal. There were also several wounds in the chest, neck and throat which could have killed him. All commensurate with having been close to an exploding grenade.’
‘The bullet wounds’, Leguyader, of Forensic, said, ‘were fired from a range of a metre or so. It looks as though the assassins’ car drove up alongside and the man with the gun was in the back. He fired solidly, I think, at Bozon, the driver. The lines from the entrance holes to the exit holes were slanting as if the cars were moving. There were twenty-seven bullet holes in the car. The gun was a 9mm Sterling. British made. Same gun that hit Sagassu. It was an assassination.’ Leguyader paused. ‘Killing by violent means for political or religious reasons. In this case, doubtless for private reasons, connected with what they were engaged in – crime. The word derives from hashishin, a person who takes hashish. It was bound up with Arab politics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The original Assassins were members of a breakaway Moslem sect which adopted the practice of murdering their enemies as a sacred religious duty. They were alleged to take hashish to inspire them with visions of paradise.’
Pel glanced at Darcy. But Leguyader hadn’t finished yet. ‘Was it a conspiracy?’ he asked. ‘Persons joining forces in secret for an evil purpose, to make an agreement to commit an unlawful act?’
‘I know what a conspiracy is,’ Pel snorted.
‘It could be a crime passionnel.’ Leguyader had the bit between his teeth now. ‘That’s a defence plea that we recognise in France.’
‘Who’s supposed to have committed that?’
‘Maurice’s wife? She may have entered a conspiracy to have him murdered.’
‘A conspiracy can’t be a crime passionnel.’
‘In certain circumstances it could be argued that it was.’
As Leguyader sat back there were several grins. Everybody knew his favourite reading was his encyclopaedia and that he spent his evenings with it so he could quote it the following morning at Pel’s conferences to give himself an aura of knowledge.
Remembering Yves Pasquier’s query, Pel tried it on Leguyader – sarcastically. The sarcasm rebounded.
‘Boules? Of course. Played by two or three people. Or by teams. Known to the English as bowls. In Italy as bocci. The English play with bowls made of ebony weighted on one side. We use unbiased steel balls all apparently the same but each carrying different striations for identification purposes. In the south it’s called pétanque. It’s supposed to have been invented near Marseilles by a man who suffered from rheumatism and couldn’t manage the game that required you to take three steps before bowling. He produced the shorter version and, as the local dialect for pieds fixes, or feet together, was ped tanco, from that came pétanque.’
They were all silent as Leguyader finally dried up. He could be overpowering when he got going. Pel studied him for a moment. Well, he thought, at least I’ve got something to pass on to next door.
Seven
The funerals of Maurice Tagliatti and Benjamen Bozon took place in the city. There was no point in holding on to the bodies because there was no question about who they were or how they’d died – the only question was why, and who was responsible – and permission was given for the interments to be held.
The Rue d’Auxonne was full of people. The cortège consisted of two hearses, followed by the limousines containing the family mourners. It always startled Pel a little to learn that people like Maurice Tagliatti had families, even that they had fathers and mothers. He always felt that gangsters appeared suddenly from under stones or, like mushrooms, grew up and – usually – were bumped off violently, died in prison or simply faded away. How many of the people lining the grass verge were mourners and how many were there merely out of curiosity he couldn’t tell as he stood by the parked police car with Darcy. It was an old trick watching the crowd, in the belief that the murderer was there, but it always seemed to Pel a vain hope and it was now. There was nobody he could see who would have been likely to be involved with Maurice Tagliatti.
There was a sung mass and the funeral cars were decorated with black and silver draperies, with more draperies round the door of the church inside the cemetery where the priest waited. The weather had become drizzly and dull and the low clouds made the surrounding tombs of the bourgeois dead of the city – all decorated with glass-covered photographs and plastic wreaths inside dirty glass domes – a grey wilderness of rectangular shapes reaching away into the mist. Inevitably there were far too many flowers. Like everything else about Maurice, it was overdone and there were enough to be vulgar. All morning men had been unloading wreaths. With fondest memories of Maurice, said one. Never forgotten, said another. Mother of God, Pel thought, they were going over the top a bit. He wondered if Pépé Le Cornet had sent one – Yours in eternal hell, Pépé. Or from more important sources – With happy expectations, Mephistopheles.
The chapel entrance was puddled where the drizzle had blown and its interior was full of the heavy scent of the flowers piled against the altar steps. As Pel moved inside, the only illumination came from the candles near the coffins in the body of the chapel.
There were two groups of mourners. Bozon’s wife had two children with her. Perhaps Bozon had been nothing but a driver, one of the people surrounding Maurice Tagliatti who were largely innocent of what he was up to. Maurice’s wife was an attractive woman with blonde hair who didn’t appear to be fighting back the tears. Behind them came Sagassu, his arm still in a sling, Devreux and Guérin and several others, all trying to look as innocent as new-born babes in dark suits and black ties with mourning bands on their arms. In the grey light, despite the innocence they affected, their faces seemed heavy with menace. There were also a few women, drummed up, Pel felt, to make the funeral look respectable. People of Maurice’s ilk set a lot of store by respectable funerals.
Behind the mourners the pall bearers laid the wreaths down, the choir sang a Requiem, the De Profundis was played and the choir started again. The strong smell of incense swept over everybody as they moved outside, the coffins in front, then a boy with a silver cross and the priest bent over his prayer book. Near Pel were the newspapermen, Fiabon, Sarrazin, Henriot and Ducrot. They had gone to town over the shooting.
MAURICE AND SIDONIE, France Dimanche had headlined. TRAGIC COUPLE’S HAPPINESS SHATTERED. Tragic couple! It made Pel want to throw up. France Soir had tried to equal the sob stuff. BURGUNDY LOVE NEST FOUND BY GUNMEN, they had said. Henriot, of Le Bien Public, which was a small provincial newspaper, hadn’t been so ambitious. CITY MAN SHOT, he had announced. AMBUSH AT LORDY. Henriot was always less dramatic than the other newspapermen in case the conservative types who read the paper gave up their subscription in disgust and bought a bottle of brandy instead.
When Pel and Darcy returned to the Hôtel de Police, Misset was standing in the middle of the sergeants’ room. He was doing nothing as usual and, moreover, was stopping other people working.
‘Why is a woman like a horse?’ he was asking Brochard.
‘Go on,’ Brochard said wearily. ‘Why?’
‘Because she’s expensive to keep, difficult to mount and often needs new shoes.’
‘Heard it,’ Brochard said uninterestedly. ‘At school.’
‘There’s another–’
‘Misset!’ Darcy roared.
‘Where do you come from?’ Pel asked.
‘Near Chatillon, Patron. North end of the Plateau de Langres.’
‘What did you do before you became a cop?’
‘Farming. For my father. But I’ve got an older brother, so the farm will never be mine. I thought I’d try something else.’
‘Fancy going back to farming?’
‘Driving tractors? Sloshing round in cowshit? No thanks, Patron.’
‘Not up there. At Lordy. The Roblais farm.’
‘You mean, to keep an eye on Tagliatti’s lot?’
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
‘Fine, Patron.’
‘It’ll mean driving tractors. Getting manure on your boots. Dirty hands. Maurice Tagliatti’s lot are pretty smart. They’ll notice anybody who doesn’t fit in.’
‘They won’t notice me, Patron.’
‘Right. Arrange to be a cousin come to help. You’ll have to do a bit of work, of course. They’d soon notice anybody wandering round the fields not working. Had you much on?’
‘Nothing important, Patron.’
‘Dump it all on Misset. It’ll stop him telling funny stories.’
Misset watched sullenly as Brochard cleared his desk. ‘Off out?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s on?’
‘Surveillance.’
‘Where?’
‘A farm.’
‘What sort of farm?’
‘A farm type farm.’
Brochard had been told to keep his mouth shut and he was doing just that. Misset was intrigued. He was always alert for information. He’d been earning beer money from Sarrazin, the freelance, for years now for titbits of information he’d provided for the papers.