Pel and the Picture of Innocence

by Mark Hebden

  ‘He hit me.’

  ‘Well, that’s an indictable offence. You can’t go round clouting people. Is that what he did? Clout you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I made a mistake.’

  ‘That’s no reason to go round handing out clouts. We’re a bit fussy these days about people clouting other people. There’s such a lot of it about.’ Darcy studied Roth. ‘I don’t see any signs of a beating up. No black eyes. No missing teeth. No limp. No cuts or bruises.’

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  ‘What’s that mark on your cheek? Did he do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘His ring, I think. But he didn’t intend to.’

  ‘But he did intend to hit you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he intended that. But not to cut me. It was just a clout or two. He was angry.’

  ‘What did you do? Sell the Parc des Princes or something?’

  Julien Claude managed a smile. ‘I didn’t sell anything. I was going to sell some sports equipment, that’s all, but I didn’t get around to it.’

  ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘A set of boules.’

  ‘And that deserved a clout?’

  ‘Well, I got one, didn’t I? He was out and I went into the cellar for something; and he came back and – paf! – that was it. But it was nothing to get worked up about. Not really. And, after all, he did me a good turn as it happened. When I left France Sport I got this job here and I get a better wage. Not much, but a bit. I’ve forgotten it. I don’t bear any malice. It was just one of those things. Léon was a funny chap.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He was on edge a lot. He was a nervous type.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Sometimes he worked late. Down in the cellar after I’d gone. I think he was crating things up. He bought and sold things with a type in Marseilles called Boileau. They exchanged stock. I expect what upset him was me going in the cellar.’

  ‘There was something special in the cellar?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Just sports goods. I had my eye on something I’d seen but he found me there and went for me. Paf! Wallop! It seemed to bother him.’

  ‘But now you’d prefer we forget about it?’

  ‘I didn’t bring the charge, did I?’

  It had been Darcy’s intention to call on Fernand Léon at France Sport in the Rue Général Leclerc there and then, but the street was full of fire engines, firemen, policemen, the usual spectators, and smoke. Chief Lapeur, of the Sapeurs Pompiers, was just climbing out of his car. ‘Dress shop,’ he said to Darcy. ‘Flimsy stuff. You know what women wear. Somebody left a fire on. It went up like a torch.’

  Darcy decided to leave Fernand Léon for a more opportune time.

  When he reached the Hôtel de Police almost everybody had gone home. Nosjean had just finished the reports on the art fraud he’d been looking into and was stuffing things into drawers and reaching for his notebook.

  ‘Report of an attack on a woman at Talant,’ he said. ‘I’ll handle it.’

  ‘Haven’t you got enough on?’

  ‘One more thing won’t hurt.’ Nosjean was a good cop and never grumbled about extra work.

  ‘Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann,’ he said. ‘Impasse Chévire. Lives alone. Plenty of money. Cop at Talant reported it. Maid telephoned. She’d been out and when she returned she found her on the floor. The cop thinks she’s been hit with a poker; looks like an intruder she disturbed.’

  ‘Need help?’

  ‘Misset’s still here. I think he’s had a row with his wife and isn’t all that keen to go home. I’ll take him.’

  Heading for Talant with Misset grumbling behind him, Nosjean decided he wasn’t sorry to be finished with the art fraud. It had tied him down in Lorne which was not at all the place he would ever choose to stay in long and was far from the flat he shared with Marie-Joséphine Lehmann.

  His feeling for Marie-Joséphine Lehmann had come a little unexpectedly and had sprung from the fact that, as an art expert, she had accompanied him to Lorne and Nosjean had somehow found his way into her bed in the hotel where they were staying. Within twenty-four hours he had moved into her flat and given up his own.

  So far, he hadn’t introduced her to his mother or his three sisters who were a formidable trio who liked to keep a sharp eye on his morals, and one of these days there would have to be a confrontation. Under the circumstances he considered it wiser to put off the meeting until as late as possible, but that was something that wasn’t going to be easy because Mijo Lehmann had started to ask when she was going to meet his family.

  He drove to Talant as if he were going to a bank that was about to fail and he was anxious to get his savings out before it was too late.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said to Misset who was bouncing about on the rear seat because the front passenger seat was stacked with books and papers. ‘We have a good hospital and a marvellous rescue services. In half an hour you could be in bed with the top specialist to look after you. I have a special style of driving. No hands. No signals.’

  The Impasse Chévire was at the end of the village. On one side there were houses, on the other side nothing but open fields. Half-way along was a half-circle of large houses, built round a grassed-over island so that they all looked inwards to each other, their gardens radiating outwards to the south like the spokes of a wheel. Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann’s house was smaller and its garden ran through an orchard to the long copse of trees that lay behind all the other houses in the Impasse Chévire.

  When Nosjean and Misset arrived, Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann had already been removed to the hospital and the daily help, a middle-aged woman who wore a pink dress and apron, was nervously making coffee for the cop on duty outside the door.

  ‘What happened?’ Nosjean asked.

  The cop had hastily removed the cigarette he was smoking – you never knew when it might be Pel – but had relaxed as he saw Nosjean. Nosjean looked too young to be dangerous.

  ‘The daily help had gone out,’ he said. ‘Doing a bit of shopping. When she came back she found her lying in the wreckage of the tea tray.’

  ‘You know this Annabelle-Eugénie Thing?’

  ‘Oh, sure. Not bad-looking considering her age.’ The cop was twenty-two and anybody over thirty was geriatric. He decided to be clever. ‘The help was doing a bit of shopping for herself. Knicker elastic. New suspender belt. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Have you asked her?’ Nosjean demanded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Confirmed that was what she was after?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then let’s stick to facts, shall we?’

  The cop’s jaw dropped. Mother of God, he thought, this one was formed in Pel’s image! He dropped his cigarette and stiffened. ‘She left the tray ready in the salon,’ he reported. ‘Annabelle-Eugénie likes an afternoon nap.’

  ‘Is she old?’

  ‘No. Forty-five. But she considers herself delicate. Minces about the place, looking after herself.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Never got round to it. From what I’ve heard she was scared of it. But she had boyfriends when she was young and she seems to have been pretty enough.’

  ‘You know this?’

  ‘I’ve heard it from my mother. She knew her.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The help left the tea tray ready. Name of Simone Clément. Spinster like Annabelle-Eugénie. Cup, saucer, milk, sugar, biscuits. That sort of thing. When she came back, the first thing she saw was the tray on the floor. Milk and sugar everywhere. And Annabelle-Eugénie on her back behind the settee with blood all over her face. She telephoned us and we had her removed to the hospital.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Touch and go.’

  ‘Was it sexual?’ It was a question you always had to ask these days. When Nosjean had started as a cop it didn’t always follow, but in the last few
years something seemed to have happened to the world.

  The cop shrugged. ‘Her clothing wasn’t disarranged.’

  ‘Found the weapon?’

  ‘It’s the poker. It’s a heavy one. It was lying beside her. It’s still there. I marked out where she lay. I used pink tape from the maid’s work basket, held in place with weights from the kitchen scales. It’s a thick carpet so there was no other way.’

  Nosjean gestured at Misset. ‘Take a look round outside. See if there’s anything that might be interesting.’

  ‘There won’t be,’ Misset said.

  ‘Something might leap out and bite you in the leg,’ Nosjean snapped.

  Misset scowled and moved away. He resented the fact that Nosjean was younger than he was and had been at the job far less time. But Nosjean had ideas and drive while Misset contrived to avoid both. Nosjean gestured at the cop who had watched the exchanges with interest.

  ‘Let’s have the housekeeper, or whatever she is, in here. We’ll take a look at the room. She’ll know if there’s anything missing.’

  The cop jumped to it. He’d realised that Nosjean’s youthful demeanour didn’t mean a thing. This one, he decided, could be nasty.

  Simone Clément, the help, was a stringy little woman, her eyes still red with weeping. The room was wrecked as if Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann had put up a good fight. The teapot was in pieces and the cups, saucers, milk jug and sugar bowl seemed to have been smashed to small fragments, as if the feet of a woman struggling for her life had tramped backwards and forwards over them. Sugar and milk had been pounded into the carpet.

  The poker lay alongside the policeman’s decorative effort with the housemaid’s tape. It was heavy, and the end of it, sharpened by constant use, was marked with blood. Bending close, Nosjean saw that fair hairs were clinging to it. There were also traces of wood ash and, turning to the fireplace, he saw the grey remains of a wood fire and logs stacked neatly alongside. A wooden tray lay face down near the hearth with a hole in the centre. Round the hole were traces of the same wood ash that was on the poker, as if Annabelle-Eugénie had used the tray as a defence against the wild swings of the poker. A chair lay on its back and a second one had been flung sideways and smashed the front of the television.

  ‘Looks like quite a fight,’ Nosjean commented. ‘I’m surprised nobody heard it. There must have been some screaming. Anything missing?’

  ‘Her purse has gone,’ the help said.

  ‘Much in it?’

  ‘Could be. She wasn’t without money and she usually made sure she had plenty handy.’

  ‘How much do you call plenty?’

  ‘She usually had around a thousand francs on her.’

  ‘That’s enough to encourage somebody to break in. Any sign of a break-in?’

  ‘No need. She wasn’t in the habit of locking the door during the day. Only at night. I wasn’t here then, of course. I only come during the day.’

  ‘Was she alone?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I set the tray for her.’

  ‘Could she have been visited by anybody?’

  ‘She wasn’t expecting anyone. She liked to take a nap in the afternoon and it was never certain what time she woke. She was becoming a bit eccentric.’

  ‘Men friends?’

  ‘There’d been a few. She was quite lively in her day. But not so many lately because of her asthma. She suffered from it.’ The help shrugged. ‘The man she was going to marry was killed on a motorbike years ago.’

  ‘Did everybody know her habits?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anybody else likely to know them?’

  The help couldn’t think of anyone so Nosjean began to go through the possibilities.

  ‘Neighbours? How about them?’

  ‘Older than she is.’

  ‘How much older?’

  ‘Sixties. Around there.’

  ‘What about men? Was anyone interested in her?’

  ‘Everybody was interested in her. She was still pretty. The men liked her.’

  ‘How about their wives?’

  ‘The wives, too, as far as I know.

  ‘But they wouldn’t be worried about stealing her purse, would they?’ the cop from Talant pointed out.

  ‘Perhaps whoever did it was less interested in the purse than in Mademoiselle Sondermann,’ Nosjean said. ‘Perhaps they just took the purse to obscure things a bit.’

  ‘I can see why you belong to Plain Clothes,’ the cop said admiringly.

  Nosjean moved to the other end of the room. That end had been made into a sort of sun lounge and the floor there was of tiles and was uncarpeted and covered only by two small rugs. Scattered on it were the remains of what appeared to have been a statuette. Nosjean could see parts of the base and the head of a girl.

  ‘What was this?’ he asked.

  ‘A statue,’ the help said. ‘She was very fond of it.’

  Nosjean studied the fragments again and gauged the distance between them and the wreckage of the tea tray. There seemed to be no connection between them. The struggle by the tea tray surely couldn’t have swayed backwards and forwards as far as this? He studied the floor and saw that one of the tiles was newly chipped – as if a corner of the heavy base had struck the tiles first. Which seemed to indicate the statuette was in an upright position when it had fallen – as if it had not merely been knocked over but had been picked up and deliberately dropped. And if it had, why?

  ‘Was it valuable?’ he asked.

  The help pulled a face. ‘I think so. But I wouldn’t know. She treasured it. It was her father’s.’

  Returning to the area near the tea tray, Nosjean stared hard at the carpet. There was a dried leaf near the hearth and a few twigs and fragments of mulch.

  ‘Could an intruder get in from the back?’ he asked. ‘Without being seen, I mean.’

  ‘People use the woods.’ The help jerked a hand towards the window. ‘There’s a lot of fallen wood there. We all collect it. It saves buying it.’

  ‘Did she ever have visitors? I mean, during the day?’

  ‘Not really. Only her lawyer.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Monsieur Lescop. Jacques Lescop. He has an office in the Rue Georges-Guynemer. There’s also an architect who came to see her because she was talking about building an extension on the back of the house.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Picard. Guillaume Picard. He’s not a proper architect. I mean, he hasn’t a practice or whatever they call them. He was a draughtsman and he set up on his own. He doesn’t design buildings. At least, not big ones. But he does a lot of extensions. Things like that.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about him.’

  ‘He’s my nephew.’

  ‘Ah! Address?’

  ‘Here in Talant. He’s only young. But he’s good.’

  ‘Neighbours ever visit her?’

  ‘Occasionally. Not really, though.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Chiefly Madame Mahé and Madame Auvignac. Madame Kersta, too, but less so. She’s not always well. Nerves. Madame Auvignac goes in for gardening and she liked to advise Mademoiselle Sondermann on what to do. She never took any notice, mind. She didn’t like gardening.’

  ‘What about Madame Mahé?’

  ‘Tapestry. They both went in for it. They were all good friends. They live in the little close down the Impasse. Their kitchens face on to the green and they wave to each other – even call to each other sometimes. They’d know what was going on.’

  ‘Any youngsters live round here?’

  ‘There’s Raymond Mahé.’

  ‘Who’s Raymond Mahé?’

  ‘He’s eighteen. He’s the Mahés’ son. Occasionally he cut the grass for her. He did it for Dr Kersta, too.’

  ‘Who’s Dr Kersta?’

  ‘Dr Robert Kersta. He was her doctor. He has a practice here in Talant. He’s had practices all over Europe. He came to see her regularly because of her asthma. He seemed able to cu
re it.’

  ‘And Raymond Mahé knows the house?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Ever been inside?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He sometimes carried logs in and he occasionally brought messages from his parents. She played bridge with them from time to time.’

  ‘This boy. What’s he like?’

  ‘All length and no breadth.’

  ‘What does he do with himself?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Who’re his friends?’

  ‘Other boys of his own age. Girls too. I’ve seen him with them.’

  ‘Any of them on drugs?’

  The help shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Ever been in trouble?’

  ‘He was once in front of the magistrates for shooting at Leu without a licence.’

  ‘He has a gun?’

  ‘His father has. He shoots at Leu, too. With a friend of his. I don’t know his name.’

  ‘This boy. Has he ever threatened anybody?’

  ‘Not that I know of. He doesn’t look the sort.’

  ‘What is the sort? Has he ever had words with Mademoiselle Sondermann?’

  ‘Once, when he was little. She ticked him off for being rude. But she seemed to get over it. And so did he. I think his mother made him apologise and she wasn’t the type to bear malice.’

  As he had been talking, Nosjean had been prowling round the room, nosing into the corners. As he straightened up, the Forensic boys arrived. They were discussing the football scores.

  ‘What was it?’ one of them asked. ‘A riot?’

  ‘It looks like robbery with violence. You’ll find the poker on the floor. Let Prélat have it. I’d better go and see the woman. Perhaps she’s come round.’

  ‘What about the room?’ the help asked. ‘Can I tidy it up?’

  ‘No. Leave it exactly as it is. I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, we’ll have it sealed.’

  When the help had gone, Nosjean turned to one of the Forensic men, and indicated the two lots of scattered fragments, those of the shattered statuette and the broken china from the tea tray. ‘Collect it up,’ he said. ‘But keep the two lots separate.’

  ‘It’ll be a job,’ Leguyader’s man said. ‘It looks as though somebody’s walked across it wearing clogs.’

  ‘We’ll have it just the same.’