by Mark Hebden
The Forensic man stared at the mash of crockery, tea, milk, sugar and biscuits on the carpet and decided it was going to take well into the evening. And he had a date. It was the sort of thing that made police work exciting.
The nurse in charge of the ward where Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann lay looked like a younger sister of Catherine Deneuve. It bothered Nosjean. There had been a time when people who looked like Catherine Deneuve had always been in danger of getting a proposal of marriage from him.
‘How is she?’ he asked, glancing at the silent figure swathed in bandages just inside the ward.
‘Not in a fit state to answer questions.’ The nurse eyed Nosjean speculatively. He was a good-looking young man, brisk and personable, and she thought he looked a bit like Gregory Peck in his younger days. Films were a great leveller.
‘Is she conscious?’
‘No. You wouldn’t be either, with a fractured skull. It’ll be a few days before she’s fit to see you.’
‘Any objection to one of our people sitting near the bed just in case?’
The nurse smiled. ‘Who were you thinking of? You?’
Nine
France Sport, in the Rue Général Leclerc, just off the Rue de la Liberté, was a big store. Its windows were full of footballs, rugby balls, clothes for wearing while exhausting yourself, clothes for wearing while you were resting after exhausting yourself, punch bags, sports shoes of every colour and size, muscle builders, Indian clubs, stationary bicycles, rowing machines, tennis racquets, inflatable dinghies. Darcy stared at them contemptuously. The most he conceded was an occasional go at squash – half an hour of violence with the chance of a heart attack – then forget exercise for a week.
The fire brigade had disappeared and there was no sign of the fire beyond a charred shop front and a boarded-up window. In the window of France Sport, an assistant was piling tennis balls in a pyramid. From the concentration he showed, he might have been piling up diamonds.
Léon came from a tiny office at the back of the shop. He was a tall man, surprisingly unhealthy-looking for the owner of a sports shop. He also looked nervous and ill at ease.
‘Well, you’d be nervous, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘With a fire not twenty paces from your premises.’
‘It seems to be out now,’ Darcy said.
‘It was in the dress shop,’ Léon continued. ‘Those girls are always leaving fires on. There was a moment or two when it seemed to be taking hold and heading for the paint shop next door. That would have had me worried.’
His nervousness didn’t improve when Darcy told him why he was there. ‘Well, of course,’ he admitted, ‘I’ve been expecting you for some time.’
‘Why?’
‘Well – walloping the boy as I did.’
‘So you did hit him?’
‘Oh, yes. I hit him.’
‘Why?’
‘I lost my temper. He was in the cellar. He shouldn’t have been.’
‘Why not? He said that all he did was go down there to fetch a set of boules he was going to sell.’
Léon licked his lips. ‘It isn’t as simple as that. They hadn’t been processed.’
‘How do you process a set of boules?’
‘They have to go through the ledgers. They have to go into the IN ledger when they arrive. Everything that comes into the shop has to go through the IN ledger. When they’re sold we make a note in the OUT ledger. It’s necessary to keep track of stock for reordering. If you don’t do that you find you run out of things. That was what it was all about.’ Léon seemed anxious to push the point. ‘Nothing was supposed to go from the cellar without my knowledge. I’d told him. But he never listened. He was always in a dream.’
It sounded reasonable enough and Darcy didn’t argue. Instead he studied Léon. There was a lot of bruising round his eyes that made him look like an elderly boxer who’d tried to make a come-back and failed. Darcy eyed it speculatively.
‘Did Roth do that?’ he asked.
Léon hesitated. ‘Well…’
‘Well, did he?’
Léon gave a half-hearted laugh. ‘No, he didn’t. That was my wife.’
‘Been beating her up as well?’
Léon’s laugh became a weak smile. ‘She hit me with a tennis racquet.’
‘Habit of hers, is it?’
‘It was an accident. We were fooling about. You know how married people do. It caught me under the eye. Quite a bruise it was.’
‘It’s a hell of a bruise from an accidental blow from a tennis racquet. A tennis racquet’s not all that heavy.’
‘The edge is pretty hard.’
‘It looks more as if it were done by a fist to me.’
Léon shook his head violently. ‘Oh, no. It wasn’t a fist. I told you. It was a tennis racquet.’
Darcy didn’t believe him and decided he’d have to enquire further.
‘This argument with Roth,’ he said. ‘What was it about? Let’s hear your version. Was there more to it than just selling something he shouldn’t?’
Léon shrugged. ‘No. He was just stupid. He’s rather a stupid type. Always thinking of girls.’
‘So am I.’
Léon smiled. ‘His mind was always miles away. He’d done several stupid things and this time I just saw red.’
‘It was an assault. It’s a chargeable offence.’
Léon’s eyes flickered. ‘I have to accept that. Did he put in a complaint?’
‘His mother did. She said he’d been beaten up.’
Léon managed a laugh. ‘Hardly beaten up. Right hand, left hand, and that was it.’
‘What happened then?’
‘When I came upstairs, he’d gone. Took his coat and left. Is there anything I can do to put this thing right?’
‘You could offer the kid his job back. At a better wage.’
‘I tried. He wouldn’t come.’
Nosjean was aware of a slight tension in the air when he returned home.
‘Are you ashamed of me or something?’ Mijo Lehmann asked.
‘No, of course not,’ he said.
‘Well, isn’t it about time we met each other’s parents? Are you nervous?’
‘Yes.’
‘What of?’
‘Your father.’
Nosjean was nervous of Mijo’s father because he had a suspicion that fathers, having got up to a few things in their youth, looked with great suspicion on young men who might be trying to get up to the same things with their daughters.
Mijo laughed. ‘My father’s all right,’ she said. ‘He’s old-fashioned but he’s quite broadminded. He’ll understand. What about your family? Don’t they wonder why you never go home for meals these days?’
‘Oh, they know,’ Nosjean said.
‘I think I ought to meet them then. Or don’t you think they’ll like me?’
Nosjean felt his parents would adore Mijo, but it wasn’t his parents he was worried about. It was his sisters – Susanne, Emilia and Antoinette. They weren’t as clever as Nosjean, nor as good-looking – every scrap of good looks in the family seemed to have flowed past them and gone into the making of their little brother. They all held dreary jobs in the city and he had a feeling that when they saw Mijo Lehmann, who possessed the good looks that had passed them by, the brains they’d never had, and the well-paid job they had never attained, they might dislike her on sight. He knew the way they’d think. A young woman who had ceased to be pure couldn’t regain her innocence. God didn’t demand that she should, but she could put right the mischief by marriage.
‘They’ve got to meet me sometime,’ Mijo urged. ‘They’ll want to know what we intend.’
‘What do we intend?’
‘They’ll want to know when we’re going to get married.’
Marriage wasn’t entirely in Nosjean’s plans. It wasn’t that he wasn’t deeply attached to Mijo. It was just that marriage was so final, and he felt he was too young to die.
It bothered Nosjean a lot and even to
ok his mind off the Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann business occasionally.
The attack puzzled him. For several days he had been checking all the people who had been to see her. They all seemed to have alibis, though young Mahé seemed nervous. That, of course, might be just because he was young and anyway Madame Kersta had seemed nervous, too, and, for that matter, so had her husband. Nosjean wondered how much of it was due to the fact that he, Nosjean, was a policeman – because policemen had a habit of making people nervous – and how much because they knew something about Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann that other people didn’t know. Perhaps, however, they had good reason to be nervous, because Madame Kersta, a faded blonde, had once been mugged.
Madame Auvignac, a large woman with thick legs, was indignant about the way Madame Kersta had been mugged and implied that the police had been sitting around drinking beer when they should have been stamping out crime. Nosjean couldn’t imagine Madame Auvignac ever being nervous. Madame Mahé, the tapestry expert, small, neat and precise, also didn’t seem nervous. However, all three women swore that at the time in question they had seen the other two appearing in and out of their kitchens across the circle of grass that centred the little close where their houses were situated. Following the modern style, their salons were at the back, looking over the gardens running towards the woods between tall hedges, while the kitchens faced north towards the road, and they could always see what was going on.
It seemed very much as Nosjean had first suspected. Somebody had entered the house from the woods, snatched up the poker and lashed out. As the tea things had been upset, Mademoiselle Sondermann had grabbed the tray in an effort to protect herself and the poker had gone through it.
Leguyader’s view confirmed it. ‘The leaf we found’, he said, ‘was beech. There are beech trees in the woods behind the house. It was done with the poker because the ash on it’s the same as the ash round the hole in the tea tray she used to defend herself.’
Going back to Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann’s house, Nosjean studied the place again. Everything was much as it had been, except that the broken china and the remains of the statuette had been collected and Prélat was going through the pieces in the vain hope that one of them might have on it a fingerprint by which they could identify the attacker.
To get into the house, Nosjean had had to collect the daily help from her sister’s house where she lived. She had refused to enter Annabelle-Eugénie’s premises alone since the attack. Nosjean turned to her impulsively.
‘I’d like to look at the rest of the tea set,’ he said. ‘To see what it looked like.’
The help produced a cup and saucer. They were of fine bone china and were decorated with pink roses with a gilt edge and fluted sides.
‘Pretty,’ Nosjean observed.
A few days later Madame Roth reappeared.
‘Have you arrested that man yet?’ she demanded of the cop on the front desk.
The cop on the front desk was feeling flippant. ‘Which man were you thinking of, madame?’
‘That one I was talking to one of your detectives about.’
‘Which detective would that be, madame?’
‘Smooth sort. Fancied himself. Had a mouth full of teeth.’
The man on the front desk recognised the description of Darcy at once. Though having a mouth full of teeth was common to everybody in the Hôtel de Police, Darcy’s were most noticeable. Two minutes later, Madame Roth was in Darcy’s office.
‘I want to know if you’ve arrested that man yet,’ she demanded.
‘Not yet, madame,’ Darcy said. ‘We’re making inquiries.’
‘What do you need to make inquiries about?’
‘We have to ascertain that all the facts are correct.’
‘Ask my son.’
‘His version doesn’t entirely agree with yours, madame.’
Madame Roth uttered what could only be described as a snort. ‘He’s soft, that’s what. He was always soft. Like his father. He has no backbone. It’s time you got on with it.’
Darcy drew a deep breath. ‘Perhaps I should remind you, madame,’ he said coldly, ‘that we’ve been a little preoccupied just lately. There’s been a double murder – you probably read of it in the papers – and these things occupy the time of a lot of men. Your son’s case is trivial by comparison.’
‘Not to me.’
‘It seems to be to him.’
‘He’s a crook.’
‘Who is? Your son?’
‘No. That Léon.’
Darcy’s eyebrows lifted. ‘That’s a pretty strong statement to make,’ he said.
‘Well, if he isn’t, he has some funny friends.’
‘Oh? Who?’
‘Well, that type who was killed was one.’
‘Which type?’
‘The one you’re talking about. The one near Lordy. In the car.’ Darcy began to take notice. ‘Maurice Tagliatti?’
‘I don’t know what his name was. It was something Italian and unreliable.’
‘How do you know he was a friend of Léon’s?’
‘My son told me.’
‘He didn’t tell me, madame. I think I’d better see Léon and find out what he has to say about it.’
But Léon wasn’t available. When Darcy called at France Sport next morning it was closed. The young man he had seen building a pyramid of tennis balls on his last visit was waiting disconsolately for it to open.
‘It didn’t open yesterday either,’ he said. ‘I waited until lunchtime but nobody turned up.’
‘Who’re you?’
‘Emile Demoine. I’m the assistant. He took me on after he had a fight with the last assistant.’
‘Know where he lives?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest. He’d better not try fighting with me. I go in for karate.’
The manager of the paint shop next door hadn’t seen Léon for some time either and, preoccupied with cleaning up after the fire in the shop alongside, wasn’t much interested.
‘Know where Léon lives?’
‘Out Fontaine way somewhere. It’s in the telephone directory.’
It was, and Darcy shot off in a hurry. There was no one at Léon’s house. It was a large place and the next-door neighbour informed him that Madame Léon worked in the city.
‘They didn’t get on,’ she said.
‘I got the impression’, Darcy said, remembering what Léon had told him about the larking about that had resulted in the bruise over his eye, ‘that they did.’
The neighbour pulled a face. ‘I don’t know where you got that story. They never seemed to me to get on.’
The case was beginning to look interesting. There were several varieties of truth – half-truth, more than truth and nothing but the truth – and it seemed that Fernand Léon’s didn’t belong to the third category.
‘Where does she work?’ Darcy asked.
‘She runs a boutique in the pedestrian precinct. It’s called Dorée.’
Dorée might be called a boutique but it couldn’t hold a candle to Madame Pel’s boutique in the Rue de la Liberté. It was very small, and seemed to concern itself not with the elegant women who patronised Madame Pel’s establishment but with brash young teenagers. There seemed to be a lot of bleach-washed jeans and blouses in bright colours, and not much else.
Madame Léon was a brisk brunette who seemed already to have adapted to her husband’s disappearance. ‘He’s left me, I expect,’ she said. ‘He’s done it before. When we were in Aix-les-Bains. He walked out on me for a German woman. He was back within a year but I always expected it to happen again. After all, a wolf doesn’t change its clothing, does it? People don’t alter, they just become more so.’
She had no idea where Léon could have gone and knew of no woman in particular. ‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t have one, though,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised he left the shop, all the same. The stock’s worth a bit. She must be loaded, for him to do that.’
‘He’d got some nasty
bruises on his face,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘He said you caused them.’
‘Then he’s a liar!’
‘He said it was done accidentally, mind you. With a tennis racquet.’
She pulled a face. ‘He told me he did it falling down the cellar steps when he went to bring up a bottle of wine for dinner. He said he tripped. He might have done. He had two cracked ribs and bruises all over his body. I saw them. He tried to hide them.’
‘So it wasn’t a tennis racquet, and you didn’t do it?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘It looked nasty.’
‘It was. He had to go to the doctor.’
‘Did he now?’ Darcy was becoming more and more intrigued. ‘Who is his doctor?’
‘He didn’t go to his own doctor.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. But he said his own doctor was too far away. He went somewhere else.’
‘I think he’d been beaten up. Know any reason why he could have been?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Or why he’s disappeared?’
‘Well…’ She paused. ‘He once got into some funny business in Aix, I know. Perhaps he’d got into some more. He certainly had some funny friends.’
‘What sort of funny friends?’
‘Well, just lately, anyway. I was in the shop once when they arrived. Big men. Fat men. Wearing smart suits. They pretended to be interested in sport but they weren’t the type at all. And when I went in a few days later, there they were again, talking to him. They pretended to be on the point of buying something but I noticed they didn’t. I think he was up to something.’
Darcy fished in his briefcase and produced a picture of Maurice Tagliatti.
‘That’s one of them,’ Madame Léon agreed. ‘He was the one who was doing all the talking.’
‘When was this? Can you remember?’
‘July. About the end of July.’
It seemed to call for another visit to Julien Claude Roth. Darcy explained about Léon’s injuries.
‘What did you hit him with?’ he asked.
Roth was indignant. ‘I didn’t hit him.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’