by Mark Hebden
‘What with?’
‘There was a spare key in the office. I knew where he kept it. I think he’d forgotten it. I knew he kept all his best stuff down there so when this type said he wanted some good boules for his son-in-law’s birthday, I went down and looked around. I thought he’d want me to. But that’s when he came back and started yelling that the boules weren’t for sale. He played hell. I reckon it was because I’d opened the cellar. I bet he had something in there he shouldn’t have had.’
Darcy grinned. ‘That’s probably not a bad guess, old son,’ he said. He turned to Pel. ‘It looks as if he was still handling stolen goods, Patron.’
Pel eyed the boy over his glasses. ‘Have you been out to Cloux lately?’ he asked.
‘Not since I was a kid. My father took us one day in his car. I haven’t got a car.’
‘Know an Audi estate, number 637-RT-25?’
‘Sure. That’s Léon’s.’
‘He hasn’t been to the shop for the last two days. Did you know?’
‘No, I didn’t. And I told you, I didn’t hit him. I never touched him, so it’s not my fault if he’s in hospital or something.’
‘He’s not in hospital,’ Darcy said. ‘He’s not “or something” either. His car was found near Cloux this morning. It was in the ditch.’
Roth stared. ‘Well, it’s nothing to do with me,’ he yelled. ‘If he says it is, then he’s a liar.’
‘He doesn’t say anything,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘He can’t. He’s dead. He’s been shot.’
There was more for them the following day after the Chief’s conference.
They were still puzzling about Léon’s disappearance when one of Nadauld’s men from Uniformed Branch turned up outside Pel’s office. His story was unexpected.
‘I saw Léon three nights ago,’ he said. ‘After the fire in the dress shop. He had his car by the back door. It opens on to the Place Franchaud. He was loading cartons into his car. It’s an Audi estate. The cartons looked heavy and it was late and I went to see what was going on. I thought at first it was a break-in. But his papers were sound and he had a driving licence to confirm it. Besides–’ Nadauld’s man gave a sheepish grin ‘–I’m often in that part of the city and I know him well. I was going by the book, that’s all. He said he was shifting some stock to his home. And that’s what he seemed to be doing. I put it in my report.’
Madame Léon was puzzled. ‘He never brought stock home,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have allowed it. The shop’s the shop. Home’s home. I expect he’s moved it somewhere else. To Lyons. Or Aix. Or Marseilles. Or Toulon. He worked another shop down there with a friend of his.’
‘Name of Boileau?’
‘I don’t know.’ She paused, puzzled. ‘On the other hand,’ she went on, ‘he left a lot of stock behind, and if he’d been opening another shop, surely he’d have taken the lot.’
The new murder had them all baffled. Why should Maurice Tagliatti be in cahoots with the owner of a sports outfitters? Pel was beginning to feel a little desperate at the lack of progress.
‘Anything yet from Brussels about Rykx’s friends?’ he asked.
‘No, Patron,’ Darcy said. ‘They’re being a bit slow as usual.’
Pel shrugged. The Belgians were never very quick off the mark. There were jokes by the dozen about their slowness. What would you do if a Belgian threw a hand grenade at you? Take the pin out and throw it back. That sort of thing.
They were still talking round the subject when Leguyader appeared. He was fidgeting as they talked and eventually he began to look as if he would burst. Pel guessed he had discovered something.
‘You look like a poodle that wants to be let out,’ he said. ‘What have you found?’
Leguyader smiled. ‘Clay,’ he said. ‘Modellers’ clay.’
‘On Maurice’s trousers. We know that.’
‘I found some more. On Léon’s shoes.’
Pel sat up and Leguyader went on cheerfully. ‘He wore a shoe with a very distinct pattern on the sole.’ He fished in a plastic bag and produced a pair of grey shoes. ‘Léon’s,’ he pointed out. ‘You’ll notice the sole’s designed with V-shaped ridges in it, each about five millimetres deep. They’re very marked and distinct, as you can see, and they extend over both sole and heel. My son wears them. They’re supposed to stop you slipping. What they really do is pick up mud which later dries out and falls on to the dining-room carpet just when your wife’s cleaned it. Clay. Soil.’
‘Dog shit,’ Darcy added.
Leguyader smiled. ‘Dog shit,’ he agreed. ‘I found two or three patches of this stuff on Léon’s shoes. It’s modelling clay. He’d obviously trodden on a piece while it was soft, forcing it into the ridges where it set hard. I dug it out.’ Leguyader produced a photograph. ‘That’s it.’
‘And it means what?’ the Chief asked.
‘That wherever Maurice got the splash of clay on his trousers,’ Pel said, ‘Léon had been there too.’
‘So,’ the Chief asked. ‘Who do we know who uses modelling clay?’
The director of the School of Decorative Arts was very grave but had never heard of Maurice Tagliatti.
‘He didn’t study here,’ he said.
However, he came up with a list of potters he knew, most of them elderly ladies who liked to make crockery.
‘Their work’s not very good,’ he said. ‘They haul it round the gift shops with the idea that tourists will buy it. They never do, of course. I wouldn’t either. It’s always cock-eyed.’
He also knew of a few private pottery classes, and two men, both sculptors – Gilbert Deville, who lived at Perrenet-sous-le-Forêt, and Gaspard Rac, who, he believed, lived somewhere in the same area.
‘Let’s go and see them all, Daniel,’ Pel suggested.
The private pottery classes weren’t much help because they never saw anybody but their own members. The old ladies making cock-eyed crockery were under the impression that they were about to be arrested for making pottery without a licence. In the end it left the two sculptors, Deville and Rac.
Deville lived at an ancient barn-like house about ten kilometres from Lordy at the end of a long twisting road that sloped upwards to the old village at Perrenet. The house was on the edge of Perrenet and hidden away among deep shrubbery down a winding drive where the foliage brushed both sides of the car. It was a grey day with drizzle and heavy with shadow so that, surrounded by greenery, it was like being in a goldfish bowl. The garden was littered with white statues that looked like ghosts among the misty shrubbery. Some of them had obviously been there for some time because they had lost their pristine whiteness and gone green, and one or two of them even had convolvulus growing round them.
Deville appeared to be working on a model of a frog about half a metre high squatting on a heavy base shaped like a rock. He was no longer young but he had piercing blue eyes, a mane of shaggy fair hair growing grey, and a tangled mass of beard that hung down on his chest.
‘Always intend to shave,’ he said. ‘But I get absorbed and forget.’
He was wearing a blue labourer’s smock and looked as if he’d taken a bath in wet plaster. Dried clay hung from it in globules and there were smears down his front as if he’d wiped his hands there. His trousers were stiff with the stuff, it had got into his hair and on his eyebrows, and in his beard two large pieces clicked together every time he turned his head. The floor and even the walls seemed to be liberally spattered with white dried stone hard blobs and in one corner was a potter’s wheel and a large square metal container containing damp clay. Several statues stood about the room, all of them sagging limply as if they’d lost their spines.
‘It’s the wet application technique,’ Deville explained. ‘Some call it “Droop”. Symbolic. That’s how life is, isn’t it? Sagging. I do it with wet clay.’
He flicked away a globule of clay from his smock. It landed on Darcy’s sleeve. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You can pick it off when it’s dry. Just give it a
brush like this.’ A big hand reached out and the clay was smeared down the disgusted Darcy’s arm. ‘Oh, well,’ Deville said. ‘It’ll come off in time. You only have to be patient. I model in paint, too. Like Van Gogh. Put it on good and thick. Use a table knife. Gives depth.’
‘Tagliatti,’ Pel tried.
‘Never touch it.’
‘Never touch what?’
‘Tagliatti. What is it? An Italian pasta?’
‘It’s a name. Maurice Tagliatti.’
‘Never heard of him. What does he do?’
‘He doesn’t do anything,’ Darcy grated, looking at his sleeve. ‘He’s dead.’
‘That’s the worst of dying,’ Deville said. ‘It stops everything.’
‘He was a criminal and he was found in a car at Lordy,’ Pel explained. ‘Shot. Didn’t you read about it?’
‘Never read the newspapers.’
‘How about the television?’
‘Haven’t got one.’
‘Radio?’
‘Bust. It was one a niece of mine bought for me but I made a mess of something I was doing and threw a hammer at it. It missed and hit the radio. I don’t take much interest in what goes on outside.’
Pel drew a deep breath. ‘He had clay on his trousers,’ he said. ‘The sort of clay you use.’
‘Well, he didn’t get it from here, and if it came from here, he must have pinched it. I don’t sell it or give it away. I’ll have to look into my security. I often forget to lock up at night.’ The sharp blue eyes looked narrowly at Pel. ‘Why would he want to steal clay?’
‘He didn’t steal clay.’
‘You said he did.’
They were getting nowhere.
‘Know anybody else who works with this stuff?’ Pel asked.
‘A few old ladies making crockery. A few students. An odd studio that works for tourists. Tourists’ll buy anything.’
‘Whom do you work for?’
‘I work for me.’
‘Where do you sell your work?’
Deville stared at them, a blank expression on his face. ‘I never did sell my work,’ he said. ‘Not until recently. Then this type from Singapore – Japanese or something – turned up. He’d decided he wanted statues for his garden to put among the ferns and the palms and the banana plants or whatever they have there and he decided that what I made was just the thing. Something to do with keeping evil spirits at bay.’ Deville paused and clapped his hands. ‘Chinese,’ he said.
‘What about “Chinese”?’
‘That’s what he was. Chinese. They’re great ones for gods and things like that. Like to have shrines in their gardens. Great believers in evil spirits. That’s why their roofs always slope up at the eaves.’ Despite themselves, Darcy and Pel were listening. ‘Evil spirits like to slide down roofs and the bit that turns up suddenly is there to catch them in the family jewels.’ Deville grinned. ‘I expect all Chinese evil spirits are holding their balls.’ He gave a hoot of laughter. ‘I expect that’s why they have such agonised faces.’
Pel managed to get a word through a chink in the diatribe. ‘If Maurice Tagliatti had clay on his trousers,’ he asked, ‘how would it get there?’
‘Easy enough.’ Deville flicked his fingers and this time the globule of wet clay landed on Pel’s shoe. Deville indicated it. ‘Like that,’ he said.
‘Know a type called Fernand Léon? He’s dead, too. Shot like Tagliatti. He kept a sports shop.’
‘I gave up sport years ago.’
‘He had clay on his shoes. The sort of clay you use. He’s mixed up with Tagliatti. They had obviously both been to see someone using modelling clay.’
‘They might not have. They might have been buying it from the manufacturers for something else entirely. To seal up drugs, for instance. So the sniffer dogs couldn’t smell it.’
It was an idea, Pel had to admit.
Gaspard Rac was a squat hunchbacked man with sour lines on his face, his features covered with black hair that made him look even more evil. He was surly and answered their questions unwillingly.
‘Deville’s an old fool,’ he said bitterly. ‘He doesn’t know the first thing about modelling. But he’s found somebody abroad to sell his work to. He’s even got an export licence.’
‘Who do you sell to?’
‘Anybody who wants to buy. I try to show at exhibitions.’ Rac indicated a cubic shape. ‘Cupid and Campaspe,’ he said. ‘I sold that. But the bastard backed off.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t like Cupid very much,’ Darcy said.
‘It’s a question of how you see them.’
‘Know anybody called Maurice Tagliatti?’
‘He’s the chap who got shot, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard he was a crook.’
‘He was. Ever met him?’
‘No. And I don’t want to. I think crooks – of any kind – ought to be hung up by their thumbs.’
‘How about Fernand Léon?’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He’s probably a crook, too.’
Rac stared at them hostilely. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re after but I don’t associate with crooks.’
They went through the same questions and got the same sort of answers, though with a little more coherence. Rac modelled in clay like Deville but he seemed to be no more successful.
‘You can buy rubber things these days,’ he said. ‘Like French letters. You fill them with wet plaster of Paris. When you peel off the rubber, you’ve got Snow White or Mickey Mouse or Asterix or somebody. Why should people buy statues and models that I’ve laboured weeks over when they can do it themselves as easily as that?’
Eleven
‘Whatever it was that Maurice was involved in,’ Pel said, ‘this big thing he was working on, then Léon must have known about it, too. He must have been part of it. Maurice went to see him at his shop. They talked. The boy, Roth, said so.’
‘Jewellery?’ Darcy suggested. ‘Some big haul Maurice had got hold of that Léon was about to get rid of for him?’
‘Whatever it was, somebody else knew about it, it seems, and wanted to be in on it. That’s why they tried to kidnap Maurice.’
‘So who did for Léon? The same lot?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Pel said. ‘Perhaps somebody different. But somebody who was obviously in the know. They probably even got out of Léon where the loot, whatever it was, was hidden.’
‘So where was it hidden?’
‘In that strong room underneath his shop?’
They stared at each other. ‘It occurs to me’, Pel said, ‘that perhaps we ought to have a look at that strong room.’
Madame Léon had no intention of allowing Pel and his men to enter France Sport on their own and insisted on accompanying them. She seemed to be handling her husband’s death with considerable calmness. So far they hadn’t seen any tears but had noticed a great deal of cold calculation.
‘I could move my stock there from the pedestrian precinct,’ she said. ‘There’d be more space. It would cost more in rent but there’d be more elbow room.’
She shut up Dorée and walked round the corner into the Rue Général Leclerc with them. Emile Demoine had disappeared at last, and France Sport had a feel of emptiness about it, like an unlived-in house. There was no smell of dust or decay, simply of stale air, of no windows or doors having been opened, of no one having breathed there, of nothing having moved. Madame Léon knew how to switch on and work the till, but there was nothing in it but small change. ‘He always took the notes and large denomination coins away with him,’ she explained. ‘Was it robbery?’
They didn’t bother to answer. Instead, they sniffed round the shop, half expecting to find something but not certain what. After moving warily about for a while, Pel turned to Madame Léon.
‘The basement,’ he said, and she indicated a flight of stairs hidden from sight by a large display of track suits.
They trooped down after her. The
basement looked much the same as the floor upstairs, except that the things there were still in cartons and stacked with no pretension to display. There was also a small work bench where minor repairs of one sort or another were made.
‘He sent tennis racquets away to be restrung,’ Madame Léon said. ‘In fact, recently he began to send everything away. He used to have a man who did small repairs for a while but he got rid of him about two months ago.’
‘Do you know exactly when?’
‘I think it was the end of July or the beginning of August.’
‘Let’s check if anything big happened about then, Daniel.’ Pel murmured. ‘A big robbery. A jewel haul. An airport drugs snatch. That might be why he got rid of him. If he had some loot hidden here, he’d prefer no one to know.’
There was a heavy metal door at the end of the basement and Darcy tried the handle. It was not locked and he heaved it open. Inside there were more cartons, most of which seemed to be track suits, and a new stock of football shoes for the coming season. In the deepest recesses of the room there was a clear space where something had been moved. It was about a metre wide and a metre deep and, for all they knew, could have run up to the low ceiling.
‘Something’s gone from there,’ Pel said, turning to Madame Léon. ‘Know what it was?’
She had no idea. She had taken no interest in the sports shop and had never intended to. ‘Sport’s crazy. People drop dead with it.’
‘Let’s have the dogs in, Daniel.’
The sniffer dogs found a scent at once. It set them all shifting cartons as if there were buried treasure behind them, but all that happened was that they grew hot and dusty, and turned nothing up.
‘Well, even if it isn’t here now,’ Pel said, ‘we know they’d used the cellar to hide drugs.’
Locking the place up, they arranged for Prélat, of Fingerprints, to check it over. There had to be fingerprints somewhere, because it was full of glass-topped showcases.