Pel and the Picture of Innocence

by Mark Hebden

  ‘Gold? And it’s here?’

  ‘It must be. Check the hotels, Daniel. For the days before Maurice was killed. We’re looking for Englishmen – Geebees.’

  Braxton turned up on the books of a hotel in Auxerre and Coy on the books of the Hôtel Central in Dijon where, to their surprise, they also found George Harding’s name.

  ‘All nice and handy,’ Pel said. ‘For when Maurice moved from Lordy.’ He lit a cigarette slowly and studied the end of it. ‘What do people do with gold when they steal it, Daniel? Do they ever saw a little bit off the end and try to get rid of it to a jeweller?’

  Darcy grinned. ‘Most of what appears nowadays goes through the Middle East and from there to India which is regarded as a traditional sponge for it. Its value seems to be that it’s indestructible and there’s no difficulty in changing its identity. You simply melt it down, remould it and put another stamp on it – South Africa, Crédit Suisse, whatever. The basic motive for wanting it seems to be fear. If you have to vanish overnight you can stow enough of it in your pockets to tide you over to easier times. That makes it particularly useful to shaky African dictators. Europe’s greatest hoarders are us. The French. It was those two world wars in a generation and all those devaluations of the franc since 1914.’

  ‘It’s a convenient way of avoiding death duties,’ Pel agreed.

  ‘Doesn’t pay to disguise it, though,’ Darcy said. ‘Some type once did. As saucepans. He painted them black and hid them in his cellar, thinking his family would find them when he died. Unfortunately they didn’t like his old pots and pans and sold the lot to a junkman. They never got them back.’

  Fourteen

  While Pel suddenly began to make headway, Nosjean, busy with the Sondermann case, remained exactly where he was.

  He sat at his desk and studied two lots of broken fragments in front of him. They were in two neat piles, one the remains of the statuette he had found near the sun lounge, the other what was left of the crockery from the tea tray. But his mind wasn’t really on them. It was occupied with Mijo and he was worried because she was still wanting to meet his family. She had been working round to it, in fact, much more persistently of late. ‘How about Saturday?’ she had asked.

  Nosjean wasn’t keen on Saturday. He wasn’t keen on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday either, because he had a feeling the meeting would be a disaster, anyway. Stilted conversation, long silences, stiffnesses all through lunch of the sort that all the wine in the world wouldn’t change. It bothered him as much as the Sondermann case.

  Sitting up and thrusting the matter from his thoughts, he stared at the two piles on his desk again. Finally he pushed the remains of the statuette to one side – there was a puzzle there but he didn’t know what it was – and concentrated on the pieces of china from the tea tray. There was an explanation for the statuette, he felt, but it wasn’t important, and the china was. He began moving the pieces with a pencil, spreading them out until he had separated the parts which seemed to make up the cup, saucer, teapot, milk jug and sugar basin. There seemed to be more left than he’d expected. Puzzled, he headed for Claudie Darel’s desk. ‘I’d like a bit of help,’ he said.

  Indicating the broken china, he pointed with the pencil to the portions he had separated. ‘That lot’, he said, ‘makes up the cup, saucer, milk jug, teapot and sugar basin. That lot–’ the pencil moved ‘–seem to be the handles. Right?’

  ‘Right. What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Well, normally I don’t drink out of cups and saucers, I usually make do with a mug. So does Mijo–’

  ‘How’s it going with Mijo?’

  ‘She wants to meet the family.’

  He had thought Claudie might be sympathetic, but she wasn’t. ‘It makes sense,’ she said. ‘It would make her feel more secure.’

  Nosjean sighed and Claudie indicated the broken crockery. ‘The china,’ she said.

  Nosjean nodded, coming down to earth. ‘How many handles do you make?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think there might be more than there ought to be and I thought I’d ask you.’

  Claudie smiled. ‘I usually drink out of mugs, too,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll have a go.’

  Carefully, they began to separate the fragments of pink and white china. Apart from a few missing fragments, they made up the handle and spout of the teapot. That was easy because they were heavier than the rest. The milk jug was easier, too, because that was also thicker. The sugar basin wasn’t too difficult, because it appeared to have had a handle on either side, as they discovered by matching the fragments with the sides from which they had broken.

  ‘Just leaves the cup,’ Nosjean said.

  Claudie poked around a little more then she began to frown.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘There seem to be two handles.’

  ‘That’s also what I thought.’

  ‘Did the cup have two handles?’

  ‘If it did, it was the only one in the set that did. I looked at the others.’

  ‘Suppose’, she said, ‘that we try to put them together.’

  Nosjean went out and bought the kind of glue the experts used, and by the end of two hours they had what looked roughly like two cups, each with one handle.

  ‘Two cups,’ Nosjean said. ‘Not one. That means–’

  ‘That she had a visitor. Somebody she knew well enough to offer a cup of tea to.’

  On the Monday morning, Nosjean started staring at the broken crockery again. The weekend hadn’t been the disaster he had expected. Mijo had gone down well with his family but his sisters had firmly ruled out the idea of them living together.

  ‘Without a wedding,’ his sister Antoinette had decided, ‘the union can’t be blessed by the Church.’

  And that was that. Between them they seemed to have settled his fate. All the same – he cheered up a little – as a fate, with Mijo it didn’t look as if it would be too bad.

  He dragged his thoughts back to the job in hand, and he suddenly remembered that, quite by accident, in the Tagliatti case they had learned there had been two other people in the car with Maurice when he was killed, not one. His head lifted. There had been two people in the room sitting at the tea tray when Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann had been attacked, not one as they had originally thought. Had the attacker been there in the room with her all the time?

  And the broken statuette? Why was it broken? Was it deliberate? Had it been broken out of spite or in a rage? Unlike the china from the tea tray, the statuette had produced fingerprints. But they were useless because everybody in the neighbourhood seemed to have handled it. He could only assume it had been a beautiful piece of work and people had touched it in admiration, as they often did with objets d’art.

  He thought of the china from the tea tray again. Two cups, and an attacker who was not a stranger to Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann but someone she knew well enough to ask into her house, for whom she had fetched another cup to offer tea.

  After his visit to his home, he had deposited Mijo back at the flat they shared and headed for the Impasse Chévire. His inquiries covered everyone who lived there.

  So far he hadn’t been able to pin anything on anyone. Young Mahé seemed to have a clear alibi, as did all the other males. Come to that, so did all the women.

  For a long time he sat staring at the photographs of the scene of the crime. Eventually, he began to concentrate on that of the battered tea tray on which the china had been standing when the attack had taken place. It had been blown up to actual size and in the centre of the tray was the splintered hole. It looked as if it had been made, as both Leguyader and Nosjean had decided, by someone hitting it with a poker. It was a light tray with a thin wooden base and sides of thicker wood. He studied it carefully. It was possible to see the wood ash adhering to the edges of the hole.

  He went in search of Claudie Darel again, to try on her
another idea that had occurred to him.

  ‘I thought it had been done by the poker,’ he explained. ‘I thought perhaps the china was upset because she snatched up the tray to defend herself when she was attacked. As a shield, sort of thing. Now I wonder. It was face-down when I found it. On the carpet, among the broken china. I assumed it was the poker that made the hole because it had wood ash round the edges. Now I’m beginning to wonder if it was.’

  Claudie examined the photograph for a moment then she studied her shoe.

  Nosjean caught her eye. ‘That’s what I wondered,’ he said.

  Once again Nosjean sat staring at the repaired cups. He was almost there, he felt. But young Mahé’s alibi seemed sound. So, for that matter, did those of the men who were involved. Dr Kersta had been in his surgery. Auvignac seemed to have been in his office at Métaux de Dijon where he worked. Mahé, who was as neat and small as his wife, had been busy in the large and expensive china shop he ran in the Rue de la Liberté. It was from there, in fact, that Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann had bought the tea set she’d been using when she’d been attacked. The other men Nosjean had interviewed – the architect, the lawyer – hardly seemed to come into it.

  The women?

  Nosjean frowned. Madame Auvignac seemed a likely candidate from her size alone. Yet all the women seemed to be in the clear, because all those involved had been able to see each other in their kitchens across the central green of the little close. Madame Kersta had admitted leaving hers for a while – ‘There was a short wildlife programme on television,’ she had said – but she was prepared to confirm that she had seen Madame Auvignac and Madame Mahé in their kitchens. Madame Auvignac and Madame Mahé had offered the same sort of corroboration for her.

  And, if one of them had slipped out, gone down the garden, through the wood and into Annabelle-Eugénie’s house and had then sat down to have a cup of tea with her, it would surely have occupied an hour or more, and they had all been prepared to swear they had seen each other in and out of their kitchens at the appropriate time. The most anyone had appeared to be missing was Madame Kersta’s quarter of an hour with the television, and a quarter of an hour wasn’t sufficient to take tea, half kill Annabelle-Eugénie and return without being missed.

  There seemed to be something wrong somewhere.

  Nosjean stared again at the two crooked cups he and Claudie had built from the fragments of crockery that had been found. Prélat had been unable to produce any good prints, save one scrappy one belonging to Annabelle-Eugénie which had showed on one of the smaller broken pieces. But that puzzled Nosjean because if someone had taken tea with her, surely there would have been other prints, or parts of prints.

  Then, studying the two lopsided cups, Nosjean noticed something he hadn’t noticed before. One of them, the one that contained the fragment that bore Annabelle-Eugénie’s dab, had the brown stain in the bottom where the dregs of her tea had dried. Tea always left a brown stain and there it was. But what was odd was that the other cup didn’t show the stain. It was clean and white as if it hadn’t been used.

  Nosjean swung round and turned his attention to the photograph of the tray again and then, suddenly, the whole thing came together.

  Fifteen

  Pel was going through the papers Murray had given him. It was obvious now what had so occupied Maurice Tagliatti that he had found it necessary to appear to be in the city when he had set off disguised for some destination still unknown. A gold bullion robbery was big enough to account for the Manoir de Lordy, too. That must have cost him a packet, but big, important jobs usually did cost a packet and he had done the job thoroughly, even to having the place redecorated and painted to make it appear the move was permanent, not temporary.

  So – was the gold at Lordy? It didn’t seem so or they would surely have turned it up in their search. But Maurice had obviously had it and the fact that he’d been well and truly bumped off seemed to indicate that his English partners had been rather more than a little upset. All of which seemed to show that the gold hadn’t been sold and was still around, but that Maurice had relied too heavily on his bodyguards and one of them had shopped him.

  Cavalin? Sidonie? Vlada Preradovic? One of his men with a grudge? Ourdabi, for instance? Or was it simply that the English partner had found out and produced his professional killers? After all, he wouldn’t have had to look in the yellow pages for them. He already knew them well, it seemed. So had Maurice’s move to Burgundy been merely to duck out of sight for a while until things blew over? Surely not. Maurice was too old a hand to imagine that someone he’d cheated out of several million francs of loot would just forget it. So what had been going on? Was this the explanation for Devreux appearing dressed in Maurice’s clothes in the city on the day he died? So that Maurice could disappear in a different direction to organise the moving of the gold?

  It seemed pretty obvious now that the gold had been in Léon’s shop at some point. But it wasn’t there now because they had taken the place apart, and there was that report of the policeman who had seen Léon loading cartons in his estate car to indicate that Léon had got the wind up and moved it.

  Pel shifted the papers around for a while then looked up at Darcy. ‘Suppose you were moving gold from England to France, Daniel,’ he asked. ‘How would you do it?’

  ‘Only one safe way, Patron,’ Darcy said. ‘By air.’

  ‘They seem to have followed that thought up in London and got nowhere.’

  ‘If it came to France, it could be across the Channel in an hour. If it landed here, it could be unloaded and gone within a couple of hours of the robbery.’

  ‘Murray checked all airports. There was no record of any aircraft taking off that couldn’t be accounted for.’

  ‘What about small airports?’

  ‘He checked those, too.’

  ‘How about a field – an ordinary field?’

  ‘It would be a heavy load.’

  ‘There are aircraft to carry them, Patron. And there are fields which would be – or could be made to be – suitable. All it needs is flat land. Could it be that some farmer was paid to look the other way? I’ve been checking the weather for that period. There’d been a long dry spell with wind. The ground must have been rock-hard.’

  ‘Get in touch with the airfields in this area, Daniel. Find out if anything arrived from England on that day.’

  Nosjean knew now who had made the attack on Annabelle-Eugénie Sondermann, and it was time to make his move.

  Trying to see Dr Kersta, he was put off with the plea that Dr Kersta was busy. Nosjean dug his heels in, however, and insisted, and in the end one of the doctor’s patients had to wait instead. Kersta was a tall man with a shock of grey hair that stood straight up from his head like a patch of wheat stubble.

  ‘I thought we’d been through all this once,’ he snapped.

  ‘We have, of course,’ Nosjean admitted, studying Kersta’s neat doctor’s fingers. ‘But we haven’t quite finished our inquiries.’

  Having got the doctor to the starting gate, he found him not unwilling but, on the other hand, none too willing either. He seemed to hedge at some of the questions, so that Nosjean began to grow impatient.

  ‘Do you burn wood in your fireplace, doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Kersta said. ‘We all do. With the woods at the back, it’s easy to get. There’s always plenty there.’

  ‘What about the ash when the grate’s emptied? What happens to it?’

  Kersta looked puzzled. ‘Is this to do with – with the attack on Mademoiselle Sondermann?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I don’t see–’

  ‘I assure you,’ Nosjean said, ‘it’s very important. What happens to the ash?’

  ‘We put it on the garden. It’s supposed to do the soil good. It contains potash which is a first-rate fertiliser. We use it a lot. I’m a great believer in wood ash.’ Kersta paused. ‘Look, what are you getting at, young man?’

 
; It was that ‘young man’ that niggled Nosjean. He wasn’t all that old and he certainly looked younger than he was, but he was no fool. ‘Mademoiselle Sondermann was attacked while she was taking tea,’ he rapped back smartly.

  ‘So?’

  ‘By someone she knew.’

  Kersta’s expression changed. ‘Oh?’ he said.

  ‘Someone who entered her garden from the woods and went into the house. She wasn’t surprised because she knew them well. She even fetched another cup and invited them to take tea. Perhaps because she was nervous. She had reason to be.’

  ‘Are you suggesting’, Dr Kersta said coldly, ‘that whoever attacked her had been sitting down to tea with her?’

  Nosjean was silent for a moment. ‘That’s what it looked like,’ he agreed. ‘But it isn’t what happened. The intruder didn’t sit down to tea. It didn’t take that long.’

  ‘So it was someone from the wood?’

  ‘It was certainly someone who arrived from the wood. You see, there was someone who had been seeing rather more of Mademoiselle Sondermann than he should.’

  ‘Are you trying to suggest something, young man?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Sondermann was popular, doctor. With men as well as with women. She had had quite a reputation when she was young. The habit hadn’t left her. And you visited her regularly, doctor, didn’t you? Young Mahé has sharp eyes. You had good reason to, of course. For her asthma. But was it always for her asthma?’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘You tell me, doctor. The layout of your garden is different from the others. You have a flowerbed at the end of it by the wood. You have to cross it to get into the wood. It has a lot of ash on it. Anybody crossing it would get the ash on their shoes. They’d lose most of it as they passed through the wood, of course, but you use a lot, don’t you? You’ve just said so. And even going through the wood didn’t brush it all off. Some of it was still there when the tray was trodden on and it was on the tray when it was found after the attack.’