by Mark Hebden
Pel reported that the van had been found at St Barien, north of the city, and the investigation had revealed certain interesting facts.
‘It belongs to Meluc,’ Darcy said, ‘the guy found in the canal, and it’s the vehicle that was missing. It would be just about right for six men and several sacks of loot. In addition to traces of cement, brick dust and plaster, the, vehicle also contained two fifty franc notes that had slipped under a broken tile.’
‘There are dabs all over it,’ Prélat, of Fingerprints, said. ‘They’re Meluc’s. All the others are smudges. Our friends were wearing gloves. But this is the van they used all right, the one that old boy saw them climb into and drive away.’
The bank had immediately offered a substantial reward for anyone bringing in information that would lead to the arrest of the robbers. It was the usual procedure, even if it was done only to reassure their customers. The police put up another sum.
‘It’s big enough now to be tempting,’ the Chief snarled. ‘Somebody might nibble. The money’s stashed away somewhere but it won’t be easy to hide.’
‘If I know the way their minds work,’ Pel said thoughtfully, ‘they won’t touch it until the thing’s blown over.’
Dressed in overalls and wearing a protective helmet, Pel wrinkled his nose with distaste as he descended with Darcy from the manhole in the Place Nozay. He looked like a cat on a wet pavement as he followed an inspector of sewers called Benoist along a narrow footway that ran alongside a channel of swiftly flowing water. But Pel was surprised to find the system cleaner than he had expected.
It was a strange echoing world down there, a land of waterfalls and hurrying rivers, the main sewer almost as wide as a railway tunnel, fed at intervals by streams from minor sewers carrying water from higher levels that had been cleansed in its fall. The air in the main sewer was surprisingly clear but everywhere there was the sound of rushing water.
Benoist then produced a plan which showed that it was easy to move underground from the Place Nozay where Bridier had seen the men emerge from the manhole to the Rue de la Queste where the bank was situated. When they turned off the main sewer, they began to find a scum of orange peel, twigs, cigarette packets, pieces of plastic, every kind of minor debris imaginable floating in the water caught in the angles of the channels. The smell deteriorated considerably here. After the fresher air of the main sewer it was unpleasant and Pel was sure he could hear rats.
Eventually they came to a sharp turn where the water swirled away in a rushing fall to a lower level. Reaching a small recess, Benoist led the way to the tunnel. Propped up alongside it was a sheet of plywood cut to fit the entrance and smeared with cement to look like part of the wall. ‘They must have had it dug for some time,’ Benoist said. ‘And just plugged the end up with this until they were ready.’ Pel nodded gloomily.
An army surplus field telephone lay on the walkway with a wire running down the tunnel to the bank which had been abandoned or overlooked. It had already been examined for fingerprints and carried none. There were a few plastic bags containing soil and debris stacked on the footway that they had to climb over.
‘It can’t be all of what they dug out,’ Benoist said. ‘There must be more somewhere.’
It didn’t take them long to find where. More plastic bags were stacked in another recess and a few had fallen into the water which had risen around them. There was no sign of any tools.
‘They planned this one well,’ Darcy commented. ‘They got rid of everything before they entered the bank. I reckon they were ready to go the night before and tidied up behind them so they could make a quick getaway.’
Pel’s face was grim as he crawled along the tunnel. Although it was a hurriedly constructed affair, nothing had been left to chance. The boards that held the sides and roof in place had all been carefully cut to size.
At the end of the tunnel, bricks had been removed from a wall and stacked carefully to one side. Beyond the hole was the bank’s stationery store and the back of a wooden cupboard. A large portion of it had been cut away and about them in the tunnel were crumpled sheets, forms and notepaper bearing the bank’s heading.
Scrambling into the store among the trampled paper and files, Pel looked about him. The cupboard had a lock and key.
‘They locked it after them,’ Lotier said. ‘As they left. And dragged it into place from the back. That’s why all the stuff’s stacked in the corridor. When they arrived they cut a hole in the back so they could push stuff out. As soon as they’d got enough out of the way, they managed to move the cupboard and one of them climbed through. It would be quite a job. In a small space like that. He hauled out the rest of the stuff and dragged the cupboard further from the wall so that the rest of them could climb in. After that, all they had to do was wait for the staff to arrive.’
Pel was thoughtful. ‘But how did they know where to cut the hole in the cupboard?’ he asked. ‘They could have spent half the night trying to cut holes and finding the saw up against boxes, files, bound blocks of paper. Find out who was responsible for the stationery, Daniel. They might know how it was stacked. Come to that,’ he ended, ‘how did they know the cupboard was made of wood?’
Pel’s conference was also attended by the Chief who was in a foul temper because he felt thoroughly humiliated. He had always felt he ran a good department that produced results and the robbery at the Crédit Rural had shaken him to the core. Turgot was wondering if suicide might fit the bill.
They had struggled to avoid bloodshed and in their concern for the safety of the hostages had allowed themselves to be led up the garden path. The robbers had never had any intention of shooting, or even holding, the hostages. The point of the whole charade had been to concentrate the police round the bank and the area of the Church of St Philibert, so as to leave the streets round the Place Nozay clear for a swift getaway.
They knew that now but it was always easy to be wise after the event. Chivvied by the Search and Assist people and the sharpshooters from Lyons, to say nothing of the enormous numbers of policemen involved in surrounding the Rue de la Queste area, setting up listening gear, preparing to abseil down the front of the building from the roof, and pondering all the other possibilities that had been considered, Turgot had had quite a lot on his plate.
‘It was a put up job,’ he explained bitterly. ‘That telephone call that raised the alarm – they deliberately took their eyes off the hostages for a minute or two before they were gagged so that it got through.’
Sitting at the back of the room, Nosjean decided that quite a lot of people had been taking their eyes off things lately – Distaing, for instance, and the staff of the Musée des Arts Modernes.
‘It gives us all red faces,’ the Chief growled. ‘It must be one of the most daring robberies ever.’
There had been other daring raids on banks. Robbers had tunnelled through sewers before, or entered through ceilings from flats situated above. But these had occurred in Marseilles or Nice where one expected that sort of thing to happen, not in this city which was their pride and joy.
‘There’ll be a full inquiry,’ the Chief said. But, he admitted on the quiet, he didn’t regard the case as having been mishandled. ‘Turgot did everything he was supposed to do,’ he decided.
Except make guesses, Pel thought.
Benoist, the inspector of sewers, who was sitting in to give advice, outlined the sewerage plan. ‘There are different systems,’ he pointed out. ‘And they’re all designed for minimum maintenance so there’s no regular inspection. The first is a combined one in which one set of sewers receives both foul sewage and the rainfall run-off from roofs, roads and surfaces. The second has two patterns, one of which takes the effluent to the sewage works for treatment, and another which delivers comparatively clean surface water to the nearest point of outfall. There’s also a third by which surface drainage from houses is discharged into the effluent sewers. The sewer they used is what might be called a clean water sewer and it has ventilati
on to remove poisonous, explosive or corrosive gases produced by decomposition and other causes.’
Pel lit a cigarette. Fat chance he had of giving them up, he thought. Avoid stress, the adverts said. He lived and breathed stress.
‘Near the Crédit Rural,’ Benoist added, ‘there are two smaller sewers – both large enough for a man to move easily along them designed to remove water from the streets during heavy rainstorms. In one of these there’s an unlit recess from which the tunnel was driven.’
‘We ought to have realised what they were up to,’ Turgot said bitterly. ‘There’s a ventilation column in the street almost outside the bank.’
‘The route they took’, Pel continued the story, ‘was under the Rue Doctor Chaussiet, the Rue de la Poste and the Rue du Château, emerging in the Place Nozay. It was marked with a line on the diagram we found and looked like the tail of a kite and was carefully worked out to bring them up outside the perimeter we put up. One among them was either a cop with experience of traffic or they’d watched the traffic and worked it out – or both. The Place Nozay brought them on to a direct route out of the city.
‘They were waiting when the bank staff arrived,’ he went on. ‘They took the customers hostage to make it look better, and they knew perfectly well when the under-manager arrived because someone had told them, as someone had told them the day when the surplus old notes were waiting to be removed. The shots were intended to draw every policeman in the city to the bank. When they were there, they got away by the route they had arrived. They were well clear before Labarre managed to struggle to the window. Were the roads out of the city guarded?’
‘No,’ Turgot admitted. ‘Because the gang were all in the bank. We’d circled the whole area. Every street and every building. They couldn’t get out.’
‘But they did, didn’t they?’ Pel said quietly.
Gilbaud, the manager of Crédit Rural, a small pink man who looked as though he always dined well, explained how the bank worked. ‘Every branch has a certain sum in cash in hand,’ he said. ‘If at the end of the day or week it has more than it needs it sends the surplus in shoddy notes to central headquarters. Ours was already packed and waiting to go in special sacks.’
‘Same time every week?’ Pel asked.
‘No. I vary the days and time.’
‘So someone would have to know?’
‘Only me. I telephone from my office.’
‘Would anyone else know?’
‘No.’
‘What about the staff?’
‘They’ve been with us for ages. Apart from the youngest clerk. They’re entirely trustworthy. The bank makes sure of it. So do I.’
A huge plan of the bank had been pinned to a blackboard, together with a plan of the sewers.
‘We start’, Pel said, indicating it, ‘by examining how the tunnel was made. They had a distance of around thirty metres to cover from the sewer to the back of the storage cupboard. It’s not a lot to experts and I expect they’d all read those books that were written after the war about people trying to escape from German prison camps. If my memory serves me right, they all gave everything in great detail.
‘The tunnel was around eighty centimetres by fifty. Not a lot of soil to remove, especially as it’s soft and sandy. Half-way along they built in a small recess twice the width of the tunnel where a man could crouch. It was to enable them to pass each other, something that was otherwise impossible. They used it also to store the final bags of soil they’d removed from the digging. To shore the walls up they used pieces of plank–’
‘Of cheap whitewood or plywood,’ Leguyader pointed out. ‘Eighty centimetres tall, fifty wide. The roof was held up by longer ones, sixty wide, resting on the uprights.’
‘And they took no chances,’ Pel said. ‘They were set against the wall only a few centimetres apart. They must have used over sixty sets of them and they’d been cut by a circular saw. We need to know which saw. They got in at night. It would be a good time because nobody’s about at night these days. They’re all watching Dallas. They needed light but they didn’t tap the electricity, so they must have used heavy battery lamps. There must have been at least six. One each. Find out where they came from. They also used a military field telephone. Where did that come from? Plastic fertiliser bags were used to haul the waste away. They probably intended them originally to haul away the loot but the bank obligingly placed the notes in canvas bags which were suitably sized for handling in the tunnel. Where did the fertiliser bags come from? When we know these things we might make some headway.’
He turned brusquely to Benoist. ‘I shall want a list of all your employees,’ he said. ‘Every man who works in the sewers or who has worked in them during the last five years. I’ll also want the names of all employees who had access to plans of the sewers. Anybody who could have known that it was possible to climb through that manhole in the Place Nozay and end up under the Crédit Rural.’
Pel bluntly made it clear to his team that everybody would be on duty twenty four hours a day. ‘You’ll be missing meals and sleep,’ he pointed out grimly. ‘You also won’t be seeing your homes much till this thing’s sorted out. Almost seventy million francs were stolen and we don’t rest till we get it back. Furthermore, I might remind you that this is also a murder inquiry. Somebody killed Robert Meluc. He was part of the gang but we still want to know who killed him and exactly why.’
As Pel looked over them, he wondered how their wives and girlfriends would take the overtime – if twenty four hours a day could be considered overtime. Whenever anything big occurred, the tensions at home always rose, and it was God help those women who weren’t occupied and didn’t know how to be happy in their own company. What did they all do when their men didn’t appear for days on end and when they did were exhausted, complaining about their feet, frustrated from trying to find something that wouldn’t appear, snappy because of failure, and not concerned with the fiendish expectations of the marriage vows? It was then that the women forgot the bit about being faithful ‘till death do us part’.
Seven
Meanwhile, Nosjean was still hot on the trail of Colette Esterhazy. He discovered that she was well known at the University, more, it seemed, for her looks than for her chances of getting a degree, which were nevertheless excellent. It seemed that not only the students but the tutors, too, had been quick to notice her beauty.
‘She was quite clever,’ one of them admitted. ‘I told her she was wasting her time worrying about a degree. I told her she should get hold of a studio and start painting. I said it might take time but she was bound to make it in the end. She did as I said but she kept on with her studies all the same. She had skill…’ He paused ‘…if not a lot of artistic imagination.’
Nosjean guessed that one of them at least had slept with the girl but, judging by their descriptions of her, it seemed to have been inevitable. From the University, he found his way to the studio of a man called Albert Courtrand, who had painted her. He was a huge, amiable man with a beard and an untidy thatch of hair that was spotted with paint. His studio was full of paintings of nudes, all a little too gorgeous to be true. ‘Sure,’ he told Nosjean. ‘I knew her. She often modelled for me. That’s her.’
He showed him a portrait of a nude girl sitting on a stool tying a bandanna round her hair; the light fell across the subject, highlighting the curves of flesh. She was outstandingly beautiful.
‘It isn’t exaggerated either,’ Courtrand said. ‘She was one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever met.’ He gestured at the other paintings. ‘Those are models which I’ve titivated up a bit. Improvements on the nose. The eyes. The bust. The legs. The lips. So they’ll sell better. I make my living from nudes so I always make them as gorgeous as I can. But not old Esterhazy. You didn’t have to improve on her in any way. There was nothing you could improve. She was perfect.’
‘In every way?’
‘In every way,’ Courtrand said stoutly. ‘She was good-tempered and happy.
Tell her to take off and she took off without wondering if it were cold.’
‘Take off?’ Nosjean had visions of a naked girl flying round the studio with her arms outspread.
‘Clothes. Take off. Put on. Clothes.’
‘Ah.’ Light dawned. ‘Did you ever see her apart from her being a model?’
Courtrand was wary. ‘We sometimes ate a meal together,’ he said. ‘Had a drink together.’ He grinned. ‘Went to bed together.’
‘Was she your mistress?’
‘No, man. But I enjoyed sex and so did she. But I have a wife so we kept it quiet. I hope all this isn’t going to find its way into the papers.’
‘No reason why it should,’ Nosjean. said. ‘I’m grateful for your frankness.’ He left Courtrand with a lightness in his step, not sure that he was really getting anywhere but hopeful that he might.
When Nosjean at last managed to find him, Leygues seemed shattered. He had just flown home and still looked exhausted. A tall, good looking man in his fifties, he had a high forehead and a fine straight nose and chiselled chin. Judging by what Nosjean had heard of her, he’d have made a good match for Colette Esterhazy.
‘She made her first application to the museum last year,’ he said. ‘In the usual way. We agreed to let her copy. It was a Picasso. She completed that and then decided to tackle something harder – a Clouet. She did it very well, too. Then she asked about the Rousseau and the Paot. Since she’d been so enthusiastic, I gave permission that she should be allowed.’
‘Even to taking the pictures from their frames?’
Leygues flushed. ‘Yes. Even that. She claimed she could do the work better that way, that she could get nearer. She studied the things with a magnifying glass to get the brush strokes right. I gave permission.’