by Mark Hebden
They enquired at the houses in the Place Nozay surrounding the manhole by which the gang had entered and left the bank.
‘They must have carried equipment,’ Pel pointed out.
‘Picks. Shovels. Crowbars. Hammers. Saws. Plastic bags to remove the dirt they were digging out. Somebody must have seen something.’
But nobody had. It was too much, he thought savagely, to expect an intelligent human being to notice anything out of the ordinary.
One or two people mentioned seeing workmen but they hadn’t seen them enter the manhole, couldn’t describe them, didn’t know which day they saw them, and weren’t even sure what job they were engaged on. The police checked them out as far as they could. One or two had even seen a grey car hanging around in the square some time before and had now begun to wonder, as they put two and two together, if it had had anything to do with the robbery.
‘It more than likely had,’ Pel said. ‘Did you get the number?’
‘It was too far away.’
‘What make was it?’
‘It was broadside on and I couldn’t see the bonnet.’
Pel’s face had begun to take on the look of a small boy who had expected a bicycle for his birthday and received a ballpoint pen.
It began to seem that the gang had made a detailed survey of the Place Nozay, doubtless counting the number of people who used it, and coming up with the answer, ‘Not many,’ had decided it was safe to masquerade as sewerage workers and open the manhole from time to time.
This theory was given added force when they learned that at the Bar du Nord on the corner of Rémy and Foch a man had made a habit of sitting for long hours in the window with a drink, watching the road west.
‘He had a notebook and pencil in his hand,’ the barman said.
‘What was he like?’ Pel asked.
The barman rubbed his nose. ‘He wore a black windcheater,’ he said.
‘Lots of people wear black windcheaters. But some people have two or three.’ Pel was growing frustrated to the point of sarcasm. ‘Of different colours. And they sometimes even swap them about. What was he like? The man himself.’
‘His hair was short. As if he kept it well trimmed.’
‘Tall?’
‘Medium.’
‘Thickset?’
‘Fairly. But not too much.’
‘In other words, he was medium.’
‘Yes.’
‘What about his face?’
‘We never saw it. He was always staring out of the window, with his back to us.’
‘Did no one see him? Other customers?’
‘He came usually in the late afternoon. There aren’t many around at that time. It’s quiet. They mostly start coming in when the offices close. A quick drink to stiffen them for meeting the wife and kids. Or else early in the morning when we were rushed off our feet serving breakfast coffee and rolls.’
‘Didn’t you see his features at all?’
‘Not really.’
‘Complexion? Sallow? Fair?’
‘Medium.’
There were other bars at which they thought they might have more luck, but if somebody had sat watching the roads at the junctions of Liberté and Bossuet or Arquebuse and Monge they had managed to make themselves inconspicuous because they hadn’t been noticed.
‘So which way did they go?’ Pel snarled. ‘We seem to have a choice between north, east, west and south.’
By this time Crédit Rural was functioning again. The front office was still full of people clamouring to know what had happened to their safe deposit boxes and the counter staff were hard at it. On the surface, except for a couple of policemen on the door, it looked normal enough. Behind the scenes, however, Fingerprints were still hard at work, covering the whole premises and checking the dabs they had found with Records. They’d found lots of them but they all belonged to the bank staff, with a few additional ones from customers. The gang had worn their rubber gloves at all times, so fingerprints weren’t really expected.
In the offices behind and in the narrow corridors, large policemen brushed shoulders – and not only shoulders – with buxom typists heading for the canteen or the ladies’ room. It was a confrontation that pleased both sides and Misset, at least, managed to get a date out of it. All the paper, envelopes, forms and files from the stationery store had been stacked in the office of Annette Didon, the manager’s secretary, adding more than a little to her discomfort and confusion, and the Fingerprints boys were busy inside the wooden cupboard.
One of them was holding a circle of wood. ‘Cut out with a keyhole saw,’ he said.
‘Why a wooden cupboard?’ Pel asked Gilbaud. ‘I thought bank furniture was steel.’
Gilbaud looked both sheepish and defensive. ‘This is an old branch – the oldest in the city. We still have some of the original furniture which is considered antique. It’s heavy and it was decided at head office to use it, but it’s due to go.’ He spoke fast.
‘But it hadn’t gone,’ Pel said bitterly. ‘Had it? And the gang cut a hole in it to remove the contents and shift the cupboard so they could climb through.’
They had nothing to work on but one smudged footprint on one of the sheets of scattered notepaper in the stationery store-room but they eventually found the carpentry firm who had cut the boards. The man who had ordered and collected them was described as short and squarely built. He had seemed nervous and had asked for a bill. The name he had signed with was Jacques Dupont but there were hundreds of Jacques Duponts. It was the name men signed in hotel registers when they were having a dirty weekend.
‘It sounds like Meluc,’ Darcy said, fishing in his briefcase for the photograph Aimedieu had obtained for him.
It was Meluc. The clerk in the office identified him without doubt.
‘He thought I didn’t know him,’ he said. ‘But I used to work for Bricolage Secours and he used to come there regularly for cement and tiles and things. He said he’d been told to provide them but didn’t intend to slave with a hand-saw. He asked for them to be made from old off-cuts and bits of leftover plywood. I’d know him anywhere. He was always a bit of a shyster who used poor materials and charged top prices.’
Pel was more cheerful as they left. It was the first mistake the gang had made. If Meluc hadn’t been lazy they wouldn’t have found even this frail lead.
‘But he was involved,’ he mused.
The telephone and the battery lamps had been hired from an electrical firm in the Arsenal district, also by Meluc. They had not been returned and the owner was far from pleased to learn that, when they were found, they would be retained as police exhibits for the court to see when the trial finally took place – if it took place.
‘That stuff means money to me,’ he snorted.
‘It means prison for someone,’ Darcy pointed out drily.
By this time the newspapers were becoming abrasive about the affair, doing their usual act of being wise after the event and jeering at the police. They never mentioned their own boobs, of course. Newspapers liked to imply that, like God, they were models of infallibility. Unpopularity didn’t worry the police too much, though. One half of the nation had always regarded them as the tools of a fascist dictatorship, the other half as half-baked, wet behind the ears dolts who couldn’t arrest a small boy on a bike. Some considered they were given to breaking heads for pleasure, others that they existed merely to be targets for brickbats and pieces of paving stone flung by students. At the very least, motorists considered them interfering busybodies, while old ladies who found them standing on corners wanted to know why they weren’t stamping out crime.
The pressure wasn’t allowed to die down. There had been plenty of telephone calls from people who saw a little easy money in the reward and thought they might pick it up. One woman had seen a man covered with blood at St Seine. But nobody else had, certainly not old Bridier, who had watched them emerge from the manhole. Every known crook and con man was checked again. Hotel registers – espe
cially those of backstreet establishments – were checked in case their men had holed up.
There were also the usual hoaxers who thought it funny to burden the already overburdened police with false alarms. One or two were picked up and were now contemplating their misdemeanours in 72, Rue d’Auxonne. A woman clairvoyant said the money no longer existed. It had been flashed, she claimed, to Mars by a streak of lightning. Every postbag brought letters, most of the anonymous ones accusing the owners of noisy dogs or people who refused to turn down their televisions, had sons with motorbikes or even simply, in one case, hung out washing on the Sabbath.
They did a round-up of everybody in the city with a known habit of removing things that didn’t belong to them. Every cop in the Hôtel de Police was on the streets and a few were even brought in from the surrounding districts to help. For a while life became very rugged for the city’s criminal fraternity.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ one of them said indignantly as he was hauled in. ‘You can’t lift a roll of insulating tape these days without being accused of pinching sixty million francs.’
There were a few false alarms. A man reported to have been flashing a large number of high denomination notes in a bar at Talant turned out to have just cashed in his insurance at the age of sixty-five. A woman who boasted to a neighbour that her husband had come into money was interviewed when the neighbour reported it to the police and the husband was picked up at Métaux de Bourgogne where he worked. It turned out that he had just sold a car. But the car’s distance indicator had been tampered with and he had his name taken and the man who had bought the car indignantly demanded his money back. The following evening, one of the city cops was called to a backstreet fight between two women. The wife of the man who had fiddled the car had just blacked the eye of the neighbour who had informed on her husband.
Finally, another man getting on a train for the north with a large sealed canvas sack was spotted by someone buying a ticket for Lyons to go and see his sister. A telephone message resulted in the suspect being hauled off the train at Montbard. He turned out to be an engineer on his way to Paris with an urgent spare part for the printing press of a Paris newspaper. When he was finally allowed to go on his way it was too late and when he arrived in Paris the paper had lost thousands of copies. As a result the paper was now indignantly threatening to sue the police, the railway and the man who’d made the report.
Nine
The next day, Pel had to attend the funeral of judge Polverari. Everybody who had known the old man was there – from the Chief downwards, and including Judge Casteou who had already been appointed to take his place. The funeral was a suitably sombre affair, with the black and silver drapings and the long cadences of the priest’s voice. The weather had suddenly become bitterly cold and they stood in a circle round the grave while the clouds built up like sheets of lead over the hills to the north.
That evening the snow came. The temperature had dropped until it became that particularly cheerless cold that always precedes a blizzard and the snow started in the afternoon, falling in a blinding white whirling cloud that made it difficult for Pel to reach home. Even as he arrived, the sanding and gritting lorries were out and he noticed a snow plough in the village ready for the morning. Evidently someone had read the forecasts.
‘You’ll need something warm on tomorrow,’ his wife commented. ‘Put on that thick sweater I knitted for you.’
‘Of course, Geneviève de mon coeur,’ Pel said, smiling.
But it was a false smile. Madame Pel believed her household duties included knitting for her husband but, despite her ability with money, she was no knitter and what she created, though warm enough, could hardly be called becoming. Pel decided to take the sweater with him and leave it at the back of the cupboard in his office.
Muffled to the eyebrows and wearing so many clothes he could hardly move his arms, he set off for the city next morning with some trepidation. But the snow plough had been ahead of him and it wasn’t as difficult as he’d expected. At the junction with the main road a lorry with a trailer had jackknifed and gone into the ditch. Its driver was standing near it looking shocked and dazed, talking to two policemen from a patrol car as they waited for a crane. Traffic accidents were none of Pel’s business and he pressed on, thankful he hadn’t been around when it happened.
At the Hôtel de Police, it took him some time to thaw out. He’d had the car heater going full blast because he was as warm-blooded as a frog and liked to live parboiled, and the walk from the carpark left him chilled to the marrow. He stood in his office as though petrified until Annie Saxe arrived with the newspapers and a bundle of letters for him.
‘I’ve been through the papers,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘I’ve marked a few things I thought you might be interested in. It’ll save you having to go through the whole lot.’
It would also, Pel thought with a glare, take the edge off opening a brand new paper.
The newspapers were actually just an excuse for Annie to get out of the sergeants’ room. Misset had decided she was a pushover. Despite her aggressive manner, he considered that she wasn’t big enough to put up much resistance. Misset had enormous confidence in his woman-killer tactics and didn’t expect problems. His approach was well tested and proved, and he knew she was unmarried because he’d looked at her file. Misset preferred them unmarried because it was always possible that a woman you picked might turn out to have a weightlifter for a husband.
He had opened his campaign with a comment on her car. ‘Very sexy,’ he said.
It had made her wary immediately. Her car was a Citroen 2CV, one of the old Deux Chevaux which were noted for the fact that they wouldn’t start, were uncomfortable to ride in, had the same suspension as a jelly and got blown off the road trying to overtake lorries. Annie’s had been used for years by her father in the woods round Belfort before he’d given it to her and when in motion it usually smelled strongly of burning. Misset’s comment had been stupid.
She pushed him briskly to the back of her mind and concentrated on Pel, wise enough to know that he was the one who mattered.
‘You look cold ‘sir,’ she said cheerfully.
‘I am cold,’ Pel snapped.
She helped by energetically yanking away several layers of clothing, almost tearing his arm off in the process. ‘You need something warm,’ she announced. ‘How about coffee?’
‘Send Didier Darras across to the Bar Transvaal for a bottle of rum.’
The coffee turned up within five minutes and the rum a minute later. Annie Saxe sloshed it into Pel’s mug with joyous abandon and he began to see that enthusiasm in the young might have its advantages.
The paper’s were still obsessed with the hold-up at Crédit Rural. The headlines varied from BANK DEATH WATCH PUZZLE: 23 HOSTAGES FACED GUNS to HOLD-UP ARREST FOILED: POLICE STILL BAFFLED BY ESCAPE. The headlines were no worse than normal, Pel decided, tossing them aside. Just the usual police knocking campaign.
He was just beginning to feel better when Darcy appeared. ‘Who made the coffee?’ he asked.
‘The Lion of Belfort.’
Darcy grinned. ‘How are you getting on with her?’
‘She makes good coffee. And the rum appears in record time.’
‘We might have a name, Patron.’
‘On the bank job? If he’s got his cut he’ll be on the way to somewhere like Paraguay by now. Better have the airports and seaports watched. Try Cape Canaveral. He’s probably gone into outer space. All sorts of people get up there these days. Who is he?’
‘Type called Dufrenic. Josip Dufrenic. Born Budapest. He’s a Hungarian but he’s lived in France since 1956. I spent half the night checking the names on that list of sewerage workers we got from Benoist. I didn’t find much. Just one – this Dufrenic. He has a record. From Reims. Another bank job.’
‘Sounds a possible customer. Where is he now?’
Darcy grimaced. ‘Not around here,’ he said. ‘He’s lying in a coffin in the Cime
tière de Pejoces. He died in November.’
Pel and Darcy ate lunch at a brasserie in the Rue de Tivoli. They hadn’t tried it before and decided not to again. The knives were blunt, the wine seemed to be suffering from metal fatigue and the rest of the meal tasted as if it had come direct from the freezer.
‘It’s the preservatives,’ Pel said irritably. ‘They stick so much in these days, there’s no need to embalm you when you die. Its a plot by the undertakers.’
As they talked, outside a dog lifted its leg against a lamp post. It seemed to symbolise their lack of success.
The bank job seemed to have reached a stalemate and Pel knew the investigation wasn’t moving ahead at all. Whoever had done it had planned it well and they’d kept their mouths shut. There hadn’t been a murmur from anywhere except Meluc’s wife despite the fact that everybody had their ears to the ground and all the informers had been tapped. He had come to a dead stop.
Morell, who had been put on the Sobelec television and video theft case, hadn’t come up with anything yet either. The only movement they’d seen was in the assault and battery and making an affray case at Bezay involving the circus twin, Georges Guillet. The fight in the bar that had brought him a broken ankle and a place in the hospital at Chatillon. But it had also alerted the police to him – and interest had begun over an accusation that he was the driver of a car stolen in Gray which had been used during a breaking and entering at Fontaine. There was still also the threat that his brother would try to spirit him away from the cop who was watching his hospital room.
‘I sent the Lion of Belfort to make enquiries,’ Darcy said. ‘Nice easy job for her. It’ll enable her to get her bearings.’