by Mark Hebden
Pel reckoned it was, too.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Inform me. After the type from the south – who came next?’
Le Bernard drew a deep breath. ‘Type called Poulex,’ he said. ‘But he didn’t stay long and it was bought by an American called Keitzer. But he never seemed to be here. He was a film director or something and was always somewhere else. Eventually, he went back to America. After that it was a chap from Paris called Duclose. He wanted a weekend house, but he only came in the summer months and then not often. He died. After him–’ he nodded towards the house. ‘–this lot.’
‘So about the time our friend was put in there it was owned by this Caillas or this Poulex?’
‘I reckon so.’
‘Why did Poulex sell?’
‘He wanted to do things. One of them was to open the tower. But his bricklayer informed him when he started work that if he went any further it would collapse. He sold the place soon after. He was only here about five years.’
‘Who was this bricklayer?’
Sous-Brigadier Lefêvre, the guardian of Puyceldome’s morals, a stiff-faced policeman not noted for his sense of humour, answered.
‘Type called Lupin, sir. Came from St Valéry-le-Grand.’
‘Make a note to see him, Daniel.’
Old Le Bernard grinned. ‘You’ll have a job,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘He went to live in America. Did very well for himself, too. His son, who used to chase my daughter, sent a photograph of where they live. It’s in California. Swimming pool and everything. Suggested she went out and married him. She didn’t fancy it. He was a bit flash. She married an estate agent from Goillac instead. She’s got three kids. They’re growing up now and she’s started work again – as a computer operator – and–’
‘Hang on,’ Darcy said. ‘Hang on! This chap who went to America. What’s his full name?’
‘Lorick Lupin.’
‘Any relations round here?’
‘There might still be some in St Valéry.’
‘What happened exactly? Why did he emigrate?’
‘I dunno. He was working on the tower and when he told Poulex it would collapse if he continued, Poulex told him to brick up the hole he’d made and leave it. He said he’d have one more try – from the bottom – and he took out a few stones and got inside to make an inspection. Then he put them back, told Poulex it wouldn’t work and left. He warned Poulex the tower was best left alone. He said he’d made it safe. He even worked late one night, I remember. That was the last we saw of him. He moved from St. Valéry to Arne and soon afterwards he went to America.’
Pel stared at the tarpaulin-covered sheet as if he were trying to see through it.
‘This Lucie Croissard,’ he said. ‘What can you tell us about her?’
‘She’s from here. Lived across the square for a while. She was Lucie Suley then. She married Henri Croissard – also from here – and they lived in The Cat House. When he died and her family married and left home, she decided the place was too big for her and the winters up here too cold. So she bought a house in the valley and sold this place. In the end it came to these people.’ There was a faint contempt in Le Bernard’s tone, as if foreigners like the Briddons were beyond the pale. ‘Now they’ve decided to do the same thing. And it has collapsed.’
‘So who’s he? Pel indicated the shape under the tarpaulin. ‘Could he be this type, Lupin?’
‘Shouldn’t think so.’ Le Bernard shook his head. ‘He’s got big feet. In fact, he looks to me like a big man. Loro Lupin was a little guy.’
‘So who is he? He must have been there when your friend Lupin got inside the tower. It hasn’t been opened since until now, has it?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps that’s why Lupin packed it up so suddenly, Patron,’ Darcy suggested. ‘Perhaps he found our friend here.’
‘So why didn’t he report him to the police?’ Pel asked, his policeman’s nose twitching. ‘There’s something here that smells a bit, Daniel. Something isn’t right. I think we need to see this Madame Croissard.’ He turned to Le Bernard. ‘Is she still alive?’
‘Lives with her daughter in Goillac. Last I heard she was still around. Try the bar. I think they’re some relation.’
The owner of the bar in the square had already heard of the discovery in the old tower and was enjoying the notoriety he had acquired as the relation of a previous owner. Half a dozen men were hanging over the zinc listening to him. They moved aside to allow the policemen to approach.
‘You’re the cops, aren’t you?’ the man at the bar said.
‘We are,’ Darcy admitted. ‘Chief Inspector Pel. Inspector Darcy.’
‘I’m Marc Plessis.’ The landlord pushed forward two glasses and a bottle of red wine. ‘Better wet your whistles. I expect you’re dry from asking questions.’
‘We’ve got a few more,’ Pel said, reaching for his glass. ‘About Madame Croissard, for instance.’
‘My wife’s aunt,’ the landlord said. ‘Lives in Goillac. She’s eighty-three.’
‘Address?’
‘Anny!’ Plessis turned and bellowed into the kitchen. His wife appeared at once, flour on her apron and wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. Her husband gestured at Pel and Darcy.
‘Police,’ he said by way of introduction. ‘They want Aunt Lucie’s address.’
‘Why?’
‘Better ask them.’
‘We’d like to ask her a few questions about the tower,’ Darcy explained. ‘You’ll have heard a man was found in there. Dead.’
‘She didn’t do it,’ Madame Plessis said.
‘We don’t imagine she did. But she was the owner around the time he was put in there.’
‘She lives in Goillac.’
‘We’d like to know where.’
‘It’s down by the river. She lives with my cousin these days. She says it’s too cold up here in winter for her. She won’t even come and visit.’
‘Just as well,’ Plessis commented. ‘She’s a disagreeable old trout.’
His wife whirled. ‘That’s my aunt you’re talking about!’
‘The address, madame, please,’ Darcy interrupted quickly.
She whirled back. ‘It’s in Goillac. I told you.’
‘Where? Exactly.’
‘By the river. It’s one of those streets that end at the river. He likes fishing.’
‘Who does?’
‘My cousin’s husband.’
‘Madame.’ Darcy was icily polite. ‘The address.’
‘Rue Josephe-Magne.’ Madame Plessis seemed to think they were stupid not to have realised that by now. ‘Number 17.’
‘Thank you, madame,’ Darcy said sarcastically. ‘You’ve been most helpful.’
When they returned to the heap of collapsed masonry, an ambulance had arrived and Doc Minet was arranging for the removal of the body. It had set in the twisted position it had occupied in the narrow tower, its knees raised to its chest, its head tucked down in a foetal position, and it had been impossible to get it inside one of the plastic bags that were provided for corpses. The people who had invented them hadn’t allowed for bodies set in odd shapes, so they’d had to use blankets.
The forensic boys were rooting around among the stones, removing them one by one and laying them carefully aside.
‘Anything?’ Pel asked.
‘So far, nothing,’ Leguyader, the head of the Lab, said. ‘Old newspaper or two. I’m keeping them. They might give you a date. A few coins. I think they must have fallen from his pocket when the cloth rotted. I’ll have them cleaned up. What seems to be the remains of an identity card. I think it must have been nibbled by mice or something and it’s black with age.’
The Press had arrived – Fiabon, of France Dimanche, Henriot, of Le Bien Public, and Sarrazin, the freelance – and they were demanding information. Darcy gave them what he knew. It wasn’t much and it was thirty years old, so it didn’t matter a lot.
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nbsp; As they talked, a message arrived via the local substation and Sous-Brigadier Lefêvre.
‘Call from the Palais de Justice,’ he said. ‘The juge d’instruction’s on his way.’
Pel scowled. He didn’t think much of legal interference when he was working.
‘Who is it?’
‘Judge Brisard, sir.’
Pel looked at Darcy. Judge Brisard was an old enemy of Pel’s. The Hôtel de Police, in fact, was full of high-tension cross-currents. Most people managed to cope with them but there were always one or two that were difficult to live with. Judge Brisard was one. He was a tall man, young for his job, flabby, wide-hipped like a woman, and with a nice line in marital fidelity which Pel, who had discovered he had a woman in Beaune, knew to be false. He had disliked Pel from the moment they had met because Brisard was unctuous and pompous and Pel was anything but. The dislike was amply returned and the occupants of the Hôtel de Police had been wondering for years which one of them would be the first to break under the strain and shoot the other. At the moment, Brisard was lagging behind and bets were being taken about when he would be carried off screaming that he couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘How long is he likely to be?’ Pel asked.
Lefêvre glanced at his watch. ‘Half an hour, sir.’
Pel looked at Darcy. ‘It’s time,’ he said, ‘that we were somewhere else.’
Mrs Briddon was still occupied with Aimedieu. Knowing that Pel wanted her out of the way, now that he had finished asking questions Aimedieu was holding her attention by admiring the huge beams that held up the ceiling.
‘They date back to the twelfth century,’ she said proudly.
‘I bet there’s a bit of woodworm there.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Mrs Briddon said briskly. ‘They’re as hard as iron. Any woodworm trying to make inroads into them would soon retire with jaw ache.’
‘Nice house all the same,’ Aimedieu observed.
George Briddon had vanished outside again to check the latest developments and Ellen Briddon was enjoying talking to someone of her own age.
‘We decided to come and live in France,’ she said.
‘You could speak French, of course?’
‘Well, not very well. But you can learn a language simply by living among the people, can’t you?’
It was a common fallacy that Aimedieu was inclined to doubt. As a boy he had been sent to a family in Portsmouth to learn English but, possessed of practically no grammar and very little vocabulary, all he learned was ‘Cheeky boy’ and ‘Have it again,’ picked up from the teenage daughter with whom he had played tennis. Judging by Mrs Briddon’s accent, it seemed she was likely to experience the same difficulty.
‘You speak English well,’ she said. ‘How did you learn it?’
‘Night school, and a lot of hard work.’
‘Oh!’ She looked faintly dismayed and slipped into speaking English rather than the laboured French she had been trying. Aimedieu decided it was a good job his English had improved a lot.
Ellen Briddon eyed him speculatively. Her husband liked to go back to England from time to time. To see his agent or his publisher, he said. She suspected he was bored and had often wondered if there was another woman. Aimedieu was not unaware of her sidelong glances. He was a good-looking young man and was used to them and knew what they meant. He tried to divert her attention.
‘Have you ever noticed anyone taking an interest in the tower, madame?’ he asked.
‘Oh, call me Ellen,’ she said. ‘My husband’s George. He’s a writer, and in publishing people get to first names very quickly. It would be nice to have a few friends of that category.’
Aimedieu couldn’t see a cop providing much of a social scene but he smiled and repeated the question.
‘Only the boys just along the road,’ she said. ‘They keep asking.’
‘Which boys?’
‘The actors. The boys who’re putting on the show during the celebrations. It’s going to be quite a big show. They’ve already started working up the party spirit.’
‘What sort of interest have these boys been showing?’
‘They asked how old the tower was and when it was last used. That sort of thing.’
As he finished his coffee and left, it occurred to Aimedieu, who was a bright young man with ambitions, that it might be a good idea to interview the young men in question. He got further directions from two men who were arguing in the middle of the square, apparently over the form the show at the end of the month should take.
‘Folk dancing!’ one of them was saying contemptuously. ‘Singing! Fireworks!’
As Aimedieu asked his way, he swung round, his gnarled face close to Aimedieu’s. He wore a paint-daubed jacket and an iron-grey beard and he stared aggressively at the policeman. ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘Who’re you?’
Aimedieu flashed his identity card. ‘Sergeant Aimedieu,’ he said. ‘Brigade Criminelle. Who’re you?’
‘Oh!’ The old man grinned. ‘I’m Serge Vitiello,’ he said. He indicated the other man. ‘Jean-Jacques Le Pape. We’re discussing the show we’re putting on for the tourists to finish the month. We’re on the committee.’
‘There are six others,’ Le Pape pointed out. ‘But we ignore them.’
‘Why?’
‘They’re not worth listening’ to.’
‘Won’t our finding the body in the tower put the tourists off?’ Aimedieu asked.
‘Never,’ Vitiello said. ‘Tourists are so dim nothing puts them off. In two days’ time your stiff will be forgotten. All they want to do is come and gawk. We’ve decided to go in for a medieval night. Dinner here in the square. Long tables down each side and across the top.’
‘Waitresses in medieval costume.’ Le Pape grinned lecherously. ‘Low necklines. Lots of tit showing.’
Vitiello snorted. ‘We’ll never afford that,’ he said. ‘And the girls at the hotel wouldn’t do it. The tourists won’t mind, though. We’re giving them wild boar stew. Good medieval dinner, wild boar stew. Even sounds medieval. Should please. Easy to arrange. The hotel lays it on twice a week for workmen’s lunches, anyway. There are dozens of boar in the Forest of Grasigne. But the tourists won’t know that. We’ve got a good show together – including me. Drawing portraits.’
‘You an artist?’
‘I’m professor of art at the Lycée in Goillac, so that makes me not an artist. But I can draw faces. Quickly. I once worked as a caricaturist. People like to see their own ugly mugs coming to life.’
‘We decided originally’, Le Pape said, ‘on playlets. To show how the town came to be founded.’
‘After all–’ Vitiello grinned. ‘–there must have been a good reason for someone sticking a town in such a stupid place as this. So we thought we might as well let the tourists know. We found the Molière Players. Seven of them. Just right for what we had in mind. Then two of them vanished, then two more. We said that they’d got to get them back or we’d cancel the booking. In the end we decided on a medieval night, anyway. Much easier.’
He indicated the house Aimedieu was seeking, set in the Rue Nobel, one of the winding alleys off the square. In the street outside was a big shooting brake with ‘Molière Players’ painted crudely on the side. It was white but plastered with brown mud. On the back door was the deathless message, ‘Save food. Eat Tourists,’ and in the dirt on the side someone had written with his finger end ‘Also available in white.’
The actors’ house turned out to be a dark little building with a rabbit warren of bleak stone-walled rooms, staircases and little in the way of comfort. It looked like the sort of place that would cost very little to rent, but the three young men who occupied it seemed as if they wouldn’t be able to pay much, anyway. They were occupied when Aimedieu arrived with checking the few properties they possessed. They looked half-starved, all with straggly beards and long hair, and wore ragged jeans and brightly checked shirts that looked as if they had seen bett
er days. One of them, tall and with pretensions to good looks, appeared to be in charge.
‘Jean-Paul Remarque.’ He introduced himself as they shook hands. ‘He’s Pierre Béranger. That’s Gus Blivet.’
‘Been here long?’ Aimedieu asked.
‘A month.’
‘Early, weren’t you? The show isn’t for another two weeks.’
Béranger smiled. ‘You don’t put things on just like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘You have to think about things a bit.’
‘What about these repertory companies that go around giving a different play every night?’
Remarque gave a nervous little laugh. ‘They’re different,’ he said. ‘They put on well-tried plays they’ve been doing for years. They could do them in their sleep.’
‘Can’t you?’
‘We’re only just starting in the game,’ Blivet pointed out. ‘And we do Racine, Molière, Sartre. In fact, we do everything. They’re a bit more difficult than the farces these other people put on. Besides, this will be a medieval show. We’ve got to find out what people did in those days.’
‘Why are you interested in the tower?’
‘What tower?’
‘The one that’s fallen down. You must have heard of it.’
Remarque grinned. ‘We actually heard it,’ he said. ‘I thought it was an earthquake at first. There’s a fault in the earth’s surface here somewhere, I believe. They found a body, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. Know him?’
‘No.’
‘So why are you interested?’
‘We’re not interested.’
‘I was told you were. In the tower. I heard you were sniffing round it asking questions.’
The three young men glanced at each other then Remarque smiled. ‘Oh, that!’ he said. ‘We were wondering if we could use it as a sort of backcloth. Do our stuff in front. It would look good. All that old stone. We thought perhaps we could drape it. A few banners here and there. We thought we could borrow a few from the Maine. They’ve got some they used for the 700th anniversary.’
‘The tower’s not in the square,’ Aimedieu pointed out. ‘I thought all the celebrations were to be in the square.’