Pel and the Party Spirit

by Mark Hebden

  ‘How about coming in for a piece of cake,’ he suggested.

  Madame Routy’s steely heart, Pel had discovered, was not above leading her to hand out slabs of cake to small neighbours. But the boy shook his head.

  ‘She hasn’t made one,’ he said.

  Pel’s eyebrows rose. Madame Routy was a softer touch than he had thought, and he was surprised. ‘Why not?’

  ‘She said she wasn’t up to it. I’m going home.’

  As he wandered off, Pel opened his door. It was like entering a morgue and reminded him that, as he had for the past few days, he would be eating alone and would be breakfasting at the Bar du Palais des Ducs – until apartheid reared its ugly head, the Bar Transvaal – behind the Hôtel de Police. It was a prospect that didn’t appeal.

  The house was silent and Pel once more became aware what being alone meant. When he had really been alone – alone that was but for Madame Routy – he had never realised its meaning. Now, when Madame Pel wasn’t in the house, it was silent in a way that he had never noticed before. His wife wasn’t arranging flowers or singing one of the quaint little songs she seemed to pick up. She wasn’t in the kitchen or moving through the salon. There was no sound of her. There was nothing.

  There was no sign of Madame Routy either and he assumed quite naturally she was watching television. Nowadays, she watched in her room in the evenings but, with Madame Pel away, he suspected she had sneaked off and was probably watching wrestling, or Dallas, or Gardeners’ Hour – even, for God’s sake, something to do with politics.

  Moving through the house, he poured himself a drink, noting at the same time that Madame Routy had been at the whisky. He was just debating what he ought to do about it when Madame Routy herself appeared. He was just about to deliver a blast when he realised she had been crying. Her nose was shiny and her eyes were red-rimmed, and suddenly he found himself being sorry for the old trout. Normally he might have asked her what she had spoiled for dinner and received the reply that it wouldn’t matter as he had no idea what good food ought to be like. It was an exchange they had been using for years. Tonight was different.

  ‘It’s Didier,’ she said, without waiting for him to ask what was wrong.

  ‘What’s wrong with Didier?’ Pel asked, though he had already learned of the trouble from Darcy.

  ‘His mother’s worried.’

  She wasn’t the first mother to be worried about her son. Pel remembered his own mother being worried about him when he had announced he was going to be a cop. Cops, he had decided long before, tended to be people who kept a low profile and anybody with the names he bore would inevitably prefer to keep a low profile.

  How would de Gaulle have felt if he’d been called Evariste Clovis Désiré de Gaulle? Or Bonaparte? Evariste Clovis Désiré Bonaparte! He’d never have made Emperor. It had soured Pel’s life as a young man. Girls in a heavy clinch burst out laughing when he told them his name. One had actually laughed so hard she had fallen out of bed. What was more, she hadn’t bothered to get back in.

  He eyed Madame Routy warily. ‘I’ve heard about him at headquarters,’ he said carefully. ‘His work hasn’t been satisfactory for some time.’

  ‘It’s that girl,’ Madame Routy sniffed. ‘That Louise Bray who lives next door to him. She always went around with him. Now she’s going round with someone else.’

  ‘It’s a habit girls have,’ Pel said.

  ‘His mother wondered if you could have a word with him.’

  ‘He’s too old now for me to “have a word with” him. It was all right when he was small. He’s a young man now.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything? He always thought a lot of you.’

  Enough, Pel remembered, to cheat happily with him when they played Scrabble, enough in the days when he was courting Madame Pel to choose for him the right tie to go with the grey suit he kept for the day when the President of the Republic would pin the Legion d’Honneur on his chest; enough to go fishing with him; enough to enjoy bolting with him for the nearest restaurant when Madame Routy, his aunt, announced that it was casserole for dinner. He seemed to deserve a few thoughts.

  ‘All right,’ Pel said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  He finally got round to calling Didier into his office late the following afternoon.

  The boy stood in front of his desk. He was tall and good-looking in his uniform but he kept his eyes down and seemed sullen and uncooperative.

  Pel didn’t mention Aunt Routy. That, he felt, was the worst way possible to conduct an enquiry into a young man’s behaviour. Any suggestion that aunts were asking the boss to help control him would immediately and inevitably bring on a fit of the vapours. Instead he went straight to the point which concerned him most.

  ‘There have been complaints about your work,’ he said.

  Didier didn’t answer. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t even raise his eyes to look Pel in the face.

  ‘They say you’re not paying attention to it as you should.’

  Pel itched to introduce the subject of Louise Bray but that, he felt, would be a disaster, too. Louise Bray was too personal to be brought in and he stuck to work. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you anything to say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Is there something on your mind? Debts? Anything like that?’

  The boy lifted his head at last. ‘I’ve decided I’m not cut out to be a policeman,’ he said.

  ‘There was a time when it was your sole ambition.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘What happened? Everybody thought you were doing well.’

  ‘Oh–’ Didier shrugged. ‘Things happened.’

  It was impossible to get to the heart of the matter. ‘You never come to see us at home these days,’ Pel said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You used to come often.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘I still enjoy fishing and a game of boules. Your Aunt Routy still cooks.’

  Didier’s head lifted and there was a ghost of a smile on his face. ‘Not very well,’ he said.

  ‘She’s improved a lot since my wife took her over,’ Pel said. ‘And when she doesn’t come up to scratch I still bolt and have a meal in town.’

  ‘It’s different now.’

  ‘So it seems. Are you thinking of leaving us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind.’

  ‘We’ll need a month’s notice. I’d have thought that, as part of my team, you’d have learned fast and been on the road to plain clothes work pretty quickly.’ Pel lifted one hand in a gesture of frustration. ‘Well, under the circumstances, for the time being you’d better stick close to me. We’ve got a pretty sticky case. Body thirty years old unearthed by repair work in Puyceldome. You’ll have heard about it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sergeant Nosjean’s got a tricky one too. He might need help. We need someone around to write up the logs. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. So be ready to leave the office at any time. You’ll be working hard and for long hours.’ And let’s hope, Pel thought, that would take his mind off himself and Louise Bray. ‘How’s your shorthand and typing? Have you finished the course at night school?’

  ‘Yes. They’re all right.’

  ‘Fast?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And accurate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’ve got a job. See that you do it well because I shall be there watching. What you do when the case’s over is your affair but when we’re on a case I expect the best. Afterwards you can become a clown in a circus if that’s what you want but until then you’re a cop and I’ll be expecting you to behave like a cop.’

  As Didier left, Darcy pushed past him into the room.

  ‘Caillas, Patron,’ he said. ‘I’ve nailed him. Real name Luzeau. Lauren
ce Luzeau. Known as Lulu Grande-Tête, chiefly because he did, in fact, have a particularly large head. He was also a bit of a big-head in the other sense; too. He thought he was a big-time operator when actually he was just a demi-sel. No importance at all. Marseilles police knew him well. They didn’t think much of him either and it seems they were right because he got himself bumped off with another guy in a Marseilles bar. Thirty years ago, Patron. About the time our friend got himself sealed up in the tower.’

  Pel studied his desk top, deep in thought. ‘What else do we know of him?’ he asked.

  ‘It seems there were four of them who used to work together: Luzeau, and three others – Pierre Pirioux, Georges Pulot and Albert-Jean Sammonix. Luzeau and Pulot were knocked off in the Marseilles bar. Pirioux was killed soon afterwards in what seemed to the Marseilles police to be a fishy car crash on the Corniche. Sammonix went to America and died there of cancer soon afterwards.’

  ‘It must be connected with the tower at Puyceldome.’

  ‘Must be, Patron. It’s too big a coincidence otherwise.’

  ‘And our friend in the tower? Where does he come in?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to Le Bernard. He told me he remembers seeing a big chap with red hair working on the tower. That fits with Doc Minet’s thinking. He’d built a little platform at the top, Le Bernard said, and appeared to be sealing up a hole just under the roof. Next day he wasn’t there. A bit later – a few days, he thinks – he was there again. Then the next day another bricky appeared and finished the job.’

  ‘So who is he?’

  ‘We’ll find out, Patron. I’ve got some names,’ Darcy opened his notebook. ‘Baulier. Mesquer. Orvault-sur- Seine. Rèze.’

  ‘Who’re they?’ Pel asked.

  ‘They’re not whos,’ Darcy said. ‘They’re whats. Places. Where our friend from the Cat Tower might have worked. Places where the soil consists of clay with a calcium deposit. I got them from the University geological department. It was easier than I expected. This type led me into an office where there was a big map on the wall done in colour. He just looked at the key and pointed. Clay soils are one of their pet subjects. Farmers think of clay as earth which becomes as hard as brick when it’s dry. In fact, they use it to make bricks. But when it’s wet it was once considered sticky enough to resist all efforts to work it with ordinary agricultural implements. They’re getting over that problem these days, but a pure clay soil’s considered quite infertile unless it contains lime, potash and soda which make it amenable to cultivation.’

  ‘You sound like Leguyader. As if you’ve been reading an encyclopaedia.’

  Darcy grinned. ‘The point is this, Patron. Since it’s not very suitable for agriculture, it’s the sort of land farmers are quick to sell off for development, and that makes it the sort of land on which the government’s usually willing to grant permission for building. Baulier, Mesquer, Orvault and Rèze are all part of a long streak parallel with the River Orche.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I did a bit of thinking. Where would a guy get mud up to the knees? The only place I could think of was a building site. And a large project too. A lot of mud didn’t indicate a small project. Not one house. A lot. It’s on big building sites where the mud’s deep enough to work its way well up the trousers. I decided to see if there were any big developments around thirty years ago in these spots. There were. There was a new supermarket at Rèze. A new housing estate at Orvault. A factory making parts for tractors at Baulier. Houses for young executives at Mesquer. All in recent years.’

  ‘How recent?’

  ‘Some too recent. But the housing estate at Orvault was built around thirty years ago. In the late 1950s. The factory for tractor parts was a bit later. 1960. The other two were too late to be of interest to us.’

  ‘That the lot?’

  ‘It’ll do for a start. I’ve got the names of the firms who were involved. Thermine Super run the market at Orvault. Big firm, with a chain of stores. I dare bet they’ll have all their records and know who built the place. The tractor parts factory’s owned by Locarez. Another big group. I’ll get in touch with them both and find out which firms held the contracts for the building work. That should sort things out a bit. The mud wouldn’t be there after the walls went up so only a few of the contractors would be involved – those who employed bricklayers, which is what our friend in the tower was. After that, it’s a case of getting the names of the men they employed and finding out what they remember.’

  ‘They’ll be getting on a bit these days.’

  ‘Certainly over fifty.’

  ‘When I’m over fifty,’ Pel observed gloomily, ‘I shan’t be able to remember my own name.’

  Darcy grinned and pushed his cigarette across. ‘What you need, Patron,’ he said, ‘is another nail in your coffin.’

  ‘You don’t help me give them up. That’s why I shall be senile at fifty.’

  ‘It’s going to be a long job, Patron.’

  ‘Who’ve you got on it?’

  ‘Lagé. He’ll go to endless trouble so long as it doesn’t involve walking too far.’

  ‘He is due for retirement,’ Pel pointed out. ‘When I’m that close to retirement I shan’t fancy walking far. Especially if I’m as fat as Lagé.’

  ‘I shan’t find them all,’ Darcy admitted. ‘Some of them will be retired or dead by this time. But there must be some, and most would remember whom they worked with – even that length of time ago. We’ll find him. We have one advantage. He was big and had red hair. Easy to remember. After that it will become easier because his death has to be murder. You don’t seal a chap in a tower and leave him there for thirty years because he has measles.’

  Six

  The post mortems on the two bodies they’d found didn’t produce much. Body number one, the body from Puyceldome, had been dead a long time. That they knew.

  ‘And,’ Doc Minet said when he arrived with Leguyader for Pel’s conference, ‘because of the free access of air into the tower and the fact that it’s hot there in the summer, a gradual process of drying occurred. He’s really just a framework, because putrefaction took place long since. Flies must have deposited their eggs which eventually hatched and devoured most of the soft tissues, just leaving the skin and the bones with the remains of some red hair going grey. He’s still a bit twisted because when he died, he fell in a cramped position and he stayed that way for a long time.’

  ‘How did he die?’ Pel asked. ‘That’s what we want to know.’

  ‘You’re asking a lot,’ Leguyader said. ‘After all this time, with the flesh gone and a process of mummification, it’s virtually impossible to say how he died. But it seems no attempt was made to cover the body. There was no sack over him. Nothing like that. In parts where his weight rested on them, his clothes became married into the flesh. We had to soak them in glycerine to free them. There also appears to have been a certain amount of digging beneath him. Perhaps an attempt was made to get him out through the hole at the bottom. On the other hand, the digging might have been done by himself in an attempt to escape, though there were no tools in there, and from what we can tell from his finger ends he didn’t use his hands to do any digging. But he was a bricklayer by the sound of him and it seems he must have gone in through a hole at the top – we suspect, in fact, from the position he was in that he fell in – and for some reason wasn’t able to get back up the tower to the hole.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have had an assistant who could have helped?’

  ‘That might depend on why he was there.’

  It might indeed, Pel admitted to himself. It had begun to seem more and more likely that whatever their red-haired friend had been up to, it had probably been none too honest. If he’d been honest, why hadn’t he been helped to escape?

  ‘He’d be working from the top of a ladder, wouldn’t he?’ he asked. ‘So let’s get this straight: are you by any chance suggesting somebody climbed up after him and pushed him in? Or stabbed him or clubbed
him or shot him as he was leaning through the hole, so that he just disappeared inside?’

  ‘We might be able to tell you more about that later,’ Doc Minet said. ‘When I’ve examined him properly. But I felt you ought to know how I was thinking. There’s one other thing that might help. He was European. Judging by the overalls, a Frenchman, though he might have been an Algerian, but, with red hair, I’d think not.’

  ‘Nothing further towards identifying him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Teeth?’

  ‘The teeth are all there but dental records weren’t kept as precisely thirty years ago as they are now and we’ll have difficulty. It’s in hand, though. They’re poor teeth, too, so perhaps he didn’t bother with dentists much.’

  ‘Injuries?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘Nothing at all. At least, nothing we could find. After all this time it isn’t easy but there was no damage to the skull or chest. No perforations or crushing. We looked for wounds or injuries. It wasn’t easy but we decided he hadn’t been shot or stabbed.’

  ‘So if nobody shot him, stabbed him or hit him with a blunt instrument, how did he die?’

  ‘Poison?’ Leguyader offered.

  ‘And then stuffed him in there out of the way?’

  ‘He could have died in there of the poison. Taken by accident in food. Or given him deliberately before he got inside. Slow-acting stuff. But lethal enough to work after he was inside.’ Leguyader was always one for a bit of melodrama.

  Pel gave him a cold look. ‘Find any trace of anything?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Doc Minet said firmly. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There is another alternative,’ Pel suggested. ‘He might have fallen in accidentally and broken his neck.’

  ‘He didn’t break his neck.’

  ‘Could he have been strangled?’

  ‘No indication that he was. The upper horn of the thyroid cartilage – the hyoid bone – was undamaged. It’s a little bone and it’s the best indication there is that someone’s been strangled. It only gets broken when there’s pressure on the throat. In any case, he’d be a difficult chap to strangle. He was big and there’s no indication of a rope round his neck, so it would have to be done by the hands. And if he was strangled it must have been done inside the tower.’