by Mark Hebden
‘It would be a tight squeeze with two of them in there.’
‘It couldn’t have been done outside and then the body – of a heavy man – hoisted up a ladder and dropped inside the hole.’
‘There’s yet another alternative,’ Minet added gently. ‘He could have had a heart attack.’
‘Proof?’
‘None. But it could well have been something like that. If he’d been walled up alive he’d surely have protested a bit. Somebody would have heard him.’
Pel sat back, scowling. Doc Minet smiled. ‘People do have them,’ he pointed out. ‘He was a big chap and probably carried too much flesh, so it’s not unlikely. But after thirty years or so it’s impossible to tell if there was any disease of the organs, impossible to take cross-sections of the cardiac arteries to examine under a microscope, impossible to tell if there’s any trace of an infarct or embolism. The same applies to signs of petechiae in the lungs or anything that might suggest he was asphyxiated. Our friend’s just been too long dead and, in the absence of wounds or marks of assault, all we can do is assume he dropped dead for some reason we can’t discover at this distance in time.’
Pel frowned. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘It was a heart attack and he fell inside. So why didn’t anybody inform a doctor or the police?’
‘Perhaps they were up to something in there,’ Doc Minet suggested. ‘And when he died they took fright and bolted.’
‘They weren’t so frightened that they didn’t stay long enough to wall him up. Why wall him up anyway? Some-body weighed up the pros and cons. How old was he?’
‘He wasn’t young,’ Minet said. ‘But he wasn’t old either. He could have been anything between twenty and fifty. Older than twenty, I’d imagine, because he’s fully developed in every way. But younger than sixty because after fifty the bones begin to show changes. He was well built and I should say strong. With red hair and probably, judging by the bone structure, with a prominent nose.’
‘After thirty years,’ Pel said grimly, ‘that will be a great help.’
Even as Pel and Darcy were discussing the post mortem on the body at Puyceldome, Nosjean and Dr Cham were just buttoning up again after their own post mortem on the body found at Garcy.
‘Thirteen times,’ Dr Cham said, offering a cigarette. ‘With what I think were butcher’s knives. Whatever they were, they were pointed, single-edged and sharp. Five of the stab wounds were in the back, but none of them need have been fatal. If he’d had attention, in fact, he’d probably have recovered. The other wounds were either in the chest, stomach or side. Judging by the wounds on his hands and forearms he put up a fight and collected more wounds as he did so.’
Nosjean said nothing. Cham, in his opinion, was right.
‘What is odd, though,’ Cham continued, ‘is that none of the wounds seems to have been aimed at a vulnerable part of the body. And there were two knives. Both the same type but one larger and therefore slightly broader at the base of the blade than the other. Some of the wounds were wider than the others. Both knives were pointed and long – about twenty-odd centimetres. Say the length of a carving knife or the sort of knives butchers use to dress meat. One was used to stab him six times, the other seven, not counting the slashes on his hands and forearms and the one on his cheek, which I reckon were done as he tried to escape.’
‘If none of the wounds was so desperate,’ Nosjean said thoughtfully, ‘why didn’t he escape? Surely he’d try to run. He was found within reach of his car. The car had been moved, true, but he doesn’t seem to have tried to get in.’
‘Suppose he couldn’t?’
‘None of the wounds was on his legs. Why couldn’t he?’
Cham gestured. ‘Suppose, when he turned away from his attacker, he found himself facing a second attacker. Two knives were used because there are two different kinds of wounds. But I can’t imagine him being attacked by someone with a knife and then that they threw it down and tried to finish him off with a different one. And I certainly can’t imagine him being attacked by someone with a knife in each hand. I’m wondering if there were two attackers.’
‘Two?’ Nosjean said thoughtfully. ‘That seems to indicate he picked up two people. But who’d pick up two hitch-hikers these days? And nobody’s going to drive into those woods away from the main road with a couple of men.’
‘If one had a gun, he would,’ Cham said. ‘There are a lot of things you’d do with a gun stuck up your nose.’
‘But he’d never pick up two men in the first place. Nobody’s that silly these days.’
‘Well, you don’t often see two men hitch-hiking together,’ Cham agreed. ‘They’d never get a ride for that very reason. Suppose one was a girl. He’d be off-guard if a girl stopped him, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t be suspicious of a girl. But, having stopped for her and while she’s got the door open so he can’t drive off, out pops a man from behind the trees. It’s an old dodge. A pretty girl does her stuff to get him to stop. A show of leg. That sort of thing. But then he finds she has someone with her. Probably holding a gun.’
Nosjean had already arranged with the radio studio to issue an appeal for anyone who might have seen Michel Vienne picking up a passenger on the N6 on the day he died. It wasn’t a busy road but it was popular with hitch-hikers in the way the motorway wasn’t. The police watched the motorway and you couldn’t stop, and the only way to get a lift there was to ask motorists at one of the petrol or service stations. The N6 was different. It wasn’t so often patrolled by police, and hitch-hikers had discovered it was a good route to use for the south.
Cham’s theory had changed things considerably. Nosjean and De Troq’ had been busy checking and cross-checking on single hitch-hikers known to have been picked up on the day of Vienne’s death. Now they began to look for couples, and there was a surprisingly good response to their appeal. There had been a normal amount of traffic along the N6 and a large number of hitch-hikers, all young and mostly alone, though there had been a few boy and girl combinations. Nobody had seen two men seeking lifts.
Cham had been able to fix the hour of Vienne’s death by the half-digested lunch in his stomach so they could assume that he’d picked up his passenger or passengers during the afternoon and this helped them to fix a time.
But all the couples who had been reported to have picked up lifts seemed to have behaved themselves. And, since they had all been picked up well to the north of where Vienne had been found and had all been taken all the way to Lyons, they had to be eliminated. Some of them, in fact, seemed to have struck up a good relationship with their drivers, some of whom – older men with children who hitched lifts elsewhere in the country – had even been friendly enough to provide a meal on the way.
The case was becoming complicated with enough enquiries to keep Nosjean and his team busy. They seemed to have established a few possibilities, however, and Dr Cham had been among their most enthusiastic supporters. As Nosjean finished clearing his desk at the end of the day, the doctor was waiting to buy him a beer. As they rose to go, De Troq’ joined them. He had been working with the police in Garcy so that nothing was missed. He looked tired but he immediately held out a plastic bag. Inside was a woman’s hair-slide.
‘It was found where Vienne was lying,’ he said. ‘A bit lost in the grass. It must have been underneath him so it must have been there when he fell. Leguyader’s boys are undecided how long exactly it had been there.’
‘A long time,’ Nosjean said. ‘Women don’t go scattering hair-slides and hairpins about these days.’
De Troq’ shook his head. ‘Not as long as that,’ he insisted. ‘The Lab boys thought a few days at the most – perhaps the day before Vienne was murdered, perhaps even the same day.’
‘So whose is it?’
‘Well, whoever it belongs to, it doesn’t belong to his wife,’ De Troq’ said. ‘I’ve asked her. I thought it might have been one of hers and he had had it in his pocket. Something like that. She said immediately it wasn’t hers and th
at she’d never owned a slide like it.’
‘It’s not much,’ Nosjean said. ‘It’s a cheap slide and there’ll be plenty of them about. I bet you can buy them in the Nouvelles Galeries in packets of ten.’
‘It doesn’t have a manufacturer’s name on it. But perhaps we can find out where they were distributed and which shops bought them.’
‘Cheap shops,’ Nosjean said. ‘Not the sort of shops where they have files on their customers.’
‘You never know.’ De Troq’ grinned. ‘She might have been a raving beauty, a child of the nobility, a film star, well known to everybody–’
Nosjean grinned back. ‘–Who discussed her purchase with the shop assistant because there was a story attaching to it. She was on her way to an assignation with Jean-Paul Belmondo or Robert Redford and lost her slide and had to nip in to get one to replace it because she was running late. And they discussed it long enough for the assistant to have a clear recollection of it.’
‘But it wasn’t her,’ De Troq’ said. ‘She wasn’t the type. She’s beautiful and kind and had just been offered a part in a glamorous new TV soap opera. But she dropped the slide in the studio and another girl picked it up. Some girl who makes the coffee or sweeps the floor – a different type altogether, mean, cruel, grasping – and she picked it up and dropped it again while she was murdering Vienne.’
They grinned at each other. They were good friends and often put on little imaginative dramas. ‘It’s a nice line,’ Nosjean said. ‘Perhaps we ought to set up as script writers.’
‘Only one thing wrong,’ Cham commented dryly.
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re assuming that mean, cruel, grasping people are all poor. It’s wrong. You must have heard of Cinderella.’
‘That’s it, of course,’ Nosjean agreed. ‘We’ve got it now! It was one of the ugly sisters.’
Sometimes it was possible to get some fun out of police work.
They were all inclined to be busy with their own thoughts as they sank their beers.
The heat had come at last. After weeks of indifferent days and cool winds, the weather seemed to be trying to make up for its past failures. It was humid, and elderly men in the bar carried their jackets over their arms and wiped the perspiration from their faces.
Nosjean was thinking of Mijo Lehmann with whom he shared a flat. He couldn’t imagine how he had ever managed to live before he met her, and even his family were now beginning to approve. De Troq’ was just glad to be on his own base. Garcy was a small town with a small town’s comforts and small-town minds and De Troq’ was inclined to be arrogant. He had recently met a girl in the Palais de Justice who also had a title of sorts – Second Empire, not Old Regime like De Troq’s, but nothing to sneeze at – and he liked to feel he was moving in the right company. Dr Cham was beginning to see himself as a great pathologist and imagined himself moving without any problems into Doc Minet’s place when he retired. As he did so, another thought occurred to him.
‘Suppose’, he said, ‘that the girl who encouraged Vienne to stop and pick up her and her companion was involved in the killing, too.’
Nosjean said nothing. Cham was brighter than he looked and he was beginning to think that for deputies they were doing very well. Himself and De Troq’ instead of Pel and Darcy; Cham instead of Doc Minet; Minoli from Fingerprints instead of Prélat; Du Toit, Leguyader’s deputy from the Lab. A few bright ideas had turned up without any prompting from the big boys and he began to see them cracking the case without any help from their departmental heads. It was team spirit at its best.
‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.
Cham finished his beer. ‘The wounds,’ he said. ‘The depth of some of the wounds. I’ve been looking at butchers’ knives in Labarres’, the hardware people, and though they’re all standard sizes, there are none which fit the wounds exactly. They’re all a little wider. Which seems to indicate the blades weren’t driven into their full length, so that the widest part of the blade never came into contact with the flesh. That would explain why the wounds aren’t the right width, wouldn’t it?’
It certainly would, and it made Nosjean think.
‘That doesn’t seem to indicate the attack was made by someone with the muscle power of a man,’ he agreed. ‘It takes strength to drive a blade into flesh and it isn’t something a woman would have.’
‘And it doesn’t look to me as if they knew much about it,’ Cham said. ‘The wounds are just stab wounds, but they don’t seem to have been aimed at any vital part of the body. Vienne’s dead because he bled to death, not because some vital organ was hit. That also seems to indicate a female. I think men know more about these things because a lot of them have done their time in uniform and been trained in killing, and wounds are the sort of thing that crop up in the sort of books men read, the films they watch. Women don’t read that sort of book or watch that sort of film.’
He paused. ‘Suppose,’ he went on, ‘suppose he picked up two of them.’
‘Two of what?’
‘Suppose it was two girls.’
‘Would two girls go in for this sort of killing?’ Nosjean asked. ‘Surely not.’
But it was an idea, and the following day they began to look at the all-girl couples they had previously rejected. The thing seemed to be changing all the time and Dr Cham, unprepossessing though he might be in looks, certainly seemed able to use his brains.
Then they learned that the N6 had picked up a bit of a reputation they hadn’t so far been aware of. It seemed that men who were anxious to make sexual overtures to passengers they picked up liked to use the route because it was quieter and well wooded. As a result, girls who were prepared to pay in the way the drivers wished to be paid for the lifts they gave had started to use it, too. With this in mind, it didn’t take long to learn that Vienne had used the road often and from this that he had had a roving eye.
They didn’t go to Vienne’s wife to find out his habits, but called at his office and spoke to his colleagues. What they said indicated that Vienne wasn’t the saint his wife thought he was.
‘He liked the girls,’ they said. ‘He always did. After he got married, he kept away from them for a while, but it started again, especially when he was on the trot, doing his rounds of calls. He more than once admitted staying at hotels with women he’d picked up en route.’
‘Hitch-hikers?’
‘Wouldn’t put it past him.’
Seven
The interview with Vienne’s wife was more difficult. Vienne, his wife considered, was a good husband and father but she had a strong suspicion that when he went off on his selling trips he wasn’t above picking up a girl wherever he happened to be.
‘I don’t know,’ she insisted. ‘It was just a feeling I had.’
‘Would he pick up hitch-hikers?’ De Troq’ asked.
‘I think so. He was a bit soft-hearted and didn’t like to see anybody stuck.’
‘Even these days?’
‘He might have done.’
‘Girl hitch-hikers?’
Vienne’s wife suddenly began to cry. ‘A girl hitch-hiker more than anybody,’ she wailed.
As the questioning went on, it began to appear that Vienne had had more than a roving eye. He had had roving hands, too, and more than one of his wife’s friends had complained about his behaviour at parties. His wife had loyally and steadfastly turned a blind eye.
It began to put a different slant on what they knew, because it now began to seem that Vienne had been in the habit of picking up young girl hitch-hikers and then demanding payment in kind for the ride.
The hair-slide they’d joked about suddenly took on a new significance. They had assumed at first that it had been dropped by someone in a family who had happened to picnic a day or two before in the spot where Vienne had died, but now it was no longer the joke they’d made of it.
‘Let’s find out exactly how long it had been there,’ Nosjean suggested.
When th
ey got down to it, it didn’t take the Lab long.
‘Forty-eight hours,’ they told De Troq’.
‘Which means it was dropped about the time he was done in,’ Nosjean decided. ‘Even just before or during the scuffle. Let’s assume it was done at the time he was killed.’
‘In which case,’ De Troq’ said, ‘we might reasonably also assume that it belonged to whoever did for him.’
It was the sort of thing that only happened in fiction. A cigarette with the killer’s name on it specially made for his fastidious tastes. A perfume used only by one person known to the victim. A special sort of lipstick. A print from a shoe made for the foot of a cripple known to the dead man. A hair-slide – especially a cheap one – didn’t quite come into those categories but the chances were that it had been dropped by a girl engaged in a life and death struggle with a man trying to escape. It wasn’t much but when you hadn’t much it was a great leap forward.
‘Let’s find out where it came from,’ Nosjean suggested. ‘Is it a girl’s slide or a woman’s?’
‘A girl’s,’ Leguyader’s man, Du Toit, said. ‘I think they were young. Young enough to tempt him anyway.’
‘But they didn’t have sex with him,’ Doc Cham insisted. ‘There were no signs that he’d indulged. I think they’d just arrived and they went for him almost at once. I think they attacked him when he wasn’t looking. Perhaps when he was bending down, because one of the wounds is in a direction that would be difficult – almost impossible – if he were upright. Perhaps one of them dropped that hair-slide deliberately and as he bent to pick it up, he was stabbed in the back. As he turned to defend himself he was stabbed by the other girl and they continued to stab him.’