Pel and the Party Spirit

by Mark Hebden

  ‘The Director’s away sick,’ Darcy pointed out as they ended the day in Pel’s office.

  He pushed a packet of cigarettes across and, throwing caution to the wind in his weariness, Pel took one like a drowning man snatching at a straw. Lighting it, he drew the smoke down so far it seemed to be in danger of coming out through his trouser bottoms.

  ‘We’ve been going steadily through the Guinchay list,’ Darcy went on. ‘Checking every single girl and boy. Those who aren’t in the district are being traced and questioned. Some are easy. Some aren’t. One girl’s a doctor and she’s in Angola. She’ll take some finding. But we’re progressing slowly because most of them are still in this area for the simple reason that they’re not old enough to have moved very far away. One or two are at universities or technical colleges and they’re traceable. One or two have taken jobs in Belgium, England, Italy and Spain, but their parents have been able to contact them for us. We’ll do the same with the list from Vonnas when it arrives, but it seems they’re also short of administrative staff. They’ve promised the list as soon as they can.’

  He looked at Pel and turned a leaf of his notebook. ‘That photograph of the girl they sent,’ he said. ‘It was a polaroid picture. Photography says it was one of the new cameras fitted with a flash. Just the thing for kidnappers. Snip, snap, and you’ve got evidence that you’ve done what you’ve said you’ve done. I’ve got Lagé asking round the photography and video shops to see if anyone bought one, and if so, who. Also if anyone interesting’s been buying a tape recorder or tapes, because they used a tape to record that message they sent, and someone might have bought one.’

  ‘I think they’ll be cleverer than that, Daniel,’ Pel said. ‘Any word from Leguyader about the ransom note?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Didier was typing out the details in the room he shared with Claudie Darel next door, and appeared at Pel’s shout.

  ‘Leguyader: did you tell him we were in a hurry for the report on the ransom note?’

  ‘Yes, Patron.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Leguyader, always eager to score off Pel, had been noncommittal, but Didier didn’t say so.

  ‘He didn’t say anything, Patron.’

  ‘Go and see him. Tell him to hurry it up. We need it.’

  It was late in the day and Didier had been hoping to get to Puyceldome. Feeling mutinous, he took his time. He still occasionally thought about Louise Bray’s monstrous infidelity – she’d sworn undying devotion at the age of seven and had never swerved from it until he’d made the mistake of introducing her to former Cadet Martin. Mind you, he’d been aware that she’d noticed Martin’s good looks some time before when they’d been involved in an enquiry and ended up in the Hôtel de Police with Martin writing the details down in his notebook.

  Still dwelling on the circumstances of his vanished love life, he arrived at Leguyader’s laboratory in low spirits. Immediately he noticed the ransom note he’d taken there, still in the plastic envelope on Leguyader’s desk. He was studying it when Leguyader appeared.

  ‘Well, what do you want?’

  Automatically Didier noticed the difference between Pel and the Lab chief. Pel could be ironic, sarcastic, sharp and hurtful, but he wasn’t normally downright rude, which was Leguyader’s usual attitude towards lesser members of the staff of the Hôtel de Police.

  Didier indicated the sheet. ‘The Chief’s asking for the report on that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not ready,’ Leguyader snapped.

  ‘He asked for it urgently. I told you.’

  ‘What he considers urgent and what I consider urgent are two different things.’

  ‘Shall I tell him that?’

  Leguyader back-tracked quickly. He knew how far he could go. ‘I’ll get it finished and let you know.’

  ‘What about the footprint on it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Chief will want to know. He was interested.’

  ‘Tell him it’s a footprint.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘We don’t know. Nor are we likely to.’

  ‘What about the paper?’

  ‘It’s paper-type paper.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘If there’s more, it’ll be in my report.’

  As Didier returned he bumped into Pel in the car park as he left for home.

  ‘What did Leguyader have to say?’

  Didier toned down the replies he’d received. ‘He’s not quite finished, Patron,’ he said.

  Pel was on the point of climbing into his car when he stopped and turned. He eyed Didier sympathetically. He was going through a difficult period, he knew. His girl had transferred her affections elsewhere and that was always an awkward time. Pel had been through a few awkward times himself as a young man. In fact, every girl he met seemed to transfer her affections elsewhere as soon as possible. He was glad he’d married.

  ‘I’ll run you home,’ he said. ‘It’s on my way.’ He paused. ‘Fancy a game of boules?’

  The boy didn’t answer and Pel wondered if it were because he was heavily indifferent or because he was finding it difficult to be friendly after his earlier sullenness. It wasn’t easy for the young to change step.

  ‘Thought I might try the Bar de la Frontière,’ he said. ‘My wife’s still away and they do a good blanquette de veau there, and there’s room for a dozen sets of boules.’

  The boy didn’t respond but he climbed into Pel’s car without objecting. Didier knew the Bar de la Frontière. It was an old haunt of Pel’s in the days before he had met his wife, and they’d visited it often in the days of Pel’s bachelorhood. He didn’t go there much now but if he were passing he still liked to call in for old time’s sake. It was outside the city in an open space in the woods, with a huge sandy car park which was used less for parking cars than for playing boules. It was an old building, with a fading advertisement for Byrrh painted on the gable end, and it smelled of Gauloises, cooking, wine and sausage. There were usually one or two old men playing dominoes and one or two more trying their hand at boules, often watched by a couple of small boys and an old woman with a long loaf sticking out of her shopping bag, who had dropped in to rest her aching feet.

  The blanquette de veau was especially good and Pel ordered a carafon of red wine. ‘How about you?’ he asked. Previously the boy had always drunk Coca Cola but perhaps he was growing a little old for Coca Cola now.

  ‘I’ll have a beer, please,’ he said.

  As they ate, Pel looked at him. ‘How are things?’ he asked.

  Didier shrugged.

  Pel eyed him for a moment and came to the conclusion that the best thing to do, instead of fiddling about round the edges of the problem, was to dive in at the deep end.

  ‘Losing your girl’s always a nerve-shattering experience,’ he said. ‘I ought to know. When I was your age I lost mine on an average of once a month.’

  Didier looked up, startled. It had never occurred to him that older men had been through the same experience.

  ‘I was never very good with girls,’ Pel said.

  ‘Madame Pel’s all right,’ Didier said stoutly, and Pel knew it was meant as praise.

  ‘Best thing that happened to me when she decided to marry me.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask her?’

  Pel considered. He couldn’t remember that he had. He supposed that Madame had organised it as efficiently as she organised everything else, slightly amused by him, even probably singing to herself one of the old songs she liked as she manoeuvred him. He could only imagine that she had grown tired of him wavering about, trying to pluck up courage, and had decided to take matters into her own capable hands so that, before he had known where he was, he was on the way to the altar. He shrugged. She had made a better job of it than he ever could have done.

  ‘Do all men have problems with girls?’ Didier asked.

  ‘Some men’, Pel said, ‘have a lot of problems. I was one. It’s part of growing up. My
sister married a Rosbif, as you know. She’s older than me and once when I was visiting her in England, she took me to see a musical show that was being put on in the town where she lived. Amateur. It was awful. The scenery wobbled. The leading tenor was too fat, the heroine looked like a barmaid and the chorus couldn’t have made anything even of the “Marseillaise” – and anybody who can’t make anything of that isn’t very good. But it had a song in it I remembered. It went, “At seventeen he falls in love quite madly with eyes of tender blue. At twenty-one he’s got it rather badly with eyes of a different hue.”’

  Pel translated for the boy. ‘I remembered it because that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? But there are always other fish in the sea, you know. Or as they say in Paris, if you miss one bus, there’s always another one coming along in a minute or two.’

  Didier grinned unexpectedly. ‘One has,’ he said.

  Pel looked up. ‘Oh? Who?’

  ‘Bernard Buffel Bis’ sister. Bernadette.’

  ‘It must be confusing with everybody in the family having the same name. What’s her mother called. Bernadine?’

  ‘No, that’s the aunt. The mother’s probably Bernadelle.’ Didier gave another grin and Pel felt he was getting somewhere.

  ‘Let’s try our hand at boules,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling skilful tonight.’

  When Pel arrived home, the telephone was ringing. It was his wife who had telephoned to make sure he hadn’t dropped dead of neglect. He was so pleased to hear her voice he almost did a dance by the instrument.

  ‘How’s Madame Routy?’ his wife asked. ‘Is she behaving herself?’

  ‘Yes.’ Madame Routy at that moment didn’t seem to have the spirit not to behave herself. ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘It will be next week, I’m afraid. Do you miss me?’

  ‘If I lost my legs, I’d miss them.’

  ‘I tried to ring earlier. There was no reply.’

  ‘I was out.’

  ‘Police work?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Pel said. ‘A life-saving job.’

  At Puyceldome, everybody was agreed that the medieval night had been a great success. There were more than a few thick heads about still and already they’d heard of people waking up in beds that weren’t their own, one even, judging by his black eye, in the bed of someone else’s wife. The barman at the hotel was in trouble too. Having locked up the bar and secured the doors at 4 am after all the customers and the owner and his wife had gone home, he had fallen asleep in the cellar. It was unfortunate that he had had to be awakened by the police at 7.30 to unlock the door to let out a couple of German tourists who had hired the top bedroom and had come down to breakfast to find the bar and the dining-room still covered with the litter of the previous night’s spree and no means of getting out.

  ‘Suppose the place had caught fire,’ one of them said indignantly.

  Madame Plessis, the proprietor’s wife, still had steam coming out of her ears with fury and Aimedieu could hear her screeches as he sat at a table in front of the hotel, a pencil in his hand, checking items in his notebook. Alongside him was a plastic carrier bag containing a few things he’d bought from a mini-supermarket situated just off the square. He had a feeling his work at Puyceldome was finished. He had seen no Maria Theresas and no napoleons or silver dollars floating around, and, after thirty years, didn’t expect to. Instead of Ellen Briddon’s excellent meals, from now on he would be cooking for himself and the plastic carrier bag – free with all orders over twenty francs at the supermarket – contained instant coffee, tinned meat, and frozen vegetables.

  He had been present at the medieval night chiefly because Ellen Briddon had wanted to see it but hadn’t wanted to be unescorted, and he had felt that he owed her a little politeness if nothing else. She had given him coffee and drinks without number and had even fed him once or twice. It was obvious she had gone out of her way to please him, too – which was what worried him because things the night before hadn’t turned out quite as he had expected. Ellen Briddon had drunk more than she’d intended and had literally thrown herself at him. It had resulted in a session of very heavy breathing, but Aimedieu had had the sense to back off before they had gone too far and she had had so much to drink it didn’t matter much, anyway, because she had promptly gone to sleep. She had wakened that morning feeling as if the side of her head was about to drop off.

  He had taken his farewell of her early. He had delivered the photographs she had taken as he had promised but she had been feeling so hung over and miserable she hadn’t been very interested. Her husband was due back in a few days’ time and she had sadly accepted that, for both their sakes, it was wiser for Aimedieu to disappear from the scene. She had wept a little and clung to him, but she had seen the wisdom in the decision he had made and they had sorted things out with a degree of sense and determination.

  As he toyed with his beer, thoughtfully wiping off the condensation from the glass with his finger end, he could see Remarque with Béranger and Gus Blivet propping up the bar. He’d noticed them packing and assumed that they, too, were about to move on. They weren’t going to make a lot of money, he felt, the way they drank. He decided even that they were probably on drugs. It didn’t surprise him. Nothing much did.

  They didn’t look like addicts, however, but, then, they were actors and could look like anything they wished. No wonder De Troq’ had decided to pay a visit to Puyceldome the night before.

  The two girls, Mercédes Flichy and Odile Daydé, were sitting at a table nearby drinking black coffee and smoking. As he watched, the Flichy girl picked up the glass ashtray she had been using and passed it across the table to the other girl. They looked as blurred and dazed as Remarque and he decided they were probably on drugs, too, and that the cigarettes they were smoking contained cannabis.

  When he had taken Remarque home the night before, they had been there almost as if they were waiting to collect him. Béranger and Gus Blivet had looked scared but the two girls had looked angry, as if they had been having a tremendous row.

  Aimedieu had ignored the scowls and laid Remarque down. Remarque had given no trouble. As Aimedieu had let go of him, he had crumpled like a sack of rubbish into the only decent chair the five of them possessed.

  ‘The fool!’ Odile Daydé said, staring at him with disgust. ‘He was always a fool. He can’t hold his liquor. He should lay off it.’

  As he fished in his pocket for his cigarettes, Aimedieu’s fingers came in contact with the two portraits of the girls he had bought from Serge Vitiello the night before. He took them out and unfolded them. They weren’t particularly good. They were recognisable but, while Vitiello could capture features with an art teacher’s precision, he didn’t seem to have the flair of a true artist.

  Without thinking, Aimedieu began to draw a moustache on one of the pictures and a pair of spectacles on the other. As he stared at them, he frowned, then sat up. Seeing Vitiello across the square, he took the pictures across to him.

  ‘Got an indiarubber?’ he asked.

  ‘Artists always have a pencil, an indiarubber, a penknife and a sketch pad on them,’ Vitiello grinned.

  ‘I’d like to borrow the rubber.’

  Sitting down, he rubbed out the moustache he’d drawn on the portrait of Odile Daydé. He looked up.

  ‘Could you alter them?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They could be prettier.’

  ‘You in love with them?’

  They sat down together and Vitiello fished out a pencil and began to work to Aimedieu’s orders. Aimedieu fetched him a beer. As he placed it on the table, Remarque and his friends left the bar. The two girls rose and followed them. Aimedieu glanced about him and, as they passed, he picked up the ashtray they had been using and transferred it to Vitiello’s table.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ Vitiello said.

  Aimedieu smiled and studied the ashtray. He emptied it on the ground then placed it carefully in his carrier bag.

 
; ‘You nicking that?’ Vitiello asked.

  Aimedieu grinned. ‘I’m short of an ashtray in my flat,’ he said.

  Vitiello grinned back. ‘Once a cop, always a cop,’ he said. ‘You’ve had an eye on them for some time. I’ve noticed. You think they’re smoking cannabis.’

  Aimedieu smiled. ‘Something like that,’ he said.

  When Vitiello had finished his alterations, Aimedieu studied the two drawings.

  ‘I’ve hardly made them prettier,’ Vitiello said.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to.’

  ‘What’s behind all this?’

  Aimedieu shrugged. ‘I always alter the pictures in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘It’s a habit of mine. You can make the prettiest girl look like a grandmother with a few lines. You can make Robert Redford look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.’

  ‘Is that how you spend the evenings?’

  ‘It’s something to do when Dallas grows a bit dull.’

  Vitiello decided they had some very odd cops these days. As he disappeared, Aimedieu sat studying the pictures for a while, then he jumped up, thrust the carrier bag into his car and set off for The Cat House.

  Eighteen

  Pel had just reached his office when Darcy burst in. He looked tired but his energy was undiminished. His face was a mixture of triumph and disappointment.

  ‘You look as if you’d lost a franc and found a centime,’ Pel said.