by Mark Hebden
‘No, sir.’ Didier coughed again. ‘It’s not that. But I saw that ransom note in the Lab. It was on the table and I got a chance to study it. I got a good look at it. I noticed something.’
‘About the message?’
‘Not about the message. About the paper.’
Pel eyed him shrewdly. ‘Something Leguyader missed?’
‘Yes, Patron.’
Pel sat up. He had been joking and hadn’t been expecting ‘yes’ for an answer. This was one for the book. Next time Leguyader tried to tell him the police couldn’t function without the Lab, he’d be able to retort with the information that the Lab couldn’t function without the sharp eyes of the police – even those of the lowliest cadet. He hoped what was being offered was good.
‘Inform me,’ he said.
‘It was on a page torn from a notebook, Patron.’
‘That we know. So?’
‘One edge of the paper was faded.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, a little while ago I had to buy an extra notebook. Inspector Darcy gave me a dressing down for not having a spare, and I went across to the shop in the square at Puyceldome and bought one.’
‘And?’
Didier laid the notebook he’d acquired on the counter. Pel studied it. One edge was faded, the colour of the blue lines paler, the paper slightly browner.
‘Tell me more,’ he suggested.
‘That’s where I met Bernadette Buffel. The shopkeeper’s her aunt.’
‘Everybody there’s related.’
‘Yes, Patron. We got talking. She apologised because the notebook had faded a bit. They’d had it in stock a long time and it had been sitting on a shelf in the sun. They don’t sell a lot of things. Most people go into Goillac to do their shopping at the supermarket there. I said it didn’t matter because it was just important I had a notebook.’
‘Because your senior officer had just given you a dressing down for not having a spare?’
‘Yes, Patron. But I noticed that the ransom demand note’s faded in exactly the same way. Along the same edge.’
‘And what conclusion did you reach?’
‘That it had come from the same shop, even the same pile.’
Pel was silent for a moment. ‘I trust’, he said eventually, ‘that you made out a good case for yourself. Nasty-minded superior officer. Long-suffering cadet. And that the young lady was duly sympathetic and in the end agreed to take a walk with you.’
Didier was silent. Pel looked up at him.
‘No matter,’ he said. ‘It happens to us all when we’re young. If nothing else, it shows you can use your brain. When you’ve learned to be patient and suffer the knocks fortune gives you in the shape of boring jobs, inconstant young women and unpleasant elderly inspectors, you have the makings of a policeman. You’d be wasted as a clerk in a railway station. In the meantime, we’ll say nothing of the fact that you were in Puyceldome when you probably weren’t supposed to be.’
As Pel was enjoying himself at Didier’s expense, the troops were gathering.
During the course of all enquiries there had to be times when everybody was brought together to discuss what had happened. It was the time when the superior officers were able to lay down the general direction of their thoughts, and when the junior officers, those who did the leg work, had an opportunity to produce any thoughts they might have had. Pel believed firmly in his conferences and so did the Chief, who held his own regularly, and this was an emergency one called hurriedly because of the circumstances. Pel’s brain was ticking away like clockwork and Didier’s disclosure had set things in motion. The local cops had been given instructions to keep their eyes open and report on movements while Pel’s men were brought in at a rush to see what they had to contribute. Among Pel’s team were one or two bright boys who occasionally did a bit of thinking and on more than one occasion they had changed the direction of an enquiry. As Brisard had said, it was team spirit, but not quite as Brisard visualised it. He liked to see himself directing and everybody else jumping to attention.
Pel’s conferences were always free and easy affairs but this one concerned two vicious murders and a kidnapping – never a formula for calm. The demise of Alfred Fouché had been removed from the list, of course. They were never going to get any further with that now, and the police at Goillac had been informed of what had happened and, what was more, that the credit for sorting the affair out would go into Pel’s statistics not theirs.
Darcy gave them the latest on the affair at Puyceldome, then they turned to the other cases.
‘We’ve got names,’ Nosjean said. ‘One of them’s called Gabrielle and the other’s Sonia.’
‘Not much to go on,’ the Chief observed. ‘No surnames?’
‘Nothing definite, sir. The names they gave at the hostel at St Just were false and the hostel didn’t know what their real ones were. But one of the staff, a girl called Jeannette Rebichon, came forward. She’s employed in the office. She heard about our enquiry and she realised the names they’d given were wrong. Apparently the older of the two girls dropped her shoulder bag in the hall as they were leaving and her belongings spilled out. The Rebichon girl helped her pick them up and she got a glimpse of her identity card. Her surname appeared to be Dufort or Durand or Dunois. She wasn’t sure which but when she heard of our enquiry and the names that had been passed on to us, she felt she had to contact us.’
‘Have you checked?’ Pel asked.
‘As far as we can, Patron. But there are a lot of names begining with “Du” – Durand, Dufort, Dugast, Ducret, Dubois. There are hundreds of them.’
Pel said nothing and Nosjean became silent. He was still at a bit of a loss. He had the names and he had the movements of the owners up to and just after the murders of Vienne and Burges. After that they had lost them and he could only assume they had gone to ground somewhere and were lying low. They had questioned every contact of Vienne in the hope that his murderers might have been known to him. In Burges’ case he had obviously simply been doing his duty and couldn’t possibly have had any personal connections with his killers. But they had studied Vienne’s papers and his diary, and checked every single telephone number they had found. Most of them turned out to be business contacts but one or two seemed to be thinly disguised names of girls. One number alongside the name. ‘Jacques’, turned out to belong to a girl by the name of Jacqueline. Another girl was listed as the name of a firm. It had become clear that Vienne had had an eye for the main chance sexually, and they had turned up a number of female contacts who clearly existed for him for no other reason but for overnight stops when he was away from his wife. He had them all over the west and south of France.
‘But we put out a request for information,’ Nosjean explained. ‘Asking if anyone knew a girl – Christian name Gabrielle, surname beginning with “Du” – aged about nineteen, who’d been involved with the police. We found one who called herself Gabrielle Dufort. Her papers are believed to be false though. She was known to be strong-willed. She had a sister and two brothers but she was able to reduce all of them and her mother to tears – separately or all together. She was known to have tried hard drugs while still very young and liked watching violent and porno videos and films and reading books about violence and sex. She worked for a time as a hairdresser but it didn’t last. Even before she entered her teens the family was unable to exercise any control over her. Finally, she ran away. She was placed in a home for delinquents and it was there she met another girl – name Sonia Gaum – and they joined forces and became a formidable team, too much even for the authorities. I think they’re the girls we want.’
Nosjean turned a sheet of his notebook. ‘Both – either accidentally or deliberately as a means of escaping – somehow contracted venereal disease and were transferred to hospital for treatment. From there they escaped – three months before two girls answering their description were seen in Beaune purchasing butchers’ knives. They’d taken with them money they’d stol
en or bullied from other prisoners. They were good at that sort of thing. But the money they took wasn’t much and they were in need of more and they obviously decided it was worth murdering to obtain it. All we have to do now is find them.’
They discussed the Vienne and Burges cases as far as they could then turned to the kidnapping of Sybille Junot. Dunoisse, from Treffort, and his deputy were present and Darcy had a pile of papers in front of him containing the names from the Lycées at Guinchay and Vonnas. He wasn’t looking forward to the job of sorting them out, and the belief that the kidnapping was somehow connected to the murder cases was still only a hunch rather than a fact.
It was about this time that Aimedieu produced the drawings he’d bought from Serge Vitiello, doctored a little here and there by himself and the artist.
‘Where did you get these?’ Nosjean asked sharply.
‘Puyceldome. Artist there drew them.’
‘He copied the Photofits?’
Aimedieu shook his head. ‘He drew them from life.’ His smile grew more self-satisfied as he laid the photograph he’d taken of Ellen Briddon on the table. He’d had Photography blow it up.
Pel stared at it. ‘Pretty,’ he said. ‘So?’
‘Look at it carefully, Patron.’
Pel did. ‘I see a woman,’ he said. ‘A pretty woman. Madame Briddon, I believe. You’ve been paying her a lot of attention, I hear.’
The bugger had eyes in the back of his head, Aimedieu decided. ‘Only as far as the job permitted, Patron,’ he said. ‘I got a lot of information from her.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No, Patron.’
‘So, why the photograph?’
‘Look at the background, Patron. It’s Puyceldome. It shows members of the Molière Company who gave the medieval show there. Quite clearly.’
‘Sinking beers.’
‘Without their make-up, Patron.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Look at the girls, Patron.’ Aimedieu’s finger fell on one of the faces. ‘She’s not wearing glasses. She took them off because they didn’t wear specs in the Middle Ages. She has thin eyebrows and the other one, you’ll notice, has thin lips. Their appearance around Puyceldome was always assisted by make-up. But in the photograph they’ve wiped that make-up off with the make-up they put on for the show and, because they thought nobody was looking at them and it was dark, perhaps because they’d had a drink or two, they haven’t replaced what was underneath. It was taken with Madame Briddon’s camera. By flash.’
‘Did she take it?’
‘No, I did.’
‘Deliberately?’
‘Chiefly to please Madame Briddon, Patron. I didn’t realise its importance at first.’ Aimedieu’s finger jabbed again. ‘This one always wore glasses round Puyceldome. Here she isn’t wearing them.’
‘Go on.’
Aimedieu gestured at the picture. ‘Those glasses she wore didn’t magnify,’ he said. ‘They’re just property glasses. The sort people wear on stage. I’ve seen her reading without them and I once saw them on the table resting on a newspaper. They did nothing for the print. She didn’t need them. They were just a disguise, Patron. I think they’re the girls Nosjean’s after.’
Pel studied Aimedieu. He didn’t like praising the younger members of his team too much in case it went to their heads and they started demanding extra pay, promotion or just time off, but this time he felt Aimedieu deserved a word. He hadn’t just stumbled on something. He’d used his eyes and his head.
‘I think that was very perceptive of you, mon brave,’ he said. ‘You may well be right.’
Praise from Pel was praise indeed. Aimedieu felt two metres tall.
‘Well, you know the descriptions, Patron,’ he went on. ‘The tall one was blonde. Well, now she’s dark. And the smaller one who was dark is now gingerish. They were also said to have been well developed–’
‘So how do we account for girls with big boobs now being a different shape?’ Darcy asked.
‘Binding.’ Aimedieu had looked it up. ‘From time to time women appear on the stage as boys or men. They flatten themselves.’
‘Does this Remarque character climb into bed with them?’
‘Not with the Daydé girl. I once talked to him about his family. I asked him how he came to be an actor. He mentioned he had two sisters, and a brother who went to Canada. One sister married, the other had a row with the family and walked out. Isn’t that what Nosjean’s Gabrielle Dufort did? She had a sister and two brothers. Same family as Remarque. It came together when Remarque picked a quarrel with young Didier over Bernard Buffel’s granddaughter. Remarque isn’t his name. His name’s Pierre Dupont.’
Darcy looked up quickly. ‘Dupont? You’re sure?’
‘I saw his papers. The local cop demanded to see them. They were made out in the name of Pierre Dupont. He calls himself Remarque for the stage. His real name’s Dupont and, I reckon, so is hers.’
There was a long silence as Aimedieu became silent.
‘She’s his sister, Patron, I bet,’ he went on. ‘When they murdered Vienne they moved back north for safety and Burges bumped into them and they did for him with Vienne’s gun. So what then? They had to go out of circulation for a bit. They’d been on drugs and probably still were, so the obvious place to head for was where they could be certain of safety – Big Brother’s. They took the place of two girls who left. Since I’d never seen the first two I assumed they were the same girls. Especially as they used the same names and turned up with a third girl as if they were all together. The other girl left – probably because Remarque tried to get into her bed, probably because she suspected something fishy was going on and decided she was best out of it. It was sheer chance they all arrived together and I didn’t associate them with Nosjean’s case.
Pel said nothing and Aimedieu went on. ‘They could even fit into the acting lark. Dupont, or whatever she’s called, knew how to play a guitar and sing and do tricks. She could even do a bit of juggling. She did it with her brother when they were young. He said so. The only one without any experience was the Flichy girl – Sonia Gaum – and she didn’t have much to do but sing and dance. It was awful. But it didn’t look awful because it was medieval and, if you ask me, everything medieval’s awful.’
There was a ripple of laughter then De Troq’ spoke.
‘I think Aimedieu’s right,’ he said firmly. ‘I think this type, Remarque, follows Speedy Sam and Philippe Douanet, known as Gorgeous. Douanet told me he was a carpenter and that he’d done a course in design at the Technical College, but when I enquired, it turned out to be stage design. He’d built stage sets and it seems he knew Marceau because Marceau painted the flats he’d built. And they were both at the Théâtre des Beaux Arts at the same time as this Remarque type. I let Douanet out and followed him to see where he went. He went to Puyceldome the night of the show. Marceau was there, too – fixing some sort of screen he’d painted to hide the band. They went into the bar and this Remarque type joined them.’ De Troq’ gestured. ‘Who better for the job, Patron? Dupont gets around, arranging his little shows.’
Pel lit a cigarette and drew on it slowly, almost as though he were trying to make it last all day. ‘Could one of these two girls have been the old school friend Sybille Junot said she met?’ he asked quietly.
They all became silent again as they were suddenly presented with a whole new can of worms. Darcy furiously began to rummage through the lists of names from Guinchay and Vonnas.
‘If only the buggers would put them in alphabetical order,’ he said. Then he slapped the sheets. ‘There’s one here!’ he said. ‘Gabrielle Dupont! Same town. Same school, too, Patron.’
‘They probably did know the girl,’ Pel said. ‘And they were surprised when they met her in the Chemin des Marguerites at Treffort.’
‘They probably weren’t thinking of kidnap then, though, Patron,’ Darcy said. ‘Not at first. Probably just thinking of lying low at Puyceldo
me under Big Brother’s wing. All they probably thought was envy at Sybille Junot having come into money. But then – or soon afterwards – it dawned on them what she was worth.’
‘What do you think, Nosjean?’
‘Girls don’t usually go in for kidnapping, Patron.’
‘They don’t usually go in for murder,’ Darcy said sharply. ‘But these two did. Twice.’
‘They’re certainly known to be vicious,’ Nosjean agreed. ‘They’re also known to be tough.’
‘If they’re vicious enough to murder,’ Pel said, ‘they’d be vicious enough to kidnap someone. Especially Sybille Junot, who’s small and slight. She must have bumped into them on the bridle-path as they were making their way back north. They’d probably taken it after they shot Burges to get away from the main roads where we were looking for them. She mentioned meeting an old school friend.’
Darcy took up the story. ‘And the old school friend had a friend with her. They exchanged the time of day, probably even tried to borrow money off her. She might even have given them some, except that she never carried any. But as she rode off, they started thinking. She’d doubtless told them why she was there and the following day they waited for her, dragged her from the saddle, bundled her into a car and drove her away.’
‘Only one thing wrong with that idea, Patron,’ Nosjean said dryly. ‘They couldn’t drive. They’d been in institutions since they were old enough to drive, so they never learned.’
‘The Dupont girl’s learning now,’ Aimedieu pointed out. ‘Fast, too, I dare bet. She’ll be hell on wheels when she can. Literally.’
Pel was still mulling things over. ‘You can’t kidnap a girl on your own,’ he pointed out. ‘Not even a child. An adult would require three or even four. One to drive, two to bundle the victim into the car. Another to be ready with a blanket to throw over her.’
‘If the Dupont girl knew her brother was on drugs,’ De Troq’ said, ‘she could easily blackmail him into helping.’