Pel and the Prowler

by Mark Hebden

  This time it was the anger.

  ‘Perfectly ordinary clothes line,’ he explained smugly. ‘They’re different from ropes because, apart from the cheapest, the strands are woven, not twisted, and the weave shows clearly on the enlarged photographs of the victims’ necks. So –’ he smiled cheerfully ‘ – that won’t help you much. You can buy clothes lines at any ironmonger’s, at the Nouvelles Galéries, at street-corner grocery shops. Most women have one; some have two. People also buy them to tie up suitcases and trunks or cartons of books or crockery when they move house. I’d imagine that are probably 25,000 in this city. There isn’t much point in asking.’

  ‘Leave me to do my job in my own way,’ Pel growled.

  Leguyader rose. ‘Far be it for me to tell you your job,’ he said.

  Pel glared. Given half a chance, Leguyader would tell God His job.

  He stared angrily at the door as it closed behind Leguyader. It would be nice, he thought sourly, if Leguyader’s left leg could drop off.

  Nosjean was next. ‘The Abrillard theft, Patron,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve found the woman – probably also the man.’

  Pel sighed. Nothing was ever finished neatly in police work and the cases on the list always overlapped so that the slate was never wiped clean. And, despite the fact that he was supposed to be wholly engaged on the Prowler cases, he liked to be available to members of his squad if they wished to see him to ask advice.

  ‘Inform me,’ he said.

  ‘Name of Florence Remaud. She lives with her husband, Georges Remaud, at 7, Rue du Vieux Pont, Chatillon. He’s an unemployed bricklayer’s labourer. The police in Chatillon know him. He’s not got a record but there’s been a rash of break-ins up there and they’ve been watching him.’

  ‘Perhaps they didn’t watch hard enough.’

  Nosjean shrugged. ‘They’ve nothing they can pin on him,’ he said, ‘but they’re pretty certain he pinched a camera from a house in the Rue de Dijon when he was working on a building site nearby. Unfortunately they never found the camera.’

  ‘What about the woman? Does she fit the description of the one who tried to sell the tankard? Smart, fair-haired, slim.’

  It was Nosjean’s turn to sigh. ‘Unfortunately, no, Patron. This one’s a brunette and scruffy, and she’s hardly slim because she’s well and truly pregnant.’

  Pel sniffed and pushed his glasses up to his forehead. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing,’ he said. ‘This has been going on a long time and she was probably two or three months pregnant when they robbed the Abrillards and it didn’t show. She could be five months now. It shows then, doesn’t it?’

  Nosjean allowed himself a thin smile. ‘I don’t know, Patron. I’ve never been pregnant. But I think you’re about right.’

  ‘And this business of being fair-haired. She could have worn a wig. I think we should get a warrant to search the place.’

  At the Chief’s conference at noon, it was decided they should have even more men on the streets during the hours of darkness. Pomereu promised extra prowl cars and Nadauld said he could produce another dozen men. There would be complaints about overwork but they’d have to lump it.

  ‘Can we borrow a few more from the districts?’ the Chief asked. ‘And how about you, Pel? Can you spare anybody?’

  Pel offered Misset at once. He’d groan that his feet ached and doubtless go down with flu and it would take some doing to keep him on the job, but they’d have to try, if only to make his life miserable. All the same, Pel had a suspicion that they were wasting their time. Pushing men out on the streets wouldn’t help a lot in the long run. All it would do would make the Prowler more cautious, because he’d obviously never attack anyone if there were a cop around. And the best cop in the world couldn’t make himself invisible while, if the Prowler hid himself first as he undoubtedly did, then he’d inevitably see the cops before the cops saw him.

  That lunchtime he and Darcy tried the Hôtel Centrale again. They’d taken to eating there more often these days and Pel could only put it down to the more gracious life he was living since his marriage. Always brimming with confidence, Darcy had never hesitated to use the place but in his Rue Martin-de-Noinville days, Pel’s style of living had gone with the house he’d occupied and he had tended to favour the more prosaic Bar Transvaal.

  Gau, the manager, greeted them as if they were old buddies. ‘I expect you’re being kept busy,’ he said cheerfully.

  He had meant nothing more than mere conversation but, seeing the look Pel gave him, splintered and sharp as broken glass, he hurried on, anxious to put things right with a little jolly conversation.

  ‘We have a special guest with us at the moment,’ he said.

  Pel said nothing. The President of France? The Queen of England? The President of the United States? Brigitte Bardot even?

  ‘National lottery winner,’ Gau whispered. ‘He’s staying here. Arrived with an attaché case full of notes. Deposited it in the hotel safe.’

  ‘Locked, I trust,’ Pel said in the voice he normally reserved for Judge Brisard and those of his wife’s relations he didn’t like.

  ‘The safe?’ Gau smiled. ‘Of course.’

  Pel’s face didn’t change. ‘The case I meant,’ he said.

  Gau decided he was joking and managed a laugh. Fishing behind the reception desk, he produced Le Bien Public, the local newspaper.

  MILLION FRANC WINNER IN CITY,’

  the headline said.

  ‘DECIDING HOW TO SPEND IT. I DO NOT TRUST CHEQUES, HE CLAIMS.’

  ‘So he has it all locked in the attaché case,’ Gau explained. He gestured at a small spectacled man sitting in the bar with a large whisky in front of him. ‘That’s him. Henri Bayetto. He arrived this morning from Lyons. He’s here because he wants to start a cellar and he can’t make up his mind whether to concentrate on Bordeaux or Burgundy.’

  ‘Bordeaux,’ Pel said coldly, ‘is a medicine. Burgundy’s for the strong.’

  They used the quiet to discuss the Prowler. The press so far having discovered nothing about the attack on Monique Letexier, they decided to leave it that way.

  ‘Keep it to ourselves,’ Pel suggested. ‘Let him wonder what happened. Just watch her. If he doesn’t know whether she reported it or not, he might come out for another go.’

  When they returned to the Hôtel de Police, Nosjean had obtained the necessary warrant to search the home of Georges and Florence Remaud and was just leaving with Bardolle.

  The Remauds were surprised to see him back, because they’d seen him off the premises on the previous occasion with wide smiles as if they’d felt they’d seen the last of him.

  ‘I’m going to protest,’ Remaud said. ‘It’s a gross intrusion on human rights.’

  He was a slim, good-looking young man with horn-rimmed spectacles who looked as if he read all the intellectual magazines and belonged to all the correct political parties. He knew his rights and continued to quote them as Nosjean and Bardolle went through the house. They took their time, working carefully to leave no untidiness. There was no sign of the guns that had been used – whether they were genuine or imitation – no sign of stocking masks or the suitcase that had been used to carry the loot away, and no sign of the fair wig they were certain Florence Remaud had worn.

  ‘All chucked in the river, I expect,’ Nosjean murmured as they met on the landing.

  Towards the end of the second hour, however, Bardolle came up with a tankard in a brown paper bag at the bottom of a cupboard under the stairs.

  ‘Yours?’ he asked, holding it up for Remaud to see.

  The tankard was heavy-shouldered and looked valuable, but it was of pewter, polished over many years so that it looked like silver.

  ‘It’s not very valuable,’ Remaud said.

  ‘No,’ Bardolle agreed. ‘No thief would bother to steal that.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Unless,’ Bardolle suggested, ‘in his hurry he thought it was silver.’

  ‘Are
you suggesting –?’

  ‘Me?’ Bardolle was all innocence. ‘What could I be suggesting?’

  Nosjean turned to Florence Remaud. ‘This is the one you tried to sell in Chagnay, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Why did you try to sell it? And why did you leave in a hurry?’

  She glanced at her husband and he jumped in quickly with an answer.

  ‘You’ve only to look at her, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘She’s five months pregnant. We need the money.’

  ‘And the hurry?’

  ‘Because she was worried. She’d been on her feet a lot that day and she was feeling pains. She’s had one miscarriage and she didn’t want another. She came home and I put her to bed.’

  They couldn’t argue about it so Nosjean tried another angle. ‘Mind if we take it with us?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just to check it isn’t silver.’

  ‘You can see it isn’t silver!’

  ‘Well, shall we say we think it isn’t silver. But it’s as well to check, isn’t it?’

  With Remaud watching warily, Nosjean examined the tankard carefully. Underneath, round the rim in small Roman lettering, there was a name – Edouard Rummus, Lyons.’

  ‘Who’s Edouard Rummus?’ he asked.

  Remaud shrugged. ‘The manufacturer, I expect. It’ll be on everything they produce.’

  ‘How do you come to have it? Did you buy it? Was it given to you? Or did you find it at the side of the road after it had fallen off a lorry?’

  Remaud favoured Nosjean with a glare. ‘It was given to me by a type at Corlay. I built them an extension. They gave it to me because they were pleased.’

  Nosjean nodded. ‘So,’ he said, ‘if it was given to you by a type at Corlay, why did your wife tell the shop at Chagnay that it was her uncle’s?’

  As Remaud’s head turned, Nosjean caught the glance that passed between him and his wife. Remaud recovered quickly.

  ‘She was mixing it up with another one,’ he said. ‘That one was given to us by her uncle.’

  ‘And that one? Where’s that one?’

  Remaud didn’t bat an eyelash. ‘We sold it. For the money.’

  Nosjean nodded sagely. ‘I thought you might have,’ he said.

  Remaud was only partly right. The tankard had come from Lyons all right but Edouard Rummus wasn’t the name of the manufacturer.

  ‘He’s my brother-in-law,’ Abrillard said. ‘He has a small business in Lyons. Fifteen years ago they celebrated their hundredth anniversary, and they had three dozen of these made to give to their favourite customers.’

  ‘How did you come to have it?’ Nosjean asked.

  Madame Abrillard, her eyes still bruised, looked up. ‘They ran out of people to give them to, so they simply gave the ones that were left to their friends. There were only six left by that time. When they’d finished, there was still one left so they took it home and used it themselves. Eventually they gave it to us. Because I’d admired it.’

  ‘You can identify it with certainty as yours?’

  ‘Won’t my fingerprints be on it?’

  Nosjean smiled. ‘Not any more, I should think,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There’s a dent in the side where I dropped it. Near the handle.’

  Sure enough the dent was there.

  ‘I used it for flowers,’ Madame Abrillard said. ‘But I always polished it so that it looked like silver. I think the burglar thought it was silver.’

  Nosjean smiled ‘I think he did, too,’ he said.

  Though Nosjean was making progress, Pel and Darcy weren’t.

  Because they were beginning to grow desperate, they pulled in Josset, the man who had allowed Bernadette Hamon to use his land to park her car, and questioned him closely.

  He didn’t know any of the other victims but he was uneasy and they finally dug out of him that one of his neighbours had once punched him on the nose for molesting his daughter.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Five years ago.’ Josset’s eyes rolled miserably.

  ‘Were the police called?’

  ‘No. He just hit me. He broke my false teeth and my glasses. You shouldn’t hit a man with glasses.’

  ‘Men with glasses shouldn’t molest people’s daughters,’ Darcy snapped.

  ‘No.’ Josset sighed. ‘But it’s difficult. I’m a bachelor. And I think I’m different, and she was afriolante – very sexy.’

  They plugged at him all afternoon but all they could be certain of was that, although he probably wasn’t the Prowler, he could well be a Prowler in years to come.

  ‘Put him on the list of deviates,’ Pel said as they released him. ‘He’ll bear watching.’

  With Claudie Darel, looking more like Mireille Mathieu than ever, producing coffee for them or Cadet Martin bringing beer from the Bar Transvaal when they needed something stronger, they went once more through the list, from Wolfgang Schwendermann, who had found the first of the Prowler’s victims, right up to Monique Letexier who, but for Darcy’s restless prowling, would have been his latest.

  They had checked on Doctor Padiou’s admission that he’d known Marguerite de Wibaux most of his life and found it true. But it led nowhere and there was nothing in the fact that he’d not mentioned it, beyond what he’d said. Padiou had a light-hearted, indolent manner that made them suspicious but there was nothing they could prove against him.

  ‘Schwendermann knew De Wibaux, too,’ Pel said, going slowly down the list. ‘So, of course, did the other students – Sergent and Aduraz. Padiou also knew Bernadette Hamon. Doctor Bréhard knew them both, too, because De Wibaux’s father occasionally lectured at the hospital and he’d met her through him and through Padiou.’

  ‘None of them seem to have known Magueri, Patron,’ Darcy pointed out.

  ‘No.’ Pel frowned. ‘But Doucet knew Nauray because she was his girlfriend – and he also knew De Wibaux because she was another student.’

  ‘But none of them,’ Darcy pointed out, ‘knew Monique Letexier. Only I knew Monique Letexier.’

  ‘I expect you’ll get to know her better, too,’ Pel said drily. He took out a cigarette and stared at it as if it might explode in his face. ‘Is there no way at all to stop smoking cigarettes?’ he asked.

  ‘Only one I know, Patron. Smoke cigars.’

  ‘I tried a pipe once. All it did was set my pocket on fire.’ Defiantly, Pel applied a match, dragged the smoke down to his socks, and sat back, feeling guilty but better. He sighed and shifted the files around on his desk for a while.

  ‘There’s no pattern, Daniel,’ he said. ‘And there ought to be. Nothing common to them all.’

  ‘Except that he probably said “Whore” to them all, Patron, as he did to Monique Letexier. That’s something we don’t know because all but Monique Letexier are dead.’

  ‘It seems to indicate that he thought they were all whores. But they weren’t.’

  ‘They were out and on the streets late at night.’

  ‘But the people we suspect might have killed them don’t seem to have been. Not that it means much. Mass murderers never turn out to be among the names on the list. Grenoble will probably pick up some type for interfering with little girls and he’ll admit everything.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Darcy went on, ‘he doesn’t live here at all. Perhaps he’s from Langres or Chatillon and just comes in by car when he feels the itch.’

  Pel was silent for a moment. ‘Letexier,’ he said slowly. ‘L. An L’s different from a W or an H or an M or an N, which is what the others seemed to be marked with – the initial letter of their name. They all had three or more strokes. L has only two.’

  ‘M for Monique has more than two, Patron.’

  Pel frowned. ‘Could it be some sort of witchcraft thing, Daniel? A message or something? A propitiation? A sacrificial mark? There’ve been black magic murders before now. Ceremonial burnings. Mutilations.’

  ‘Not many inside the city boundary, Patron. Mostly those types come from the m
ountain or forest villages. Where the people are still only just down from the trees.’

  ‘It can’t be ruled out. Is he a nutter who believes in killing as a sacrifice? Do we know anybody who knows anything about it?’

  ‘I don’t number any among my friends, Patron, but I’ll ask around.’

  Pel was still frowning deeply, staring at the smouldering end of his cigarette.

  ‘Something bothering you, Patron?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Pel stirred. ‘I think next time he might use that knife he has for more than just marking their cheeks. The next one might be rather a messy one.’ He sighed. ‘You know what it’s going to come to in the end, don’t you?’

  Darcy nodded. ‘Yes, Patron. Something to fetch him out from wherever he’s hiding. A bait.’

  ‘And you know who that will have to be, don’t you?’

  Darcy nodded. ‘Yes, Patron. Claudie.’

  Thirteen

  Claudie Darel sat opposite Pel. She was small and slight and looked well-scrubbed, a highly efficient and attractive young woman, with straight black hair styled in a bob with a fringe coming down to arching black eyebrows over large brown eyes. As always, Darcy was impressed with how much she looked like Mireille Mathieu. Despite her ability, there was something innocent about Claudie, as not only Darcy had noticed but practically every man in the Hôtel de Police from Cadet Martin, through Nosjean and De Troq’, who were both ardently pursuing her – and Misset, who would have liked to pursue her but hadn’t a cat in hell’s chance – right up to Pel and beyond him to the Chief himself.

  She was wearing a neat blue dress and a blue jacket with brass buttons and she was looking brisk and confident. ‘I’ll do it, Patron,’ she said.

  ‘We could get someone from Paris,’ Pel offered. ‘Someone who’s experienced at it.’

  ‘She’ll probably be like a house-side and he wouldn’t look twice at her.’ There was confidence in the words, a certainty that she was attractive to men, yet there was no self-satisfaction, no smugness.