by Mark Hebden
The apartment was bigger and better furnished than Duche’s, as though Belec was more comfortably established in the world of crime. They probably had to serve an apprenticeship, Nosjean thought, before they started making money at it.
The woman who opened the door to him was older than the girl in the Impasse St Mesmir and she had a look of security about her, despite the calculating eyes and blonde hair. She had clearly long since come to terms with living with a criminal.
‘Madame Belec?’ Nosjean asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like to speak to your husband.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Is he at home?’
‘No.’
‘What about the Mercedes outside? Is that your husband’s?’ Nosjean couldn’t imagine it being anyone else’s.
She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t he take it with him?’
‘One of his friends picked him up.’
‘Why?’
‘They were eating in town and he didn’t want to be caught driving with drink in him.’
With his record, Nosjean decided, it was probably a good idea.
‘Know where he is now?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ You could hardly have called her helpful.
Nosjean drew a deep breath. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d like to know.’
‘It’s easy enough. Follow your nose back to the Hôtel de Police. He’s there. They’ve just arrested him. He was on the telephone just now telling me to get his lawyer down there.’
Nosjean was startled. For once, it seemed, Misset must have shown some initiative and, instead of grumbling about having to work at nights, had discovered something and nailed Belec. It seemed to be time to go back to the Hôtel de Police.
The sergeants’ room was littered with beer bottles, coffee cups and paper, and the ancient typewriters which were unloaded on the sergeants when they were no longer fit for anyone else to use stood silent. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke and looked shabbier than normal because the cleaning women didn’t come in until first thing in the morning.
Nosjean stared about him. It was certainly not an office that might be used by a successful young executive, and he suddenly wondered why he’d become a policeman. He could only put it down to the fact that he felt, as he’d always felt, that he had a vocation. He’d wanted to be a policeman even when he was at school and, despite the pleas of his parents and his three adoring elder sisters, all of whom could see a bright future for him in one of the professions, he’d chosen instead to pound the beat until he could get on to plain clothes work. It was only when he’d reached the rank of sergeant and managed to distinguish himself in a variety of small ways that their protests had been stilled. Now they saw him as a sort of minor James Bond and took to buying him quartz watches and warm clothes.
He tossed his notebook on to his desk, noting as he did so the cigarette burns placed there by Misset who had a habit of sitting on it to discuss his woes or the latest attractive secretary downstairs.
Sergeant Lagé was bent over the next desk talking to Alain Rodsky, the social worker from the Ministry of Welfare. Rodsky operated with the police and at that moment was engaged on the case of a seventy-five-year-old man who had tried to drown his wife by stuffing her head in a bucket because, he claimed, she was making eyes at the manager of the local supermarket.
‘Perhaps the best thing,’ Rodsky was saying cheerfully, ‘would be to have them all put down – murderers, pimps, prostitutes, queers, nuts. We could easily do without them.’ He gave Lagé a rueful defeated look. ‘But we’re stuck with them, aren’t we, and, since we’re stuck with them, we have to deal with them in the best way we know how. A smack on the back, a word of good cheer, a punch on the nose. There are dozens of ways of sorting them out, I suppose.’
Lagé, who had been brought in to give a hand, shrugged. Like Rodsky, he was a big burly man, and again like Rodsky, he was always cheerful and never complained at having to work, even when it was Misset’s work – which it often was.
‘Psychology’s become important in police work,’ he said.
Rodsky smiled. ‘Sure. It helps you recognise that there are no longer any criminals, just disturbed people. What do you think, Nosjean?’
Nosjean shrugged. ‘It substitutes understanding for condemnation.’
Rodsky grinned. ‘Until one of them kicks you in your wedding tackle. Then you find it hard to accept them as being put-upon. Most psychiatrists are in need of a bit of psychiatry themselves, anyway.’ He gave his infectious grin again. ‘I sometimes think when I’m hauled out on a cold night that it’s a pity we don’t retaliate. When we’re attacked we ought to hit back. If they deal out obscenities, then perhaps obscenities flung in their faces might shock them; if they start slinging blows, a good hard bonk on the conk might make them see sense. Most policemen seem to think so, anyway. I was once done by a poof I was trying to help. He sent me to hospital with a knife wound along the forearm that required ten stitches. And I used to be a boxer, too, and can handle myself.’
Sergeant Daniel Darcy was sitting in Pel’s office, and he looked up as Nosjean entered. He was a strong-faced, good-looking man with large white teeth which he enjoyed using to smile with.
‘I hear you’ve got him,’ Nosjean said.
‘Who?’
‘The type who did it.’
‘No, we haven’t.’
Nosjean frowned. ‘She said you had. She said you’d got him down here.’
‘Who said?’
‘His wife.’
‘We don’t even know who it is?’
‘Well, I – ’ Nosjean stopped. ‘Who’re we talking about?’
‘Our fine feathered friend, Armoire à Glace. You know whom he got this time?’
Nosjean nodded. ‘Yes. Misset told me. Yves-Pol Aramis.’
‘Yves-Pol Aramis,’ Darcy agreed. ‘Harmless as they come. I’d like to catch the bastard who did it.’
‘It’s some dingo who has a thing about them.’
Darcy gave Nosjean a sour look. ‘Where did that brilliant idea spring from?’ he said. ‘Of course it’s some dingo who’s got a thing about them. Why else beat ’em up? What about this stabbing you went out on?’
‘It’s not just a stabbing,’ Nosjean said. ‘It’s murder.’
Darcy pulled a face. ‘Who was it?’
‘You’d never guess,’ Nosjean said. ‘Edouard-Charles Duche. The type we’ve been trying to nail for years. I thought you knew. That’s why I came in. I went to see Sammy Belec – naturally – and his wife said you’d got him here.’
Darcy looked bewildered. ‘We’ve got Sammy,’ he said. ‘But not for that.’
It was Nosjean’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Not for that?’ he said. ‘Why then?’
‘Assault and battery.’
‘It’s not just assault, mon brave. The man’s dead. Stabbed to death.’
‘No, he isn’t. He’s got a cracked jawbone. The hospital said so. And a broken nose.’
Nosjean was looking completely bewildered now. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what are we talking about?’
Darcy reached across the desk and picked up a sheet of paper. ‘Report of Jean-Pierre Thibault, sous-brigadier de police, uniformed branch. He was on duty at 11.33 near the Porte Guillaume when he heard a cry. Swinging round he saw a man, who turned out to be one, Roger Tachenay, lying on the ground. Standing over him was another man who’d obviously just knocked him down. Thibault arrested him. It was Sammy Belec.’
‘At eleven thirty-three?’ Nosjean said slowly.
‘So Thibault says.’
Nosjean frowned. That, he thought, seemed to put paid to his theories. Belec could hardly be stabbing Edouard-Charles Duche in the Passage Wallieux when he was busy beating up Roger Tachenay near the Porte Guillaume, which lay in the city centre and roughly three kilometres to the south along the main road.
‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that we ought to get the Old Man
in.’
Darcy frowned. ‘He’s going to love that,’ he said.
Two
As it happened, the Old Man, Inspector Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel, was longing to be called in.
He was sitting at home; wondering what an overworked, underpaid, ill-cared-for policeman could expect from his span of life. He was undernourished, he felt certain, because his housekeeper, Madame Routy, seemed indifferent to food and appeared to expect him to be indifferent too, and to improve matters, also kept him awake at night playing the television with the volume turned up beyond ‘Loud’ to ‘Shuddering’.
In addition, he smoked too much.
He knew he smoked too much, and read every possible article in every possible magazine which offered any kind of cure. He’d tried them all. But he still smoked too much, and was convinced by now that he was about to drop dead at any moment and that most days he only just managed to stagger home at his last gasp, exhausted, sick, and old.
In fact, most of the time, he was fitter than most people, despite Madame Routy, the overwork, and the smoking. But Pel enjoyed being a martyr. Being a martyr gave him the sensation of succeeding at his job.
He was small, slight, dark, as intense as Nosjean, but with a permanent worried frown and a shrunken look that made him seem as if he’d been too often laundered. The few strands of hair he combed over his balding head looked like anchovies draped across a boiled egg.
At that moment, he was thinking bitterly that nobody appreciated him. Despite the promises after his latest success, there had been no rewards. No handshake from the President of the Republic. No promotion. Not even an illuminated scroll from the Chief. Nothing but the congratulations of his team which had cost him, he remembered bitterly, drinks all round in the Bar Transvaal.
Trying to read, he was sitting in the least comfortable chair in the tiny room he liked to call his salon. He was sitting in that one because Madame Routy, as usual, was sitting in the best one, the ‘confort anglais’. He was tempted to leap at her, drag her to the floor and fling himself down in her place, leaving her to do the best she could with the one he was in, which he called the ‘angoisse française’. For the love of God, he thought sourly, she was only the housekeeper. It was his house and he paid the bills.
He glared at Madame Routy. She had the charm of an advert for tractors and life with her was exhausting and unnerving. He wondered why he couldn’t pluck up courage to do what he knew he ought to do. Perhaps because he was an inspector of police and she might run to the Chief and complain that he’d attacked her, which wouldn’t do him a lot of good. Especially if Le Bien Public got hold of it. ‘P J Inspector Attacks Housekeeper.’ Pel cringed at the thought and decided that she not only had him over a barrel but that she was also well aware of it.
He sighed. It was a pity, he decided, that his affair with Madame Geneviève Faivre-Perret, who was a widow and ran ‘Nanette’s’, the hairdressing salon in the Rue de la Liberté, didn’t seem to make much progress. It hadn’t even, he decided gloomily, started to get off the ground yet.
When he wasn’t busy with police work, with which nothing was allowed to interfere, Pel was besotted with Madame Faivre-Perret, and she even seemed interested in him. Unfortunately, however, whenever he seemed to be making headway, either he or she was always called to the other end of the earth. One dinner date had fallen through because Pel had found himself in Austria. The last time, it had been Madame Faivre-Perret’s turn and she’d been called away to attend to the affairs of a dead aunt in Vitteaux. Since then he’d spoken to her once or twice on the telephone but she’d been still sufficiently preoccupied for him to wonder bitterly how long it took to get someone properly dead and buried and their affairs wound up.
He scowled as Madame Routy made herself more comfortable. Unlike Madame Faivre-Perret, who was neat, well-turned-out and spotless, Madame Routy was lumpish and apparently totally unaware of the needs of Pel’s household. There was dust on every ledge, the food was enough to deter a hungry wolf and the coffee tasted like distilled iron filings. Everything was either overcooked or cold because Madame Routy’s obsession with the television led her to cook whatever was easiest if she remembered – and leave it in the oven for when Pel appeared. Pel considered himself in the running for a saint’s badge of office. Anybody less than a saint would have done Madame Routy in long since.
As he studied his housekeeper with hatred in his heart, the television roared at him. It sounded like the moment when they turned the lions loose on the Christians in the Coliseum. There were four people in the screen involved in what appeared to be a domestic disagreement. Like all French people in a dispute, they seemed on the point of snatching up the table knives and starting a bloodbath. It was nothing, of course. In France it was well known that such arguments merely added to the spice of life and were infinitely more interesting than the chilly affairs that occurred in England, when the man put on his cap and took the dogs for a walk, leaving his wife rigid with stiff upper lip digging the garden. No wonder, Pel thought, they had such good gardens and bred such splendid dogs.
The dispute on the television gave way to two cars chasing each other round a highway that twisted and turned like the Ballon d’ Alsace. As Pel eyed it sourly, the telephone went and, grateful for an excuse, he shrieked at Madame Routy.
‘Turn that thing off,’ he yelled.
She moved slowly and he headed for the telephone quite convinced he would have to have a shouting match with her to turn down the volume. It was something he always expected, but she knew to the second how long it took him and as he lifted the telephone, preparing to shout at her again, the television became silent.
‘Pel here!’ he roared.
There was silence from the other end and he lowered his voice. ‘Pel,’ he said meekly.
‘Darcy here, Patron,’ came the voice in his ear. ‘We’ ve got rather a puzzle down here and I think perhaps you ought to come in. I’m sorry to bother you.’
‘Bother me?’ Pel was almost cheerful. ‘You think I’m being bothered?’
The cold was enough to take Pel’s breath away. His feet and hands were devoid of feeling and he was convinced his circulation had ceased altogether. Doubtless his state of health had finally caused his blood to stop moving round his veins.
Reaching his office, he stood for a moment by his desk, stamping his feet in an attempt to get himself moving again. Then, his hands on the radiator which, despite the fact that oil was roughly the price of uranium, was going full blast and filling the office with heat, he took off his overcoat, scarf and hat. Then he removed his jacket and the spare pullovers he was wearing. It reduced him from the shape of a polar bear to near-normality and made it possible to move his arms. If he’d fallen down, he thought, he’d never have been able to get up.
‘The heater in my car isn’t working,’ he explained. Come to that, he thought, neither was anything else. The windscreen wipers limped as if they had a mouse’s nest in the motor, one of the indicators was on the blink – but not on the blink enough to spend good money having it repaired – and the engine behaved as if it were made of wood and was suffering from woodworm.
Darcy shoved a packet of cigarettes forward. Pel shook his head.
‘I’ve gone on to Gitanes Maïs,’ he said. ‘If I’ve got to kill myself by smoking I might as well stroke something that will kill me elegantly.’
He took out the cigarettes and they gazed at the yellow paper together.
‘Very exotic,’ Darcy observed. ‘It makes you look like a Russian.’ He held his own cigarette between thumb and forefinger. ‘Exotic cigarettes should be held exotically – like this.’
Pel frowned. ‘I don’t hold cigarettes,’ he growled. ‘I keep them in my mouth so the smoke can filter down to my lungs and ruin my health.’ He eyed the cigarette again. ‘They say they’re better for you than ordinary ones.’
‘Who says?’ Darcy was never one to be merciful.
Pel shrugged and lifted his hand in a hel
pless gesture to indicate that he’d forgotten. ‘Perhaps I read it in the paper,’ he said.
Some time during the night the heat went off. It always went off in the middle of the night because the place was supposed to be virtually empty by then. As his office grew colder, Pel put back the pullovers he’d taken off and eventually wound the scarf round his neck again.
The reports were clear enough. Edouard-Charles Duche had been fatally stabbed; Roger Tachenay had had his jaw broken in an assault; and Yves-Pol Dupont, also known as Aramis, had a black eye and a broken cheekbone in a second assault. The world, Pel thought, was living well up to its reputation.
He stretched, sipped at the cup of coffee someone had made for him, and turned the papers over again. Like most policemen, he didn’t expect to come up with brilliant solutions to anything. The solutions came out of the paper-work, and from the men who sniffed around the gutters for weapons, and went from door to door, apartment to apartment, asking questions until they were bored stiff. It was the grind that brought the results not the brilliant intuitions.
‘Let’s have Belec in,’ he said.
There was no getting round Sammy’s story. With the help of Nosjean and occasionally of Sous-Brigadier Thibault, who had arrested him, Pel and Darcy leaned on him, but he didn’t budge from it. A short hard-faced man with shoulders so broad he looked as if he had no neck, Sammy had arrived full of confidence, wearing an immaculate and expensive suit and preceded by a waft of perfume that was enough to rock a cow back on its heels. There appeared to be no blood on him – though the Lab might find something later; there was no weapon; and, according to Sammy, no motive.
‘Of course I didn’t like Duche muscling in on my territory,’ he began.
‘It isn’t your territory,’ Pel snapped. ‘It belongs to the French Republic and more particularly to the people of this city.’