by Mark Hebden
‘But he got away! With the rest of the money!’
‘Yes, Patron.’
‘This is a fine start to the new regime,’ Pel snarled.
‘It can’t be helped, Patron,’ Darcy said, knowing very well that it might have been. Lagé had been slow. Misset was well known as a fool, and the affair had been bungled. ‘I was going to try a shot at him, but Misset got in the way.’
‘You should have shot Misset,’ Pel snapped. ‘He wouldn’t have been missed.’
The enquiry the following day was a subdued affair. Subdued, that is, except for Pel. The story had got round the Hôtel de Police and there were a few sniggers, a few whispers behind hands, and a few sidelong glances, and he let his team know exactly what he thought of them, which wasn’t much. He let them all have it, though he knew that Darcy’s only fault was over-enthusiasm. He suspected also that Nosjean had done exactly as he’d been told. De Troquereau was still an unknown quantity but Darcy seemed satisfied that he’d been quick off the mark and Pel had a feeling that, despite the fiasco with the mugger in the Cours de Gaulle, De Troquereau was sufficiently eager to prove himself that, had he been given half a chance, he wouldn’t have failed. He stared at Lagé and Misset. There, he felt, lay the blame, but neither of them was saying much, and he couldn’t do much more than hand out the bricks to them all collectively.
On the desk lay nine piles of notes and he gestured at them coldly.
‘We have now to start again,’ he said. ‘That is, unless one of my team has an idea of unsurpassable brilliance. In the meantime, we’ll go round the shops asking them to look out for big spenders or bundles of old notes because, whether our friend was a hoaxer or a genuine kidnapper, let’s not forget he still got away with most of the money. We’ll have everybody on it and I hope it makes your feet ache.’ He paused. ‘Now, while my brilliant team ponders on that – ’ he let the words hang in the air, redolent with sarcasm and bitterness, so that they all looked at each other, faintly sheepish ‘ – I shall go and lay my head on the block. The Chief wishes to know what went wrong.’
The Chief was with Judge Polverari.
‘I think this is one we’d better keep quiet about,’ he said, obviously annoyed. ‘After all the fuss about setting up the new team, the Minister wouldn’t be pleased to hear our first foray ended in disaster. I think we’ll just say our man got away and leave it at that. Did nobody get a look at his face?’
‘It was dark,’ Pel pointed out.
‘There are lights along the bridge and the hospital overlooks the place. And it couldn’t have been all that dark or Darcy wouldn’t have had a chance to shoot. We can expect his price to go up now, I suppose, out of sheer bad temper.’
‘If it is a kidnap,’ Pel observed.
‘You still think it might not be?’ The Chief leaned forward. ‘There’s been another kidnapping in the south. Yesterday. In Aix-en-Provence.’
‘Aix isn’t here,’ Pel said doggedly.
It was an unsatisfactory interview and, taking sympathy on Pel, Judge Polverari took him along to the Bar du Destin for an apéritif before taking him to lunch.
‘It happens, old friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it worry you.’
Pel nodded, knowing very well that it would. There were a lot of things that worried Pel: Armoire à Glace. The Sammy Belec business. Rensselaer. And now this failure to grab the man who’d probably kidnapped him – if he’d been kidnapped.
It still didn’t make sense to Pel, because there’d been no proof of kidnap. These days kidnappings followed a pattern – a demand note and a photograph of the victim taken with a polaroid camera. This time there’d been no photograph and Pel wasn’t convinced, so that when he returned to his office, he sat down, and, in an attempt to get his thoughts in order, began to set out what they knew.
Is it kidnap? he wrote at the top. Or more?
Then he wrote down the names of everybody involved in the case who might conceivably be connected.
Madame Rensselaer
Marie-Christine Guitton
Jean-Marc Guitton
Bernard Pujol
Retif
Fabre
They were the ones who might well have a grudge against Rensselaer, and he put small asterisks alongside the names of Madame Rensselaer, Jean-Marc Guitton, Retif and Fabre as being the most likely.
It was an interesting list.
Eleven
Most people, when things go wrong, allow themselves a few days to recover then start afresh. With the police, it didn’t work that way. There was no pause for a cigarette and a think. They had to start afresh but there was no time to get their breath back. The break-in at Daix still hadn’t been solved. The old man with the bucket of water was still, despite Rodsky’s pleas, threatening to dunk his wife if she looked at anybody else. Edouard-Charles Duche’s murderer hadn’t been found. Armoire à Glace still hadn’t been apprehended. Rensselaer still hadn’t turned up despite the enquiries being made along the south coast and at all his old haunts. In the meantime, there were the city shops, and the whole team was busy making the pilgrimage round them, asking questions and offering warnings. Anybody been doing a lot of spending? Any bundles of old notes?
They got nowhere. If someone was spending the money intended for the ransom of François Rensselaer they weren’t spending it locally.
‘Let’s try another line,’ Pel suggested. ‘Let’s find out who it was he shacked up with. If he had a mistress then he must have bought her things. The shops might know who she was.’
They set out again, armed this time with a fresh set of typed questions and photographs of Rensselaer, concentrating only on the expensive shops in the belief that Rensselaer wouldn’t waste time on anything but the best. The enquiry produced nothing. Rensselaer seemed to have been an expert at covering his tracks and anything he might have bought to please a girlfriend hadn’t been bought in their area.
At the end of the second day Pel and Darcy stopped in the Bar Transvaal. A nuclear explosion would barely have scratched the surface of Pel’s frustration.
‘What are you drinking, Patron?’ Darcy asked.
‘It had better be arsenic on the rocks,’ Pel growled.
Darcy pushed Pel’s glass forward. ‘Where do we go from here?’ he asked.
‘We keep trying,’ Pel said. Being a detective, he decided, required stamina. In fact, he often felt, merely living required stamina. If you lost your nerve, you became a drop-out.
‘There’s one thing that’s noticeable,’ he said, ‘and that is that no more ransom notes have appeared. And that seems to indicate that the thing was a hoax from the start. If it had been genuine there’d have been another message by now, containing a few threats and an insistence that next time it’s done properly.’
‘You’ve never gone along with the kidnap idea, have you, Patron?’
‘It wasn’t a kidnap,’ Pel said firmly.
‘Murder? To have a murder you’re supposed to have a body.’
‘Unless it’s been hidden.’ Pet frowned. ‘It’s only a hunch, I admit. But I think the ransom note was from someone who killed Rensselaer and is trying to make money out of it, or from someone who wasn’t involved but saw Rensselaer die.’ He paused and gloomily accepted one of Darcy’s cigarettes. ‘On the other hand, it could merely be from someone who read in the paper that Rensselaer’s missing and is trying to climb on the bandwaggon. There are always nuts who try to get into the cases they read about and, with kidnapping in everybody’s mind as it is at the moment, why not use the urge to be involved, to make a little money? Demand a ransom – even though you haven’t got Rensselaer.’
‘Which raises another thought,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘The only person who was eager to pay the money over without question was Pujol.’
They were all a little low in spirits but there was nothing they could do but go back to their original enquiries in the hope that they would provide a lead. Back to square one. Back to the drawing board. There were ple
nty of ways of describing the routine but they all meant the same thing. They were right back where they started.
Nosjean went back to Sammy Belec, De Troquereau to Armoire à Glace. Misset took over a new enquiry – an attempted rape at Vitré-en-Rille – while Lagé took over the break-in at Daix and Claudie Darel took over the old man with the bucket of water. The Chief maintained a frigid silence.
By evening, Ducrot, of Paris Soir was baying outside Pel’s door, demanding an interview.
‘Come on, Inspector,’ he begged. ‘I’ve helped you before. Return the compliment.’
Pel told him what he considered he deserved – which was about one-tenth of what Pel knew – and the following day the story was splashed across the paper with the headlines, ‘RANSOM ATTEMPT FAILS. IS RENSSELAER DEAD? POLICE THEORY.’
It generated a state of smouldering fury in Pel, who had always believed newspapermen should be seen and not heard. It also produced a request from Pujol to see him.
‘If you feel Rensselaer’s dead,’ he pointed out, ‘then it raises certain legal problems.’
Pel frowned. He was in no mood to be confronted with difficulties. The Chief was growing so restive the rumbles were enough to drown the through-trains from Paris to Marseilles. ‘Such as what?’ he demanded.
‘Well, we can hardly have a funeral without a body,’ Pujol said with a little smile. ‘But Madame will wish to go into mourning and put out the usual notices.’
‘I should tell her to wait,’ Pel advised. ‘We could be wrong.’ After all they’d been wrong often enough up to now, so why be ungenerous? ‘I hope we are,’ he added, ‘and that he’s still, as was suspected in the beginning, in the South with a woman.’
Pujol frowned. ‘This time, like you, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I think not. What do you propose to do next?’
Pel stood up. ‘I’m going to take that abbey apart,’ he said.
Nosjean, Lagé, Misset and De Troq’ were called off their investigations again and, stuffed into cars and followed by three vanloads of uniformed men, descended on the Abbaye du Fond en masse. With them were Judge Polverari, Leguyader and his lab boys, Grenier and the photographers, Prélat and the Fingerprint men, two frogmen who had been brought in from St Nazaire, even Rodsky, who was an expert in sign language, to talk to Retif.
As the cavalcade swept into the courtyard, Madame Fabre was just coming out of her house with a bucket of dirty water in her hands. She flung it out, narrowly missing Darcy’s car, then stood with the bucket in her hands, staring at them.
‘What’s all this?’ she demanded.
‘We have a warrant,’ Pel said. ‘It’s a search.’
‘Search for what?’
‘François Rensselaer. We have reason to believe that he’s dead and that he may have been murdered somewhere in this vicinity.’
Her face was expressionless. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s happened here. If it had, I’d know. When nothing normally happens, you know if a sparrow falls.’
Pel ignored her and turned briskly to the men tumbling out of the cars, unloading equipment and lights. ‘Everywhere,’ he said gesturing like Ney directing the Guard at Waterloo. ‘Every room. Every attic. Every corridor. Every heap of rubbish. Every garage. Every stable. Every pile of straw. Even the dungheap. I want someone down in the oubliettes. I want the stream that runs through them checking.’
As they dispersed, Fabre appeared with the young gypsy-looking whipper-in, Maurice Cottu. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.
‘The Martians have landed,’ Cottu grinned.
Pel explained and Fabre frowned, his thin face dark and unwelcoming. ‘Well, you’ll have to do without me,’ he said. ‘I’m busy. We’ve got a sick bitch. She’s just thrown a litter and we’ve lost one. She’s had trouble before. We’ve also just had to put one of the hounds down.’
‘Why?’
‘Because some bastard burned him.’
Fabre was about to turn away when Pel stopped him. ‘Just a moment. We need a few directions. We need someone around who knows this place.’
‘I’m busy. I told you.’
‘Let Cottu attend to it.’
Fabre glanced at the whipper-in, then back at Pel, then he gestured at Cottu who nodded and disappeared.
‘I don’t think you’ll find anything here,’ he insisted. ‘If anything happened, we’d know about it.’
He seemed to realise he’d been rude and tried to make amends. ‘I’ve got a plan of this place in the pedigree room,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a copy of the building plan. They’ve got the original in the museum in Dijon.’
The little office under the porte cochère was small and, with sunshine rarely penetrating into it, had an icy dampness. It seemed stuffed from floor to ceiling with paper.
‘We’ll have to sort this place out one of these days,’ Fabre said. ‘Some of this stuff’s been here for years. You could hide a horse in here behind all this paper. Unless you know where it is, you can’t find anything.’
The plan was stuffed at the back of the huge old cupboard. It was very brittle and faded, and was spotted with mould at the corners. Fabre spread it on the table.
‘It shows every room, every corridor, every beam, every brick almost,’ he said.
‘It’ll be a help,’ Pel acknowledged. ‘You appreciate that we shall need to examine your own quarters.’
‘Why? Are we suspected of something?’
‘Nobody’s suspected of anything yet, but we can’t afford to overlook a thing.’
Fabre studied him for a moment then he shrugged. ‘Very well. You’d better come and see my place first. I doubt if it’ll please my wife.’
It didn’t, and she made it very clear that it didn’t.
‘In this place you need danger money,’ she snapped.
‘Danger, Madame?’ Pel asked.
‘There’s always the danger of going mad.’
Fabre gave her a bitter look and was about to protest when Pel interrupted.
‘Madame Fabre, it’s been suggested that Monsieur Rensselaer was seen here on the day he disappeared. Did you see him?’
‘No. I went into the city.’
‘Why?’
She gave him a cold look. ‘Why does a woman ever go into a city? For shopping. To see people. To see life, to prove to herself that there are other people in the world. Ask any woman. Sometimes they forget what the outside of the house looks like.’
‘In the name of God, woman – !’
As Fabre finally exploded, Pel held up his hand to silence him.
‘What time did you go in?’ he asked.
Madame Fabre turned her glare of defiance from her husband to Pel. ‘Early,’ she snapped. ‘As soon as my husband left for Beaumarchais. You have to leave here early. You know how far it is? Sixty-seven kilometres. It takes all day. I must have reached the city about eight-thirty.’
‘And what time did you leave?’
‘Midday sometime. I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a bar, then drove back.’
In the silence that followed her words, Fabre spoke. ‘They’ll want to see Rensselaer’s apartment,’ he growled.
She turned quickly. ‘Why?’
‘I wish to see everything, Madame,’ Pel said.
‘Well – ’ Madame Fabre glanced at her husband ‘ – you’ll have to show them. I’m not going in there. It gives me the shudders.’
Fabre frowned and led them to the small apartment next door. It contained a sitting room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a small dining room, and a small kitchen.
‘He never used the kitchen, of course,’ he said. ‘If there were any meals, my wife prepared them.’
‘When did he use this place?’
‘Not very often. Sometimes when he was delayed in the city and needed a good night before going out with the hounds. That’s all.’
‘Ever bring any visitors?’
‘Visitors?’
‘Women.’
‘Oh –
!’ Fabre’s head moved ‘ – I never saw any.’
‘Would you see them if they were here?’
‘I might not. I move about a lot. I’m responsible for seeing the farmers. I buy the feed and the meat. I organise hay and oats. I attend to saddlery. I see the vets. It’s my job to see any horses he’s interested in. I’d be making preparations if there were to be a meet. I might not have seen them.’
Pel eyed the little apartment. It could hardly have been called a love nest. The walls were bare and the floor uncarpeted, and there were two wooden chairs and a narrow bed over which hung a small crucifix.
‘He seems to have believed in living hard,’ he observed. Fabre shrugged. ‘I doubt if he noticed,’ he said. ‘He never seemed to sit down, anyway. He was in the stables. In the kennels. Examining the hounds or the horses. He was always busy. He couldn’t give up much of his time so that when he did he made sure it was always fully occupied.’
During the afternoon, the press arrived – Ducrot; Henriot, of Le Bien Public; Fiabon, of France Dimanche; and Sarrazin, who was a freelance and legman for anybody who wanted to employ him.
‘What’s going on, Inspector?’ Sarrazin demanded. ‘We heard you were out here tearing the place apart.’
‘Where did you hear?’
Sarrazin’s face became veiled and Pel decided that somewhere in the Hôtel de Police somebody was drawing a rake-off for information. He wondered if it were Misset and made a mental note to find out.
‘We’re doing a search,’ he admitted.
‘Are you looking for Rensselaer?’
‘We’re looking for something which might indicate where he is,’ Pel said guardedly.
‘Isn’t he in St Trop’ with a girl? I’d be in St Trop’ if I had as much money as he’s got.’
Still convinced that it would be at the abbey where they’d find traces of Rensselaer, Pel insisted on all heavy knives, axes and cutting instruments being brought in and tested for human blood.
‘You think they carved him up and buried him?’ Leguyader, who liked to be sarcastic, was faintly scornful.