The rain went on all evening. Pel played Scrabble in the kitchen with Didier Darras because Madame Routy was still in a bad temper. The neighbour had been round complaining that his greenhouse had had a pane broken and she’d had to fend him off. What was more, she still hadn’t forgiven them for dodging out when she’d cooked dinner for them.
Since the television was blaring away, at Didier’s prompting they started playing Scrabble at the top of their voices, betting matches on each score. As it grew riotous, in retaliation Madame Routy turned up the television. Inevitably, they started shouting louder and louder until, in the end, the man from next door arrived to complain.
‘And him a policeman, too,’ he said to Madame Routy while Pel hid in the kitchen, pretending to be out.
Misset was at home with his wife, listening to her going on about their increasing family. ‘Three already,’ she announced. ‘My mother says you ought to be more careful.’
‘Your mother has never had the experience of being a man and in bed with a beautiful woman like you,’ Misset said gallantly, and his wife’s nagging changed to a beam of pleasure.
Lagé was at the hospital, keeping an eye on Matajcek. Normally he was at home with his wife. He made model aeroplanes and his wife and son helped him. Krauss was asleep. He put the television on the minute he arrived home and promptly closed his eyes, while his wife went across the road to where her daughter lived, and spent the evening there.
Nosjean had spent the evening with Odile Chenandier. She lived in a little flat over a shop in the Rue Bossuet. Whenever Nosjean was feeling low and put upon, or when his girl-friend had thrown him over – which seemed to happen with great regularity – Nosjean went to see her. She remained as shy as she’d been when he’d first met her, but he had a feeling that he was bringing her out of herself. To the sensitive Nosjean this was a triumph, and her delight when he arrived always made him feel two metres tall.
She made him coffee and they went for a walk under the trees in the Place Wilson. On the way back, he leaned towards her to kiss her. Immediately she turned her head away.
It was disappointing because, since Nosjean had put off asking Catherine Deneuve’s younger sister for a date when she was off-duty, he felt frustrated and virile as a bull, and he went home with steam coming out of his ears, wondering if he smelled.
Darcy spent an uncomplicated evening with his girlfriend, Josephine-Heloïse Aymé, and now, at five a.m. the next morning he was lying awake. Alongside him, Josephine-Heloïse Aymé was making soft little snuffling noises that were as well-bred as she was. She came from Normandy and still had in her some of the beserker Scandinavian blood that had peopled the province hundreds of years ago. It made their evenings together warm, passionate and at times somewhat gymnastic.
At that moment, however, Darcy’s mind was less on Josephine-Heloïse Aymé than on Marie-Claire Jacquemin. Recalling the map in her office, he remembered something that he’d passed over at the time without thinking much about it. There were words on it, written in a German hand. ‘Hier’ and ‘Die beste Möglichkeit’, and, remembering the miles he’d tramped across Bussy-la-Fontaine since the enquiry had begun, it suddenly dawned on him that the crosses on the map matched the places where Piot had turned the earth over with his digger. It suddenly seemed important and he began to climb out of bed.
The girl stirred.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked sleepily.
‘I’ve got a job to do.’
‘Now?’ She snapped into alertness like a startled deer. ‘First thing in the morning?’
‘I have to,’ Darcy said. ‘I’ve got to see this dame.’
‘Which dame?’
His words triggered off an explosion of anger, and for a while he listened to the tirade, gesturing one-handed as he attempted to dress and protest at the same time.
‘She’s involved in this business at Bussy-la-Fontaine,’ he explained.
As he moved to the next room, she followed him. She was small with red-brown Norman hair and a high white forehead, and her temper was working up to full throttle.
‘I’m a cop,’ Darcy said. ‘It’s my job. I’ve just thought of something.’
‘I’ll bet you have!’
Complaining all the time, she followed him about the room as he collected his belongings. Listening stoically, he pulled his tie straight and put on his jacket, but his explanation only produced another tirade which grew shriller and angrier as he moved towards the door. As she reached for the metal breadbasket which stood empty on the sideboard, he began to run.
Outside, his back to the door, he heard the breadbasket rattle against the panels and stood listening intently for a minute as the sound of anger died away. His mouth widened into a grin, and he stared at the closed door with the crafty grin of a fox interrupted in its maraudings.
Picking up his car from the street outside, he drove towards Dôle. It was a clear day for a change, with the cloud breaking up, so that the soggy fields and the clumps of woodland stood out in sharp contrast.
The journey proved a dead loss. Marie-Claire Jacquemin was in Paris at a conference.
‘She goes once a month,’ Danielle Delaporte said. ‘This is the day.’
She was doing some filing in Marie-Claire Jacquemin’s office and she perked up considerably at Darcy’s appearance.
He indicated the map on the wall.
‘That map,’ he said. ‘Are there any other copies?’
‘Yes. Probably a dozen. We had them done on the copier.’
Darcy frowned. ‘Why that many?’
‘Monsieur Piot asks for them occasionally.’
‘Why?’
‘He says they get dirty and torn.’
‘How?’
‘He uses them, I think. I don’t know what for.’
‘Can I have a copy?’
Darcy drove back in a detour towards Orgny. Since Dôle had produced nothing, perhaps Orgny would. As he climbed, occasionally he saw a hare in the fields, and he drove with the window open, sniffing the cold fresh air and trying not to think of Joséphine-Heloïse Aymé. That was the worst of women, he felt. There were too many of them.
As he turned into the long drive down to Bussy-la-Fontaine he almost ran into Grévy, the garde. He was driving the digger and, pulling it to one side, he waited for Darcy to pass.
Darcy stopped, however, and climbed out of his car.
‘The boss awake yet?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Grévy’s large impassive face stared down at him. ‘He gets up early, like me.’
‘What are you up to?’
‘Building a dam. Down behind the Bois Carré.’
‘Another dam?’
Grévy’s big shoulders moved. He had a gift of answering without speaking.
‘I thought the boss did all the digging,’ Darcy went on.
‘I do a bit, too,’ Grévy said. ‘It was my idea that we bought our own digger. It’s a Poclain. Previously, everything up here was done by contractors. Monsieur Heurion understood things, but he wasn’t a practical man.’
‘And Piot is?’
Again there was that slight movement of the shoulders that meant either yes or no.
‘How do you know where to dig?’
The shoulders moved again. ‘He marks the map.’
‘How?’
‘How else but with a cross?’
‘And when you’ve dug it up, you tick it off?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he then telephone his works at Dôle and tell Mademoiselle Jacquemin to cross it off on her map, too?’
‘Has she got a map?’ Grévy’s face was blank.
‘In her office,’ Darcy said. ‘Hanging up. It’s covered with crosses, and some of them are ticked off.’
Grévy shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said.
‘Does he telephone her?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Still?’
‘Why not? He’s still her boss. The telephone comes through my place so we can answer it when he’s away. Sometimes, when we’ve forgotten to put it through to the house, I’ve picked it up and heard him.’
‘I thought they’d broken with each other.’
Grévy’s shoulders moved again. Yes or no. He wasn’t saying.
‘Do you think they still see each other?’
Once more, yes or no. Darcy knew he wasn’t going to get a straight answer.
He waved and went back to his car. The digger’s engine roared and it lumbered past him. At first Darcy thought it was going to crush the wing of his car but Grévy knew exactly what he was doing and it rumbled past at no mean speed, missing by a centimetre or two.
Darey stared after him. Grévy was an enigmatic man. Was it just through being alone so much? Or did he have secrets? Did he know more about Piot’s business than he allowed? He’d persuaded Piot to buy the digger. Was he somehow involved, too?
Darcy lit his first cigarette of the day and, climbing back into the car, drove down towards the house. The sun had just come up through the trees and he knew it was almost too early to call on people. But at this time of the morning he felt he had an advantage.
Madame Grévy was at a table outside her back door trimming vegetables, in her coat. She looked up, saw it was Darcy, frowned and went on with her work.
Darcy came up behind her and slapped her backside. She whirled at once.
‘Take your hands off me, Monsieur! My backside isn’t free pasturage for the hands of such as you! If my husband knew–’
‘He’d probably black my eye,’ Darcy said. ‘Like he did Lionel Tisserand’s.’
She flushed and frowned. ‘There was no need for him to do that,’ she said sullenly. ‘There was no harm in him. He was lonely like me. It’s a lonely beat he has. He just liked to talk. I thought my husband liked him, too.’
‘He doesn’t now,’ Darcy said. ‘When did you marry him?’
‘1946. He was twenty-nine then and I was nineteen.’
‘You must have been quite a girl.’
She frowned. ‘I was never “quite a girl”,’ she said angrily. ‘I never even had a youth. I was a child when the war started and thirteen when the Germans came. When it was over I was an adult, and soon afterwards a mother with children. Now I’m a grandmother.’
The outburst had taken Darcy by surprise. He changed the subject. ‘Do you come from round here?’
‘Orgny.’
‘Is that where you met your husband?’
‘No. I met him in Chaumont. He was working in the factory there. So was I. I moved there after the war.’
‘And went to work at the factory?’
‘Not at first. I was ill for some time. The effects of the war. I stayed with friends for several months. Then I went to work. My husband had also just started. He was there until he found his health was suffering. It came from being a prisoner of war.’
Darcy lit a fresh cigarette. He offered the packet to Madame Grévy. She accepted one without a word and went on working over the vegetables with it between her lips.
He gestured at the vegetables. ‘They look good,’ he said. ‘I always say good vegetables make a good meal. So long as they’re properly trimmed, and that’s a sharp-looking knife you’ve got there.’
She stared at the knife dully. ‘I wouldn’t mind sticking it in you’ she said.
He laughed and headed for the house. Piot was drinking coffee as he sat at the kitchen table, reading the previous day’s Bien Public. Darcy produced the map he’d got from Dôle.
Piot stared at it calmly. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.
‘Never mind where it came from,’ Darcy said. ‘Have you got one like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do the crosses represent?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why are they ticked off?’
‘I thought they were good places to dig. Dams. Road. That sort of thing.’
Darcy jabbed a finger at the map. ‘That one’s on high ground. Not exactly a good catchment area. What’s it for?’
For the first time, Piot looked a little confused and Darcy pressed home his advantage.
‘Speak German?’
‘A bit.’
‘Know what “Möglichkeit” means?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll tell you. It means “possibility”. Somebody wrote it on the original map. “Die beste Möglichkeit”. The best possibility. Who wrote that, do you think?’
Piot had regained control of his emotions. ‘A German, I expect.’
‘Why should a German have a map of Bossy-la-Fontaine?’
Piot shrugged. ‘Well, they were all round here during the war.’
‘Where did the map come from? Originally?’
‘From a book. I bought some old ones from Baron de Mougy. I have a second-hand bookshop in Dijon. The students from the university use it. It brings a profit.’
‘You’re a great one for profits, aren’t you?’
‘I’d be a fool if I weren’t.’
‘Are they always honest profits?’
Piot’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Have a guess.’
Piot stared at Darcy for a while, then he smiled. ‘I have a reputation for sharp practice,’ he admitted.
‘A fair one?’
‘Not really. I’m not a crook, if that’s what you want to know. I’m just quick off the mark where there’s money to be made.’
Darcy paused and lit a cigarette. He offered the packet to Piot, who took one too.
As Darcy held up a match, he looked up at Piot. ‘Ever visited the Château de Mougy at Ste Monique?’ he asked.
‘Yes. On business.’
Darcy paused and smiled. ‘Ever heard of the Baron’s silver plate? It was worth a fortune and it was looted during the war. It’s supposed to be still around.’
‘Yes.’ Piot nodded. ‘I’ve heard of it. Everybody has.’
‘Ever found any of it?’
‘No.’
‘Hoping to?’
‘That’s not why I’m digging.’
Darcy frowned. ‘Why did Grévy persuade you to buy a Poclain?’
Piot smiled. ‘Perhaps because he was sick of using his own muscles.’
‘And why does your secretary have a map like that hanging in her office?’
‘Perhaps because she’s fond of the place. She always was. She’s a sentimental type.’
Darcy frowned. ‘I’d say she was a most un sentimental type.’
Piot shrugged. ‘You can’t judge women by appearances. Sometimes the toughest bargainers are terribly sentimental.’
Darcy saw he was getting nowhere and he took his leave. It just wasn’t his day because, stopping at St Seine l’Abbaye on the way back to the city to try to put things right over the telephone with Joséphine-Heloïse Aymé, all he got for his trouble was an earful of insult, a threat of suicide and promises to set her brothers on to him.
The morning conference in Pel’s office was hardly a riot of enthusiasm. The man found at the calvary was still unidentified and Matajcek was still unconscious and likely to be for some time, while a bored Lagé was still waiting outside his door in case his attack had had some sort of revenge motive and there might be another attempt on him.
By this time, the Chief and the Proc were beginning to grow a little hot under the collar. A murder and an attempted murder within a kilometre or two of each other and neither throwing up any helpful clues was enough to stir the department to its foundation. Moreover, Judge Brisard was after Pel, his temper not improved by a streaming nose and a headache.
Apart from a few small leads, progress could hardly be called wildly encouraging and, as everybody disappeared to the sergeants’ room, Pel sat staring bitterly at his blotter. The pattern was missing. Everything had a pattern and this business hadn’t. There seemed no connection between Matajcek and the man at the calvary.
In his frustration, he set about the whole of his team, particularly Nosjean who seemed to have been specially designed by the Almighty as a victim.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Nosjean bleated.
Darcy shrugged. ‘Probably going through the change of life,’ he said.
His love life in ruins – as it always was whenever anything came up that took time – Nosjean took solace in visiting Bique à Poux. The medicine bottles filled with cheap cognac he carried bit into his wages and he knew that if there were one thing he’d never get back on expenses it was the cost of bribes of that sort, but he had a feeling that somehow it would pay off in the end.
By this time the old man had developed a great fondness for him – or for the cognac – and referred to him constantly as ‘mon petit’, which, if it might have been affectionate, was also embarrassing to say the least. Being addressed as ‘little one’ in front of Catherine Deneuve’s younger sister hardly helped to produce an image of manly virility and charm.
Nevertheless, Nosjean was making headway. It hadn’t escaped his notice that the rash of robbed hen-houses that had been reported before the murder at the calvary seemed to have subsided and he couldn’t help feeling that Bique à Poux, despite his protestations of innocence, had been responsible.
‘Not me,’ the old man insisted. ‘I wouldn’t do that. I’m as honest as they come.’
‘But you do visit the farms at night,’ Nosjean pointed out.
‘Not to steal chickens. To look. That’s all. I have no family. Nobody wants me. I like to watch people. I like to watch children playing. I watch through the trees. I see the little boys kicking their balls and the little girls playing with their dolls. I watch them playing with dogs, and the teenagers going off into the woods together.’ Bique à Poux gave a little snigger. ‘The things they get up to!’
The damned old voyeur, Nosjean thought, wondering if he were wasting his sympathy on a pervert.
The old man’s next words made him change his mind. ‘They make me feel warm,’ he said. ‘I know it’s wrong to watch when they don’t know I’m there, but I don’t watch for that. I just watch, that’s all, and if that’s what they get up to then I can’t move, can I? It would just humiliate and embarrass them and ruin everything.’
‘It might end up in a black eye for you, too,’ Nosjean said.
The old man shrugged. ‘It might. But I also like to see the older men and women sitting together having their drinks outside the house or watching the television in the evening. And the really old ones, older than me, sitting together holding hands when they know they haven’t much longer to share their lives.’
Bique à Poux seemed to be in a sentimental mood but his next words changed Nosjean’s mind again.
‘Sometimes I see horrible things, too. I once saw a man beat a dog to death.’
‘You should have reported it,’ Nosjean said.
‘How can I? I’d never be able to go on his land again. Sometimes I see mothers with too many children who lose their tempers because they’re tired. That night in the Bois Carré –’
Nosjean was alert at once. ‘What about that night in the Bois Carré?’
‘Those two men cut his throat.’
Nosjean leaned forward. ‘You saw it? You couldn’t. It was dark!’
‘I didn’t see it. I heard it.’
‘How could you hear it? A knife through flesh doesn’t make a noise.’
Bique à Poux frowned. ‘I know the sound of someone having his throat cut,’ he said. ‘The voice disappears in a gurgle. Wet. As if he’s drowning. As he is. In his own blood.’
Nosjean’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know what a man having his throat cut sounds like?’
Bique à Poux’s eyes became blank. ‘I once cut a man’s throat myself,’ he said.
Nosjean reached for his notebook. ‘When?’
‘1945. He was a German. I was on the run from them. One of them was separated from the others and I got him from behind. He was trying to call for help when I used my knife. You remember the sound all your life.’
Nosjean was tingling with excitement by now. ‘You were near enough to this man in the Bois Carré to hear that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Didn’t you hear anything else?’
‘Shots.’
‘How many?’
‘Five or six. I also heard someone say “liebstandarte” and “Sturmbannführer.”’
‘Those were German titles. SS titles. From the war.’
‘Yes. Everybody in France at one time knew what those words meant.’
By this time Nosjean had decided that it might be a good idea to visit the old man’s hideout in the woods as soon as possible.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said. With patience – and patience was a detective’s greatest virtue – he felt he might find out a great deal about what had happened in the woods that night the man at the calvary had been murdered because, by now, he was beginning to feel that Bique à Poux knew.
‘Keep at him, Nosjean,’ Pel said when he reported what he’d discovered. ‘And go and take a look at his camp tomorrow. You might be right. You might find something.’
Darcy was late man that night. He spent the time checking through the reports and once more tried Joséphine-Heloïse Aymé. But he seemed to have disappeared with a hollow thud into the limbo where old lovers fade away.
Ah, well, he thought, there was always Danielle Delaporte, and picking up his coat, he headed for the street to find a glass of beer and something to eat. In the entrance hall, as he stopped to tell the sergeant at the desk where he was going in case there was an emergency, two policemen were leaning on the counter talking business with the man at the enquiry desk. It was police business. A boy in Toulon had poured petrol on his fiancée and set her on fire because he’d changed his mind about marrying her and hadn’t the nerve to tell her, and that morning in the Avenue Victor Hugo a car had hit an old man on a crossing.
‘Hitting somebody in the street,’ Darcy said, ‘that’s sport. On a crossing, it’s just sadism.’
He was heading for the door when the telephone rang. The sergeant on the desk answered it and gestured frantically to Darcy.
Leaning over the counter, Darcy took it standing up. He didn’t recognise the voice.
‘This is Georges Vallois-Dot,’ it said. ‘I’m the postmaster at Orgny. Is that Sergeant Darcy?’
Darcy could just remember meeting the postmaster in the garden behind the police station when he’d gone down from Bussy-la-Fontaine on the morning they’d found the corpse at the calvary.
‘Yes,’ he agreed slowly. ‘This is Sergeant Darcy. What can I do for you?’
The voice came again, breathless and on edge. ‘They said you were in. Can I see you?’
‘Why not see my chief, Inspector Pel?’
‘I’d rather it were you.’
‘All right. When?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Why not now?’
The voice sounded agitated and uncertain. ‘It’s not that important. I’ll come down in the morning. Will you be there?’
‘I’ll make a point of it.’
‘I’ll see you then.’ There was another pause. ‘Unless I change my mind. I might decide it’s not necessary.’
The telephone clicked and the experienced Darcy stared at it. There was something in the wind, he decided, and it sounded as if Vallois-Dot wanted to tell him something worth knowing. It seemed, in fact, a much better idea to drive out to Orgny there and then and get it out of him. It was probably the break they were waiting for.
Pel was late, too. Later even than Darcy, because he’d been having a long session with the Chief.
Calling in a bar in the Rue de la Liberté for a coup de blanc, he sipped his wine and decided he couldn’t face Madame Routy and the television, not even with Didier Darras to help. Buying a jeton, he rang home to say he would have to eat in the city, and, pleased at Madame Routy’s furious yell that she’d already prepared his meal, he headed for the Relais St Armand where he’d bumped into Madame Faivre-Perret. Perhaps she’d be there again, he thought. The idea was pleasurable, and he stopped outside a furniture shop and adjusted his tie in the mirror of a dressing table in the window. Perhaps their chat this evening would be a little more intimate, he thought. Perhaps she might even invite him home. Pel almost blushed.
As he entered the Relais St Armand he saw her at once. She smiled and raised her hand in a little wave, and he was just about to cross to her table to exchange the time of day when a man appeared and sat down beside her, so that Pel’s confident stride turned to an embarrassed shuffle that swung abruptly to starboard and deposited him at a table in a corner where he could see without being seen.
The food tasted like ashes and he drank too much wine, so that he left the restaurant knowing for certain he’d end up with indigestion and probably not sleep a wink. Popping a bismuth tablet into his mouth just in case, he headed for the Hôtel de Police before going home, to find out if there had been any messages.
The sergeant was just dealing with a nervous Englishwoman who’d been walking in the Parc de la Columbière and been frightened by an over-enthusiastic puppy.
‘She wondered if it had hydrophobia,’ he said indignantly as she left. ‘In England they think we’re cowering back all over France from rabid animals.’
There was a message to say that Judge Polverari had taken over Judge Brisard’s interest in the murder at Butte-Avelan and was asking him to ring his home.
Pel beamed, his spirits lifting a little. The disappointment he’d felt at finding that Madame Faivre-Perret knew other men besides himself faded somewhat as, using the sergeant’s telephone, he rang the judge’s number. The judge answered with a booming laugh.
‘You’ve got me, Pel,’ he said. ‘Judge Brisard’s gone sick. You’d better come over and fill me in.’
Driving to the judge’s house, Pel relayed what information they had so far over coffee and brandy, and was just on the way out when the telephone went.
Polverari answered it and held it out to Pel. ‘For you.’
It was the sergeant on the desk at the Hôtel de Police. ‘Sergeant Darcy’s been asking for you, sir,’ he said. ‘Several times. I tried your home, but then I remembered Judge Polverari had rung, and I wondered if you were there. The sergeant left a number.’
Pel recognised the number as Massu’s sub-station at Orgny and wondered what Darcy was up to out there at that time of the night. Darcy answered the telephone and he sounded excited.
‘Patron,’ he yelled. ‘Thank God you’ve turned up! We’ve got another one on our hands!’
‘Another what?’
‘Another murder, Patron!’
Pel’s heart dropped into his stomach with a thud, all the joy gone again at once. ‘Where?’
‘Orgny. I think we really have got a nut on our hands.’
Pel had a curious feeling of dread in his bones. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. ‘Do we know him?’
‘I do, Patron.’ Darcy’s voice sounded faintly angry. ‘It’s Vallois-Dot, the postmaster.’