The weather continued to improve. The heat mounted until it seemed like midsummer and the city glowed with the glory of the Lord. Pel’s cold seemed a little better and it only needed a miracle to put him right.
As he drove to work through the ancient villages, he drew a deep breath because he loved the uplands outside the city, rich and golden in the summer, bleak in the winter. In the same way he loved the busy streets of the city itself, the magnificent buildings, the varnished roofs. Even the quiet cafés on the outskirts where, in an atmosphere of red wine and Gauloises, old men played dominoes or a slow game of boules, the players solemnly measuring the spheres with stalks of grass, watched by children or women resting their legs after shopping.
His buoyant mood didn’t last long after he entered the Hôtel de Police. Darcy was on the telephone to the Missing Persons Bureau and he remembered they were still struggling to establish the identity of the man on the motorway.
‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there has to be a reason for all this modesty. Here we have a man whom nobody knows found dead on the motorway. Why is it so hard to come up with his name? We’ve tried Fingerprints but he’s obviously not a criminal because his dabs aren’t on record.’ He paused. ‘If nothing else, he’s one of the Chief’s Missing Persons. We don’t know who he is and neither, it seems, does anybody else, so he must be. And if someone who’s missing is found dead, the relatives should know, though it isn’t our job to inform them. That’s the duty of the Bureau of Missing Persons. But this might be murder and that makes it different.’
Lagé’s discovery from the shoe repairer at St-Alban had led inevitably to the city doctors.
‘If his feet were bad enough to have his shoes built up,’ Darcy suggested, ‘it seems to indicate he’d seen a doctor about them. He might, of course, have made the decision on his own but it seems to suggest medical advice. I’ve got Lagé going through all the doctors in the area now to find if any of them made the recommendation.’
Meanwhile Nosjean and De Troq’ were trying their new angle and Claudie Darel was following Janine Ducasssis wherever she went. It was easy to see the tills of the Talant supermarket from outside through the glass doors. A prowl around the place would give the Tuaregs the layout and they could easily have waited for the correct moment to strike by watching from a car. Unless – and it was a possibility – some sort of signal had been given from inside. The wave of a coloured handkerchief could have indicated the absence of officials or customers from the area of the tills and check-out desks, and they had begun to suspect by this time that this was exactly what had happened because it seemed more than fortuitous that Monique Vachonnière had been away from her till at the time of the raid.
Janine Ducassis drove a tiny Fiat Panda and Claudie and the policewoman lent by Uniformed Branch, looking like two housewives returning from shopping, followed her home in an unmarked car. She lived with her parents in an unpretentious house near the Arsenal, down a dusty street where the male inhabitants seemed always to be playing boules as she arrived and had to pause to allow her to pass. She seemed to be all she claimed to be – a hard-working till supervisor with a responsibility.
Then, as Nosjean checked through his files late in the evening, the man at the front desk rang through to say there was a man to see him.
‘Name of Philibert,’ he said.
Nosjean looked puzzled. ‘Philibert? Who’s he?’
He turned out to be the owner of the bar at Morbihaux who had reported the presence of the fawn Ford Sierra that had been parked near the church on the day of the hold-up at Talant. There had been so much arguing going on in the bar about the car, its colour, its make and its number, Nosjean had concentrated chiefly on the old man who’d first noticed it and had barely noticed the man behind the bar.
‘We’ve remembered about it,’ Philibert said. ‘We’ve been arguing about it ever since. It came from Garages Europe Automobile.’
‘Here? In the city?’
‘Well, it might have been Garages Europe Automobile in Paris. They’re a big group. But somebody remembered there was this sticker on the rear window. You know how garages stick them on when they sell a car. I always make them take them off mine when I buy one. I tell them if I want to advertise anything on my car I’ll advertise my own bar.’
‘Go on,’ Nosjean encouraged before he got carried away.
‘Well, one or two saw the car and everybody thought different. Even about the colour. Was it grey or fawn or brown? In the end we decided it was fawn. Nobody could remember what the sticker said either, but then another car with the same sticker parked outside the bar yesterday – two sales representatives from Metaux de Dijon – and everybody remembered. It was Garages Europe Automobile.’
It was as good as having the number of the car and it didn’t take them long to establish from Garages Europe Automobile the names of everyone who in the last three years had bought a Ford Sierra 2000 from them. The colour reduced it further, and, finally, they pinned the car down to a Jean-Philippe de Rille. His address was given simply as Montagny.
‘Where in Montagny?’
The directories solved the problem.
‘Fancy address,’ De Troq’ commented. ‘The Manoir. That’s all. Sounds expensive.’
‘Some crooks have expensive ideas,’ Nosjean said drily.
When Pel arrived in the Hôtel de Police next morning there seemed to be a lot of loud voices in the sergeants’ room. The loudest belonged to Aimedieu who had planted himself in the middle of the floor as if he were defying anyone to try to shift him. ‘I’m back,’ he was saying defiantly.
‘Did Goriot send you?’ Darcy asked.
‘I sent myself.’
‘You haven’t had orders to report back here?’
Aimedieu’s face was that of an angelic choirboy and at the moment it was a very stubborn and angry choirboy. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Then you’d better return to Inspector Goriot, hadn’t you?’
Aimedieu scowled. ‘I’ll resign first,’ he announced. ‘That damned man doesn’t know how to treat his subordinates. I’m on the Old Man’s team.’
‘The Old Man’s temper’s not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’
‘The Old Man’s all right,’ Aimedieu said stoutly.
‘Not long ago you couldn’t stand him.’
‘Well, now I can. He doesn’t nag. And you know what he’s up to.’
‘Do you?’ Darcy said. ‘I never do.’
‘All the same, either I work with someone else or I quit.’ Aimedieu’s stubborn expression crumbled as he stared at Darcy. ‘For God’s sake, sir, have a word with the Old Man for me.’
Pel listened quietly to Darcy.
‘I’ll see the Chief,’ he said.
‘And Aimedieu?’
‘Tell him he’s back on my squad.’
‘Who takes his place with Goriot?’
‘He can have Lacocq. Last in, first out. That’s how the unions think. Besides, Lacocq’s a placid type and not likely to complain much. He also isn’t as smart as Aimedieu. Point out, of course, that like Aimedieu, it’s only temporary. If Goriot wants a team, he has to pick them himself. I’ll arrange it with the Chief.’
Pel was still thinking about Aimedieu when word arrived that one of the city doctors had turned up the mysterious ‘Dupont’ whose name they’d acquired from the shoe repairer. A doctor called Billetottes claimed to know him.
‘I’ve got a Dupont with flat feet on my books,’ he said.
Because things were quiet, Darcy decided to look up Doctor Billetottes himself. It gave him the opportunity to drive about the city. Darcy regarded the city as his back garden and he liked to know what was going on in it. He often drove round it after midnight when the streets were deserted and everything was silent. Every now and then he liked to stop and wait as if he were listening to it breathing. He never knew what made him stop and why he chose the places he did, but he liked to watch the bars closing and keep an eye on the people going home. He never got involved – that was the job of the men in uniform – but he liked to get the feel of the place.
Doctor Billetottes was an enormously fat man who refused to consider talking until they both had a drink in their fists.
‘Jean Dupont,’ he said. ‘That’s his name. He’s one of my patients. I saw him about two months ago.’
‘Address?’
‘I haven’t got one. Not a proper one.’
Darcy frowned. ‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it is. But he’s a bit of a mystery man.’
‘That’s our impression. How come you haven’t an address?’
‘He gave me the address of the Hôtel Central. Said he was staying there.’
‘Right. I’ll get it from there. Did he come often?’
‘No.’
‘Know anything about him?’
‘He’s a widower. That’s all I know. He came on my books about five years ago.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Seventy-eight.’
‘We were told between sixty-five and seventy.’
‘He’s in pretty good shape.’
‘Not now, he isn’t,’ Darcy said.
‘Why not? Has something happened to him?’
‘Yes. He died.’
There was a long silence. ‘Well,’ Doctor Billetottes said, ‘I must say that’s a surprise. I’d have given him another ten to fifteen years. Last time I saw him he seemed fit enough.’
‘Well, he’s not now. What did you see him about?’
‘His feet. They were flat. So flat they were curling up at the ends. He took to sitting down a lot.’
Darcy seemed to have found their man. ‘I expect he developed good sitting bones instead,’ he said.
Doctor Billetottes laughed. ‘He didn’t just sit down for the sake of sitting down. He played cards. He loved cards.’
‘Who did he play with?’
‘God knows. Neighbours, I suppose. Women. He liked women.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Things he said. He said he was here to see a woman. That was why he was staying at the Hôtel Central. He’d done it before, he said. I got the impression that he’d been in the habit of following them about. What happened to him? Heart attack? I wouldn’t have expected it. He had a heart like a trip hammer.’
‘It wasn’t his heart,’ Darcy said. ‘At least, only in so far as it stopped. He was found dead on the motorway.’
‘What was he doing there? He didn’t drive.’
‘He wasn’t driving. He seems to have been drunk and staggering about and was hit by a car.’
‘It doesn’t sound like him. Sure you’ve got the right man?’
‘Appendicitis scar? Kidney operation scar left side?’
‘That’s him, all right.’
‘Did he suffer from depression?’
‘Mon Dieu, no! Why?’
‘I wondered if getting himself hit by a car was a new way of doing himself in, and whether the whisky he’d drunk was to help him screw up his courage. After all there were lots of scars on his wrists as if he’d tried to open veins.’
Doctor Billetottes laughed again. ‘They weren’t suicide attempts. They were accidents. I asked him about them. He told me he once had a property in the hills. Lots of trees along one border. He felt they needed lopping to let in some light and decided to do it himself. But he wasn’t very good at it and a bow saw’s not an easy thing to handle when you’re up a ladder. It’s a wonder he didn’t cut his hand off.’
‘Did he hit the bottle much?’
‘He liked a few drinks. Who doesn’t? But I don’t think he overdid it.’
‘He seems to have done this time,’ Darcy said.