The thing was beginning to get on Pel’s nerves. After considering it an affair that concerned Orgny and the countryside around, he had thought wrongly for a while that it was a mere domestic bitterness; now he realised that it did concern Orgny after all, but not in the way he’d first thought. It was deeper than that and he felt himself neck-deep in old hatreds and a bitterness that was suffocating. Having been only a boy during the war, he’d never realised the emotions it had engendered. Now it seemed to be welling up again, filling the valleys with fury.
It seemed to be time to go to the man who might really know the truth, and he rang the Baron de Mougy and arranged to meet him at the château at Ste Monique.
The Baron was much more formidable than his wife, a cold-eyed man almost two metres high, thin as a lathe with a frame that was still all muscle and sinew despite his age. Pel remembered he’d been a champion fencer, a dead shot and a ruthless and murderous Resistance leader, and decided he wouldn’t like to be Piot if he discovered the liaison with his wife.
‘Inspector Pel,’ he said. ‘Police Judiciaire.’
The Baron sniffed, as if he considered policemen a proletariat invention that couldn’t possibly have any connection with himself.
‘Wasn’t there a Pel who was police commissaire for Avignon in the Twenties,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard of him.’
He was so condescending Pel disliked him at once. ‘There was a Pel who murdered his wife in Paris,’ he said flatly. ‘Felix-Albert Pel. Cut her up and burned the bits in the kitchen stove. It was at the time when Boulanger was trying to become President of the Republic. There were a lot of funny things happening in those days.’
De Mougy gave him a quick look but he didn’t say anything and, with him effectively put in his place, Pel laid down the map of Bussy-la-Fontaine that Darcy had obtained from Dôle. ‘Have you seen this before, Monsieur le Baron?’ he asked.
The cold eyes glittered. ‘Of course.’ The words were clipped and sparse like the Baron. ‘Heutelet telephoned me.’
Pel’s eyebrows lifted. ‘About this?’ he said.
‘No. About something else. He said he’d explained about that.’
‘Yes,’ Pel agreed. ‘He did.’
‘Then why ask me?’
‘Merely as a check, Monsieur. What is it?’
The Baron frowned. ‘It’s a map we put out to confuse the Germans during the war.’
‘Did it confuse them?’
‘Often.’
‘Were you in the château here when they were in residence?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Where were you?’
‘In the woods.’
He wasn’t exactly forthcoming, Pel thought, and he was having to dig out the facts with a trowel.
‘Where, Monsieur?’ he asked.
‘At Illy.’
‘What about the Germans here?’
The Baron’s thin mouth moved. ‘We shot a few,’ he said.
‘What about when they looted your château?’
‘We shot a few more.’
Pel hesitated for a moment. ‘Did you ever recover any of the loot?’ he asked.
‘Just one silver plate.’
‘Where?’
‘It was found in a ditch near Bussy-la-Fontaine – Piot’s place.’
‘Does Piot know?’
‘I imagine so. Everybody else does. It was returned to my father.’
‘Did you do anything about it?’
‘We searched Bussy-la-Fontaine after the war. Monsieur Heurion was most helpful.’
‘But you found nothing?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘No sign?’
‘Not one.’
‘Did you ever learn where it all went to?’
‘No.’
‘Had you no idea?’
‘I heard later it was on Heutelet’s land. Or on that lout Matajcek’s.’ The Baron’s broad shoulders lifted.
‘But you don’t know for sure?’
‘Of course not or I’d have claimed it.’ Ask a silly question, Pel thought.
‘Did you ever meet a German called Geistardt?’ he asked.
The cold eyes flickered. ‘Fortunately for him, no.’
‘You knew who he was?’
‘Yes. Sturmbannführer Heinz Geistardt. He was a murderer. It was my dearest wish that I might meet him.’
‘What would you have done if you had?’
The Baron blinked. ‘Shot him,’ he said. He sounded as if Pel ought to have known.
Pel’s thin dark face melted in a smile. ‘That’s what Heutelet telephoned about, isn’t it?’ he said.
The Baron frowned. ‘Yes,’ he snapped.
‘Because he’d heard Geistardt had been seen.’
‘Yes.’
‘He never paid for his crimes, did he?’
The Baron shrugged. ‘American-British soft-heartedness. They lean over backwards to explain away the acts of criminals.’ He seemed to be warming up at last and his face had reddened. ‘But for them we should have hanged the lot – guilty or not. But, of course, Britain and America were never occupied. The Dutch and the Norwegians would say the same as us.’
So had Heutelet, Pel thought.
‘What do you know about Geistardt?’ he asked.
The cold eyes were full of anger now. ‘He was a murderer and a torturer of Frenchmen.’
‘In addition to that.’
‘Could there be more?’
‘There might be. I need to find out. I would appreciate your help.’
The Baron considered. His nose wrinkled as if Pel were a bad smell. ‘He was a characterless monster’ he said. ‘What can one say about a mere boy?’
‘He was a boy?’
‘Twenty-two or three. No more. I suspect he had influence with Himmler to be so important. He was the sort who tortures puppies or pulls the wings off flies. The school bully who enjoys seeing the smallest children weep.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Fair-haired. Blue-eyed. Tall. Not sturdily built. But I imagine he wasn’t a weakling.’
It all fitted the description of the corpse, Pel thought. He seemed to be getting somewhere at last.
‘What else do you know about him?’
‘He was a swindler.’
‘Oh? In what way?’
‘Every way you can think of. He made people hand in their papers then charged to get them back. He operated a protection racket round the bars. And round the farms. If you didn’t pay, you found your animals commandeered. He extorted money from my father by saying that his paintings would go to Germany. They went anyway.’
‘Anything else? Characteristics?’
The Baron’s mouth curled in a sneer. ‘What would you call these but characteristics?’
‘I need more, Baron.’
‘He was sadistic. He enjoyed torture, I think. He was also a womaniser. And always with young women. Girls almost. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. That age. I think he enjoyed their terror.’
‘Would you know anybody he might have had occasion to visit?’
The Baron’s mouth twisted in contempt. ‘I can’t imagine him being welcomed anywhere.’
‘What about the women you mentioned?’
‘They wouldn’t dare. In any case, they all moved away after the Liberation. I’ve no doubt they decided it was safer. It wasn’t entirely their fault, I realise, but not everybody knew that.’
Pel persisted. ‘Wasn’t there one courageous enough to stay and face people?’
De Mougy paused. ‘There was a woman.’
‘In Orgny?’
‘You know one such?’
‘I might,’ Pel said.
The Baron shook his head. ‘No. Not in Orgny. She lived in Savoie St Juste. She went away but she came back.’
That was what Bique à Poux had said. Pel leaned forward. His mind was on Madame Grévy. ‘Do you know her name?’
The Baron sniffed. ‘Who would forget the name of a woman who went with a man like Geistardt? Yes, I do. It was Charpentier. Denise Charpentier.’
Pel was surprised. This was a name they’d not heard so far. ‘And she fraternised with Geistardt?’
‘That’s hardly the word to describe what she did.’
‘You knew her?’
The Baron’s hand moved in a gesture. He had never seen the woman with Geistardt. Savoie was some distance away, but all the stories indicated that she was Geistardt’s woman. If he hadn’t lived with her, he had always been at her house, a green-painted one at the end of the village. It was still green, in fact, because he’d seen it as he’d driven through.
Pel looked excited. ‘Is she still there?’ he asked.
‘I think so.’
Pel’s heart leapt. ‘I think I’d better go and see her,’ he said.
He was about to leave when the Baron stood up. ‘If Geistardt has returned,’ he said. ‘I hope you catch him. If you don’t, someone else will.’
‘They probably have already,’ Pel said. ‘I think he was the man shot and tortured at the Bussy-la-Fontaine calvary.’
De Mougy’s eyes glittered. ‘I trust so,’ he said. ‘It would be poetic justice. He shot and tortured the Louhalle girl.’
‘You knew her?’ This seemed to be an unexpected bonus. The Baron nodded. ‘Very well.’
‘She was brave, I believe.’
‘Superlatively so. She was quite indifferent to danger and the real leader in that area, whatever Heutelet claims. The men would never admit it, of course, but she was. I was the one who recommended her for the posthumous Légion d’Honneur.’
‘Who received it for her?’
‘I did. There were no relatives. It’s in the Resistance Museum now.’
There seemed to be a desperate need to know this legendary fighter.
‘Why was she so courageous?’ Pel asked.
‘Perhaps because she’d nothing to lose. She gave the Germans a lot of trouble at a time when nothing was organised round here and they took it out of her when they captured her. They did terrible things to her. Up there in the woods. Not to get information, you understand. Just because she’d been a nuisance to them.’
‘How do you know this?’
The cold eyes flickered again. ‘I was there when they were found. She was lying separate from the rest.’ The thin face grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t like to say what they’d done to her. It was Geistardt who did it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We had our sources of information. Unfortunately, they weren’t firm enough when he was brought to trial and he got away with it. I was disgusted. He was a fastidious man and I think he made it worse for her because of what she was.’
‘What she was?’ Pel leaned forward. ‘What was she?’
The Baron’s eyebrows rose. ‘Didn’t you know? She was a tart.’
Pel’s jaw dropped. This didn’t seem to fit the picture of a heroine.
‘A tart?’
The Baron smiled for the first time. ‘Every man round Orgny – every man in the group – had her. I had her. I expect old Heutelet had her. He had every girl for miles around who was willing and I believe he still does.’
Pel found it hard to accept. ‘She was a prostitute?’
‘She took money for it.’
Pel was silent and the Baron went on. ‘You look startled, Inspector. You needn’t be. The heroes of the Resistance weren’t all noble men and women. All too often they were the people who didn’t fit well into society and therefore fitted well into the Resistance.’
‘You were one, Baron.’
The Baron smiled. ‘I was part of a privileged class. The wealthy never give a damn what people think and the poor can never afford to. It’s the middle classes that play safe, both now and during the war. Some of the best of the Maquis were either the aristocracy, who were indifferent to conventions, or the gangsters and small-time city thugs, who’d lived by their wits all their lives. For them the Resistance was merely an extension of their peacetime behaviour. Because Dominique Louhalle was a tart was no reason why she shouldn’t be brave. And, unlike the Charpentier woman and one or two others, she was never a German tart.’