Doctor Cham, who was Doc Minet’s assistant, appeared in Pel’s office. With him was Leguyader, of Forensic. They had been working together, which was always a sound and sensible idea but didn’t happen very often with peace and harmony. Leguyader was as difficult to handle as Pel himself and always delighted in turning up something that would throw a spanner in the works. Working in close co-operation with someone as young, modern and stubborn as Cham seemed to calm him down a little.
Cham was holding a large brown envelope containing the report he and Doc Minet had compiled. He was a tall young man with glasses and a long neck with a protruding Adam’s apple. He wasn’t much to look at but they’d discovered he had a quick perceptive brain and they’d all decided he was just the man to take Doc Minet’s place when the old man finally retired.
‘There’s no sign,’ he reported, ‘that she had recently had sex, and she certainly wasn’t pregnant.’
Well, if nothing else, that meant she hadn’t been murdered because she was carrying an unwanted child.
Leguyader was hopping about like a dog wanting to be let out and Pel recognised the sign. He had something to say he considered important. Perhaps he’d got it from the Encyclopédie Larousse which, it was believed, he perused every evening for something new with which to dazzle the Philistines at the Hôtel de Police.
‘We’ve done a preliminary examination of the clothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t disturbed and it’s all French—’
‘Shouldn’t it be?’
‘No,’ Leguyader snapped. ‘Not necessarily. In fact – if you’ll allow me to finish – there was, as I was about to say, one exception, a cotton and acrylic sweater. It’s marked St Michael.’
‘They’re calling sweaters after saints?’ Pel knew very well what St Michael meant but he could never resist putting Leguyader off his stroke with an interruption.
Leguyader sniffed. ‘It’s the maker’s name,’ he said coldly. ‘And I happen to know it’s English. The people who manufacture and sell them are Marks and Spencer, a British supermarket group.’
‘So she could be English?’
‘Again, not necessarily.’ Leguyader was at his most pedantic. ‘She could be Scottish. Or Welsh. Or Irish. Or French even. They have a store in the Champs Elysées in Paris. This I know because the last time I was there I was dragged in to re-equip the family with new clothes. They may also have a store in Marseilles and doubtless in other places, too. On the other hand–’ Leguyader paused, ‘the sweater may have been bought at a store in England.’
‘Any other indication that she’s English?’
‘Not at the moment,’ Cham said. ‘Her teeth will probably tell us. They have different methods of tooth care in England and use different amalgams for fillings. I’ll check.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing we can see. She wears a wedding ring, but we think that’s French. She could be a tourist. It happens occasionally. Husbands or lovers getting rid of unwanted women. Take them on a visit to romantic Paris, suggest a trip into the country and leave them there.’
‘Sometimes they’re left there by Frenchmen,’ Pel said dryly. ‘They strike up a romance and it proves awkward.’ He scowled, because he knew it could be a whole lot simpler even than that. Tourists had been murdered by over-sexed farm boys they’d never met before. But this time it didn’t seem to involve sex because the woman’s clothing had not been removed or damaged or even disarranged.
There was the Chief to inform, and the Procureur who would have to assign an examining magistrate to work with the police. Then there was the Press. There was always the Press, coming down like wolves on the fold, usually demanding information that couldn’t be given.
Their first questions, of course, were the usual ones.
‘Is it a rape case, Chief?’ Sarrazin asked. Sarrazin was a freelance who represented half a dozen Paris and provincial papers, mostly of the gutter type, and could always be relied upon to have his eyes open for anything faintly salacious.
‘At the moment,’ Pel said, ‘it doesn’t appear to be.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
They went off, satisfied, and the following day’s headlines came well up to expectation, GIRL’S BODY FOUND. ‘Girl?’ Pel said. ‘Name of God, she was forty if she was a day.’ LOVE NEST NEAR BY? ‘It is believed,’ Sarrazin’s papers announced, ‘that, though her name isn’t known, the victim was living in the area of Vieilles Etuves and that she had been seen in a car with a man.’
Pel shrugged. Newspapermen in France were never known for their veracity. Sometimes they helped the police by frightening a suspect out of hiding or into doing something silly, but mostly, apart from giving the great sporting public a salacious half-hour, they did nothing to forward a case.
He frowned at his blotter. You could count the reasons for murder, when you boiled them all down, on the fingers of one hand. And the sooner the police got on the trail the better it was. If they could be informed within an hour they invariably found the killer close to the scene of the crime, shocked and speechless. If the trail was a few hours old, it was that much harder. Six weeks was almost impossible. The killer could be in the South of France by then. In the United States. In China. In outer space. It was surprising who got to outer space these days.
So, he thought, if it weren’t a matter of sex, what was it? There was always unrequited love – which included jealousy and fury – and greed. When you thought about it, there weren’t many more.
Somehow, though, despite the missing handbag, Pel had a feeling it wasn’t robbery. So why had she been murdered? It had all the signs of a premeditated affair. The spot where she was found was about as isolated and unpopulated as you could get. Even in summer there were few people in the forest. A hunter or two, perhaps, anxious to shoot anything that moved – a rabbit, a starling; even, sometimes, another hunter. Even when their lives were not being threatened, Frenchmen with guns were quick on the draw.
He was still sitting at his desk, gloomily pondering the problem, when Aimedieu appeared. He was another of Pel’s bright young men who, like Nosjean and De Troq’, were expected to go a long way.
‘I’ve just brought in Philippe Bigeaud, patron,’ he said.
Pel sighed. Bigeaud was a deviate well known to the police. He was always being brought in for indecency or trying to molest young girls.
‘Well, get rid of him,’ he snapped. ‘Shove him up before the magistrates. You don’t need me to tell you what to do. He’s always being brought in. What was it this time?’
Aimedieu refused to be put off. ‘Loitering,’ he said.
Pel’s head lifted. ‘You mean, looking for some kid to frighten?’
Aimedieu stuck to his guns. ‘No, patron, not this time. He said he was hiding. He was in that abandoned house near the waste ground at the end of the Rue de la Poésie. He lives round there.’
‘Hiding?’ Pel said slowly.
‘That’s what he said, patron.’
‘Who from?’
‘He said he was a witness to that house fire there two months ago. He said he saw who did it and that the man who did it knew he was seen and by whom. So Bigeaud’s been trying to keep out of his way ever since.’
Pel remembered his talk with Darcy. ‘Does this type he saw, whoever he is, also live near the Rue de la Poésie.’
‘Bigeaud doesn’t know. But, since he saw him there, he thought he might.’
Pel pushed his chair back. The house in the Rue de la Poésie, Darcy had discovered, was owned by a Dutch couple. There were several other Dutch families in the area who owned houses and a lot of resentment among the locals because of it. It began to seem that Darcy’s idea that the fire had been deliberately started was not so far out. But it didn’t seem the Dutch couple were involved because they had been found to be under-insured and had lost all their furniture.
‘Let’s go and ask him a few questions,’ he said.
Bigeaud was sitting in the interview room, twitching at his trousers. He was a lean, pale-faced man with a long neck and a bad case of acne. He jumped to his feet as Pel entered.
‘I was only hiding,’ he said at once.
Pel waved to him to sit down and took a chair opposite him.
‘Hiding from what?’ he said.
‘This man.’
‘Which man?’
‘This type I saw set the house on fire.’
‘How did you see him?’
‘Well–’ Bigeaud hesitated, ‘I was just walking by—’
‘Time?’ Pel glanced at Aimedieu.
‘Midnight, patron.’
‘Just when everybody goes to bed. Any young women round there?’
Aimedieu grinned. ‘Plenty.’
‘He was Peeping Tomming, I suppose.’ Pel gestured at Bigeaud. ‘What do you say you were doing there?’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Bigeaud said earnestly. ‘I often can’t. So I go for a walk.’
Pel didn’t believe him for a minute. Criminals and deviates didn’t change. Their habits remained the same; they just grew more so as they grew older.
‘So what did you see?’ he asked. ‘Apart from women going to bed.’
‘I wasn’t looking for–’ Bigeaud stopped dead because he knew he wasn’t believed. ‘I was under the trees. It was dark. I saw this man come past. He was carrying a can and I smelled petrol. He stood and looked about him. I think he was deciding which way the wind was blowing. Then he vanished. I was scared he was the brother of one of the—’
‘The girls you’d been watching?’ Pel finished for him.
‘No. I wasn’t, sir. Not really. I—’
Pel gestured wearily. ‘Go on about this man.’
‘Soon afterwards I saw flames in the house. I thought he must have started it.’
‘But you didn’t inform the fire brigade?’
‘No. I was scared.’
‘Name of God, you idiot! You might have saved the place!’ Pel sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘All right, go on. What next?’
‘As I stepped out from under the trees, I almost bumped into him. He was running. I smelled petrol again. Then I knew he’d done it. He saw me, though. He got a good look at me.’
‘Didn’t you tell anyone’?’
‘No. I bolted. Into the darkness. I found some bushes and lay flat underneath them. I heard him moving about and knew he was searching for me.’
‘Who was he? Do you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well? Name?’ Pel was growing impatient.
‘I think it’s André Corvo. He’s a carpenter. I’ve seen it on the van he drives.’
Pel glanced at Aimedieu. ‘Take him away,’ he said. ‘But hang on to him for a while. We might need him for corroboration. In the meantime, let’s have this André Corvo in.’
Corvo was a hard-faced angry young man and his answer was brisk and unequivocal. Faced with the information that he was believed to have set a house on fire, he admitted it at once with an air of defiance.
‘I was going to buy that house,’ he said bitterly. ‘I made an offer and it was accepted. But then these bastards from Holland came along and offered a higher price. And the lousy con who owned it took their money and went to live in Brittany. Now, when we marry, me and my girl will have to go and live with my mother. None of us fancy that and it’s about thirty kilometres from where I work and from where we want to live.’
‘Were your intentions to buy the damaged house cheaply and make something of it?’
‘I can’t afford that. But the Dutch lot can. They’d submitted plans to convert it to a modern dwelling. People like me haven’t a chance. This is our country, not some Dutch speculator’s. It’s not surprising it goes on all the time.’
Pel’s eyes narrowed. ‘What goes on all the time? Arson?’
‘It must do. A guy even offered to do it for me.’
Pel sat up sharply. ‘Offered? Does he make a profession of it or something?’
‘He said he knew all about it.’
‘Who was he? Have you his name?’
‘You don’t think he’d tell me, do you?’
‘Did he ask for money?’
‘No.’
‘What did he look like, this man?’
‘Tall. Thin. Big nose.’
‘Dark or fair?’
‘Fair.’
‘Did he say he’d done it before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Houses?’
‘Anything. He said it was easy. I think he’d had a few drinks and was showing off.’
‘Where did this meeting take place?’
‘In the street. He just stopped me. After the Dutch bought the house. I didn’t take any notice of him. I thought he was just shooting his mouth off.’
‘But perhaps he wasn’t, was he? Why did he approach you? You haven’t been advertising, I suppose. In the small ads column of Le Bien Public: “Wanted – expert fire raiser.”’
Corvo scowled. ‘I suppose he heard me shouting the odds in the bar. I have been doing.’
‘Which bar?’
‘The Bar Emilien in Talant. That’s where I usually go. We’re always talking about houses there. We’re mostly in the building trade and we mostly work in and around Talant and some of us are wanting to buy. We get a bit fed up.’
Pel turned to Aimedieu. ‘Check that bar. Get names and look them up. Somebody might know our friend’s adviser on arson.’ He swung in his chair back to Corvo. ‘The fact that you’re helping us now won’t stop us putting you up before the magistrates,’ he said. ‘You realise that, don’t you?’
Corvo’s scowl grew deeper. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be getting married now.’
‘Not this year, you won’t. Arson isn’t the answer. Will your girl wait?’
‘I think so. She knew what I did. I told her.’
‘What did she say?’
Corvo answered wearily. ‘She told me I was mad.’
‘She was right.’
‘I was just so fed up. We’d been waiting ages. I was furious that somebody with more money from another country had got the house we’d set our hearts on.’
Pel lit a cigarette. Slowly, to give him time to think. ‘You know St-Etois?’ he asked.
Corvo looked sourly at him, resenting the questioning. ‘I’ve worked there. On the housing estate that’s going up.’
‘Know the woods there?’
‘We used to drive out there to eat our sandwiches in the lunch break. It caught fire.’
‘We think somebody set it on fire. Was it you?’
Corvo’s eyes opened so wide they looked as though they might fall out and roll about the floor. ‘No,’ he yelled. ‘It wasn’t! I’ve admitted this one and I expect I’ll get it in the neck for it, but don’t start hanging any others on me!’
‘What about this other type? Did he mention St-Etois?’
‘No, he didn’t!’
‘He might have been interested though, mightn’t he? Why didn’t you report him to us? We need to pull him in. He might have done the St-Etois job. He might even be offering to do a similar job for other people, too. What’s more, his offer might be taken up. Let’s have a description of him. Every detail. Everything you can remember.’
They got the identikit man in and started work. Within an hour they had a picture of the volunteer incendiary. To Pel he looked remarkably like the picture they’d build up of the missing man from the team that Jean-Pierre Orega had been briefing in the Parc de la Columbière.
‘Get hold of Nosjean,’ he said.
When Nosjean arrived, accompanied as usual by De Troq’, Pel handed him the identikit picture.
‘Seen that type before?’ he asked.
‘Sure, patron. That’s the type we saw with Orega in the park. The fifth man. The one we thought might be a fence.’
‘Found out any more about him?’
‘Nothing, patron. He seems to have vanished. Where did this come from?’
‘A type called Corvo.’
‘Does he know him?’
‘Not by name.’
‘Is he involved in another job?’
‘Yes and no. It seems that whatever else he does for a living, he also specialises in setting things on fire on the side.’