Suddenly they began to make headway – in both the Arri and the Barclay cases.
‘Pomereu’s found a farmer,’ Darcy told Pel, ‘who saw what might well have been some sort of rehearsal for the kidnapping. He was driving cattle on a hill out towards Villers-Chenaudin when he noticed several cars on the road below him. It must have been interesting because it seems he lost one of his cows among the trees.’
As usual, the report was coming over the top of a bock of beer in the Bar Transvaal.
‘They were going through a set of movements that seem to have been the same as the ones Jacqueline Duhamel saw when Barclay was snatched. There was even a motor cyclist who set the thing going. We’re trying to find out more but we already know one of the cars was a yellow Passat. We’ve also found a type who could have known Ennaert’s Citroën was in its garage the night it was needed. In fact, there could be a whole bunch of them. It’s a nosey neighbourhood.’
The habits of Ennaert and his girl friends were well known, it seemed, and everybody in the street, even in the bar opposite, seemed to know what went on, though none of them seemed to deserve a second glance except a man called Henri Journais.
‘He was in the army,’ Darcy said.
‘179th Regiment?’
Darcy shrugged. ‘His neighbours think he knows all about karate, and, what’s more, he seems to be tall enough to drive a car with the seat pushed right back. He’s done his time in the army but he worked for a while with a security firm until the job fell through. Now nobody’s quite sure what he does.’
‘Have you brought him in?’
‘No. He’s disappeared with his wife. The neighbours think he’s gone to Blois to do some fishing in the Loire. I’ve got the uniformed boys here to keep an eye on his apartment and asked Blois to pick him up if they spot him. But you know what it’ll be like there. Give a Frenchman a fine day and he’ll have his rod over the nearest stretch of river before you can breathe.’
That evening, Darcy was on the telephone to say they’d taken another step forward.
‘We’ve found the owner of the yellow Passat,’ he said. ‘A Madame Danton-Criot. Dominique Danton-Criot. She has a big house near Vallefrie. She says the car was parked in the drive overnight with the keys in it, and the gates were left open, and it had disappeared when she went out to it the next morning. It was found the same evening at Arbaçay, the next village.’
‘Who found it?’
‘She did. She was driving through Arbaçay in another of her cars – she seems to have three – and there it was. In the square. She had someone with her, who took over the car she was driving and she simply got in the Passat and drove it away. It was unlocked and the keys were on a shelf under the dashboard.’
‘Did she report it?’
‘No. It was undamaged and nothing was missing, so she decided it had been taken by kids who’d been drinking in Vallefrie.’
Pel frowned. ‘But it wasn’t kids, was it?’ he said slowly. ‘It was somebody who used the car to rehearse a kidnapping. This Madame Danton: Has Lamiel seen her?’
‘Yes, Patron. He seemed very happy to accept her word.’ Darcy chuckled. ‘I think he was influenced a bit by the way she looked.’
‘How did she look?’
‘Well, you’ve seen Brigitte Bardot. And Sophia Loren. Maybe even Marie-France Pisier. She’s a bit like all three. Only better.’
Pel frowned. ‘What in God’s name are you trying to say?’
‘She was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, Patron. Not young any more, but then neither am I. I can’t think how I’ve never managed to meet her. As tall as me. Superb figure. Dark hair and the most enormous blue eyes I’ve ever seen. She managed to project considerable voltage into the occasion.’
Pel gave a contemptuous sniff. ‘I think you should go home and take a cold bath.’
Darcy chuckled. ‘A little sex is what makes the flowers grow. Cops always have dreams about damsels.’
‘Some cops just have bad feet. Who is she?’
‘I don’t know, Patron. I’ve never seen her before and apparently neither has anyone else.’
‘Wealthy?’
‘Judging by her house, yes. Manoir de Varas it’s called. Near to Vallefrie.’
‘Which is where?’
‘Next village to Arbaçay. It’s a big house. Long drive. Outbuildings. Stables. It’s even got a couple of statues in front. You can smell money.’
Pel frowned. ‘What does she do for a living? Is she a female gangster? Only gangsters can afford that sort of set-up.’
‘Nothing known either in Arbaçay or Vallefrie. I made a point of asking. Apparently she took the place over about five years ago.’
‘Don’t they know anything about her?’
‘She doesn’t trade in the villages.’
‘She sounds as if you’d be out of your league.’
Darcy laughed. ‘With her, maybe. But not with the girl who drove the car. She’d do me any time. Dark-haired, petite, deux jolies lolos, figure like a gazelle. Patron, I’ve found that beautiful women don’t normally have beautiful companions, in case they draw attention away from themselves. But this one has, and the companion comes a good second to the boss. Lamiel was swept off his feet. All apologies and promises not to trouble them again.’
Pel frowned. ‘What about Monsieur Danton-Criot? Is there one?’
Darcy paused. ‘We asked. Seems he’s a financier of some sort. Films. That sort of thing. Spends three-quarters of the year abroad. In America.’
‘So does she have boy-friends? Beautiful women usually have to fight them off.’
Darcy laughed. ‘I wouldn’t mind being one, Patron,’ he said.
‘That’s not the point,’ Pel said coldly. ‘Was Barclay one?’
Sitting at his desk, insulated from all the tension, Nosjean studied his notes. Before him was a list of names – the cast of characters in the investigation in which he was involved: the Rumanian, Cubescu, who had sold Chevrier, the fabric designer, what was believed to be a Rembrandt, but wasn’t. Riault, the lawyer who sold dubious paintings on the side. Jean-Philippe Roth, a gallery owner who was honest most of the time but was by no means above encouraging people, without using so many words, to believe that the paintings they bought from him were more valuable than their prices suggested. There was Vacchi, who liked to project his image with the works of art he bought. And Ugo Luca who, whatever his wife claimed, was a painter as well as an art restorer, and had worked for all the others at some time or other. It was Nosjean’s opinion that he could take any old painting out of any old attic and, according to the subject, make it into a Rembrandt or a Cézanne or a Utrillo or a Vlaminck.
Then, of course, there was an eighty-nine year old man called Solecin who claimed, quite falsely, to have been the curator of an art museum and was prepared to write provenances for pictures for money – provenances which, in the absence of an authentication, were a great help in increasing the value of the works in question.
Somewhere in the background there also had to be an organiser. So who was it? Wondering if other police forces had come up with similar cases, Nosjean got in touch with a few and found, not entirely to his surprise, that there had indeed been other instances. There was a Degas, a couple of Gauguins, several Toulouse Lautrec chalk sketches and a number of Cézannes. They had all changed hands some time before, however, and it was going to be difficult to trace them back. But then he came across a businessman called Moncy who had come into possession of a Utrillo. With it went an authentication written on the back of a photograph of the painting and signed by Matisse, who was a contemporary. Since Utrillo had always been a good target for forgers because at times he couldn’t tell his own work from a copy, Moncy had decided to investigate a little further and had sent the photograph with the authentication to a handwriting expert, together with a photograph of a genuine letter written by Matisse.
A second authentication signed by – guess who! – that same professor of Fine Art, Yves-Pol Solecin, made the Matisse authentication very suspicious and, finding Moncy’s address, Nosjean went to see him. He wasn’t prepared to stand up in court because the painting had been a gift but he enjoyed art and was willing to help Nosjean, and promptly put him on to a friend of his who had acquired an early Renoir, authenticated this time by a letter apparently written by Arline Charigot, who had married the artist and lived with him happily for the rest of her life. Since this was also accompanied by an authentication from Yves-Pol Solecin, however, Nosjean assumed it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
‘It’s obvious what they’re doing,’ Mijo Lehmann said as she and Nosjean clutched each other that night in the big bed in her flat. ‘They’re choosing paintings that are easy to copy.’
‘Easy?’ To Nosjean, for whom painting a door was difficult, the meaning wasn’t clear, and Mijo paused long enough to nuzzle his ear with her lips.
‘Impressionists, most of them,’ she explained. ‘And all painters with a heavy style of laying on colour. Dégas, for instance. Not too difficult so long as you can produce his special blue. Gauguin. His Tahitian studies wouldn’t be hard to produce. Vlaminck. Van Gogh. All that whirly paint.’
They were a little preoccupied for a while but when they resurfaced she went on enthusiastically. ‘Manet, no,’ she said. ‘Toulouse Lautrec? Very definitely. Especially his cartoons and chalk drawings. I once had copies of A First Communion and Riding to the Bois knocked off for me in a couple of hours by an art student as a present. With a letter from Yvette Guilbert, who was a friend of Lautrec’s, you’d have provenance enough.’
Nosjean held her tight. He was beginning to see himself directed to Paris to run the art fraud squad.
The following morning Nosjean was at his desk pondering on what Mijo had said when the telephone rang. It was Moncy, the man with the fake Utrillo.
‘My expert took about two minutes to compare the handwriting,’ he announced. ‘He said it was impossible that the same hand could have written both letters. The authentication was a deliberate fraud.’
‘Where did you get the picture?’
‘It was given to me by a business acquaintance. He collects pictures. I put some work his way and he probably felt grateful.’
‘An odd way of showing his gratitude – giving you a dud picture.’
‘He likes to pretend he knows a lot about it and he probably thinks I don’t.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Man called Vacchi.’
‘I thought it might be. I’d like to talk to your handwriting expert. Who is he?’
‘Name of De Lavigny. Lives at Auxerre.’
It took Nosjean no more than a couple of hours to reach De Lavigny. He was a small dark intense man but he had a relaxed manner that belied his appearance.
‘Someone had tried to copy Matisse’s handwriting,’ he said. ‘But forging isn’t that easy and under a magnifying glass it didn’t even compare with the real thing. Mind you, they’d done their homework. The picture’s a view of a bridge under a sky of racing storm clouds and it’s signed Maurice U Valadon, which was how Utrillo signed himself in the early days. Also, the message’s addressed to him at the Rue du Poteau, Montmartre, where his mother lived. But anybody could look all that up in a book about him, so it doesn’t really have much value.’
By this time, Nosjean was deeply involved and was very much intrigued to learn that the lines he had established all seemed to lead firmly back to Raoul Riault. Which, in a way, brought him back to Claude Barclay’s Vlaminck, which had started it all when it had been stolen under the noses of visitors at the opening of the Hôtel du Grand Cerf at Lorne.
The manager of the hotel wasn’t so easily convinced. ‘If Monsieur Barclay says it’s genuine’, he said with a sniff, ‘then as far as I’m concerned, it is genuine.’
He seemed to regard policemen making enquiries as if they were asking for free meals in his best dining room, and the drink he gave Nosjean was in a glass so small it looked like the bulb of a thermometer.
‘If you have any doubt, you’d better enquire at the Collège Privé de l’Est,’ he suggested. ‘Monsieur Barclay gave them a picture and I’m sure that, with the experts they have on their staff, they wouldn’t make a mistake.’
When he checked on the background of the staff of the college, however, Nosjean wasn’t so sure. The man who taught art – very essential for the indulged sons and daughters of wealthy fathers, who couldn’t be relied on to get a qualification in anything more technical – was simply a teacher of art with a minor qualification from the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and no more. It seemed it might be worth a visit to the college, as the manager of the Grand Cerf had suggested.
The college was a splendid place deep in the countryside near Chaux. It was an old manor house covered with ivy, on to which a new complex of matching buildings – designed by Deputy Barclay – had been added with a great deal of taste. Several smartly-dressed young ladies were exercising horses in a paddock alongside the drive, watched by a groom. It was that sort of college.
Outside the entrance was an expensive-looking Porsche whose windscreen was being wiped by a ravishing blonde who looked like Catherine Deneuve and immediately made Nosjean wonder if he’d been too precipitate in finally giving his heart to Mijo Lehmann. As he halted his car, she turned towards him with a smile that made his heart skid about under his shirt like aspic on a hot plate.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Francie Lejaune. I run the office. Can I help you?’
Francie Lejaune didn’t seem to do much work and Nosjean could only assume her duties were chiefly to put at ease parents – especially fathers – who called to see their children at work and play. She was chattily amusing, making Nosjean, who blushed easily when faced with beautiful women, completely at ease. She seemed able to talk about anything without really having a lot of knowledge about anything, and Nosjean wondered if she were the product of some sort of charm school.
The college principal, a tall distinguished man with a shock of white hair, seemed proud of her. ‘Francie’s not a typist,’ he admitted. ‘Though she can type a little. But she’s such an asset in that she puts people entirely at their ease. She turned up a week or two ago and said she’d worked for Monsieur Barclay, and that seemed good enough for us, because he’s a director of the college and has a splendid reputation. We decided to take a chance and Francie turned out to be perfect for the job. She has taste, a great ability to please people and, as I’m sure you’ve observed – a great natural beauty.’
Though Nosjean found the delectable Francie a fascinating subject, she wasn’t the reason for his visit and he worked the conversation round to the subject of the Vlaminck which had first started his enquiries.
The principal shrugged. ‘Well, I’ve heard that Professor Grandjean’s expressed doubts about it,’ he admitted. ‘We have none, of course.’
Nosjean was about to say it might be better if they had when the principal gestured. ‘Monsieur Barclay’s word was good enough for us,’ he said.
‘He assessed it?’
‘He sold it.’
‘He sold it? I thought it was his.’
‘It was until we bought it. People thought it was still his but, in fact, it belongs to the college. He owns a large share of the place and was keen to improve it. We felt the same way. We consider we got a very valuable painting very cheaply.’
‘How much was paid for it?’
‘Five hundred thousand francs. We have large funds at our disposal. Many well-known people back us, including Claude Barclay himself, of course.’ The principal paused. ‘We sincerely hope that he’ll be found unharmed.’
Nosjean murmured his agreement but he was intrigued and pushed on. ‘Who organised the sale?’ he asked.
‘The college bursar. He’s an old army friend of Monsieur Barclay. An excellent man.’
‘Do you have other paintings?’
‘Oh, yes. We have another Vlaminck, for instance, two Van Goghs, a Cézanne.’
Nothing difficult, Nosjean noticed, and he knew Mijo Lehmann would have agreed.
‘This Vlaminck,’ he said. ‘The disputed one. When Monsieur Barclay sold it, he was, in fact, in a way selling it to himself, wasn’t he? Transferring it from one collection in which he had an interest to another of the same nature.’
‘Not quite that.’ The principal smiled. ‘The collection at his home is personal. This one is owned by the college.’
‘But the money that was paid for it went into Monsieur Barclay’s private account?’
‘But of course.’
‘Did you have an expert examine it when you bought it?’
‘It wasn’t necessary. Monsieur Barclay produced provenance and we accepted his word. As we did with the Utrillo.’
‘Which Utrillo?’
‘The Narrow Street in Montmartre. It’s hanging in the great hall. You must look at it as you leave.’
‘Did Monsieur Barclay sell you that, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘The same price.’
Which, Nosjean thought, made a cool million francs. And if neither of the pictures was genuine and they were worth only around a thousand francs for the two – five hundred was what Mijo Lehmann had suggested might be reasonable for a fake – that made a clear profit of nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand!
As Nosjean moved forward, so did Lagé, and the following day, armed with one of the plates from Arri’s cottage, he headed down the motorway towards Beaune, where he turned off for Montluçon and finally Limoges. He was back the same evening, bursting with excitement.
‘Patron,’ he said. ‘That china! It was ordered by Barclay!’
‘Barclay!’ Pel sat up sharply. What in God’s name had they got into?
‘The order was for four hundred pieces,’ Lagé said. ‘Varying colours. Blue, pink, green, yellow and red. All trimmed with gilt.’
‘Four hundred pieces!’ Pel stared. ‘In the name of God, what would he want with four hundred pieces?’