‘Patron,’ Nosjean looked puzzled, ‘it’s not a crime to run a brothel. Especially one which is obviously run on good lines.’
‘It’s a crime if it isn’t licensed,’ Pel said stiffly.
‘At least they kept it quiet.’
‘Not quiet enough. Sécret de deux, sécret de Dieu. Sécret de trois, sécret de tous. They forgot – walls have mice and mice have ears.’ But who’s going to worry about who goes to a brothel?’
‘Paris might not worry about who goes to a brothel,’ Pel said. ‘But the provinces do and, despite the fact that Paris thinks that what Paris does the whole of France is doing, the provinces don’t take these things so lightly. They would certainly object to a junior member of the government being involved.’
When he reached home Madame Pel was sitting on the settee holding a small whisky and listening to Mozart. Indifferent to music, Pel poured himself a drink, and sat on a chair at the back of the room, unobtrusively reading the headlines in the newspaper until it had finished. As the machine clicked, Madame caught sight of him for the first time and reached out to touch his hand.
‘You’re always so good,’ she said. ‘Letting me listen to things you don’t like.’
Pel shrugged, trying to look as if he’d behaved with true nobility but in reality fully aware that it was always easier to read the paper than try to understand eighteenth century melodies.
‘Was it a good day?’ she asked.
‘A very good day. And tomorrow I think we should go to see your Cousin Roger.’
Madame almost dropped her glass.
She had never known Pel enthusiastic to meet her relations before. Usually he was full of excuses but she had noticed that, though Cousin Roger was considered the black sheep of the family, somehow he and Pel had taken to each other at the party at Bois Haut.
A telephone call brought an enthusiastic response from Roger’s wife. She was delighted to be seeing Madame Pel again. ‘And Roger will be pleased to see Pel!’ she shrieked down the telephone.
It was a noisy day. Roger had two cats, two dogs, several goldfish and a budgerigar, to say nothing of four children, all of them at the age when they made a lot of noise, got in the way and ate enough for a carthorse. Apart from the goldfish and the budgerigar, they all seemed to spend all their time fighting cheerfully with each other and when Pel and his wife arrived the two youngest children were playing at terrorists.
‘If they stick splinters under your fingernails’, one of them was saying, ‘will you tell them who sent you?’
‘I’ll tell them long before that.’ To Pel the reply seemed eminently sensible.
They had lunch which started with apéritifs at midday, and finally put their coffee cups down at four in the afternoon, to look round to see if anyone was interested in tea. Roger, in fact, had dropped off to sleep in the sun.
Pel nudged him. ‘Show me the garden,’ he said.
Roger groaned, climbed out his chair with an effort and poured the dregs from his brandy glass into the aquarium in the hall. ‘I think it cheers them up,’ he said.
Leaving the rest of the family squabbling over who was going to make the tea, they drifted off up the lawn towards the shrubbery.
‘I suppose’, Roger said, ‘you’ve come about Barclay.’
Pel admitted the fact.
Roger offered a cigarette and sat down on a bench in the shade. ‘He was a shifty type, you know,’ he admitted. ‘We’ve been his accountants for a long time but I never knew a period when he wasn’t always a few steps ahead of us.’ He seemed a little puzzled. ‘He’d been getting stock together,’ he went on. ‘Negotiable bonds, money, company assets that could be sold. I think he was planning to go to America. He’d applied for a residence permit there, I know, and he’d been transferring funds for some time.’
‘Did he expect to get his permit?’
Roger laughed. ‘With his money? Of course.’
‘Has he any family there?’
‘None I know of.’
‘He was doing well in France, wasn’t he?’
‘As far as I can tell.’
‘Then why go to America?’
Roger shrugged. ‘We were his accountants, not his advisers. He did what he fancied, and he was good enough at it to do it well, then he left us to pick up the pieces with the tax people.’
‘Was he honest?’
‘We never found he was dishonest. But that’s not quite the same, is it? He had his fingers in a lot of pies and I’m sure he didn’t tell us everything he should. Some people are straightforward with their accountants, As a rule, it’s because they’re honest or because they don’t understand what’s going on and feel it’s safer. But there are also a few who are dishonest who try to pick up a little extra on the side. The ones who’re dishonest and not clever usually find themselves facing a frozen-faced accountant and, if it goes on happening, they have to find another more accommodating accountant, because shifty clients usually indicate shifty accountants. We’re not that sort. But there are also clever clients – some of them not always as honest as they might be – who are able to bamboozle even their accountants, because, after all, we’re only human and if the client’s cleverer than we are, he manages to hide things from us.’
‘Which group did Barclay belong to?’
Cousin Roger scratched his nose. ‘I honestly don’t know. But I know he’d been shifting money about a lot lately.’
Barclay’s interests were hardly on a world-wide scale, but he seemed to have a lot of them. Boutiques, perfume shops, supermarkets, restaurants, linenware, vineyards. They were none of them vast undertakings and, Pel noticed, they weren’t grouped under one title like Barclay Enterprises. That in itself seemed suspicious, as if, perhaps, Barclay used the funds of one to bolster up another. Fraud in France was rising at an alarming rate – insurance companies believed that computer frauds were costing billions of francs a year – and the number of cases detected bore little relation to the total committed.
The list Cousin Roger was able to offer was far from complete – he admitted it himself – and didn’t include those affairs that were not based locally. But, Pel noticed, he and his department were already familiar with several of the names.
‘Of course,’ Roger said, ‘he was deeply involved in charities, too.’
‘Which charities?’
‘Children’s homes for a start. Ex-servicemen’s charities. As you’ll know, he was a much-decorated soldier as a young man. He fought at Dien Bien Phu and was taken prisoner.’
Pel was growing a little tired of Barclay’s heroism. ‘I’ve heard of that. What else?’
‘The disabled. He runs several disabled ex-soldiers’ homes and collects funds for them.’
‘Any more?’
‘Natural disasters. The Mexican earthquake, for instance. Africa. He took a great interest in those and raised a great deal of money. Things of that nature always captured his attention at once. He’d handled millions of francs for recovery schemes.’ He paused. ‘Hospitals, too. There must be a lot of hospitals grateful for the funds he’s raised. Art galleries. He’s given dozens of pictures and sculptures. He was always working. I don’t know how he found the time. A lot of it was here, of course, but he was also in Paris a lot. He was a member of the government, after all.’
Pel nodded. ‘That’, he said, ‘is what worries me. Was he in financial trouble?’
Roger considered. ‘I think the tax inspectors had been having a few doubts about his ability to meet his responsibilities. It worried us, I have to admit.’
‘You mean you think he was dodging his taxes?’ Pel asked bluntly.
Cousin Roger hummed and hahed for a while. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘How far would you go?’
‘Shall we say we were investigating him a little ourselves. No firm of accountants likes to wake up and find they’re mixed up in something fishy.’
‘Was it fishy?’
‘It was beginning to smell a bit.’
‘So you did think he’d been dodging his taxes?’
‘No, we didn’t. But we know he was behind in his payments and the tax inspector was wanting to know why. But he’s not prepared to do anything about it – not yet, anyway, because these big operators often lay well back, feeling that for reasons of their own it’s best to delay paying. To have cash available for some scheme they’re working. To give the impression of wealth being in the right place when it isn’t really. To give confidence to investors, that sort of thing. They accept that they’ll have to pay interest on their unpaid tax, but they feel that it’ll be worth it for reasons of business.’
‘And he was a big operator?’
‘Oh, yes. He was a big operator. But he had drawn a lot out lately. And the bank contacted us a week or so ago because they’d had a request through someone who has power of attorney to draw money on his behalf. He’d been taken ill, it seems. A lot of money went out. Made out to one of his firms.’
‘Which one?’
‘A meat wholesaling firm. I can let you have it.’
‘I don’t think you need bother. I think I know it.’
Cousin Roger was silent for a while. ‘Funny you should come to see me,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of getting in touch with you.’
‘About Barclay?’
‘Yes. There’ve been a few hints that there’s something fishy going on at the hospitals here, too.’
‘What sort of fishy?’
‘There’ve been a lot of things missing.’
‘Surely he wouldn’t be up to that sort of thing?’
‘Not him. A type called Guy Rochefort. He’s administrator for three of the hospitals here. The Hôpital des Pauvres, the Hôpital Médico-Chirurgical Ballier and the Hôspital Ste Geneviève. But – and this is the point – Rochefort was given the job by Barclay. At least, Barclay was on the panel which selected him and, though the other two members weren’t very impressed and wanted another type called Magny, Barclay pushed Rochefort and he got the job.’
‘And now?’
‘There’s a belief that Rochefort’s been overbuying – things like sheets, pillowslips, towels – yet the hospitals are always short of them. He handles a lot of equipment.’ Roger looked uncomfortable. ‘Ought I to have got in touch with you before?’