Pel Under Pressure (Chief Inspector Pel) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright & Information

  About the Author

  Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Note on Chief Inspector Pel Series

  Pel Titles in Order of First Publication

  Synopses of 'Pel' Titles

  Copyright & Information

  Pel Under Pressure

  First published in 1980

  © Estate of John Harris (Mark Hebden); House of Stratus 1980-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Harris (Mark Hebden) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  184232893X 9781842328934 Print

  0755124960 9780755124961 Pdf

  0755125169 9780755125166 Kindle

  0755125363 9780755125364 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other 'part time' careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the 'Chief Inspector' Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Note

  Though Burgundians will probably decide they have recognised it and certainly many of the street names are the same, in fact, the city in these pages is intended to be fictitious.

  One

  The city was like an oven.

  In its deep valley under the northern hills the place sweltered and the sergeants’ room in the Hôtel de Police was as uncomfortable as the inside of a furnace. The building was new and the architects had clearly believed in the use of solar heating but, planning to extract the maximum amount of energy from the sun on cold days, they had overlooked the fact that the city had quite a few hot days, too. At the last moment, however, they seemed to have panicked and, while making the windows nearly two metres square to let in the sun, they had also arranged for them to turn on a central pivot so that it was possible to lay them horizontal to allow the breeze to enter the offices as freely as possible.

  That day, unfortunately, there was no breeze at all and, despite the early hour, it was already so hot nobody was eager to start work. Certainly no one was anxious to be out on the streets and they clung to the sergeants’ room as if it were a life raft and they were drowning, all of them hoping nobody would be stupid enough to rape anyone else, rob anyone else or assault anyone else until the heat wave broke and the city grew cooler. They already had enough to keep them occupied.

  Sergeant Nosjean sat at his desk in his shirt sleeves, staring at a set of photographs spread in front of him. Some were in close-up; others had been taken far enough back to include the furnishings of a shabby room. They showed the bound shape of a young man lying on the floor and were sharp enough to show the worn patches in the carpet.

  The young man’s name was Jean-Marc Cortot and he was a student at the Faculté des Sciences at the University. He had been found the weekend before in his room, naked and bound hand and foot, with enough rope round him to moor a North Sea oil rig. His room-mate, one Philippe Mortier, had returned home to discover him, his face bruised, his body scarred, quite dead.

  There were marks on Cortot’s arms that indicated he had injected himself recently – and had been doing for some time – with heroin. There were no other wounds, however, beyond the bruised face and the scars on his naked back, and Dr Minet, the police surgeon, had made it clear very quickly that none of these was the cause of death.

  Nosjean’s chief, Inspector Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel, involved in investigating on behalf of the Chief a bit of sharp practice at a police sub-station at St Clément-sur-Tille, had turned the enquiry over to Nosjean, for whom, though he would have died rather than admit it, he had a very high regard.

  ‘Bend your brilliant mind to it, mon brave,’ he had said. ‘Why was he tied up after injecting himself with drugs? Who gave him the drugs? And where did they come from? You ought to sort it out in no time.’

  At the next desk, Sergeant Lagé was typing a report. He was engaged on a hit-and-run case at Gévrey that looked remarkably like an attempted murder and it was involving him in a great deal of work with a typewriter. He wasn’t enjoying himself, because most of the machines in the sergeants’ room were cast-offs from the offices of the girl secretaries elsewhere in the building and they were so worn they made typing a job for a strong man. And, since Sergeant Lagé, in the manner of most policemen, used only two fingers, he was feeling the effort right up to his elbows.

  Sergeant Misset was studying a map of the city. How, he was trying to decide, had a certain Hyacinthe Baranquin, who was well known for his ability to break into locked shops and offices, got from the Avenue Victor Hugo to the Rue Rioux in a matter of five minutes? Misset had tried it. It had taken him a quarter of an hour. There had, he decided, to be an accomplice somewhere.

  Sergeant Krauss was merely reading the newspapers. He was due for retirement any day now and nobody wanted to know him. It had once been Nosjean’s job, as the youngest and most innocent member of Inspector Pel’s team, to fetch the beer and sandwiches, but, as Nosjean had grown older and more experienced and Krauss had grown slower and more indifferent, they had exchanged duties. There had been no orders from Pel, no instruction from the Chief. It was simply accepted that Krauss wasn’t very fast any more, either with his feet or with his mind and, since he was so close to retirement, if he were caught up in something big, it would have caused endless
problems if he’d passed from the force by the time it came before the court. Krauss was therefore left alone.

  Sergeant Daniel Darcy watched them all with a sort of wary affection. As senior sergeant and Pel’s right-hand man, he was cynical enough not to trust a single one of them too far. After all, he thought, they were all human, in spite of being policemen. Misset and Lagé, he noticed, had stopped work and Lagé was now sitting on the corner of Misset’s desk, discussing photography. Lagé’s son had been in the habit of building model aeroplanes from kits and Lagé had caught the habit from him. Growing ambitious, he had hung them from fishing rods and photographed them against the sky but, unfortunately, the thread persisted in showing and it had so engaged Lagé’s mind he had joined a photographic society in Fontaine where he lived to find out how to overcome the problem. The speed with which they had made him secretary was put down in the sergeants’ room to the fact that he could use a typewriter, was a sucker for doing other people’s work, and had access to the copying machine in the basement of the Hôtel de Police. Lagé’s son had long since progressed from model aeroplanes to girls but it had still not occurred to Lagé that the photographic society was making a monkey out of him, and he’d become so keen on photography, he’d forgotten his aeroplanes and went out every weekend with a German Braun taking pictures in the Parc de la Columbière, along the Cours General de Gaulle and the Canal de Bourgogne, and in the neighbouring villages and towns. He had even taken pictures in the prison which, he claimed, provided great contrasts of light and shade. He was always talking these days about light and shade.

  ‘You got any women in your photographic society?’ Misset was asking.

  Lagé looked surprised. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he demanded.

  Misset grinned. ‘I wondered if that was why you were so keen.’

  ‘We’re not all like you,’ Lagé said stiffly. Misset was also married – almost too married at times, he felt – and with his family growing faster than he could assimilate it, his eye had started roving once more over the pretty girls.

  Nosjean listened to them, saying nothing. Though he had a girl and Odile Chenandier would have given her eye-teeth to be his wife, he nevertheless still managed to fall in love with anything female that took more than a normal amount of interest in him. Nosjean was young and, though he was becoming a good detective – much better than he realised – he still managed to remain shy, slightly introspective and doubtful of his own skill. He had met Odile Chenandier when, with his colleagues, he had been instrumental in sending her father away for life and, cowed at home, since meeting Nosjean she had blossomed. The sergeants’ room had been taking bets on her for a long time.

  Lagé was gesturing. ‘Brigitte Bardot,’ he was saying. ‘That’s what she’s like.’

  ‘Who?’ Misset asked.

  ‘This dame I’m talking about: Marie-Anne Chahu. I’ve been trying to find an excuse for weeks to go and see her again.’

  ‘If she looks like Bardot,’ Misset grinned, ‘I’ll come with you.’ Nosjean frowned at them. With his idealistic approach, his own affairs with girls were invariably meetings of the mind. Which was why they rarely came to anything. Most girls weren’t interested in meetings of the mind.

  Lagé did things with his hands to indicate bust, waist and behind, and Krauss put down the newspaper to join in.

  ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I think I’m getting too old to run after women.

  ‘When you’re retired,’ Misset said, ‘you won’t have to run. You’ll be able to walk. Slowly. To conserve your strength. What are you going to do, anyway? Get a job with some security organisation?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Not even watchman at FMPS?’

  ‘Not even that.’ Krauss smiled. ‘I’m going to spend my retirement sleeping. To make up for all the nights on this job when I couldn’t.’

  ‘Can’t you find anything better to do?’

  ‘I might grow tomatoes,’ Krauss admitted. ‘I might take my grandchildren out in the car. I’ve got two. Come to think of it, I might even take them tonight. It’s hot enough and there’s a plage near Fleurey. Paddling pool for the kids, swimming for me and the wife and daughter and a bar for all of us. What more can you ask?’

  ‘This famous Marie-Anne Chahu you’re going on about.’ It was Misset again to Lagé. With women these days he was like a terrier at a rat-hole. ‘Why haven’t I ever seen her?’

  ‘You’ve only to go to Foussier’s office,’ Lagé said.

  ‘Which Foussier? There are dozens of Foussiers in this city.’

  ‘Professor Foussier. University. Faculté des Langues Modernes.’

  ‘Oh, him!’ Misset stared. ‘I’ve been there! That time when the porter was pinching from the lockers. I saw nothing special. Just an old dear with glasses and a bust like a frigate under full sail.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong office,’ Lagé said. ‘That’s the University office. He has a private practice. Aviation Studies and Navigation and a few other things. La Chahu works for him, not the university.’ Lagé looked smug. ‘She speaks three languages,’ he pointed out.

  ‘So do I,’ Krauss said in the thick Alsatian accent he put on from time to time. ‘French, German and Obscene. Is she his secretary?’

  ‘She’s his personal assistant.’

  ‘Assistant to do what?’

  Lagé grinned. ‘It’s not like that.’ He paused. ‘All the same, I wouldn’t mind having her as my personal assistant.’

  Misset eyed him enviously. ‘How did you get to know her, anyway?’

  ‘The photographic society.’

  Misset looked at Krauss and grinned. Lagé and the photographic society had become a joke in the sergeants’ room.

  ‘I wrote to Foussier,’ Lagé went on. ‘Asking him to give us a talk. He’s an expert on photography, too. I got a telephone call from her. What a voice! My wife thought I’d taken a mistress.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind taking a mistress,’ Misset said wistfully. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She asked me to go over and see her. It was that time when I was going to Talant about that supermarket case. I said I couldn’t just then, so she gave me her telephone number. She doesn’t give it to anyone. I was very lucky. She asked me to let her know when I could call. She had something for me.’

  Misset grinned. ‘Did you get it?’

  Lagé grinned hack. ‘Foussier couldn’t give us a talk but he had one I could read to the members. It was one he’d given in Lyons. He said we could use it.’

  Lagé was so full of his own importance, Nosjean couldn’t resist taking him down. ‘This Marie-Anne Chahu,’ he said.

  Lagé looked round. ‘Yes?’ he asked. ‘What about her?’

  Nosjean smiled. ‘I have her telephone number, too,’ he said.

  The disgusted expression that appeared on Lagé’s face at Nosjean’s words was being roughly matched just to the north of the city centre by the expression on the face of one Emile Escaut. Long-haired and none too clean in grubby pink jeans and a navy blue shirt, he was having difficulty identifying his car. He had left it by the sidewalk in the Rue du Chapeau Rouge the previous evening to go to a party and now he was not at all sure which it was.

  They were pulling down an old house at the end of the street and the dust hung in the air like a veil, obscuring the view and covering everything within a hundred yards with a thick sepia pall that came from old plaster and the accumulated dirt of years. The parked cars had been covered with it as it drifted on the light breeze and they looked now as if they had lost their brightness, like vehicles in an old and faded photograph.

  Eventually, Escaut managed to identify his car, less by its colour than by the dents in it, and moved round it, wiping the dust from the windows. When he came to the rear window, however, it dawned on him it was so tightly shut in by other cars he couldn’t hope to move it. There was less than a centimetre or two at either end.

  ‘Merde,’ he said bitterly.

&nb
sp; Moving to the car behind it, he examined it. His own vehicle was an old Deux Chevaux and the car behind was a large American Cadillac. Staring at it, he allowed his thoughts on American tourists to range freely across the spectrum. They were too tall, too handsome and too wealthy, their cars were too big, and they had no right to block good French cars driven by good French drivers. It was quite obvious there was going to be no movement in that direction. The Cadillac was too wide by a long way. Nor could he bash his way out. The little Deux Chevaux would fall to pieces long before he’d moved the Cadillac enough to get clear.

  Moving to the front of the car, he examined the vehicle ahead. It was a large old-fashioned Renault, but this still left it quite a lot smaller than the Cadillac. If he was going to get out he was going to have to do it that way.

  He put his hand on the boot of the Renault which was hard up against his own front bumper. The metal was hot under the sun and he sniffed in disgust. As his nostrils wrinkled, he became aware of the smell. It was strong, sweetish, sickly and stomach-churning, and in his delicate state after the party, it made Emile Escaut heave.

  ‘Merde,’ he said again.

  The smell appeared to be coming from the boot of the Renault and it was enough to make his hair curl. It was something he had never smelled before, like bad drains but infinitely worse than that, something repugnant and obscene, and nauseating enough to make him catch his breath.

  He noticed, however, that whoever owned the Renault had pulled the handbrake only over the first notches and it was just possible to move the car against it. Sighing, knowing he would end up exhausted, he got his back against the car and pushed. The effort made his head throb and caused him to break into a sweat. With the best will in the world, he knew he couldn’t move it sufficiently to escape.

  He was just about to light a cigarette when one of the demolition men approached from the old building just up the road. He was a short man, with a belly that hung over his belt, and he sucked at a cigarette end, a thickset figure with a face so ravaged by acne in his youth it looked like the workings of a quarry. He wore a blue armless singlet and his grubby thatch of hair supported a tartan cap with a bobble on top. Escaut thrust his cigarettes away quickly. The street was empty of passers-by because they were all avoiding the dust, and this man was the first he’d seen.