Pel and the Promised Land Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Pel & The Promised Land

  First published in 1991

  © Estate of John Harris (Mark Hebden); House of Stratus 1991-2011

  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

  1842329065 9781842329061 Print

  0755124901 9780755124909 Pdf

  075512510X 9780755125104 Kindle

  0755125304 9780755125302 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 readers may decide they have recognised the city in these pages, in fact it is intended to be fictitious.

  One

  It was late in the afternoon and Chief Inspector Evariste Clovis Désiré Pel was feeling low as he stared morosely at his blotter. It has just occurred to him that he was twenty-four hours older than he had been at the same time the previous day. It was a fact that took the breath away. There were only 8,760 hours in a year, so that, given thirty more years of life, he had only 262,800 hours left to live. It wasn’t long and all he had achieved in his years of toil, he felt, was to become an official in the province of Burgundy of the Brigade Criminelle of the Police Judiciaire of the Republic of France. And one who had passed his prime into the bargain.

  It wasn’t true, of course. There was a lot left in Pel. He would have felt cheated if there hadn’t been. But the mood was far from unusual. Pel was never a man to look on the bright side.

  In fact, he realised, when you thought about it, things were even worse than he had contemplated. Those hours he had so carefully calculated gave him only 15,768,000 minutes and 15,768,000 minutes added up to only 946,080,000 seconds. And, name of God, he thought, a second wasn’t very long. No more than a second.

  What was more, he had a cold coming on, so he probably wouldn’t last even that long. The germs were waiting for him everywhere, ugly, menacing, fanged and hairy, always ready to pull him down.

  Pel was trying hard to live up to his reputation. Gloom was one of his few pleasures. But it was always harder to be bad-tempered in the sort of weather they were having at the moment. In addition, he was comfortably married after expecting never to be wanted by anyone, and was carefully nurtured by a woman who seemed happy to accept him, warts and all, without complaint.

  Being depressed grew harder every day. Even the Society of Bigots, of which he was president, secretary and only member, didn’t occupy a lot of his time these days, because on the whole he had remarkably little to complain about. He could well imagine a miserable old age unable to avoid being happy.

  He lit a cigarette. He had tried on many occasions to give them up – millions did; why couldn’t he? – but had finally come to realise he would never ever manage it. As he drew a luxurious lungful of smoke down to his socks, he reflected that they were bound to kill him off before long with asthma, cancer or one of the associated diseases. Everybody said so.

  ‘I almost cracked it once,’ he pointed out. ‘I went two days without one. Do you think I’m likely to die before my allotted span?’

  Detective Inspector Daniel Darcy looked up from the other side of the desk. He was smoking, too. But Darcy was in good spirits and looked at the peak of his form. His teeth shone like the jewels in a Disney cartoon and his profile seemed highly polished and in top gear.

  ‘I might just as well slash my wrists,’ Pel ended gloomily.

  Darcy grinned. ‘Why not have your lungs replaced by an electric pump?’ he suggested. ‘It would involve a big operation, mind you.’

  Pel gave his deputy a sour look. He didn’t appreciate humour so late in the day – especially when he was on the receiving end. It wasn’t, he considered bitterly, just that Darcy seemed to feel assured of living longer; it was simply that he didn’t appear to give a damn.

  Pel had been in a resentful mood all day. He had just completed one of the fatuous forms which occasionally appeared in the pipeline, demanding the answers to questions which some half-witted government jack-in-office insisted would enable the department to handle crime with greater efficiency. There were sheets of them, ending up with a request for personal data which was not only a waste of time but downright impertinent. Where were you born? And why? Full address. Full name. That always irritated Pel because he was the child of an ambitious woman who had seen her son as a future president of the Republic and had given him the names to go with the position. Evariste, Clovis and Désiré were enough to make a man worry rats. They had been the cause of considerable aggression in the school playground and a great deal of laughter among the girls who had been curious enough to ask what he was called. One had actually fallen out of bed laughing. What was worse, she hadn’t bothered to climb back in.

  In addition to all this weight he had to carry, he had an extra temporary source of bitterness because his wife was on one of her occasional trips to Paris and he was at the mercy of their housekeeper, Madame Routy. Madame Pel ran a hairdressing establishment in the Rue de la Liberté which was rapidly becoming famous – if only for the prices that were charged. To the boutique she had opened next door in case her clients had anything left after they’d settled up, had been added a children’s wear establishment, a sportswear shop, a teenagers’ shop and a shop that sold nothing but denim. She seemed to Pel to be raking in money hand over fist. Not that Pel minded. He was all for anything that would make his old age more comfortable. Police pensions never led to a life of debauched luxury and it relieved him of the terror of ultimate penury.

  The only snag was that Madame Pel, being a good business woman, occasionally had to attend to the sticks and stones of her livelihood and disap
pear into the blue to attend to financial and other matters. And when she did, Pel felt bereft, orphaned from the moment she walked out of the door.

  He shifted a few papers round on his desk and looked at Darcy. Darcy had been in court all day and was only just delivering his daily résumé of what they had in hand.

  ‘Alors,’ Pel said heavily. ‘Inform me.’

  Darcy, who had known Pel a long time and had a shrewd idea what was going on at the back of his mind, smiled to himself.

  ‘Misset’s made an ass of himself again, patron,’ he said.

  ‘That’s nothing new.’ Misset was Pel’s bête noire, the only member of his team who didn’t pull his weight. He had been in danger on many occasions of being returned to the uniformed branch but had regularly defeated the attempts by unexpectedly pulling off something spectacular.

  ‘What was it this time?’ Pel asked.

  ‘That stabbing in the Rue Frères Lumières. Nothing much in itself, but he got the names the wrong way round. The magistrates found they were trying the victim.’

  ‘One day,’ Pel said darkly, ‘Misset will cut his own throat.’

  ‘I doubt if he’s that competent.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Everybody else’s busy. Do you want the details?’

  ‘Not if everybody’s busy. I like to see them busy. It prevents mutiny. What about Nosjean and De Troq’?’

  Darcy shrugged. Known as the Heavenly Twins, Sergeants Jean-Luc Nosjean and Charles-Victor de Troquereau needed no supervision. They worked together excellently, were young, bright and energetic, and could be trusted.

  ‘That garage at Genois that was broken into. They think the owner’s been handling hot cars and that somebody was trying to identify something that belonged to him. The course of the enquiry seems to have changed direction. I gather they’re due to wind it up any day now. I think it’ll be the owner they’ll pull in, not the type who broke in.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s a request from the police at Evian. There’s been a spate of smuggling down there and they’ve asked us to keep our eyes open.’

  Pel’s features rearranged themselves to register disapproval. Switzerland intruded into his territory at Pontarlier and just to the south round Geneva on Lac Léman, which the Swiss, with a chauvinism to match anything the French could produce, had the cheek to refer to as Lake Geneva. From time to time they called on each other for assistance. At others, their interests clashed and there were eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations.

  Pel was French enough to imagine there was nothing anybody in France, let alone Burgundy, could ever want from anywhere else. ‘What would we need to smuggle from Switzerland?’ he demanded. ‘The secret of the cuckoo clock?’

  Darcy grinned. ‘Insides of watches. The Swiss are complaining.’

  ‘They always do.’

  ‘There’s somebody getting them across the lake. If anything crops up, we’ve been asked to pass it on. I don’t suppose there will be. The rest of the boys are involved with the usual. A complaint’s come in from Rogeaux-sur-Ile. Type called Barthelot. Says someone’s poisoning his sheep. Brochard says he’ll deal with it.’

  Pel was suspicious at once. Cops didn’t usually volunteer for things without good reason. ‘Where’s Brochard now?’

  ‘Next door.’

  ‘Have him in.’

  Brochard was young and looked far more naïve than he was. They often used him on cases where there was a woman involved. He looked as if he needed mothering, and it was surprising what he found out just by looking innocent.

  ‘Why do you want to handle this sheep poisoning?’ Pel asked.

  ‘I know about sheep,’ Brochard pointed out. ‘My father’s a farmer. He has sheep.’

  ‘And you think you can handle it?’

  ‘Easy, patron. I bet it’s a fiddle. I know those farmers up there in Rogeaux. They’re as cunning as a lot of weasels. I bet this Barthelot’s up to something. Or else he’s plain stupid. I know all the tricks, and what I don’t know my Old Man does.’

  ‘And doubtless you’ll want a day or two off to seek his advice?’

  Brochard grinned. ‘It would help, patron.’

  As Brochard left, Pel looked at Darcy. ‘That young man’s sometimes too bright for his own good,’ he observed darkly. ‘What else?’

  Darcy flipped through his files again. ‘Lagé’s on that fiddle at St-Pol,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated. It’ll take a long time.’

  ‘That’ll suit Lagé. He goes slowly but he’s thorough. The more detailed it is the better he likes it. What about that rumour that the forest fire at St-Etois was started deliberately?’

  ‘Chief Lapeur of the Sapeurs Pompiers thinks it was. But he’s got no proof. He put his experts on it. All they learned was that there was a gale blowing and it swept away twenty-five hectares of woodland in one night.’

  ‘Why does the Fire Chief think it might have been deliberate?’

  ‘It’s happened before, patron. That house in the Rue de la Poésie. Chief Lapeur thinks that was another. He says it had all the signs. Indications of a fierce core of flame where there was no reason for fierce flames. He won’t be definite but he suspects kerosene or petrol. He wondered if the owners set it on fire for the insurance. We’re checking. Aimedieu’s handling it.’

  Pel nodded. Aimedieu was young but he was reliable. ‘Does it have much land?’

  ‘Quite a bit. Around a hectare.’

  Pel stared intently at his blotter for a moment. Darcy frowned.

  ‘The land wasn’t destroyed,’ he said. ‘Except by firemen with feet like camels trampling everything flat. Why, patron? Is it important?’

  ‘It’s worth bearing in mind,’ Pel pointed out. ‘We’ve had a routine report from Paris on these unexplained blazes where land’s involved, and a request to keep our eyes open.’

  ‘What’s behind it, patron?’

  ‘Speculators are believed to be starting fires. They pick on restricted land, destroy it, then slap in a request for building permission on the grounds that it’s become waste land. And they’re getting it, too. After a place’s been devastated by fire, no one can object that it’s a beauty spot. They then put in an application and shove up a complex of buildings and, hé op, before you know where you are, what was a bosky dell has become a small select housing estate on the fringe of the country with excellent outlook, good accessibility and all mod. cons. Someone must be getting a rake off.’

  ‘It’s happened before, patron,’ Darcy said dryly. ‘And, with the housing law as it is and the need for homes everywhere, it leaves itself wide open to the fly boys. It all comes back to the same thing in the end. The environment. It’s getting crowded.’

  Brochard had left the office delighted with himself. He hadn’t expected Pel to give way so easily and a little of his mother’s cooking would go down well.

  He decided to celebrate with a drink and chose the Bar du Destin. It was a dark little place full of pot plants you could hide behind. Pel had once been in the habit of going there to brood. Last time in there Brochard had spotted a girl and she might be in there again. Brochard was in need of a girlfriend. He was good-looking enough to have a lot of girlfriends and he had just broken off with the latest, who lived in Talant. Not without tears, bad temper and threats, mind you, so it had seemed a good idea at the time to find a bar a long way from where she lived.

  ‘I’ll shame you,’ she had stormed. ‘I’ll take an overdose of sleeping pills just to show you up!’

  Collecting his beer, Brochard had looked for a table. At one of them, two youngsters had been clutching each other, the boy’s hand on the girl’s thigh, their mouths clamped together as if they’d been welded. Dark bars were always the haunts of lovers and lost souls. The only available table had been occupied by a solitary girl drinking coffee – the one he was looking for now. She was pretty and had long legs and didn’t seem to mind showing them. She had been studying a sketch book of drawings.

/>   ‘Mind if I sit here?’ Brochard had said.

  She had moved her seat a little and removed her handbag from the table. It was as big as a portmanteau and most of its contents were spread across the table. She had begun to collect them up and stuff them inside. The pile of coins seemed big enough to start a bank with.

  ‘Isn’t it heavy?’ Brochard had asked.

  She had grinned at him and they had begun to talk. She was a book illustrator, she had said. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Enquiries,’ Brochard had answered cautiously. Being a cop sometimes put a girl off.

  ‘What sort of enquiries?’

  ‘Insurance.’

  Her name was Carlota Ciasca – Charlie for short – and she came from the Jura. He suspected there was a bit of Italian in there somewhere. She was dark, the name was right and it wasn’t unusual. The Italians had been moving north for generations looking for summer jobs around the Swiss lakes, and a few had spilled over into other places, married Swiss or French, and settled down.

  It had turned out that his guess was a good one. Papa Ciasca’s family had originally come from the Italian side of Lake Lugano. Papa Ciasca now spent his time making gifts for tourists. He painted and framed the sort of pictures that were repeated ad nauseam at every resort along the European lakes, and assembled cuckoo clocks and musical boxes from ready-carved pieces bought in bulk from Brienz, Engadine and Berne.

  It hadn’t taken long for Brochard to suggest to the girl that they should meet again. Why not, he had thought. Having just got rid of one girl, he had virtually walked into the arms of another.

  Because he had no wish to go home to a house devoid of wife and comfort, Pel worked late. He liked working late. It gave him more things to worry about and a good reason to complain to the Chief that he was being put upon.

  As he left, he bumped into the Chief himself. The Chief eyed him warily. He was a big man who had been noted as a boxer in his youth. In his period in uniform he had settled disputes with clouts round the head rather than hauling off a wrongdoer to the Hôtel de Police for an appearance before the magistrates. There were many who considered it an excellent idea, because it saved the gaols from becoming overcrowded, the magistrates from complaining, the individual cop from a lot of paperwork, and the wrongdoer from a lot of wasted time in a cell.