Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

It was Boisseau who interviewed Denise Viron, the red-headed girl, obtaining from her a detailed description of two quite different men who had made inquiries about Leon Jouvel the previous day. He made a careful note of the descriptions, observing that neither of them could have been the shuffling man

`Could either of these two men have been English?' he asked at one stage. Denise had shaken her head vigorously, crossing her legs in a provocative way which made Inspector Rochat frown. Boisseau, on the other hand, who was interviewing the girl in her apartment, had noticed the legs appreciatively while he offered her another cigarette.

`Was Jouvel often asked about by people?' he inquired. `Did he have many visitors?'

`Hardly any. The two callers were exceptional…'

Boisseau had not blamed Rochat for failing to dig up this information. It was quite clear that his superiors had resented the Paris police prefect's intrusion on their territory and had ordered the inspector to clear up the case quickly. So, once it seemed clear it was suicide, Rochat had inquired no further.

`You are satisfied?' Rochat suggested as he drove the man from Paris back to the airport.

`Are you?' Boisseau countered.

`Technically everything was as it should be-taking into account Jouvel's short stature, the length of the rope, the position of the bathroom chair he had kicked away from under himself. Only an expert could have faked it.'

`I find your last observation disturbing,' Boisseau said.

Robert Philip, fifty-two years old-the same age as Guy Florian, but there the resemblance ended-rose late from his bed on Sunday morning, and was then annoyed because his companion, Noelle Berger, continued sleeping. Shaking her bare white shoulder roughly, he made his request with his usual finesse.

`Get up, you trollop, I want some breakfast…'

Separated from his wife, he now consoled himself with a series of fleeting affaires, each of which he took care to ensure did not last too long. As he told his drinking cronies, 'Have them in the house for a week and they think they own the place…' Of medium height and gross, heavy figure, Philip had a thatch of reddish hair cut en brosse and a thick moustache of the same reddish tinge. Grumbling, he went downstairs and pulled back the living-room curtain. At the opposite kerb in the normally deserted street was parked a Citroen with the bonnet up and two men peering inside at the engine. A holdall lay on the pavement with tools spread about. 'Serve you right for wasting petrol,' Philip muttered, holding his silk dressing- gown round his middle as he went off into the kitchen. A few minutes later, similarly attired, Noelle Berger, small and blonde-haired and with an ample figure, wandered into the living-room in search of a cigarette.

`See the girl,' Vanek whispered, his head half under the Citroen's bonnet. 'This is going to be complicated.'

`Ideally,' Brunner replied, 'she should be dealt with away from the house…'

`If she leaves the damned place. This is Sunday…'

Robert Philip had been the Leopard's armourer during the war, the man in charge of acquiring weapons and ammunition for the Resistance group, a process which normally involved raiding enemy munition stores, and as such he had been one of the key members of the Leopard's staff. Since the war Philip's career had been a success story-if you measure success by the acquisition of a large villa and a sizeable bank account by dubious means. Philip was a gun-runner.

In 1944, while Resistance groups in the Midi were building up huge caches of weapons to support the Republique Sovietique du Sud the Leopard was on the verge of bringing into existence, Robert Philip was busily diverting some of these weapons to secret hideouts. It must have been a great relief to Philip when the Communist coup failed. Seeing de Gaulle was winning, Philip proclaimed himself a lifelong Gaullist, revealing half of his weapon caches to the General. The other half he salted away as a future investment.

In the years which followed Philip supplied weapons to Fidel Castro in his early days-using the Communist connections he had built up in the Lozere-to Eoka terrorists fighting the British in Cyprus, to Kurdish rebels fighting the Iraqi government, and to anyone hard-pressed enough to pay over-the-odds prices for an inferior product. 'I have,' as he once boasted to a bar companion, 'overtaken my contemporaries.' His wife, Yvonne, now occupied an apartment in Paris. 'I have pensioned her off,' as he was fond of saying. 'After all, I do not believe in treating a woman badly…'

At two in the afternoon Noelle Berger emerged from the villa alone, well wrapped in a fur coat, and walked the few steps which took her to the station, leaving Robert Philip alone in the house. The Citroen which had been parked opposite No. 8 had long since disappeared and the only person in sight was a lean, bony-faced individual who stood gazing into a shop window. Noelle went into the station and bought a return ticket to Strasbourg, taking no notice of the man who came up behind her and in his turn purchased a single to the same city.

Vanek's instructions to Lansky had been simple. 'I don't think she's his wife-she looked far too young and casual. If she comes out, follow her-unless she has a suitcase, in which case she's leaving, so forget her…'

Noelle Berger had decided to go and do some Christmas shopping in Strasbourg to give Philip time to recover his temper.

Let him stew in his own juice, she had reasoned, and then he'll be glad to see me back this evening. In Strasbourg the shops had opened at two-to scoop in more business since it was so close to Christmas-and Noelle spent quite a lot of Philip's money in the rue des Grandes Arcades. Which damned well serves him right she told herself. Later she relented and bought him a bright yellow waistcoat. Once, someone nearly knocked her under the wheels of a bus as she waited at a crowded kerbside, but when she looked round she saw only a fat woman behind her. At the end of the afternoon, laden with purchases, she made her way to the quiet district known as Petite France down by the river. She had decided to have a cup of tea with a friend before catching the train back to Colmar.

At the edge of the lonely Place Benjamin Zhia the river Il divides into three different sections before joining up again lower down, and here an intricate network of footwalks crosses the river. There is a lock-gate, a penned-up channel where the water roars through the bottleneck, and sluices which flood out from under a building beyond. The sound of churning river is deafening. Taking a short cut, Noelle moved out on to the footwalks, quite alone as far as she knew. She was half-way across, she had heard nothing above the growling roar of the water, when something made her turn round. Lansky was one step behind her, both hands upraised. She stared in disbelief as the hands reached her and shoved. She was half-way down before she screamed, and her screams were lost in the boiling sluices which dragged her under and then rushed her at speed towards the Quai des Bateliers. Bobbing on the surface of the racing flood her Christmas purchases had a bizarre, festive look, including a bright yellow waistcoat which broke free from its wrappings.

In twenty minutes Lansky was boarding the turbo-train which would return him to Colmar by seven in the evening. With two people in a house it is too difficult to stage a convincing double 'accident'.

On the evening of Sunday, 19 December, Grelle waited in his office for Boisseau to return from Strasbourg, but as the hours ticked away the police prefect was far from idle. For a good part of the day he had been immersed in tightening up the security arrangements for the presidential motorcade drive to Charles de Gaulle Airport-or Roissy as it was often called -on the morning of 23 December when Florian departed for Russia.