by Olga Wojtas
“Is the individual present?”
“He is,” said Sylvain.
“Point him out, if you please.”
Sylvain pointed straight at the fake teacher. Madeleine sprang up again and pushed past us, her hands already shaping into claws.
“You dared to threaten my Sylvain?” she shouted at the fake teacher, who was trying to hide behind his half-brothers. She grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.
“I didn’t write the note,” he protested, his voice high with panic. “It was him!” He indicated the fake undertaker and cheesemonger.
Madeleine grabbed him by the scruff of the neck as well. “You,” she said, shaking the fake undertaker and cheesemonger like a rat, “threatened my Sylvain. And you,” she said, shaking the fake teacher like another rat, “implied that my Sylvain was illiterate.”
It looked very much as though she was about to bang their heads together.
“Get her off me!” squealed the fake undertaker and cheesemonger. “I’ll admit everything!”
“So will I,” echoed the fake teacher.
“Beloved,” called Sylvain.
“Yes, beloved?” Madeleine replied instantly.
“I yearn for you beside me.”
“And I for you beside me.”
Mary Garden and I shared another eye roll.
Sylvain held out his arms and Madeleine released her two victims and ran to him. They snogged for a while, and everyone looked elsewhere in an embarrassed sort of way. I noticed that Sylvain now had his arm firmly round Madeleine’s waist, ensuring that she couldn’t rush off and attack anyone else. I was impressed.
“Get on with your admissions,” Judge Dupond barked at the younger Jeans.
“Maman was always having a go at us for being useless,” said the fake undertaker and cheesemonger.
“She always said we were just like our useless fathers,” added the fake teacher.
“That’s not fair!” shouted a father.
“Yes, it is. You were totally useless,” called a villager to widespread approval. Even the judge nodded.
“So, when we discovered the mayor had an illicit still–” The villagers’ mouths dropped open. “–we thought we could take over his business.”
“The mayor has a business?” said a villager.
“He’s our mayor – shouldn’t it be our business?” said another.
“If the mayor has a business, it’s definitely our business,” said the third. “How long has it been going on, and how much has he made?”
The mayor stood up. “Judge and citizens, I’d just like to point out that my venture was not for personal gain, but for the benefit of our village. How do you think the town hall got built? The Jeans, on the other hand, merely wanted to line their own pockets.”
“We may have wanted to, but we didn’t manage it,” grumbled the fake judge. “We haven’t made a brass centime.”
“It seemed so easy,” complained the fake policeman. “The mayor had a great system, hiding the bottles of brandy in the consignments of cheese that were for export.”
Cart Woman turned on the mayor. “I’ve been working for a smuggling ring? You know my husband’s a judge?”
“Of course I do,” said the mayor. “Why do you think I never told you?”
“You never told me either,” said the other Dupond with a D, the cheesemonger. “I’m not at all happy about my cheese being involved in criminal activities.”
“They didn’t know,” groaned the fake policeman, sinking to his knees. “They didn’t know. We could have kept the same system.” He began rocking backwards and forwards, keening.
“What the matter with him?” asked the judge.
The fake judge patted his brother’s shoulder and addressed his real counterpart. “We thought your good lady and the cheesemonger were getting a cut of the profits. So, we decided to set up our own transport system. The only other vehicle we could think of was the hearse, so we thought we could pretend to be exporting coffins, and put the hooch in the cheese in the coffins.”
“Why did you put the hooch in the cheese?” asked the judge. “Why didn’t you just put the bottles straight in the coffins?”
The fake policeman smacked the back of the fake teacher’s head. “You idiot! Why didn’t you think of that? Then we wouldn’t have had all the problems trying to make the cheese.”
Cart Woman leaned over to me. “Their mother’s right. They’re completely useless,” she whispered.
“And you’re right as well – this proves the importance of education,” I whispered back.
The magisterial cheesemonger stood up. “Judge, citizens, I didn’t know the full extent of the Jeans’ evildoing, but I knew something was amiss. They kidnapped me and forced me to tell them how to make cheese, which I did. Apart from telling them that they needed rennet.”
There was prolonged applause from the villagers until Judge Dupond banged his gavel. I didn’t like to point out that even though they couldn’t make the big truckles without rennet, they could still have made a nice cream cheese.
The mayor stood up. “And I refused to give them the recipe for the eau de vie even though they threatened to kill me.”
There was a smattering of applause. The villagers obviously felt more strongly about their cheese than about hooch they hadn’t been allowed to sample.
Judge Dupond fixed the Jeans with a judicial stare. “Perhaps you could explain the death threats and the kidnappings?”
They shuffled uneasily, apart from the fake policeman, who was still on his knees.
“We knew Officer Sylvain was on to us,” said the fake teacher, with a nervous glance at Madeleine. Sylvain’s arm tightened round her waist. “He would obviously approach you as examining magistrate to report his suspicions. We needed to take over the cheese business and the undertaking business, and we needed the schoolchildren as our workforce, so we had to get rid of all five of you.”
“Maman wanted us to kill you,” the fake judge piped up. “But we weren’t very keen on that. Jean here faints at the sight of blood.”
“Men,” whispered Mary Garden in disgust. I was particularly disgusted to think that they had sent small children to do their bloody crushing.
“We tried to scare you away instead,” said the fake undertaker and cheesemonger. “We sent you the notes saying ‘Remember you must die’. When none of you went away, we had to kidnap you and hide you, so that Maman would think you were dead. We organised funerals, and used the coffins to store the cheese and hooch the mayor was about to export.”
“We threatened the mayor with Maman,” added the fake teacher. “We said if he didn’t appoint us to the vacant posts, we’d tell Maman he was hiding our fathers, and then she’d kill him.”
The courtroom door opened and a slight figure dressed in a double-breasted black frock coat slipped in with a murmur of apology. He joined the crowds who were standing, and when he caught my glance, he mouthed, “I had to go home to let Ermintrude out.”
An obvious fib to cover his embarrassment: he was up to his usual trick of avoiding conflict. But I gave him a forgiving smile.
Judge Dupond was speaking: “In my role as examining magistrate, I can verify the accuracy of what you are saying, notably through my own direct experience. I find you guilty of larceny, kidnap, assault, attempted murder and gross incompetence.”
I waved my hand to attract the judge’s attention.
“Yes?” he barked, peering at me over his spectacles. “What is it?”
“May I approach the bench?” I asked.
“I can see no reason why not, unless your purpose is vandalism, or if the bench has been freshly painted,” he said. “But I am currently concerned with conducting a criminal trial rather than answering questions from the general public.”
“No, I mean may I speak to you in private,” I said.
He peered at me. “Do you have courtroom experience?”
There had been some very flattering reviews for my role as Atticus Fin
ch in the school’s dramatisation of To Kill a Mocking Bird. I nodded.
He beckoned me forward.
“There are two additional matters to take into account,” I told him in an undertone. “First, they stole Count Dracula’s coffin and destroyed his bedding.”
The judge’s brow puckered. “Who’s Count Dracula?”
I pointed him out among the crowd.
The judge banged his gavel. “Prisoners in the dock, why did you steal the English milord’s coffin and destroy his bedding?”
It was the fake teacher who was nominated to reply. “The workmen who built the milord’s castle told everyone at the time about his coffin with wheels. We thought coffins with wheels would be useful for our business, so we took it to copy.” His voice tailed away. “But it didn’t really work.”
“Surprise,” said Dupond the cheesemonger. “So, none of you managed to make any cheese, any hooch or any coffins. You really are useless.”
“And the bedding?” demanded Dupond the judge.
The brothers exchanged puzzled looks.
“We don’t know anything about that,” said the fake judge. “We didn’t see any bedding.”
“Earth,” called Dracula. “Did you see any earth?”
“Yes, the coffin was full of it,” said the fake teacher. “We tipped it all out.”
“That was my bedding,” said Dracula, with a catch in his voice.
Judge Dupond made a note.
“And another thing,” I said to him quietly, “while you were incarcerated, the fake schoolmaster, and probably his brothers, forced the schoolchildren into an extremely dangerous situation.”
The judge looked down at his daughter. “Is this true?”
“It wasn’t really dangerous, just hard work,” she said.
“Your daughter’s being very brave,” I said. “She and her little friends were sent out in the forest to crush wild boar.”
His daughter giggled. “You say it funny. You make it sound like we were crushing wild boar.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You were sent out to crush wild boar.”
“No, we weren’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
She was laughing now. “The thought of us going into the forest to crush wild boar!”
I could understand her making light of it in order not to upset her father, but it was important that the judge understood the brothers’ full culpability.
“I saw your hands,” I reminded her. “They were covered in blood. I saw the buckets of blood in the morgue.”
The judge looked down at his daughter in horror. She grinned at him.
“It’s all right, Papa, we weren’t crushing wild boar, we were crushing wild boar.”
His face cleared. “Ah. Of course. I certainly wouldn’t want you anywhere near wild boar. But that’s still shocking. You should have been in the classroom, learning, not wasting time in the forest crushing wild boar.”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “You accept that they were crushing wild boar?”
He pulled a sheet of paper towards him, took the stopper out of the glass ink bottle, and wrote a couple of words with his dip pen. Then he gave passed the paper to me.
The first word I read was sangliers. Wild boar.
The second word was sangs-liés. Literally blood links, but I had no idea what it meant, and said so.
“It’s the name of our special forest plant,” said the judge’s daughter.
I remembered the tiny flowers, blood-red, that I had found blossoming throughout the forest.
“Our teacher explained all about them,” she went on. “Not the teacher who made us crush the plants; our proper teacher. They’re carnivorous, which means they live on insects that are attracted to them, and they attract them by being bright red, and having sugary stuff on their leaves.”
It all made sense now. The cute wee flowers were a relative of the sundew plant, which exists on every continent except Antarctica. The children were gathering blood-red nectar for the cheese and brandy production. And Dracula was eating the insect-rich flowers as a source of protein. He really was a vegetarian.
“It seems to me,” said Judge Dupond, “that there is an individual who is missing from the dock. Officer, arrest Maman.”
Sylvain went off to find this latest culprit, devotedly followed by Madeleine. While we were waiting, there was time for Mary Garden to entertain the gathering with the “Depuis le Jour” aria from Charpentier’s opera Louise, followed by “The Boddamers Hanged the Monkey-O”.
Sylvain returned gripping Maman by the arm, followed by Madeleine and Debussy. They stood before the bench looking for all the world like the bride and groom at a shotgun wedding, flanked by the best man and chief bridesmaid.
“Prisoner in the dock,” said Judge Dupond, “We have heard evidence that you are guilty of incitement to murder.”
“Yes, but it didn’t work, did it?” rasped Maman. “They’re useless, these boys, just like their useless fathers.”
It wasn’t the best defence I’d ever heard, even though the villagers were all nodding agreement.
“What was your purpose?” the judge demanded.
“My purpose? I’ll tell you my purpose. First of all, to get those useless boys out from under my feet and into proper jobs. Then, once they’d killed the mayor, to get myself elected in his place and say goodbye to that smoke-filled shack for good.”
There was a second’s silence, and then the place erupted.
“A woman mayor?”
“A woman? Mayor?”
“How could a woman be mayor?”
“There isn’t even a word for a woman mayor.”
“There probably is. What about mayoress?”
“That just sounds ridiculous.”
“Why shouldn’t I be mayor?” shouted Maman. “You think I enjoy spending my life wiping beer spills off tables? I’ve got a brain, even if my idiot sons and husbands don’t.”
I couldn’t begin to applaud her methods, but I admired her goals.
Judge Dupond put his elbows on the bench and wearily massaged his forehead, his daughter clinging to him to avoid falling off his lap.
“The accused are, by their own admission, guilty,” he said. “I shall now consider the disposal.”
He continued the massaging.
Beside him, I coughed discreetly. “If I might make some suggestions, judge?”
He turned hopeful eyes on me. “Continue.”
I lowered my voice. “There’s no point in jailing them. That would be a drain on the public purse, which doesn’t have any money in it. And there’s only enough room in the cell for Maman.”
“And the alternative?”
In a whisper, I outlined my plan. He started taking notes with his dip pen, then put it down. “Just tell them yourself,” he said.
“Gentlemen,” I said to the Jeans. Courtesy costs nothing. “Judge Dupond hereby sentences you to work as artisanal technicians, your rate of pay to be determined by productivity.”
“A proper job?” said the fake policeman in wonder.
“With pay?” said the fake judge.
I nodded. “You will be under the supervision of the operative team.” I gestured towards the fathers. “And ultimate responsibility will lie with the chief executive officers.” I indicated the mayor and the magisterial cheesemonger. “Cheese and brandy production is to increase with immediate effect.”
The mayor looked uneasy. “You know what I’m doing is illegal?”
“Not any more,” I said. “You’re going to have a properly licensed business. But don’t worry about that side of it. It will all be sorted out by Maman when she reaches Paris.”
“I’m being sent to the Bastille?” asked Maman, sounding quite proud.
“You’re going to Paris as head of the Sans-Soleil syndicate of initiative, in recognition of your having more initiative than your husbands and sons put together,” I said. “You will promote Sans-Soleil as a tourist destination,
along with its unique local produce, cheese with the brand name Cramoisi Crémeux and brandy called Eau de Vie en Rose.”
The mayor and the magisterial cheesemonger shook hands.
“I don’t know how to get to Paris,” said Maman, looking at Cart Woman.
“I don’t know how to get to Paris either,” said Cart Woman.
“Ah, but I do, my sweet little Bérénice-Églantine,” said Debussy. “We will travel to Paris together.”
Before Mary Garden could say she would be joining them, I changed the subject.
“Monsieur Dupont,” I said to the Botticelli schoolmaster, “might your pupils be available to do some sums?”
“It’s Sunday,” he said. “There are no lessons today.”
There was a small wail from the judicial bench. “Please, monsieur! Please, madame! We like doing sums.”
The schoolmaster gave Cart Woman’s daughter an approving nod. “Go and get your schoolfellows.”
The pupils were soon assembled with their slates, squeaking out trigonometry calculations. The wee scone was finished first, and explained it to his slower classmates. Meanwhile, I had sent the villagers to the town hall to pick up the pieces of shattered mirror and bring them to the main square, instructing them to wear gloves to avoid injury
When they returned, I explained that the children had been calculating where to place mirrors on the mountainsides in order to reflect the sunlight into the village.
“It will do wonders for the grass,” I said. “And you’ll be able to grow all sorts of things yourselves. No need to get produce from other villages.”
“Oh, great,” grumbled Cart Woman. “Destroy my business some more, why don’t you?”
“You’re going to be run off your cart wheels with cheese and brandy,” I assured her.
The pupils laid down their slates, gloved themselves and picked up pieces of mirror. The mountains loomed all around, craggy and oppressive.
“But how are the kids going to get up there?” objected Cart Woman. “It’s too high and too far.”
It was true, I hadn’t quite worked out all the logistics – but right away a solution presented itself. Dracula touched my arm.
“Perhaps you would allow me to transport them?” he murmured.
I had forgotten Bram Stoker’s terrifying description of Dracula crawling head-first down the outside of his castle wall like a lizard. He would be great at negotiating precipitous mountainsides.
