‘I’ve said too much already,’ abruptly. ‘Go on out of it, you,’ shooing a cat. Yes and you too, Mister Inspector. You’ll want your dinner anyhow. Think about it by all means. Don’t go arresting people, though, on the grounds of what I tell you.’
A dear old woman. Wide awake. Full of homely wisdom. Art, too.
TWENTY-TWO
Castang sulked along, hands in his pockets, through dusty, autumn sunshine, hating himself and everybody else, finding himself wearisomely dim-witted. I’d like to go out, he thought, and take some stupid vagabond by the collar, and say ‘You’ll do’. And if he didn’t admit it, then thump him till he did. Because anything else…
If this, then that, and there are witnesses to back it up. Lots of lovely witnesses. Recalcitrant or chatterbox, but all sure that the truth was what they saw and knew, simple and clear-cut, and if you didn’t like it then you were a crooked cop.
Everything was very quiet. Lunchtime was well advanced. Nothing on the streets but sickly smells of stew and cabbage, other people’s beastly meals.
Why didn’t somebody commit an offence likely to lead to a breach of the peace? He’d draw his gun, and shoot the bugger to bits. Lake Isle indeed. Hive for honey-bee. Pool of sticky honey, and him up to the neck in it.
Need something to eat. Irish tea followed by beer, not to speak of bubbly old ladies, had made him hollow and over-buoyant, an empty bottle with no message inside tossing on choppy waters; eddying about at the mercy of the waves.
Waves brought him to the Bay Tree, where loudly laughing businessmen had reached the cheese, and Sophie was measuring with her eye along a knifeblade to get twelve equal pieces out of a tart. She cut and looked up.
‘Another regular. All alone? No room for a few minutes: this lot are nearly finished.’
‘When do you eat?’
‘When I’m clear. Quarter of an hour.’
‘Will you eat with me?’
‘All right, lonely heart – yes, yes, coming.’
‘I’ll hold out that long.’
‘Have a drink – help yourself; steal some cheese if you’re starving.’
How many cafés were there left for heavens’ sake where they let you help yourself! He took a crust of bread to stop his stomach rumbling. From an obscure corner of memory came the sarcastic voice of a police-school instructor.
‘You think the decline in public honesty is something new! You can forget the nostalgic tales about the good old days, because you know when it was that the waiters stopped leaving the bottles on the table? The Paris Exhibition of 1900! And it was the rich visitors who thought it funny to steal the cafés blind.’
The degrading French mania for petty cheating was taught them by the bourgeois, not all of whom were French. You get rich by skinning five-cent pieces off your neighbour’s back. So what would you do now to restore trust and self-respect, and slough off that crust of hard cold suspicion? Will the cops start by leaving the bottle out?
The lip twisted up into a sour little knot of smile. His neighbour at the bar, drinking a cup of coffee over a racing paper, looked at him and made a face. If anybody had nudged this good man’s elbow and muttered ‘PJ cop’ he wouldn’t have been surprised. Looked a right bastard, he would have thought.
‘There,’ said Sophie, finishing off a half-glass of vittel-cassis. ‘Always like this; they come tumbling in together and then all rush off late after a long quarrel about whose turn it is.’
‘You can’t leave them the bottle.’
‘Yes I do because they always empty it. They look at the bill and say they can’t possibly have had that much, and I just point. But they come regularly, and that’s the way Léonie and I live. Think everything is permitted them. They go in the kitchen and dip their fingers and suck them, and go yum-yum, and come out here to slap my bottom.’
The sour knot was untwisting.
‘Everybody wants something for nothing.’
‘Not quite everyone,’ looking at him. ‘Martine’s father, for instance – you might think about that. Scrupulous. Doesn’t say all astonished “Oh, I’ve forgotten my cheque-book.” I’m sold right out of beef; can you eat fish?’
A thoroughly casual meal, much more so than at home. Vera had a taste for formality, and hated policemen in a hurry, gobbling. As it was they had too many hastily bolted hunks in greasy humid pubs, ‘washed down’ (as she said, one of the filthiest phrases in the language) with drinks from hastily swilled glasses ‘with tuberculosis germs all over’. So that she tended to be school-marmish at table, telling one to sit up straight and not fidget.
Meals with Sophie were alarmingly domestic.
‘Damn, I’ve no knife,’ taking the butter knife and wiping it on the cloth, ‘no matter; got to be changed anyhow.’ It was more than doubtful whether Vera would approve of Sophie.
It suited him. The woman had been scurrying, and needed to unwind. And it was not only physical ballast, in his belly, that he needed. He had these vivid, splintered little pictures to digest. Scraps of bright-coloured glass set in lead, or concrete nowadays… Old Vincent in the garden, propping up pea-vines, muttering about Madame Bovary. Sabine as Mama, buttering fresh crusts and making huge cups of cocoa for a meagre little boy who would always look pale and haggard, no matter how much grub he absorbed. A house untidy and badly dusted, with bits of model ships and butterfly collections all mixed up with fragments of tesselated pavement and pottery shards. Vincent silent and irritable the whole evening because of a bad school report, snapping when the television got turned on. ‘This cretinous trash – are you incapable of reading a book?’
A nice meal: raw ham with olives and radishes, grilled trout, fennel done with bone marrow, a piece of tart unsold ‘because a bit burned underneath’ and ‘give me whatever you think fair’, she said, making coffee. He helped clear away, thinking joyfully of the Hotel Central and hideous fried potatoes.
‘I’m going to have a bit of a sit; you in a hurry?’
‘No,’ said Castang pleasurably. It was time to start work again, but this was as good a place as any to begin. She brought coffee.
‘You were a bit naughty to Martine, you know.’
‘Yes, a nice girl, but a bit too daft.’
‘A bit too vulnerable! Means everything with all her heart. She might do the wrong thing, but she won’t do it idly or negligently.’
‘But stupidly. What could she hope to gain?’
‘There you are – you think in terms of what can be gained! Not her style. She hoped that if you were approached transparently, with generosity, you might behave generously yourself. And so you did, I’m glad to say. Or you wouldn’t be sitting here with me. She thinks that even a cop will be sincere given the chance.’
‘Never altogether – as you know.’
‘You want something from me,’ said Sophie. ‘I don’t know what, yet, but I’ve experience of cops.’
‘Nothing much. Sincerity, maybe.’
‘And what do I get?’
‘Nothing much either. I’ve no influence around here. A good word with Peyrefitte, which you might not even want.’
‘Mm. Well, you were straight with Martine, at least. Not just jig jig and then good girl, that was fun. Try me.’
‘All right; I will. An old lady gets killed. By some intruder, just like the paper said. Nothing to show it wasn’t. But there are background circumstances which don’t get told me. One of these is Thonon. There’s nothing against him. He’s reticent, all right, because of a bit of tax evasion or maybe a fiddle with building permits, some small stuff that wouldn’t interest me. You know this place, and some at least of the people in it,’ nodding towards the table where the businessmen had been sitting. ‘Now why should Martine feel so bothered, running to get me to lay off? Lay off what?’
‘I see. That’s not too difficult. He has a dishonest sort of job, but he’s a straight man. You can see from the girl. Good father-daughter relationship. Your old lady – I can’t help you. Know nothing about
her. That crowd I serve, yes, they can be very indiscreet, but I heard nothing. They were as surprised as you’d expect. Everyone accepted the vagabond theory: it can happen to anybody, nowadays. Why should there be anything else?’
‘Most probably there isn’t.’
‘As for Martine getting worked up – oh foo: that’s just young-girl romanticism. She sees you as a mystery story and gets a bit breathless. Saw you hanging about and started dramatising. She dramatises most things as you’ve surely realised. Including me. She sees me in kind of a pink light,’ said Sophie. ‘Damaged goods, poor her. Tart with a heart. Fix her up with a good man.’ Castang laughed.
Sophie did not laugh.
‘I was a girl like that myself. And now I’ve a boy of my own. He’s eight. I don’t see him at lunchtime; Léonie gives him dinner on the corner of the kitchen table. I’m rushed and sweaty, and I haven’t time to show affection, and I don’t want to show impatience. The waitress, bright and joky. Concentrate on that. So I get one hour in the evening, when he comes back and does homework. Five till six. So I’ve only learned one thing since I was eighteen myself. Keep your life in compartments.’
‘By day and by night.’
‘Ah,’ she drawled, ‘you mean does he know? Of course he does, and he doesn’t say so, and I don’t tell him. You want me to tell you, maybe, all about what I think when I’m in bed with a man? As he grows up he’ll learn all about it, and what work there is with this piddling restaurant, and this scruffy little bar, and this squalid little town, and what I’d do without Léonie, and all about the paperwork and the regulations, the municipal hygiene and the running water, and what I may charge and may not charge, and how to bribe public officials – are you really interested?’ viciously, ‘would you like to learn all that too? Fucking well shut up, then. I don’t tell Martine either. She’s a nice little bourgeois girl, straight and good and sheltered, and I’d like to see her stay that way.’
‘All right, understood.’
‘You’re not a bad bugger. Too soft to make a real skinflint cop.’
‘I can be bastardly upon occasion.
‘This isn’t it. Leave Martine alone.’
‘You made a nice speech. But it rings a little false, you know.’
‘Huh?’
‘Martine is romantic, and lives a sheltered existence. That could explain her ringing me up, acting the mysterious and secretive. She wouldn’t offer to take me to bed. It doesn’t cover her being frightened. I think of more than just a tax fiddle coming to light.
‘There’s more to it, as I think you know. And I think you know what it is. Or you wouldn’t be trying to distract me with a long tear-brimming speech about you being driven into prostitution by the hard-hearted Minister of Finance.’
‘Coo. Can be bastardly after all.’
‘Just sincere. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? Cops aren’t sincere much. People aren’t with them either, on the whole. All these generous offers from lovely young girls.’
‘I prefer sleeping alone in the afternoons, but I’ll stretch a point.’ He started to laugh, and after a moment so did she.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Now what has Daddy really done that has Martine in such a flap?’
She smashed out her cigarette end and took another.
‘Now we understand each other, I’ll say it again; I’d feel pretty sure, nothing criminal. He might be short of liquid, and that could be the source of Martine’s worry. The wife’s all right, but she likes money, and he likes to give it to her. Then there’s that big house, and the girl’s horse. The bills must come pretty high.’
‘He gamble or anything?’
‘No, but the competition is tough, and credit is tight. He had a deal set up with the old lady. Martine knew that, because she told me. And now the old lady’s dead and that queered the deal. Then you come poking into it. Queers it further, screws it maybe right up. But I think he was counting on it. Martine had a boy-scout notion of smoothing you out and generally unscrewing. Without Daddy knowing. Being strapped for money, for those who aren’t used to it, is humiliating. I truly don’t think it has to be more complex than that.’
‘If it was that simple why not tell me straight out before?’
Sophie studied him. He studied her. Nice girl. Pretty, too. Pale, thin, a bit anaemic-looking. Mouth cut beautifully, with unusual precision.
‘You’re a criminal-brigade cop, you know. And there was a murder. That’s a bit intimidating. You’re quite right, everyone has been wondering whether there wasn’t more to it than the hippy blunt instrument. Everybody wondering where he stands, with you around. They feel uneasy. Now look, I don’t want to throw you out, but I have to be at work again at five: go be a cop somewhere else.’
‘I’m nearly through. Do you know a man called Barde?’
She looked startled.
‘I do as a matter of fact. Very slightly: he’s an occasional customer. But what’s that, out of the blue?’
‘Very little. Cop talk. I was talking to him. Nothing material: he knew the dead woman in bygone days. Martine saw me near her house, which is near his: thought I was spying on her.’
‘Nice neighbourhood.’
‘One just likes to know a little more about who one talks to.’
‘I don’t know him much. Don’t particularly want to. As a waitress I sort them out crudely; the ones who are pleasant to serve or not. He’s an aren’t. That’s all.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Oh, patronising, condescending. Comes with the hundred franc note as though he were conferring a favour. Not so much that he’s the type that gives trouble. More that he has the notion his beautiful personality more than makes up for trouble caused. Phoney manners. Upsets a glass and starts a song: “Oh, I am so sorry, do forgive me.” ’
Castang grinned, listening to Barde’s voice.
‘And likes to stay the night, perhaps?’
‘Oh,’ comically, ‘he has very kindly offered to a few times. Somehow I haven’t managed to be disengaged. He’s a slug. No real dignity: it’s all phoney standing, like apartment houses with marble entries. Blithers about his family and being at school with the Proc. But owes money everywhere – tradesmen can wait because what importance have their affairs. A phoney big squire in riding boots that aren’t paid for.’ He sniggered. ‘That’s it – village gossip from the village call girl – go on; buzz off.’
TWENTY-THREE
Oh, the fine affair! He’d only been digesting his dinner, taking a pastoral stroll in the fresh air on his way to sort out Popaul Thonon. He’d been conscientious, making a detour by way of the Hotel Central to see if there were any messages. And look at him now! The place was in an uproar, and the Police Judiciaire highly unpopular.
Messages, grumbled the patronne – cow she was! Should just about think there were: all morning it’s been going on, and through lunch time. As though one hadn’t enough to do without that phone ringing. It hadn’t stopped, and people haven’t the right to be inconsiderate – there, it’s ringing again. Not here to run errands for customers, police or no police, and tell them I said so.
Castang, jolted out of any post-prandial euphoria, cut the tirade off by blocking his hearing ostentatiously with both earpieces.
‘What’s it now?’ he mumbled.
‘Lucciani,’ bleated that donkey.
‘Is that who’s creating all this uproar?’ said Castang ominously.
‘No, listen, look, Richard said to let you know, and I’m trying everywhere to get hold of you, and nobody knew where you were, and it’s not my fault, but that old bag…’
‘And you forgot your toothpaste in the bathroom and you’d like me to wrap it in a neat little parcel to send on?’
‘No, wait, look, listen – ‘ The accumulation of ums and ers was adding to exasperation.
‘Where the hell are you, anyhow? You’re supposed to be working.’
‘Well, I am working. I’m in Longueville, Richard told me t
o stop off to see about that lab report and then – ’
‘Never mind: what the hell are all these calls in aid of?’
‘I keep trying to tell you, the lab report, they sent it stupidly back here instead of on to us, the blood’s human and it’s the right group, the fellow what’s disappeared, no not this one but the other.’
‘What fellow?’
‘Well, the gendarmerie, they think they’d like to ask that fisherman fellow some more questions, because making an affray, leastways that’s a pretext, see.’
Castang wasn’t in the least interested. The gendarmerie in Longueville might not all have doctorates of philosophy, but were perfectly competent. He didn’t want to know anything at all about them and their affray. Unfortunately, he would be held responsible for any confusion caused by this mumbling boy.
‘Talk sense. Who’s stopping them?’
‘Well listen, the fellow’s done a bunk, see.’
‘Stop saying listen. He’s what?’
‘He’s nowhere to be found.’
‘Look for him then; where’s he gone to?’
‘East Jesus for all I know,’ obnoxiously jaunty.
‘And you are standing there, all pleased with yourself, telling me about it?’
‘Well, I knew you were in charge of the case and so I thought I better let you know.’
Castang held the phone away from his face, shook his head at it, sighed deeply, put it back again, adopted a deep bass voice like an operatic villain.
‘Now you listen. You go find him, see. Or you’ll be headed for East Jesus arse foremost, and what’s your blood group?’
‘Well, we’re searching.’
‘Search to more purpose,’ banging the phone down. He hadn’t walked more than two paces away from this dunderhead when the cretinous telephone rang again.
‘Twenty pork chops for tomorrow, butcher, and how about a calf’s head, and don’t forget the brains.’
‘What?’ said Peyrefitte’s voice bemused. ‘This is the Comm — oh, is that you, Castang, at last?’
‘But I’ve my hand held up. Please, miss, may I leave the room, miss, please?’
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