Summertime All the Cats Are Bored

by Philippe Georget

  Lefèvre didn’t have to be asked twice.

  “You will have noted that in this poem there are six different stanzas plus a sort of refrain that returns three times: ‘Who does what, who catches who? Who’s the cat, who the mouse, who?’ Four questions that recur as in a nursery rhyme and that ask about the place of each actor in this case.

  He pointed to the first lines of the text.

  “At first, the characters seem easy to identify: the ‘intrepid mouse content to wait’ is Ingrid Raven. Her situation is perfectly described in the second stanza, where he says she was held “down in damp hell,” which represents the cellar of the house, as you’ve all understood. The cat whose cruel paw sets the mouse’s fate is Coll himself. No major problems there, either. On the other hand, the “ill-trained dog” mentioned in line three raises more difficulties. At first I thought it referred to us, policemen often being represented by dogs in stories.”

  “Oh yes . . . police dogs,” Lambert thought it useful to explain.

  “But on reflection, I think it refers to José Lopez,” Lefèvre went on. “‘For this ill-trained dog t’was check and mate,’ that is, he was removed from the game. And he would also be the ‘hairy prey‘ mentioned a little further on.”

  Sebag felt like he’d gone back twenty years to his high school years, when he listened to his French teacher commenting on the great texts of French literature. Lefèvre’s memories were more recent: the young superintendent’s presentation was clear and didactic. He was doing very well.

  “We—that is, the police—appear later in the poem. First in the form of another prey, one that he ‘makes first lose, then gain. Then we are the ‘you’ used in the fourth stanza. Finally, we appear again in the next-to-last stanza: in my opinion, the other cats’ again refers to us.”

  “I think I’m no longer following you,” Ménard said, perplexed. “It seemed to me that the cat was Coll.”

  Lefèvre looked up at Ménard for a moment and smiled at him.

  “‘Who’s the cat, who the mouse?’ The questions are clearly addressed to us in the refrain, and they are asked throughout the poem. Coll is sometimes the cat and sometimes the mouse: incontestably the cat with Ingrid, but both cat and mouse with us. ‘Who does what, who catches who?’ We’re the ones who are supposed to chase the kidnapper but he’s the one who came to seek us out, to challenge us, he’s the one who’s playing with us. We may be cats, but we’re his prey.”

  “And, from a certain point of view, maybe he’s the one who will end up catching us,” Ménard went on.

  “That remains an open question,” Lefèvre concluded.

  The little fly collided violently with the windowpane, but its flight was hardly affected. It buzzed over their heads, sounding like a revving scooter, but then chose to land on the paper in front of Molina. The former rugby player slowly brought up his big hand and then suddenly captured the fly before it could escape. He got up, opened the window, and threw the fly outside.

  “Remarkable technique,” Lambert commented as Molina sat down.

  Llach cleared his throat and pointed to a line in the poem with his index finger.

  “In the third stanza, it says that the mouse ‘chooses a day to sit, opens a vein.’ Doesn’t that suggest that Ingrid Raven has in fact been killed? Her vein would be opened, just like Didier Coll’s.”

  “The answer is in your question,” Lefèvre replied triumphantly. “You’re misinterpreting the text. In this stanza Coll isn’t the cat but the mouse; he calls himself a ‘greedy mouse.’ And he chooses a day to open his veins in an attempt to kill himself.”

  “Except that it wasn’t really he who chose the day. It was our raid that triggered everything,” Raynaud quibbled.

  “Yes, that’s true. Coll was probably a little pretentious there . . . ”

  In general, Sebag agreed with Lefèvre’s analysis.

  “Coll isn’t pretentious,” he said. “He really did choose the time of his death. He’d undoubtedly planned from the outset to commit suicide on the day we came to get him. In that sense, as he wrote, he didn’t lose: he did what he’d set out to do.”

  Molina tapped on his sheet of paper with his fingers.

  “All that’s perfect. Clear and brilliant. But if we want to have a good grade on the final exam, we have to find the place where Coll hid Ingrid. I suppose the answer is in the text?”

  “Absolutely,” Lefèvre sighed. “The last two stanzas refer to that. The message is clear: Ingrid is waiting for us patiently, but the ‘house of stone’ will also be her tomb.”

  Molina was impatient and pursued his point.

  “Fine, so where is the girl hidden? Have you discovered that, yes or no?”

  “In a ‘house of stone.’ ‘In the shade of a mast bobbing o’er the wave.’”

  “And that means . . . ?”

  “The mast, the wave . . . naturally, that makes us think of the sea.”

  “So Ingrid is being held in a stone house near a boat?” Llach asked. “That’s not very precise.”

  “There are two places near the sea that are connected with this investigation,” Lefèvre replied. “The Revels’ house in Collioure and the Hôtel du Sud in Canet.”

  Castello turned to Sebag.

  “Is the Revels’ house built of stone?”

  “The façade is stuccoed,” Gilles answered. “I don’t know what’s underneath it.”

  Ménard spoke up. He had an idea.

  “I investigated the murder in Argelès. There was a casot between the Oleanders campground and the beach.”

  “A what?” Lefèvre asked.

  “A casot,” Castello explained, “is a cabin where vineyard workers store their tools and sometimes spend the night.”

  “A stone cabin,” Ménard added.

  “Stone . . . ” Lefèvre repeated in a low voice. “That interesting, but I don’t see why the campground in Argelès would be brought back in here. Ingrid has nothing to do with that.”

  “There are lots of casots in the department, Raynaud said. “And some of them are not very far from the sea.”

  “There are vineyards in Collioure, and thus also casots,” Moreno added.

  Lefèvre glanced at Castello questioningly. He wanted to urge him to make a rapid decision.

  “I’m not very convinced but we’ve got to do something. And since we don’t have any other ideas . . . Raynaud and Moreno, you’ll go to Canet to have a look at the Hôtel du Sud. Molina, Llach and Lambert, you’ll go see the Revels in Collioure. In the meantime, I’ll call the gendarmes, and they’ll give you a hand examining all the casots in that area tomorrow. And finally, Ménard, just to be sure, I’m sending you back to Argelès anyway. We mustn’t overlook anything.”

  The superintendent turned to Sebag.

  “You stay here, Gilles. While your colleagues are running all over hell and gone, I want you to think about other leads.”

  The inspectors got up and went out, one after the other. Lefèvre followed them. He had decided to go to Collioure as well.

  When Castello was alone with Sebag, he telephoned his secretary to ask her to bring them some coffee. He sank down on his chair and gave his dejection free rein.

  “You don’t believe it either, do you?”

  “No. I didn’t feel anything click.”

  “Your instinct didn’t tickle you?”

  Sebag just smiled. The two men continued to sit in silence, each lost in his somber thoughts, until Jeanne came in. She put two steaming cups on the table, along with two spoons and a plastic glass in which she’d put a few lumps of sugar. Then she went out again.

  “Go ahead,” Castello said. “I don’t like it when it’s too hot.”

  Sebag didn’t have to be asked twice. The coffee was weak but acceptable.

  “By the way, are your kids doing all right?” t
he superintendent asked him.

  “I think so. Léo is roaring around on a quad in the Cévennes and Séverine is in Spain with the parents of one of her girlfriends.”

  “And your wife is on a cruise in the Mediterranean, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “She is. She’s coming home in a little while, incidentally.”

  “If I know you, you must be feeling a little lonely, right?”

  “Oh, I really haven’t had the time . . . ”

  Sebag preferred to avoid the subject. But Castello was in a mood for confidences. He put two lumps of sugar in his cup and stirred it slowly. He continued while staring sadly at his coffee.

  “It’s going to be six months since I saw Charles. Charles is my eldest, he’s studying medicine in Paris.”

  He suddenly got up and opened the window. He took out a cigarette and began to smoke. He took two long drags before turning back toward Sebag.

  “Plus I’m getting old and I think family is the most important thing in the world. I say that with force and conviction even though I’m well aware that I’m preaching to the choir: family values have become fashionable again.”

  A plane passed far overhead, leaving its white contrail across the blue sky.

  “What isn’t said often enough is that what holds the family together is the couple. Without a stable couple, there is no solid family.”

  Sebag hurried to finish his coffee. He put the cup down on the table and got up, pushing back his chair noisily.

  “Let’s hope our colleagues’ investigations will be successful . . . ”

  It took the superintendent a while to understand what Sebag was talking about. Then he shrugged.

  “Don’t count on it too much.”

  Sitting in his office, he contemplated his computer. His hand flitted over the blackened keys. The machine couldn’t do anything for him.

  No machine could.

  Electronic circuits, even very complex and powerful ones, turned out to be too primitive to follow the corrupt twists and turns of human neural pathways.

  He couldn’t concentrate on that damned poem. He read it. Reread it. He just couldn’t keep his mind on it. Nonetheless, behind these clumsy verses and sad rhymes the life of a nineteen-year-old woman was hidden. But the blond Ingrid’s smile was effaced behind that of a brunette almost twenty years her elder. Claire would be home in a few hours . . .

  He wanted another cup of coffee.

  “The die is cast, the cat’s run away.”

  He’d put the poem down on the computer’s keyboard and turned the desk lamp on it. But it was his brain that needed light, not his eyes.

  “The mouse remains on a summer day, for other cats’ survival, she must stay.”

  He tried to get around the obstacle. Go back to the simple stanzas. Use them to get started. Land by surprise on the obscure lines. Make them spit out their poison.

  “In the shade of a mast bobbing o‘er the wave.”

  Claire with her suitcases on the platform at the train station.

  “She waits and waits . . . ”

  Claire with her soft eyes, her face without makeup.

  “The house of stone will be her grave.”

  To rid himself of irrelevant thoughts, he tried to imagine Ingrid Raven lying on the cold marble of a tomb.

  He looked at his watch. 10:30. He couldn’t concentrate.

  The cruise ship should be approaching the port of Marseilles. The arrival was scheduled for a little before noon. How long would it take such a boat to land? Would it have to wait off the coast for a while first?

  He got up from his chair, swearing. He had to get hold of himself. Ingrid Raven’s life depended on it.

  Pretentious idiot! he said to himself. Do you think you’re the only one who can find her?

  He thought about his colleagues who were searching the casots near the seacoast and finally answered “yes,” he might in fact be the only one who could save her.

  Unfortunately for her.

  In seven hours, Claire would arrive at the station in Perpignan. And he still hadn’t made a decision. He’d see when the time came. Everything would depend on her attitude. If she was still resentful about their last phone call, things would certainly be easier. But if she threw herself into his arms and murmured words of love in his ear, he was capable of forgetting everything.

  He loved her. That was the only thing he was sure about.

  “The couple is what holds the family together,” Castello had said.

  By asking Claire for an explanation, he was taking the risk of destroying everything. Of course, if she loved somebody else, it would be better to get it over with right away. Force her to choose.

  To divorce him.

  Separation. Alternating custody. A few words exchanged between two doors at each meeting. Angry fights, perhaps. Bitterness, for sure.

  Weeks without them. A life without her.

  But if Claire’s affair was a simple fling after twenty years of fidelity . . . What good would it do to bring it out into the open? I’m a cuckold, I know it, you ask my pardon and I absolve you. Ridiculous and vain. If he was ready to forget everything, why not push the logic all the way?

  Not say anything. Not do anything.

  Accept?

  The other day, at the Deux Margots cafe, he could have learned more about Claire’s lover. He hadn’t wanted to. Instinctively, he’d already decided. When he had felt himself ready to pardon her, he’d been scared. He thought that was a bad sign, a sign that he no longer loved his wife enough. But jealousy is not a proof of love.

  He sat down on his chair again. Settled himself firmly against its back.

  Ingrid Raven.

  The house of stone.

  An image had come to him a little while ago when he’d thought about the young woman stretched out on the marble tomb. The cold marble. Slabs. Stone walls. A house. A church. The house of God . . .

  In his mind’s eye, he saw again Didier Coll’s apartment. A coffee table between two armchairs. The Bible lying on the table.

  “You read wholesome books,” he’d said.

  “It’s the only novel I can stand,” Coll had replied.

  Ingrid Raven was being held prisoner in a church.

  “In the shade of a mast bobbing o’er the wave.”

  A church at the seaside. The church in Collioure? He put his hand on his telephone to suggest that his colleagues also have a look at the church in Collioure. He felt it vibrate before it rang. It was Jeanne.

  “The superintendent is waiting for you downstairs. A body has been discovered at the house in Le Soler.”

  They didn’t exchange a word during the trip to Le Soler. When Pagès had called, the superintendent was on the phone. Pagès had left a brief message that contained no more details than those Jeanne had given him.

  A cadaver had been found at the back of the yard behind a copse of reeds.

  Castello was driving too fast. He’d turned on the siren and floored the accelerator. Fortunately, the road to Le Soler had few curves. Sebag didn’t want to believe it: Coll actually killed Ingrid before killing himself. The traces of sweat in the car, the poem: all that was just meant to deceive them.

  Impossible!

  “Beyond the passage the game renews.”

  The meaning of this line in the poem was clear. And without a prize, there could be no game. And the prize had to be finding Ingrid alive, not discovering her body under a layer of earth. He tried again and again to reach Pagès, but each time got his answering machine. He checked his list of phone numbers but didn’t find one for Elsa Moulin.

  The superintendent had to slow down as he came into the village. He drove down the main street, passed the city hall, then turned left on the road to Thuir. Now Coll’s house was not far away.

  A midnight-blue car
was parked in front of the entrance to the property. Castello and Sebag greeted the gendarmes before going through the gate. They went around the house and approached the back of the yard. A red backhoe was holding its powerful arm over a pile of ochre-colored soil. Alongside it, Jean Pagès’s bald head was sticking out of a hole. They went up to the hole and bent down. They were totally surprised to see what the crime lab men had unearthed.

  “What the hell is that?” Castello exclaimed.

  Pagès stood up, holding a trowel in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. His face was sweaty and dirty. He’d already managed to excavate the lower half of a skeleton.

  “That’s not Ingrid,” Castello observed.

  “No, that’s highly unlikely,” Pagès replied. “This guy’s been here for at least twenty years.”

  The head of the crime lab put the toothbrush in the pocket of his shirt spattered with dirt and handed the trowel to his assistant. Then he held out his arm to Sebag so he could help him climb out of the hole.

  “Who is it, then?” Castello asked.

  “It’s a little too early to say, Superintendent. The shape of the pubic bone tells us that it’s a male and the size of his femur tells us that he was about five foot eleven. Finally, the presence of osteoarthritic calcifications on the toes suggests that the individual was at least fifty years old, maybe sixty, but that’s an initial estimate. If we can excavate the whole of the skeleton today, we might be able to identify him by examining the jawbone.”

  “Assuming that we already have some idea of who he is. And that we can find the right dentist. So in your opinion he’s been buried here for twenty years?”

  “Give or take five years, yes. And what’s strange is that he’s been buried here from the outset. We’re almost sure that the body has never been moved.”

  “And why is that strange?” Castello asked.

  Elsa Moulin climbed out of the whole in turn. She was the one who replied.

  “We decided to look here because we noticed that the earth had been recently dug up. We don’t know why. It’s an odd coincidence!”