by Tim Roux
“Yes, there is a lot of golf in Belgium.”
“Do you play? Have I insulted you?” Paul has this tense, drawn, muscular face with closed-circuit twinkly eyes that many gay men have which becomes particularly noticeable, both endearing and threatening, when he is being playful.
“No,” I reply. “I don’t do golf.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“The girls. I bet you do lots of girls.”
“Yes, Mike and I go out into Montpellier a lot, and party in the streets. We also spend days on end at home in Valflaunès which is about forty kilometres away from here, just north of St. Mathieu-de-Trévier, if you know it.”
“No.”
“Twenty kilometres due north of Montpellier.”
“Gotcha. And when you are in Belgium …. ?”
“I’m a student at Leuven University.”
“Don’t know it.”
“It is sort of the Oxford or Cambridge of Belgium.”
“What’s it like?”
“Great.”
“What are you studying?”
“As little as possible.”
“Girls again, eh?”
“Something like that. Beyond that, I do turn up for applied science and robotics lectures occasionally, not enough for my professor, though. You are meant to turn up for work in Belgium.”
“I told you it was a middle-class sort of place.”
“You are right, it is,” I concede, “a country of suburbs and farms that are tended like lawns.”
“The only thing I know about it is the Mannequin Pis, and the story that the local brethren suck chocolate off it once a year.”
“I hadn’t heard that, but it makes sense I suppose. People dress him up in different costumes throughout the year.”
“Does he ever piss beer?”
“According to the locals, that may be where Maes comes from – a pissy Dutch beer, if you have never heard of it. Juppiler, the Belgian equivalent, comes from Leuven. I pass the factory most days.”
“I did dance in Brussels once, at La Monnaie, for three days. We packed the place out. Stayed at the Agenda hotel, if you know it.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Yeah, that was quite fun. Anyway, must fly!” His voice soars like a sax solo at the end of the sentence, and he turns-tail and extracts himself.
I always find it strange how different people are as real people when they are not flaunting themselves in groups.
* * *
Somebody, somewhere, has suggested an outing to St. Guillaume-le-Désert, Sarah I assume, because she seems to be the one organising it. Peter, John, Fiona, Sarah, Mr. Harding (John and Sarah’s dad), Inspector John, Mike and I are up for it, with Natalie in tow. The French contingent is disdainful. It wouldn’t be seen dismembered in a place that touristy which didn’t have a rugby team that repeatedly won the national championship thirty years ago (most of the French gang comes from around Béziers, which did). It’s impressive how long people can cling onto past ephemeral glories when they hail from a long-lost two-dog town.
I would have preferred to visit Uzès because in twenty years of living in and visiting the region I have never yet seen the place, and it is meant to be quite special according to all my friends around Montpellier who have ever discussed it. However, the core of the trip committee has determined that it is too far to reach at this time in the afternoon, given that we have to be back for dinner tonight.
Mike and I have been to St. Guillaume-le-Désert a few times and actually rather like the place. We have fond memories of playing with the taps once and getting ourselves soaking wet, buying lots of wooden toys and eating massive sugar-disc lollipops. I guess that it must have a similar appeal to some of the others too because visiting it has all the air of a familiar annual ritual.
We go in three cars: ours, Inspector John’s and one of the Affligem ones – a people carrier - so we could have gone in one less, except that Mike and I will be peeling off afterwards to go into Montpellier with Natalie rather than to return to Freyrargues for dinner.
The Earl and the Countess have no intention of joining us, of course. They kiss the family, wave the rest of us regally away, and turn back to their guests.
Natalie is OK in the car, seductively loving and cheerful in fact, leaning up against me and addressing observations to me with individual intensity, but once she reaches the car park her whole attitude changes. She looks lost somehow among this band of English trippers, on foreign soil in her own country. An hour later she is pouting fit to ooze poison, making it transparent that joining us was a hideous and tedious mistake, and that she would rather be tucked up with Marcel, probably, on safer ground. When the French want to make arses of themselves, they certainly go flat-out. I don’t try to reason with her. She does what she likes. I appreciate that this straggling group of Brits may appear pitifully shambolic and unsophisticated in its own way, but at least it seems at ease with itself.
I find myself strolling alongside Mr. Harding instead – “Call me Alan”.
“Everyone tells me that you have psychic powers,” he leads off the conversation.
“Everybody tells me that so do you,” I counter.
He chuckles modestly. “No, I don’t, and especially not any more. I think I was channelled in a way once upon a time, but all that left me years ago. And you?”
“I only said that Inspector John’s house felt spooky, that’s all. I don’t think that you have to be especially clairvoyant to observe that.”
“Maybe more clairvoyant than most of this crowd,” Alan observes collegiately. “So you don’t claim special powers otherwise?”
“No.”
“Pity.”
“It would have made me more interesting?”
“It would have made you more useful. Poor John is getting quite distressed about it all. You could at least have joined him in tracking down the rest of the remains, and settled a few bets in the process. I have the torso,” he laughs shyly, “not that I asked for it. Peter placed the bet on my behalf, just to keep me in the loop, I suppose. What do you have?”
“I’m not involved.”
“Too frivolous?”
“No, I simply didn’t happen to be there when they were arranging it. Peter told me about it, but I am sure that by then all the body parts were taken.”
“Gruesome, isn’t it?”
“A body part is a body part to me, but it must have much more significance to you as a healer.”
“A former healer.”
“Whatever.”
Alan shrugs his shoulders. “In the end, we live, we die, and if you are dead it probably doesn’t matter too much what the several parts of your body are doing.”
I am about to protest that it matters a great deal, that is why the entity is so spectacularly angry, but zip my lips firmly before the first word escapes. I am not meant to know. However, I think that Alan notices. “What do you think?” he asks.
“I don’t think anything.”
“That would surprise me,” he retorts, and we continue in companionable silence for a short while until Natalie accosts me to insist that we take her home.
“Mike and I are going swimming in the river,” I tell her.
“You’re not!” Sarah protests. “People have been known to dissolve in there.”
“You will certainly come out of there dirtier than when you went in,” adds John Jr..
“Mike and I do it every year. We are not dead yet, nor have we ever emerged smelling anything other than sweetly.”
“I want to go home now,” Natalie moans.
“We won’t be long,” I assure her. She flounces off. “Don’t go off far, Natalie, or we will have to leave you behind. Mike and I are going now, aren’t we, Mike?”
“Ready when you are,” beams Mike.
“I’m coming too,” declares Peter. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“You haven’t got your
costume!” cuts in Fiona.
“I am not going to swim. I only want to spectate, and to clap each time Paul and Mike swallow a disease. It could turn out to be even more fun than Inspector John’s garden!”
Inspector John winces. He doesn’t find the emergent treasures of his garden the least bit fun, and nor do I.
So we pile back into the cars and drive down to the bridge overlooking the pool that is fed by the river. Mike and I strip off with our swimming costumes underneath, Peter claps, and we wander into the water amid about twenty-five other people who are already bathing. Mike and I ease ourselves down into the water itself and laze there. “You’re missing out!” I tease the rest of them.
“No costumes,” Fiona replies emphatically.
Peter turns to John Jr.. “Do you think that they have those little fish in there that swim up your penis?”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” John concurs.
“You two are disgusting,” disapproves Sarah, smirking. Alan and Inspector John decide to take a short, evasive stroll along the flats. Mike and I get up and get out again.
“Do you have any towels?” Fiona inquires.
“No, that’s OK. We’ll use our clothes,” I reply, rubbing myself down with my trousers while Mike grabs a shirt. “We’ll drive in our costumes and have a shower when we get back to Valflaunès. Natalie is eager to get back.”
Natalie pulls an expression to intimate that she is past caring, for her return home or for me. Her former fondness for me has definitely dissipated into -ex.
“OK, see you guys in a few days,” waves Mike.
“Paul,” Inspector John engages me, having returned from his excursion with Alan, “I was hoping that you would call round to my house sometime soon. Perhaps you could help me out.”
“We could bring a couple of spades, if that is what you mean,” Mike proposes.
“I was rather hoping that I could rely on Paul here’s psychic powers.”
Mike laughs. “Psychic powers? Paul? He wouldn’t notice a bus if it hit him. You need Mum for that. Shame she is in Agay. She would have drummed up about a thousand psychics over the Internet to help you by now, if she was here. You might have a bit of a problem getting rid of them afterwards, of course. They cling on like leeches. That would be the downside. But we could give her a ring if you like. She would love it. It would make her feel useful.”
“Well, would you two care to call over anyway?” Inspector John continues doggedly.
“Yeah, no probs,” Mike replies willingly. “When would you like us?”
“Tomorrow, if that were possible.”
“What time?”
“Do you want to come for lunch? Or for tea?”
“Yeah, we’ll come over for lunch,” Mike confirms without even bothering to look at me. “Thank you very much for the invitation.”
“Thank you! See you tomorrow, then.”
Chapter 4
Inspector John is insisting on offering us an hour of kir, lunch and small talk before he takes us for our ghoul’s tour of the garden. I wonder whether I should warn him that kir is also definitely off the Affligem’s map of appropriate aperitifs – only white wine, rosé (surprisingly), champagne and scotch being acceptable. I don’t.
He keeps glancing at me to check whether I have detected anything untoward and ominous as I sit here, but I cannot feel a thing. It is a charming cottage in the French countryside between Montpellier and Béziers. I am sure that many a holidaymaker would be delighted to have discovered this place.
Mike keeps glancing over at me too, although he knows well enough already that I would never give anything away in front of strangers if I could possibly help it.
Actually, the extent of my clairvoyance is the one unexplored secret between us. He is fully aware that I have some powers of communication with the supernatural because it is an open secret in the family, but he has never actually seen me using them, and I have never chosen to elaborate on my experiences. In truth, Mike really doesn’t want to know, and I really don’t want to tell him.
Into the vacuum, Inspector John spills his story as to why he is here. His daughter, Julia, rented this house with a friend three years ago. The daughter of the owner, Mme. Picard, became very friendly with them, and then, one day, she and the friend, Mary, ran away together as lovers. Then the girl, Alice, simply disappeared. Mary got up in the morning wherever they were, and she was gone. The police had already been looking for Alice, at the request of her parents, and so Inspector John’s daughter, Julia, was already in hot water. However, when Alice disappeared definitively while with Mary, they turned on Mary instead, who simply stonewalled saying that she didn’t have a clue where she was.
According to Julia, Alice’s father stormed the house with a lynch mob, planning to do all manner of horrible things to them no doubt, but Julia fought them off with a gun she had stolen, and they then fled to Spain. Sometime later, Julia returned to the UK and committed suicide. So that is why Inspector John is here, in search of the spirit of his daughter.
What he now wants to know is whether the spook that I sensed when I was here last time was that of his daughter, or that of the girl, or that of somebody else entirely. He would also like to know whose body he is finding. Is it Alice re-emerging at last, or some entirely unrelated corpse, perhaps being raided out of the nearby cemetery by some wild animal or other, maybe by a wild boar or a fox.
We commiserate with the death of his daughter and he nods his appreciation.
“Strangely enough, I find Alice’s mother, Mme. Picard, the owner of this house, absolutely charming. Julia couldn’t stand her. She called her Mme. Quelque Chose de Quelque Part because she considered her to have impossible airs and graces.” He shrugs his shoulders. “She obviously didn’t appreciate two women living together here openly as lovers with her young daughter nearby. Perhaps she had guessed at Alice’s real sexual orientation and feared that Julia and Mary would draw it out of her, as indeed they did, making her life miserable and causing a scandal for the family, as indeed happened too.”
“It is very traditional around here,” Mike comments. “They would probably have to leave the area.”
“Except that they haven’t,” Inspector John corrects him. “They have stayed in the village. As I say, Mme. Picard is lovely. Her husband, M. Picard is an irascible soul, though. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t have something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. Not the liberal broad-minded type, I wouldn’t think, nor in the least forgiving. If I were in the Force here, I would be knocking on his door until he told me what he really knew, which is a lot more than he is letting on, I wouldn’t mind betting my bottom dollar.”
“Have you spoken to the local gendarmes here,” Mike inquires.
“Yes, I met up with Capitaine Herbert immediately after I arrived. He was a very friendly fellow – a straight-up, decent copper. I took to him immediately, and I think he to me. He was intrigued to meet Julia’s father, but warned me not to divulge my identity to Mme. Picard or her husband, or I would discover another side to Mme. Picard PDQ.”
“Ah, well, we won’t tell,” Mike replies. “Don’t know her anyway.”
“Capitaine Herbert told me that the inquiry was suspended with regard to Alice – no body, no crime, ultimately. She is logged as another waif who has strayed, not that Mme. Picard is at all happy about it. She campaigns almost every month for the case to be re-opened. It is interesting that the father doesn’t – that intrigues me. Perhaps he does, but Mme. Picard is the more voluble. However, he is apparently deeply shamed by his daughter’s behaviour, running off with Mary, or so Capitaine Herbert told me, and probably, in all honesty, would rather that she were dead, if, of course, he didn’t bump her off himself, or maybe indeed even if he did.”
“What a place!” Mike exclaims. “I didn’t realise that it had quite so much history.” He takes a sip from his glass, wishing that it was larger, and that there was a bowl of olives to raid. “So h
ave you managed to make contact with the spirit of your daughter?” – a very bold question for Mike to pose.
Inspector John smiles. “Funnily enough, I do feel her all around me. It may be my imagination, but it does feel like she is here somewhere, sharing a glass of wine with me.” Both Mike and my eyes shift involuntarily to the empty chair alongside us. “It’s a bit fanciful, I know,” Inspector John continues, “but please humour an old man.”
“Not exactly old,” Mike chimes in on cue.
Inspector John turns to me. “So what do you think, Paul?”
“About what?” I reply, startled.
“About anything.”
“I don’t, really. Obviously I am sorry for your daughter, and for you – maybe even for Alice if she isn’t dancing around Paris, strutting her stuff. We may even bump into her in Brussels. I’ll look out for her.”
“So you don’t think she is dead?”
“I haven’t a clue. Why would I know that? I have never met her.”
“I thought you might have sensed something.”
“I thought that this house seemed a bit spooky, that is all. Now that I have heard your story, I am not surprised. It cannot be a very happy house.”
“Actually, I find it has a very homely atmosphere, maybe because I sense Julia’s presence here. I only got to know her towards the end of her life because she was brought up by her mother, so I am desperate to get as close to her for as long as I can.”
“What about her mother?” Mike asks unwisely.
“She committed suicide too – many years ago. It must have been in the genes – not my genes, though. My ancestors were all rough and tumble dockworkers and their wives. One died in a loading accident on the docks, and another was lost at sea as crew on a merchant ship, and several were killed in the two world wars, but that is as dramatic as it ever got on my side of the family. Nobody ever died by their own hands or was even depressive, as far as I know. Good solid Lancashire types.”
“It must have been very difficult for you.”
It seems for a second like Inspector John might even let a tear escape his eyes. “It was. I liked what I knew of Julia very much – and her mother …. ” He smiles instead. “ …. her mother was a really wild one. Totally untameable. Not the suicidal type either, you wouldn’t have thought, although otherwise hell-bent on self-destruction.”
