Playing the Martyr

by Ian G Moore

  ‘Tiens…’ said one of the knights, offering his flaming Zippo lighter. ‘Ça marche?’

  The ‘French peasant’ looked up at the taller ‘English knight’, cigarette in his lips. ‘Thank you,’ he said in a clipped English accent. ‘Sorry. Merci!’ There was a brief pause as the cigarette was lit. Then, and without obvious reason, they all burst out laughing.

  Lombard slid past them unnoticed, and into the pub where he at once caught sight of the tall, muscular Michael Dwyer. The landlord was eschewing the famed warm Irish welcome and instead wore a face like a stormy sea. Someone was going to get it. Lombard liked Dwyer, but thought he was in the wrong job. He served customers with all the grace of a menacing debt collector, and greeted any rare good fortune with absolute suspicion. Lombard doubted he played the lotto, but if he did he’d curse a win for the extra burdens it would bring. He’d been manager of Hurley’s Irish Pub for two years now and looked like he hadn’t enjoyed a second of it.

  ‘You’re late, Lombard!’ Dwyer shouted over the noise, emphasising the ‘d’ at the end of Lombard as a childish attempt to cause offence. He looked like an angry giant, and his slow Australian twang, belying his Irish name, was designed to be intimidating too. But the bar was too noisy for subtle menace. ‘This was your bloody idea and it’s bloody chaos.’

  Lombard picked out an empty stool at the end of the bar nearest the entrance and surveyed the ‘chaos’. It looked no more chaotic than any busy pub he’d had ever been in in London or Dublin, but he could see Dwyer’s point. This was genteel, refined Tours on a Sunday evening, it didn’t normally do ‘raucous’. The apologetic Lombard met Dwyer’s stare with a slight shrug, his permanently sad-dog eyes giving as much information as Dwyer needed. ‘I’m sorry. It was unavoidable. At least you’re busy.’

  ‘Too bloody busy!’ spat Dwyer and moved off down the bar to another waiting customer, his red hair and beard looking like a flaming beacon guiding an angry mob.

  Lombard let go another rare smile, but not so that the volatile Dwyer could see it. It had been a long time since he’d enjoyed himself and he was enjoying this evening immensely so far. He knew pretty much every bar in Tours and every bar owner, and he liked Hurley’s Irish Pub a lot. It was like every Irish pub outside of Ireland, a ubiquitous clichéd addition to every city or town in the whole world, about as authentic as cheap imported Camembert, but comforting nonetheless.

  The walls were a kind of fake tobacco stain colour, the parts that showed at least. They were adorned with ‘Irish’ artefacts like bicycle wheels, battered instruments, an odd mix of bread and fish baskets, old poster adverts for Guinness, and incongruous road signs. ‘Dublin 486 miles’ one read which annoyed Lombard intensely every time he looked at it, his pedantry, never far from the surface, always piqued by the inaccuracy. Dublin was 512.9 miles from Tours, as the crow flies. And Cork was not, as another ‘road sign’ would have it, 750 kilometres away. It was 828.58 and, another thing, show some consistency – work in either miles or kilometres, but don’t mix the two.

  He leant against the bar. He liked its sturdiness. Certainly, he liked French bars too, with their informality and formica tables, their light. But an Irish pub, no matter how inauthentic, had a welcoming solidity. They were a mirage in the desert for the weary traveller, a false way out obviously, but one that offered temporary refuge if you allowed them to do so. And you could generally be left alone in a pub; a bar had fewer alcoves and corners, fewer places to hide.

  Dwyer slammed a pint glass down on the bar, disturbing Lombard’s thoughts. In the glass was a microphone. ‘Like I said,’ Dwyer leaned ominously over the counter, its raised floor on the server’s side adding to his considerable stature, ‘it was your idea, so you can be quizmaster in the second half. See how you like being ignored.’

  ‘But you’re perfect for the role!’ Lombard protested half-heartedly, ‘As an Australian you are entirely neutral.’

  ‘There’s no-one here more neutral than you, Judge. Half-English, half-French? You’re ideal.’ He stood up to his full height and crossed his arms. ‘Both sides hate you.’

  It was a logic Lombard knew only too well and one that couldn’t be faulted. So again, he shrugged, his recently unearthed insouciance allowing him to be guided by the tide of the evening. It was a small price to pay anyway. Maybe in his own bar, he would have regular quiz nights. And bands. A jazz band on a Sunday lunchtime perhaps. He didn’t like jazz at all, but they fitted a Sunday lunch somehow. And proper roast potatoes on the bar, like his grandparents had had at their English country pub. He got down off his stool, ‘Why not?’ He was speaking to himself in French, as a kind of pep talk. ‘This might be fun.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here though, should you?’ A small man in blue overalls who was sitting on the stool next to Lombard, replied in French. He did so without looking up from his drink, which he now gulped down despite a shaking hand. ‘You should be out doing your job.’ He carried on, still without directly addressing Lombard.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ Lombard was taken aback by the anger in the small man.

  ‘You’re Monsieur le juge Lombard, aren’t you?’ His accent didn’t have the usual Tours clarity, possibly from the east, the Jura maybe. His oil-stained hands spoke of years as a mechanic too. Lombard wondered if mechanics ever really tried to clean their hands, or at a certain point in their career just gave up, realising the futility of it. It was the kind of distracting, unanswerable question he found often got in the way, but he seemed an odd fit for Hurley’s, this heated little man. He still in his overalls too which was unusual for a Sunday, and under Lombard’s scrutiny he was now self-consciously wiping them. He had a grubby name sewn on his left breast: Maichin.

  ‘Yes, I’m Lombard, Monsieur Maichin.’

  ‘Then you should be out doing your job, like I says. Out catching murderers and the like.’ The man now turned to look at Lombard and he looked like he had surprised himself by interrupting and was now regretting it. He slid off his stool, but was shaky on his feet and Lombard went to steady him, but grabbed him a little too hard, frightening his accuser.

  ‘Have you any specific murderers in mind, Monsieur?’

  The little man wriggled free. ‘My brother works for La Nouvelle République. Something happened over in Saint-Genèse this evening. Horrible, he said, gruesome. Some English bloke. Just left out to rot… crucified.’

  ‘I am an ex-juge,’ said Lombard, making his decision to leave Tours semi-public, and therefore ratifying the decision in his own mind. ‘It’s none of my business anymore.’

  ‘That’s not what my brother says. This is an Englishman, killed near Tours. You’re English, sort of. He says if you’re not given this investigation they’ll have to say why.’ He looked at the floor again, giving the impression that he thought he may have gone too far. But added nonetheless. ‘And nobody wants that.’ He paused and wiped his mouth, as though what he was about to say next needed a smarter mouth. He decided against saying whatever it was anyway.

  ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’ Lombard responded, trying to exercise some self-control. Though if he was honest with himself, he felt a thrill of excitement amidst the anger at the intrusion. The kind of excitement, he admitted with reluctance, that he hadn’t felt in a while: intoxicating and addictive.

  ‘Anyway. That’s what my brother says.’ The strange messenger took another long slug of his drink, spilling some down his front as his desire to get out quickly met with his need to get his money’s worth. Lombard couldn’t reply to the man, but felt a strange gratitude towards him. He was in a mythical land here tonight, an Irish pub in France populated by angry Giants and gossipy Elves.

  His elf saw his chance and bolted out through the door without saying another word, leaving Lombard speechless at the bar.

  ‘Right, you bastards. Silence! Fermez la bouche!’ Dwyer was on his own microphone from behind the bar. ‘There are two rounds left and, seeing as you wouldn’t listen to me, I’ve bloody retire
d.’ A cheer went up from the room while Lombard felt the pub door open again and a man stand slightly too close than was necessary right at his shoulder.

  ‘The score is sixteen all.’ Dwyer bellowed through the feedback.

  ‘Good evening Lombard. I thought I’d find you here.’ Lombard spun round to face a younger man leaning in on him. His manner was confident bordering on arrogant, his skin shiny as a lizard, one who basks regularly in his own sunlight. His expensive suit and matching tie and pocket square were as out of place in Hurley’s as silver service cutlery but didn’t bother René Llhermanault, Procureur de la République de Tours and, in theory at least, Lombard’s boss.

  Oblivious, Dwyer carried on his shouty introduction. ‘Instead, I hand you over to his judgeness, Monsieur le juge Lombard.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Judge Lombard!’ He yelled it this time and simultaneously turned towards the end of the bar where Lombard had been. All he saw was the door shut quietly and the bar stool empty. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sakes!’ He roared, forgetting to drop the microphone.

  Chapter 3

  Giants, elves and now talking lizards, it had been quite some evening for epic high fantasy fans, Lombard mused. But as he and Llhermanault left Hurley’s behind, with Dwyer’s primordial roar still audible some way down the rue Colbert, Lombard felt his own brief fantasy of independence receding too.

  Llhermanault had gone to turn right out of the bar and direct him back towards the Commissariat, but Lombard had insisted he needed to go home first. First before what though? Nothing had even been said yet, but it was implicit that he was being handed an investigation, and no doubt it was the death of the Englishman in Saint-Genèse. A crucifixion, his strange emissary had called it. The whole evening had taken a very Gothic turn indeed, he thought as he walked quickly in front of Llhermanault, his longer strides leaving the smaller man in his wake as if trying to lose him. He could do with grounding the whole thing back in some sort of mundane reality rather than all this fabled creatures nonsense. Unfortunately though, if the narrow medieval backstreets of Tours lent themselves to anything it was Gothic horror, where every lengthening shadow had a Nosferatu edge to it.

  Llhermanault may have lagged a few yards behind but he was smart enough not to try to keep up; he had other ways of bringing people to his level.

  ‘We were all devastated by Madeleine’s death, of course,’ he said loudly, giving the word ‘devastated’ such emphasis that it bordered on the sarcastic. Lombard stopped in his tracks, but didn’t turn around. Llhermanault reached his side and put a hand on his arm. ‘You know, old friend,’ – he had a way of speaking that made Lombard think of little girls trying on their mother’s dress shoes, the words didn’t fit, they belonged to a different generation – ‘you should have let us know she was ill. We could have eased your burden somehow.’

  Lombard felt like punching the man, but what good would that do? He had barely thought of Madeleine all afternoon and though the guilt of that lapse suddenly upset him, he’d be damned if he’d let a worm like René Llhermanault get under his skin. But then he obviously already had and was burrowing deeper too like the insidious parasite he was.

  ‘Your mother came to the funeral,’ Lombard said without inflection and started walking again, though this time more slowly, more measured. There was no point running away from this. There was nowhere to go.

  ‘I would have come myself but…’

  ‘But you weren’t invited.’ Lombard was clenching and unclenching his fists. Nobody had known Madeleine was ill, it was how they both wanted to deal with it. There was to be minimum fuss. She didn’t want visits from concerned acquaintances, half-friends as she called them, she just wanted to carry on as she, they, had always done. Wrapped up in each other, keeping the world at bay. And anyway, she would say airily, if she survived the cancer nobody would be any the wiser, and if she didn’t…

  She didn’t. The first signs of Madeleine’s illness had occurred over Christmas. Lombard was under pressure at work with a nasty, very public, investigation into the murder of a child over in Joué-lès-Tours. A dreadful crime that was made somehow even worse by what Lombard regarded as the false bonhomie of the festive season. Madeleine was coughing a lot, but that wasn’t unusual as she was a heavy smoker anyway, sticking stubbornly to her student rollups like they were a symbol of her politics or youth. She secretly went to see a doctor, had some urgent tests and broke the bad news to Lombard before Twelfth Night had passed.

  Over the next four months he watched her die. Small cell lung cancer, pernicious like all cancers only faster acting, rapidly took her already thin body and left her weak and bed-ridden. He didn’t mind not telling anyone. It wasn’t as if he had an extensive support network of his own to call on anyway, and he knew that time was short. He didn’t want to have to share her with anyone else when so little of her was left.

  ‘Of course,’ oozed Llhermanault, ‘at least it wasn’t too drawn out. She didn’t suffer too much. My poor father…’ He tailed off. Lombard had been great friends with Llhermanault senior who had taken him under his wing after qualifying as a magistrate and returning to Tours. His own cancer had been a drawn out affair.

  ‘People keep telling me I’m battling it well,’ he had told Lombard once, ‘I’m not bloody battling anything, the damn thing just won’t make its bloody mind up.’

  ‘He suffered for years, poor man.’

  That’s you in a nutshell, thought Lombard. Playing poker with other people’s suffering, my dad had it worse than your wife, as if it was a competition. He remembered something else old man Llhermanault had said to him too: ‘Look out for my son,’ he’d said and Lombard had joked that René was more than capable of looking out for himself. ‘That’s what I meant,’ the old man added.

  They reached the front door of Lombard’s home. Actually, it was the door of Madeleine’s antique shop which they had lived above, but Lombard had been keeping the business going on an ad-hoc basis for the past twelve months, and force of habit made him turn the door sign round to ‘OUVERT’. He hadn’t needed to keep the shop running, but it was something to do and a lot of the stock had sentimental value, as he could remember where most things had been picked up. In truth, the stock had barely changed over the years; so he certainly wasn’t running it for the money either. It was just another part of Madeleine that he had been reluctant to let go of. Though that was all going to change now that he’d decided to leave.

  ‘What do you want, René?’ he said wearily, surprising Llhermanault with the familiarity and addressing him from a small room at the back of the shop where he was clattering about.

  ‘To rescue you from all of this!’ beamed Llhermanault, his arms outstretched and held slightly aloft like an evangelical pastor or a cheap salesman. He was a bit of both, thought Lombard. Fifty percent religious shaman, fifty percent conman. One hundred percent untrustworthy.

  ‘And what makes you think I need, or even want, to be rescued from all this?’ He was still noisily banging about, not with any intent as such, he just wanted Llhermanault away from his comfort zone for as long as possible, somewhere where Lombard had a modicum of control of the situation.

  ‘Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.’ Llhermanault’s manner changed in an instant, and Lombard sensed that they were getting to the business end of things. ‘The truth is something needs to be done… Jesus, what’s that?’

  A cat jumped on to a Queen Anne side chair, momentarily destroying Llhermanault’s poise.

  ‘It’s a cat, René,’ Lombard said matter-of-factly.

  ‘I know it’s a cat! It frightened the life out of me.’ He straightened his jacket, smoothing down the front as if he’d just been in a fight. ‘Since when have you had a cat? I thought Madeleine hated cats.’

  What would you know about what Madeleine liked or disliked, Lombard thought angrily, walking back into the room with some cat food in an expensive-looking dish bearing a military scene. He made sure Llhermanault saw th
e dish.

  ‘Is that a Creil-Montereau?’ He looked horrified.

  ‘It’s just a plate. Here you go,’ he said gently, putting the dish down on the floor. The cat miaowed in thanks and ate noisily at the dry food.

  ‘What’s it called?’ asked Llhermanault suspiciously.

  ‘Called?’ Lombard seemed surprised by the question. ‘I don’t know. Cat? I haven’t given it a name. It followed me home one evening and stayed.’

  ‘It? You don’t know whether it’s a male or female?’

  ‘No. Does it matter?’

  Llhermanault glanced impatiently at his mobile phone which looked like it was glued to his hand. He pressed the screen so that he could see the time, even though his expensive wristwatch gleamed in the one sliver of light coming through the windows. ‘I think it’s time we got on. Now you’ve fed “cat”, can we go?’

  Lombard looked about for any other potential distractions, but unable to find one he asked, a little truculently, like a bored child, ‘Go where?’

  ‘The Commissariat, old friend.’ Llhermanault opened the door, beckoning Lombard to follow. It was a particularly unpalatable invitation. A man he disliked intensely was showing him an open door back into a world he’d rejected, and that had also rejected him. He knew he had every right to be cautious, but there was also his incessant curiosity that needed to be satisfied. It had always been a powerful force in him and for months it had fed on scraps: it was starving now and needed a feast. He turned the door sign to ‘FERMÉ’ and calmly pushed Llhermanault through the door, turning to lock it behind them.

  ‘Is this about that Englishman in Saint-Genèse?’ he asked blithely, his back to the other man, though he watched in the reflection of the door to see if there was any reaction. If Llhermanault was taken aback by Lombard’s knowledge he hid it well; there may have been a brief flicker of surprise behind the eyes, but nothing substantial. Nonetheless he looked away quickly, pretending to admire the façade of the grand Opera house just yards from Lombard’s front door.