Monsieur Pamplemousse Investigates

by Michael Bond

  ‘Ah, Pamplemousse.’ Outside in the corridor the first person he bumped into was the Director. He had his right arm in a sling and he looked in a bad mood. There was a second finger in plaster.

  ‘Pamplemousse, that oiseau is as ill-tempered as its mistress. They say pets grow to be like their owners. I fear it may never yield up its secrets. It hasn’t uttered a single word since I last saw you. Its lips are sealed.’

  ‘Its lips, Monsieur, but clearly not its beak.’ Monsieur Pamplemousse glanced down at Pommes Frites. He must study his own face more carefully next time he was in front of a mirror to see if there were any changes. There could be worse fates.

  The Director looked at him suspiciously. ‘I have just been to see Sister. She has inoculated me against psittacosis. One never knows where its beak may have been.’

  ‘A wise precaution, Monsieur. I understand the disease is highly contagious. One cannot be too careful.’

  ‘Perhaps you would care to have a go, Aristide. You are more skilled in the art of third degree than I.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse hastily declined the offer.

  ‘Pommes Frites and I are off to the Père-Lachaise cemetery, Monsieur.’

  The Director turned momentarily pale. ‘Not bad news, I trust? Nothing to do with …’

  ‘It is hard to say, Monsieur. I will let you know if anything develops.’

  As they left the office Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to take a chance and catch the autobus to Père-Lachaise. The 69 normally had an open platform at the rear and because it started near by in the Champ-de-Mars it was rarely full.

  His ploy worked. It wasn’t the first time. Appreciating what his master required of him, Pommes Frites waited in a convenient doorway near a stop in the Rue Saint-Dominique until the autobus drew up alongside. There were no more than half a dozen passengers, all of them facing the front. As Monsieur Pamplemousse climbed aboard and flashed his pass, momentarily distracting the driver away from his rear-view mirrors, Pommes Frites slipped quickly over the rail at the back and lay down out of sight. With the weather as it was, the autobus would need to get very crowded before anyone else was hardy enough to join him. But just in case, Monsieur Pamplemousse stationed himself on one of the rear seats with his legs stuck out across the door and his hand at the ready so that he could give the appropriate signal to abandon ship if need be.

  He wanted time to think and somehow he always found the autobus more profitable in that respect than the Métro. It was somehow more soothing; there were fewer distractions. On the Métro people tended to watch you thinking for want of something better to do.

  There was an element about the sabotaging of Le Guide which was bothering him. It had been nibbling away at the back of his mind all day.

  So far he had been assuming – and he had no doubt that others, including the Director, had made the same assumption – that the version which was now committed to the computer’s memory was a revised version of the forthcoming publication. He’d assumed it for the very simple reason that there had been so many other things on his mind he hadn’t even bothered to sit down and think it through.

  But if that wasn’t the case – if it was based on last year’s guide, for example – did that make any difference? It would mean it could have been prepared over a long period, rather than in the brief time between finalisation and the launch party. It would then have been a comparatively simple task either to substitute a bogus disque the night before – presumably only a matter of moments – or to transfer it electronically. He had no idea how long that would take.

  In the Rue de la Roquette they had an encounter with a parked lorry. The road was narrow at that point and they were unable to pass. A short argument ensued which ended as it had begun with the driver of the camion refusing to move until he had finished unloading.

  The driver of the autobus picked up his telephone and spoke briefly. A minute or so later there was the familiar sound of a police siren.

  The lorry driver climbed into his cab and drove off. Doubtless he, too, felt himself a victim of the computer age.

  They arrived at the main entrance to Père-Lachaise without further incident. Glancing up at the gathering rain-clouds, Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to remain where he was while the autobus skirted round the outside wall of the cemetery, climbing the steep hill towards the entrance on the far side. It would save making a similar climb on foot once he was inside the gates. Taking advantage of the general exodus towards the middle as they approached the terminus in the Place Gambetta, Pommes Frites made his own disembarkation arrangements and was already waiting on the pavement by the time the doors opened. From the way he behaved as he caught sight of his master he could have been sitting there for hours.

  As they approached the entrance to the cemetery Monsieur Pamplemousse saw a woman attendant in a blue uniform peering out from her hut. She eyed Pommes Frites suspiciously as they drew near. Monsieur Pamplemousse sighed. It was yet another hazard to be overcome. For a country which allowed dogs into restaurants up and down the land and which supported a thriving industry catering to their many needs and demands, there were a remarkable number of no-go areas. He pretended not to have noticed the CHIENS INTERDITS sign.

  Treading the fine line between what some might take as a compliment and others might misconstrue, Monsieur Pamplemousse raised his hat.

  ‘M’moiselle.’ He’d guessed right. The woman softened immediately.

  Looking round as though to make sure no one could overhear, he leaned forward conspiratorially. As he did so he encountered a strange smell; a mixture of stale body odour and damp uniform in the ratio of two to one. It was not a pleasant experience. Reaching inside his jacket pocket with one hand, he motioned towards Pommes Frites with the other.

  ‘Permettez-moi, M’moiselle? He was a great fan of the late Edith Piaf.’

  ‘I see no chien, Monsieur.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse withdrew a note from his wallet. ‘In that case may I invest in a map.’

  The woman’s hands closed around the note, held his own for rather longer than was strictly necessary – long enough for Monsieur Pamplemousse to realise that in his haste he had mistaken a hundred franc note for a twenty – then slipped it inside the top of her jacket. Without taking her eyes off him, she reached towards a shelf just behind the door of her hut. As she did so he noticed another sign: POURBOIRES INTERDIT.

  Thanking her for the map, Monsieur Pamplemousse considered the situation. Patently, the transaction was considered to be at an end; negotiations as to price were not about to be entered into. For the briefest of moments he wondered whether to make up for the lack of change in some other way. He decided against it. It wouldn’t do to press his luck too far. She didn’t look the type of woman who gave receipts, and picture postcards were conspicuous by their absence.

  ‘Vous êtes très gentille, M’moiselle.’ The compliment went the way of the note.

  ‘Monsieur will find the grave of Edith Piaf near the Monuments aux Résistants et Déportés at the far end.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse felt the woman’s eyes boring into the back of his neck as he set off at right angles to the way he had intended going. Pommes Frites was already bounding along on a parallel course to his own, picking his way sure-footedly in and out of the gravestones, pausing every so often to make sure his master was still in sight, or to leave his mark.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered idly if his friend might encounter the giant cat said to haunt the place, albeit in search of young maidens. It was the kind of day for it: dark and gloomy. If they did meet up there would be hell to pay. Hair and fur would fly.

  As soon as he could, he turned right and set off up the hill, past the memorial to Oscar Wilde, to where Pommes Frites stood waiting for him. Avoiding the vast bulk of the Columbarium, he took a short cut. Simone Signoret lay undisturbed but not forgotten to his right. Further still there was the usual small group gathered in silent worship around the memorial to the faith-healer Kardec.
Eyes tightly closed, a middle-aged woman clung to the stone as though she was part of it. She looked as though she had been there for hours. He could have done with a bit of such blind faith himself.

  Having reached the highest point, he made his way down to the little chapel and paused in the gardens for a moment in order to compare his own torn-out piece of map with the one he had just bought. As he had thought, the marked area came from the older part of the cemetery, hardly changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the architect Brongniard had landscaped it, leaving the lime and chestnut trees from the original Jesuit gardens, but constructing a network of cobbled lanes and winding gravelled paths leading out from where he was standing. Abélard and Héloïse were buried somewhere near the bottom of the hill, along with Chopin, Cherubini and countless others whose gravestones marked the passage of history, and where Balzac used to wander ‘to cheer himself up’.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse looked around as he rotated the map in order to get his bearings. Not many people were braving the weather that afternoon. The few hardy ones were mostly hidden beneath umbrellas, for it had started to rain again. He wished now he had brought one himself. If he’d thought, he could have borrowed one from the office.

  There was a continuous roar from the wind in the trees and he found it hard to hold the map out straight. A sprinkling of dedicated tourists peered at their guidebooks in the dim light as they picked their way resolutely along sodden gravelled side-paths trying to reach their objectives before the gates closed. He caught an occasional glimpse of some lone person – almost always a woman – paying her respects to a loved one. You would need to miss someone very badly to be there on such a day. It wouldn’t be long before the usual quota of exhibitionists, fetishists, grave-robbers, necrophiliacs, perverts, voyeurs and other bizarre inhabitants of the potter’s fields put in an appearance.

  He set off in a south-westerly direction along the Avenue de la Chapelle, then turned left, following a path which took him past the tombs of La Fontaine and Molière. As far as the eye could see there were thousands and thousands of tiny stone properties, many of which looked as though they had long since been abandoned, their iron gates either rusted away or hanging drunkenly by a single hinge. In parts it was more like a repository for ancient telephone kiosks and pissoirs rather than a cemetery. A sodden-looking black cat appeared from behind a gravestone, then beat a hasty retreat when it saw Pommes Frites.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse found what he was looking for in an area occupied by some of the more illustrious Marshals of France. It somehow fitted in with the Director’s preferred image. He saw the names of Ney and Masséna and Lefebvre.

  The discovery wasn’t a total surprise; in a way he had half expected it. All the same, it still gave him a strange feeling to see the name Leclerc engraved in the stone above the Director’s family motto: Ab ovo usque ad mala. He supposed it meant from the egg to the apples – from beginning to end, after the Roman habit of starting a meal with eggs and ending it with apples. Given the Director’s present occupation it was an apposite choice. Interestingly, the name was spelt in its simplest form, without the letter ‘q’ at the end. It bore out Loudier’s theory that the Director himself had added it at some point in time.

  The vault was better kept than most of those around it. On one side the inscription CONCESSION A PERPETUITE was followed by a number and a date – 1780 – but it had clearly been well maintained; the stonework was clean and the ironwork was freshly painted. Monsieur Pamplemousse climbed up a small flight of steps and peered through a glass-backed ornamental door grill. There was a vase of fresh flowers standing on a plinth at the back, and the floor looked as though it had been recently swept. Otherwise the inside was bare. Around the walls there were names engraved. The Director’s grandfather had died not so long ago at the age of ninety-one – he remembered hearing about it at the time. Two uncles had died in the war. The Director’s father must be still alive, the date of birth – 1892 – had been entered, but the space which had been left to record the date of his death was blank.

  While his master was at the top of the steps, Pommes Frites busied himself at the bottom. There were a number of interesting, not to say unusual scents to be found on the ground around the tomb. Many of them were quite recent. Not for nothing had he won the Pierre Armand trophy as the best sniffer dog of the year during his time with the Paris Sûreté. Had Pommes Frites, like his human counterparts on other courses of a not dissimilar nature, kept a notebook, then he would have made entries under a variety of headings. Earth scents, which covered crushed worms and other insects, not to mention cracked and bruised vegetation. Individual scents, with subdivisions relating to Human Scent, Sex (m. or f.); and Regional Scents, covering each and every part of the body. The third category, Additional Scents, embraced types of footwear and their composition – whether they were made from leather or rubber – shoe cream, occupational scents and the kind of clothing worn.

  Making full use of the long ears and hanging lips with which nature had endowed him, Pommes Frites concentrated first of all on trapping body scents, feeding them into a system which was a million times more powerful than that of any human. He registered the fact that someone whose odour he didn’t immediately recognise had been very busy. Earth scents didn’t yield a great deal, largely on account of the nature of the terrain. Additional Scents was the most rewarding; there were several he couldn’t immediately identify – but all, animal, vegetable and mineral, were duly separated and filed away in his memory for later use should the need arise.

  The task completed, his mental ‘in-tray’ empty once again, Pommes Frites marked the spot in time-honoured fashion and stood waiting patiently on the path, wondering what would happen next and why his master was looking so puzzled.

  The simple fact was that Monsieur Pamplemousse looked puzzled because nothing he had seen so far offered up any clue as to why the piece had been torn out of the map. Perhaps it was simply, as he’d first thought, a reminder as to the exact position of the Director’s family tomb. But if that was the case what was it doing in Madame Grante’s apartment? It wasn’t until he turned to make his way down the steps again that he saw what could be the answer: just to the right of the doorway the Director’s name had been chiselled into the stone. It was followed by the beginnings of a date – the day and the month, but not the year. Perhaps whoever was responsible had been caught in the act. It was the same date as had appeared in the journal several days previously announcing the Director’s death.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse took a closer look. The work had obviously been carried out by a portable cutter of some kind; the marks were those of a saw rather than a chisel. It wasn’t nearly so professional-looking as it had seemed at first sight. Nicks where the blade had overrun were crudely etched in – probably by a felt-tipped pen.

  He stood up and considered the matter. If it was a joke, then it was in very poor taste. And if it wasn’t a joke? In his heart of hearts he knew that whoever was responsible wasn’t joking. It fitted in with all that had gone on before. The piranha fish, the announcement in the paper, the sabotaging of Le Guide, the kidnapping of Madame Grante; no one would go to that much trouble unless they were in deadly earnest. And if they were that serious then there was no time to be lost.

  Faced with the distinct possibility that if he didn’t act quickly he might have more than one corpse on his hands before the week was out, Monsieur Pamplemousse reached for his notepad and pen. It was clutching at straws, but he had to grab hold of something. Anything was better than nothing. The chances were that anyone so totally obsessed with detail would want to come back and finish the job. It needed something to arouse his opponent’s interest without giving anything away. He made two attempts, screwing both up in disgust before he finally struck the right note: MEET ME ON THE TERRACE OF AUX DEUX MAGOTS. 10.00 TOMORROW. CARRY A COPY OF LE GUIDE.

  If he read his adversary correctly he wasn’t someone who would risk leaving such an invitation
unanswered. The alternative was to hang around in the rain in the hope that someone might eventually turn up. It wasn’t an attractive prospect.

  The suggestion that whoever read the message should carry a copy of Le Guide was a master-stroke. It added a certain bizarre, yet at the same time logical note to the proceedings – in keeping with the way the other’s mind must be working.

  Mindful of Le Guide’s circulation figures and the possibility of confronting some innocent tourist, he added a postscript, OPEN AT PAGE 221!. He plucked the figure out of the air, much as he might have picked a raffle ticket. It wasn’t until some time later that he realised why he had chosen it.

  Carefully making sure the first few words of his message were visible, Monsieur Pamplemousse slipped the note into the plastic cover of his season ticket in order to protect it from the rain and placed it under a stone at the bottom of the door. It would be out of sight to any casual passers-by, but clearly visible to anyone interested enough to take a closer look.

  Lost in thought, Monsieur Pamplemousse set off towards the Avenue Circulaire along a route which would take them back to where they had started. Pommes Frites followed on behind wearing his enigmatic ‘mine is not to reason why’ look. Left to his own devices he would have gone in quite the opposite direction, but he was too well trained to protest. His moment would come. Every dog had its day. No doubt his views would be sought when the time was ripe. He only hoped it wouldn’t be too late.

  Anyway, there were soon other problems to contend with. As they reached the Mur des Fédérés in the south-east corner of the cemetery, scene of the Paris Commune’s final bloody stand when the last 147 insurgents were cornered and shot, it started to rain in earnest. There weren’t even any empty tombs to provide shelter; it was a part where flat grave stones predominated. He tried sheltering beneath a couple of spindly coniferous trees, but they were worse than useless. It was like standing under a colander. Any admirers of the late Edith Piaf had long since disappeared.