Monsieur Pamplemousse on the Spot

by Michael Bond

  A shadow fell across the bumper as Monsieur Pamplemousse bent down to examine it more closely. It was accompanied by the sound of a woman’s voice, slightly out of breath.

  He turned and looked up, irritated by the interruption. ‘It was nothing. It was our good fortune that the sign happened to be there. Had it not been …’ Monsieur Pamplemousse left the sentence unfinished, partly because there was no need to labour the point, but mostly because he found himself face to face with, indeed almost touching, two very good reasons why at that moment in time the sun’s rays were blocked out. Rising and falling as their owner crouched beside him, they loomed into view like the distant peaks of le Dent d’Oche in the background far behind. A distinct feeling of déjà vu swept over him, and for a brief but disturbing second he was sorely tempted to reach up and attempt a renewal of his experience the night before by way of confirmation. But the moment passed. The sight of a group of girls standing a little way back watching his every movement made him think better of it. Instead, he rose to his feet and converted the movement into one of running his hand over his hair, much as he often did when he was caught about to commit some minor traffic misdemeanour.

  The woman coloured slightly as she read his thoughts. ‘Monsieur is too modest. We might all have been killed. How can I ever thank you?’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse hesitated. ‘Perhaps, Mademoiselle …’

  ‘Fräulein … Fräulein Brünnhilde. I am in charge of the physical well-being of the girls at the Institut.’ She gestured in the direction of the waiting group. ‘We were returning from a run. Normally the gates would have been closed. That is why it came as a surprise.’

  Following the direction of her hand, Monsieur Pamplemousse’s senses quickened yet again. There were perhaps a dozen or more girls and among them he spied the one he’d been looking for. She caught his eye and he thought he detected a faint glint of recognition, a momentary ray of hope. She looked tired and desperately unhappy.

  Strengthened in his resolve, he decided to take the plunge. ‘Perhaps, Fräulein Brünnhilde, if you really feel in my debt you would join me for dinner tonight? I am staying at Les Cinq Parfaits. It would give me great pleasure.’

  ‘I think that would not be possible. I am also the Matron. Evenings are difficult. Besides, I do not own a car.’

  It wasn’t a total brush-off. He decided to try again.

  ‘Déjeuner, then? We could have it by the pool?’ It would be an opportunity to sample the Baron de ‘L’ again. It would be interesting to see what effect it had on his guest.

  She hesitated. ‘That, too, would be difficult. Perhaps … a picnic?’

  ‘A picnic? Certainly. I will meet you here at twelve.’ It was all too easy. Normally he would never have plucked up the courage. He wondered how many opportunities in life were let slip through lack of courage and simple communication.

  ‘13.00 would be better.’ She gave a nervous giggle. ‘I shall need to play truant.’ The words were imbued with a soupçon of wickedness. He wondered whether it was intentional or simply lack of command of the language.

  ‘D’accord. Tomorrow then.’

  ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’

  As he waved goodbye, Monsieur Pamplemousse became aware of a restless stirring beside him. Pommes Frites was getting impatient.

  Pommes Frites was right, of course, as he so often was. Time was of the essence. There were important matters to investigate. Things needed looking into, or rather under. As Fräulein Brünnhilde and her party disappeared through the gates, Monsieur Pamplemousse got down on his hands and knees and peered under the car. A brief glance confirmed his suspicions.

  From a similar position on the other side of the body Pommes Frites gave what looked remarkably like a nod of agreement. He was not a particularly mechanically-minded dog; the intricacies of hydraulically operated braking-systems passed him by. In emergencies he much preferred his own tried and tested arrangement, that of digging two enormous front paws into whatever ground happened to be available at the time. Now the sight of an open pipe dangling beneath the chassis of the car only served to confirm him in his views. It also confirmed his feeling that someone was out to nobble his master, and if that were the case then he not only had a very good idea who was responsible, but when the deed had actually taken place.

  6

  POMMES FRITES MAKES A DISCOVERY

  Monsieur Pamplemousse seated himself in a chair of an open-air bar overlooking the port in Evian, unwrapped a piece of sugar, broke it in two, dropped the smaller of the two halves into a cup of café noir, then settled back in order to contemplate the world in general and his own immediate plans in particular.

  The world in general consisted at that moment in time of a row of gulls staring back at him from a position of safety on the harbour wall, a small flotilla of sailing boats halfway across the lake towards Lausanne, two couples at nearby tables, some old-age pensioners waiting patiently for the arrival of a little rubber-tyred train which ran to and fro along the promenade, a few lorries on their way to Switzerland, and a sprinkling of late holiday-makers taking the morning air.

  It was all very peaceful and ordered, reminding him that soon after his enforced early retirement from the Paris Sûreté, he’d once toyed with the idea of going there to live. All he’d wanted was to escape from it all. But Doucette, after one night of being kept awake by cowbells, had put her foot down and it had remained a pipe-dream. Doucette always woke at the first creak, or so she said, never the second. He’d consoled himself with the thought that for most people happiness lay in dreams of what might have been.

  His own immediate plans were another matter and to some extent dependent on what fate and Fräulein Brünnhilde had in store. Of the two, he felt that fate could prove more reliable and predictable. Fräulein Brünnhilde had a slightly worrying gleam in her eye.

  Alongside him stood two large plastic carrier-bags. One contained two bottles of Evian water, a bottle of red Mondeuse, and a long, heavy-duty cardboard postal tube. The other carrier-bag, with a second one inside it for safety’s sake, bulged with goodies culled that morning from the charcuteries, traiteurs and boulangeries of Evian. Saucisses de Morteau et de Montbéliard rubbed shoulders with pork and cabbage saucisses de chou, gâteau de foies blonds de volaille pressed against smoked mountain ham sliced from the bone and sachets of thicker ham stuffed with fresh pork meat – jambonnettes the like of which he hadn’t seen since he’d last visited Mère Montagne’s shop in Lamastre, on the other side of the Rhône valley.

  The central layer in the bag was made up of a large wedge of Reblochon and a generous helping of Morbier which he’d been unable to resist; two thin layers of cheese coated with charcoal on their opposing sides before being squeezed into a rich, cake-like ball out of which oozed a thin black line.

  A crisp baguette poked up through the middle of the bag like an over-fat flagpole, surrounded by other delicacies from the same boulangère; tarte aux myrtilles, galette de goumeau – brioche cakes topped with orange flower-water custard, and some freshly baked biscuits de Savoie, feather-light and covered with sliced almonds.

  Fresh butter, walnuts, a box of dragées – the sugar-coated Savoyard almonds – honey and a selection of confitures completed his purchases.

  He wondered whether he had forgotten anything. It would be a pity if it were a case of une économie de bouts de chandelle; what the English called spoiling the ship for a sou’s worth of goudron.

  Picnics always sounded a good idea, but looking at the carrier-bags he had to admit that not for the first time his eyes had proved bigger than his stomach; a state of affairs that could well be remedied in the not too distant future. On the other hand, Fräulein Brünnhilde looked as though she might prove to be a good trencherwoman. Such a generous figure must need a great deal of sustenance.

  He wondered what the incumbents of the Crénothérapie on the hill behind him would think if they could see his shopping list. Would it make them turn restlessly on their couches
behind the glass windows of the sun terraces as they lay back paying the penalty of overstraining their kidneys?

  A few sparrows possessed of a courage handed down over the years and honed by constant sorties on the table-tops of the café, hopped on to the top of the carrier-bag and clung within pecking distance of the baguette, eyeing it hungrily. They scattered as Pommes Frites lifted his head and gave them a warning stare, only to regroup and return to the attack a moment later. Refusing to be baited for the sake of a crumb, Pommes Frites treated them with the contempt they deserved.

  Fräulein Brünnhilde was something of an enigma. That she and the person he’d encountered in the wood on the first night were one and the same, he didn’t doubt for a moment. Unless the local waters were good for more than kidney trouble and arthritis, there couldn’t be another like her in the area; it would be a grossly unfair distribution of national wealth. But if they were one and the same, why had she been lurking there? And why had she turned tail and run? She didn’t look the sort of person who would retreat in the face of danger; rather the reverse. The person he’d met at the school would have been much more likely to have hit him over the head with her sac. And how had she got there? By her own admission she didn’t own a car.

  A boat from Lausanne – the Général Guisan – gave a warning blast on its foghorn as it swept through the narrow entrance to the harbour, leaving swans and ducks bobbing aggrievedly in its wake. Docking it immaculately, as he must have done thousands of times before, the captain looked out from his bridge across the rooftop of the booking hall, making sure everything was in its place. There was a loud clang as the gangplank dropped into place and a flurry of movement from the waiting passengers as they queued ready to board. A woman carrying a bag of shopping broke into a trot as the traffic lights changed and she hurried across the road to catch the boat. Seeing her from the bridge, the captain blew his foghorn again, anxious to be on his way.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered if he was doing the right thing. It could be a total waste of time; a dead end. He was simply playing a hunch that he would be hard put to justify if it came to the point. He could picture the kind of conversation he might have if the Director got to hear about it, especially if he ever caught a glimpse of Fräulein Brünnhilde. His own experience of the printing trade was fairly limited, but he had to admit that she was not the kind of vision he would have conjured up had he been called on to describe a typical representative.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse felt in an inside jacket pocket and took out an envelope containing the pasted-up version of the words he’d put together two nights before. The message was clear enough: IN-FORM POLICE MY LIFE IS IN DANGRE. DO NOT HURRY, AWAAIT NEXT MESSEGE OF YOUR LOVED ONE.

  It was a strange message; there was an inconsistency about it which he found bothering. If Jean-Claude had had a premonition that his own life might be in danger, why hadn’t he told someone, or simply written the message out himself? Why go to the trouble of making it anonymous by having fake pieces of newsprint made up? They had to be fake; no one could possibly have published them as they were. Then again, why ask for the police to be informed and in the next sentence say ‘Do not hurry’? It didn’t make sense. And if Jean-Claude hadn’t been alarmed on his own account, who could the message have been meant for? The girl? He’d seen her twice now with his own eyes, alive and well and unharmed. She looked worried, that was true, but if she and Jean-Claude were involved in some way then it was likely to be on his account rather than her own. And how did Fräulein Brünnhilde fit into it all?

  There was a movement from under the table and Pommes Frites’ head appeared. Monsieur Pamplemousse reached down and patted it. The top felt warm from the sun. Normally Pommes Frites would have been content to sit where he was for a while, basking in his master’s attention. Pommes Frites liked nothing better than a good stroke. Given the chance he could put up with being stroked for hours at a time, but for reasons best known to himself he shook his head free and as he stood up, applied the end of his nose to the piece of paper on top of the table. He rested it there for a while, the tip quivering as it absorbed such items of olfactory information as there were to be gained; forwarding them on to the appropriate department for analysis and comparison checks before making a final decision; weighing the results against the obvious needs of his master – the depth of the furrows in his brow, the look of preoccupation which always appeared when he had a problem.

  The information duly processed to his satisfaction, the print-out deposited in the tray marked ACTION, Pommes Frites turned and made his way slowly but purposefully in the direction of the exit. Pocketing the sheet of paper, Monsieur Pamplemousse picked up his carrier-bags and followed on behind. He knew better than to query his companion and aide-de-camp at such moments. If Pommes Frites had decided there were trails to be followed, then followed they must be.

  In the event, he hadn’t far to go; it was hardly worth picking up his belongings. Pommes Frites led the way down a short flight of steps on to the pavement below, wisely hurried past some more steps leading down further to a W.C. public, then stopped outside a tabac-journaux on the corner. Outside there was a rack of journaux neatly arranged according to nationality. Ignoring the ubiquitous Herald-Tribune, bypassing Allemagne and Italie, he settled on a section devoted to those from Grande-Bretagne. Rejecting both The Times and its pink counterpart devoted to financial matters, registering disapproval of both the Express and the Daily Mail, declining a fifth, testing a sixth and finding it wanting, he placed his paw very firmly on the one of his choice and gazed up at his master.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse patted his head, removed the journal from the rack, paid for it in the shop, then made his way back upstairs again and called for another café.

  He felt a growing excitement as he compared the type-face and the quality of the paper of his purchase with the original. It matched exactly. Running through the rest of the pages quickly it seemed to have the same kind of errors; sometimes it was simply a matter of words omitted or transposed, sometimes whole lines were missing. Once or twice there was an area of complete gibberish. Excitement gave way to confusion.

  Paying for his café when it arrived, he settled down and considered the matter through half-closed eyes. If the message he had in his hand had been taken from a genuine journal, then it put paid to his original theory that the words had been specially printed, which in a sense put him right back where he’d started from. On the other hand, if someone had gone to the trouble of buying an English newspaper, then the message was clearly meant to be read by English eyes. Elementary, my dear Watson, as Holmes would have said.

  His own Watson, having done his bit for the time being, had curled up and gone back to sleep in a nearby patch of sunshine.

  On the far side of the road, near the traffic lights, there was a squeal of protesting rubber followed by a loud blare from a car horn. A motorist was complaining at being cut-up by a taxi which had pulled in sharply behind another at a rank outside the port building. There was an exchange of gestures, then the lights changed and the aggrieved motorist was forced to give up the contest. The taxi driver, wholly indifferent, climbed out of his cab and joined his colleague on the pavement.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse sat up, cursing his stupidity. In pondering the problem of transportation to and from the Institut des Beaux Arbres he’d considered every possibility from bicyclettes to lifts thumbed in voitures and back again via tracteurs and bulldozers. The one method which hadn’t crossed his mind was that of hiring a taxi. He drained his cup. He must be getting old.

  This time it was his turn to lead the way down the steps. He took them two at a time.

  ‘Do I make many journeys to the Institut des Beaux Arbres?’ The first driver looked him straight in the eye. ‘I am afraid I do not understand the question, Monsieur.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse felt in his wallet, separating a fifty-franc note from some adjacent hundreds.

  ‘What is it you wish to know, Monsieur?’

>   ‘Do many people make use of your services? Visitors? Staff? Anything you can tell me?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Most of the staff have their own cars. So do the visitors. Occasionally we get a call from the gare if someone arrives by train.’

  ‘How about the girls?’

  The two men exchanged glances. ‘May we ask why you want to know?’ asked the second driver. ‘We do not wish to get anyone into trouble.’

  Nor would you wish to lose a lucrative business by the sound of it, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse. He decided to press his luck a bit further, hoping they wouldn’t ask him for his identification.

  ‘I suggest it will be better in the long run if you tell me the truth.’

  The first driver broke the silence. ‘Mostly it is girls playing truant. They want to be taken to the disco at Thonon. Sometimes even as far as Geneva. There is a rendezvous point not far from the school. They are young and anxious to enjoy life, you understand? Almost always they go in groups.’

  ‘I understand.’ Monsieur Pamplemousse opened his wallet again. Disappointment registered on both faces as he took out the photograph.

  ‘Do you recognise this face? Did she travel with friends or was she alone?’

  The two men scanned the photograph uneasily. ‘I want to help her. It is possible she may be in trouble.’

  ‘She made the journey often,’ said the second man. ‘She used to meet a friend here in Evian. They perhaps went for a walk along the front or had a café over the road where you had yours.’

  ‘Was the friend Jean-Claude from Les Cinq Parfaits?’

  The question went home and gave him match point. Jean-Claude and the girl had been meeting nearly every day, just for short periods in the afternoon when Jean-Claude could leave his work, after déjeuner had been served and before it was time to prepare the evening meal. Occasionally she went to the restaurant to eat, but mostly they met in the afternoons. Everyone knew. It was a very happy affair. Jean-Claude always brought her flowers. No, they had never taken Jean-Claude to the school. Anyway, he had his own car, so what would be the point? There were, of course, other drivers, and who knew? It was accompanied by a shrug as if to imply that some people would do anything for money. The information came pouring out. He almost asked for his fifty francs back.