by Mark Hebden
To his surprise they were. Within ten minutes the motion of the boat had eased and, opening his eyes warily, he found they were in a small landlocked harbour with white houses round it.
‘Is the house we’ve taken here?’ he asked. ‘No. I took one called the Villa des Roses near the harbour of Biz. It’s a small town just to the north. The travel agent here recommended it. He thought we’d prefer to be away from everybody else. This place’s the Vieux Port.’
Pel nodded. It made sense, he had to admit.
He had no idea what sort of orgies people indulged in on their honeymoons but he had a feeling that, as far as he was concerned, it might well be better to be away from everybody else; and they had decided on a house instead of a hotel because, they had felt, neither of them being in the first flush of youth, that setting up house on holiday might give them time to grow used to each other. Especially, Pel thought, early in the morning when he was inclined to regard the world through dark-brown tinted spectacles.
The boat was swinging into the bay now. At one side the place had been modernised and there was a great deal of concrete, with jetties, tall posts bearing lights, and a concrete harbour-master’s office. Beyond was an expanse as big as the Parc des Princes covered with gaudy, plastic-seated chairs in neat rows. Because of the weather the chairs were all unoccupied but half the population of the town seemed to be standing on the terrasses of the little bars that surrounded them, backs against the wall out of the wind to watch the ferry arrive, all in shirts, blue trousers and a sort of rope-soled canvas-topped shoe.
As the ferry turned to head for the jetty, it was passed by another boat, a huge glittering launch moving at full speed for the shelter of the harbour. The wash it created set the ferry rolling and Pel’s stomach curvetting like an unbroken foal.
‘The Vicomte’s,’ a man alongside him said. ‘They always come in like that.’
He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into Pel’s face, reminding him of the incredible fact that, due to his nausea, he hadn’t smoked since they had left the mainland. The way he was feeling now, he was sure, a cigarette would restore not only his health but his peace of mind. Giving his new wife a shifty glance and seeing she was looking in the other direction, he sneaked one out with the urgency of a man in the desert deprived of water and, sucking the smoke down to his socks, had the pleasure of blowing it into the face of the man alongside him next time he turned to sound off about the island.
The big launch was mooring up alongside one of the concrete jetties now and immediately a lorry carrying petrol drew up, as if ordered by radio, a pipe was run aboard, and a man started up a pump.
‘Always fuels up the minute he comes in,’ Pel’s informant went on. ‘It’s the only bowser on the island and it’s private. The rest of us have to fill our cars from cans. It’s so he can take off again for anywhere he fancies at a moment’s notice. What a way to live! Consorting with the mighty. All those Greek shipping tycoons, all those jet set Americans from Monte Carlo. I wouldn’t mind a life like that.’ He glanced at Pel. ‘You feeling better, my friend? You looked rough back there.’
Pel scowled, not liking to be reminded what a rotten sailor he was.
‘André’s the name,’ the man said, offering his hand. ‘Luigi André. I live here. I run the restaurant at Le Havre du Sud. Luigi’s. I’m Luigi. It’s the best restaurant on the island. You on holiday?’
‘That’s the general idea,’ Pel admitted.
‘Come and see me. I’ll remember you. Never forget a face. I’ll give you the best meal you ever ate.’
The very thought of food made Pel feel ill and he wished Luigi André would go away.
But he didn’t. He was gesturing at the big launch. ‘Too many of that type round here,’ he said. ‘In summer they come in hordes. People with money, most of it dishonestly earned.’
Pel’s instincts were aroused, even through his nausea. ‘Did the Vicomte earn his money dishonestly?’
André shrugged. ‘He inherited it. Which is just as bad.’
‘Was he responsible–’ Pel’s hand gestured at the new concrete of the square and the harbour ‘–for all this?’
André shrugged. ‘That was a consortium. Financiers. They get into everything. They’ve got into our island and they’re behind all the building and speculating that goes on here. A type who lives at the other side of the island runs it. Nobody wanted it but nobody else has the money to oppose him, so he got away with it. New harbour when we didn’t want one, new development at Muriel, the big hotel here. Holiday homes, people building and buying old houses to convert. Mind you, they’ve taken a knock in the last year. Somebody’s been going round setting fire to them. Especially lately.’
‘Oh? Why?’
‘Nationalism. Our brand of nationalism, I suppose you’d call it. Youngsters on the island can’t compete with people from Marseilles and Nice and the result is that prices go up beyond what they can pay and somebody’s decided it might be a good idea to frighten them off.’
The afternoon was already finished and the dusk was approaching. The heavily wooded hills lifting behind the harbour looked dark and ominous and the whole town, thriftily avoiding switching on its lights too soon in the manner of many Mediterranean communities where for some strange reason a 40-watt bulb was often considered sufficient to light a ballroom, looked gloomy, depressing and ominous.
‘It looks,’ Pel observed with a profound and rooted pessimism, ‘as though things go on here that don’t bear talking about.’
He didn’t know the half of it.
Two
The ferry had dropped an anchor and was now swinging round it to put its flat rear end against the quay. Ropes were flung and the vessel tilted as everyone crowded to one side, anxious to be shot of it.
‘A taxi meets us,’ Madame announced. ‘It takes us direct to Biz and the Villa des Roses. We don’t have to worry about a thing. Everything’s laid on. They leave a hamper of food and wine for us for the first night, and tomorrow we do our own shopping. We’ve never shopped together before.’
Despite the obvious eagerness of everybody to be clear of the wretched, diesel-smelling little ferry, they had to wait a good half hour until the sacks and cartons, the crate of chickens, the goat, the old Diane and all the rest of the cargo were removed from the deck to allow them ashore, then, assisted by brown, knotted hands, they tight-roped across a narrow plank to the quay. As he stepped on to the ancient stones, Pel breathed a sigh of relief.
A policeman was standing on the jetty near a row of coloured boats drawn up on the slip. He looked overweight and shabby and André snorted.
‘Cops,’ he said.
‘Don’t you like cops?’ Pel asked.
‘Look at him. Would you? I know police. Whenever they’re in Le Havre du Sud, they drop into my restaurant, expecting a drink or something to eat. A coffee at the very least. They have the energy of a sloth and the sparkle of a pile of sand. It’s no wonder we remain in the backwaters of the last century.’
‘Do you remain in the backwaters of the last century?’
‘One man runs this island.’
‘The Vicomte?’
Luigi slapped Pel on the back. It was like being hit by a swinging girder and made him almost swallow his cigarette. ‘You are learning, Monsieur,’ he said.
Sure enough, there was a taxi to meet them. But it was so old, Pel was convinced it had seen service in the Franco-Prussian War. At the very least, it was one of the Taxis of the Marne.
It was rusty, minus a front wing – complete with headlamp – and the lid of the boot was held down with string. There was no bumper on the back and the tyres were worn as smooth as a child’s balloon. The driver, who took their luggage, seemed nervous and fumbled the suitcases, dropping one to Madame’s alarm – because she’d bought it new for her honeymoon. He didn’t seem to have his eyes on what he was doing, in fact, and kept staring towards a group of men standing with their backs to a nearby bar out of the wind. Abov
e their heads someone had used an aerosol can to paint a slogan. Save food. Eat tourists. It seemed to reflect the weather, the expressionless stares of the watching men, and the hostile attitude of the islanders to the people who cluttered up their towns and villages every summer.
‘You’ll soon be there,’ the driver said. ‘The agents are waiting for you. You’ll like it. On a promontory. Beautiful view of the sea on both sides. Own beach. Everything you need. If you need transport, just ask for me. Paolo Caceolari. I’m from Nice originally. Lived on the Promenade des Anglais.’
Pel didn’t believe him for a minute. ‘Can’t we hire a car?’ he asked.
‘Very difficult,’ Caceolari said. ‘They have to bring them over specially from the mainland. Ask the agents. I think they brought one over today. It’s better to ask for me. My charges are very low. You can put them down as expenses. You’ll know how. You’ll be a businessman, I expect. We get a lot of those.’
‘My husband,’ Madame said proudly, ‘is a policeman. A very good one, too. He’s Chief Inspector Pel. You may have heard of him.’
‘Pel?’ Caceolari wrinkled his brows. ‘I’ve heard that name. That case of those murdered cops.’
‘One of my husband’s cases.’ To Pel’s surprise, Madame really did sound proud.
Caceolari looked pleased to make their acquaintance. ‘I read it,’ he said. ‘It was in all the papers. Good cops are what we could do with here.’
‘Oh?’ Pel’s professional interest was again roused and his intelligence clicked into gear. ‘Why?’
Caceolari pushed them into the rear of the car. The seat had collapsed and was so low they had to crane their necks to see out. ‘Things happen,’ he said.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well – just things. I–’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
Pel’s curiosity was caught. He had listened to so many people answering questions and making confessions, he instinctively knew Caceolari would have liked to tell him something.
But Caceolari was clearly nervous and kept his head down. Scrambling into his seat, he tried the starter and when it didn’t work, automatically – as if they’d expected it wouldn’t work – the half dozen men leaning on the wall gave the car a shove. Caceolari gave them a worried look but when the car was rolling along, he put it into gear and the engine started.
‘Ecco!’ he said. ‘Voilà! She goes.’
The drive from the Vieux Port to Biz and the Villa des Roses was by way of roughly-made roads full of hairpin turns, precipitous hills and narow corners, on more than one of which they had to wait for the passage of some late-moving cartload of farm produce, while Caceolari, the taxi-man, put his head through the window and yelled abuse which was as much ignored by the drivers as by the mules pulling the carts.
By the time they reached the Villa des Roses it was raining and dark. Caceolari stopped alongside a dry-stone wall in the shade of a group of olive trees overlooking the sea. There was another car there, a large gleaming Peugeot. Climbing out, Pel stared about him.
‘Where’s the house?’ he asked.
‘Down there.’
Caceolari pointed down a steep slope of scree and stone and in the darkness Pel could just see a roof and a few lights.
‘Can’t you drive down there?’
‘Not possible. Too steep.’ Caceolari paused. ‘It’s a pity you can’t–’
‘Can’t what?’
‘Well, nothing gets done and – well–’ Caceolari shrugged. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing.’
Pel was intrigued. The taxi driver was clearly eager to involve him in something, but again he changed his mind and stuffing suitcases under his arms, began to head down the slope. Standing in the open doorway of the villa, which looked attractive with its lights, gay orange-coloured covers and a bowl of flowers, were a man and a woman. They looked colourful, handsome and well-fed and they wore the shirts and trousers and the rope-soled, canvas-topped shoes everybody on the island seemed to wear.
‘Pierre and Josephine Dupont,’ the man said, smiling. ‘Agents for the owner. Our office is by the harbour in the Vieux Port. Welcome to St Yves.’
As Caceolari brought in the rest of the baggage, the house seemed roomy and warm-looking. It was built round two sides of a small courtyard, the other two sides occupied by raised rockeries covered with flowers, shrubs and small cactus-like plants. The Duponts explained how things worked, how they had to be sparing with water when taking a bath, and how they shouldn’t be alarmed if the electricity went off.
‘After all,’ Dupont said, ‘this is a small island and we have neither the equipment nor the expertise of the mainland. It soon comes on again.’
They took their leave with surprising speed and the new Monsieur and Madame Pel were left on their own. Madame held out her arms and for a moment or two they clutched each other, pleased at last to be alone. Then Madame pushed away her husband, business-like and efficient.
‘I expect you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘We’d better find the hamper and make a meal.’
But the ‘hamper’ consisted of a tin of meat, some very fatty ham, a loaf, six tomatoes, a lettuce and a bottle of very indifferent white wine which Pel, a Burgundian to the core, was disgusted to notice came from somewhere he’d never heard of.
‘Tomorrow,’ he promised darkly, ‘I shall want to see Monsieur Dupont.’
However, with the bottle of wine and some food inside them they felt better and Pel began to wonder what the fishing was like. After a while Madame suggested she could do with a bath and bed. But the bedrooms, which were in the other wing of the house, could not be reached, they discovered, except along the verandah – something which could present problems if it rained hard. Moreover the bed appeared to be damp.
‘I suppose–’ Madame was trying hard to make the best of things ‘–that, being early in the year, nothing’s aired yet.’ She managed a smile. ‘We’ll have to keep each other warm.’
The bath turned out to be a shower, set for some reason waist high in the wall so that you had to kneel on the floor, and the water pressure was so indifferent it seemed easier to fill a large bowl and stand in it.
‘This,’ Madame Pel said, ‘is not my idea of a good villa.’
In that Pel was certainly in agreement but, since Madame had done the booking, he was anxious to please and be encouraging. ‘How were you to know?’ he said. ‘It’ll seem much better in daylight.’
It was almost midnight now and the rain was easing off, but Pel was smoking as if his life depended on it. Despite the terror of cancer, asthma and all the other diseases attendant on a weak will, he had never been able to drop the habit. He had managed to cut it down – ‘A million a day,’ he claimed, ‘to five hundred thousand’ – but at the moment he seemed to be attempting to make up for lost time because they had found other faults with the Villa des Roses. The promontory on which it was built, which gave them the boasted views in two directions, also enabled them to catch every breath of wind that came and at the moment it was blowing half a gale. And, Pel decided, someone hadn’t done their homework properly on the drawing board because the house had been built too near the edge of the sea and the hillside seemed to have slipped a little so that there was a huge crack in one wall, and brand-new concrete buttresses which suggested that the owner, terrified of the place dropping on to the rocks below, had done a last-minute shoring-up job. Finally there didn’t seem to be a rose bush within sight.
By this time, he was in a bad temper and only Madame’s sunny disposition, which seemed to be untouched despite the disappointments, stopped him finding a heavy blunt instrument and setting off there and then in search of the Duponts. Indeed, it was only as Madame went to sort out the bathing facilities, that he discovered that none of the doors and windows, which had stood invitingly open when they had arrived, would shut. They were not only warped with the subsidence or the winter damp but they also possessed broken locks. Sourly, he found a heavy stone wit
h which to hold the salon door closed and a piece of string with which to secure the bedroom windows. This, he decided, was something they must never learn at the Hôtel de Police back home. While the occupants of that establishment respected Pel’s skill as a detective and were wary of the cutting edge of his temper, the disasters of his private life were often subject to a great deal of merriment. Having seen Madame, they had grudgingly admitted that there must be more to him than met the eye but a story like this would destroy the image as surely as if he had lost his trousers while climbing into the wedding car.
When Madame reappeared, wearing slippers and a housecoat, Pel saw her to the bedroom and explained the workings of the attachments he had found, then left her attending to her hair and face, while he headed for the bathroom. He banged his elbow on the door, slipped on the soapy floor and cracked his knee on the shower, and as the night grew cooler, ended up half-frozen and shivering. Normally as warm-blooded as a frog, even a hint of chill in the air was enough to leave him petrified, so, because he liked to believe he took exercise, he did a few gentle callisthenics to warm himself up. Since he was also afraid that too much vigorous exercise might give him a heart attack, they were so mild as to be virtually non-existent and consisted chiefly of half a dozen knee-bends, a few moments of wild flapping of his arms and a lot of violent puffing. As he brushed his hair, he studied himself in the mirror. Not bad for a man of his age, he decided. On the other hand, he had to admit, decidedly not very good either. Doggedly brushing his teeth, he headed for the bedroom. The trip across the courtyard was enough to chill him to the marrow.
The door was ajar and Madame was sitting up in bed, holding a book. As nervous as a lion-tamer going solo for the first time, Pel gave her a smile which was intended to be tender but came out like a death’s head grin. She put down her book and smiled back at him with surprising confidence. Pel removed his dressing gown and slippers with deliberation. He was desperately proud of his new wife, and, indeed, proud of himself that he’d managed to acquire such an attractive partner. Sitting up in bed, Madame didn’t seem much bigger than a child saying her catechism, small-framed and, now that she’d taken off her spectacles, large-eyed in the feeble light. Perhaps it would be all right after all, he thought. She was a touch short-sighted and, without her glasses, he probably managed to look like Superman.