Lake Isle

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘Help,’ said Sabine with simplicity.

  ‘But your local commissaire…’

  ‘He’s a man without imagination. I don’t mean to imply that he isn’t competent; I’ve no doubt he is. But stolid. I have no tangible ground for complaint, so in his eyes there is no way of registering it.’

  ‘So you came here, thinking that we…?’

  ‘I think nothing, except that petty officials may be of mediocre quality.’

  ‘I’m not trying to sound discouraging. The Police Judiciaire works in a specialised, fairly complex manner. Generally at the orders of a judge of instruction. In all logic I ought to send you back to your commissaire, but I see that would be useless.’

  ‘I had thought the police existed also to protect people.’

  So it did. He wanted to laugh. It was unanswerable.

  ‘We’ll do what we can. We may be able to help you. We have to be free to decide whether we are competent.’ He was caught in two minds. However obvious that here was a sensitive and intelligent woman it was still terribly like those clouded tales that the neighbours are sneaking in at night, to pour weedkiller on the dahlias.

  Her clear direct look faded and blurred.

  ‘No doubt I’ve made another mistake, and you too will tell me that these are the fantasies of a silly old woman.’

  He picked up his pen invitingly and waited for her. Sabine pulled herself together, settled her glasses on her nose in a nervous gesture which he would get to know, and said, ‘The facts are as follows.’

  She rambled. There were gaps in her memory, she sometimes said things twice, she would jump into a new set of circumstances thinking him familiar with the personages. But he couldn’t see much wrong with her mind. No self-pity, no self-indulgence. A conscious, careful wish to be objective. Sadness, but unembittered. The phrase with which she finished her tale was ‘Where have I gone wrong?’

  ‘There’s no way I could answer that,’ said Castang. ‘I’ve got it all down. Can I think about it?’

  ‘Have I wasted your time?’

  ‘No. But I don’t know what I can do. I’ll have to talk to my chief. You’ll have an answer, though, and I promise to make it myself.’

  ‘I think you’ve been very patient,’ she said getting up. No umbrella, no handbag even. A light raincoat, and a scarf to tie round the short, coarse grey hair. ‘And polite…why are officials in or out of uniform such mediocre persons?’

  He shrugged; he hadn’t that answer either.

  ‘Here’s my card. If anything becomes critical, reaching a crisis, then ring me. Meanwhile I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Crises occur daily. If things weren’t critical I would never have come. I think I have been patient. This thing has grown like cancer, imperceptibly. But I love him, you see… If I ask for help – it is for him.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the whole difficulty. It’s not a police problem, and I don’t know who else it concerns.’

  ‘I realise. Thank you, Monsieur.’

  ‘Au revoir, Madame.’ They stood there bowing at each other.

  FOUR

  That evening Castang reread his notes before going to see Richard.

  ‘What have you got to regale me with?’ asked the commissaire in a slightly sick voice, like a rich man asked what colour Rolls-Royce he prefers.

  ‘That old girl you sent me. There are a lot of half-facts. I’ll leave those out, shall I?’

  ‘Are there any facts at all?’

  ‘There’s a surprising amount of money. More than she realises. If there were a dispute about the inheritance there could be grounds for a threat – but the threat itself is a half-fact.’

  ‘Go ahead and fill it in.’

  ‘The lady is the widow of a man who ran the museum. Soulay; it’s a cultural-affairs sort of place – there isn’t much else. He was a respected local citizen. Placid existence, Legion of Honour after a worthy lifetime of preserving bits of monuments. From his father he inherited a large suburban house. It’s been converted into flats, and brings the widow a rent. That’s the first fact. The man retired a few years ago, and a twelvemonth or so back succumbed to infirmities. Leaving her this house, which might be worth a good deal nowadays. Hard to tell from what she says. She’s shrewd enough, but has no idea of money. Rare, that.’

  ‘Avoid comment.’

  ‘Second fact: the widow is the daughter of a grain-dealer, who gambled, grew rich, grew poor again, ended with a country house, where she has always lived, and still does.

  ‘Third, this couple was childless, and in middle age adopted an orphan of unknown parentage from the Assistance Publique. A boy of then around ten. An impulse buy, as the supermarkets call it. This child gets introduced into a cultured sensitive atmosphere, comfortable if not wealthy circumstances, and has everything lavished upon him – medical, psychological, educational; you name it. School, university, the boy grows up. He’s said to be highly intelligent and sensitive, but won’t work. Eventually, a bit of mild local string-pulling found him a pretty junior job in the local administration and there he has stayed.

  ‘Fourth, he marries, the offspring of some shopkeeper in Paris, quite bourgeois. Two children of his own. This, it was hoped, would stabilise him. It has and it hasn’t. It’s a smallish living. The mother helps them all she can. She says it’s not much. I’d call it a good deal. They have a rent-free cottage next door, which is part of the property. It’s nothing much perhaps, but it’s free.’

  ‘It all sounds a bower of roses to me and where’s the snag? I haven’t yet understood the considerable sum of money, either.’

  ‘It’s the sort of thing nobody foresaw, a few years ago. This house is old, two or three hundred years. Bought by the grain-dealer in his days of affluence. It’s not big, but has a large walled garden. It has been modernised, central heating and so on, but unchanged. The cultural affairs people have classified it: historic building in local regional style. To her it’s just where she has always lived, and of course she’s attached to it, and wants to end her life there. But it’s worth, suddenly, a lot. Building land is scarce around there too, and dear, and there’s this huge garden. Another large sum.’

  ‘But mutually exclusive. You couldn’t knock down a classified house for speculative building.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to. One can build a wall. The proof is that an estate agent is after her. Polite and suave, but pressing. She turned it down; not interested. Now she wonders whether it was a mistake, and whether it is too late to change her mind.’

  ‘Didn’t this museum man realise all this?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s ironic. Have you been in Soulay?’

  ‘Once or twice. Castles and ramparts.’

  ‘Right; seventeenth century she tells me – fortified by Vauban. This man made it his life’s work to preserve it, and he won. Nobody has the right to build above a certain height inside, and no horrible great blocks outside the walls. It never occurred to the man that land prices would go rocketing in neighbouring villages. Look, she’s a poet, he was an archaeologist. The house was pretty, pleasant: high wall and big garden. They’d always had it, and thought nothing of it. Furthermore it’s stuffed with antiques. Old furniture bought in the days when you had it for a song. The fellow scoured the countryside. Medieval fountain being used as chickens’ drinking trough. Sculpture, I don’t know what. The place is a goldmine,’ shouted Castang, excited. Richard never got excited.

  ‘All right, I admit the considerable sum. And the inheritance is being disputed, is it? As I gathered, she claims she’s being put in fear. More half-facts, no doubt.’

  ‘The young man – he’s nearly thirty – grows increasingly domineering and even bullying. She attributes this to the daughter-in-law – they don’t get on, of course. Now, she says, there’s a whole campaign being mounted to drive her out, by making her life a misery with little stratagems. Now she has found out what the place is worth, and is wondering.’

  ‘How many relations are there?’<
br />
  ‘Look, I went into it, carefully. There are no other relations. This boy was legally adopted. It’s incontestable. He is the sole heir.’

  ‘Then all he has to do is wait. She’s an old woman.’

  ‘She’s not that old, and says she’s in perfect health. Certainly seems tough and spry enough. Now suppose she decided to sell. Her relations with the boy have grown worse. According to her, and this is all no more than her account, he goes about grumbling, accusing her of plots to diddle him out of the inheritance because she regrets the adoption.’

  ‘Once one starts to imagine…’

  ‘I gave her that for half an hour. It’s what everyone tells her – she comes here to find someone who’ll give these fears some weight.’

  ‘They all do,’ said Richard dryly. ‘She’s acquiring ammunition. If the boy is tiresome she can say “Now look, stop bullying me, because I’ve been to the PJ”.’

  ‘I don’t think she came here with that sort of motive.’

  ‘She may have convinced you, but have you convinced me?’

  ‘I think,’ said Castang slowly, ‘that a good sign that there might be something in it is that she refuses to believe it. She sees no knavery in the boy. Turbulent and difficult, yes. Deadly suspicious, yes. She finds that natural. He was already ten when they took him: all the traumas were already built in. She is afraid that no amount of affection and stability and unselfish devotion could ever quite obliterate the terrors, and embitterment. She’s had a lot of fancy psychological opinion to work on it. She’s pretty objective about this. She maintains that he is basically a good and kind person with real affection for herself. To her the villain of the piece is the wife, in whom she can see little good. She feels superseded in his affections; yes, all that’s textbook stuff. But she realises this, knows it, compensates for it.’

  ‘What form do the persecutions take?’

  ‘Petty meanness. Wheedling things out of her, and aggression. The boy walks about saying the place is his, helps himself to stuff he fancies, strips her in various ways. Rows and reproaches – she gets shouted at, accused of cheating and robbing him; even of conspiracies; her friends are accused likewise of being in league. Crude abuse and coarse language.’

  Richard’s face said clearly that this was all very sad, and no business for the police. Castang wondered why he should be making the effort. But he had liked Sabine, found her a gentle, humble person. The least he could do was his best.

  ‘She feels driven to seek help because, she says, she can no longer make headway against the persecution, which has become serious. He creeps about – she says – spies on her, listens to conversations and phone calls, reads her letters, rummages in her affairs. Finally there was a threat of violence. He has hit her a couple of times, but this was a threat with a gun. I suggested that it was bluff, immature brandishing. She agreed soberly that she hadn’t believed it either. A good boy, but suggestible, and the wife is a pernicious thing – blah, blah.’ This was coat-trailing. Richard stepped on it.

  ‘What blah, blah? What did he do with the gun?’

  ‘Oh, he threatened to put a charge of shot into something valuable. Point was that it isn’t his, something even that he has no conceivable claim upon. It had been in her keeping and she wanted to restore it to the owner. He got in a towering rage: she was a dupe and so on, claimed she would always league herself with anyone to do him out of his rights. It shocked her a lot. The vandalism shocked her too.’

  ‘And you take a grave view of this drama?’ Richard’s turn to trail his coat.

  ‘Drama, yes. I told her that was all it was. This young man sounds like a simulator. Still, that goes side by side with the real thing sometimes. She says she’s afraid of real violence now. He may be capable of it.’

  ‘What do you think you can do?’

  ‘One might drop a word to the cops there – suggest they straighten the boy out a bit. He’s only got to stay his own side of the fence. It might pull him up. He sounds that immature psychopath type: the imperative wish which must be satisfied, and suspicions of all being leagued against one.’

  He could not have made a sillier suggestion, really. Making diagnoses of somebody on hearsay could have been calculated to rub Richard the wrong way.

  ‘Cock,’ said the Commissaire unanswerably. He lunged suddenly across the desk for his internal telephone.

  ‘Robert, whereabouts was it they found that car abandoned?… Good, thanks,’ and lapsed into meditation as though there were nobody there. Castang was used to this. He picked up a roneoed sheet, originating as it appeared from some obscure authority in the Ministry of the Interior; concerned at some length with misuses and abuses of telecommunications systems. These had been distributed all over the office, and gone at once into everybody’s waste-paper basket. Richard, unaccountably, hadn’t slung his yet, which seemed a good excuse for reading it.

  ‘I’ve a job for you,’ said Richard abruptly. ‘That car may have something to do with a man who left home, and hasn’t been seen. I’ve no details: the dossier, or what there is of it, is in Longueville. There’s a story of a girlfriend here, but the thing needs stitching together. The gendarmerie has been muttering about bloodstains, alleged, in this car; query human pending a lab report. You can trot over there tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t take all morning you could drop over as far as Soulay, and check on this good lady of yours. Just see if it’s all pure myth. No time to waste; I’ll want you back here directly after lunch: we’ve both got to be in court for Zamansky.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Castang politely.

  FIVE

  Longueville was half of what its name said: long, but far from being a town. Even as a village it was an abortion; a main road that straggled on interminably, with always one more café, another filling station, another block of grimy-looking houses. He found the gendarmerie barracks, looked at the sequestered car, read a procès-verbal, heard a rambling tale of a man who said he had been fishing. He had borrowed the car, that is to say Jo lent him the car. No, Jo hadn’t been with him: no, he hadn’t seen Jo. This blood; well, he’d cut his thumb. Cleaning fish. No, of course not gutting fish in the car but he hadn’t a handkerchief, see, and in the car was a rag used for wiping spilt petrol stains… It all sounded as fishy as the thumb, and for all anybody knew it might be true, since Jo was nowhere to be found.

  Castang made the two obvious suggestions; to take a blood test of this man, to see if the stain corresponded; and to look in the river in case this other man were in it. He had plenty of time to drive the fifty kilometres further, to Soulay. Or not exactly Soulay, but the little place outside it where Sabine Lipschitz lived. He wasn’t bothered about lunch: he bought a bottle of milk and Vera had made him a steak sandwich.

  Saint Martin-du-Val, which was really in a valley, in pretty countryside sloping down to the river crossing which had been strategic once, was a much nicer village than Longueville, with a pleasant tiny square and an ancient lime tree in front of an unpretentious little whitewashed church. The hands of the church clock said ten to three, and had done so, probably, for a generation. At the far side of the square was a little café with two tables in front of it, called ‘Aux Bons Amis’. To be avoided: the Good Friends would be tremendous gossips and, at this stage, listening to village tattle would be of no use.

  In fact he had no trouble finding Sabine’s house, which was instantly recognisable from her description. A high stone wall along the whole of one side of the square, with a rusty iron grille at one corner. Within could be seen a lot of overgrown trees and bits of high-pitched slate roof, with mansard attic windows, needing paint. At the other corner there was a wooden door in the wall, and that would be the cottage. Nothing wrong with the geography.

  He parked and went like a good cop on a bit of a tour around. It was true – wedged into every bit of waste ground were new-looking bungalows and little villas. They were certainly doing well out of land her
eabouts. Ten minutes’ walk brought him back round to Sabine’s corner and a road sign saying ‘Soulay 3 km.’ He found a bell over his head, a tingle-tangle on a rusty iron chain. There was a long pause, but then a suspicious voice said, ‘Who is it, please?’ He looked up startled: her face was peering short-sightedly over the wall from a vantage point. He held his face up to be recognised, with a sunny ‘Bonjour Madame’, like a man selling insurance. She took a moment to recognise him before the face cleared.

  A key grated in the lock of the grille, which was backed with sheet metal: Sabine believed in privacy. A path wound across grass-grown gravel and grassy earth, between piles of rubbish. Crates of empty bottles stood outside a dilapidated shed; heaps of brushwood; last year’s decaying leaves vaguely raked into a pile and left there; a tree-trunk rotted through the middle, lying cushioned on discoloured sawdust, waiting to be turned into firewood. All that could be seen of the garden was jungle, trees thickly swathed in ivy. The pathway led to the kitchen door at the end, and along the front, which was a row of French windows: the centre one stood open to the morning sunlight. Sabine led the way, wearing her navy-blue trousers, an old darned sweater and a kitchen apron.

  The sunlight penetrated no further than a little lobby with oak panelling. A worn polished oak stairway climbed up in a spiral. The floor was fleur-de-lys red tiles and a Persian rug with its pattern effaced. The smell of a very old country house came rich and delicious to his nose: ancient earth and wood, dust and wax polish, faded flowers and dry leafmould. She directed him to follow through a further door, beyond which it was pitch dark.

  ‘Sorry. I’ll open the shutters.’

  Creaks, groans, rusty screams from keys, bolts, hooks and the unoiled hinges of the tall old wooden shutters. Old women living alone always barricaded themselves. The light flooded in upon his eyes.

  It was a mixture of living-room and dining-room. A big oblong table of massive wood one could scarcely see for the piles of paper and junk. A space at the far end was cleared and laid with a Chardin picture: a linen cloth, the end of a loaf, a coffee-bowl, a painted faience dish of fruit and an unopened morning paper. Beyond, next to the door leading to the kitchen, stood a beautiful great dresser-cupboard of patined oak with brass bindings, plainly very old and of considerable value.