Lake Isle

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘You saying this boy is a potential criminal?’ asked Richard with no enthusiasm. At that rate, his voice meant, you’d need a police force the size of the Russian army.

  ‘Not that daft,’ jogging Richard’s elbow as the usher appeared in the courtroom doorway.

  Castang looked at his watch, such a commonplace thing as not to be worth mentioning, except that if your watch-wrist is chained to a person asleep whom you don’t want to wake, it takes more trouble.

  It was the very stupidity of it all which made it interesting – the ability of someone like Sabine to get into a tangle. Who could be threatening Sabine? The boy? When such a thing was directly against his own interest?

  And even if the boy was annoying, driven by obscure psychological needs and torments, why had she so little common sense? She had only to say, more or less, ‘This is mine and stays mine, and now leave me alone with this clearly understood: after my death you can do as you please.’ Some agent had offered her a tempting buy, so that she would be hesitating between snapping it up or holding on in the belief that land prices would go higher yet.

  The tragedy, as far as there was one, was her inability to do one thing or the other. He shrugged. Artists…!

  It wasn’t ‘police work’, not as the public understood that phrase anyhow. Reassuring muddled old ladies didn’t sound like the criminal brigade. Not exactly the casual drawl telling the press that we’ve this minute put our unerring finger on ten kilos of heroin. Still, if a few more commissaires were like Richard the cops might do better.

  Few were. Much more numerous were the technicians, aseptic and sterilised, talking about the ‘underworld’ as though it were germs. Castang, though a youngish cop with a university degree, didn’t think much of his more pasteurised colleagues. He knew too that Richard was right in saying that there was small use in pontificating about crime. A cop was there to obey orders.

  Castang did though talk about the subject, sometimes, with a few of his colleagues, with Vera, with a few friends, one or two of whom were in the business too, like Colette Delavigne who was a juvenile court magistrate. They had to take the ‘underworld’ literally. No use discussing its deprived childhood: it was motivated by nothing but money. Brutish, sometimes vicious savages like this one chained to him, distorted by greed. Nibelungs, swarming out of black smoky fissures in the earth’s crust.

  You couldn’t talk about crime – said Vera, said Colette, said even he himself when not being too blunt and cop-like – without defining it, getting rid of the confusion, the never-drying stream of cant upon the subject. Look – he said – there is crime, which is a technical infringement of a formal code. It can be combated by technical means, a technician’s mentality. And there is evil, which is an abstract idea but real, and technicians, except the gifted ones (who are rare in the ill-paid and ill-considered ranks of the police) cannot cope with an ethical abstraction.

  There was even a doubled confusion. A lot of highly educated and intelligent people would say that the penal code, being based on Christian and Jewish ethics, was artificial nonsense, criminals being the faulty product of an imperfect society and evil being a superstition.

  Castang didn’t know a single cop who’d be starry-eyed enough to go for that one.

  He did know a few who went to the other extreme, equally barbarian, which was to claim that everything which was a breach of the code must automatically be evil. This, the guillotine-and-treadmill brigade, vociferous about indulgent judges, was as bad as the other but less, perhaps, to be blamed. They’d been mugged, quite often.

  Castang thought about it, a good deal, but didn’t let it get him down. He paraphrased Goethe, who said that if you saw things done, persistently in the wrong way, you must not complain, but continue, in the measure of your capacities, to do things the right way. Even if this maxim was of small comfort, like most other maxims, to cops. Goethe should have been in the police!

  Castang was pretty lucky in his superior. Richard could go on a lot about a disciplined body, but he gave responsibility to subordinates. This is a rare trait in bureaucrats, whose central weakness is not wanting to stick their neck out, for fear of official disapproval further up the hierarchy. Too many commissaires were just too frightened, whereas Richard would call you in and chuck a folder across the desk.

  ‘Seems a complicated affair, this. I haven’t looked at it; don’t propose to, either. Do as you think best.’ After getting your feet in your mouth a few times, you learned to do quite well.

  Richard would stay in his provincial corner too, probably, for a long time. Higher authority deplored this state of affairs, but preferred not to do anything about it. Cops still got promoted for twenty years of imbecile subservience and craven entrenchment behind the regulations, but Castang still liked his job. And Richard was an ally, in difficult situations where a peace-loving policeman might feel uneasily exposed; to some evil-minded magistrate, to tart editorials in the local paper, or to Paris, pointing out to the Prefect that the electoral district was wobbly and don’t let the cops just sit on their hands.

  Why had Richard allowed time to be spent on Sabine? Castang thought he would never know. Probably just eccentricity; caprice.

  The train slowed. He was home.

  SEVEN

  He shook his left wrist: his man woke, uncurled, went to rub his eye in a childish, pathetic fashion and remembered his right hand was cuffed. Castang forgot about Sabine. She had been a useful device for keeping his mind oilstoned over an hour or so, necessary because this sad burden he had been convoying had shot at him that morning. A few hours in a train had increased his apathy, but he was still a burden, now more than ever. He had to be carted over to the local stone jug, and signed for a good few times in a painstaking fashion, like a registered parcel that has come undone and may have been tampered with. Accepted, but without prejudice to possible future complaints. It means a lot of shilly-shally for the postman. The prison officer was owlishly suspicious of Johnny. Strings and seals had come apart on him before (Johnny had in fact made a clever and well-publicised break from provisional detention once before, away up in the Pas de Calais). Was this tatty package even really Johnny? Not by any chance some other individual with the same name as well as place-and-date of birth?

  There was a good deal more bumbledom about Johnny’s possessions, which were few; now this money he’s carrying: of suspect origin surely, and the judge will have something to say about that.

  Having – at last – got all his papers rubber-stamped Castang found it was past six, and hell, he wasn’t going back to any poxy office. Nothing but a sandwich for lunch, a thing that had happened too often recently. Back to wife, and uxorious fleshpots. Stolid, perhaps, for a man who had been shot at a few hours ago, but no, not really. A travelling salesman, a professional of the road and the car, will come, statistically, face to face with some cretin opposite him who is overtaking blind. Quick reactions and a nasty squeeze gets him past with no more than an accelerated heartbeat. A moment later he puffs his breath out, feeling his lips tight and his jaw muscles rigid, gets his shirt collar unstuck off his neck, and tells himself that that was a narrow squeak, for we tend to talk in clichés when disturbed. He goes on driving, since he has work to do. He will not, perhaps, tell his wife. What would be the use of her feeling frightened each time he was on the road?

  Since a car is a more dangerous weapon than a gun, and kills more people, including policemen, Castang saw no need to dramatise being shot at.

  As for Vera, who had not seen him since the night before, she was glad to have her travelling salesman back. He was having supper after a beer and a shower – all three unusually welcome – when the phone rang. Punishment for not having rung the office.

  ‘Castang,’ said Richard’s flat voice.

  ‘Yes, my lord. Just this moment in. Thought you’d gone home.’

  ‘Thoughtful of you. Paris has been on at me, being a bit officious, to tell me you were bringing that burglar down with you.�
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  ‘That’s right. Got him in the cellar now. I was going to tell you but I was just rinsing off the blood.’

  ‘He give you trouble?’

  ‘Full report for you in the morning. Petty cash account and everything. Let’s see; chewing gum, comic book, postage stamps, sticking plaster – ’

  ‘That will do,’ said Richard.

  ‘You want me to come in and type it all out now?’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just getting into my dinner jacket – there’s the banquet for the visiting team and then we’ve all got tickets for the Folies-Bergère after the big booze-up.’

  ‘Come in to see me tomorrow first thing. Pack your little bag, because you’ll be on the road.’

  Castang made a face. Vera, listening to the spare earpiece, made a worse one.

  ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Oh, nothing unduly strenuous,’ with a faint sarcastic emphasis. ‘A telex. Your old woman who writes poetry. I know nothing about it at all, except that she is in the past tense and the judge has decided upon an enquiry.’

  ‘Oh,’ went Castang; an ‘oh’ of surprise, slight shock, discouragement, and irritation, but not of boredom. He had liked Sabine, even if she were – had been – a most irritating person.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A housebreaker, I gather; vagabond of some sort. Open-and-shut affair, no doubt. The local people have had all of today to work on it and seem to be treating it as banal. The judge is being zealous, that’s all. You’ve met her, you know what she told you, and you’ve been on the ground, so you’re the obvious choice. I tell you now simply so that you’ll be ready to leave.’

  ‘Oh all right, all right.’

  ‘And Castang,’ said the quiet voice.

  ‘What is it now? Help! – my bandages are slipping.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Paris told me all the exciting news. All right then; take it easy, there’s a good boy. No need to get worked up, next week will do for the haircut. All right boy; good night.’

  He put the phone down and said, ‘I’d better go to bed,’ in a resigned voice.

  ‘What was all that about your bandages slipping?’ asked literal-minded Vera, suspiciously.

  ‘Stupid joke. Just a way of saying I was tired and fed up.’

  ‘I see,’ said Vera. What was the use of asking more and getting told lies? ‘I’ll pack a bag. How long for, d’you think?’

  ‘No idea. Make it three days. Maybe I can go fishing.’

  EIGHT

  ‘I’ve heard nothing more, so I still know nothing,’ said Richard, turning up the corners of a pile of forms to sign his name on them. ‘Routine demand for routine investigation, signed by the judge in Soulay. Makes a change from Paris – nasty dangerous place, that Paris. You can take young Lucciani.’

  ‘Haven’t you anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about technicians?’

  ‘The local people have done all that. What more do you want – sound effects man and a continuity girl? There’s nothing to it; I’m only sending you because of the coincidence. The judge doesn’t know, and I see no need to run and tell him, that this woman came here with tales of persecutions. No need to frighten him with false fire. See what it’s all about, that’s all. Your expenses will be okayed. The state got saved money by your bringing back that hooligan. A fine one, that. Don’t bother about him; he’ll keep. The judge is in no hurry for him, no hurry at all. Forty robberies! Whereas this bastard in Soulay is merely wanting to make a fuss. Sleepy hollow. If he were any good he wouldn’t be there.’

  With young Lucciani driving, Castang could ‘put his feet up’. Soulay was a sous-préfecture, and sub-prefects are small beer. A sub-prefect is a bland personage nicely dressed, like a hotel manager, with an agreeable smile for important guests, who does nothing much, and is really only there to terrorise pageboys. If there is a flood he is in charge; not that he will do much then, except send messages to the government asking to be declared a disaster-area. Noisy ones, to draw attention to his energy. And momentarily to increase his importance. A sub-prefecture is generally a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, where everybody knows everyone, and everything. Within this wooden O he is a strutting personage, and the local bigwigs compete for invitations to his bridge parties. Among these turkeycocks is the local judge of instruction, and between the career official and the career magistrate is a bond of sympathy: both would like to wipe the dust of Soulay off their feet. In order to bring this about they both dread and secretly hope for a scandal. To attract the attention of Paris is important, but to gain the good opinion of Paris may prove ticklish; hence the dread. It is an instance of the weakness of centralised bureaucracies.

  There was of course nothing even remotely political about the death of an ex-poetess. But Castang had needed no explanations to know that he was going to have trouble with this judge.

  Richard had been cunning. He made a point, as a rule, of taking charge of a homicide himself. He had dodged it, so that Castang would be caught between the judge and the local commissaire of the urban police. Dodged it, probably, because recently there had been a scandal in Soulay! In fact apart from the archaeological details supplied by Sabine, the scandal was all he knew about the place. A typically small-town scandal…

  Soulay was in fact a thriving little town, with plenty of light industry. But dull. To introduce some sparkle they’d been trying to attract tourists – especially since their fortifications, which they had never noticed, had been declared a monument. It was all very well to be dynamic about tourism, but there was a shortage of hotels. It happened that the mayor owned the biggest hotel. In the name of tourist infrastructure he had cornered municipal funds to get a car park built opposite his own establishment, and some local people thought this went a bit far. A complaint had been registered, and not with the sub-prefect, where the mayor was assiduous at bridge and mellifluous with the ladies, but with the Prefect – Up There in the City.

  So that local justice – dragging its feet ever so slightly – had been obliged to intervene. Charges, it appeared, would have to be preferred, and though it took time, for the mayor was strongly entrenched, charges were preferred. Traffic in influence: corruption of public functionaries: falsification of written records.

  The judge of instruction, and the prosecutor, had been lukewarm about all this. The latter was unworried, being a local notable from an old family, very happy where he was in possession of inherited wealth and a fine house. But the tergiversations of the judge vexed an authority in the city, who took a dim view anyway of ‘these little country combines’. The judge was asked tartly what was taking him so long.

  The ambitious hotel-keeper had finally been disbarred from further public office by a year in the jug, suspended. The judge had been anxious ever since to retrieve his position. Now that he had a homicide to give scope to his talents one could be sure that he would make himself insufferable to the police, his creatures.

  Castang knew all about this in the simplest way. The fraud specialists of the Police Judiciaire would have been called upon, normally, to investigate the mayor’s zeal for tourism, but had been called off by the judge, who had talked about excess of zeal, bulls in china-shops, sledgehammers and nuts, and suchlike metaphors. Richard hadn’t been pleased a bit.

  Castang sighed, being a sufficiently experienced policeman to know all about excess of zeal in country districts. He supposed that an obscure ex-poetess, the widow of a dusty functionary in the cultural-affairs sector, was not likely to be thought a ticklish problem.

  Approached from this side, Soulay was pleasant-looking, with bastions and salients and an impressive gateway. The streets of the old fortress, narrow and cobbled, led up to the citadel, where the trees in the moat made a pretty little park. On the far side, the walls had been knocked down in nineteenth-century exuberance, to build a faubourg leading to the railway station. The ‘new town’ with its industrial quarter and the flats of tho
se who worked there lay across the river and Castang had no desire to push tourism that far. The ‘Palace of Justice’ was a heavy building in a dreary square dating from Louis Philippe, that bourgeois monarch who had such bad taste in art. He left Lucciani and the car outside, and prepared to scrape his shoe back and make a very low bow. Lucciani, not being an officer, would only have to tug his forelock.

  The judge was politer than expected; even quite conciliatory, despite a bilious, irritable appearance: he was a middle-aged, concave personage with an unhealthy colour and little bunches of dust-coloured hair dotted around a high bald forehead, like thorny scrub on some African veldt. Not much shade. No lions. A hyena or two, idly playing with a rather old bone.

  He had been told by Richard on the phone that an experienced officer was being sent. If the fellow was properly house-broken there should be no problem. Time enough to grind at the peppermill.

  ‘In a certain light, yes, it’s a trivial matter. Of course no homicide can ever be trivial.’ Castang quite agreed. ‘It is evident enough what took place. A sordid case of breaking and entering. Nothing to do with the neighbourhood: that stands to reason. The village is a short distance away, but part of the – what’s their word?’ twirling his forefinger in a circle.

  ‘Agglomeration.’

  ‘Quite. Comes under the town. The local police force is competent. Limited perhaps in manpower. But to handle an enquiry of this nature is perfectly within their scope.’

  Castang seemed to be wondering, with respect, what they wanted him for.

  ‘Young thugs,’ said the judge rather loudly, ‘roaming the countryside. Hippies. All the technical findings point that way. We’ve had too much of it. This band will be well away by now. I want it found. The mobile brigade and the gendarmerie have been alerted. I want some energy shown. A suggestion has been made too which seems worth pursuing – those bands which pillage country houses for antiques. I want you to co-ordinate all this. And no little dodges. I exact a scrupulous rectitude of procedure. Discretion, you understand me, and no chatterboxing with the press. And you’re accountable to me. I expect your verbal report tomorrow morning and on subsequent days.’ He paused, to look Castang up and down, seeming surprised at what he saw.