by Michael Bond
‘As you probably know, the place is alive with video cameras. That being so, I substituted one of my own in the hope that I would be able to keep watch.
‘Like the rest of them, it is movement operated, but unlike the others it isn’t closed circuit. It can be switched on remotely when required, like so…’
Pointing to a small VDU above a console, Malfiltre pressed a button. A picture of Claudette’s bedroom came up on the screen. The camera must have been situated near the bathroom for it took in most of the wall opposite, along with the better part of the two beds.
Monsieur Pamplemousse couldn’t help feeling that Oscar would have given a lot for such facilities in the V for Voyeurisme section of his shop.
‘Anyway,’ continued Malfiltre, ‘I came back here to test it. It was lucky I did, because I nearly got copped!
‘I had hardly settled down when it came on of its own accord. Someone else must have arrived home. Even more fortunate was the fact that I had taken the precaution of putting everything back to normal. Apart from the camera itself there is nothing to show anyone has been in. Unless whoever it is has any reason to look, I doubt if they will spot it.’
‘Did you see who it was?’
Malfiltre shook his head. ‘Not yet. The point is, the range of the transmitter is fairly minimal. If you want to make use of it I may have parking problems. If it arouses interest in the wrong quarters I could be for it…’
He left the rest to the imagination. Monsieur Pamplemousse could picture what would happen if anyone from the local gendarmerie saw what was inside the van. Given current security problems, putting two and two together and making five would be inevitable.
Reaching for his mobile he dialled Jacques’ number. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Hold on a minute.’ He heard the sound of a door being shut.
‘Not good news.’ Monsieur Pamplemousse gave him a brief run down on the situation.
‘Leave it with me.’ Jacques paused. ‘By the way, while you are on, and totally nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about, but the analyst’s report on the oyster shell has just landed on my desk. Guess what?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse wasn’t in a guessing mood.
‘There isn’t a trace of cyanide. It is common or garden almond essence. Or rather, correction, common or garden is exactly what it isn’t. The boys in forensic have really gone to town – that’s why it took so long. It’s a brand called Sainte Lucie, which isn’t easy to come by. They drew a blank in Fauchon and Hediard, but struck gold in the Grande épicerie at Bon Marché in the 7th. Arôme Amande Amère it’s called. 1.68 euros for 20 millilitres, no less.’
Switching off his mobile, Monsieur Pamplemousse bent down and patted Pommes Frites. It was no wonder he had been turning up his nose at all the other brands he had been trying. To think that he could ever have doubted his abilities! Seeing the look of affection on his master’s face, Pommes Frites responded. His lick, warm, moist, and lingering said it all.
‘Before you go,’ said Malfiltre. ‘There’s something else you should know. I think Madame Chavignol is about to take off. You can’t see it in the picture, but on the right-hand bed, just out of picture, there is a large suitcase…’
‘When you say large…’
‘It’s no over-night bag, that’s for sure. One of Louis Vuitton’s biggest and best. It’s expandable and comes with built in straps on the outside. It must be a special order because it has combination locks. I didn’t have time to look inside because of them, but it weighs a ton.’
‘Just the one case?’
‘It’s the only one that’s out, but there are plenty more in a store-room leading off the bedroom. And leading off of that again – which I nearly missed – there’s a room full of recording equipment linked to all the cameras. It’s a regular little studio set-up; editing machines, digital print-out facilities for stills…’
‘But no pictures as such?’
‘None so far as I could see.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse asked for a print-out of the picture on the monitor, thanked Malfiltre for his help, and having promised to keep in touch, left him to it.
Quite why he chose to drive home the way he did – along the Rue de Grenelle, taking a right into the Avenue Bosquet and crossing the Seine via the Pont de l’Alma – he would never know. It wasn’t the most direct route by a long way, but he felt in need of thinking time and thinking time would have been in short supply had he taken a more direct route through the centre of Paris. Or so he reasoned at the time.
It had been much the same in the old days. If ever he had been stuck with what seemed like an insoluble problem he had taken himself for a walk round the block; even the simplest change of scene could throw up a fresh slant on things and help put them in a new perspective.
Although he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even to Jacques, the attempt on his life bothered him more than he admitted. He wondered if there had been someone above Chavignol; someone else protecting their interests, perhaps even in league with Claudette.
Finding out the pictures weren’t in the safe after all was little short of a disaster. He had been so sure that was where they would be. Too sure, as things had turned out. He toyed with the notion that Malfiltre, having seen what they contained, was holding out in the hope of cleaning up himself, then dismissed the idea. He had too much to lose to indulge in funny business like that.
If Claudette planned to leave town they would need to move fast. Stopping at some traffic lights he took a quick look at the print-out of the bedroom scene. There was something not quite right about it. For a start there was a silver framed picture on top of the unit between the two beds. It had caught his eye because he was almost sure it hadn’t been there before. But there was something else different about the room…
The lights changed to green and he pocketed the picture.
As for the business with the oyster shell; that was something else to think about.
In the event, the contrast between his peaceful strolls along the Seine and the present route could hardly have been greater, and yet, once again, it was almost as though it had been meant, for if he hadn’t taken it he would never have seen what he did see.
Coming off the bridge he found traffic in the vast Place de l’Alma had ground to a halt. It was the hour of affluence; cars and autobuses were nose to tail pointing in all directions. He had forgotten it was the third week in October when the Fashion Shows were in full swing. Barriers would be up in the Avenue Montaigne away to his right. Home to all the big names in the world of haute couture, it looked chock-a-block with traffic.
On the far side of the square, a police car came down the Avenue George V, its blue light flashing. Realising what was ahead of him, the driver did a quick U turn, turned on his siren, and hit the accelerator pedal. If they had been sent to sort out the traffic they’d clearly thought better of it.
Monsieur Pamplemousse looked in his rear view mirror. He had left it too late to do the same thing. The road behind him was jam-packed as far as the eye could see.
A Peugeot 207 ground to a halt alongside him and a little old lady got out. She began directing the traffic, leaving her husband at the wheel to cope as best he could with the situation.
Monsieur Pamplemousse reached for the Kyocera. It was a golden photographic opportunity; a classic Cartier-Bresson moment. It might even make the cover of Le Guide’s staff magazine. If it did it would be his second this year.
Undoing two clips above the windscreen, he pushed back the canvas roll-top, climbed onto his seat in order to secure a better vantage point, zoomed out to the Kyocera’s fullest extent, and seized the moment.
While he was at it he swivelled round in order to take a reverse angle shot of the scene and immediately froze.
He saw the car first. It was some three lanes away, but he could hardly fail to recognise the marque for it was twice as long as most of the other cars around. The radio was on, playing a current booming pop record,
and the windows were wide open, almost as though the owner wanted to announce his good fortune to the world at large.
Zooming in, he added the 2X digital zoom extension for good measure. Strictly speaking it wasn’t a zoom in the optical sense, but it effectively enlarged of the centre of the picture, which meant a loss of quality. All the same, even in the fading light, he managed to frame a decent close-up of the driver. He was hatless; hatless and bald. He also had a moustache. It had to be Pascal. Jumping the gun by the look of it, probably on the basis that possession was nine tenths of the law. Claudette was probably glad to get rid of such a car, but it would serve both of them right if someone else came along – a long forgotten relative – and contested the will.
Monsieur Pamplemousse toyed briefly with the idea of leaving Pommes Frites in charge of his own car for the moment, in the hope of having a quick word, but without warning, almost as though a cork had been pulled from a bottle, the traffic began to move.
As he slid back down into the driving seat, he heard the full-throated roar of a 630bhp Police-tuned engine rising above the noise of the other traffic and he was just in time to see the driver accelerating away as to the manner born. Seconds later the Vega’s tail-lights disappeared from view in the general flow of traffic.
Putting his own car into gear, he found himself wondering why, if Pascal was that mobile, he hadn’t been at the funeral. It was possible, of course, that he hadn’t been invited, but that seemed unlikely after such a long and close association. He would have to check on that. Maybe he had something to hide, or he didn’t want to be seen by Madame Chavignol? Or with her?
Perhaps the simple explanation was that he had been worried about arriving at the cemetery only to suffer the indignity of finding the doors on his new car wouldn’t open? Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not.
‘Well?’ said Doucette when he arrived back. ‘I hope you got what you wanted.’
‘During the time we were at the cemetery,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘I made half a euro, three English pennies and two American coins of some kind.
‘Pommes Frites did even better. He was given the remains of a hamburger and some popcorn. Oh, and we had our photograph taken by the American who left the coins. I don’t think he had ever seen a clochard using a mobile telephone before.’
He could have said a lot more, but he wasn’t sure where to start.
Chapter Nine
‘Merde!’ Monsieur Pamplemousse sat up in bed with a start. Groping for the light switch, he felt Doucette turn to face the other way.
‘Must you, Aristide?’ she groaned. ‘What time is it?’
Screwing up his eyes he peered at the digital clock until the green bits came into sharp focus. ‘03.23.25.’
‘But that’s nearly half-past three in the morning,’ said Doucette, after she’d had time to think it through.
‘It’s even worse now,’ grunted Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘It’s 03.24.07.’ He lay back on his pillow. ‘I was in the middle of a dream.’
‘Whatever it was about,’ said Doucette, turning round to face him, ‘you seemed to be doing a lot of dithering. First you were shouting “Oui, oui, oui,” the next moment it was “Non, non, non”. I thought you were going to fall out of bed at one point you were struggling so.’
‘I think you must have miscounted, Couscous,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse virtuously. ‘I am sure there were more “nons” than “ouis”.’
‘I know what I heard,’ said Doucette. ‘It sounded more like groans of pleasure. And,’ she added, ‘your pyjama jacket is half off.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse sat up again and began struggling to find a spare opening for his left arm. There seemed to be rather more options than he remembered there being when he went to bed.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘you will find it is half on. There is a big difference between the two, you know, Doucette. I have told you that before. It is like saying a bottle of wine is half empty when it would be equally true to say it is half full. The implications are very different.’
‘That,’ said Doucette, ‘depends on whether or not you feel guilty.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse was tempted to say she hadn’t been in his dream, but he decided discretion was the better part of valour. It was not the moment for scoring points.
Neither was it all that easy to explain, for it had been more than just a dream. In much the same way that he found a change of scene could be conducive towards solving a problem, so it was with sleep. Instead of letting his subconscious remain idle, metaphorically gathering dust as it were, he was a great believer in having that part of his mind do some of the donkeywork for him while he was in the arms of Morpheus. The brain was a wonderful piece of machinery. Feed it with a number of disparate thoughts and ideas in the few moments before dropping off and it was amazing what it could come up with by the morning. In the past some of his most successful cases had been solved that way. It was like taking advantage of cheap rates on the telephone.
On the other hand, such ploys did have their down side. While it was working away on its own, concentrating on sorting out random bytes of information under cover of darkness, the brain rarely had time for such niceties as the conversion of reveries into the equivalent of a three-dimensional Technicolor movie with stereoscopic sound.
Going to sleep hoping to dream about something, or indeed someone in particular, rarely bore fruit. In his experience that was especially so if the thoughts happened to be of an erotic nature. When that was the case, they often involved the most unlikely people. He’d once had a particularly vivid dream involving his sister-in-law and a large piece of tripe. He had never told Doucette, of course, and anyway it hardly came under the heading of being erotic; more of a nightmare brought on by a bad attack of indigestion following one of her meals. All the same, it had taught him never again to have a second helping out of politeness!
Occasionally, though, there were exceptions to the rule, and his fantasy involving Claudette Chavignol was a prime example. He would have been the first to admit she had been on his mind when he retired to bed that night. The picture of her boudoir on Malfiltre’s monitor was vividly etched on his mind, and inevitably his thoughts had turned to their earlier encounter. Recalling the moment, he could still hear the rustle of silk, the sound of tearing fabric, the feel of the thick pile carpet beneath his feet, followed by the warmth of her urgent flesh against his as they collapsed into a heap on the floor, weighed down more by circumstances outside his control in the shape of Pommes Frites than from any pangs of conscience.
Much as he loved his friend and mentor, there were times when he wished he wasn’t quite so quick off the mark. There was no doubting that he meant well, but his enthusiasm occasionally got the better of him. In retrospect, leaving a couple of beats before putting in an appearance that afternoon wouldn’t have come amiss.
As he allowed himself to be embraced once more by the god of sleep, Monsieur Pamplemousse was filled with remorse. Pommes Frites was the best, the most loyal of companions. Had he not reacted with speed and accuracy outside their apartment only a day and a half ago, dreams of any kind might have been forfeited for ever.
In the beginning, apart from the running order being in reverse, his fantasy had more or less manifested itself in a repeat performance of the real thing. The main difference was that he had been in Claudette’s boudoir to start with – for some reason wearing a pair of pyjamas that had seen better days – and it was she who had entered the room, clad only in the briefest of diaphanous black silk negligées.
He had been caught red-handed trying to open her suitcase with a nail file. And it was that, more than anything else, that caused the rot to set in. From then on it had been downhill all the way; or uphill, depending on where you happened to be standing.
There had been a quality of inevitability about the whole thing. To be sure there had been the same familiar moments – another case of “something old, something new”; the same rustle of silk as Claudette sli
pped out of her garment, the very same luxurious feel of the carpet beneath his feet. Only the sound was different; a shivering glissade from the harps as her negligée fell to the floor, followed by heavenly music welling up from the full orchestra as she ran towards him, arms outstretched: André Kostelanetz’s interpretation of “Moon Love” rather than the Blue Danube sprang to mind.
It was when she realised what he was up to that she suddenly changed character.
Steam didn’t exactly issue from her nostrils, nor did she paw the ground, like a bull about to give chase having scented blood. But her nipples, never slow in coming forward during moments of stress, as he remembered only too well, seemed to grow into battering rams before his very eyes, reminding him irresistibly of Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
Not only had he nearly ruptured himself when he went to lift the case off the bed, but as he tried to run off with it, his feet had turned to lead.
By then she was on him. Biting, scratching, clawing; her tongue probing, searching for pastures new; her pelvic thrusts reminiscent of a pneumatic drill going full blast.
In retrospect, with only a small nail file to protect himself, that must have been the moment when Doucette heard his ouis turn to nons, for it was really quite painful and he had begun to fear for his life as she forced him backwards onto the bed.
That was something else he couldn’t possibly explain to Doucette. She would immediately want to know how it was that he had dreamt of Claudette’s bedroom if he had never been in it before. Women had a tendency to get diverted by such minor details and in so doing lose sight of the whole point of a story.
All he remembered as came up for air was having a brief glimpse in close-up of the picture in its silver frame; and there, in his dream, he had struck gold. The first time he’d seen it had been on the dressing table in Chavignol’s apartment at the studio.
It was then, just at the moment critique, when both music and emotions were reaching a crescendo, that the door burst open and Pommes Frites rushed in, tongue hanging out and all systems at go. It was very much like the arrival of the cavalry in an old-time Western movie, but without the benefit of their bugles.