by Michael Bond
Given that it sounded as though the request had been left until the last minute, Caterina wouldn’t necessarily be aware of it, so she wouldn’t have briefed her stand-in accordingly. Which would explain why the poor girl had panicked.
Whichever way you viewed the affair it seemed an unsatisfactory situation.
‘It all comes back to Caterina,’ he said. ‘We won’t know the answer until she puts in an appearance. And knowing her, that will be in her own good time.
‘She has her sights firmly fixed on carving out a career for herself in the world of fashion, come what may. It is her goal in life and there is no getting away from it. The last thing she wants is to end up as what is known these days as a “potiche”: a beautiful and subservient wife dedicated to serving the selfish whims of a tyrannical husband.’
‘She’ll learn,’ said Doucette. ‘I shall tell her it isn’t as bad as all that when I eventually do get to meet her.’
‘Touché,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. He knew when he was beaten. ‘Aren’t we lucky to have struck a happy medium.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Doucette dryly.
‘Let me help with the washing up,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse hastily.
‘It’s all in the dishwasher,’ said Doucette. ‘I loaded the last of the plates while you were talking.’
‘Well, at least allow me to turn it on,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
He bent down and peered at the controls.
‘It helps if you make sure the door is properly closed,’ said Doucette.
‘They’ve thought of everything,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
Doucette joined him. ‘Good old “they”,’ she said. ‘What would we do without them?’
At which point, by mutual agreement, the subject was put on hold for the remainder of the day and only referred to briefly later that evening.
‘What time did the girl get here last night?’ asked Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘Soon after seven,’ said Doucette. ‘We chatted for a while and I showed her round the apartment. I asked her if she would like a bath after her journey. She said no, but went on to say she hadn’t eaten for a while. That was when we got down to the cooking. I think she was impressed with all the food I’ve got in and it broke the ice. There’s nothing quite like working together in a kitchen to let your hair down.’
‘So what did you learn?’
‘Not a lot,’ admitted Doucette. ‘She was much more interested hearing about you and your work.’
‘How about baggage?’
‘She said she had checked most of it in at the Gare de Lyon. She had all she needed for the time being in the shoulder bag she was carrying, which in turn was her cue for saying she felt like an early night, which at the time seemed a remarkably good idea.
‘Now, having caught up on her sleep, the reverse is probably true and she is catching up on lost time, which means she can come back whenever she chooses. We don’t have to wait up.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse considered the matter. It still went against the grain, but at least Pommes Frites, deprived of his usual sleeping space in the spare room, would be on guard to protect them. So bed it was.
‘He’s being very good about it,’ said Doucette.
‘He doesn’t really have much choice,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Besides, for some reason his mind seems elsewhere.’
He would have given a lot to know exactly where it was, but knowing Pommes Frites of old he would have to wait. As with Caterina, all would be revealed in the fullness of time. He’d more than once tried to find out what it was, but to no avail. His only hope was that if it was anything at all serious it wouldn’t be too late.
‘You needn’t worry any more about the spare keys,’ said Doucette, the next morning, when Monsieur Pamplemousse joined her for breakfast. ‘Whoever the girl was, she didn’t take them with her. She left them on the dressing table. Obviously she didn’t intend coming back.’
‘She might have told us,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse crossly. ‘You’re sure they’re the right ones?’
‘Positive,’ said Doucette.
‘May I see them for a moment?’
Doucette handed them over for Monsieur Pamplemousse to examine them minutely, but as far as he could see they were as clean as a whistle with no sign of any wax.
‘You can’t be too careful,’ he said.
‘I used them this morning when I went out early and bought some croissants for a change,’ said Doucette.
‘Ah!’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. At least things were looking up in one respect.
‘I bought you some biscuits while I was at it,’ said Doucette. ‘That’s another thing. You’ve never told me you liked them, Aristide.’
‘Finding out new things about one another over the years is one of the joys of marriage, Couscous,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Life might be very boring otherwise.’
‘I shall make sure you are never without a full tin from now on,’ said Doucette. ‘If there are any left. I tried one out on Pommes Frites and it went down a treat. I shall make sure you never have to ask again.
‘Who could it have possibly been?’ she continued. ‘I lay awake worrying about it for ages last night. What with that and Pommes Frites pacing up and down, I didn’t get more than a couple of hours’ sleep, and you weren’t much help, Aristide. Lying there like a log. You’re sure it wasn’t Caterina? At that age people can change almost overnight, girls especially. A touch of make-up can work wonders.’
‘Absolument!’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. He reached for Doucette’s photograph. ‘It is in the eyes. This girl has brown eyes, Caterina’s are the bluest of blue. A liquid blue.’
‘It strikes me you ought to telephone Monsieur Leclercq and tell him what has happened,’ said Doucette.
Monsieur Pamplemousse’s heart sank. She was right, of course, but it was too early in the day to face yet another variation of Oscar Wilde’s oft-quoted lines. Monsieur Leclercq would have a field day at his expense. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘I suggest we finish our breakfast first,’ he said.
‘If nobody at all turns up what are we going to do with all this food?’ said Doucette.
‘Eat it, I suppose,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse gloomily. ‘We could ask a few friends in and throw an all-Italian party. Perhaps your acquaintance at Bon Marché will have a few ideas. He didn’t seem short of them. What was his name … Giovanni? You could ask him along too.’
He hastily changed the subject.
‘I wonder why?’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Why the girl was here at all. She must have had a good reason; both for coming in the first place and then for leaving so abruptly. Did she say anything about not being met?’
‘Not specifically. But I said how much you had enjoyed her company on the train when she paid her first visit to Paris.’
And afterwards, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse, when he had turned up at the eleventh hour and saved Caterina and a whole coachload of her friends from public disgrace and a possible prison sentence. The event had been hushed up at the time, and never referred to again as far as he knew. He hoped the girl would pass Doucette’s reaction on to the real Caterina.
‘I don’t know quite why, but I assumed she must have rung the Director first and he gave her our address …’ said Doucette. ‘I suppose she must have forgotten it.’
So far, so true, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse. The Director’s reaction would have been par for the course. As far as he knew Monsieur Leclercq and Caterina had never actually met each other so, like a boxer, he would have been thinking on his feet.
In which case, it was definitely himself the girl hadn’t wanted to meet. Presumably because that would have given the game away. No wonder she had looked bothered when Doucette took her picture.
And if that were the case, what was the name of the game?
‘Talking of parties,’ said Doucette. ‘Your old friend Jacques phon
ed while you were out yesterday morning. He said perhaps you could ring him back when you had a moment.
‘I asked him if it was anything important, and he said not really. It was simply a matter of life and death.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a sigh as he reached for the phone and dialled a number. One of these days Jacques’ sense of humour was going to be the death of him.
He didn’t have long to wait.
‘That little skirmish on the canal St Martin towpath you mentioned the last time we spoke …’
It wasn’t so little, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse. But carry on. All these things are relative, especially given the location.
‘Sorry I took such a long time over it,’ said Jacques, ‘but it happened a week or so before the date you gave me. Anyway, whoever it was used a spring-loaded staple gun. The kind upholsterers use for laying extra-thick carpet. It’s relatively silent compared with a gun. You can creep up behind people and catch them unawares. Which must have been precisely what happened, according to the medical report. It doesn’t sound like the Mafia. They like to do it up front.’
‘You think it was plain robbery that went wrong?’
‘Robbery with intent to kill,’ said Jacques. ‘That would be my guess, and that was the conclusion of the report. His wallet was missing. Probably the day’s takings or maybe the week’s. In which case he could have been loaded.
‘Strange thing … the victim was wearing a topcoat and you won’t believe this but in one of the pockets there was a large steak. Or what looked like a steak. When they took a closer look it was made of plastic. It sounds like he’d been working a scam of some kind.’
‘I believe you,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Just one thing … spare me the gory details, but how do you know the weapon was a stapler?’
‘The body had an obituary notice attached,’ said Jacques. ‘Also, we sent the divers in and they recovered it.’
‘It was my turn to ask a silly question,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘Enjoy your lunch,’ said Jacques.
‘Cheer up, Couscous,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, as he caught the look on her face. ‘It isn’t the end of the world.’
‘Speak for yourself, Aristide,’ said Doucette. ‘But I couldn’t help overhearing your end of the conversation. It strikes me there must be those who might not be too happy with your summing up.’
‘Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘You can’t please all the people all the time.
‘Talking of which, Monsieur Leclercq was still going on about my missing the train at the Gare de Lyon when I left him. He has no idea what the station was like before all the changes took place, so it’s a waste of time trying to explain what went wrong.’
‘What did happen there?’ asked Doucette. ‘I can’t begin to picture what it must be like now.’
‘I’ll show you if you like, Couscous,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, relieved to have got away from the subject of what happened on the canal St Martin.
Removing the SD card from his own camera, he inserted it into the television. If he wasn’t careful he could end up as a tame projectionist going through his vast store of digital photographs. That said, he couldn’t wait to see what his current shots of the station were like on the big screen.
‘It doesn’t look any different to me,’ said Doucette, as the first one taken from the stairs outside the restaurant filled the screen.
‘It isn’t,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Apart from the fact that the train I was supposed to meet doesn’t arrive there any more.’
Lingering for a moment or two over the next shot of the empty platforms devoid of humanity to emphasise his point, he wished now he had stopped to take more pictures of the route between that part of the station and the newly completed Hall 2. A few crowd shots on the way, along with close-ups of other befuddled individuals like himself, would have painted a better picture of the whole. But then, his mind had been on other things.
The picture of an empty Quai 7 was equally dispiriting, and running through the shots he had taken at random of the hall itself in the hope of coming across Caterina lurking somewhere in the vast area only made him realise what a forlorn exercise it had been. At that time of the year everyone was wearing black and it reminded him of a Lowry painting. Doucette was right about one thing. If the girl had been wearing a red hat she would have stood out like a sore thumb.
He was about to say as much when she intervened. ‘Could you go back one?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse obliged. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve seen someone you know? They all look the same to me.’
Doucette crossed to the television and pointed to a figure in a long black overcoat standing to one side of a small kiosk. ‘It isn’t anyone I know,’ she said. ‘But he came past our block the day afterwards. If that isn’t a coincidence, I don’t know what is. I could have sworn he looked up towards our floor.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she continued. ‘But it wasn’t just him, it was the dog he had with him on both occasions. A little black thing. Very self-possessed it was, with a lovely little beard and his tail straight up in the air as though he owned the world.
‘I looked him up in your dog book. It’s what’s known as a Scottie. You see their picture on the side of Scotch whisky bottles. Do you think it’s an omen?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse didn’t believe in coincidences, or omens come to that, but Doucette was clearly so excited by the whole thing he hadn’t the heart to dampen her enthusiasm by saying the man might simply have been looking up to see if it was going to rain.
‘Let me know if it happens again,’ he said, removing the card. ‘I’ll have a word with Pommes Frites and see what he thinks.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I may only be a femme au foyer, Aristide,’ said Doucette, ‘but there is something underhand going on, and it gives me a nasty feeling. I still can’t come to terms with that girl coming and going like she did. She may have been a nice person, but in a way that only makes it worse. Somehow the whole thing is far more upsetting than a burglary. A simple breaking and entering I could cope with, but what has happened is an intrusion of our territory and it’s hard to explain, but I feel it has been violated.’
‘Ah,’ said Aristide. ‘Le terroir! To a French man or woman that is the most sacred thing of all. I do sympathise.’
‘Now, as far as I can gather,’ said Doucette, ‘it is somehow connected with a murder on the canal St Martin.’
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ agreed Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘and it grieves me not knowing what it is. As for the unfortunate affair on the banks of the canal St Martin, the least said the better.’
Doucette stared at him. ‘Unfortunate?’ she said. ‘There speaks an ex-member of the Paris Sûreté. Sometimes I wonder how I came to marry you.’
‘You can’t help being a person of taste and discernment,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘What do you see when you look in the mirror, Aristide?’ asked Doucette.
‘Someone else of taste and discernment,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Tall, dark, handsome …’
‘I must give it a good clean,’ said Doucette.
‘It’s like I have just said,’ responded Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Abraham Lincoln was absolutely right. You can’t fool all the people all the time. Is it my fault you see something totally different? Which reminds me … How about Pommes Frites? How did he behave towards the girl?’
‘He wasn’t exactly on his best behaviour,’ said Doucette. ‘He was in a funny mood.’
‘Then it definitely couldn’t have been Caterina,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘He never forgets a face and they got on well together.’
‘He did cheer up a bit when she received a telephone call.’
‘On our phone? You didn’t tell me that.’
‘No,’ said Doucette. ‘She had a mobile and the call came through soon after she arrived. Don’t ask me wh
y, but I assumed it was Monsieur Leclercq making sure she had arrived safely. It was short, sharp, and to the point.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the Director,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘Anyway, it certainly got Pommes Frites going. It was one of those phones that vibrates instead of ringing and I don’t think he had ever come across one before. He couldn’t wait to get a closer look at it. It seemed to break the ice. His tail was beating time like nobody’s business.
‘Another funny thing happened soon afterwards. He pushed the door to your den open and went inside. I peeped in to see what he wanted and he was peering at your mobile, but it was on the charger. He looked most disappointed.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse fell silent for a moment or two. Clearly there must be a connection with whatever problem was occupying Pommes Frites’ mind, but for the moment he couldn’t think what it could possibly be.
Doucette brought him back down to earth.
‘Have you ever met Uncle Caputo?’ she asked. ‘The very name gives me the shivers.’
‘No,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘And I have no wish to. I might like him and life is complicated enough as it is. Besides, it is only a nickname. My understanding is that apart from his connections with the Cosa Nostra, he is a pillar of Sicilian society.
‘As for you calling yourself a mere housewife, Doucette, I have never heard such nonsense. There is nothing mere about being a housewife.’
‘And there is nothing mere about the Cosa Nostra,’ said Doucette. ‘It’s really only another name for the Mafia.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘It’s the other way round. The Cosa Nostra came first. Roughly translated it means “our thing”. Way back in the early nineteenth century, when feudalism was giving way to more enlightened thinking, Sicily is where it all began. Small groups known as “families” got together in order to offer protection to those who needed it most: peasants holding out against the big landowners who were trying to grind them into the dirt, and on the other side of the coin the nobility, who were living in constant fear of the peasants rising up. In effect the Cosa Nostra took over from the state in enforcing the law at a time when the powers that be couldn’t cope with the situation.