by Michael Bond
‘Pommes Frites?’ Ignoring the implied threat in the last part of the remark, Monsieur Pamplemousse took a deep breath. He was about to launch himself into the attack when there was a stirring at his feet.
Pommes Frites knew a compliment when he heard one; he was also very sensitive to the reverse side of the coin. Sensing that there was little love lost between his master and Ananas, he’d been keeping a low profile, trying to catch the drift of the conversation, but without much success. He was, despite his fearsome appearance when the occasion demanded, one of nature’s mediators.
He’d been considering the matter ever since Ananas first came into the room – watching points, pricking up his ears at changes in the conversation, and he’d come to the conclusion that there was definitely a feeling of acrimony in the air.
What was needed, in his opinion, was some kind of gift. It went against the grain because on the whole he was usually fairly careful in his choice of recipient; he wasn’t at all sure that he liked Ananas. In fact, sensitive to the tone of the last remark, he definitely didn’t, but if it helped his master in any way, then so be it.
Pommes Frites was a great believer in gifts during moments of crisis. Slippers were his speciality. He often fetched Madame Pamplemousse’s slippers if she came in with the shopping on a wet day and saw his paw marks over the floor. It almost always had a soothing effect.
Slippers were obviously out on this occasion, but his eye had caught something else that he felt sure would fill the bill. It looked like a very good present indeed. Reaching out with his paw, he drew the object towards him. Then, feeling very pleased with himself, he courteously offered it to Ananas and stood back to watch the effect. He wasn’t disappointed.
A smile spread slowly across Ananas’ face as he allowed Mrs. Cosgrove’s culottes to slip through his fingers, rather like a conjuror about to turn them into a complete set of the flags of all nations.
‘Good boy!’ Catching them deftly in his other hand, he slipped them into his pocket, then reached down to give Pommes Frites a friendly pat.
Pommes Frites stiffened. From the look on his master’s face he could see that he hadn’t done the right thing.
Ananas glanced around the room again. ‘My, we have been having fun, haven’t we? Tit, if you will pardon the expression, for tat.’ He paused with his hand on the door. ‘No photograph, no present back. À bientôt.’
He made to close the door but Monsieur Pamplemousse swiftly intercepted him.
‘I imagine you will get your photograph back when the Police have finished interviewing the others involved. There is some concern about the state of their health. No doubt they will be in touch in due course.’
It was a cheap jibe, but the look on Ananas’ face made him feel better.
As he went back into his room the bathroom door opened and Mrs. Cosgrove appeared. He suddenly felt guilty. In the excitement he’d totally forgotten her presence. But he needn’t have worried. Her eyes were shining as she closed the door behind her and came towards him.
He held out his hands to greet her. ‘I am sorry. I would have told you, sooner or later. Once you start something it is often difficult to go back on it. At least when we last met I was wearing my dark glasses.’
Mrs. Cosgrove coloured as the truth of the situation came home to her. ‘Oh! You mean all the time you spent in my room when I was taking a shower … Oh dear! What must you have thought?’
‘I thought you were very beautiful.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then let us say nothing.’ Monsieur Pamplemouse suddenly felt a great warmth towards her. It was as if he’d been privileged to know another human being in a way that no one, perhaps not even her husband, had ever done before. It was not to be abused. ‘Misused words generate misleading thoughts.’
He reached for the wine and refilled their glasses. Sadly, it was the end of the bottle. ‘Let us drink to the future – not the past.’
Tilting his glass forward he held it over the white cover of one of the books. ‘Look at that colour. Think of all the love and care and attention that went into making it, and think how lucky we are to be drinking it now.’
Mrs. Cosgrove touched his glass momentarily with hers. ‘I’ve never met a detective before. At least, not a French one. It’s not a bit as I imagined it might be.’
‘You’re not meeting one now. Only an ex-detective.’
‘I bet you were a very good detective and I don’t care what you’re doing here just so long as you’re not on the side of that odious creature.’
‘People say we are like each other.’
‘You are nothing like each other. Only a fool would think that.’
He sipped the wine, tasting it properly for the first time. It was round and fruity, at its best, and yet with many years ahead of it still. Full of promise, a wine to be savoured and lingered over, not one to be hurried. The analogy between it and the person sitting opposite him was irresistible.
‘You must find the negative.’
‘Pouf! The negative! That doesn’t worry me. It is all the other things – things I don’t understand.’
‘Then we must find out about them too. I’ll help.’ Her eyes were sparkling with excitement again. ‘We’ll pool what we know. There are a lot of things I could tell you. Things I’ve heard. It may be gossip, but you know what they say – where there’s smoke there’s fire.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse hesitated. By nature and by his work with Le Guide he had grown unused to working too closely with others. On the other hand …
‘That would be – very good.’ He hesitated again. ‘Perhaps it is time for the saucisson now. If you wish I will turn off the light.’ He thought he knew the answer as he posed the question and wondered what he would do if he was wrong.
Mrs. Cosgrove shook her head. ‘I’m not in the right mood any more.’
‘They say that appetite comes with eating.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be right somehow. But thank you. Tomorrow perhaps.’ She stood up. ‘I know what – tomorrow evening we’ll go down to the village. There’s a little café. Strictly speaking it’s out of bounds, but no one need know. We can work things out over a meal.’ Pausing at the door, she turned as if she had something else to say. Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered what he would do if she asked for her culottes back. Should he tell her the truth, that they were in Ananas’ pocket? Or should he save her embarrassment and say he wanted to keep them as a souvenir. Perhaps he could pretend Pommes Frites had hidden them.
‘Do you have a car?’
‘Oui. But not here.’
‘Can you ride a bike?’
‘A bike?’ He wondered if he was hearing aright.
‘A bicyclette. I’ve got one and I know where I could borrow another for you. How about it?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse considered the matter for all of ten seconds. ‘They say you never forget. There was a time –’
‘Good! Dors bien!’ Her goodnight kiss, full on the lips, took him by surprise. A moment later she was gone.
‘Dors bien!’ He wondered how much sleep he would get that night.
Pommes Frites looked at him enquiringly and then decided to try his luck again. He reached out a paw. Knowing his master’s tastes and adding the fact that it was long past their dinner time, a saucisson – even one which was looking slightly the worse for wear through being kicked across the room – was decidedly better than nothing.
7
DINNER FOR THREE
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ said Mrs. Cosgrove. ‘As far as I can make out, they’ve all been foreign. Not French, I mean. Mostly Spanish, a few Italians, a couple from South America. Come to think of it, there were no British either. They were all Latins.’
‘And all with thick calves?’
‘You may laugh, but it’s true. I’ve seen enough old dears in my job. When did you last come across anyone that age with that kind of problem?’
Monsieur Pamplemous
se fell silent. It was an unanswerable question. He didn’t make a habit of going around looking at old ladies’ legs.
Mrs. Cosgrove looked anxiously across the table. ‘I say, are you all right? You haven’t hurt yourself?’
‘It is nothing. A little soreness. An old wound. It will soon disappear.’ Slipping his pen between his left leg and the chair seat for safety, Monsieur Pamplemousse waved his other hand reassuringly through the air.
It wasn’t a direct lie, merely a slight distortion of the truth. His right leg was certainly sore, but then so was the rest of him. Parts of his body he hadn’t been aware of for years were aching. His back, for example. And his neck. Not to mention his derrière. His thighs – mon Dieu! His thighs felt as though they had been drawn slowly through a mangle, a mangle with rollers made of corrugated iron. As for his own calves, they must be twice their normal size. If his right leg felt worse than the rest of him it was because it had never fully recovered after being peppered by shot from a gun fired at close quarters during a previous assignment.
The truth of the matter was, he’d been trying to make some surreptitious notes on his pad and it wasn’t easy. During the gaps in the conversation, his pen had been fairly racing over the pages. Whether he would be able to read his writing was another matter, but the little bistro Mrs. Cosgrove had taken him to was a discovery indeed. To the best of his knowledge it had never received a mention in Le Guide, nor in any of its competitors. If the smells coming from the kitchen were anything to go by, he was hot on the trail of a very worthwhile entry, possibly Stock Pot material. It would be something of a coup. It might even redeem him in the Director’s eyes for the loss of the letter. From the occasional stirrings and lip smackings emerging from below the folds of the red and white checked table cloth he sensed that Pommes Frites shared his excitement, tempering a growing impatience with anticipation of the good things to come.
‘Have you had many wounds? I mean, is what you do often dangerous?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse considered the matter carefully before replying. ‘The answer to the first question, touche du bois, is no. As to the second, it is no more dangerous than what I have just been through.’
He spoke with feeling. When Mrs. Cosgrove first suggested cycling down to the village for dinner he’d had a mental picture of setting forth on something fairly sedate; perhaps an old upright which had once belonged to the local facteur. In the event she had turned up with an almost brand new British Dawes, complete with a Huret fifteen speed Dérailleur gear, Italian drop handlebars, and a Dutch all-leather racing saddle. A truly international machine, and one which could have done with a certain amount of adjustment before they set out. The lowering of the saddle, for example. He winced and shifted uneasily in his chair as he recalled the saddle. Heaven alone knew where Mrs. Cosgrove had got hold of the machine. He didn’t dare ask.
The first few moments, carrying it through the undergrowth leading to a back way out of the Château, had been bliss. Light as a feather, the very feel of it had brought boyhood memories flooding back. In those days he had owned an André Bertin, and conversation had been all about the relative merits of wooden as opposed to alloy wheel rims; of brazed against welded frames.
Once outside Château Morgue though, it had been a very different story. In the far off days of his youth he had barely touched sixty kilos on the scales – the optimum weight the designers of his present machine must have had in mind. The roads, too, had been much smoother, the hairpin bends more suitably cambered, of that he was sure. Seen at close quarters, the road from Château Morgue down to the village had been one nid de poule after another. ‘Hen nests’ was an understatement for such potholes. He hadn’t felt quite so frightened for a long time. He now knew from personal experience how Pommes Frites must feel every time he set off head-first down a flight of stairs. Except that with stairs the end was usually in sight. The journey down to the village had seemed never-ending.
Mrs. Cosgrove, on the other hand, had taken it all in her stride. Eschewing the added protection of layers of material between her derrière and the saddle, she’d actually lifted her skirt over the top, allowing it to drape down either side in a most provocative manner as she led the way down the hill. At any other time and under other circumstances, he would have found the sight more than a little disturbing. Instead of which he’d spent most of the time holding onto the handlebars like grim death, hardly daring to change gear lest he got into an uncontrollable wobble or, worse still, collided with Pommes Frites, who treated the whole thing as yet another new game, running on ahead and waiting in the middle of the road for his master to appear, leaving it until the last possible moment to leap to one side.
To add to his ignominious arrival in the village, Mrs. Cosgrove had greeted him rather like the last rider home in the Tour de France, tying onto his handlebars a large, plastic, helium-filled balloon which she’d found in a local shop, by way of consolation.
He glanced round the restaurant. There were only seven tables, two of which were already occupied by regulars. Above a pine-wood fire in a large open grate was an old-fashioned spit – a complicated arrangement of weights and pulleys – the like of which he hadn’t seen for a long time. It looked as though it was still in regular use. No doubt if you ordered a steak during the summer months there would be a girl whose job it was to lay the firewood in exactly the right way, not too little, not too much, so that the meat would be cooked just as the chef thought it should be – take it or leave it.
To be true, the menu was short – again take it or leave it, but from the moment they took their seats and a plate of almond and aniseed flavoured biscuits, fresh from the oven, was plonked on their table, automatically and without comment, he knew that he was dealing with the genuine article; a chef who definitely liked his food. Moreover, from the glimpses he’d caught through the serving hatch separating the kitchen from the dining-room, a satisfactorily rotund chef. On the whole he tended to mistrust thin chefs, classing them alongside bald-headed barbers who tried to sell you bottles of hair restorer. Neither were any advertisement for their trade.
The patron’s wife, who took the orders in between sitting at her cash desk near the door, was by contrast thin-lipped and forbidding. It was a classic combination. The man, happy in his kitchen. The wife, out front looking after the money.
‘I’m sorry. It’s not very exciting.’ Mrs. Cosgrove looked genuinely disappointed as she scanned the hand-written menu. ‘But it makes a change.’
‘Not exciting!’ Monsieur Pamplemousse gazed at her. ‘It is the most exciting menu I have seen for a long time. Here you will find food of a kind you will get nowhere else in France. Why? Because the chef has probably never been further than Narbonne in his life. He knows no other cuisine, and even if he did he wouldn’t admit to it.’
He pushed the plate of biscuits towards her, at the same time signalling to the Madame. ‘Have another resquille. We will do them the compliment of helping them on their way with a bottle of Blanquette de Limoux – if they have one. It is a local sparkling wine. Not quite like the real thing perhaps, but I think you will like it.’
He ran a practised eye down the menu. ‘Then I suggest you try the cargolade – escargots grilled over vinestocks; it gives them a unique flavour. I will have mine à la Languedocienne – with a sauce of anchovies, ham, cognac and walnuts. We can share with each other.’
To his pleasure the Blanquette de Limoux more than fulfilled the promise he’d made, adding to the healthy glow of Mrs. Cosgrove’s cheeks; a glow further enhanced by the soft light from a single candle on their table. Taking advantage of the moment he made another note on his pad. The wine had the smell of cider characteristic of the Mauzac grape which was its main ingredient, but there was another element he couldn’t quite place. Perhaps the addition of some Chardonnay. He’d read somewhere that the best cuvées used it to give fuller flavour.
Conscious of Mrs. Cosgrove’s eyes on him, he returned to the task in hand. ‘Have
you ever tried Brandade de Morue?’
Mrs. Cosgrove shook her head. ‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Then that is a must. Dried salt cod pounded with garlic and olive oil until it becomes a creamy paste. Then it is served on croûtons. Salt cod is their winter equivalent of bacon and salt pork.
‘After that, since we are in Catalan country, we could try Tranche de Mouton à la Catalane, or Poivrons Rouges à la Catalane – red peppers stuffed with rice salad. Again, perhaps we can have a little of each and share. With that we can have a bottle of Côtes de Roussillon Villages – if this wine is anything to go by the patron will most likely know a small grower. It could be something special.’
He felt in his element. It was like composing a piece of music; a matter of rhythms, of trying to avoid striking a discordant note.
‘We could finish off sharing some Roquefort over the rest of the wine.’
‘We seem to be doing a lot of sharing this evening,’ said Mrs. Cosgrove meaningfully. ‘First the escargots, then the main course, now the Roquefort.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse looked up from the menu. She was back into her leg-swinging syndrome. He hoped Pommes Frites was keeping a watchful eye on things below stairs. If she carried on at her present rate he could suffer a nasty blow to the head. He would not be best pleased.
Perhaps it was a good thing they weren’t having Chambertin with the cheese. What was it Casanova had said about Roquefort and Chambertin being excellent bedfellows? ‘They stimulate romance and bring budding love affairs to a quick fruition.’
He voiced his thoughts and then immediately wished he hadn’t. Mrs. Cosgrove was doing well enough with the Blanquette de Limoux on its own. Pommes Frites stirred nervously at his feet.
‘George swears by cinnamon. He has it a lot on toast. He always says it puts lead in his pencil.’
The mention of the word pencil reminded Monsieur Pamplemousse of his pen which was now balanced very precariously on the edge of the seat. Apart from posing an additional hazard to Pommes Frites’ head, he shuddered to think what would happen to its finely engineered tip if it landed on the tiled floor. It would be like losing an extension to his right arm. No other pen would ever be quite the same.