Dial M for Merde (30 page)

‘Why?' I wailed, and they beckoned me to follow them.

‘Who did this?' Moo-Moo demanded, pointing down to one of the meticulously laid round tables that were evenly spread across the lawn like a formal garden of white lilies.

‘Did what?' I asked.

‘Look,' Moo-Moo hooted.

‘Look,' Bonne Maman echoed.

I looked, but I didn't see. I'd made sure that the water glasses were bigger than the wine glasses, as you must. And that the place cards were exactly where they'd told me to put them. Everything looked perfect.

‘The forks,' Moo-Moo gasped, as if it was a nasty word.

‘What about them?'

‘They are the wrong way up.' She bent forward and flipped one over, so that its points were touching the table rather than curving upwards.

‘Ah, that is my fault,' I said. I had gone round earlier, turning them over. It had seemed wrong to me, to place the forks with their points downwards. They looked ungainly. ‘I'll change them immediately.' I wondered how many valuable minutes of my life were going to be wasted turning over forks today.

‘There's another thing.' Bonne Maman was shaking her head. ‘There is no principal table. They are all round,
and all together. It is too … democratic.' She shuddered.

There was no way we were moving the tables at this late stage. And there was no room to pull one of them out into a more prominent position.

‘But surely, chère Madame,' I said, mustering all my French grammar and over-the-top manners, ‘any table with both yourself and the President of France on it will automatically be the principal table?'

She stared at me for a few seconds. ‘You are right,' she said at last. ‘We must just make sure that he and I are sitting facing everyone else, so they can see us together.'

‘Of course,' I agreed. If there were any stray bullets flying about, she was the perfect candidate.

 

Six o'clock came, seven. A cloud of Bonnepoires engulfed every square millimetre of the house and its immediate grounds.

In the kitchen, things were going crazy. Only the non-police waiting staff looked relaxed – most of them were enjoying a cigarette by the back door. I went to check on the wine cellar, which contained both the champagne and the pièce montée. It was on the floor in there, protected by a carefully balanced muslin shroud. I tried the door. It was securely locked.

Léanne came into the kitchen and gave me a final pep talk, or pep look. There were too many people around for her to come out of her waitress character. She stared me in the eyes and nodded encouragingly.

‘M?' she whispered.

I shrugged. She'd been with Elodie for most of the day, but for all I knew, now she could have been out in the trees helping some guy to load his rifle. Weren't the police supposed to be watching her?

I looked at my watch. Almost eight. I checked my phone. Nothing. Wouldn't it be brilliant if Jean-Marie called and said that the President had got stuck in the aeroplane toilet? Anything to put a stop to the evening's violent agenda.

Thinking about the wedding ceremony reminded me that I hadn't seen Valéry for a worryingly long time. I hoped to God he wasn't too stoned or high to say ‘I do.'

He was nowhere on the ground floor, so I went past the gun cabinet and up the stairs, asking every Bonnepoire I came across if they'd seen him. None of them had, and they all laughed. It was, they said, typical of him to go missing at a time like this.

I checked all the rooms on the first floor, including some darkly panelled bedrooms and a quaint old toilet with a polished wooden seat. I intruded on people changing, snogging, and in one case smearing a bed with Nutella – I shut the door quickly, pretending I hadn't witnessed this.

No sign of Valéry.

I went up another flight of stairs, still having to nudge past gossiping Bonnepoires at every step, and finally came across Moo-Moo standing outside a closed door.

‘Is Valéry in there?' I asked her.

She was uncharacteristically silent. ‘He is … not well,' she finally said.

‘What's he doing?' I asked, fearing the reply.

‘Bonne Maman is talking to him. He promised that he would not … He said he would refrain from …' Behind the blank wall of her self-righteousness and snobbery, she was a woman in considerable distress.

I took a risk and touched her arm.

‘It is the emotion,' I said. ‘The dealer tried to trick him,
and now the President will marry him. C'est beaucoup.'

‘He must change his ways,' she said. ‘Or …' She raised her worried eyes to mine and I almost felt sorry for her.

The door opened and Bonne Maman came out, wringing her hands as if she'd just delivered a baby.

‘Well, he is conscious, that is one consolation,' she said. ‘Someone needs to put the young idiot right. A rich man with his habits is like a suicidal maniac at the helm of a yacht. He will sink himself and the boat.'

Wow, I thought, could it be that she actually had a humane reason for wanting to stop Valéry getting his hands on the inheritance – she thought he'd only stuff it all up his nostrils?

‘Keep him in here until the ceremony,' Bonne Maman ordered Moo-Moo. ‘If he's thirsty, he can have water. If he wants to piss, he can do it out of the window.'

I laughed. The bitch grand-mère may have been a snooty vache, but a vache with a sense of humour.

4

There was a murmur and then a collective intake of breath. The news flashed around the house as fast as a gunshot.

The President's car had entered the grounds.

Oh merde, I thought. This is it.

I looked out of the nearest window and saw a long, dark-blue limo, preceded by two motorbike riders and followed by one, slightly smaller, car.

Where was M? I hadn't seen her for at least an hour. Perhaps she'd received a tip-off that the target was in sight and had melted away. Her job was done.

No, there she was with Elodie, both of them dressed to
kill, dashing down the stairs to be present when the President got out of his car. M was carrying her make-up case, as though she wanted to put on a last-minute coat of lipstick or eyeliner. I followed, trying my best to catch up with them through the crowd that was heading downstairs.

There was a loud cheer from the front of the house. Out of a landing window I saw that the car had stopped, and was being mobbed by shoving, applauding Bonnepoires. I studied all the faces I could see, looking for someone who didn't belong, or any sign of a weapon. Nothing, just a crowd of well-wishers.

In the hallway, I caught sight of Léanne trying to push through the throng to the front door, and being told off for getting above her station. Waiting staff round the back entrance, they seemed to be saying. One of her replies made a woman blush. Léanne must have told her to stick her snobbery in her own back entrance.

I stayed on the stairs, watching. Elodie and M were also trying to push forward, but there were so many people that it was impossible.

Meanwhile, the cheering outside got louder – the President must have got out of the car – and then seemed to fade, as if the breeze was carrying the voices away.

The crush eased and people were able to get across the hall and outside. I came down and headed for the front door. Just before I got there, I saw Valéry coming downstairs.

‘He's here,' I told him. In reply he gave a weak thumbs-up. He looked reasonably alert, though. Nothing that a glass of organic champagne wouldn't cure.

Outside, the crowd was flowing across the front of the house and round to the side. Léanne was dodging her way forward like a rugby player trying to break through a tight
defence. I could see no sign of the President, although a group of bulky guys in suits had materialized, and uniformed police were taking up positions by the cars and the front door.

I looked out across the grounds, scanning the tree line. Now would be the perfect time for me to catch sight of a crouching silhouette. There was nothing out there, though, except impenetrable evening shadow.

Around the back of the house I found a scene of calm confusion. The President had gone in through the kitchen door, it seemed, and the welcoming party was over for the time being. A bodyguard was blocking the doorway. I saw Léanne try to push past and get told to stand back. She argued, but he wasn't going to change his mind. She came running towards me.

‘The front door,' she said. ‘We've got to get in the house.'

We both jogged back to the front door. The uniformed cop tried to stop Léanne, but she told him to ‘get his ass out of the way, or she would eat it'. This had to be some kind of official French police jargon, because he stepped aside and let us in.

‘He's gone – disappeared.' In the hallway, Leather Jacket was looking much less smug than usual.

‘Who's in the house?' Léanne asked.

‘Tons of people,' he said. ‘We don't know.'

‘Of
our
people, cretin,' she said.

‘Oh, all of us.'

‘OK, tell everyone to start searching the rooms. I'll go to the bell panel.'

‘Oui, Madame.' In the heat of the action Leather Jacket had become almost passive.

‘Why don't you just ask the President's bodyguards where he is?' I suggested.

‘Huh.' Léanne didn't seem to think that would do much good.

In the serving room, we found Jake, his mouth full of tapenade. He was helping himself from one of the trays covering the long table.

‘Hey, you're not supposed to be eating that,' I told him.

‘Sorry, man. It was that Dadou. I was reciting my posy and he insisted I eat something. Like, practically stuffed it in my bouche. It's really bon. Hey.' He had finished ogling Léanne and decided he liked what he saw. ‘Are you une Occitane?' he asked her.

‘Jake …' I frowned at him. He'd obviously branched out from his policy of trying to shag one woman of every nationality, and was now going for ancient European ethnic group. Soon he'd be asking English girls if they were Picts.

Léanne ignored him, as the first bell rang to show that one of the rooms was clear. She marked the space on the glass with a smudge of tapenade.

‘The Prayzidon is here, right?' Jake said. ‘I'm gonna ask him about my fon.'

‘Yeah, you do that, Jake,' I said, as other bells rang. ‘In fact, you could go and look for him to ask him now.'

‘Yeah? You lost him?' Jake gave a laugh that was shot out of the air by a murderous glance from Léanne.

Elodie and M came in from the hall, and looked at us as if they didn't understand what the tension was all about. Léanne stared at M for a second, before returning her gaze to the bell panel.

‘They lost the Prayzidon,' Jake giggled. I motioned to the girls that it wasn't as big a joke as Jake seemed to think.

M was looking understandably nervous. Her guy would be searching for the President as well, and she had a million euros riding on the winner of the manhunt.

‘Merde, where is he?' Léanne swore, marking off more and more bells. ‘He's in the house, right? Did you see him pass?' she asked Jake. M looked at her in surprise, understanding for the first time that Léanne was more than a waitress.

‘I have not seen him,' Jake said. ‘I was with Dadou. He adores posy, and I was asking for his aid to ameliorate one of my posies. It's this one about some shrimps and a Cajun femme. You want to hear it, Paul?'

‘Later, Jake, much later.'

‘C'est pas possible!' Léanne stood back from the bell panel and gazed at it. All the bells were marked off.

‘The kitchen,' I said. ‘He must be in there.'

‘No, he's not in there, we looked,' she said.

‘You're wrong,' I said, in a sudden flash of realization. ‘Come with me,
vite
!'

We ran into the kitchen, which was empty except for one bodyguard. Even the cooks had been chucked out, and their goat's cheese amuse-bouches were sitting around on trays, half-finished.

‘He's in the wine cellar,' I said. ‘It's the only place without a bell.'

‘Stay away from that door.' The bodyguard moved a hand towards his armpit.

‘I'm in command of the police contingent,' Léanne said. ‘Is he in there alone? You have to tell me. Now.'

‘Alone? Er, no,' the bodyguard admitted, suddenly looking extremely worried.

Léanne reached up and grabbed him by the lapels. ‘Who's in there with him?' she shouted.

‘A woman and a man.'

‘Merde.' Léanne pointed to the door and the bodyguard
needed no more prompting. He pulled the door open, his gun already halfway out of its holster.

Silent now, we all peered into the small room, expecting to see a defunct President bludgeoned with a champagne bottle or impaled on the pièce montée.

But all that met our eyes was an abashed Valéry sitting on a stool, with a presidential hand clamped to his shoulder, and Bonne Maman's eyes drilling into his head.

The President held out a restraining palm to his bodyguard and murmured a few more words to Valéry, the last of which were ‘OK, mon petit?'

Valéry nodded. It looked like a paternalistic pull-your-socks-up talk from the highest authority in the land.

‘Bonsoir,' the President said to us all as he stepped out of the wine cellar, followed by a serenely smiling Bonne Maman and a shell-shocked Valéry.

Léanne breathed a sigh of relief and patted me on the back, but we both knew that the reprieve was only temporary. The evening, and the danger, was just beginning.

‘Paul?' It was Elodie, nodding towards Léanne, asking for an explanation. She assumed, rightly, that I must have known some of my waiting staff were cops. M, too, looked interested in what I'd have to say.

But I had turned away from them. A man was coming into the kitchen. He was dressed as a waiter, and I hadn't seen him before. Not tonight, anyway. When I looked him in the eye, he grinned at me. And suddenly I remembered. He'd been in Bandol. He was the guy at the singalong restaurant who'd been ogling M.