Monsieur Pamplemousse Afloat (12 page)

Madame Ambert hesitated. ‘Would you, in the interest of the last one in particular, whilst still maintaining the first two, be prepared to meet my brother?’

Monsieur Pamplemousse hesitated. He had a sudden mental picture of Abeille and Pommes Frites awaiting his return. ‘Of course. It is, I suspect, the main reason why I am here. But today would be a problem.’

‘Tomorrow is Sunday. That would be a good day. Everyone will be at the vineyard.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.

‘How shall I contact you?’

‘I will telephone.’ JayCee was right about one thing. Maintaining communications with the outside world was not what life on a canal barge was all about.

They both took
café
at the table and for a while the conversation turned to other topics. Eventually Madame Ambert excused herself and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

While she was gone Monsieur Pamplemousse toyed with the
petits fours
. Perhaps the Director’s aunt was right. Sometimes to know more was to understand less. And yet … he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that she was holding back on him in some way; that he had yet to hear the whole story. Perhaps she wanted him to form his own opinion of her brother first.

When Madame Ambert returned she was wearing a coat and carrying a long plastic bag full of
escargots
, their marbled shells clearly visible as she held it up for him to see.

‘A little gift from André and myself. I am so grateful you were able to come.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse was momentarily at a loss for words.

‘Everything seems so closed in,’ said Madame
Ambert. ‘I cannot rid myself of the feeling that something dreadful is about to happen.’

‘Fabrice will take you where you wish to go.
À demain
. Until tomorrow.’ She handed him a card with the telephone number of the vineyard. A moment later she was gone.

After what seemed an age he heard her car drive away and shortly afterwards Fabrice Delamain himself appeared. Presumably he and the Director’s aunt must have spoken, for on the way back to his car he asked for Monsieur Pamplemousse’s opinion of the wine.

It struck Monsieur Pamplemousse that the question had been posed out of politeness rather than any great desire to know. He seemed preoccupied, and as they set off even his driving felt mechanical, lacking its earlier
panache
.

Oui
, he had delivered the parcel.

Non
, he had spoken to no one.

There was no mention of his having looked inside the packet.

As with Madame Ambert, Monsieur Pamplemousse was left with the feeling of being an outsider. The earlier rapport they had established had gone.

‘Where would you like me to take you?’

‘There is no need to drive all the way back,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘I have some shopping to do.’

If he had been totally honest he would have added
that he wouldn’t have minded getting some fresh air. The rain seemed to have eased off for the moment and the atmosphere in the car was becoming more and more oppressive. It would be nice to have time to think; a little ‘space’.

‘Shopping?’ Fabrice looked at him in surprise, as though he’d asked for a ticket to the moon.

‘Ideally,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘I need to visit a video store. That, and a shop where it would be possible to purchase a few items of clothing … ladies’ clothing.’

Fabrice made a sucking noise. He seemed glad of the diversion; a problem to solve, however mundane it might be.

‘A video shop … ladies clothing …’

‘A present for my wife,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse by way of explanation.

‘In Beaune or Dijon it would be no problem, but in the villages around here there are few shops. Mostly they have less than a hundred inhabitants. Even the
boulangers
deliver bread by van these days. Unless …’

Coming to an abrupt stop, he glanced up at his mirror. Now that he had something positive to think about his mood changed. Backing down the hill at high speed, he slid to a halt, then turned off to the right and they began climbing again through a forest of oak trees. The clouds were low overhead; all enveloping, adding to the feeling of claustrophobia.

‘A few kilometres away, there is a possibility …’

‘That is very kind of you.’

‘I can wait for you …’

Monsieur Pamplemousse declined the offer. ‘I have my
bicyclette
. It will do me good. After all that food …’

‘You will find it is downhill for most of the way.’

‘That sounds admirable,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. It also sounded as though Fabrice was glad to be relieved of his task of acting as chauffeur. There was no question of arguing the matter.

They came out of the forest and almost immediately houses appeared on either side, their shutters closed against the weather. Fabrice parked the car in a deserted
place
.

‘There!’ He pointed towards a small shop. A neon sign above the door said
VIDEOS EXTRAORDINAIRES
.

Climbing out of the car, he went round to the back. Gathering up his belongings, the cape and the bag of
escargots
, Monsieur Pamplemousse followed suit.

By the time he caught up, his bicycle had already been removed.

‘At least the rain has nearly stopped.’

‘Nearly’ was taking an optimistic view. Monsieur Pamplemousse donned his cape. Clearly, from the speed with which Fabrice closed the boot lid he was anxious to be on his way.

Glancing round the
place
Monsieur Pamplemousse
spotted the only other shop, directly opposite the first. It was called
PARIS MODES
and its frontage was almost identical, but the windows were dressed overall with fashions he hadn’t seen in many a year. Chic was not a word which sprang to mind, and he regarded the display with a sinking heart.

Monsieur Delamain held out his hand. ‘
Bonne chance
,’ he said wryly. ‘I hope you get what you want.’

‘Merci,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse dryly. ‘
Bonne journée
.’

He stood watching as Fabrice climbed back into the car and started the engine. As it purred into life the window slid open and a hand clutching a small white envelope reached out.

‘I think perhaps you should see this. Later … at your leisure.’

Before Monsieur Pamplemousse had time to reply, the window slid shut again. He stood watching as the car disappeared into the gloom, heading back the way they had come. Fabrice was already on the telephone.

Propping the bicycle again a stone bollard, Monsieur Pamplemousse squeezed the envelope, registering the contents without for a moment betraying his mounting excitement, then consigned it to an inside pocket. The rain had started bucketing down again. Fabrice was right; it was something to be considered at leisure.

As he made his way across the
place
a sudden
gust of wind funnelling through a narrow gap between two buildings caught him by surprise. His cape billowed out like a sail as it propelled him inexorably towards his destination. But Monsieur Pamplemousse scarcely registered the fact. His mind was already racing ahead.

The proprietor of
Videos Extraordinaires
crawled out from his back parlour like a great fat slug. He didn’t look best pleased at having been disturbed. Pointedly taking his time, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, slowly filling the space behind the tiny counter before deigning to examine the cassette.

‘
Monsieur
does not have the camera with him?’

Monsieur Pamplemousse confessed he hadn’t. The last time he had seen it had been in the shower with Abeille, at which point his mind had been on other things.

The admission met with a prolonged intake of breath between yellowing teeth. ‘It is VHS-C. To play this size of tape in a normal VHS recorder will require a special cassette adapter.’

‘And you do not have one?’

‘I have one,
Monsieur
,’ the man pointed to a shelf on the wall behind him, ‘but it is new and boxed. Once the box has been opened it will no longer be new.’

Holding the bag of
escargots
with one hand, Monsieur Pamplemousse went through the motions of groping inside his cape with the other, but any hopes he might have nursed that the man wouldn’t want to see the colour of his money fell on stony ground.

‘And if I decide to purchase one, may I view the tape in your shop?’

‘
Naturellement, Monsieur
.’ Having first completed the washing of his hands in invisible soap, the man pressed a key on his cash till. A flap bearing the figure 400fr appeared behind a window. His finger hovered over the
NO SALE
key. It was the price of progress – take it or leave it.

While the tape was being loaded Monsieur Pamplemousse took the opportunity to explore other avenues.

‘I am told it is unusual in this part of the world to find a village with shops.’

‘The winters can be hard,
Monsieur
. People need things to occupy their time, otherwise it hangs heavy on their hands. Both Dijon and Beaune are impossible to reach when the snow is bad.’

‘Would there be anywhere I could buy a present for a lady? A clothes shop,
par exemple
?’

The man waved vaguely towards the far side of the
place
. ‘
Monsieur
should try
Paris Modes
.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse had half expected as much. His spirits fell at the thought of Abeille’s reaction.

They perked up again as a television receiver on the far side of the shop sprang to life. Viewed on a Philips 84 cm screen, the shots of the previous evening’s pageant positively leapt out at him; colour gave the tape another dimension; 40 watts of hifi stereophonic sound, relayed through a battery of speakers and sub woofers, added yet a third. If there had been room in the shop to stand back without coming up against racks of video cassettes, batteries, plugs, cables and sundry other items, the overall effect could hardly have been improved had the tape been projected in a cinema on the Champs Elysées.

It began where he had left off earlier in the day, so he asked the man to rewind it slightly, stopping him at a point shortly before Vert-Vert’s arrival in Nantes.

Seeing the candlelit corridors of the cellars, Monsieur Pamplemousse found himself comparing them with the catacombs in Paris, that depository of ancient remains, where femurs and tibias rather than bottles of Burgundy were neatly stacked along the walls. During the war the catacomb’s labyrinth of tunnels had been put to good use by members of the
Resistance, who had used it as their headquarters. In much the same way, it would be possible for a person to come and go unobserved for hours on end in the cellars below the
negociants
’ offices in Beaune; a fact which was convincingly demonstrated a few moments later as Abeille panned away from the group of nuns to see the ship arriving, then almost immediately panned back again.

As he watched Monsieur Pamplemousse realised something he hadn’t noticed before. During the time it took to complete the movement – perhaps all of ten seconds – the twelve nuns became thirteen. Until that moment he had assumed there had been thirteen nuns right from the start. He could have kicked himself for not checking something so basic. It only went to show that one should never take anything for granted. It also meant that the person infiltrating the group must have done so for not much more than a minute or so at the most.

He watched the pageant unfold: the camera zooming out to include the parrot, the moment when Vert-Vert took off and fluttered into the air, faltered for a second, then plummeted down to the bottom of the frame as Abeille zoomed in for a
close-up
. He had seen the latter half before, of course, and was prepared, but on the larger screen when the camera panned back to the group, it was obvious there were now only twelve. He wondered if the thirteenth person had been watching Abeille and
whoever it was had seized their chance to come and go while she was pointing the camera away from them, or whether it had been sheer luck rather than good timing.

‘
Excusez-moi, Monsieur
.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse picked up the remote controller and ran the tape back until it reached the point where the extra nun appeared for the first time, then pressed the button marked still frame. Magnified in colour on the giant screen the picture revealed something else he hadn’t spotted earlier. Protruding at around waist level from the habit of the new arrival, blued metal against dark grey, was the unmistakable business end of a gun.

Monsieur Pamplemousse stared at it for a long while. It put an entirely different complexion on things. Far from Vert-Vert having got in the way of a shot fired by someone in the audience, it looked as though the reverse must have happened.

He would have given anything to have been blessed with X-ray eyes so that he could see through the habit – or better still, ten seconds with an X-ray machine at an airport in order to make a positive identification of the weapon. It looked more like an air gun than the kind of revolver one might have expected; possibly, from the partridge style front sight, a single shot Crossman target pistol operated by compressed air. That would explain why no one had heard a shot being fired or seen any kind
of flash. Five to ten metres would be the kind of distance within which accuracy could be controlled. Wind effect would be non-existent. All the same, it was hardly a serious murder weapon.

Unless …

The angle from which the scene had been filmed made it impossible to calculate precisely where the gun had been aimed. All that could be said for certain was that from the tilt of the barrel any shot had to hit somebody in the front row; it might have been aimed at any one of the group seated in the middle.

Releasing the still frame button before the shop owner had time to register what he was looking at, Monsieur Pamplemousse re-ran the sequence where the parrot took off. It was impossible to tell exactly what had caused it to panic. The noise of the crowd? Possibly.

Pommes Frites’ sudden lunge? That, too, was a possibility.

The squawk it uttered before it fell was barely audible above the sound of cheering.

Perhaps it had simply been a case of some sixth sense warning the bird of impending danger. Once again, for the moment at least, the point was academic.

The plain inescapable fact was that someone disguised as a nun had fired a gun at a member of the audience and by a million to one chance the
parrot had got in the way. One bird’s misfortune was someone else’s good luck. The 64,000 dollar, three in one question was: who fired the shot, at whom and why? The answer to any one of them would help answer the other two.

‘Would
Monsieur
like to see the tape again from the start? There is no extra charge.’

Clearly the shop owner was getting more and more intrigued with the whole thing.

‘
S’il vous plaît.
’ Monsieur Pamplemousse waited while the tape was being rewound. He hadn’t the least idea what he was looking for, but it struck him that he might as well get his 400 francs worth while he had the chance.

As the man set the video machine running again Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a start. He had totally forgotten the footage at the beginning of the tape. The forest he had registered on first viewing the tape looked totally different blown up and reproduced in full colour.

White trees metamorphosed into undulating limbs patently made of flesh and blood. That someone was doing something to someone else was obvious, but quite what was hard to say. The picture was distorted through the use of a wide-angle lens in extreme close-up. Much of it was going in and out of focus, and for the same reason the sound, although it came and went, at times sounding like a gale force wind, was clearly brought about by heavy
breathing in close proximity to the camera’s built-in microphone.

A large cigar seemed to play an important part in the proceedings, for the glowing end appeared from time to time as smoke billowed forth from most unlikely places.

For ‘someone in communications’, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse, read ‘porno movies’. You could argue that it was communication of a sort.

By now thoroughly roused from his post-prandial torpor, the shopkeeper reached for the remote controller. As he turned up the brightness he looked back over his shoulder.

‘I am a non-smoker,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, anticipating the question.

Having denied his role as performer, it struck him that he might well be under suspicion of having operated the camera. He wondered about Abeille. From his limited observation he could vouch for the fact that she wasn’t playing a starring role in the picture.

Crouching down in front of the video player, he overrode the remote control by pressing the
STOP
button, followed by
EJECT
. As the cassette popped out he quickly withdrew it before the shop owner had time to stop him. He looked the kind of person who might try and confiscate the tape for his own purposes.

‘Perhaps
Monsieur
would like to view it again in
comfort?’ Sweaty hands resumed their washing in invisible soap mode.

‘
Non
,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘I have seen enough.’

‘I run a copying service in the back room,
Monsieur
. It is possible we could do a deal. There are other things which might interest you. I have a selection of films and there is a private viewing theatre.’

‘
Non
,’ repeated Monsieur Pamplemousse firmly.

Having removed the miniature cassette from its holder, he reached inside his cape and slipped it into his trouser leg pocket alongside the notebook and the envelope Fabrice had given him.

Looking the other straight in the eye, he held up the empty adapter. ‘Would you be interested in buying one of these?’ he enquired. ‘Mint condition. Used once only.’

The man shook his head. ‘There is no call for them.’

‘That is a pity,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘I was hoping I might persuade the police to take a lenient view of your duplicating facilities when I talk to them. Alas …’

Four one hundred franc notes appeared as if by magic from the till. The man laid them on the counter as though hardly trusting himself to hand them over personally.

‘Next time
Monsieur
wishes to view such films I suggest he buys his own equipment.’

Out of the corner of his eye Monsieur Pamplemousse
caught sight of a woman with a small child sheltering in the doorway. There were two patches of steam on the glass; one above the other. The child asked a question and received a clip round the ear for its pains.

‘And I suggest,
Monsieur
, that next time you wish to show such films in your shop you make sure the blinds are drawn, otherwise you may find yourself in trouble under the corruption of minors section of the
Code Civile
.’

Closing the door behind him with a satisfactory bang, Monsieur Pamplemousse nodded a brief apology to the woman and made his way across the deserted
place
. He felt three pairs of eyes boring into his back. If the truth be known, there were probably others as well. Doubtless half the village had viewed the tape via cracks in blinds and shutters. And if they hadn’t, word would soon get around. It was the kind of place where very little would pass unnoticed. The bush telegraph would be busy.

As he entered
Paris Modes
(Madame Blanc: Prop. – late of Paris and Rome) his heart sank. Madame Blanc was not far short of being a mirror image of the man he had just left. Only the clothes and the unhappy addition of some lipstick on her front teeth distinguished the one from the other. They had to be brother and sister. Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered if they shared the same stone at night.
Between them they probably had the whole village tied up; a captive market forced to pay over the odds for anything that was needed.

Having exchanged minimal pleasantries he stifled his repugnance and grasped the nettle with both hands. ‘I am in need of some clothing … ladies clothing.’

Madame Blanc made a show of peering out of the window as though looking for someone.

‘
Madame
has had a puncture?’

Monsieur Pamplemousse shook his head. ‘I am on my own.’

‘Aah!’ Madame Blanc understood at once. She was used to dealing with gentlemen customers who wanted to surprise their wives.

‘It is for
Madame’s anniversaire
?’

‘
Non
,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘It is not.’ He almost added that he had no wish to fill in a questionnaire on the subject, but waited instead while the problem was considered and evaluated.

‘Then
Monsieur
is looking for something a little more general? A souvenir of the area, perhaps? A local costume?’

Monsieur Pamplemousse began to wish he had thought the conversation through beforehand instead of plunging straight in. He tried to remember what Abeille had been wearing. Apart from the négligée, not a lot. Common sense told him it would be as well to get something as near to the original as possible,
but looking around the shop he could see nothing remotely resembling any of it.