Monsieur Pamplemousse on Probation (13 page)

At one point while his master was busy writing Pommes Frites pricked up his ears. His skill as a sniffer dog was never in any doubt, but he was also possessed of an acute sense of hearing. What to most people might have been the simple crunching of footsteps in the snow, not dissimilar to the sound of cotton wool being torn apart and equally innocuous, was immediately recognisable and identifiable.

It was just such a sound that had caught his attention, but since it was receding rather than coming closer, and since his master had just snapped his notebook shut, indicating it was time they were on their way, he chose to ignore it.

Back in the hotel room the red light indicating there was a message on the voicemail was flashing. Ignoring it for the time being, Monsieur Pamplemousse rang Room Service and ordered lunch. Apart from anything else, it was high time he and Pommes Frites had a get-together over a meal.

It turned out there were three messages for him.

The first was from Doucette wishing him
a happy Valentine’s Day and wondering if all was well since she hadn’t heard. Black mark Pamplemousse!

The second was from Shinko. ‘Sorry about the security system outside your room. I had it switched on after I saw you last night and for some strange reason a person or persons unknown deactivated it. Let me know what you would like me to do.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse replaced the telephone receiver and stood staring at it for a moment or two. It had crossed his mind to wonder why the alarm hadn’t gone off the night before, but he’d assumed Shinko hadn’t been able to oblige.

If someone had switched it off deliberately, then two could play at that game.

He picked up the phone, dialled the Paris code, and rang Trigaux on his direct line. He answered on the second ring.

Pleasantries disposed of, Monsieur Pamplemousse dived straight in. ‘Strictly between ourselves, I have a bit of a problem.’

‘So what’s new?’

‘I’m not sure if you can help. It’s a bit technical … to do with security …’

His ploy worked. Trigaux rose to the bait beautifully. In keeping with
Le Guide
going digital he had become something of a boffin on the subject
of security in general and computerised information techniques in particular. He was only too keen to air his knowledge, although there were times when he could have been speaking a different language. ‘Buzz words’ was one of his favourite phrases. Life became more complicated by the minute. Even making a telephone call was no longer simply a matter of dialling a number; according to Trigaux it involved GSM, the global system for Mobile Communication, with bits and bytes, and words like encryption, algorithms and data compression thrown in for good measure.

Monsieur Pamplemousse heard the sound of information being typed in while he was talking.

‘Is that all?’ asked Trigaux when he had finished.

‘It is possible?’

‘With all the facilities you have at your disposal you could send a picture to the moon if you wanted to.’

‘How about Paris?’ It occurred to him that the less he involved the hotel’s own security system the better.

‘Paris?
Pas de problème.
I could even get it plugged through to Monsieur Leclercq’s home in Fontainbleau if need be.’

‘You could?’

‘You know what a sucker he is for having all the latest gadgets. “We must do everything possible,
Trigaux, to make sure
Le Guide
is brought up to speed and on to the loop.”’ Trigaux did a passable imitation of Monsieur Leclercq in full flight.

Monsieur Pamplemousse hoped the Director wasn’t within earshot.

‘Leave it with me. I’ll come back to you on that. I’ll just have to check a few things first.’

Déjeuner
arrived just as Monsieur Pamplemousse was about to listen to the third message and there was barely time to usher Pommes Frites into the bedroom before he heard the sound of an entry card operating the lock and a ubiquitous trolley with a bevy of polished domes nosed its way in.

A chilled bottle of ’93 Leflaive Puligny Montrachet opened, tasted and approved, the bill signed and the waiter safely on his way, Monsieur Pamplemousse disposed rapidly of some
amuse-gueules
– tiny
gougères
of
choux
pastry filled with a mixture of Gruyère and Parmesan cheese. He was on his last one by the time Pommes Frites rejoined him.

Tucking one corner of a large white napkin inside his collar, he refilled the glass and set to work on a bowl of
soupe aux écrevisses de rivière
, a dish of such an exquisite delicacy of taste it almost defied analysis. It would have been tempting to report it as a magical experience, but magic had nothing to with it; an infinite attention to
detail would be nearer the truth. Underlying the dominant flavour of crayfish, he detected onion, tomato, carrot to give it body, tarragon, and what must have been a
bouquet garni
of other herbs. There was a hint of garlic, too; armagnac and cream had been added, possibly port wine. In the interest of continuing his researches, he would happily have called for another bowl and made that his complete meal. It had been a delight to all the senses.

On the other hand, such dilly-dallying wouldn’t have gone down at all well with Pommes Frites. Pommes Frites wasn’t deeply into
amuse-gueules
. In his opinion they were usually so small they constituted a complete waste of time. Nor was he particularly enamoured of
soupe aux écrevisses de rivière
. A couple of good laps and it was gone. He much preferred diving straight in to the viandes section of the menu; in this instance a vast plate of local
charcuterie
: ham, both raw and baked in pastry with Madeira, cold meats of various kinds, liver sausage, several generous slices of pork liver
pâté
and a selection of home-made
boudin
.

Monsieur Pamplemousse left him to it while he helped himself to some cheese from another plate. By the time he had taken the first bite from a slice of
Fourme de Cantal
, once again at the end of its curing period, but clearly from a local farm and
beautifully kept, Pommes Frites had licked his plate clean and had his eyes on a plate of assorted
tartelettes.

Monsieur Pamplemousse pretended not to have noticed.

Of the three –
orange, pruneaux
and
citron
– he decided he liked the
citron
best and he was glad he had left it until last. It cut through the sweetness of the first two and prepared his taste buds for the bowl of deliciously plain yoghurt.

By the time he had finished, a response from Trigaux was coming through on the fax machine. Having spent most of his life in the dark, approachable only when the red warning light outside his darkroom was off, coming out into the open seemed to have given him a new lease of life. He liked nothing better than to be faced with a problem he could get his teeth into and he had certainly gone to town on this one. There were eight pages in all, including a long list of requirements and a hand-drawn schematic diagram of the necessary connections for a hook-up.

Seeing the voicemail indicator still blinking reminded Monsieur Pamplemousse that he hadn’t listened to the third message.

It was the Director. ‘This is terrible news, Aristide. I have just heard it on the car radio. Doubtless you
will bring me up to speed as soon as possible. In the meantime …’

He could hear Véronique’s voice in the background and the sound of two more telephones ringing. He never did catch the end of the Director’s message.

Calling reception, Monsieur Pamplemousse asked if he could possibly speak to Shinko. Luck was with him. He was put through almost straight away.

‘Can you talk?’

‘Sort of …’

‘I suggest you leave the security alarm for the time being.’

‘D’accord.
Let me know if you change your mind.’

‘I hear the news is not good.’

‘Worse than not good. Doomsville.’ It sounded as though she had her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Someone got into the hospital during the night and put a bullet into
you know who
.’

On the spur of the moment he asked a question which had been on his mind.

‘You don’t have a camera I could borrow, do you?’

‘Me? You must be joking. I’ll see what I can do for you if you like.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse thanked her, declined the offer and rang off.

He wondered if he should try phoning the
Director back, then decided against it. There was nothing he could say for the time being. Instead, he picked up the pile of faxes, skimmed through them again, then signalled Pommes Frites to make ready.

Clearly a visit to the local
bricolage
was high on the agenda, and the way things were going the sooner they took off the better.

‘Pamplemousse, I cannot tell you what a stroke of good fortune this is. It couldn’t have happened at a more opportune moment. I think it is safe to say that Michelin have nothing remotely like it in their pipelines.

‘I trust you will let this go no further, but without revealing any names, Chantal and I are entertaining some highly placed members of the upper echelons of government this evening. A summit meeting of heads of state is scheduled to take place in France in two months’ time and my advice has been sought as to a suitable venue.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse could picture the scene. The Director’s house, situated as it was on the edge of a tranquil forest glade some 30km south-west of Paris, was ideally placed for high-powered
discussions of a confidential nature. Indeed, had it been any larger it would have made an ideal
rendezvous
for the summit meeting itself.

No doubt the hedges surrounding the equally tranquil gardens would be given a final tonsorial going-over that afternoon to ensure they would be standing to attention when the guests arrived.

The Director was in his element on such occasions. He loved doing things in style. Monsieur and Madame Leclercq were the only people he knew who had their table laid with antique Sèvres plates solely for show. As in many of the grander three Stock Pot restaurants, where using them as even a temporary depository for the odd olive stone was considered bad form, they were removed before the food arrived lest their delicate surface be damaged in any way.

‘I suggested the Hôtel Dulac some weeks ago,’ continued the Director, ‘because it meets all the stringent requirements. It is remotely situated. It has a helicopter landing pad. The cuisine is, or was until recently, of the highest order, the service and attention to detail beyond reproach, and I trust you will solve that little problem in the not too distant future. Above all, there is their unparalleled investment in matters relating to security. Your latest efforts in that direction are the icing on the cake as it were and I hope will set the seal on the case I have put forward.’

‘It is only an experiment,
Monsieur
,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse nervously. ‘A spur of the moment idea …’

‘Spur of the moment ideas are at the very heart of progress,’ boomed the Director. ‘Trigaux assures me there is no technical reason why the test shouldn’t go ahead successfully. As for the untimely demise of Dulac, it is, of course, an unforeseen setback, but if all I hear is true and the perpetrators of the crime are merely two dropouts, not only socially disadvantaged, but physically as well, there will be no slur attached …’

Monsieur Pamplemousse listened with only half an ear. The Director was, in any case, his own best audience and there were times when he needed no other.

It was no wonder Lafarge was anxious to get the case tied up as quickly as possible. Having a summit meeting take place on his territory would be a big feather in his cap. The Director, too, would be able to bask in the reflected glory should his advice be taken. As for his talk of killing two
oiseaux
with one stone … three
oiseaux
would be more like it. For all Monsieur Pamplemousse knew there might be other fledglings just around the corner waiting to leave the nest.

‘And the Twingo,
Monsieur
?’ he broke in. ‘What are your plans for that?’

Monsieur Leclercq dismissed the interruption with a metaphorical wave of his hand, much as one might brush away an errant fly. Clearly, it was a case of one problem at a time.

‘I am doing what I should have done in the first place, Aristide. I am making arrangements with a Renault agency in Roanne. There is one in the avenue Gambetta near the
gare
. You can drop it off there when you have concluded your investigations. Afterwards you and Pommes Frites can complete the journey by train.

‘In the meantime I will send a letter of authority to the appropriate person. As for the Hôtel Dulac, in accordance with our normal policy we will leave the allocation of Stock Pots blank for a year and take it from there. As ever, there will an inevitable drop in trade, but if they do play host to an international conference the publicity will be enormous and it will soon pick up again.

‘Now I suggest we synchronise watches.
Dîner
this evening is 19.30 for 20.00. Allowing time for
apéritifs
, we are scheduled to be seated by 20.30. The ideal time for your demonstration will be after the first course – we are having
Feuilleté de Saint-Jacques aux truffes
– so, shall we say 21.00? That is four hours, thirteen minutes from now.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse went through the motions of synchronising his Cupillard Rième
watch with the Director’s. He made it only four hours twelve minutes, but anything to keep him happy. Then, with the final injunction: ‘Remember, Pamplemousse, we are merely making use of the technology which exists to connect those who are in need of information with those who have it in their power to provide it. It is as simple as that …’ ringing in his ears, he replaced the receiver and surveyed the tangle of cables on the floor.

It was all very well for the Director to talk. He didn’t have to do any of the connecting.

Picking up the sub-miniature video camera he had removed from the parking area outside, a Toshiba with a wide-angle lens and a light sensitivity down to 0.04 lux, whatever that might mean (according to Trigaux, it was more than adequate for the job in hand), he tried attaching it to one of the dog harnesses he had purchased in the village. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but he was beginning to have his doubts.

Pommes Frites eyed his master equally dubiously as he began putting two and two together. First there had been all the measuring he had undergone in the shop, now this …

Not since he’d been on his induction course had he worn a harness, and the one his master was working on at that moment was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was more akin to the
kind of jacket he’d occasionally seen being used to calm people down when they were taken in for questioning and didn’t want to go.

Searching through the thirty-one different features contained within the Victorinox Swiss Army knife, rejecting one by one such things as the corkscrew, the tiny wood saw and an equally small wood chisel, Monsieur Pamplemousse found the tools he thought looked most suitable for the task in hand and set to work, musing as he did so that there were times in life when everything seemed preordained. Who would have thought,
par exemple
, that the simple fact of the Director’s horse getting a stone in one of its hooves would come in useful so many years later.

Rabillier, who ran the stores and was responsible for ordering a supply of the knives in the first place, always maintained it had been a bit of equine subterfuge on the horse’s part; a mute protest over the Director’s increasing weight. But like many in his calling he had become more and more of a cynic over the years and viewed the world beyond his counter with a jaundiced eye. Glandier maintained the day would come when he wouldn’t hand over anything at all to anyone.

Monsieur Pamplemousse wasn’t sure which feature proved the most useful in the end; the fine screwdriver, the awl, the toothpick, the magnifying
glass, or the fish scaler with its hook disgorger; but in combination they did the job admirably.

Reflecting on a job well done, he doubted if even in his wildest dreams, Karl Elsener, perfectionist that he was, could have pictured back in 1891 that one day his invention would become the gift of presidents,
de rigueur
aboard NASA’s
Columbia
space shuttle, and prove a godsend, not just to officers in the Swiss Army, but to people in all walks of life, from students to farmers, from lumberjacks to climbers, and from fishermen to food inspectors wishing to attach a small device to the top of a bloodhound’s head so that pictures could be transmitted over vast distances, even to the moon and back if the need arose. He wouldn’t have believed it himself not so long ago.

Had he been able to find the tiny ballpoint pen which was in there somewhere, he would have sat down and written a letter of thanks to Monsieur Elsener’s successors.

In the main, the booklet which accompanied every knife happily confined itself to illustrating such humdrum tasks as the peeling of apples and the straightening of ladies’ eyelashes. But for anyone who felt the need to attach a miniature video camera and its associated equipment to a dog, it was ideal.

It was a testament to the hardness of the chrome
molybdenum stainless steel awl that it managed to penetrate a piece of old leather so hard and so misshapen it was impossible to tell what its original purpose had been, if indeed it ever had one. Having first applied a plaster to a surface wound on his right knee, which had been briefly pierced at the same time, Monsieur Pamplemousse set about carrying out some running repairs to his fingernails with the aid of the scissors and a file.

Pommes Frites, for his part, was beginning to look less and less enthusiastic about the whole thing. After his master had finished attaching everything to him, he shook himself several times, and when that didn’t work, he attempted to dislodge it all by the simple expedient of arching his back and crawling under the table until he got himself stuck.

Leaving him where he was for a moment or two in the hope that he would become accustomed to his new role, Monsieur Pamplemousse switched on the nearest television receiver, applied power to the camera and the transmitter module, then ran through the channels until he found the right one.

Pommes Frites’ eyes grew large as a picture unfolded itself on the screen, rolled over once or twice, went white all over, then quickly darkened as the camera automatically adjusted itself to the ambient light in the room.

A series of thuds caused by a tail making contact
with the underside of a glass tabletop signalled his seal of approval as the television settled down to reveal the face of his master looking down at him.

Monsieur Pamplemousse breathed a sigh of relief. He picked up the telephone receiver and dialled Trigaux’s number. So far, so good. He had cleared the first and potentially most problematic hurdle. From now on he was content to let others take over.

For the first time since he had arrived in Pouligny Monsieur Pamplemousse was actually enjoying himself.

Trigaux summed it all up in one word –
parfait
! An hour and a half had passed since Monsieur Pamplemousse first called him to say that everything was all right at his end and now, the final link having been established via the World Space Digital Broadcasting System, everything was in its place and working.

The Director was fulsome in his praise and positively oozing satisfaction. ‘At the risk of being boring, Pamplemousse,’ he boomed, ‘I say again, this couldn’t have happened at a more opportune moment. If everything goes according to plan it will be a signal honour for us all.’

Such was Monsieur Pamplemousse’s own state of euphoria he hadn’t even noticed Monsieur Leclercq
repeating himself. All the gossip he’d heard since he had arrived at the Hôtel Dulac, much of it exaggerated no doubt, but serious none the less; talk of itching powder finding its way into the air-conditioning system, and
alors!
the time when a dead rat had been found in the main drinking water tank, paled into insignificance.

Seeing pictures appear on the television in his room as Pommes Frites, the camera perched on his head, set off on his rounds, made even the murder of Monsieur Dulac seem like yesterday’s news. It was akin to the never-to-be-forgotten moment when, as a small boy, electricity had first been installed in his parents’ home. For days afterwards the simple act of switching the light on and off had been a magical experience.

As for Pommes Frites, he was positively revelling in his new role of roving investigative reporter, although in the nature of things he missed the best bits because each time he rushed back to the hotel to see what was happening on the television he registered surprise because it still showed the inside of the room. Monsieur Pamplemousse tried recording a section in the hope that he might connect cause with effect, but it still didn’t work. In his own simple way, seeing the look of pleasure on his master’s face was, in itself, sufficient reward. The frequent pats on the head, icing on the cake.

Pommes Frites’ explorations took the shape of ever-widening circles. First there was the copse. Then he ventured as far as the main gates. That was followed by the helicopter landing pad, fortunately deserted, then he took in the dining room. Anyone happening to glance out of the window and seeing him go past might well have had second thoughts about the wine.

It occurred to Monsieur Pamplemousse that Inspector Lafarge would have a field day in the morning when he saw all the trails running hither and thither. It would be interesting to hear his theories.

He waited five minutes until his watch said 20.55 before sending Pommes Frites off on his first serious patrol. The sky was clear, and with the moon approaching its zenith, conditions couldn’t have been better. The picture he was receiving in his room was quite extraordinarily clear. Better, in fact, than if he had been there in person. He heard a round of applause over the telephone line. It was accompanied by the sound of clinking glasses and cries of
‘Bravo! Bravo!
’

‘Excellent, Aristide. Excellent.’ The Director’s voice sounded muffled. He either had his hand over the telephone receiver or he had fallen behind with the
Feuilleté de Saint-Jacques
. Monsieur Pamplemousse strongly suspected the latter. He
looked at his watch. The galling part about the whole thing, of course, was that once again as far as he was concerned it might well turn out to be a case of eating in his room. There would be no great call for the toothpick attachment to his Victorinox knife.

‘This is most exciting,’ continued the Director. ‘Not dissimilar I imagine to the moment when a Frenchman first discovered television.’