Monsieur Pamplemousse on the Spot (6 page)

‘No,
Monsieur,
it will not be possible to bring him in tomorrow morning.’ He glanced across the room at Pommes Frites. He hadn’t moved. ‘From the look of him he will not be going anywhere for some time to come. He has the appearance of one who has eaten a large quantity of plaster of Paris. Plaster of Paris which has now set hard …

‘He is in a wheelbarrow, here in my room at Les Cinq Parfaits …

‘I realise you have had a busy day,
Monsieur.
I, too, have had a busy day. I rose at six o’clock this morning. I have driven all the way from Paris and I, too, am very tired. But this is a matter of great importance and the utmost urgency …’

Monsieur Pamplemousse broke off in mid-sentence. He stared disbelievingly at the receiver. It was almost beyond belief but the person at the other end had actually hung up on him.

He hesitated for a moment or two, wondering whether to try again and offer a piece of his mind, or to telephone Durelle in Paris. Durelle would be more sympathetic. He also knew about Bloodhounds in general and Pommes Frites in particular. As one-time adviser to the Sûreté (
Division
Chiens
) he had known Pommes Frites during his early days with the force and was well used to his ways.

In the end Monsieur Pamplemousse decided against both courses of action. It was late and Pommes Frites’ breathing had become more regular. Regular and noisy. If he carried on at the present rate Les Cinq Parfaits would be liable to lose their red rocking-chair in the Michelin guide. He knew the signs. Soon the heavy breathing would turn into snores. Sleep for Monsieur Pamplemousse would become difficult, if not impossible. The way things were going he might be better off finding alternative accommodation for the night.

Several times Pommes Frites opened his mouth and licked his lips as if reliving in his dreams some recent experience of a gastronomic nature. Monsieur Pamplemousse lifted up one of his eyelids and immediately wished he hadn’t. The orb which met his gaze was bloodshot rather than hazel and totally devoid of expression. A strong smell of hay had begun to fill the room; hay and damp newsprint. It was not a pleasant combination.

Dropping Pommes Frites’ eyelid back into place, he essayed a few desultory tugs at the bedding and then gave it up as a bad job, resolving to leave matters in abeyance until the morning. At least Pommes Frites wasn’t getting worse and there was work to be done.

Heaving a deep sigh he crossed to a desk in the corner of the room and drew up a chair. Upending the envelope he had taken from Jean-Claude’s room revealed something which had escaped his notice the first time: a small cutting showing a group of skiers posing against a snow-covered mountainside. It must have been the other way up before – on the back he recognised part of a picture showing a stretch of water; it might have been anywhere. He turned the cutting over again. There were five people in the group – all male – two kneeling and three standing behind, arms
akimbo. Although as a group they looked blissfully happy, he was left with a strange and irrational feeling of unease. Against the man in the middle of the back row someone had inked in a black cross and a question-mark. He held the cutting up to the light to examine it more closely. Presumably it had either been cut from a glossy magazine, or from some kind of brochure.

Putting it to one side for future reference, he turned his attention to the remaining cuttings. Something about the type-face rang a bell. In fact, he’d seen it quite recently. A loud snore from behind reminded him; a moment’s comparison confirmed his suspicions. Bits of identical newsprint were sticking to Pommes Frites. They must have come from the
journal
he’d been lying on in the wood.

The odd thing was that although they looked genuine enough on the surface, many of them didn’t make sense. As with the cuttings, words were misspelt, letters transposed. The whole thing was clearly a fake; it couldn’t possibly ever have been a part of something seriously offered for sale to the general public. But why? For what purpose? Who would go to all the trouble of printing a mock-up of a
journal
simply to cut out particular words? Presumably they were meant to be put together at some stage to form a message, but why print the words separately to start with – why not print the entire message? And if they
had
gone to all that trouble, why not get it right? It was all so amateurish.

His senses quickened as he felt under Pommes Frites and came across another piece of newsprint from which a single word had been cut out, part of a headline which read
RUSSIAN SUBMARINE
…

A quick search through the pile of cuttings on his desk revealed the missing word:
DANGRE
. It was neatly pasted on to a sheet of plain paper, but when he held it underneath the gap in the original it fitted exactly.

He sat down again and counted the words. There were seventeen – none were duplicated. Gazing at them he found himself reminded of the time he’d spent in England shortly after the war. In an effort to improve his English he’d become a crossword addict, revelling in the cryptic
clues and the anagrams. The present problem was like an anagram, only using words instead of letters.

He set them out in no particular order, just as he had been in the habit of doing with the crossword:
OF
,
ONE
,
HURRY, MESSEGE, YOUR, DANGRE, MY, NEXT, POLICE,
LOVED, IS, NOT, AWAAIT, DO, IN-FORM, LIFE, IN.

Mathematically the number of possible combinations was beyond his ability to calculate. At least with a crossword one could eliminate certain letters by solving other clues, either across or down. He felt a bit like the proverbial monkey sitting at a typewriter trying to prove the theory that if it kept on typing at random for long enough it would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. That kind of time, however, was not at his disposal; according to the Director he only had until Friday at the latest.

Bringing logic to bear on the problem, he tried another approach – pairing certain words with each other in the hope of reducing the number of variations:
IN-FORM
with
POLICE, LIFE
with
DANGRE, LOVED
with
ONE, NEXT
with
MESSEGE
.

He added
AWAAIT
to
NEXT
MESSEGE
,
YOUR
to
LOVED
and
ONE
.

Suddenly things began to slip into place. He had a complete sentence:
AWAAIT NEXT MESSEGE OF YOUR LOVED ONE
.

Returning to the first two pairings, he added
MY
,
IS
and
IN
, and it became
IN-FORM POLICE MY LIFE IS IN DANGRE
, leaving him with
HURRY
,
DO
and
NOT
.

Laying the words out carefully in a long line Monsieur Pamplemousse reread the complete message:
IN-FORM
POLICE MY LIFE IS IN DANGRE. DO NOT HURRY. AWAAIT
NEXT MESSEGE OF YOUR LOVED ONE
.

A sense of elation came over him. He felt a sudden need to communicate his success. What was it the Director had said? My office telephone will be manned day and night. Perhaps even now he was sitting at his desk, drumming.

Reaching for the handset, Monsieur Pamplemousse pressed the appropriate button for an outside line and was halfway through dialling when he hesitated. What had he achieved? He’d pieced together a presumably as yet unsent
message, albeit in double-quick time, but it hadn’t got him any further. Repeated over the telephone it would sound like a non-event. It would trigger off a set of questions to which he had, as yet, no answers. Far better to sleep on the matter and allow his subconscious to do some of the work. Monsieur Pamplemousse was a great believer in the subconscious.

It had, in fact, already been at work. Even while he’d been dialling the office number it had sent out a message reminding him of something else the Director had said; a promise made, and one which he fully intended taking advantage of. The promise of a bottle of the d’Yquem ’45 when his mission had reached a satisfactory conclusion.

Deep down, Monsieur Pamplemousse was only too well aware that he had only really begun to scratch the surface of his problem, but scratches could widen into cuts, cuts into fissures, fissures into crevasses. There was no question of failure. Failure was not a word in his vocabulary;
consequently
it never entered his mind.

The evening had not been entirely without success. He now had things to work on. It was a cause for celebration. As a
digestif
and an aid to peaceful sleep while his
subconscious
got to work, he could think of nothing better than a glass or two of Sauternes.

He reached for the telephone again and pressed the button marked ‘Room Service’. It was more than likely that Les Cinq Parfaits, for all the riches which graced the pages of its wine-list, riches which reached back to long before he was born, would be unable to meet his request. It was asking a lot, but it was worth a try.

‘
Monsieur
is fortunate. We have only three bottles left. When they are gone we shall be reduced to the ’62s.’

‘Bring me two,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse in a sudden mood of recklessness. He would have one to be going on with and keep one for later, depending on the final outcome. It would help make up for a spoilt holiday and the absence of the
Soufflé
Surprise
he’d been so looking forward to.

If the man was surprised there was no sign of it in his voice. It might have been the kind of order he received
every night of his life. If there was any emotion at all it was one of respect; respect mingled with the faintest hint of regret.

‘Perhaps,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘you would care to share a glass with me as a nightcap – a little
boisson
prise
avant
de
se
coucher
?’

‘It would be an honour,
Monsieur
.’ He knew from the tone of the man’s voice that he had made a friend for life. Wine was a great leveller; a breaker-down of barriers.

The discreet knock on the door came sooner than expected. An assistant
sommelier,
still wearing his green baize apron, his badge of office – the silver
tastevin
– round his neck, entered the room pushing a trolley on which reposed two ice-buckets and two glasses. There was also a plate of wafer-thin biscuits. A palate cleanser.

Having circumnavigated Pommes Frites with scarcely more than a passing glance, he withdrew a bottle from one of the ice-buckets, holding it up with care for Monsieur Pamplemousse’s inspection.

Monsieur Pamplemousse assumed a suitably reverent expression, and then watched with approval while the
sommelier
went to work. From the painstaking way in which he removed the lead foil in one piece, pressing it out flat with obvious pleasure, he guessed the man must come from his own area. Only someone from the Auvergne would go to so much trouble over something which to most people would be relatively unimportant. It was strange how different areas produced people who gravitated towards certain jobs. Half the restaurants in Paris were owned or staffed by Auvergnese. If it was a Frenchman behind the wheel of a taxi, rather than an Asian, the chances were he would be from Savoie. He resolved that when the wine was finished he would replace the foil and add the bottle to his collection, a reminder of his time at Les Cinq Parfaits. Something else for Doucette to dust, as she would no doubt tell him.

Cork withdrawn, passed below the nose in an automatic gesture, the
sommelier
ran some pieces of ice round the inside of the glasses, then dried them and began to pour. Against the white of the cloth the wine was amber-gold,
tinged with yellow at the rim. It augured well. There was no sign of maderisation.

‘
Monsieur
.’ The
sommelier
handed him one of the glasses. Taking it by the base, Monsieur Pamplemousse held it up to the light, then down against the cloth,
regarding
it for a while, tilting it through forty-five degrees so that he could watch the ‘legs’ form on the inside. Satisfied at long last, he held the glass to his nose and savoured the rich, unmistakable, honeyed smell, powerful and concentrated.

The sweetness hit the tip of his tongue first. The flavour lingered long after the first mouthful, producing an aftertaste full of finesse and breeding.

‘It is how gold should taste.’

‘It will improve,
Monsieur.
A
soupçon
more of coldness.’

‘I have only tasted it once before and that was in company. Never have I had a whole bottle to myself, let alone two. It is too good to drink alone.’

They stood in silence for a while, then the
sommelier
put down his empty glass with a sigh of regret.

‘It is too good,
Monsieur,
for many people to drink at all. Unfortunately, in my profession one comes to realise that the best wine does not always go to those who appreciate it most.’

Pausing by the door, the man looked him straight in the eye. ‘Thank you again,
Monsieur
, and …
bonne
chance
.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse pondered the remark over a biscuit. Perhaps he was being over-sensitive, but in the circumstances and considering what time it was,
bonne
nuit
might have been more appropriate.

Pouring himself another glass of wine, he made his way into the bathroom. There was nothing more conducive to thought than a lingering hot bath and the notion of one enhanced by a bottle of Château d’Yquem was positively sybaritic.

But the bath produced little or no result other than an uneasy feeling that his presence at the hotel was a matter of some comment; that others knew far more than he did. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Most of his life he’d had to battle against such things. He would get there in the end.