The Widow (17 page)

‘Is that a commonplace?'

‘Deer or badgers or stuff in wooded country is, fairly much so. Less in city limits, natch, but there's woodland cover down to the Rhine in plenty; it's not unheard of. And of course boys and lunatics put logs and stones and stuff as obstructions, but that's a different kind of impact. Instructions are standard, stop and examine for damage or irregularity, which he does, and oh Yaysus, so of course he backs up, phones through; the first enquirers, firemen and S.N.C.F. security man were there in twenty minutes. One look sufficed to show him the fella's beyond help, and rightly his concern is then with railway security, there's an immobilized freight convoy on the line. Frequency of traffic on that line, anything between ten and thirty minutes.

‘So what can we conclude? You take your dog walking maybe a fifteen-minute stretch along the line, you've a chance in one, two or three of meeting a train. Short odds. Conclusion, fatality due to imprudence and the likelihood of stumbling. Dog was not on leash but distracted him, or he was just
plain preoccupied, and you're a witness to a certain mental disturbance.'

‘And there's no enquiry past that point?' asked Arlette.

‘That's the technical enquiry,' said Mr Simon reprovingly, turning more pages. ‘City Security makes of course the usual verification. One doesn't classify as suicide without a strong leader, which is why our statistics are cock, really, because hospitals will always mark accident out of consideration for relatives. Wife much distraught, unsurprisingly, states no ground for suicide. No outstanding heavy debts or obligations. Pattern of life normal. Books at work audited recently, director of firm categoric about everything normal. Quite frankly, the thing is classified and goes to the file: there's no earthly reason to keep it open.'

‘It's necessarily quite superficial that, isn't it?' This sounded tactless. ‘Not as though you had done it, for example,' she added hastily, making things no better.

‘Listen, Mrs Davidson,' patiently. ‘Your husband's a scientist, and a criminologist, and friends with the Commissaire. Normal, you feel there should be a thorough patient enquiry into this because it troubles you, and that's normal too. Why? Because you're personally involved, or feel so. You saw the fellow alive, and he's more than a statistic. Human; I understand it. But if we made an exhaustive enquiry on every death where would we be? Ask yourself that.'

‘I'm grateful, and I'm ashamed to have taken up your time.'

‘No, that's all right, it's nothing out of the way. You – you apologize. You should see how many pester us. Do they apologize – ever? Ho.'

‘I suppose there wasn't an autopsy?' she said at the door.

‘Autopsy!' said Simon, quite near breaking into manic laughter. ‘Now, what are you looking at? Fellow's exploded, like he's jumped off the tenth storey. They shovelled him up. Second, why? Like he'd taken some drug or medicament, made him dizzy or sleepy? Standard question, put to wife,'
turning pages back. ‘Was your husband following a course of treatment? Or had he recently consulted a doctor? Answer, no and no. Not to the lady's knowledge. And she'd be the one to know, right?'

‘Thanks' she said. The earnest amateur, worrying. The fusspot female, working itself up. Truth! ‘Terewth? – what is Terewth?' as Arthur, quoting Mr Chadband, frequently said. ‘Approximations, averages, and goosed-up statistics.' Like the man said, who knows really what the suicide rate is? People have already so many forms to fill in: suggest that they fill in a few more and they will find their consciences become elastic.

She walked home, across the tatty patch of open ground between the University campus and the Krutenau. It was sunny, warm and still. Students sat or strolled and chatted; a shirt-sleeved careless group played football. She came out by the students' cafeteria, crossed the Boulevard de la Victoire, and was as good as home.

What did it all amount to? Silly … housewifely … busybody… What had she managed to do? Given Norma some advice she didn't need. Complicated Marie-Line's existence by stiffening both father and daughter. And done no good at all to Albert Demazis. She'd failed to gain his confidence, and she'd failed to know anything about him.

Was he what Arthur had thought, and what the police plainly thought, a mildly neurotic person, not feeble-minded but what the shrink would call fragile-minded? Commonplace type, spinner of fantasies, teller of tales, who went a step further and began to act out his scenario?

Or as she had thought a sad and frightened man under a burden, who had not known how to bear it, asked for help, been disappointed, relapsed into a fatal indecisiveness, stretching as far as a death that was neither a true suicide nor a true accident.

She had been a flop either way.

Desolately she sat at home and had a drink; thought that
for some days now the grub had been a bit substandard and hadn't she better do something about that?

Was it only the alcohol that hardened her resolve? You will not cave in, she told herself.

Come on; show some grace under pressure.

But why had she been shot at? Such an idiotic thing to happen, so wildly melodramatic.

Paul Friedmann had been sceptical.

‘Syllogism. Place is full of twenty-two rifles. They're not controlled – heaven knows why, since pistols are. Far more accurate and have a far greater range. Thus more dangerous. Typically French, this, like forbidding alcohol advertising, and importing more alcohol.

‘Two, place is full of feeble-minded individuals with vague rancours and resentments against society.

‘Conclusion; assemble the two sets of statistics and they overlap. People do let off rifles in the street, not aiming at anybody in particular. Does them good, if one may so put it, to make a bang and break some glass. Probably someone whose very old Renault got a flat tyre and who got extremely cross at you sailing by in that heavenly Lancia. Shit, even arouses my envy.'

‘No,' said Arthur, after Paul had gone, bearing Marie-Line with him, a Marie-Line delighted with Paul, delighted with the white Alfa Romeo, delighted with adventures: wait till they heard about all this
Chez Mauricette
… ‘No. Too much like an ambush. Too much premeditation. The shot was too carefully placed.'

Arthur had had a fright, and been cross about that. He had calmed down.

“‘A voice called to him”,' he said meditatively, ‘“to stand out of the moonlight or he would get some lead in him, and the same moment a bullet whistled close by his arm.”'

‘What's that?'

‘
Treasure Island,'
said Arthur straight-faced.

‘Intimidation?'

‘It's been in my mind from the start. Anybody whose business is action, not academic speculation like mine, gets vague threats, feeble-minded vengeances, little nastinesses. I took that, as I thought, into consideration. You know, obscene phone calls. Hence various precautions, filter on the front door, peepholes etcetera, the recorder. But guns … I want to think about this.'

Arlette did some cooking, a bit desultory; she was restless. Prowled about. She hadn't had the nerve to tell Inspector Simon about the car windscreen. He would have raised his eyebrows, struck an attitude, and said ‘Play it again, Sam'. Like Arthur.

‘You take the gun, Trelawney, you're the best shot'. The phone call whispering to her was the same. These were the antics of mentally-retarded adolescents, surely.

Look dear, Dingus talks to you in a silly mysterious way, and a day later he slips on the railway line. You instantly get yourself worked up.

‘No, no; NO,' she said crossly to the kitchen wall. ‘I Won't get worked up. But I'm not going to cave meekly in. I won't get told by some little peejay cop, that I'm a fragile-minded female and back to the saucepan, dear.' She went into the living-room, poured herself a whisky, and in mockery put the record of
My Defences are Low
on the player.

She stood in the window embrasure to watch for Arthur's arrival. Would somebody take a shot at the window? Let them! She was derisively aware that this was due to the size of the whisky, and didn't give a damn.

Arthur arrived driving the Lancia, with a spanking-new-sparkly-clean windscreen.

Arthur, however, was serious. He turned the player down a little, sat, started to fill his pipe and said, ‘I'm wondering whether I haven't made a frivolous mistake, dragging you into all this.'

‘You mean that I really did get shot at?'

‘I mean that nobody knows much about violence. There are the obvious things like alcohol, people in urban high-density conditions, aggressivity on the road, stuff like that. A lot of fragmentary work has been done. It's a large, shapeless subject. It occurred to me that among other experiments this one would have value. Now I'm not so sure. Evil-minded persons can be nasty in small vicious ways. I think that you should not get involved with the hare-brained: perhaps after all we should leave it to the professionals.'

‘I went through a stage of thinking the same thing. I've changed my mind. I was very uncertain and discouraged. But no – I'm not going to renounce.'

‘What changed it?'

‘The professionals. I was down at the P.J. I saw this Simon. He had the file on Demazis. They don't enter into it at all, because of course there's no earthly ground for supposing homicide. Municipal police. Railway police. Technically it's very thorough. I couldn't have done any of that.'

‘But?'

‘But, there are several buts. Like there's no background. They ask the wife whether he had dizzy spells, they ask his employer whether his books were straight. Nobody asks what he was doing on the railway line in the first instance. It's a silly, wild sort of thing to do. Like coming to me. Why doesn't he come again, he rings up and cancels, and next day he's dead on a railway line.

‘The professionals are aware of these gaps. They're resigned to the fact that their machine which works very closely and competently on areas that interest them isn't adapted to the
oddities. And there are too many oddities. I'm gabbling; I've had a lot of whisky.'

‘Go on.'

‘They shrug. Resigned to the fact that nobody enquires into the borderline of suicide or accident. Result, a lot of homicides go quite unsuspected. Simon, when I told him what I knew, said perfectly justly that you couldn't measure neurosis in a dead man. Like those car suicides where people who couldn't push themselves into jumping off the bridge provoke an accident. Dodging the responsibility as it were. To him this could be one of those. Mixture of bravado and cowardice.'

‘Calling you up was a theatrical scenario to make it all more grand and important?'

‘I don't want to speculate.'

‘But can you ever find out?'

‘I can try. The amateur can find areas that the professional doesn't bother with. I don't know what, yet. But if there was any intimidation, it simply stiffens my resolve.'

‘Mm,' said Arthur. ‘You mustn't take it so personally.'

‘No. I won't make an obsession of it. Let's just keep our end up. Not be hustled by the likes of Siegel.'

‘By the way, I drafted your letter. I can redo it this afternoon. If you don't like it, that is.'

‘Marie-Line's worth an effort. And we mustn't let this wretched Siegel imagine the whole of Strasbourg stands tugging at its forelock. Show.'

“Your correspondent's letter is a distortion.
“The public has the right to seek advice and aid. Numerous organisations provide this in specific circumstances. By the nature of bureaucracy their action is belated, devious, often bewildering and frequently inefficient.
“The private advice bureau does not compete with state or municipal services. It may help in approach to them, or to simplify procedure.
“It functions where no competent authority exists: these cases are too numerous to mention.
“In all cases, it is to be judged on its merits.
“The accusation of fishing in troubled water for a profit motive is categorically denied. In my case, consultation costs nothing; in no instance do I ask payment before a problem has been explained and an action agreed upon.
“In professions offering services to the public a code of deontology, of ethical behaviour, must exist and be enforced. Where controlled by a governing body, malpractice may still exist and remain for long undetected. The private bureau, self-disciplined, must be judged by its practice. It exists to combat apathy, as much as to lessen abuse, and even corruption.
“No ethical practitioner will advise a minor unbeknown to the parents or guardians, recommend action contrary to known parental opinion, nor undertake action without parental consent, save where the interest of the minor, as in cases of ill-treatment, demands the intervention of authority.
“In accordance with the legal right of reply these words are addressed to the newspaper for insertion.”

‘Well,' said Arlette, ‘You take the gun, Trelawney, you're the best shot.'

‘Pompous enough? You could have done it just as well, you know.'

‘So I could, no doubt. What counts with me is not that I could, but that you should.'

Arthur contemplated her, with pleasure.

‘The Widow,' said Arlette, ‘is now thoroughly married.'

‘No need for Paul, though I'll get him to check it. I phoned the paper, belabouring them slightly with my own impressive professional titles. They were conciliatory, and promise full amends. They were jockeyed of course by Siegel: they won't admit he frightened them. Their legitimate claim is the right to campaign against shyster agencies. So we get that settled.'

‘Is it necessary? I mean I was wondering whether to adopt dignified contemptuous silence.'

‘No it's needed; failure to deny an accusation, in the public's eye, is tantamount to admitting its foundation. And it gives us a definition. I was vague myself on the point: I mean that a sociologist does not as a rule offer consultations to the public. I'm taking it up with Paul, to protect you if necessary. You don't, you see, offer legal or medical treatment, which is where there'd be an infringement and a charge of illegal practice. Paul was extremely funny about the jurisprudence involving faith-healers and witch-doctors.'