In the living-room sat Madame Herault. But she stood to receive her foreign visitor, and switched off her radio too. She looked like her daughter, but was between thirty and forty years older. She patted her hair and said something about how Dominique should have warned her. To which Dominique replied that if she had warned her mother, her mother would merely have tired herself out cleaning and making cakes and dressing herself up, when they were only staying for fifteen minutes or so. Then Dominique said she had to go to her room and change. Barclay was made to sit on the huge springy sofa which reminded him unnervingly of the 2CV’s suspension.
‘Keep Mama company, will you?’ Dominique asked in English. ‘I won’t be long. Oh, and if she offers you some of her calvados ... refuse it.’
And with that she was gone. Madame Herault, still standing, asked him if he would like something to drink? He didn’t, but nodded anyway, since Madame Herault fixing him something to drink was preferable to Madame Herault sitting expecting him to make conversation with her. Then he remembered the warning about the calvados.
‘Pastis, s’il vous plait,‘ he said.
But a drink was not enough. He would have something to eat, too, wouldn’t he? Barclay shook his head, patting his stomach.
‘Complet,’ he said, hoping it was the right word.
She persisted, but he persisted too. Just a drink, a drink would be very good.
‘Calvados?’ Madame Herault asked.
Barclay shook his head. ‘Pastis, s’il vous plait,‘ he insisted.
So off she went to fetch him a pastis. He released a great intake of air, and smilingly chastised himself for his original thoughts regarding Dominique’s intentions. The room was comfortably old-fashioned, exuding what seemed to him a particularly French sort of genteel shabbiness. The ornaments were too ornate, the furniture too bulky. The dresser was enormous, and should have stood in a chateau entrance hall rather than a second-floor Parisian apartment. He wondered how they’d got it into the room in the first place. The obvious answer seemed to be: through the large windows. A block and tackle job from street level. Yes.
God, he thought, what am I doing here? I should have stayed in the car. She’s been teasing me, hasn’t she? She could have said it was her mother’s place. She could have told me her mother would be home. Instead of which, Dominique had let him think his own thoughts, teasing him. Little vixen.
Madame Herault carried a tray back into the room. Barclay had risen from the sofa and was examining some framed photographs on top of an upright piano. There was one of a man in police uniform.
‘Mon mari,’ explained Madame Herault. ‘Il est mort.’
She placed the tray on a footstool. There was a long slim glass containing an inch of pastis and a single ice-cube. There was also a jug of water, and a saucer on which sat some plain biscuits. She motioned with the jug and poured until he told her to stop. Then she handed him the glass and picked up the photograph, giving him some long story of which Barclay made out probably most of the relevant facts. Monsieur Herault had been a policeman in Paris, a detective. But a terrorist bomb had blown him up ten years ago. He’d been helping to evacuate shoppers from a department store where a bomb was said to be hidden. But it had gone off sooner than expected ...
She gave a rueful smile and picked up another photograph, a beaming schoolgirl.
‘Dominique,’ she said, quite unnecessarily. Barclay nodded. She looked up at him. ‘Tres belle.’ He nodded again. For want of anything else to add, he gulped at the drink. Mother of God, it was strong! He lifted a biscuit to disguise his discomfort. But the biscuit disintegrated in his hand, falling like bits of bomb-blast to the floor.
Madame Herault apologised and went to kneel to pick the pieces up, but Barclay was already down on his knees, his fingers trying to lift the tiny pieces without them splintering further.
And that was the scene which presented itself to Dominique when she entered the room. The crumbs collected, more or less, Barclay got to his feet and helped Madame Herault to hers. Dominique had changed into a knee-length skirt, showing off legs which, even in the dim light of the apartment, Barclay could see were tanned and smooth. She had a jacket slung over her shoulder, and wore a crisp white blouse with a small gold cross on a chain around her neck.
‘Drinking in the middle of the day?’ she chided him. ‘We’ve still got a lot of work to do, Michael, remember?’ Then she said something in a rush of French to her mother, and her mother replied in an even faster rush, her cadences soaring and plummeting. He finished his drink while the conversation went on, noticing Dominique glancing towards him from time to time. When he made to replace the empty glass on the tray, she signalled, with the slightest jerk of her head, that it was time to go. This was actually hard to achieve, since Madame Herault seemed to have a lot she still wanted to say to him, and there were hands to be shaken, cheeks to be kissed.
‘Oui, Mama, oui,’ Dominique kept saying, her exasperation increasing. Finally, they were at the front door, and with a final push from Dominique herself Barclay found himself on the stairs and starting his descent. But Madame Herault came to the stair-head and continued to call down instructions to her daughter.
‘Oui!’ Dominique called back. ‘Bien sûr! D’accord. A ce soir, Mama! Ce soir!‘
The street, the dull claustrophobic street, seemed suddenly a huge and necessary release, a refuge. Even Dominique sighed and fanned her face with her hand before getting back into the car. She didn’t say anything as she keyed the ignition, checked behind her, and started off along the street. But, edging out into the traffic at the end of the road, she remarked simply, ‘That was my mother.’
‘Really?’ replied Barclay.
His irony escaped her. ‘Yes, really.’
‘She was charming, so like her daughter.’
She pursed her lips. ‘I should have warned you.’
‘Yes, you bloody well should.’
She laughed. ‘Tell me, Mr Michael Barclay, what were you thinking?’
‘When?’
‘When I led you up the stairs.’
‘I was wondering why the stairwell smelled like the London Underground.’
The answer surprised her. She glanced at him. ‘Really?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ he said. And he kept his eyes on the windscreen, well away from her bare tanned legs as they worked brake, clutch and accelerator.
‘Mama kissed you twice,’ Dominique mused. ‘I think you made an impression of her.’
‘An impression on her,’ Barclay corrected.
‘Well, anyway,’ Dominique added with a smile, ‘you made an impression.’ And she laughed, suddenly and brightly.
By a strange twist of fate, Jean-Claude Separt’s apartment-cum-studio was the sort of place Barclay had imagined Dominique’s apartment would be. It was obvious that cartoonists, even (especially?) left-wing cartoonists, could live very comfortably in France. The apartment took up the whole top storey of a sandblasted block near Odeon. ‘Tres cher, tres chic,’ Dominique kept saying as they made their way up in the lift to the penthouse. They’d spoken about Separt on the way to Paris, talking about the garret he would inhabit, vermin-ridden and with unsold tracts and pamphlets piled to the ceiling. Preconceptions were there to be broken. Here was the second (only the second?) shattered preconception of the day.
Barclay knew his place. He was Dominique’s colleague, a police officer from England (but not London; nowhere as important as London) on an exchange programme and spending the day with Dominique, who was herself a lowly police officer, a trainee in one of the administrative departments. They were here to interview Monsieur Separt regarding the theft of his motor vehicle, for a scheme called, as far as Barclay could work it out, the Vehicle Repatriation Register Survey. Well, something like that. Dominique had prepared some questions, and had written them down on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. She looked the part, he decided. Her clean, efficient clothes were just a b
it too clean and efficient - the sort of outfit a trainee would wear when wanting to impress with the notion that they wouldn’t stay a trainee forever. And she’d got rid of her lipstick, so that her face was a little plainer. It was perfect.
So was Separt’s apartment. He was fat and greying with cropped hair and a grizzled beard. He wore faded denims, baggy at the knees and ankles, but tight at the stomach. He wore a short-sleeved striped shirt, and his eyes glinted from behind thick-lensed glasses. A strong yellow-papered cigarette either hung from his mouth or else from his fingers. And he lit a new cigarette with the dying embers of each old one.
Having ushered them in, Separt flapped back to his working-desk. ‘I won’t be a second,’ he said. ‘Just the finishing touches to a face ...’
The bulk of the apartment was taken up by a single, huge thick-carpeted room. At one end stood a series of architect’s tables over which hung anglepoise lamps. Here, Separt worked on his cartoons. On shelves behind him along the walls were various tools, old comic books, magazines, disparate newspaper cuttings. Pinned to the walls were photographs of politicians, some of them subtly and tellingly altered by the cartoonist. Barclay laughed at one of his country’s own Prime Minister, showing the premier emerging from a bowl of soup. Written at the bottom was ‘Prime Minestrone’.
Separt seemed inordinately pleased at Barclay’s response. He chuckled and went back to inking some wild hair on his latest caricature.
There was a computer close by, which Barclay studied too. He thought maybe it would be a Paintbox, one of those extraordinary machines used by some artists and graphic designers. But it was just a plain old personal computer.
At the other end of the room, Dominique had already settled on the extremely long sofa. Empty wine bottles and beer bottles were strewn around the floor, and ashtrays brimmed with cigarette ends and the roaches from several joints. Separt, who had known from their intercom conversation that two police officers were on their way up, didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. Two walls of the room were made up of windows, one side opening onto a small rooftop patio. The view of the city was breathtaking.
‘How can he work with a view like that in front of him?’ Barclay marvelled. Dominique translated the question, and Separt, who had thrown down his pen with a flourish, beamed again before saying something.
‘He says,’ Dominique replied, ‘that he no longer sees the view. It is something for visitors, that’s all.’ Separt and Barclay shared a smile, and Separt motioned for his English guest to sit on the sofa beside Dominique. Barclay did so, and Separt, ignoring the spare chair, flopped on to the floor in front of his visitors, resting with legs out, one foot over the other, hands stretched behind him so he sat up. He had an impish look, as though every moment of his life was both revelation and opportunity for humour. But Barclay noticed that Dominique pressed her knees together and kept them like that, and he wondered if there were some more sordid reason for Separt’s choice of seat ...
His French was coming on fast, and he understood most of the dialogue which followed.
‘Your car was stolen, monsieur,’ Dominique began, her pen held above the clipboard.
‘Of course, otherwise you would not be here.’ Separt beamed again.
‘Of course,’ said Dominique. She was a good trainee police officer. But Barclay wondered how she would have talked her way out of it if Separt had asked for identification. They’d considered the question on the way over here. Considered it, and come to no solution.
‘We’ll handle it when the time comes,’ she had said, leaving it at that.
‘But you are one of the lucky few,’ she was saying now, ‘who not only have their car stolen, they also have it recovered.’
‘So I understand. But it’s an old car.’ He shrugged. ‘It would not have been a catastrophe if the car had disappeared from my life for ever!’
‘You reported the car missing quite late, I believe?’
‘No, not late, just before midday I think.’ He chuckled again.
Dominique managed the faintest of official smiles. ‘I meant, monsieur—’
‘Yes, yes, I know what you meant.’ Another shrug. ‘I reported it stolen when I realised it had been stolen. You’ve seen the parking around here, mademoiselle. A nightmare. I had parked the car around the corner in Rue des Fêtes. It was not visible from the apartment.’ He laughed, gesturing towards the huge windows. ‘Unlike most of the motor vehicles in Paris.’
She smiled a cool smile, scratched on the pad with her pen. ‘You were ill, is that correct?’ This much they had read in the Calais police report.
Separt nodded. ‘I wasn’t out of the apartment for four days. Some sort of bug, I don’t know exactly.’
‘What did the doctor say?’
‘Doctors?’ He wrinkled his face. ‘I can’t be bothered with doctors. If I get better, I get better; and if I die, so be it. I’d rather give my money to tramps on the street than hand any over to a doctor.’
‘And the tramps might give you a more accurate diagnosis,’ added Dominique, causing Separt to collapse into a laughing fit, which then became a coughing fit. He rose to his feet, shaking his head.
‘You are making my day, believe me,’ he said. ‘I must write that down. It’s a good idea for a cartoon. Give the money to the beggars instead of the doctors, and the beggars give you a diagnosis - on the state of society’s health.’
Barclay and Dominique sat silently while he went to his work table and wrote something on a sheet of paper, which he then tore from its pad and pinned to the wall.
‘You know,’ he called, ‘my best ideas come this way - from other people. I feel a little guilty sometimes, I do so little work myself.’
When he returned, he chose the chair rather than the floor, sinking into it and crossing his ankles. Now that he was seated on a level with her, Dominique relented and released the pressure on her knees.
‘So the car could have been taken any time during those four days?’ she asked.
‘That’s right. I went outside on the fifth day, and I was puzzled at first, I wondered if I’d parked it where I thought I had. I walked around all the neighbouring streets. No sign. So I called the police.’
‘This was on the first of June?’
‘Was it? I’ll take your word for it.’
‘According to the records it was.’
‘Then it was.’
‘But your car’s outside now?’
‘And as rusty as ever. There are a few scratches on it that weren’t there before. Well, to be honest maybe they were there before - it’s hard to tell.’
‘Nothing missing from the car?’
‘No.’
‘And nothing there that wasn’t there before?’
He laughed again. ‘You mean, did the thief leave me anything? No, not a sou.’
‘Why do you think someone would steal a car from this arrondissement and take it to Calais?’
Separt shrugged. ‘Joy riding. They may have been all over the place, and just run out of petrol there. Or maybe they were considering a trip to England, but changed their minds. Something like that, I imagine.’
Dominique nodded. ‘On the whole, monsieur, you’re happy to have your car returned?’
Separt gave this a little thought. ‘On the whole, I suppose I am. Not that it would bother me unduly if someone stole it again ... Listen, I’m being rude, can I get you a glass of wine?’
‘That’s very kind, but we’ve already taken up enough of your time. We appreciate your talking to us like this.’
‘Not at all.’
Dominique rose to her feet. Barclay rose too. He was glad they didn’t have to drink anything. His head still ached from the pastis. Separt seemed disappointed that they were leaving so soon.
‘When the survey is complete,’ Dominique said, ‘I may have to return with a few final follow-up questions ... without my colleague here, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Separt. ‘You’ll be welcome any ti
me, believe me.’
Barclay had never seen anyone chatting up an on-duty policewoman before. Trust the French. Separt took Dominique’s hand and brushed his lips against it. Then he shook Barclay’s hand warmly. A few words of English came to the cartoonist.
‘Urrr ... good luck, chum. Have a nice day.’
‘Merci,‘ said Barclay. He waved a hand around him. ’You have a beautiful home.’
Nodding, grinning, laughing to himself now and then, the cartoonist showed them out of the apartment. When Dominique and Barclay were alone in the lift, and it had started its descent, he turned to her.
‘Seemed like a nice chap,’ he said.
‘And genuine?’
‘Not entirely.’
‘A complete fake. He was worried as hell, that’s why he kept laughing like that. Nervous laughter.’
‘You think he knows something? So what do we do now? Keep a watch on him?’
She bit her bottom lip. ‘Better than that, I would like to bug him. But I don’t think my superiors would allow it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Separt’s politics. If a bug was discovered, the left would have a ... what do you say?’
‘A field day?’
She nodded. ‘A field day.’
Barclay had a thought. ‘What if you didn’t bug him?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you know how to make a listening device?’
‘No.’
He nodded. ‘What if someone created a bug of their own? Not the French security service. Maybe the British.’
She gasped. ‘You’re mad. If it got back to your superiors ...’
‘Or if it got back to your superiors that you’d helped me ...’
They were both silent for a moment, considering these thoughts. Then Dominique turned to him. ‘What would you need?’
‘A shop selling electronic parts, an enthusiast’s shop. And entry to Separt’s apartment, preferably when he’s out.’