Dog Will Have His Day (13 page)

‘Louis Kehlweiler? To what do I owe the honour?’

Michel Chevalier was smiling, but not all that much. Louis was used to this. An unexpected visit by an emissary from the Ministry of the Interior never put elected politicians at their ease, whoever they were. Apparently Chevalier wasn’t aware that Louis’d been dismissed, or else his dismissal was not enough to reassure him.

‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘I’d like to believe you. You couldn’t hide a pin in Port-Nicolas. Too small.’

The mayor sighed. He must be bored stiff in his office here. Nothing to hide and not much to get involved in.

‘Well, then?’ the mayor went on.

‘Port-Nicolas may be small, but it scatters its belongings. I’ve brought you something that might come from down here, something I found in Paris.’

Chevalier had large blue eyes which he couldn’t narrow, but that’s what he was trying to do.

‘I’ll show you,’ said Louis.

He fumbled in the pocket of his jacket, and his hand encountered the bumpy skin of Bufo, who was snoozing there. Shit. He had brought him out for a walk this morning to the
calvaire
and had forgotten to drop him off at the hotel. It certainly wasn’t the moment to bring Bufo out, since the mayor’s sagging face was already looking anxious. He found the screw of newspaper under Bufo’s belly: his toad had no respect for exhibits in a case, and had snuggled down on top of it.

‘It’s this little thing,’ said Louis finally, putting the fragile piece of bone on Chevalier’s wooden table. ‘It bothers me enough to have brought me all the way to you. But I hope it may be a big fuss about nothing.’

The mayor leaned forward, looked at the object and slowly shook his head. A patient, plastic type, thought Louis, he operates in slow motion, nothing panics him and he’s not stupid, in spite of those big eyes.

‘It’s a human bone,’ Louis went on, ‘the top joint of a big toe, which I had the bad luck to find on the Place de la Contrescarpe, on the grid round a tree, and you’ll have to pardon my being explicit, monsieur le maire, but it was in the excrement of a dog.’

‘So you go poking around in the excrements of dogs?’ said Chevalier calmly, and without irony.

‘There’d been a torrential rainstorm in Paris. The organic matter was washed away, leaving this bone sitting on the grid.’

‘I see. And the connection with my little municipality?’

‘I thought it unusual and worrying. So I paid attention to it. It was quite possible that it came from an accident, or in an extreme case, a dog could have got inside where a body had been laid out. But one couldn’t rule out the possibility that this bone came from a murder.’

Chevalier didn’t budge. He listened, without intervening.

‘And the connection with this place?’ he asked again.

‘I’m getting there. I waited in Paris. And nothing happened. You must know that you can’t hide a corpse for long in the capital. Nothing turned up in the suburbs either, and there’ve been no reports of missing persons for twelve days. So I checked the movements of dogs in the area, found two that lived outside, but had left their excrement on a Paris street. I’m following the trail of Lionel Sevran’s pit bull.’

‘Go on,’ said the mayor.

He remained his usual flaccid self, but his concentration was progressively increasing. Louis leaned one elbow on the table, but put the other hand in his pocket, because his blessed toad didn’t want to go back to sleep and was wriggling around.

‘At Port-Nicolas,’ he said, ‘there was an accident down by the shore.’

‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.’

‘Yes. I’ve come to check it really was an accident.’

‘Oh yes,’ Chevalier interrupted him. ‘It was an accident all right. The old lady slipped on the rocks, and fractured her skull. It was in the papers. All the necessary statements were taken by the gendarmes from Fouesnant. There’s no doubt about it being an accident. Old Marie always went to the same spot, rain or shine, all weathers. It was her special place for gathering winkles, she collected bags full of them. Nobody else would have gone to look for winkles there, because it was her patch. She must have gone out as usual, but it was raining that Thursday, the seaweed was slippery, and she fell over, alone, in the dark. I knew her well, and nobody would have wished her any harm.’

The mayor’s face clouded. He stood up with his back to the wall behind the desk, listlessly, fiddling once more with his fingers. In his eyes, this interview was coming to an end.

‘They only found her on Sunday,’ he added.

‘That’s very late.’

‘Nobody missed her on the Friday because it was her day off. By Saturday midday, she hadn’t been seen in the cafe, so someone went to her house, and to the people she worked for. Nothing. So it was four o’clock before they started to look for her, a bit amateurishly, people weren’t seriously concerned. Nobody thought to go along to Vauban Cove. It had been such bad weather for three days that they didn’t think she would have gone gathering winkles. Finally, they called in the Fouesnant gendarmes at eight that night. And they found her next morning when they extended the search. Vauban Cove isn’t that near the village, it’s along at the point. That’s all. As I said, the necessary formalities were gone through. An accident. So?’

‘So, art begins where the necessary formalities leave off. Did anyone notice anything about her foot?’

Chevalier sat back down with apparent docility, glancing briefly at Kehlweiler. It wouldn’t be easy to throw Kehlweiler out of his office, and he was not a man to throw people out without taking precautions.

‘Well, look now,’ said Chevalier. ‘You could have spared yourself a lot of trouble and kilometres if you’d just telephoned me. And I’d have said, Marie Lacasta slipped over, and there was no injury to her feet.’

Louis looked down and thought.

‘Really? Nothing? You’re sure?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Would it be indiscreet of me to ask you for the report?’

‘Would it be indiscreet of me to ask you if you’re here officially?’

‘I’m not working at the Interior any more,’ said Louis with a smile. ‘And you knew that, didn’t you?’

‘I merely suspected it. So you’re here unofficially.’

‘That’s right, you have no obligation to answer me.’

‘You might have told me that at the start.’

‘You didn’t ask me.’

‘True. All right, go and take a look at the report, if it sets your mind at rest. Ask my secretary for it, and please consult it without taking it out of the office.’

Once more, Louis wrapped up his piece of bone, which obviously nobody else wanted to be bothered with, as if it was a matter of little moment that a woman’s toe should be found on the grid round a tree in Paris. He read the gendarmes’ report attentively. It had been prepared that Sunday evening. Nothing about the feet, quite true. He thanked the secretary and returned to the mayor’s office. But Chevalier had now gone for his aperitif at the cafe over the road, the young man in reception explained.

The mayor was playing an energetic game of billiards, surrounded by a dozen of his constituents. Louis waited until he had missed a shot before going up to him.

‘You didn’t tell me Marie worked for the Sevrans,’ he whispered from behind his ear.

‘What does that matter?’ the mayor whispered back, his eyes on his opponent.

‘Well, for heaven’s sake, the pit bull! It belongs to the Sevrans.’

The mayor had a word with his neighbour, passed him his cue and took Louis into a corner of the games room.

‘Monsieur Kehlweiler,’ he said, ‘I don’t know exactly what it is you want, but you can’t twist reality. In the Senate, my colleague Deschamps had spoken well of you to me. And I find you here chasing after some local incident, tragic, no question, but not at all the kind of thing to interest a man like you. You come six hundred kilometres to try and fit together two elements that have nothing to do with each other. I’ve been told it’s hard to shake you off, which may not be a desirable quality, but when you come up against the evidence, what do you do?’

A little criticism, a little flattery, Louis registered. No politician had ever liked seeing him turn up in their constituency.

‘In the Senate,’ Chevalier went on, ‘they say a man would rather find a bedbug in his sheets than “the German” looking through his papers. Forgive me if that sounds rude, but it’s what they say.’

‘I know.’

‘They go on to say the only way to get rid of him is like you do for bedbugs: burn the furniture.’

Chevalier gave a little laugh and threw a satisfied glance at the man who had replaced him at billiards.

‘In my case,’ he continued, ‘I have nothing to burn and nothing to show you, because you are not here officially any more. I don’t know if it’s because you’re at a loose end that you’re being so obstinate. Yes, the pit bull belongs to the Sevrans, and so did Marie, if one can say that. She’d been Lina Sevran’s nanny, always with her. But Marie had a fall on the beach, and her feet hadn’t been touched. Do I have to say it again? Sevran is a public-spirited man, does a lot of good in the village. I won’t say the same for his dog, just between ourselves, mind you. But you have no reason and no right to come harassing him. Because his dog, you need to know this for your own good, spends its life running away, prowling the countryside and snouting around in dustbins. You could be ten years trying to find where the dog picked up that bone – that’s if it was him.’

‘Shall we finish the game?’ said Louis, pointing to the billiard table. ‘Your opponent seems to have given up.’

‘Very well,’ said Chevalier.

They each chalked their cues, and Louis, played first, surrounded by a dozen spectators who passed comments or maintained an appreciative silence. Some left, others arrived, there was a lot of coming and going in this cafe. Louis ordered a beer, in the middle of the game, which seemed to please the mayor, who ordered a Muscadet and ended up winning. Chevalier had been down in Brittany about twelve years, that makes four thousand games of billiards, that adds up. Evidently feeling expansive, the mayor invited Louis to lunch. Louis discovered behind the games room a huge dining saloon with about fifteen tables. The walls were bare granite, blackened by smoke from the open fire. This old cafe with its sequences of rooms pleased Louis more and more. He would willingly have installed his bed in a corner by the fire, but what was the point, since Marie Lacasta had died on the rocks with both feet intact? The thought depressed him. He wasn’t going to find out what was at the end of the piece of bone he had recuperated so carefully, and yet, damn it all, he didn’t have the sense that he was dealing with an incident of no importance.

Sitting at table, Louis remembered Marthe’s advice. When you’re faced with someone who is trying to decide whether to accept you or reject you, sit facing him. Seen in profile, you’re intolerable, just get that into your head, but face to face, you have every chance of winning him over, if you make an effort not to put your German expression on. If it’s a woman, the same but closer to. Louis sat down facing the mayor. They talked about billiards, then the cafe, then how things were going in the town hall, business and politics. Chevalier wasn’t a native of the region, he had arrived there as a candidate for his Senate seat. He’d found it tough being exiled to the far end of Brittany, but he’d grown to like the place. Louis dropped a few confidential bits of information which he knew would please him. The whole lunch operation seemed to work, and the mayor’s wary limpness had relaxed into cordial and benevolent limpness, with a few whispered confidences. Louis was a past master at creating an entirely artificial complicity. Marthe thought this disgusting, but useful, of course, it was always useful. Towards the end of the meal, a fat little man came over to talk. Low of brow, heavy of jowl, Louis immediately recognised the director of the health spa, the husband of his little Pauline, in other words the bastard who had claimed Pauline. He was talking about figures and water courses with Chevalier, and they agreed to meet later that week.

This last encounter had unsettled Louis. After leaving the mayor on a note of insincere
entente cordiale
, he took a walk round the harbour then along the deserted streets of houses with closed shutters, allowing Bufo to take the air. The toad had not suffered too much inside his damp pocket: Bufo was an easy-going creature. Perhaps the mayor was too. The mayor was well content that Louis would be leaving Port-Nicolas and Louis chewed over his disappointment and his discreet dismissal. He called a taxi from the hotel, and had himself driven to the gendarmerie in Fouesnant.

MARC STEPPED DOWN
from the train at quimper in the early evening. It was too easy by half. Kehlweiler made him go charging around after a carrion-gobbling dog for days, and then he went off to wrap up the mystery all on his own. No, it was just too easy. Kehlweiler wasn’t the only person who liked to see things through, even nasty businesses. He, Marc, had never left an enquiry unfinished, never, because he hated leaving anything unfinished. His investigations might all be medieval ones, but they were still investigations. He had always followed his archive trails through to the bitter end, even the most difficult. The big study on village economy in the eleventh century had cost him blood, sweat and tears, but hell’s bells, he had finished it. This was obviously something else, a nasty murder, Louis suggested, but Louis didn’t have exclusive rights to nastiness. And now this son of World War II – yes, he must stop calling him that, one day he was going to blurt it out by accident – this son of World War II was off all alone in pursuit of the dog, a dog identified by Mathias, what was more. And Mathias had agreed, yes, follow the dog. That was probably what, more than anything else, had decided Marc. He had hastily packed a rucksack, which Lucien, the historian of World War I, had immediately emptied, telling him he had no idea how to fold shirts properly. Oh God, with friends like that . . .

‘Shit, you’ll make me miss my train!’ Marc had shouted.

‘No, you won’t, trains always wait for brave soldiers, it’s written up for all time at the Gare de l’Est. Women weep, but alas, trains depart, for the Western Front in that case.’