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| Margot: damned thorough. |
Louis Shalako
He’d
been praying for the room to be cleared, mostly, hopefully, by the time he
returned after his interview with Internal Investigations.
It was not to be, and his heart sank. The whole damned bunch of them were there, and he was clearly going to be the object of their attentions.
Fucking Delorme, Langeron, Archambault, Margot, Firmin was back, LeBref. There was even a new face, a uniformed officer he’d frankly never seen before in his life. Admittedly they were a little short-handed right about now…two down and one to go, a very depressing thought, but the next guy to go was most likely going to be him.
“Good morning.” He put his hat on the rack.
“Sit down, please, Detective Hubert.” Langeron cleared his throat, glancing through the notes…
He looked up, from his perch on a corner of Hubert’s regular desk.
“Take Maintenon’s desk.” It made sense enough, he would be able to face them all at once.
“Yes, sir.” He was just dying for a crummy cup of coffee from the urn, and at some point Hubert might even run out of patience.
This was no time to push his luck.
It was all he could do, to clamp down on that tongue and avoid any little impulses…
“Smoke them if you got them.” Delorme didn’t smoke, so that was mighty big of him.
Hubert could forego the pleasure, at least for the moment.
Margot went first, with a little hitch in her voice that might have been humour, more likely simple disbelief.
“So, in your report, you mention…a bore, a witch, a hermit…and a Little Red Riding Hood?” The tone was neutral, her eyes dropped to the page, and then came up again.
Hubert flushed.
“Yes.” He almost choked on it. “And a ghost—”
Don’t forget the fucking ghost.
“Ah, okay. And you say the witch, for example, had a dream?”
“Yes. She claims that she saw his ghost, which sort of tells you something about her. She’s rather sly as well, all part of the, uh, the schtick. It’s all in the report. She says she saw Maintenon, clear as day, walking down the road. Early to mid-afternoon. It was getting warm and she was opening up a couple of the front windows. She didn’t think much of it at the time. She knew him when they were younger. She had heard he was in town. It’s that kind of a place. She says she recognized him immediately. Her description fits well enough, including the clothing and no hat, a point I pressed on her a little bit. A certain psychological profile, it’s like they just can’t help but to embellish. Claims not to have seen him around town on his visit, just to clarify. One wonders about the relationship, she was a little bit coy on that subject. They were young, right, one or the other may have had something of a crush. It was all hints, not too subtle with that one. Nothing really specific. She craves attention as much as anything. And she’s clever enough, in that people are willing to pay for the privilege of giving it to her. Anyhow. It was only after, ah, afterwards, when she heard about it through gossip or the newspaper or something—and she was confused in terms of the day and the date. That’s kind of understandable in a person of her age, and not regularly employed in the classic sense. Days may go by, and she might not even leave the house. I don’t know, but she would probably have to have a calendar in the kitchen or study or somewhere. She must have a clock on the wall somewhere. Anyhow, she calls Dampier to tell him all about it, that’s the senior sergeant down there, and he’s already convinced she’s crazy. It seems she might be something of a pest, and now, he has her halfway-convinced it was a dream. She says he’s an idiot.” He’d been careful with the interview, wondering just how suggestible she might be.
It was better if stuff came out freely, all on its own, with not a lot of detail supplied by the officers themselves…that one was right out of the manual.
“I see.”
“So, in logical terms, one, she had a dream, two, she saw a ghost, three, she saw Gilles walking down the road—with no hat, we might add, if we can even believe her, previous to his decease, but she is confused as to the exact time and date…or. Four. She saw Gilles exactly when and where she says she saw him. That one troubles me, but it also seems the least likely scenario.”
“So, she had a phone?”
“Yes. She does fortune-telling, Tarot, tea leaves…séances, palm reading. She has a crystal ball. She sees clients by appointment. The clients are very loyal…they swear by her. According to her. The police have tried to shut her down, fairly nicely as it would seem, and she simply defies them. Also, according to her. It’s no wonder they, ah, Dampier in particular, see her as more of a nuisance than anything.” It wasn’t the alleged witchcraft so much, as the fact that the lady was making money at it—that was the real problem.
Even in this modern age, there were still criminal cases before the courts upon occasion.
It was seen as more of a con, a confidence game, rather than as any legitimate service or business enterprise. The challenge, of course, lay in getting any kind of conviction, in an age when no one took it too seriously to begin with…caveat emptor, and with the customers being seen as fools with more money than brains. A fool and their money were soon parted—prosecutions cost money, and the penalty was peanuts, essentially. It was a question of cost-benefit analysis, which even the police and the courts had to take into account.
They were, after all, responsible to the taxpayers.
“Did you see the phone? Do you know where the phone is?”
Hubert was stumped. One had to admit, she was very thorough.
“I have no idea. This is all second-hand information at this point…”
“I see.”
“I can only hope that I do—but if her memory is correct, and if it was not a dream, then Gilles Maintenon was walking down her road, more or less about the same time he was supposed to be drowning in the river Pique.” And then there was the question of the exact time, where she was pretty fuzzy again.
He hadn’t been all that eager to play up the ghost in his report—but Hubert could also be thorough, although just this once he was having second thoughts. To leave stuff out of a report would be to go against all training and all doctrine.
“And what do you think, Hubert?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I really, really, just don’t know.” It wasn’t necessarily wise, but he just had to say it. “My instinct tells me that we can rule out the ghost...”
Margot nodded. A faint grin appeared and then faded again.
“Well, that seems fair enough.”
A fifth possibility had just occurred to Hubert.
“She might have been just plain lying.” You couldn’t rule out anything with someone like Dolores.
Margot nodded, pursing her lips.
Hmn.
“As for Maurice and his wife, there seems to be nothing much there. Gilles was staying at their house in Luchon. They’re not hurting for money, and Guillaume is their son. I would have liked to speak to Guillaume, but I am told he came to Paris. Another boy and girl live nearby. They were on our list, but it was a long list and we had to prioritize. We didn’t ever get to them. We weren’t getting anywhere. We ran out of time. Someone had to make some kind of a decision, and I guess it was my call. It is two and a half days on the train. It sounds like a joke—and it is, but we could have flown there faster.” Which wasn’t all that complimentary to the airlines, but fair comment nevertheless. “As for their grief, it seemed fairly muted, but Gilles had been away for a long time. To the wife, he’s merely the brother of her husband—and they haven’t seen him in years. As for Maurice, there seemed to be a lot of love in the family, and yet sometimes people have trouble showing it, or expressing it, or something. At social functions, the women hubble-gubble like geese, and hug like crazy coming or going. The men, they shake hands, grin and nod at each other and make lame jokes about the weather…”
They were anything but demonstrative. They were the stereotypical Frenchmen, certainly, but men, first and foremost.
“Did Gilles say or do anything unusual, anything out of character? What sort of things did they talk about?”
“Insofar as they hadn’t seen him in years, and according to him, both of them, letters and phone calls, Christmas cards, birthday cards, all that sort of thing, they were few and far between. Which we might have guessed for ourselves. Other than that, they talked about old times, reminiscing…” Mostly gossip, relatives near and far, people they knew, all that sort of thing. “One grandkid is having a baby, another one’s getting married, and do you remember old so-and-so? Well, he just died last winter and ain’t that a shame sort of stuff.”
“Okay. So. Tell us about your hermit.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know much, or even anything about him. No one seems to know his name. He's only a recent arrival. No one knows where he came from or how he came to be there. They can’t say exactly when he first showed up. The land is owned by private interests. There is some logging, and there are tracts, plantations, of new trees, rows and rows of new trees. They’re said to be about twenty-five years old, and not quite ready to harvest. We didn’t notice any such thing, but this is what we were told. It all looked like pretty regular forest to me. According to our source, no one from the company has been in there in quite some time.”
“You did try to speak to him?”
“Yes, yes. Of course. That one seems to be anti-social at the least. Possibly some sort of mental illness, or maybe just years of stubborn isolation. Other than that, we can only speculate.”
“Not quite a hunchback, you say.”
“Ah, ah, no. No, just the suggestion of…of, ah, something like that. Ah, scoliosis? Something like that? Just something about the posture.” He felt like an idiot, but there it was, right in his own notes.
Margot plodded on, the others silent but watching, always watching…
“And Sergeant Dampier provided you with the list of names and suggestions. Any idea of why this, ah, hermit?”
“Ah. Yes. Looking at the map, you can see how his little hole in the wall is barely six hundred metres from the riverbank, and the trail is perhaps a little longer, but easier, than the one LeBeaux and I went in on. Once we got to the top of the waterfall, it gets a lot steeper. You have to get down from there. Hard-packed dirt in places, muddy as hell in others. Also, there are little side-trails all over the place. But the point was, we have an unknown quantity, and we have no idea of whether he and Gilles had any kind of interaction…and he refused to even speak to us. He had that shotgun. It seemed understandable, considering his circumstances, and what we might presume to call his personality type.”
The absence of an actual body, Maintenon’s for example, was proving to be sheer hell in terms of any investigation…might as well shove that in there. But people did have rights.
The police could only push so hard. A local judge would never have given them any kind of warrant, bearing in mind they had exactly nothing on the man.
“I understand. Here’s another one. How does the hermit live? He can beg, he can work, he had chickens or so you say. He can line up at the back door of the parish church and get a handout, stale bread, powdered milk, cheese, half-rotten produce. Considering the area, and the shotgun, is he poaching. This might account for the, uh, shyness. It happens all the time. Yet there is that cash economy…a box of shells costs money. If he is a hermit, is he still going into the village or the town and cashing some kind of benefits cheque, oh, a military pension, subsistence payments or something?” That would at least get a name, and a name could be checked out—
Hubert had to admit, he had no answers. He hadn’t put all that much thought into it, it was the missing LeBeaux who had triggered this new set of questions, or were they a new set of assumptions. They’d already given up at that point…they’d been thinking of home.
Hubert had the wife to consider—
They were only assuming the man was a hermit, mostly because everybody—that is to say Dampier and perhaps some of Dampier’s other sources, were saying that he was, and sure enough, when they found him, the circumstances had seemed to confirm it by direct observation.
Oddly enough, he was finding that all of this proved nothing. He even began to relax, again, this was not personal. It wasn’t about blame. It was about that eternal search for truth, and the truth was, he had fallen down—badly.
It was a debriefing, nothing more and nothing less. As far as stories went, his was showing an awful lot of holes.
A person could learn a lot from a good debriefing.
“Okay. So, in light of Maintenon’s disappearance, and then LeBeaux goes missing. Ah…did it ever occur to you that he might not have gone voluntarily?”
No! It was like a punch in the guts.
He sat there with his mouth open.
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| This is no letter in the file, this is no reprimand...merde. |
Merde.
This just kept getting better and better, all of the time, as one of them had said all too recently. That had been him, as he recalled. That was me, all right…fuck.
“Is it not possible that some party, or interested parties, caught up with him in the restroom, or at the end of an empty carriage, put a gun to his head or stuck a knife in his ribs and told him he was going with them?” Those eyes were damned intimidating. “He did leave his luggage, right. If you were asleep, he could have gotten that from the luggage car, right? All you have to do is ask, after all…”
Hubert was reeling.
“No. I had no reason to suspect anything of the sort…” A feeble answer, but it was the only one that he had. “He would have had to give his name…his ticket was all the way, ah, through…shit. It strikes me that LeBeaux hadn’t shaved for a day or two. I thought nothing of it at the time, but now I have to wonder…whether he had some kind of idea in his head even then.”
There would be questions if he asked for his luggage, which had a tag, a copy of the ticket attached for obvious reasons. LeBeaux wasn’t looking for that kind of attention, or so he thought.
Back to the cold sweat again—
“All right. Back to the beginning…”
Margot took a breath.
“Okay, you don’t know this, but our three victims, that is to say the bodies in the freezer in Maintenon’s apartment, were all deceased from natural causes…” And. “Does that suggest anything in particular to you…”
Hubert was about ready to scream, but that really would have meant the end of his job, which was looking more and more insecure with every passing moment.
“Oh, God. No. Not really—” He’d only just heard of it, for crying out loud.
This whole fucking mess had been his idea, there was no denying that.
“I just want to say, I take full responsibility.” For what exactly, at this point, he wasn’t too sure.
Dead silence.
He reached into his pocket, hand shaking, for the cigarettes.
“Okay. So, when you discovered that LeBeaux appeared to be missing, you phoned ahead from the next station and reported to us, and Detective LeBref answered the call, to be exact. Have you considered phoning down to Bagneres de Luchon, or are we holding off on that. What are your exact thoughts on that little matter…?”
“Oh, God. What in the hell would I tell them?” More than anything, but by that point, all Hubert had wanted was a little help and advice. “I’ve lost my partner, and if you don’t mind, won’t you please go around have a look. He’s fallen in love with Little Red Riding Hood and I really am worried about him—”
He sighed.
“I mean, seriously—”
Poor old Hubert was just sagging in his chair, what with all the lost sleep, the last night in Bagneres de Luchon, and the night before leaving, at home, and then on the train, and laying alone in hotel rooms, and worrying about LeBeaux, and then an hour and a half of interrogation downstairs, and now this, and it was all too much. He was only human.
Everyone had their limits. He was getting close to his own limits.
He let out a long, sad groan, shaking his head, knowing now, for sure, that his career was over—this was no letter in the file, this was no written reprimand, this was no demotion back to sergeant or constable. This was the end, and he knew it. He’d be selling insurance, all too soon now—
Margot looked around.
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| Just a few more questions... |
“Can we get a cup of coffee for Detective Hubert, please.”
About three of them hopped up to obey—but to them, all of this would be fascinating enough. Seniority had won out, in that it was Roger who carefully put a brimming cup on the corner of Maintenon’s desk.
“All right.” Margot had more, plenty more. “Now tell us again, about this girl.”
“Ah…”
“Was she coming or going. Was this the same trail you mentioned, the one where you saw the hermit going along, or was this one different. Ah, Guillaume Maintenon showed up here, and Detective Archambault didn’t really know what questions to ask, although he did his best. You did not have access to Guillaume, but to your knowledge, did he, or they, by that I mean the police down there, recover or confirm, one, or possibly two sets of waders…their initial report was bare-bones, very thin. Ah, why do you think Gilles might have taken a weapon down there, let alone on a simple little fishing expedition…” Presumably, they were all friends down there…
“In your report, you mention a map. Do you still have it? It doesn’t appear to be in LeBeaux’s bags…”
And so it went, on and on and on.
END
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