FIFTEEN

It was not to be. Lucciani wasn’t back from his sex film yet, but the good lady of the Hotel Central was still alert behind her bar, helping the government to collect its Value Added Tax.

     ‘Monsieur Peyrefitte asked you to ring him back as soon as you got in.’ How singularly ill-timed of him.

     The voice came harsh through the phone receiver.

     ‘I’ve been trying to reach you: where the hell you been?’

     ‘Military brothel.’ Fellow sounded too excited.

     ‘What? Now hell, this is serious. I’m pulling these people, and that’ll be your affair settled, likely.’

     ‘At this time of night?’ scandalised.

     ‘Judge reckons there’s enough evidence. Got a good tip. Pick you up with the car, in a few minutes: I’ll explain then,’ hastily, before there could be any complaining. Castang had time to think that he could, instead of this gallop, have been in bed with Martine…

     Second thought was technical. A judge of instruction possesses vast powers. He can issue several sorts of warrants to the cops. Besides the convocations inviting Mr Thing to present himself, voluntarily and without coercion, there is a detention warrant, authorising the cops to consign Thing to jail. And there is an arrest warrant, which permits the cops to pick Thing up, if need be by force, at any time of day. This one is not all that frequently used. Well, well, thought Castang: these country judges can throw their weight about.

     Third thought was that if Peyrefitte seemed unusually zealous it was Castang’s fault and no other. The local cop would be pleased to give a demonstration of his own efficiency, and wipe the PJ’s eye for it. These city boys, who think themselves clever.

     If, of course, Peyrefitte had identified the burglar who had used violence on Sabine (involuntary homicide: blows and wounds resulting in death, grave crimes these; not to speak of assorted felonies like armed robbery, breaking and entering – either plain burglary or climbing-in in the nocturnal hours)… well then, of course, the judge was quite right. The forces-of-order would gallop in the nocturnal hours, and he, Castang, would be only too pleased to go home to his wife with his homicide tidied behind him.

     The police car flicked headlights at him from twenty metres along the pavement. He got in at the back, next to Peyrefitte’s second, a stolid man with a finger missing. Not his trigger finger.

     ‘We think this is hot,’ said the commissaire over his shoulder, ‘and we’re taking every precaution.’

     Tyres whirred on the cobbles of the old town, through the medieval gateway – a scant hundred metres from the Bay Tree down the Rue des Remparts – over the river-crossing this fortress had once defended. The land beyond the bridge was low-lying: this was the ‘new town’, a dreary sector of industry and municipal housing, deserted at this hour. The road stretched out into a featureless farmland of potatoes and sugarbeet while Peyrefitte talked in choppy sentences and Castang fought against feeling sleepy. He turned around: they were being followed by a Citroën van.

     ‘Turned out in force.’

     ‘They are four brothers: tough group they make, too.’

     ‘Four black bastards,’ muttered the adjutant.

     ‘They Arabic or what?’ asked Castang.

     ‘Basques. Got those unpronounceable names. All right,’ to the driver, ‘cut the motor; coast in quietly. Pack of hooligans,’ sourly. ‘This may not be funny, and I’m taking no chances. They may easily possess arms, and they might not be slow to use them once they realise that I mean business.’

     Like the man in the Rue d’Aboukir, though this was not very like the Rue d’Aboukir. An isolated small farmhouse, or rather a dilapidated bundle of outbuildings huddled round a cottage. The night was cloudy: vision just good enough to see that the cottage was oddly neat, even prim, with flowers growing round it.

     The dispositions were rather more elaborate than in the Rue d’Aboukir. It was as though ‘whatever Paris can do, we can do better.’ Four cops with assorted weapons got out of the van: eight armed men made the brothers seem unusually formidable, but not by terrorist standards. They didn’t have any armour, or marksmen with sniperscopes. The cops scattered round the outbuildings. Peyrefitte advanced purposefully, Castang flanking. The adjutant and the driver stayed at the gate.

     Light glowed through the bars of a shutter, at a ground-floor window: the bluish flicker of a television screen. Peyrefitte knocked at the door: the sound died instantly. There was silence for a count of ten: he knocked again.

     ‘Police,’ he said, in an unemotional way. Castang moved a little further sideways to where he could not be seen.

     The light went out. A pounding of feet sounded on the stairs. A window opened above Castang’s head. There was enough light to catch the oily glint on a pair of well-looked-after shotgun barrels.

     ‘Now don’t act the imbecile,’ said Peyrefitte, tucking himself against the wall on the lock side of the doorway. ‘I don’t want to have to use any force.’ Silence went on ticking and nothing happened. ‘Let’s have this door opened quietly, boys. Order from the judge. Refusing just gets you in worse trouble.’

     Nobody stirred, but the glint upon the shotgun slid gently along the barrels. Castang watched them dip.

     ‘Idiot,’ he said. ‘Live one and die one: the man’ll blow your head off.’ One was down here, and one was up there, but he was wondering where the other two were, and if they were deciding to be heroes.

     ‘We start again from scratch,’ said Peyrefitte patiently. ‘If the door gets opened quietly, then nothing need be said about resisting arrest.’ Castang, stifling yawns and wondering how much shotgun pellets would scatter from three metres high – in no hurry to find out – was getting a crick in his neck.

     There was a dragging movement behind the kitchen door.

     ‘No shooting?’ said a soft hoarse voice. ‘Word of honour?’ It sounds serious, in Spanish.

     ‘Word of honour,’ said Peyrefitte.

     All this talk about honour, thought Castang.

     ‘You might just break the gun open,’ he said conversationally. The glint wavered and wobbled, and then drooped with a snick. He took a couple of steps forward, turned round and tucked his gun into his belt, quite surprised to find it still there: such a strong feeling of his trousers coming down.

     ‘Put it down on the floor.’ The adjutant, holding a big Star pistol against his hard belly, advanced ponderously. The door-bolt creaked and a large man with lank hair glinting like the gunbarrels was smiling politely in the opening with a hunting rifle in the crook of his elbow. He and Peyrefitte bowed at each other like two penguins, all very formal. Out beyond the gate, the driver was dropping a tear-gas gun back into the boot of the car.

     The other two were at the back. One had a long single-barrelled shotgun for duck. The other, a boy of eighteen, grinned impudently at all those cops with submachine-guns, and put down a .22 repeater.

     ‘For rats,’ he said, showing his teeth.

     ‘No prohibited weapons,’ said the eldest. ‘All legal. You frightened us. No resisting arrest.’ The judge would appreciate that, and so, thought Castang, would everyone else.

     The four brothers were taken back two by two, while the adjutant and a couple of cops stayed for a search. They got back at around three in the morning, with an old army revolver, two-thirds of a kilo of plastic explosive, several objects known to have been stolen from a parked lorry, and a lot of gold coins.

     ‘Too many,’ said Peyrefitte, ‘for a small potato farm, and nobody has four tape recorders.’ But neither this fact, nor all the interrogation up to then, produced anything to do with Sabine.

     Castang indeed made a face at the results of the search, and went home. Neither Peyrefitte nor the judge would lose face.

     Certainly not. The brothers had several activities interesting Justice, including the Basque Liberation Front, and contravention of Common Market Regulations concerning potatoes. The rummaging went on till nearly midday, turning up a packet of detonators, which are Prohibited Weapons, and also the microscopic scratches made by the previous owner of eighty-four gold napoleons, by which he could identify them. But Castang had gone to bed. He didn’t believe that the four brothers had anything to do with Sabine, despite the denunciation sent to the judge. Their contempt for the idea of hitting old ladies was too genuine: the notion was altogether against Honour.