Richard limped heavily as he tried to keep up with a marching Valérie. She was not best pleased but rather than communicate that personally, she’d delegated to the bag-bound Passepartout, who was shaking his head from side to side, partly as a result of Valérie’s stomping but also, and Richard was sure about this, because he was tutting in admonishment.
“That really bloody hurt! What are they, Rosa Klebb shoes?”
“They are Jimmy Choo,” Valérie responded, obviously thinking Rosa Klebb to be some high-end shoe brand, but not as high-end as the ones she was wearing.
“But what’s the problem? I thought you wanted to help Monsieur Grandchamps? I don’t see how telling the police what we know is a bloody problem?”
She turned on him, anger in her eyes, and Richard half expected Passepartout to go flying off, jettisoned as she spun round. “I thought Englishmen were tight-lipped and taciturn. Why tell him what we know?”
“Why not tell him what we know?”
“Because the old man asked me for help, that’s why. And so it happens that he’s been disappearing for a few weeks. That’s a cry for help, no?”
“Maybe. But which is also a police matter, surely.”
“If Monsieur Grandchamps wanted the police involved, if it was that kind of thing, he would have gone to the police himself, don’t you think?” She jabbed her finger in his chest.
“Not necessarily,” Richard sulked.
“Instead, now we have a meeting with Juge Grandchamps and Brigadier-Chef Principal Philippe Bonneval.”
“Right. That’ll be the missing man’s concerned brother and an officer of the law, then?”
“Listen, Richard, please, just don’t mention the blood or the glasses. Can you do that for me?”
“Why not, though? They are quite possibly the only people who should know!”
She sighed heavily and moved closer to him, looking into his eyes. “Because, one, we have no proof, none at all. And two…” She broke off.
“And two?” Richard thought he spotted some vulnerability and was trying to be more assertive.
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“I’m bored, Richard. Life is boring. I have been widowed now for nearly a year, and I am so bored! That man asked for my help, and maybe I need a little adventure.” She spun around again, leaving Richard face to face with Passepartout.
“I didn’t know,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know you had lost your husband. I am sorry.”
“Don’t be, really.” They walked on a bit, approaching her car. “It was mercifully quick, not drawn out like some of these things. Jean-Pierre would have wanted it that way, I think.”
“I suppose we all do really.”
She put Passepartout on the backseat.
“What did he do, Jean-Pierre?”
“He had his own business, not very glamorous, pest control. Rats and moles mainly. But, even though he was much older than I, we had a lot of fun.” She put the key in the ignition and started the engine. “I do miss him.” She leaned dramatically on the steering wheel.
Richard was silent for a few seconds. He recognized bare-faced emotional blackmail when he saw it and knew full well he was being played. Played by a quite possibly crackpot woman who was thrill-seeking her way out of life’s middle-aged boredom and possibly grief, or possibly not grief. He knew all that, and, surprisingly or maybe not, he didn’t mind it one little bit. He wasn’t exactly having his own laugh-a-minute time himself.
“OK,” he said eventually, and affecting a big put-upon sigh for the sacrifice he was about to make, “let’s go for the adventure.”
She went to interrupt.
“But on one condition.” He wasn’t letting her in, with her doe eyes and her pleading ways. “If this is serious, if the poor man has been done away with, we get Principal-Chef Brigadier Philippe…”
“It’s Brigadier-Chef Principal…”
“We get whatsisface involved, and involved tout bloody suite. Deal?”
“Bonneval. His name is…”
“Deal?”
She gave him a big smile and he went to shake her hand, but instead she gave him a kiss on the cheek, put the car in gear all in one move and roared off through the town back to Jules Ferry Street.
***
She glowered at him from across the road. It was a look that only really stubborn people can give. A look that comes naturally, without being forced, that says, “I’m quite clearly dealing with an idiot.” Teachers specialize in it, Parisian waiters too and, thought Richard, who could be just as stubborn if he put his mind to it, every French woman he’d ever met. Valérie stood at the gate of one house belonging to Monsieur V. Grandchamps and Richard, no more than twenty feet away, stood at the other gate belonging to a Monsieur V. Grandchamps. Neither was willing to budge but neither had pressed the doorbell either, their certainty not quite certain enough to spread to proof or the possibility of error.
“He said the house on the right!” hissed Valérie. She was facing the direction in which they’d arrived and her arm was outstretched like a cyclist indicating a turn.
“I know!” Richard hissed back. He was looking the other way down Jules Ferry Street, and his right arm was also stretched out. He was aware of how ridiculous they both looked, and he was also aware of how little it actually bothered him whether he was right or wrong, but he was drawing lines in the sand here, and so not backing down. If he was going to take part in this “adventure”—an innocent word, he reckoned, more reminiscent of Enid Blyton than old blokes being possibly done in—then he was going to make damn sure that Valérie d’Orçay didn’t just take him for granted. That she couldn’t just use him as a…well, whatever he was being used as. He glowered back at her and then saw the imposing figure of Officer Bonneval appear behind her at “her” gate. “A lucky guess,” he muttered to himself, scratching the back of his head with his arm as if that had been his intention all along, and sauntered, as nonchalantly as he could, over the road.
“It’s an odd setup, isn’t it?” he asked, nodding his head back to where he’d just come from. “Two brothers living opposite each other like that, identical houses.”
“They can’t share a house,” Bonneval said, opening the gate. “They hate each other.”
“Then why live near each other at all?” It was Valérie with the question.
“Because, madame, they hated each other so much they couldn’t let the other have the luxury of independence. I’ll explain more inside. The judge himself might explain it better. It depends.”
“It depends on what?” Richard was getting a bit irritated with all the ambiguity.
“On how he’s feeling today.”
“Bonneval!” The cry, almost a demand like a master to servant, silenced them all. The voice was high and arch, more like an old woman’s than an old man’s. “BONNEVAL!” It came again and the huge policeman’s shoulders visibly slumped.
“Is he feeling good or bad, do you think?” Richard asked, and Bonneval shot him a look as if to say that this was no time for levity, instead indicating sullenly that they should follow him inside.
The entrance hall was so dark it took time for their eyes to adjust to the dinginess after the bright sunshine outside. The place smelled musty, as though the air never circulated and the doors and windows always remained shut. Bonneval led them down the dark passage to a room at the back of the house. The shutters were closed here, too, just a narrow shaft of light penetrating the room like a laser, moodily showing a large dining table, row upon row of bookshelves, and in the corner sat a small man in a wheelchair, lizard-like, his malevolent eyes catching the gleam of the outside light and following them as they filed into the room.
“Monsieur le juge, these are the people I told you about. They have news of your brother.”
“The only news I need of my brother is an announcement of his death,” he spat. “Do you have that? Hmm, well, do you?” he badgered. Quite the charmer, thought Richard. “Ha! I thought not,” the judge added with genuine disappointment.
“He was staying at my chambre d’hôte,” Richard offered, “even though it’s really not far away.”
“And that surprises you, does it?” Every word the judge spoke was dripping with a mean-spirited edge. “Well, it doesn’t surprise me. He does this all the time, just to embarrass me.”
“How does that embarrass you exactly?” The tone in Valérie’s voice showed she was unimpressed by monsieur le juge, and certainly not intimidated.
“Because he goes off, checks into places, pretends to be me, more often than not, and generally makes a nuisance of himself. It’s a childish game he plays.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know! You’d have to ask him that. He’s a nasty little man. Always has been. He’s spent his entire life on the wrong side of the law.”
“Yet you’re a judge?”
“Was. The right side of the law.”
Richard had had very few dealings with either the law or with crime. He’d once had to plead for leniency to a magistrate to avoid a driving ban and, on the other side, he’d once wandered into the wrong East End pub on the day of a gangland funeral. He’d found the experience with the magistrate far more intimidating. He was made to feel like a criminal for having exceeded a motorway speed limit at two in the morning driving through unmanned roadworks yet made to feel welcome like a member of the family by weeping London hoodlums. Richard wasn’t a huge fan of certainty and didn’t easily trust people who had no doubts, and the law, as far as he was concerned, required conviction and absolutism, the naked “I’m going to do this no matter what,” like a drunk karaoke stalwart, plowing on regardless.
“Vincent and Victor fell out a long time ago,” Bonneval said quietly, as if trying to hide the fact from the old judge.
“Nonsense!” the old man exclaimed. “We never fell in!”
“It’s rare for twins to hate each other so much,” mused Valérie, “yet your bond kept you close.”
“Bond! Pah!” The old man leaned forward, his sharp chin almost used as a pointer. “The bond was in blood and in name only. We didn’t even look much alike.”
Richard wished he could confirm that but all he saw when he thought of his Grandchamps was the beard and the stoop.
“Well…” began Bonneval.
“Be quiet, man!”
“So why live as neighbors?” Valérie’s very reasonable question was met with silence initially while Bonneval looked at his enormous boots and Grandchamps picked at some imaginary fluff on his gray trousers.
“I don’t like that femme de ménage you found for me, Bonneval,” he said eventually as if the brief pause had rendered the question irrelevant. “She’s too proud of her tattoos, is that girl. If you can’t keep your own body free of stains, how can you keep a house clean?”
This man is barking, thought Richard, though he had some sympathy with the whole tattoo issue.
Bonneval looked hurt. “As you know, Marie only works a few hours at the bar. She needs the extra money.”
“And you’ve got your eye on her, too, no doubt,” the judge said cruelly.
“Monsieur le juge,” Valérie said sternly, interrupting the bullying, “you didn’t answer my question. Why did you and your brother, your twin brother, live as neighbors if you hated each other so much?” Again there was a short pause, and then the judge broke out into a hideous grin. It changed his demeanor entirely. Richard could have sworn that the man hadn’t cracked a smile in some thirty odd years, probably not since some appalling miscarriage of justice that he’d helped to perpetrate. But this sudden grin, unpleasant though it was, revealing spiky yellow teeth, softened the eyes, showing a surprising array of laughter lines and crow’s feet.
“Why, madame, you ask why?” He cackled. “Pure. Spite.”
“He moved here to make your life miserable?”
“No.” The smile widened with difficulty. “I moved here to make his life miserable!”
There was a stunned silence while Bonneval looked vaguely embarrassed, like a relative publicly apologizing for a flatulent uncle. “I could have gone into politics.” The judge continued staring into space. “Who knows how far? But that worm, that snake in the grass, he held me back. He didn’t hide his criminality, his lawlessness. He was brazen. So I retired a common or garden-circuit judge, respected, yes, feared, certainly. But worse, I was pitied. Pitied! ‘If it hadn’t been for his brother…’ they’d say. He ruined my career, and when I retired, I was determined to ruin his. I would follow him wherever he went. People would be less willing to do their business with him if they knew monsieur le juge Victor Grandchamps was watching from across the street.”
It was delivered with such conviction and certainty, thought Richard, a crackpot scheme that sounded more like the statement of a clichéd supervillain revealing their plan for world domination, usually just before they meet their complicated demise. Valérie leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “This man is a lunatic,” she said quietly.
“Why are you looking for him anyway?” The judge snapped back from his spiteful reverie.
“He was friends with my mother in the Algerian war. She died recently and…”
“Was it a one-night stand? Probably. Because my brother deserted the army very quickly.”
If Valérie was insulted by the remark, and that was surely the intention, then she didn’t show it. “I made a promise to her that I would pass on her regards. I’d still like to do that.”
“Well, I hope you do! He keeps disappearing, Bonneval will have told you that. I’d go out and look for him myself, but as you can see, I can’t get around too easily these days. Find him, bring him back.” He cackled again. “I’m bored without him! What do you say, Bonneval?”
The policeman shrugged. “You can do what you want. He’s not reported as missing; in fact, it’s the opposite. People keep reporting that he’s turned up. You are not the first chambre d’hôte to come by saying he skipped off without paying.”
“I’m not paying his bills!” the old man interrupted. “You’ll get no money from me!” There was a knock at the door. “Oh, it’s that painted woman. That’s too many people in my house now, you’ll have to go.” And with that, he theatrically spun his wheelchair around, effectively turning his back on them. Bonneval nodded to them to start to leave.
“Bonjour!” came a cheery voice from the door. “And how’s my poisonous reptile today?” It was the young waitress from the brasserie, and belatedly she saw the others in the room. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, turning bright red as she began taking in all the faces one by one, obviously startled to see visitors.
“Typical,” spat the judge. “I blame the tattoos.”