Significance (36 page)

Jean
-
Pierre dialled the number of the local police station direct. It was a number he had memorised as he'd had excellent cause to use it on numerous occasions – good citizen that he was. It rang seven times and he counted, mouthing the number under his breath.

The older of the two men got into the car beside the woman. They talked to one another and then she shook her head and, smiling, she turned around and took the steering wheel in readiness to set off.

Jean
-
Pierre pushed down the catch on the driver's door locking himself in. He heard the ring tone pulse twice more. Still no answer.

The woman started the engine. He saw her suddenly look at him with an expression of annoyance and surprise. He saw her lips move, though he could not hear what she said, and she lifted both hands from the wheel as if in supplication.

Then the man looked at Jean
-
Pierre. He frowned and shook his head, then said something angrily to the woman which caused her to sound the horn in two quick bursts.

Jean
-
Pierre pressed the button to end the call to the local station and dialled the three digit code for the emergency services.

The man and woman seemed to be debating what to do. The woman shook her head and then the man reached in front of
her and pressed the horn. Three long beeps filled the air. Jean
-
Pierre, who had his window three quarters open, now shut it until there was only a slim gap at the top.

The horn sounded again, this time an extended angry blast, impossible to ignore. Pedestrians and people in cars craned their heads to see what was going on.

The switchboard operator at the emergency number answered the phone just as the man was getting out of the car and coming slowly toward Jean
-
Pierre and gesticulating for him to move the Renault. Jean
-
Pierre did his best to ignore him. The man tapped on the driver's window, waved his arms indicating the driveway and the waiting car.

Then he began yelling, partly in bad French, partly in English.

‘Monsieur, monsieur! Alle oop! Hey! Hey, guy! Hey, move your car! Sir. For Christsake! Monsieur, vite. Je suis's getting mad as goddamn hell.'

There was more banging on the side window, then some sweeping arm movements, which indicated forward movement.

‘Police, please,' Jean
-
Pierre said into his mobile phone.

‘One moment,' the woman's voice at the other end said brightly.

Jean
-
Pierre had been looking straight ahead, determined not to look directly at the man, only seeing what he was doing from the corner of his eye. Suddenly the man bobbed into view, thrusting his face in the direction of Jean
-
Pierre on the other side of the windscreen, and yelling, ‘Are you deaf?' then slamming his hand three times on the bonnet, making a series of resounding bangs and probably denting it.

Then just as suddenly, the man seemed to give up. He moved away from Jean
-
Pierre's car and crossed the pavement to his own, shrugging at the woman behind the wheel as he did so. He got back in the car beside her, slamming the door behind him. They talked to and fro animatedly for a few moments, throwing the odd hostile glance at Jean
-
Pierre as they did so.

The boy in the back, Jean
-
Pierre noticed, was rocking rhythmically from side to side and letting his head repeatedly collide with the window. The couple, bickering now, did not seem to notice. They should stop him from doing that, Jean
-
Pierre thought, they should tie him up, pinion him, put his head in a brace of some sort. Drug him. Keep him home. In a home. He wasn't safe.

Then the man tilted his body to one side in order to reach into his trouser pocket.

A gun? Jean
-
Pierre thought with alarm.

An object was brought into view and waggled aggressively in Jean
-
Pierre's direction. A slim silver
-
grey object. No gun, but a mobile phone. Somewhat ridiculously Jean
-
Pierre mimicked the gesture. Two little boys threatening each other with toys. Bang
-
bang, you're dead.

But this was even more banal, two grown men threatening each other with cell phones. Gonna tell the police. Gonna tell Daddy.

But this is a fight Jean
-
Pierre will win. He has a head start.

At first it's difficult for him to explain over the phone, what happened yesterday, what happened today. Lines get crossed. The person on the other end of the phone thinks it is Jean
-
Pierre trapped in his driveway and when he persuades them it is the other way around they sound nonplussed. Why did you do that, sir? Because they were escaping. Escaping what?

So it goes. On and on.

Finally Jean
-
Pierre remembers the man slamming the flat of his palm on the bonnet. Three times. Hard. Causing untold damage. Deliberate. Reckless.

A patrol is on its way, the telephonist says.

Scott, speaking to another operator, is told the same thing.

Quietly, Scott told Marilyn to take Aaron back into the house. He could handle this. It was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

The Hanged Man

The layout of the police station was such that from Sabine's window she could see into the briefing room, which was in a wing at right angles to the main block. She had been typing up a report when she glanced up to see Paul Vivier standing by one of the stacking chairs near the front of the room. His back was to her and his right hand was resting on the chair, while his left was hanging loose and lifeless. His head was bent forward, so that her first quick impression was that of a hanged man.

The first dead body she had ever seen had been that of a man who'd hung himself.
This was long before she'd joined the police, long before anyone should see such a thing – she had been twelve years old. The man, a neighbour, was a bureaucrat of some sort (she never found out exactly what he did to earn his living) and Sabine's mother, noticing that his shutters were still closed at midday, had sent her round to see if there was anything the matter.

‘If he's not well, ask him if there's anything he needs. I'll make some of Aunt Bridget's special garlic soup.'

Sabine had gone to the man's front door first, rang the old fashioned bell and waited. The man lived alone, he had no wife or children, and his mother had died three years earlier after a long illness. Sabine's mother took a great interest in him. ‘A young man like that…' she'd say, though to Sabine he didn't look young at all. ‘Poor thing, he was devoted to his mama. She gave him life, then she took his.' It had taken many years for Sabine to understand what that meant.

She had rung the bell again, rattling the chain and enjoying the loud clamour that seemed to echo in the unusually quiet street. No one answered, but his car – a four by four fitted out with a special ramp so that he could take his mother out and about in her wheelchair – was parked in its usual place in front of the house. Sabine went around to the back of the house and, after rapping her knuckles on the glass panel, she tried the door and found it was unlocked. She crept in, calling loudly,
‘Monsieur Thorez! Monsieur?'

He was hanging over the stairs, his head lolling forward and his toes pointing down like a string puppet. He was in his black suit – perhaps he had no less formal clothes – but he'd taken his shoes off – perhaps to prevent damage to the
belle époque
chair he'd stood on.

Vivier moved then, lifting his head and looking around as if he'd suddenly had a new thought. Or as if someone had called his name. He moved to the corner of the room near the window where there was a flip chart. He stood staring at it, as if reading, though the sheet of paper was white and empty.

Sabine Pelat watched him for a few minutes. She remembered how earlier she'd teased him, laughed at him and then, delightfully, laughed with him. All over a stubbornly knotted shoelace. It had been as if a peculiar sort of insanity had overtaken them both. The nature of the work really, which was often so terrible. She knew from one or maybe several of her translated English novels, that one of the slang names for the police in the UK was ‘the filth'. Certainly filth was what they dealt in. Nightmarish, visceral, tragic and real. Filth. Not their filth, but when you dealt with it day in and day out it entered you; seeped into your pores, coated your tongue. You breathed it, lived it, dreamt it.

But Paul Vivier, that most remote of men, had laughed. And laughed. And it had been thrilling to see him laugh, to recognise that this was possible. Without recrimination. It could quite easily have gone a different way. He may well have been less than amused. And then?

But he had laughed. His face transformed. So that she could see his strong white teeth, the sharp incisors, with a single nugget of gold glinting towards the back. His eyes gleaming brightly, the creases at the outer edges of his lids, which were not unattractive, as one presumed wrinkles to be, but almost like accent marks which highlighted the act of smiling.

Sabine had been quietly focusing her attention on Paul Vivier for some time. For a year or two, if somewhat distantly. But now, in these three or four minutes, it dawned on her that lately her interest in him had been less formal, less to do with admiration and respect for a superior, with a keenness to watch and learn, and more to do with… She paused and looked away from him in order to gather her thoughts.

Was it lust? No, something deeper and more complex.

Then did she like him a great deal?

‘Like' was such a flaccid word, it needed the hard on of a qualifier such as ‘very' or ‘a lot' or ‘loads'.

No, the word she was reaching for presented a leap of perilous risk; the word was (how could it be?) love.

She smiled. She could not help herself.

And then as if to remind her of where she was, of who she was, the phone rang.

She picked it up and gave her name. On the other end of the line there was only silence.

‘Who's there? Hello.'

She listened. There was no breathing to be heard, only a sort of hollow quiet rushing noise, like faraway waves in a seashell. Like the sound of an asthmatic twelve
-
year
-
old girl's lungs when something has frightened and shocked and saddened her, and stripped away the last illusions of childhood.

She listened and looked up again to where Vivier had been standing seconds before, but he was gone.

‘Paul?' she said into the mouthpiece, then realising her mistake, she hung up the phone and went back to the report she'd been typing.

Road Rage

It was Lamy who was sent to deal with the traffic incident in the end. A waste of a morning as far as he could see. Two motorists squabbling over a parking space, turning nasty, but mostly just the loud venting of rage.

Dawn had been hazy, but now as he drove in the direction of the rising sun, its piercing light seemed to rip right through his eyeballs to drive a dagger of pain into his head. He adjusted the sun visor, but that didn't help, and so with a flick of his hand, he slapped it back to its original position.

He turned onto rue Jules Verne; a tree
-
lined avenue where the sun, now to his left, benignly sparkled and shone through the trees. Then, turning left, he saw La Coquille Bleue and, on the other side of the road, a blue Renault Clio parked on the pavement, and in the driveway beyond, a silver Saab estate. A tall blond man was sitting hunched on the garden wall a few feet from the car. He wore a blue short
-
sleeved shirt, faded denims and yacht shoes. In the Renault another man sat defiantly upright. He had a sharp little face, all pointy nose and narrow chin and scrawny neck topped by an unusually bouffant hairstyle like a coxcomb, which gave him a disturbingly bird
-
like quality.

Lamy pulled his car onto the pavement in front of the Renault, effectively blocking that car's escape and, after first sizing up the situation between the two men, he got out and signalled to the Renault driver that he should get out of his vehicle. In response, the driver in the Renault looked at the blond man who had been sitting on the wall, but was now leaning against it, then back at Lamy. His glance was theatrical, a head
-
twitching performance of double takes.

The blond man, watching this, pushed himself off the wall and made a move to approach Lamy. Lamy, like a cop on traffic duty, showed his palm to the blond man and beckoned to the scrawny man in the Renault. Reluctantly both men did as they were told and stood five feet away on either side of Lamy, shifting and posturing restlessly.

Lamy stepped forward and, applying a little theatrical panache himself, he removed his notebook from his pocket and flipped it open.