Dial M for Merde (10 page)

‘Hang on, what are you saying exactly?' I asked. ‘You invited me along on this trip because you thought you'd be less noticeable if you were in a couple? I was some kind of male camouflage while you got on with your investigation?'

‘No, of course not. I thought it'd be fun, the two of us. After LA and all that.' She sighed. ‘But you have to admit it's a bit of a pain if the guy you invite along starts getting the police and the army all excited while you're trying to keep a low profile and ask a few discreet questions. What if you'd been charged and sent to court?'

‘I wasn't charged, though,' I said. ‘And I did find out where there might be some sturgeon. Which is the whole point of your trip, right? I was only trying to help.'

‘True,' she conceded, edging a few millimetres towards forgiving me at last. She sighed and went to gaze out of the window. ‘We're going to have to leave Collioure, though,' she said. ‘I know where we can hide out.'

‘Hide out?'

‘Yes, I need to keep you away from hen parties and men in uniform. I know an island with no police, no commandos. I'm pretty sure they haven't even got a postman.'

I didn't like to spoil her change of mood by saying it
wasn't the uniforms that worried me. Judging by my various interrogations back at the gendarmerie, it was the plain-clothes guy, the cop in the leather jacket, we had to worry about.

1

T
HE
F
RENCH COMEDIAN
Fernandel said that a glass of pastis is like a breast. One isn't enough, and three are too many.

Another similarity between breasts and pastis is that French men love to play with them both. Give a French guy a glass of the aniseed alcohol and a carafe of water and he regresses to when he was a baby filling cups in the bathtub. It's all because of pastis's fascinating ability to change colour when you add water, not just diluting the shade but turning the liquid from transparent amber to milky gold.

Not surprisingly, Paul Ricard, the guy who patented the drink, made a packet, and used the proceeds very wisely (in my humble opinion), buying two islands off the Côte d'Azur – Embiez, which is big enough to contain twenty-odd acres of vineyards, and the tiny Bendor, his personal hotel island a couple of hundred yards off the resort of Bandol.

And it was to the smaller of these that M and I were now headed, to ‘hide out' as she put it. I just wish I'd remembered what a Parisian barman once told me – that pastis has made its way not only into Provençal hearts and livers, but also into their language. When they say ‘Quel pastis!' they mean that something is a total mess, a situation as mixed-up and cloudy as the drink of the same name.

I was about to get myself into a right pastis.

 

We were on a train rattling out of Collioure, and the morning sun was already high over the rooftops.

‘What did you tell the police?' M said, for at least the fifth time, like a cop who keeps hoping you'll change your story and contradict yourself.

I repeated the key points of the previous night's various interviews.

‘And how exactly did you ask the commando guy about sturgeon?' she said.

‘I simply asked if he'd seen any while they were out diving.'

‘Straight out, just like that?'

‘You think I should have started with sardines and worked my way up?'

It was meant to be a joke, but she didn't laugh. Instead, she began to explain some paranoid theory about the police being after me rather than the drunken exhibitionists.

I didn't want to tell her that she was taking it all a bit too seriously. So what if the police knew she was investigating sturgeon farms? We were only talking about a few fish, after all, not nuclear submarines. They'd let me go, hadn't they? And no one had tried to arrest her.

‘Look,' I told her, ‘they came to get us because a gang bang on the beach doesn't fit in with the town's arty image, that's all. Someone saw naked buttocks and called the cops.'

She gave a faint smile, her first of the day. ‘Yeah, you're probably right.'

‘So what will you do about the sturgeon sighting?' I asked.

‘I've reported it. We'll try to find out where the soldiers do their exercises along that bit of the coast.'

Personally, I would have been making plans to hire a microlight aircraft and do some zig-zagging over the sea at Saintes Maries, but M's dynamism seemed to be dulled by her worries this morning.

As soon as we had trundled through a pitch-dark tunnel, I opened that day's
Midi Libre
. I'd bought a copy in case my beach party had made the news. In French local papers, nothing is too minor to warrant a write-up.

To my relief, there were no puns on ‘Sussex' in the headlines, but the previous day had been pretty eventful in the region. I read out a few titbits to try and lighten M's mood.

In Céret, in the Pyrenees, two wild boars had burst into a school classroom. An adult sow and a piglet had scattered desks and terrified children for ten minutes before bursting out again, running into the street and knocking an Englishman off his bike. The boars had escaped unhurt, but the Englishman had suffered a dislocated shoulder.

‘The reporter seems to think that was a good result,' I said. ‘Local wildlife two, Brits nil.'

M disagreed. She thought the writer had just been reassuring the hunters up in the mountains that their targets hadn't been damaged.

I soldiered on, informing her that windy conditions were predicted all along the coast. I read out the forecast. Down near Collioure, I told her, the sea was going to be ‘agitée' – rough. But further northeast, where we were going, it wouldn't be as bad, merely ‘ridée', or wrinkly.

‘Like me,' she said.

‘You're not wrinkly.'

‘Yes, I am. And my boobs are drooping.'

‘No, they're not. They're perfect. Especially when they're agités.'

She grunted a short laugh, and went back to staring at her phone. She was watching it, hoping to catch it the second it rang.

‘I'd never realized oceanography could be so stressful,' I said. ‘I thought you floated around in coral reefs and cavorted with dolphins.'

She seemed to force herself to snap out of her gloom.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘I'm forgetting. We're on a train in the South of France, it's gloriously sunny, and we both know we're going to shag each other's brains out the second we get to our hotel.'

I indulged in a few seconds of pleasant daydreaming before my phone buzzed, distracting me from the thought of what was to come. It was Elodie, who was in too much of a hurry to bother with pleasantries like ‘hello'.

‘Did you call my father about getting money for your mad friend Jake?'

‘Yes,' I confessed.

‘Well, don't bother Papa with things like that. He has enough to think about. And please try not to get Valéry arrested any more, OK? I need him to be at the wedding. Have you arranged to come and see the bitch grand-mère?'

‘Yes.'

‘And have you prepared those menus?'

‘No, not yet,' I said, feeling as though I was back in the gendarmerie again.

‘What? Don't you know how urgent this is?' Elodie sounded almost hysterical. ‘Haven't you got any ideas at all?
Apart from the anchovies, that is, and they were my idea.'

‘Yes, of course I have
ideas
,' I lied. ‘I just haven't put them on paper yet.'

‘What ideas?'

Oh merde, I thought, staring out of the window for inspiration. Railway tracks marinated in olive oil? Telegraph poles à la vinaigrette? Deep-fried fig trees?

Yes, the curly branches of the tree had given me an idea.

‘Local food,' I said. ‘Everything local.'

‘And?' Elodie wanted more details.

‘A local, seasonal banquet. I've ordered your anchovies, I'll buy other local stuff, like figs, olive oil, uh, olives …' Shit, what else did they produce down here?

‘It doesn't sound very chic,' Elodie said. ‘What about champagne and foie gras and a giant exotic fruit salad, with mangoes and passion fruit and—'

‘But think about your carbon footprint, Elodie.' Encouraged by a thumbs-up from M, I was warming to my theme.

‘My what?'

I tried to translate it for her. ‘Your pied de charbon?'

‘Coal foot? What is that, a miners' disease?'

‘Haven't you heard of food miles? The ecological impact of importing goods from far away?'

Elodie gave one of her trademark shrieks of despair. ‘I have less than two weeks, Paul. The mangoes I want are already on their way to France. Do you want me to take them back on a Vélib?'

‘But this is your chance to do something for global warming,' I said. ‘Every little helps.'

‘Global warming? This is my wedding, Paul. Fuck the planet. Send me some menus.'

M took two calls on the train. Each time she went out into the corridor to speak, and when she came back she looked troubled, as if she'd just received bad news. No, not bad news. Difficult news, that I wouldn't be pleased to hear.

Not that there was much danger of my being displeased by hearing anything. When I asked her if everything was OK, she shrugged and said ‘the usual'.

We changed on to a TGV at Narbonne, and she made a call from the platform while we waited for the train to leave. When she came to sit down, she looked more preoccupied than ever. This time, I knew better than to ask why.

Soon our TGV was rolling smoothly along the shore of an immense lake. M brightened up and said that it might be a good place to hide a few sturgeon pens. The brackish water was perfect for them. And it wasn't far from the Camargue.

Several fishermen were at work on the lake, standing up in one-man boats. I watched them, waiting for a giant fish to torpedo one of the punts, but everything looked serenely peaceful.

The train picked up speed and we skimmed between the sea and a series of smaller, marshy lakes. It was here that I had a hallucination.

‘Flamingos? Aren't they meant to be down in Africa somewhere?'

This perked M up even more. ‘You know that the French call them pink Belgians,' she said.

‘What?'

‘
Flamands roses
. Flamand means Flemish. They're pink Belgians.'

‘Really?'

‘No, it's a joke.' She squeezed my knee as if this might
wake my brain up. ‘
Flamant
with a “t” at the end is flamingo. The word for Flemish ends in a “d”. You see?'

‘Yes, typical French joke. It has a kind of medieval originality about it.'

‘Now who's being grumpy?' She grabbed me round the neck and kissed me fiercely on the cheek. I'd had less painful things done to me by osteopaths, but I didn't mind. The clouds, it seemed, were dispersing.

‘I think I'm going to give up this job,' she said. ‘It's doing my head in.' She rubbed her temples to illustrate where the damage was being done. ‘Sorry if I've been down. It's just that none of these French guys will take me seriously. They pretend they're listening but they just stare at my tits. They promise they're going to help, then call me up and give me a million reasons why they can't. You report a sighting and they don't even answer. So bugger them. I'll just have to get some money together for my own aerial survey. I'll call London about it as soon as we get to Bendor. Then we can relax and enjoy the last of the summer sun.'

It wasn't a good time to remind her that my immediate horizon was darkened by a meeting with Elodie's bitch grand-mère.

 

The TGV snaked past another gigantic inland sea, which would have looked inviting except for the petrochemical works along its banks, and then hit the sunny but shabby suburbs of Marseille. At the Gare St Charles, we changed trains again, this time on to a double-decker train bound for Toulon.

It wound its way across some tough-looking neighbourhoods in east Marseille, then broke out into countryside again, clattering between mountainsides cloaked in dark-green pines. There were clumps of villas, too, and
occasional flashes of deep-blue sea framed by grey cliffs.

‘Won't it be good to be just on holiday?' M said wistfully. ‘I don't want my work problems to come between us, like they did with your other girlfriends.' I'd told her about Florence, who left me when I hit merde setting up my tea room, and Alexa, who drifted away from me because of all the work-related chaos in America. ‘I'm definitely going to tell the French where to stick their research.'

‘Won't that mean you'll get sent back to London?' I asked.

‘London?' she said, as if she'd temporarily forgotten the name of her home town. ‘Oh, maybe.'

 

There were no taxis in the forecourt of Bandol station, so we strolled down the hill towards the sea. On the waterfront, the marina stretched as far as I could see in either direction, the masts like an infestation of spiny sea urchins. At the end of a row of millionaires' cruisers was a small pontoon decorated with photos of rugged coastline, dramatic sunsets and underwater sea life. This was where we were to get the ferry to Bendor. M was reading a timetable posted on the ticket office.

‘Seven minutes,' she said. ‘Brilliant.' Her smile faded when her phone began buzzing in her bag. She took it out, looked at the screen and gritted her teeth in frustration. ‘I'm going to have to take this, sorry.'

She wandered away down the line of flashy yachts, talking in French. She stopped about thirty yards away, at the foot of a wooden gangplank belonging to an old, classy boat – a long, curvaceous vessel with a brass deckrail. You could imagine 1930s film stars lounging there as they drank cocktails and sucked on cigarette holders. It made a change from the bulky ostentation of the fibreglass pimp cruisers.

M seemed to be arguing, cutting at the air with her free hand. But it didn't look as though she was winning the argument.

‘Merde!' I heard her clearly above the traffic noise from thirty yards away.

The Bendor ferry, a flat craft big enough for a single car, was backing up to the quayside when M returned, looking grim.

‘Did you tell them to get lost?' I asked.

She grunted one of her short-lived laughs. I gathered that meant no.

There were two other passengers for the island – a businessman with a briefcase and laptop, probably on his way to sell the hotel new windows or management software, and a guy accompanying a pile of oyster boxes. That night's entrée du jour, I guessed.