‘A policeman has been killed in Paris.’
NINE
Stewart Cowper, having invoked the British Consul, was allowed to leave the police headquarters the same afternoon that he was detained with Harvey. He refused to answer any questions at all, and his parting advice to Harvey was to do likewise. They were alone in a corridor.
‘The least I can do,’ said Harvey, ‘is to defend Effie.’
‘Understandable,’ said Stewart, and left to collect his luggage from the château and get a hired car to Paris, and a plane to London.
Harvey got home later that night, having failed to elicit, from the questions he was asked by an officer who had come to Epinal for the purpose — the same old questions — what had exactly happened in Paris that morning, and where Effie was supposed to fit into the murder of the policeman.
‘Did you hear about the killing on the radio, M. Gotham?’
‘No. I’ve only just learned of it from you. I wasn’t in the château this morning. I was in the cottage with my English lawyer, Stewart Cowper.’
‘What did you discuss with your lawyer?’
‘The different versions of the Book of Job in various recent English translations of the Bible.’
Harvey’s interrogator looked at him with real rage. ‘One of our policemen has been killed,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Harvey.
They escorted him to pick up his car at Nancy, and followed him home.
Next day the Sunday papers had the same photograph of Effie. There was also a photograph of the policeman, lying in the street beside a police car, covered by a sheet, with some police standing by. Effie had been recognised by eye-witnesses at the scene of the killing, in the eighteenth arrondissement. A blonde, longhaired girl with a gun. She was the killer. Her hair was drawn back in a pony-tail at the time of the commando-raid; she was wearing blue jeans and a grey pullover. The Paris security police and the gendarmerie were now operating jointly in the search for FLE and its supporters, and especially for the Montmartre killers.
That was the whole of the news, though it filled several pages of the newspapers. The volume of printed words was to be explained by the length of the many paragraphs ending with a question mark, by numerous interpolations about Harvey and his Bible-sect, his wealth, his château, and by details of the unfortunate policeman’s family life.
It was not till after lunch on Monday that he was invited to the commissariat at Epinal once more. Two security men from Paris had arrived to interrogate him. Two tall men, one of them in his late forties, robust, with silvering sideburns, the other fair and skinny, not much over thirty, with gilt-rimmed glasses, an intellectual. Harvey thought, if he had seen them together in a restaurant, he would have taken the older man for a business-man, the younger for a priest.
Later, when he chewed over their questions, he was to find it difficult to distinguish between this second interrogation and the first one of a few days ago. This was partly because the older man, who introduced himself by the name of Chatelain, spent a lot of time going over Harvey’s previous deposition.
‘My house is surrounded by your men,’ said Harvey. ‘You have your young woman auxiliary in my house. What are you accusing me of?’ (Stewart Cowper had advised him: If they question you again, ask them what they have against you, demand to know what is the charge.)
‘We are not accusing, Mr Gotham, we are questioning.’
‘Questions can sound like accusations.’
‘A policeman has been shot dead.’
And their continual probe into why he had settled in France:
Harvey recalled later.
‘I liked the house,’ said Harvey, ‘I got my permit to stay in France. I’m regular with the police.’
‘Your wife has been in trouble before.’
‘I know,’ said Harvey.
‘Do you love your wife?’
‘That’s rather a personal question.’
‘It was a personal question for the policeman who was killed.’
‘I wonder,’ said Harvey, conversationally. He was suddenly indignant and determined to be himself, thoughtfully in charge of his reasoning mind, not any sort of victim. ‘I wonder … I’m not sure that death is personal in the sense of being in love. So far as we know, we don’t feel death. We know the fear of death, we know the process of dying. From the outside it looks the most personal of phenomena. But isn’t death the very negation of the personal, therefore strictly speaking impersonal? A dead body is the most impersonal thing I can think of. Unless one believes in the continuity of personality in its terrestrially recognisable form, as opposed to life-after-death which is something else. Many disbelieve in life after death, of course, but —’
‘Pardon? Are you trying to tell me that the death of one of our men is trivial?’
‘No. I was reflecting on a remark of yours. Philosophising, I’m afraid. I meant —’
‘Kindly don’t philosophise,’ said Chatelain. ‘This is not the place. I want to know where your wife is. Where is Effie?’
‘I don’t know where Mine Gotham is.’
And again:
‘A policeman has been killed by the FLE gang. Two men and a girl, all armed. In the eighteenth arrondissement in Paris.’
‘I’m sorry that a policeman has been shot,’ said Harvey. ‘Why in the eighteenth arrondissement?’
‘That’s what we’re asking you,’ said Chatelain.
‘I have no idea. I thought these terrorists acted mainly in popular suburbs.’
‘Was your wife ever before in the eighteenth arrondissement, do you know?’
‘Of course,’ said Harvey. ‘Who hasn’t been in the eighteenth? It’s Montmartre.’
‘Have you and your wife any friends there?’
‘I have friends there and I suppose my wife has, too.’
‘Who are your friends?’
‘You should know. Your colleagues here went through my address book last week and checked all my friends.’
In the middle of the afternoon Chatelain became more confidential. He began to melt, but only in resemblance to a refrigerator which thaws when the current is turned off. True warmth, thought Harvey at the time, doesn’t drip, drip, drip. And later, in his cottage, when he reconstituted the scene he thought: And I ask myself, why was he a refrigerator in the first place?
‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise with you, Mr Gotham,’ said Chatelain, on the defreeze. ‘Not to know where one’s wife is can not be a pleasant experience.
‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise with you,’ said Harvey. ‘I know you’ve lost one of your men. That’s serious. And I sympathise, as everyone should, with his family. But you offer no proof that my wife, Effie, is involved. You offer only a photograph that you confiscated from a box on my table.’
‘We confiscated …?’ The man consulted Harvey’s thick file which lay on the desk. ‘Ah, yes. You are right. The Vosges police obtained that photograph from your house. Witnesses have identified that photograph as the girl in the gang. And look — the identikit, constructed with the help of eye-witnesses to a bank robbery and supermarket bombings, some days prior to our obtaining the photograph. Look at it — isn’t that your wife?’
Harvey looked at the drawing.
‘When I first saw it in the paper I thought it resembled my wife’s sister, Ruth, rather than my wife,’ he said. ‘Since it couldn’t possibly refer to Ruth it seems to me even more unlikely that it refers to Effie.’
‘Mme Gotham was arrested in Trieste.’
Harvey was still looking at the identikit. It reminded him, now, of Job’s wife in La Tour’s painting even though the drawing was full-face and the painting showed a profile.