Night of the Radish

The “Night of the Radish” is a novel-length farce being written in installments as and when I can find the time. There is a plot. If anyone is expecting Thomas Mann or something then they should hit the “back” button on their browser right now.

“Night of the Radish” is a work of pure fiction and the characters and events potrayed are the product of the author’s fevered imagination. Any similarilty to actual persons or events is co-incidental.

Rubbish though it might be, like all the material on this site, “Night of the Radish” is copyright so I’d be obliged if it were not pinched.

Night of the Radish

I

Pierre-Yves Pompodore de Frou-Frou clicked his tongue with barely suppressed fury.

His impeccable family connections had led to the hushing-up of the unfortunate incident – a single indiscretion to which anyone could have fallen prey – that had led the end of his high-flying career in the highly secretive “Interesting Ideas for Thwarting Naughty Non-French Types” department (more officially known, though to only a handful of people, as the Directorate de Confusion Internationale, Non -Coopération et Désinformation – DCINCD) of the French Foreign Ministry.

Worse, he had been banished from Paris to this God forsaken hole in the south Angoumois, one of the least regarded of France’s départements, and reduced to the rank of a humble tax collector.

And now, the nadir of his humiliation: dealing with an impertinent, scruffy Englishman over the trifling matter of €60.
He flared his elegant nostrils, sultry tunnels lined with the silkiest of hairs that had made so many women swoon and so many men seethe with envy.

“M’sieur” he barked in his stentorian tones, honed at great public expense to the keenest of edges at l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration, “M’sieur, it is a very simple matter! You are the proprietor” – he almost choked on the word! – That this Englishman with his dreadful haircut and moth-eaten jumper could ever have been allowed to run any kind of business in France was insupportable – “of an accommodation enterprise. As such you receive paying guests and, ergo, are liable for taxe de sejour based on the number of nights for which you had these guests”

His tormentor smiled. “Yes, yes. I understand,” said the Englishman, brandishing a small wad of grubby €5 notes. Pierre-Yves squirmed in his exquisitely tailored trousers (a stark contrast, he noted to the somewhat soiled jeans sat in front of him). Cash! Would the vulgarity never end!

“But what I don’t quite understand,” the English continued, “is why you are bothering to collect this tax in the first place. Let’s imagine that there are 100 enterprises letting accommodation in this delightful little canton of ours, OK? Right, assuming that our setup is paying the average amount, then the total revenue from this exercise is €6000. Now this office, which is solely concerned with the administration and collection of this tax, employs your good self and two other people. I find it very hard to believe that once the overheads of this are covered there can be much left over for the promotion of tourism in this fine region!”

Pierre-Yves wanted to scream at this lack of deference to social betters. Ever since the requirement for Europeans to have a residence permit – a carte de sejour  – to live in France had been discontinued the borders of the Republic had been laid wide open to unspeakable riff-raff (somewhat dusky riff-raff, in this case, he noted) such as this, borne here on a tide undeserved profits from a fluke speculation in the insane property market of the United Kingdom. It was scant consolation that he had advised against the move, in the days when his opinion had carried weight, but the rules on freedom of movement had overruled any objection.

Even the rat-infested hellhole that passed for a school where this idiot in front of him had received his laughable education, someone must have explained that administration was an end in itself, not the means to achieve some other aim.

He ground his teeth, splintering the expensive ceramic crowns into priceless dust, as he considered a response, his ENA training eventually overcoming his distaste.

“M’sieur is quite correct: in the short term the taxe de sejour will not in itself cover the expense of promoting tourism in the south Angoumois. However, the introduction of this tax in this region is only one contributory item to the overall scheme. M’sieur should rest assured that our objective remains to secure considerable return on this early investment.

This seemed to satisfy the Anglo-Saxon moron as he grinned broadly. “Oh well, in that case Pete me old fruit, here’s the cash!” and he started to count out the stained currency. “Ooopps – that one’s got a bogey on it – kids, eh? Still, I’m sure it’s still valid anyway!”

Pierre-Yves buried his immaculate head in his manicured hands. That his career should have descended to this. He opened the draw of his desk and rummaged around in the impressive collection of tablets prescribed for his “nerves” by Dr Chandra and located the bottle containing the large blue ones and labelled “For stress caused by foreigners.”

II

His morning’s business at the tax office concluded, Dave Grimple wandered cheerfully down the Rue de la République towards the bar / hotel / grocery shop he ran with his wife, Cheryl.

His interview with Pierre–Yves had been most satisfactory from his point of view. He now not only felt an increased appreciation for the self fulfilling nature of the Gordian Knot that was French bureaucracy but he now knew rather more about the dapper little man who walked past the bar each morning and who lived in a large, elegant maison bourgeoisie set back from the main drag a few hundred meters down the road from his own establishment.

Cheryl had been most interested in the little man. Or, rather, in his wife, whom she swore she recognised from somewhere. But Cheryl had been unable to satisfy her curiosity about the well-dressed and, frankly, very attractive woman who had arrived in the town two months previously and who walked past the bar most days on her way to the shops. The woman, it seemed, spoke to no-one.

But now he had a name for her. Or at least he thought he had. Pierre–Yves had had an animated ‘phone conversation on the subject of lobsters with someone called Delphine during the course of their meeting, and since it seemed unlikely that the man would be call his fishmonger ma chèrie, Dave could only conclude that Delphine was his wife or mistress. It was a start.

The Rue de la République widened out into the Place de l’Hôpital, the effective centre of St Louis sur Baq, administrative heart of the south Angoumois, the most sparsely populated and bucolic part of this largely agricultural département. . The place was dominated by the covered market in its centre. Beyond the place the Rue de la République continued, crossing the river Baq and rising out of the town to the countryside beyond.

On the side to Dave’s left was his modest business empire: the “Lamb & Flag” bar and hotel, and “Le Comptoir Anglais,” expat grocery store and unofficial community centre.

A native of South East London, and of somewhat confused ancestry, Dave had been fascinated by France from the age of 14. Until that point, his most notable academic achievement had been bring voted “Little Toerag Most Likely to Set Fire to the School” in a staffroom poll.

But a school trip to Calais changed all that. While his classmates scoured the shops for flick-knives and fireworks before scouring their insides with wine fit only for cleaning drains, Dave had undergone an epiphany. Whether it was the buildings, the cafés or the people, Dave could not say. All he knew was that he wanted to be there.

On his return to England he had applied himself to getting himself back to France for good, excelling in the language to the point of alarming his teachers and devouring French literature and history texts as though possessed.

A French exchange visit to the Darkest Loire provided some succour. While other pupils complained bitterly about the lack of entertainment, the decidedly primitive sanitary arrangements and the somewhat dubious foodstuffs they were being offered (some of which, to their horror, didn’t even appear to come from shops but had been dug from the ground or recently bludgeoned to death in the back garden), Dave was happier than he had ever been.

Leaving school with a perfect grade O level in French and a handful of more mediocre qualifications, Dave spent the next few years bobbing & diving and ducking & weaving in proper London fashion before finally hitting upon the idea that made his fortune.

It was boom time in the City of London of the 1980s, and Dave set himself up selling specialist French-style sandwiches office-to-office to people with more money than sense. His Roquefort & Asparagus baps and Foi Gras & Avocado Panini’s became legend across the Square Mile. To the more discerning (that is, rich and morally bankrupt) of his clients, Dave would supply such rare delicacies as Thrush Pâté on Rye and wholemeal baguettes filled with illegally sourced Ortolan Bunting, tiny but gastronomically sought after birds that had been force fed with a pounded mixture of walnuts and dried figs before being drowned in Armagnac and lightly roasted. He told his neighbours in Bermondsey that the caged birds were canaries, though a culinary experiment with those more easily obtainable creatures turned out to be rather less than an unqualified success.

The sandwich game made more than enough for Dave to make frequent trips to France, scouting the regions for that perfect little bit of the country that he knew existed. It also allowed him to salt away a tidy little sum against the day when he would up sticks and move there for good.

It was during his sandwich selling days that Dave met Cheryl. He was delivering a “Mixed Kebab of Endangered Songbirds in Pitta” and a “Frogs’ Legs Pasty” to one of her colleagues.

Superficially like chalk and cheese – Cheryl was public school, Oxford PPE and was trading equity warrants for a Japanese bank when they met – their shared appreciation of all-things French had drawn them together.

That was twenty years and four children ago, and ten years previously they had finally found in the South Angoumois what Dave had been searching for: a place they could call home.

The South Angoumois was also potentially very appealing to the British, being generously endowed with scenery, culinary treats and an ample supply of reasonably priced wine from extensive vineyards.

What it lacked was good transport links, but Dave had recognised the development potential of a disused military airfield with a shed on it near the départemental capital, Préviné, and, sure enough, three months after the Grimples set up shop, Aer O’Hooligan had started running twice daily flights from the UK.

And the British had come. Tourists for the most part, but also retirees and others newly enriched by the UK property boom, who came to take advantage of a plentiful supply of inexpensive renovation projects, pouring money into the local economy with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for the services of artisans and the offerings of DIY stores.

For the Grimples, business had expanded year-on-year. The Lamb & Flag provided accommodation for holidaymakers during the summer and house hunters during the winter. The bar had become popular with expats and locals alike, and even attracted women via the simple expedients of having clean loos and a cocktail list.

For Dave the crowning moment of his career to date as a bar owner had been the appearance one morning of Mlle. De Follette in his establishment. A proud daughter of the Republic, Mlle. De Follette was said to be 102 years old and rumoured to have been mistress to both General Le Clerc and De Gaulle. She had tasted the coffee, inspected the WCs and pronounced the bar “acceptable,” the closest to a Royal Warrant the place was ever likely to get. Now she came each morning, drank coffee for which she was never charged and blatantly flouted the ban on smoking in public places, about which no-one ever challenged her.

The grocery store was a more recent innovation. Expat residents hungered for the tastes of home and Dave was happy to sate their appetites.

An old friend from Bermondsey days arrived each week with a van load of baked beans, Marmite, cheddar cheese and Proper Sausages amongst other things. He also brought – securely hidden from prying eyes – special consignments about which Dr Chandra would prefer the world at large knew nothing.

The van returned to London full of cheese, confits, pâtés and other delicacies bound for a stall on Borough market, selling a taste of France to the British, in which Dave held a very lucrative 30% share.

The weekly delivery had been very early that morning and the doctor’s car was outside. Entering the bar, Dave caught the medic’s eye and inclined his head slightly. Dr Chandra drained his cup and started towards the door that joined the bar with the shop next door, then, checking he was unobserved made a sudden right to go through a door marked “Private.”

Cheryl was behind the bar. “Hello love,” said Dave, “won’t be a mo. Just something to tidy up. By the way, I think that woman’s called Delphine.”

And with that he too disappeared through the door.

“Delphine, Delphine…” Cheryl said to herself, “Ah yes, of course! Now I know you. Well, well, well.”

Dr Chandra was waiting somewhat nervously by the kitchen table when Dave appeared. He dabbed his brow with a handkerchief. “Right Dave, let’s have a look at the merchandise.” Grimple took a key from his pocket, unlocked a cupboard, and took out a large cardboard box, which he set upon the table. With a penknife, he slit the top open and took out one of the many clear plastic bags it contained, handing it to the doctor for inspection.

“Oh that is just perfect, Dave. Can you drop this off for me tonight?” “No problem – about 10 o’clock suit you?” “It does,” replied Chandra, and taking a roll of banknotes from his pocket, he handed them to Grimple, before nodding a goodbye and slipping through the door back to the bar.

Cheryl popped her head round as the doctor left. “Dave – can you mind the shop for a little while? There’s a call I’d like to make.” “No problem. Going anywhere nice?” “Perhaps,” said Cheryl, “I’m going to re-acquaint myself with Mme. Pompodore de Frou-Frou.”

III

In his office in his castle on a stormy West Coast of Ireland, Padrig O’Hooligan smiled to himself. It was not a particularly nice smile, but then Padrig O’Hooligan was not a particularly nice man.

Even amongst the chairmen of low cost airlines, that most cut throat of businesses, O’Hooligan was known as “That Bastard,” and epithet he bore with equanimity.

Although Aer O’Hooligan had not attained the scale and influence of the likes of Ryanair and Easyjet, the three dozen or so routes it operated were astoundingly popular and most lucrative. Padrig O’Hooligan was very definitely an extremely wealthy man.

He’d started small, in the late 1960s, by buying a couple of condemned DC3 Dakota aircraft being offloaded by the Irish Defence Forces for scrap with the profits of an livestock trading operation that had been his family’s business for almost a century.

Padrig had spotted the potential of being able to widen the scope of the livestock trade, with the value of certain high quality animals being far greater in the larger towns than their own locality would bear. All he asked of the owners of these happy creatures was 30% of the price plus their fare.

In between livestock sales he ferried passengers on family and business visits between obscure airfields on the mainland and on offshore islands. The timetable was flexible: he turned up when it suited him and people waited for him because the prices he charged were low and they had little choice otherwise.

The two aircraft provided transport for man and beast up and down the West Coast of Ireland for more than a decade, with conditions onboard best described as “pungent”.  Padrig travelled too, and observing the behaviour of men freed from the fetters of domesticity, began his lifelong study of human moral frailty and its application in the business of blackmail.

Normally the favours he gained for forgetting what he had seen were small: a waiver of landing fees at some small airport or the fitting of spares to his planes free of labour charges. But some rather bigger favours he stored away for the future, so that when Ireland entered the EU in 1973, young Padrig O’Hooligan was first in line for financial handouts.

And that was the point where O’Hooligan had abandoned the livestock transport business for good and had moved into the business of transporting organisms with far lower expectations of comfort and certainly of less value.

The money he received had not only funded an ever-renewing fleet of some 20 modern aircraft but had even allowed him to acquire the disused RAF Brothwick base to the North of London and to convert it to a civilian airport capable of handling millions of passengers and thousands of tonnes of freight (much of it legal) each year.

Having profited so handsomely from the weaknesses of others, O’Hooligan was very careful in the conduct of his personal life: he did not smoke, gambled occasionally and then only on the horses; drank in moderation and was a model, if somewhat cold,  husband and father.

His business affairs, shielded behind a phalanx of tame lawyers and accountants, were less impeccable and routinely involved bribery, coercion, practices so sharp they could cut and financial structures of such labyrinth complexity that no tax official would have time before retirement to begin to unravel them.

To his passengers he appeared to be some kind of folk hero, taking on the larger carriers and confounding and insulting them in equal measure.

What never ceased to amaze O’Hooligan was this: the more he set out to humiliate his customers with his conditions of carriage, the more they seemed to love him for it.

Like the other low-costs, O’Hooligan’s policy was to cut “fares” to the minimum and then to top-up on increasingly unavoidable “frills.” In line with his competitors he had engaged in the practice of stretching flight schedules – sometimes even mid-flight – so that it was practically impossible for his flights to be anything but on time, and 99.8% were.

He had introduced bookings charges, card charges that were impossible to circumvent unless one had a Platinum Visa Card from the Fourth National Bank of North Yemen, charges for checking in and charges for carrying hold baggage. He cadged “marketing grants” from the owners (usually the local municipality) of the airports to which Aer O’Hooligan flew, all of which was entirely consistent with accepted business practice in the world of the low-costs.

But O’Hooligan sought to go that little bit further: he wanted to differentiate himself from the pack with the ambition of being able to pay his customers to fly on his aircraft and to recoup the  money with ever-more imaginative “frills” charges.

It was the success of this latest strategy that was the source of Padrig O’Hooligans rather malevolent smile this May morning.

He pressed the intercom button on his desk. “Slyme you disgusting piece of distended rectum! Get your foetid, worthless, carcass in here you pointless pile of yak spittle!” he yelled.

At the other end of the cable, Kevin Slyme grinned: it sounded as though the boss was in a good mood. Slyme had been given the task of finding the new streams of revenue his boss had demanded, and this morning he knew that he had more than delivered. He rose from his desk and went through the door to the neighbouring office, ducking low as he did so. A large Waterford crystal paper weight shattered on the wall behind him at the point where his head would have been had he been standing normally.

“Ah, I almost got you that time, you little shite! Now come here and tell me what this pile of arse-wipe is all about.” And with that he hurled Kevin’s report across the desk.

“Well, Sir. As you can see, we introduced three new optional charges and one new surcharge on all flights a month ago. The first of these was the ‘Stairway Service Charge’ whereby passengers are given the choice of either hauling themselves up a greased rope into the aircraft or passing through a turnstile at the bottom of the aircraft steps and entering in a more conventional fashion. The rope is free; the turnstile costs €3.50. So far only six passengers have attempted the rope and all but one of these was beaten back by the cabin crew, who have been instructed to hit them with sticks issued for the purpose.

“The second charge of €2.50 is the ‘Optional Aircraft Cleaning Fee.’ Passengers can opt out of this provided that they are able to levitate themselves over the carpet and remain floating above their seat for the duration of the flight so as to avoid dirtying either with their person. 100% success there.

“Thirdly we have the ‘Lavatory Privacy Premium’ costing €5.00. Since we were prevented from charging for toilet usage on the planes by the Civil Aviation Authority (“Bunch of pinkos and queers!” muttered his boss) we hit upon the idea of a voluntary charge to avoid having a video of your visit to the loo posted on You Tube. Not quite as successful, that one: 95% take up, but then some people seem to like their few minutes of fame however it is arrived at.

“Finally, we have started weighing and measuring passengers to determine their Body Mass Index. Any flyer with a BMI of 20 or more is asked to pay a “Fat Sod” surcharge of €1.00 per excess BMI point or part thereof. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the BMI, Sir, but 20 is pretty damned thin.

“We’re now paying passengers €1.75 to fly Aer O’Hooligan, but the additional revenue generators are netting us an average of €15.65 per head. That’s over €70 million per year.”

O’Hooligan nodded. “I suppose it will do. I notice that you’ve suggested that my idea of renaming the business ‘Aer Screw You, You Losers’ might not be such a good one, ya little turd.”

“Well Sir,” said Slyme, “the costs of aircraft repainting and changes to advertising would be considerable and I’m not sure that the travelling public is quite ready for the rapier irony you intend.”

“Hmmmmm….” O’Hooligan had long learned to trust Kevin Slyme’s commercial judgement, “Very well. And the other matter?”

“I’m afraid the CAA are still being somewhat intransient about the idea of making cabin air supply an optional extra, Sir. They claim that delivering passengers alive is an inherent prerequisite of our licence. I’ve drafted a letter to the Secretary of State for Transport regarding this restraint of trade for your signature.”

“So I see, Slyme, so I see. You’ll let her know that we have the photographs of her with those two strapping 6th formers, won’t you?”

“Yes Sir. When she caves in, should I dispose of the negatives in the usual fashion?”

“Well of course you should Slyme! I’ve no doubt that her husband will find them most instructive. Particularly that business with the stuffed badger. Hopefully her replacement will be a little more pliable. Figuratively, I mean. She’s clearly quite sufficiently pliable in the physical sense. Now get out of here you nasty little rat’s pizzle!”

Slyme went. As he reached the door he stepped smartly to the right. The throwing knife embedded itself in the door with a thud! and vibrated alarmingly.

A voice behind him said: “Missed. Bugger.”

IV

Cheryl Grimple walked back to the Lamb & Flag feeling rather elated.

She had hoped that Delphine Delacroix – as she had been named the last time they met – might just remember her, but she hadn’t been expecting the warmth of welcome that she had received.

It had been as though the woman had been dying of thirst and Cheryl had been dispensing chilled water.

Now that Cheryl could see her properly it was obvious that this was the Delphine she had once known. True, the dark hair was cut to a short bob these days rather than the long tresses she had once sported and her attire was a rather demure ensemble of knee length skirt and sweater, and not the mini dresses that she had once favoured. But in all other respects, physically she seemed little changed.

They had met at Oxford where Delphine had been passing a year as part of her university Modern Languages course. She had arrived the epitome of bon chic, bon genre, having been born and raised in the privileged environs of the 7ème arrondissement of Paris, the only child of a multi-millionaire financer.

Her decorum and restraint had lasted about a week before she had fallen in with a crowd that had included Cheryl under the misapprehension that being the product of some of the finest girls’ public schools Britain had to offer they were “proper” company for a young lady of her breeding and status.

Once disavowed of this impression, Delphine Delacroix had begun consuming alcoholic fluids and exchanging bodily ones with an enthusiasm that surprised even some of the more hardened hedonists of her new acquaintance, and although she and Cheryl had never been bosom friends they had enjoyed many entertaining evenings together, some parts of which they even remembered, though those memories were locked away firmly in a cabinet marked “Pub Rules” the key to which had been very carefully mislaid.

Her reaction on seeing Cheryl had been to burst into tears.

Once it had been established that her tears were ones of joy the pair of them had fell over themselves to try and understand how the other had come to be in this far-flung outpost of the Fifth Republic.

For Cheryl, the explanation was fairly straightforward:

“I was disillusioned with my job, married to a man who loved the idea of living in France one day, and the children were at an age where a move would be easy for them. Plus the price of property here was ridiculously low, the climate convivial and we reckoned we could make a living. Your turn.”

But for Delphine things were not so clear cut. The truth was, she didn’t really know why she was in the South Angoumois. What she did know that about five months ago her husband had returned from a weekend “conference” in a state of extreme agitation.

She had strongly suspected a mistress somewhere in the background, but that was entirely normal, and women of her class in France did not stoop to acknowledge the weaknesses of their men folk, so she hadn’t pressed the matter.

A little later, she had come to doubt that this simple explanation was quite correct. The following week, Pierre-Yves had been whisked away. The ministry had sent a car for him, and she had been informed by a very serious official that her husband was needed urgently at a location he could not disclose, for a reason that could not be revealed and for a duration he was not at liberty to divulge at that moment in time.

Pierre-Yves had reappeared ten days later looking tired and grey. He could not, he said, discuss what had happened while he had been away, but he told his wife that she should prepare to move. It was for the good of France. He had to be where bad things were happening, to face wicked men, look them in the eye and to challenge them. All, he added, in the deepest secrecy.

Why this should involve moving to the dullest part of the most boring département in France, Delphine could only speculate. Certainly nothing appeared to be amiss in St Louis sur Baq that she could detect, though, presumably, if it were the people perpetrating nefarious acts would be doing their level best to conceal the fact. She awaited developments with great anticipation.

But the last two months had been the most dreary of her life. The children had stayed in Paris, partly because Pierre-Yves had implied that his assignment could carry an element of risk, and partly because they didn’t want to move partway through the school year. Without them, Delphine was listless; however, her place was at her husband’s side.

The shops in St Louis sold nothing that she could ever consider wearing. Their proprietors, seemingly stuck in the 1960s, saw fit to offer for sale only excruciating underwear (all of it coloured tan), nylon blouses printed with patterns that would make Jackson Pollock blush and housecoats in six different shades of blue.

Worse, there had been no-one remotely her equal with whom she could talk. Delphine was from the highest stratum of society which, paradoxically, meant she was far too well brought up to really be a snob; she simply had nothing to prove and could happily talk to anyone capable of conversing on any topic that was remotely interesting to her.

And there was the rub. The good ladies of St Louis sur Baq were interested only in the cultivation of cauliflowers, the state of their bunions and the artificial insemination of sheep, not subjects on which Delphine was well placed to comment.

But now here was Cheryl. Cheryl with her languages, education and travelling and… whatever was she doing here? For a mad moment Delphine wondered if Cheryl were somehow involved with whatever it was had brought her husband down here. After all, she was foreign. But she was too far pleased to finally have someone to talk to to consider this unhappy idea for too long. Besides, Cheryl, it seemed, had been here for years and Pierre-Yves had implied the “threat to France” was a new arrival that only he could be trusted to deal with.

So Delphine blurted out something about her husband requesting a post away from the capital for a little while just to allow him to round his skill base prior to taking on a most senior role.

Cheryl had lived with Dave Grimple long enough to be able to scent bullshit at 500 metres: what little she had so far gleaned about Pierre-Yves suggested that the man would rather have his teeth removed without anaesthetic than willingly leave Paris, but she let it pass.

Instead they talked and drank tea for an hour. Cheryl explained how she had thought she had recognised Delphine, but couldn’t place her and how her husband had happened to have business in Delphine’s husband’s office that morning and how she had  finally managed to put a name to the face, and Delphine apologised for not realising that Cheryl was there, but she didn’t really frequent bars any longer but of course she would now and its all went along very cosily until Cheryl announced that she really had to get back to the bar because lunch service would be starting shortly.

“Of course! And I must prepare something for Pierre-Yves. But we must meet again and very soon.”

“Well,” considered Cheryl, “tomorrow being Friday we are having a curry evening: it’s always popular with the local Brits and, come to think of it, some of the local locals. Why don’t the two of you come as our guests? I can offer you a choice of korma, jalfrazi, Madras or vindaloo!”

“I’ve not had a well made curry for twenty years! We would love to and it will be a chance for our husbands to meet properly.”

They embraced and then Cheryl was off back off up the road to the Lamb & Flag.

V

Cheryl’s departure from chez Pompodore de Frou-Frou was not unobserved; the man of the house was approaching as she came out of the gate. Pierre-Yves came to a sudden halt. “Can I help you…Madame?” he asked.

“You must be Pierre-Yves!” exclaimed the woman, seizing his limp hand and pumping it enthusiastically, “Delphine has told me so much about you, though I’m sure there is so much more to hear. But there will be time for that tomorrow night. You must please excuse me – I’m running late.”

And with that she rushed away, leaving Pierre-Yves rooted to the spot in horror, his hand still extended. The woman had known the name of his dear wife! Her accent was unmistakably English! The Universe could not be that unkind to him, could it? And what the hell did she mean by “tomorrow night”? He shook himself out of the trance that had overtaken him and looked around to see if anyone had been paying attention to the meeting, but the lunchtime street was more or less deserted. He hurried inside.

He left again an hour later (and a whole hour earlier than was normal for a lunchtime in France) in a state of extreme agitation.

The lobster Thermidor served with a perfectly chilled bottle of Chablis Valmur Grand Cru had turned to ashes in his mouth as his wife had recounted the events of her morning. Pierre-Yves couldn’t remember seeing her this animated in years: her eyes glistened and her cheeks flushed with excitement as she recounted the sudden and serendipitous appearance of an old friend, a woman of culture and breeding in whose company she could at last find an equal. He had held his tongue until she mentioned that they would be dining with Cheryl and Dave the following evening.
“But, ma chérie, you cannot be serious. The rosbifs are an appaling race. They cannot cook. They are gauche! And that, that, that man – he called me Pete!”

“That is just a sign of friendliness, Pierre-Yves! Our social life here is non-existent. We never have visitors and we are going to go out tomorrow evening! Unless you can give me a very good reason indeed why we should not associate with these people?”

She looked at him expectantly. Although she had discarded the notion of Cheryl being anything to do with whatever ghastly plot had brought them to St Louis sur Baq she nonetheless hoped that she might be able to shake her husband into revealing something.

Pierre-Yves paused. He was under no illusions that he owed his comfortable lifestyle – his substantial civil-service salary notwithstanding – to his wife’s considerable wealth. She had been asking more frequently of late about their reasons for being stranded in the South Angoumois: she was no fool and the last thing he needed was for her to go and start digging around and discovering the truth about his banishment. He decided to wheedle.

“Darling – I am so sorry. Quite a morning, you understand.” He tapped his nose, conspiratorially. “Of course we should go. I cannot pretend that I am well disposed towards the English, but I am sure it will be a diverting evening. And I am delighted that you have found someone with whom you can share interests.”

“Oh Pierre-Yves! Are you getting closer to those bad people? Can’t you tell me any more?”

“My love, it is far safer that you know as little as possible. I could not bear to think that I had placed you in any danger. And it is such a comfort for me that you are here with me.”

And with that he had taken his leave, kissing her on the cheek as he left, implying that he must return to the fray.
Once outside, however, any inclination he might have had to go back to his nasty little office with its cheap furniture evaporated. What Pierre-Yves needed was a drink.

****

Christophe, barman and proprietor of the Boule d’Or polished a glass with a grimy cloth and peered balefully though the plate glass window of his café across the Place de l’Hôpital towards the Lamb & Flag.

Tables had been set up outside on the pavement to take advantage of the late April sunshine and about twenty people were at lunch. A waitress would emerge periodically from the dark depths of the hotel to deliver yet another of the steaks for which the place was moderately famous.

Taken from the astoundingly dim but very tasty Angoumois cattle, whose meaty carcasses were dry matured for three weeks according to Dave Grimple’s precise requirement, these tick cut steaks were presented only one way: medium rare and served with a deep purple red wine and pepper sauce, chips and salad on the side.

When he had first heard that the Englishman proposed to serve food, Christophe had guffawed with the best of them. It was well known that les Rosbifs killed their meat twice,(the second time being when burning it to a crisp before putting it on to a plate, so who on Earth would eat there? The answer was, after a little while, lots of people. The vacuum packed croque monsieurs that Christophe had been serving for lunch for years quietly passed their sell by dates uneaten.

Christophe spat in the glass absent mindedly, gave it a final polish and placed it back on the shelf behind the bar. What irked him most was that the Hôtel de la Place (as it had once been called) should have been his.

When old Thomas died, more than twenty years ago now, he had left the hotel to no fewer than 43 relatives. They, in turn, had placed the matter of the sale in the hands of a local notaire. Each year, Christophe had gone through the same rigmarole. Sometime in January he would make an offer for the hotel at 60% of the asking price. This would be rejected with howls of indignation by the sellers who would counter with the indication that they might entertain a bid not unadjacent to 95%.

Christophe would then wail about having a poor sick mother and would come back with 66%, the sellers would respond along the lines of not only were their mothers sick but the dog was also looking  a bit peaky and, bearing this in mind, they would be prepared to continence bids in excess of 90% of the asking price.

This would continue for several months until mid November when an agreement would be reached at around 78% of the original price but with a portion of this to be paid in cash to avoid tax.

On the day of signing, however, one or other of the parties would attempt a last minute negotiation that would completely upset the apple cart and the deal would collapse. After a few weeks of recrimination and shortly after New Year, however, the family would re-offer the hotel for sale at an increased price and the whole circus would start again.
This had continued for a decade, the hotel becoming ever more dilapidated, the notaire wearing an ever more haunted mien and the number of sellers varying as births, deaths and marriages swelled and depleted the ranks of those owed a share by turn.

Then one day the Englishman had arrived, viewed the property and then walked in the notaire’s office and had offered to pay the asking price straight away, an approach that had simply never occurred to Christophe even though his own diligent evasion of taxation meant that he could easily have afforded to do so.

The property had been signed for and a deposit paid even before Christophe had been aware of the foreigner’s presence in St Louis sur Baq. His vigorous protestation in the notaire’s office that the hotel was his by right which culminated with his emptying a sack full of faintly mouldy 500 Franc notes onto the man’s desk had been to no avail and had led to his being bodily ejected from the building. Worse, he had to endure an interesting interview with the “fiscs” – the tax police – the following week over the origins of the cash.

He glared at the establishment across the square and then turned his gaze to the room. They were all here, his regulars, those people who through loyalty to his establishment, or force of habit or for want of imagination were prepared to put up with stale beer, sour wine and surly service. Other people came and went – Christophe still had the advantage over his rival of being able to sell tobacco and to take bets – but these people represented the core of his business.

Around one table sat Gilbert with his son Jean-Louis and daughter-in-law Clotilde. Gilbert was just about the most wealthy farmer in the region, though his particular approach to exploiting the land gave him plenty of leisure time to pursue has favoured pastimes of drinking, lechery and shooting the breeze. Jean-Louis had inherited his father’s love of the bar room as well as his additional fingers. Clotilde, even among the sturdy female stock of the South Angoumois, was known as a big girl. Over two metres tall and weighing in excess of 200 kilos, she sat in a specially reinforced chair, toying occasionally with the glass in front of her while her husband regarded her pregnant form with adoration.

At the bar itself sat Bernard who had once worked for the Commune of St Louis sur Baq for three months before going off sick with a “bad back” for the next 35 years; beside him, sitting in quiet companionship was Roger, famed as the town’s least competent mechanic, but the one who could, nonetheless, always get a car through its controle technique, whatever was wrong with it, for the small consideration of €150.

The last of the regulars sat in the corner, in the shadows, by himself, ignored for the most part by the others, even to the extent that they did not notice him either arriving or leaving and would be hard put to identify him in the street. This was La Mouche. He probably had not been baptised thus, but he had been known by the sobriquet given to his profession – a paid denouncer of others – for so long that any other name had been forgotten. His presence here was tolerated (and Le Boule d’Or was the only bar within 40km where it was) on the understanding that he would neither denounce anyone else drinking in the café nor use anything he might hear there to denounce others. He was permitted to drink between one and three pm and his bottle was placed on his table before he arrived and payment removed after he had left.

The banging of the door shook Christophe from his reverie. A man – possibly the best dressed man his establishment had ever welcomed – stood before him. “Good afternoon,” said Pierre-Yves, “May I have a Cognac please?”

Christophe fumbled through the bottles of assorted rocket fuel on his shelf. No-one had asked for a Cognac for years. If they wanted a spirit it was normally marc, the fiery, colourless alcohol distilled from the remains of grapes pressed for wine, which he offered in several fearsome strengths, but after a few moments probing he discovered a dusty bottle of Camus XO that had lain unopened for a decade or more. He pulled the stopper and poured a glass for the stranger which was drained at a single draught.

“Another, if you would be so kind.” Christophe complied with the easy felicity of a man who has realised that he may be onto a good thing: he made a rapid calculation based on the man’s clothes, the likely current price of a bottle of Camus XO and the speed at which he was consuming the stuff and came to the happy conclusion that €12 per glass would be about fair.

“Again, if you will.”

Refreshed, Pierre-Yves picked up the third glass and turned to face the room. The room stared back at him. He felt slightly disturbed by the view. Everyone he could see appeared to be sporting some kind of physical oddity. The two men at the table in the middle of the room held glasses with hands that had at least two extra fingers. They were accompanied by what appeared to be a gorilla wearing a bell tent. In the corner, he thought he detected some movement in the shadows, but after peering into them for a moment, he concluded that he must be mistaken. At the bar there sat one man with two lazy eyes that floated off randomly without either checking with the other that it would be OK to do so, and another who seemed to have a head with a completely flat top, an impression reinforced when his companion placed his glass on it.

Aside from this, Pierre-Yves was struck by the similarity of facial features. He might have been less so had he been enlightened by Dr Chandra. Generations of cousin marriages had shrunk the gene pool in St Louis sur Baq alarmingly, and the medic had taken it upon himself to draw up a family tree for every one of his patients to understand how each might be related to the others. Dr Chandra was no apologist for eugenics, but he was a great believer in the maxim that forewarned is forearmed, so each new coupling he observed amongst his “flock” he graded from one to five, depending on genetic desirability.

Five was the best rating – a nice assortment of DNA. Down at two the best that could be said was that any offspring would more likely be human than not. For the joining of Clotilde and Jean-Louis, Chandra had had to extend the scale down to zero. He simply had no idea what was going to happen. His analysis suggested that their child would be not only its own great aunt but also its own son, and he awaited the birth with a horrid fascination.
But all this was unknown to Pierre-Yves who, with a brief glance across the square to the Lamb & Flag, turned back to the barman.

“Thank you, mon ami. This drink is indeed needed.”

“You are most welcome. Please excuse me if I am mistaken in my presumption, but I am a little surprised that you are not over there with” – and here Christophe gestured through the glass – “with the other suits.”

“Ah, no. I have no desire to dance attendance on the English. I prefer very much a French bar.”

“Humf,” ejaculated Christophe, “well, you’d be one of the few that do. Everyone seems to go in there. You know that he even lets women in there?”

Pierre-Yves turned his head slightly to look again at Clotilde. Sitting down her knuckles were very close to the floor, she appeared to be sporting a beard and her arms looked like a pair of hams, but she was wearing what he now recognised as being a dress.

“But is that not a woman there?” He asked.

“That is entirely different, monsieur; that is a married woman in the company of her husband and who does not consume more than one drink per week. Over there they are unaccompanied and are allowed to drink what they wish. It is insupportable! St Louis would be a better town if the English just went home.”

Pierre-Yves nodded. “I agree my friend, I agree. Sadly we cannot throw them out any longer.” And with that unhappy thought, he drained his glass, paid his exorbitant bill and headed back to is miserable office and his miserable life.

VI

Pierre-Yves looked at his reflection in the bedroom mirror and felt slightly ill.

It was bad enough that he was been obliged to go out this evening anyway, but he could have borne it more easily had he been able to confront les Rosbifs wearing the proper attire. Pierre-Yves wore suits, and that was the end of the matter. In extremis he would sometimes wear a sports jacket, but for him “informal” generally meant wearing patterned socks.

Certainly he would never continence wearing jeans, and yet these were, at his wife’s insistence, precisely what were encasing his legs at this moment in time. Pierre-Yves had no idea that jeans were French. He had always thought that Claude Lévi-Strauss had solely concerned himself with the study of anthropology, but it seemed the man had also been running a sideline in making denim trousers. Or perhaps it had been his brother who’d been in the clothing business. Pierre-Yves struggled to believe that any Frenchman could have designed such awful trousers with a straight face, but the label clearly bore the name.

He looked at himself again and suppressed the urge to whimper. Delphine kissed him on the cheek. “My darling, you look lovely. Actually, you look quite sexy!” and to his surprise she gave his bottom a light slap. “Here,” she said, “This might make you feel a little better;” and she handed him a yellow silk cravat.

Weak with gratitude, Pierre-Yves knotted it carefully and arranged it in the open neck of his shirt.

“Thank you, my love,” he said, “as always you are a model of consideration for others. And you too look most lovely.”
Though he had said it as a result of the conditioned reflex of a many-year term served married man, Pierre-Yves realised with a start that his wife was indeed looking lovely: the eye still gleamed, there was a spring in her step and she had a definite bloom about her. Perhaps, he reflected, the evening wouldn’t be so dreadful after all.

When they arrived at the Lamb & Flag, the place was already busy. As they were about to pass through the door, a man of late middle years wearing the most disreputable ensemble of clothing that Pierre-Yves had ever seen on a grownup was coming out. His hair was long – down to the middle of his back – but was grey and he had a prominent bald patch on top which gave the impression of his having been tonsured. The head was adorned with a multi coloured headband.
The man’s jeans were heavily stained with what looked like engine oil and had multiple patches in assorted shades. He was wearing a threadbare Motörhead tee-shirt and a rather moth-eaten denim jacket.

The apparition peered at them through bottle-bottom glasses, nodded to them and spoke in English. “Evenin’. Should be a brutal gig tonight. The Cat’s on fire.” Before they could ask him to elaborate on this faintly alarming statement he had vaulted with surprising agility into the back of a decaying Ford Transit leaving behind him a powerful fragrance of patchouli oil. The hand painted legend on the side of the van read “Rockhalicious Robbie’s Roadshow – the Mobile Music Magician. Weddings, Funerals and All Events Catered For. Bar Mitzvahs a Specialisation.”

Entering, Pierre-Yves and Delphine were immediately seized by Cheryl who kissed them and led them over to a table in a corner. “We’ve reserved this for us this evening. Good view of the room. Just in case.”

Pierre-Yves was now decidedly concerned: first a feline inferno and now a “just in case:” what had he got himself involved with? He saw Rockhalicious Robbie coming back in, dragging a huge Marshall speaker behind him. “That man – who is he? He said his cat was on fire!”

Cheryl smiled “Oh Robbie’s alright. Completely insane, mind you. He used to be an assistant bank manager, but his wife left him. She found life with him too exciting- constant bridge evenings, odd glass of sweet sherry and so on – and ran off with an actuarial accountant. Called Clive. After that he rather lost it, threw everything up, bought a van and hit the road. He ended up here and started the mobile disco. He believes that he can channel the spirit of Cat Stevens via a stuffed cat called Steven that he keeps in a basket under the record decks.”

“But,” pointed out Delphine, “Cat Stevens isn’t dead. He just changed his name.”

“Ah, but Robbie channels the spirit of his musical career as it would have been had he not converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf. He believes that the Cat would have become a DJ and it is Steven’s ethereal hand that is spinning the discs not his. Like I said, completely insane. But he does a good show.”

Dave joined them, bearing a tray of gin & tonics. Placing it on the table, he grasped Pierre-Yves hand and shook it. “Pete! Good of you to come!” Pierre-Yves caught the warning gaze of his wife and smiled weakly. His brain started working after a second and he managed to formulate a nicely ambiguous reply that everyone could live with. “It was very good of you to ask us. I have done nothing but think about this evening since Delphine told me of your kind invitation and I’m sure it will be a most intriguing occasion.”

“I’m sure we’ll have a great time! I’ve got so much to ask you,” replied Dave.

Pierre-Yves groaned inwardly. He’d rather hoped that he would be able to absent himself from the conversation and just be allowed to sit quietly, but it seemed he was to be included. Dave turned to Delphine, kissed her hand and said “enchanté” with smile and a wink that made Pierre-Yves’ fists itch.

They had just set down, clinked glasses and had taken a life-affirming first draught when an overweight, blonde, middle-aged lady appeared at the table. She scowled at them and without uttering a word thrust a piece of paper at Cheryl.

“Oh yes. Good evening Mrs Smedley. There was a package for you. If you wait a moment I’ll get it for you.”

The large woman made a noise that sounded like “Hurrumph” and stood by the table wordlessly, studiously ignoring the gaze of those seated at it, while Cheryl disappeared through the kitchen door. She was back a few seconds later.

“There you are Mrs Smedley. Can I get you anything else? A drink perhaps?”

“I hardly think so, Mrs Grimple!” she spat, then turned on her heel and swept from the room.

“What on Earth was that about?” asked Delphine.

“The postman leaves parcels for the local British here if they are not in. It’s easier with limited hours the office keeps: we’re open well into the evening, you see.”

“And that woman?” asked Delphine, “A friend of yours?”

“Mrs Smedley is a truly ghastly woman, it must be admitted,” grinned Cheryl. “But I do feel a little sorry for her. She moved here with her husband and kids under the impression that she would find the French countryside filled with delightful middle-class types wearing Boden. Instead she found people like Rockhalicious Robbie and, well, what he wears.”

“Ah – a snob”

“Indeed. But it got worse. Her husband told her that he would be working from home over the net. After six months he said he had to go to the UK for a few days for a meeting. A month later for a few more days and so on until he is spending three weeks out of four in London. He has a pied à terre in Fulham and is sleeping with some floozy from his office (“I checked” interjected Dave, “she’s called Shannize and she’s 23, which is, by a happy co-incidence, the same as her IQ”) while she is stuck out here with three increasingly feral children and a leaky roof. She does have a rather jaded view of us because we open our doors to anyone who’d like our hospitality. Any old riff-raff are welcome here!”

Pierre-Yves decided he quite liked the sound of Mrs Smedley. She seemed like a woman with her head screwed on the right way. “So why doesn’t she just go home?” he asked.

“Well, Pete, it isn’t that simple,” said Dave. “You see the she’s told all her friends in the UK how wonderful it all is here – bilingual kids, masses of fresh air, the idyllic rural lifestyle and so on. To move back would mean losing face, which is worse than living here. It’s a status thing. Plus, she moved from the Home Counties – good, middle class stock, you see – but with the way house prices have risen in the UK in the interim she could never afford to move back there. She’d have to move to the North or Wales or something. And the husband would still have an excuse to be in London and enjoying himself with young Shannize.”

Pierre-Yves nodded – he really could now empathise with Mrs Smedley – and took another sip of his drink. It was diabolically strong; more G than T he suspected. He noticed with surprise that Delphine had already finished hers and that a waitress was approaching without being bidden with another glass for both her and Cheryl.

“So,” he said to Dave, “are all the people here tonight British?”

Dave cast an eye around the room. “Mostly. There will be some locals in later for drinks and Robbie’s gig, but curry is more a British thing.” Pierre-Yves didn’t doubt it: in Paris he had eaten proper curries prepared by Michelin starred French chefs none of whom would ever consider the education of the palates of a dreadful dump like St Louis sur Baq a worthwhile exercise. He wondered miserably what he what be expected to eat this evening.

Dave continued: “But that table just next to ours” – he pointed – “is reserved for a party of Germans. They’ll be here shortly.”

“I see – and why are there towels on the seats?”

“Oh, that’s just a little joke we have. It doesn’t really translate I’m afraid.”

“And are Mr Rockhalicious Robbie and Mrs Smedley typical of our British contingent here in St Louis?” asked Pierre-Yves.

“Oh no. They are at the more eccentric end of the scale.” This came from Cheryl. She and Delphine had both finished their second drinks and were looking just a little flushed. “Most people are quite ordinary: a mixture of retirees and people who have set up businesses here like us. There’s a selection of families with school age children, one or two smallholders looking for the Good Life, a smattering of old hippies and a handful of borderline alcoholics drawn here by the cheap booze. There are a few who are running away from something or other and have some kind of history, but it is seldom anything sinister.  I suppose Lenny the Tidy Builder and Mysterious Eric are quite interesting. That’s them, by the bar,” she indicated. A tall, ruddy-faced man in jeans and a sweatshirt was deep in conversation with a slight, well dressed man.

“And what is notable about them?” asked Delphine, thanking the waitress as her third G&T appeared.

“Mysterious Eric is just that. No-one knows much about him. He’s perfectly sociable, but he tells the most extraordinary stories about himself are that transparently untrue – how he raced at Le Mans, was bodyguard to the Shah of Iran, drank Champagne with the Aga Khan, slept with Jackie O that kind of thing. We’re not even certain that his name is Eric. It might be Duncan.

“Then, just occasionally, he comes up with something that sounds like a complete fantasy but then it appears to be true. He once spun me a yarn about how he made a million in one night playing poker at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and then lost the lot on a single spin of the roulette wheel. A few weeks later I was passing the time of day on the ‘phone with a old friend who works for a bank as in investment analyst in the gaming industry and it turned out the tale was true. He even found me a newspaper cutting with a picture with a photo of a beaming Eric.  And despite being Eric on his passport, driving licence and bank cards, he gets post addressed to “Duncan” and has even had people turning up looking for him and calling him Duncan.”

“What kind of people?” asked Delphine, by now getting quite interested in Eric / Duncan.

“American people. Of the large, muscular variety who have to be shoe-horned into their suits. Some stayed here a few months back.”

“Mafia!?”

“No idea. But they went out to find Eric, though I didn’t help them do that. And then they came back, packed in such a hurry they left half their clothes here, and just left a pile of cash on the bar because they couldn’t wait five minutes while I changed the printer ink to do their bill. I was quite worried about Eric, but he sauntered in for a drink a bit later, asked if they’d left and if they had been any trouble, and then changed the subject rather firmly.”

“How very odd,” Delphine opined, “and the other man?”

Dave answered this: “Imagine that you had an outhouse that you wanted to covert in to a little studio for visitors; how many tradesmen would it involve?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A bricklayer for walls and windows, a carpenter, a plumber, perhaps an electrician and then a decorator, so four or five.”

“And the job would take months because they would all be waiting for each other to finish something and they’d leave a terrible mess at the end, right? Well Lenny is something of a novel concept in that he does all those jobs himself, and most of them he finishes in about a quarter of the time it would take local French firms.”

Pierre-Yves spluttered into his drink. What he had just heard was outrageous “But what about demarcation? There needs to be proper control! How can this be allowed?”

Dave smiled. “Lenny had all the proper certificates and just went and registered himself in all the right places. He caused a certain amount of bureaucratic confusion, but in the end no-one could find anything wrong with what he wanted to do, which was everything. And he has another big selling point: he actually cleans up after himself. He is booked solid for months in advance, mostly be people who’ve had builders in before and just can’t face the hassle a second time. He charges a premium and no-one ever argues that he isn’t worth it.”

Delphine was about to ask for the contact details of Lenny the Tidy Builder when there was a commotion by the door. A party of six had just arrived – four men and two women – and they appeared to be wearing Bavarian costume: the men, lederhosen; the women, dirndl. They entered the bar to a chorus of wolf whistles and catcalls.

Dave called out in English. “Helmut – you’re over here tonight.”

“Ha! Dave! Do you have any idea how uncomfortable these clothes are? Leather trousers in this heat for God’s sake. I’ll spare you the details but I really recommend that you don’t be around when I remove them.”

Helmut looked exactly like a middle aged German should look, a tall man with a broad face, steel grey hair, glasses and a large pot belly that hung over the leather shorts he had squeezed into.

Dave introduced them to Pierre-Yves and Delphine: Helmut clicked his heels in an exaggerated manner and grinned, revealing a mass of expensive dentistry. “I’d advise you not to hang around with this lunatic,” he told them, “he’ll have doing all sort of stupid things. Which reminds me – we had a bargain: we dressed up like a bunch of arschlöcher, so I hope you managed to find your part of the deal?”

Dave pointed over Helmut’s shoulder to the two waitresses approaching with laden trays. “I think you’ll find this to your satisfaction,” he said as the girls arrived with six maßkrüge – litre sized glass beer mugs – brimming with lager.
“Augustinger Helles!” exclaimed Helmut, “genuine Munich beer. How in God’s name….” he took an enormous draught. “Ah. Fabulous. Forgive me,” he said to Pierre-Yves and Delphine, “The French make fine wine, but to be honest, the beer…well, you should just warm it up and put it back in the horse.”

Pierre-Yves was about to bristle at this, but to his horror his wife just brayed with laughter and pointed to the enormous glass. “Unfortunately I cannot argue. I’ll have what he’s drinking!”

“Well, we all should,” agreed Dave.

“Please,” protested Pierre-Yves, “a glass of wine – white perhaps – would suit me better.”

“Of course! So three of those and please bring a bottle of something decent for Pete here,” he said to the waitress.
Helmut was brandishing one of the towels and smiling broadly. “Most amusing Dave, most amusing. I shall use this later to dry out my shorts. I like you. You make me laugh. If there is ever a Fourth Reich I shall ask them to kill you last.” And he sat down as a second round of the gigantic glasses arrived at his table.
“I had no idea that Germans could be so amusing,” said Delphine.

“We’ve known Helmut for a while,” said Cheryl, “he and his wife moved here about three years back and he misses nothing about Bavaria except the beer. A friend of Dave’s is working in Munich now, exporting specialist beers to the UK, so actually getting hold of the Augustinger wasn’t too difficult, but Helmut doesn’t have to know that. We’ve been trying to get him to dress up for ages. ”

“And beer is ideal with curry, so here’s a menu,” added Dave, passing them around.

Pierre-Yves looked at it in mystification. From his Parisian restaurant experiences, he knew that curry came in three varieties: Red, Brown and Yellow, but none of these seemed to be listed. Seven very unfamiliar names were marked on the page. As he considered what to do next, a plate of things – brown and approximately spheroid in form – were placed in the middle of the table.

“Onion bhajis, “said Dave, seeing Pierre-Yves slightly startled look. Pierre-Yves took one gingerly. To his surprise it was pretty good. He brightened a little and looked again through the menu. At the neighbouring table, the Germans were being served plates piled high with what looked like sausages and chips covered with a lumpy brown gloop.

“Wurst with fried potatoes and a curried lentil sauce,” said Dave, “you can take the boy out of Germany, but…”
Finally, spotting something that sounded as though it might be cooked using sensible ingredients like wine, Pierre-Yves chose. “I’ll take the vindaloo, I think.”

“Well, if you’re sure Pete, though it is a little spicy that one,” cautioned Dave.

“I’m sure it will be delightful.” Pierre-Yves was just hoping that the wine would cover up the flavour of the rest of the ingredients. He sat back, filled a glass with what turned out to be a quite good Quincy, and surveyed the room while the other three at the table talked amongst themselves.

The “Lamb and Flag” was certainly busy. All the tables he could see were full, and the bar area itself was crowded with drinkers. He was saddened to see a number of his colleagues in the place; even his own secretary – a woman in her 40s! – was there, drinking something brightly coloured with an umbrella and a large chunk of pineapple in it in the company of a girlfriend. Didn’t these people realise how un-French this behaviour was? They should be sitting around a dinner table, enjoying a traditional meal and discussing philosophy. If they were men, that is; women should be in the kitchen discussing whatever it was they discuss in there – flowers or shoes or something. They should not guzzling cocktails in some den of iniquity run by foreigners.

Another party was wrestling its way towards the bar, and aghast as he was, Pierre-Yves’ disgust found room to rise even further. The party comprised three people: Dr Chandra, the most respected of his profession for many kilometres in any direction; Chantal Lesessarts, Mayor of St Louis sur Baq and none other than the Sous-Prefect for the South Angoumois, Gustav Muss. That three such eminent people should be in here was insupportable! And where was Mr Lesessarts? Mayor or not, Chantal Lesessarts was a married woman who was in the company of two men, neither of whom was her husband.

Pierre Yves sank low into his chair, borne down by a weight of shame and humiliation. He should never have agreed to this. It was bad enough that the Dr, Mayor and Sous-Prefect should be here, but they were not – even given his current wretched circumstances – his equals and if they should see him here…

But they did. Gustav Muss hurried over to where the group was sitting. “Good evening Dave, Cheryl, and this must be your wife Pompodore de Frou-Frou!”

“Good evening Mr le Sous Prefect,” said Pierre-Yves, completely crushed, “Yes, yes, this is my wife, Delphine. My dear, may I present Mr Gustav Muss, Sous-Prefect for this shi- for this delightful part of the Angoumois.”

Muss exchanged a few plesentries with the other three and then turned back to Pierre-Yves.

“Actually,” he murmured as conspiratorially as the rising volume of Rockhalicious Robbie’s musical outpourings would allow, “I’m rather pleased that I saw you this evening. Now, it’s not official until next Wednesday, so please do be discreet, but the Prefect has decided to offer you the post of tourism supremo for the South Angoumois. It’s quite a delicate position, you understand, but a man of your training and experience…”

The Sous-Prefect had very little idea of Pierre-Yves’ background beyond his being an ENAque who had graduated from that elite school second in his class, which had effectively given him the choice of any job he wanted. Rumours of a breakdown had accompanied his arrival in St Louis sur Baq, but Gustav Muss remained in awe of Pierre-Yves.

Pierre-Yves was completely underwhelmed by the intelligence, but even in the ghastly surroundings of the Lamb & Flag he managed to hide it.

“That is wonderful news Mr le Sous-Prefect!” he exclaimed “But a delicate position you say?”

“Tourism is now officially the biggest revenue generator in the Angoumois. It is a business that requires intelligent and sensitive handling. A hot potato, you might say. But I have no doubt you are equal to the task! And I see your food is arriving. I’ll bid you good evening and bon appetite.”

Pierre-Yves hardly doubted that he would be equal to the task. In fact, he imagined that he could do the job in his sleep. Still, it would be better than being the collector of a pointless tax that in which no-one was remotely interested.

“Yes. Thank you Mr le Sous-Prefect. Good evening to you too” Pierre-Yves was aware of his wife watching the exchange without being able to overhear it. Good. It would help to bolster his domestic position. In a slightly improved frame of mind he looked at his dinner.

Vindaloo, it appeared, was just another word for the Brown curry. He quite liked that one. Smoothing a napkin over his knees, he took a sip of the Quincy and followed it with a large mouthful of the curry…

VII

At about the same moment as Pierre-Yves began his Odyssey into the world of Goan cuisine, there was a knock at the door of Padrig O’Hooligan’s inner sanctum.

“Come!”

The man who entered was called Mr Callaghan. He bore a striking resemblance in both size and appearance to Willie Carson, and while he did not mind the comparison when made in favourable terms, people who mocked Mr Callaghan often found that shortly after their knees seemed to have been turned the wrong way round and that they were in a certain amount of discomfort.

Mr Callaghan was O’Hooligan’s Head of Security.

He came with an impressive track record. He’d served with distinction in the Irish Defence Forces, including periods of active service with the Irish Army Rangers that had seen him posted all over the place on peacekeeping assignments. Mr Callaghan had a robust view of peacekeeping which included a period of peace making that may or may not involve cracking people’s heads together until they saw stars depending upon how quickly they calmed down when he asked them to do so.

He was later assigned to the Covert Operations section of G2, the small, discreet, but highly effective Irish Military Intelligence Service until he reached pensionable age. Knowing that he was finding retirement something of a bind, a mutual friend had suggested that O’Hooligan could do worse than to hire him.

In his first week at the company, Callaghan had rooted out three industrial spies that had been passing corporate secrets to competitors, patched gaping holes in the Aer O’Hooligan’s IT systems and closed down a people smuggling operation run by employees that had been disguising illegally migrating Moldovans as air freighted cut flowers.

Padrig O’Hooligan feared no man, but he extended a great deal of respect to Mr Callaghan, and he poured the man a whiskey before asking the question.

“So?”

“It is as you suspected, Sir. The relationship between Mr Slyme and your daughter has progressed. Marriage is now being talked of.”

O’Hooligan nodded slowly. He was not fool enough to try and interfere directly in Niamh’s love life, but he could not afford to ignore the fact that at 23 – and despite a fine education – she was somewhat naïve to the ways of the world. This, coupled with her vivacious beauty and her vast future wealth, had led to every kind of undesirable vermin sniffing around her since she came of age, and O’Hooligan had needed the professional services of Mr Callaghan more than once to deter some of the more persistent suitors, one of whom had made the memorable – if imprudent – offer of allowing Mr Callaghan a chair to stand on to even things up a bit.

“And has young Kevin given any thought to his future with Aer O’Hooligan?”

Mr Callaghan nodded. “It would seem that he expects instant dismissal and the disinheriting of your daughter so that it will be incumbent upon him to support them both and he is exploring other employment opportunities. I have confirmed that he is in discussions about alternative situations.”

“Good – so he loves her for herself. That does simplify matters a bit. Though is does leave the somewhat formidable hurdle of her mother.”

“Would I be correct in assuming that Mrs O’Hooligan has other ambitions for her eldest daughter’s happiness?”

Padrig sighed. “You would be, Mr Callaghan, you would be. She persists in the hope that Niamh will marry a man of ’subsatance.’ Now, you and I may know that such men are invariably complete tossers, but Siobhan will not be persuaded. Young Kevin is ideal: he’d make an admirable husband. Dull, perhaps, but admirable. No chance of him being a part-time swordsman.”

O’Hooligan drummed his fingers on the desk for a few seconds.  “I could just promote him to vice chairman – what do you think?”

“Well Sir, it occurs to me that even if he had your blessing, Mr Slyme would prefer to feel that he had earned his place in life. He is a little bit old fashioned. But if he could perform some even faintly remarkable act for the benefit of the company it might satisfy both his rather Protestant character and Mrs O’Hoolgan’s desire to see her daughter marry appropriately.”

“Then we must endeavour to find Mr Slyme an opportunity to shine, Mr Callaghan. And sooner rather than later.”

O’Hooligan moved to refill their glasses.

“Tell me, Mr Callaghan, you know your saints” – Callaghan had entered the seminary and had very nearly joined the priesthood before the army had claimed him – “Is there a patron saint of bridegrooms?”

“As it so happens, Sir, there is. St Louis, King Louis XI of France as was.”

“Then, Mr Callaghan, I think a little toast and a small prayer in His direction would be sensible. That he will deliver unto young Kevin a chance to do something that will win the heart of his future mother in law!”

They clinked glasses.

“St Louis!”

VIII

Pierre-Yves opened the bedroom shutters and blinked painfully at the brilliant morning sunlight.

He felt quite dreadful. An incautious burp reminded him of the source of his malaise: that bastard Rosbif had tried to poison him with some fiendish concoction masquerading as Indian cuisine!

Pierre-Yves ground his teeth in rage: that he of all people could have been seduced into eating anything that had passed through the kitchen of an Englishman. All in all, the evening had been a complete disaster. But it had also been an epiphany.

The mouthful of vindaloo had been followed by a moment of complete disbelief that anything could have such an extraordinary flavour. Then the burning had started. His mouth had felt as though it had been filled with molten lead. In a desperate attempt to subdue the fires, he had drained not only the three quarters of a bottle of Quincy in front of him but also two tankards of the revolting German brew and yet another of Dave’s abysmally strong gin and tonics (“Trust me – this will help!”).  The agony had receded, but Pierre-Yves had been left stunned by the sudden intake of alcohol and with a tongue that appeared to have been cauterised.

In this unhappy state he watched events unfold.

His fellow dinners seemed to have been served a rather different meal, if their expressions of delight were anything to go by. They ate – and, rather more significantly, drank – with abandon, and the Lamb & Flag rang with animated conversation and a rising volume of laughter.

Under scoring it all had been Rockhalicious Robbie’s musical selection, this evening at least, firmly founded in the glam rock genre and played at a volume (at least to Pierre – Yves’ ears) just the wrong side of irritating: loud enough to require people to shout without being loud enough to make out what the tune actually was.

But then the singing began.

It was started by his own wife and that ghastly Cheryl woman who sang something in English that he couldn’t really follow. Pierre – Yves spoke English. It was entirely necessary in the Directorate de Confusion Internationale, Non -Coopération et Désinformation for the simple reason that the people whom it was most desirable to confuse, fail with which to co-operate and to misinform were usually Anglo Saxon.

He used to joke with his colleagues that although English was a barbaric tongue, it was at least a straightforward one. “Why, even Americans can make a reasonable attempt at speaking it!” he would say. And they would laugh. Though not very hard.

But, in truth, his grasp of the vernacular was hopelessly inadequate. The song appeared to be about a dwarf with an unusually long and girthsome tallywhacker. But what a tallywhacker was and why the little man should feel the need to whack it so frequently was lost on him.

Though not, he noted with rising ire, to the Germans (for whom Helmut was able to provide a translation) nor to the party including the Mayor of St Louis and the Sous-Prefect where Dr Chandra was doing the same. All of them were helpless with mirth, while he sat there fuming, a stupid fixed grin on his face.

A one point a couple of gendarmes wandered into the bar. Pierre – Yves’ heart leapt: although it would be faintly humiliating for him to be found in such a place at least the horrible evening might now be brought to a halt by the forces of law and order.

The gendarmes disappointed him. They made their way through the crowd shaking hands and exchanging a few words with the revellers as they went before arriving at Dave’s side. The elder of the pair – an adjuant chef he saw, a very senior NCO for a town of this size – looked over Pierre – Yves with a something more than indifference but said nothing to him. He did, however, spend several minutes talking quietly to Dave, accepted a beer and handed over a folded piece of paper, which Dave put into a pocket without looking at it.

And then they were gone. And then the dancing started.

Rockhalicious Robbie turned up the volume to what he referred to as “groove factor ten” and put on “Hi Ho Silver Lining.” Tables were pushed back and the floor filled with stamping, drunken people. Such was the din that bottles were rattling on the shelves and glasses of beer vibrated themselves off the bar.

Pierre – Yves was dragged unwillingly into the mêlée. Involuntarily inebriated, he was unable to protest convincingly and was alternately swung around like a whirling dervish and crushed in the heaving mass of sweaty humanity.

The foretaste of Hell finally stopped at 2am. The crowd poured out onto the Place de l’Hôpital where Pierre – Yves was not entirely surprised to see a gendarmerie van waiting. Finally, he thought with relief, the idiots in blue had realised that a disturbance was in progress. As he watched, the young gendarme leaning on the van stood upright and slid open the side door. About eight people – amongst them Mysterious Eric and Lenny the Tidy Builder climbed on board.

Pierre – Yves turned to Dave. “How unfortunate,” he said, trying to keep his voice free of any note of smugness, “that the evening should end with arrests!”

“Oh they’re not being arrested, Pete. That is a little bit of crime prevention. The gendarmerie makes a tour of the outlaying hamlets at night anyway, so they give a lift to anyone heading that way so that they are not tempted to drink and drive.”

Looking back later, Pierre – Yves realised that this was the moment when everything changed. The idea that the Gendarmerie Nationale was providing a free taxi service for the benefit of foreign drunkards was too much. The English and the rest of them would have to go. Suddenly he had his mission.

He controlled himself and said “How marvellously public spirited! Well, I must thank you for an unforgettable evening.”

“No problem Pete. We’ll see you soon I hope.”

Kisses were exchanged, and then they were off down the street, Pierre-Yves’ head suddenly clear and his back straight, while Delphine tottered along unsteadily in her heels, singing quietly to herself.

Once home she made a suggestion of their performing an act of such gross indecency that Pierre – Yves struggled to believe she could have ever conceived of such a thing. However, she passed out before she could find all the necessary equipment and sank into a deep, alcohol soaked sleep. He slept fitfully, finally dozing off before dawn and waking with a start at 8am.

He brooded briefly next to the slumbering form of his wife. It was all very well deciding that St Louis sur Baq and the whole of the South Angoumois should be scoured of foreign pestilence, but how exactly was he to go about it? He had no resources, no real influence and very little authority. And he had no plan. Good. No preconceived ideas then, he reasoned.

The first step must be information gathering. Pierre – Yves dressed quietly and left the house. He would start by going for a cup of coffee at Boule d’Or. It may be a dreadful dump, he thought, but at least they are French in there, and they are properly local. He might just pick up some titbits there. That or typhoid. He’d just have to risk it.

IX

“Out of the way, Froggie!”

Mrs Smedley called all French people “Froggie.” Her chubby hands were white on the steering wheel as she gunned the Range Rover ever closer to the car in front, looming over the tiny Renault 4 like a juggernaut.

In contrast, her face was suffused purple, her teeth bared as she spat abuse at the hapless driver in front of her. “Garlic sucking snail eaters! Useless the lot of you!”

She’d been tailgating the tiny car full of nuns for several kilometres. She had had plenty of opportunity to overtake, but that was not the point: they should get out of her way.

Finally, the elderly Bonne Soeur at the wheel of the Renault panicked and it left the road, ploughing into a field of wheat.

Laughing spitefully, Mrs Smedley accelerated away. She didn’t want to be late.

If Constance Smedley had been a verb, that verb would be “seethe.” She seethed with resentment; she seethed with indignation; she seethed with humiliation. Sometimes she seethed with indecision, vacillating between whether she loathed the French peasants of the South Angoumois or the hideous parvenu British incomers who had made it their home the more.

Whatever, she seethed.

The Grimples occupied a special place in her distaste. Dave Grimple because he was common and perpetually cheerful with his lot in life; Cheryl because she was a Class Traitor for having abandoned her upper middle class roots and taken up with the oaf in the first place.

But Mrs Smedley was very sure of one thing. She hated rural France and the rural French.

Twenty years and twenty five kilos earlier she had passed a year in France as part of her degree. Six months in Paris and a blissful summer on the Côte d’Azur had turned her into a convinced Francophile.

Further seduced by the likes of Peter Mayle, she had concluded that her social aspirations would be well served by moving her family to one of France’s lesser known but most beautiful regions, not least because it would give her the cachet of pioneer.

She imagined her life being one perpetual summer of elegant parties, well-educated, cultured company and nicely deferential locals.

Having neglected to do any proper research whatsoever, she removed her household from an agreeable dormitory village, her children from their expensive schools and jumped into the South Angoumois feet first, solely on the basis of a gushing article in the Daily Mail about the place, written by an estate agent hoping to drum up trade.

The first summer had been idyllic. They had moved into a vast, rambling, isolated farmhouse with a huge garden a few kilometres outside St Louis sur Baq. The children had played outside in the sun and in the new pool, and many, many visitors had come, all of them admiring and some of them openly jealous of the Smedley’s new lifestyle. Constance had squirmed with self-satisfied pleasure.

But then winter had come. The house had proven impossible to heat to her customary norm of 25°C, no matter how much wood and heating oil was burned. The wind whistled around the place week after freezing week. The children didn’t play outside any longer, not least because they left for school in the dark and returned after night had fallen.

The stream of visitors from the UK dried up and Constance Smedley was forced to fall back on local society, only discover that there was nothing and no-one locally who met her standards.

She had had one brief flash of optimism when she had heard about Cheryl. Superficially their lives had appeared very similar: Home Counties, public school, Oxbridge and three children. But Constance had learned very quickly that she and Cheryl were most definitely not cut from the same cloth. That woman would associate with anyone, no matter where they went to school or with whom they were connected. The flash faded.

It became worse. The following summer, the novelty paling, fewer people came to visit and Mrs Smedley started to become restive. What was the point of having an ideal life if no-one could be envious of it?  And the locals, instead of being deferential to one of her social standing and breeding treated her like a normal person, not something to which she was used.

Gradually her Francophile status shifted. She found fault with all the French she met, with the shop keepers and the public servants, with anyone who drove on the roads or required anything of her, and most particularly with the peasants, who arrogance and independence vexed her terribly.

The local British irritated her too. She couldn’t bear the that they were more content than she and her dislike for each was based on the degree of happiness that they were rash enough to exhibit.

Another winter and Henry started spending more time in London at the office he had once been so keen to leave behind.

She started looking into the possibility of moving back to the Home Counties, but it became rapidly apparent that they had grossly overpaid for the house in the South Angoumois and prices in the UK had moved so much that the South East was out of the question. It would have to be Wales or – heaven forbid – the North, and she could not countenance that. What would people think?

Her children were becoming increasingly “difficult:” they were rapidly forgetting that they had ever been socially superior to the farmer’s offspring they now associated with. And in what in her eyes was a clearly racist move, their teachers refused to acknowledge their obvious genius and would describe them only as being perfectly pleasant and slightly above average in their group.

Three years in and Mrs Smedley discovered that Henry – now spending three weeks in four in London – was having it off with some common little bint in his office. She also suspected – rightly as it happened – that he was misstating their financial position so that he could keep her well away from his trysts.

So she decided to murder him.

What she lacked in intelligence, Constance made up for in tenacity and low cunning. She remembered her mother’s adage that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” and thus began her campaign to feed Henry to death.

To the stomach she added the liver, and by dint of a truly remarkable amount of research and enquiry, Constance Smedley could now be considered one of Europe’s foremost authorities on cardio vascular diseases due to diet and the effects of alcohol abuse.

Her library was considerable, numbering over 1800 texts, many of them highly academic, the latest of which had been handed to her by Cheryl Grimple only the previous evening.

She had risen early this Saturday morning and had been shopping at the market and super market for all the necessary provisions for the following few days of “gavage,” the French word used to describe what was done to ducks and geese in the process of fattening their livers for foie gras.

And now she was off to the airport to collect her “Ducky.”

During his week here, Henry would be subjected to a strict regime beginning each day with an early morning cooked breakfast: three eggs fried in butter, black pudding and plenty of sausages. This would be followed by a basket of all-butter croissants with jam. All of this would be washed down with plenty of strong coffee, to which Constance carefully added extra caffeine – bought, as were all the Devilish substances and books she purchased, on the internet with a pre-paid credit card and via an anonymous PO Box in Luxembourg – to ensure that Henry didn’t get too much in the way of quality sleep while he was at home. She understood very well the damaging effects of sleep deprivation on an organism under stress.

Lunch and dinner would be similarly packed with fat: potatoes would be cooked in goose grease, meat would be fried wherever possible, pâtés, cheese and cream where much used as was that gift of the French kitchen to the murderous wife, rillettes.

Rillettes made heart surgeons gibber. Meat slow cooked in vast quantities of fat and heavily salted, it ticked all the boxes for her.

Fruit and vegetables were eschewed, and alcohol was supplied in staggering amounts. Henry would be given a huge whiskey sour at 11 each morning to “help him relax” and from then on the day would be spent marinating in wine and brandy until bedtime.

Whatever exercise Henry got while writhing around with Shannize, he would get none here. “You must rest,” she told him, “you work so hard for us.” And Henry would spend the entire week in an easy chair or on a pool lounger.

After a year of this, Constance Smedley was well pleased with her progress. Her husband was now morbidly obese and had only last week on the ‘phone been complaining of breathlessness and a tightness across the chest that had her checking and re-checking the dozen or so insurance policies she’d taken out on his life.

As she neared the airport outside Préviné, the Aer O’Hooligan flight from London passed overhead on its final approach. She glanced up at it. She needed to get started on finding  a nice address for a wealthy widow. Three months, six at the outside.

She waited at the arrivals gate for her husband. He emerged looking flabby, sweaty and pale. Just perfect, she thought, and galvanised a smile onto her face.

“Henry, my love, how nice to have you home.”

X

The Saturday market that Constance Smedley had patronised earlier that morning for her cheese supplies was in full swing when Pierre – Yves reached the Place de l’Hôpital. Since leaving the house he had decided that a more assertive approach might be better: he was going to recruit Christophe the barman to his as yet undefined campaign.

He traversed the market with a vague sense of unease. Since he had arrived in St Louis sur Baq, Pierre –Yves had noted not only how backward the South Angoumois was, but how life here flirted with the brutal.

People kept pigs in their gardens in the South Angoumois, fattening them up for late autumn and employing the services of un tuerur, a slaughter man, to do for them at home. In the weeks before the killing, entire families would spend their weekends scouring the hills around St Louis sur Baq gathering the chestnuts that grew in such abundance. These would be used to feed the pig – really stuff it full of food – in the final month or so of its life.

Pigs reared this way could reach truly staggering sizes: 250kg weights were the norm and grotesque beasts in excess of 300kg were quite common. An animal of this size could provide fresh and preserved meat for a large family for the best part of a year, plus a vast quantity of lard for cooking. The inhabitants of the South Angoumois may have heard of a low fat diet but wanted no truck with it.

Pierre – Yves had yet to pass autumn in St Louis, but he had heard tell of the dreadful squealing that was the background music to the slaughter, traditionally performed here (with what Pierre – Yves scorned as typical peasant superstition) on the Saturday falling before November 22^nd, being eight weeks before the feast of St Anthony the Abbot, patron saint of swineherds and pork butchers. It was all rather organic and decidedly unpleasant.

Were people hadn’t got space for a pig (and usually if they had, they did this anyway), rabbits were reared in hutches crammed into any spare corner. Even at the office where he worked some of the commune employees kept a stack of hutches, feeding the inmates on weeds collected as part of their duties from public gardens and parks. He had come to detest the sickening thud – a blow in the back of the head with a length of lead pipe kept for the purpose – that marked the dispatch of a bunny assessed to have reached a worthwhile size for the pot.

Here and there on the market itself, local farmers’ wives had set up tables and were selling poulets fermiers – free range chickens. These were priced according to live weight with small additional charges displayed for dispatching, plucking and dressing. A sensible approach on the part of the seller who didn’t know how many birds she might be taking home with her, but a little close to the knuckle for those who preferred their meat to come plastic wrapped. But most purchasers, Pierre – Yves noted with a slight shudder – were taking their Sunday lunch home very much alive and clucking, dangling them like a shopping bag via a string that bound their legs together. The chickens had a resigned air about them, as though they realised that being dangled upside was simply prelude to The End and that further resistance was futile.

With some relief, Pierre – Yves ducked through the door of the Boule d’Or. The place was busy for once; it usually was on Saturdays when people in town for the weekly shop took the opportunity to stock up on tobacco and do a little light gambling.

He took a seat at the end of the bar and waited for Christophe to notice him, and when he did he said “A coffee please and a minute of your time when you have a moment. I need to discuss something with you.”

Suitably mystified, Christophe hurried away to clear the backlog of nicotine addicts baying for his attention and Pierre – Yves sipped his coffee. It was, as he had anticipated, fairly disgusting, cheap Robusta beans over roasted and blended with chicory, but it was better than nothing. He looked around the bar: he couldn’t see any of the people who’d been there the on his previous visit, but he noted that the shadowy corner was now bathed in light. There was a table there, so perhaps he had not imagined someone in the shadows. He shrugged. It wasn’t important.

Christophe returned. “So what is this about?” Pierre – Yves looked at him steadily. “You said to me once that St Louis would be a better town if the English left.”

It was Christophe’s turn to shrug. “Well, it would be. But as you yourself pointed out it isn’t that simple.”

“And that is true. But supposing they could be persuaded to leave?” Christophe grunted non-committedly: he was suddenly wary of a trap. Who was this man?

Pierre – Yves continued: “I am going to devote myself to clearing not only St Louis sur Baq of the English but the whole of the South Angoumois. I wish to see it returned to its rightful occupants and freed of the foreign infestation that currently debases it.”

“So why are you telling me this?” Christophe liked what he heard by was still suspicious.

“Because I believe that you are a man who also wants this to happen and who might be willing to help make it happen. I don’t expect you to trust me straight away, but I am certain that you will come to. Also, I need a base, just a room that I can use for planning my moves. Have you something for me?”

Christophe considered for a moment. He had an upstairs room that he had previously let by the hour to St Louis’ only lady of negotiable affections, but she had recently hung up whatever it was that prostitutes hang up when they give up the game and had retired to Toulouse. She’d got over 50 years under her belt, but had been unable to find a successor. The end had come when she kept dozing off on duty, her customers complaining that her snoring was putting them off their stroke.

Her own daughter, who would traditionally have taken up the mantle, had had some damn fool idea about becoming a lawyer or a judge or something and had disappeared to Paris to make money in some office somewhere rather than being prepared to put in an honest day’s work flat on her back, so for the time being he had some unused space.

“Yes, I have a room you could perhaps use.”

“Excellent.” Pierre – Yves placed €500 in €100 notes on the bar. “And this will cover the rent for the first month?”

Pierre – Yves may have found folding money a little gauche, but he had correctly judged that the barman would not. Blinded by avarice, Christophe decided that trusting the man could be lucrative. “It would be. You can count on my support.”

“Even better. Please, think of others who might wish to join us. They must be discrete, loyal to France and have a strong desire to see the English gone.”

Christophe nodded. “I shall give the matter some thought.”

“And I shall make a start. I need to make a list of the names, addresses and occupation of all the British in the area to give me some idea of where there might be some points of leverage. It may take me some time.”

“I can have that list for you in 24 hours.”

Pierre – Yves was taken aback. “How?”

Christophe nodded toward the corner “La Mouche will be in shortly. He will prepare it for the price of a bottle of marc. It will be accurate.”

Pierre – Yves looked at the corner. To his astonishment it had faded into complete, nearly impenetrable shade.

“So you have a mouche here, do you? Tell me, how does he get on with his mother?

Christophe grinned. “He doesn’t have a mother, but the woman who gave birth to him sometimes favours him by spitting at him in the street. He once denounced her for selling eggs from her own hens and not declaring it.”

Pierre – Yves whistled through his teeth. The real thing. He was impressed.

“Very well. I shall pass by at six o’clock Monday. Could you arrange for La Mouche to meet me in the room? I shall probably need to ask him some questions.”

And with that they parted. Pierre – Yves to make himself some potable coffee and to be as nice as he could be to his wife and Christophe to write a note of instructions for La Mouche. He may tolerate the man, but he was damned if he was going to speak to him.

XI

As Pierre-Yves wended his thoughtful way home, some thousands of kilometres to West a crisis meeting was taking place.

The men around the table – and they were all men – were rich, powerful and very, very worried. They represented the secret funding resource behind the bid by one Rev. Elstow J Periwinkle III to become the next President of the United States.

To say that the Reverend was right wing and conservative was a bit like saying the Dead Sea was slightly salty.

Among Elstow Periwinkle’s more popular policies could be listed: a plan to arm all kindergarten teachers; reform of the judicial system so that the families of the guilty shared in their punishment (which could include death by stoning for some offences); a complete ban on women wearing trousers or skirts that came above the knee to “curtail immorality” and the disenfranchisement of anyone receiving welfare benefits.

Foreign policy objectives were similarly robust and based on the principle that “promotion of American values in all nations – if necessary by forcible means – is a Godly mission and one from which we will not shirk. Hallelujah.”

It was all terribly stirring stuff and, coupled with some highly persuasive but entirely unattributable internet conspiracy theories involving all the likely nominees from other parties,  it had seen the Reverend’s Holy Renewal Movement surging in the polls to the point where the mainstream parties were getting more than a little twitchy. It was clear that Elstow J Periwinkle III was very much in with a chance of scoring the Top Slot in November.

Unless, that is, something occurred to put him out of the race.

So when the letters began arriving, outlining some of the more questionable business activities that were funding the Reverend, the assumption had been made that it was the Opposition that was behind them.

And although they were a concern, it had not been a great one. The various enterprises – legal and otherwise – that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Holy Renewal Movement’s coffers were separated from the Movement by multiple layers of shell companies, nominee directorships, blind trusts and brass plates in far flung corners of the globe and could not possibly be linked to the Reverend or to his backers, individuals who felt that they were not already rich enough and saw the chance to make a substantial return on their investment in Elstow Periwinkle once the Moral Rearmament started in earnest.

Thus, it was assumed that the main parties were just flinging mud in the hope that some would stick.

Until, that is, the first detailed description arrived.

It explained how cash generated from an illegal gold mining operation in the Amazon that was poisoning several hundred square kilometres of virgin forest with toxic wastes was air freighted via three Caribbean islands described as machine parts, printer ink cartridges and exotic fruit to Panama, where it was laundered through a more-or-less above bored foreign exchange business. From there, the semi-clean money was “spent” at a chain of a dozen Nevada brothels (owned, ultimately, and in deep obscurity, by the Periwinkle Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up to combat moral turpitude arising from line dancing) before heading to Europe.

Exchanged for Euros in another foreign exchange operation in Estonia, the cash was used to purchase second hand furniture in the Baltic States, which was then shipped to the United Kingdom, to be resold at any number of small auction houses, car boot sales and antique fairs.

The now laundered money was finally used to buy improving literature and DVDs from the Reverend’s own London Mission. From there it was repatriated to the States to partially fund the Movement’s campaigning.

There were many such operations going on under the Movement’s control.

Two things were interesting about the letter: firstly, that it contained information that for reasons of simple security was not known in its entirety by any one person; secondly, that it came with a return name and address.

Two of the Movement’s more senior enforcers (or “heavy clerics” as they were known internally – in this case the Reverends Kelly and Steve) were sent off to France to “interview” the sender, a man calling himself Duncan Michelson-Morley.

They returned a few days later thoroughly bruised and deeply shocked by what they had undergone.

Having found the isolated cottage corresponding to the address, the Reverends had settled down for a few hours to watch the dapper little man they presumed to be Duncan Michelson-Morley as he pottered around his garden, drenching roses with the contents of a large, old fashioned, brass sprayer.

Having satisfied themselves that the man posed no conceivable threat, even though they were missing their accustomed hand guns, the clerics had followed the man as he re-entered the cottage, with a view to employing some “enhanced interrogation” techniques, for fun if for no other reason.

When they came to their senses a few minutes later it was to find themselves in their underwear, strapped firmly into upright chairs. The dapper little man was there too, but now he looked far from harmless. It wasn’t that he was polite and smiling (always a bad sign if one is professionally bound, the reverends knew), it was that he was confidently brandishing a kendo shinai with which he had already – apparently – inflicted a number of livid bruises on arms and legs.

“Now, now my dear fellows,” he had started, “did you really think that I wouldn’t spot your clumsy attempts at discrete surveillance? What do they teach you young people these days? No matter, let me explain what this is all about.”

And so he had. He explained that he knew all that was going on to support the Periwinkle campaign, though he declined to reveal how. He explained that his continued good health and liberty – as evidenced by regular communication by means he was not about to disclose with several lawyers around the world – were key to ensuring that the intelligence remained between “friends”. He explained what he wanted: Elstow Periwinkle to be exposed for the fraud and filthy hypocrite that he was.

“He can even blub on television and beg for forgiveness like that Jimmy Swaggart character who was big your side of the water a while back did, if he wishes. Then he can bugger off to West Virginia or somewhere and take up snake worship or something. I really don’t care. But I want him gone or I pull down everyone and everything associated with him. Just nod your heads if you understand, gentlemen. Jolly good.”

Then he had kicked them out, watching them go from the door, casually swinging the shinai with a practiced ease.

They had found their car and clothes about a kilometre up the quiet lane that led to the lonely house. The reverends dressed quickly, not least because, to their profound surprise given the haste with which they had made the return, when they arrived they found Duncan Michelson-Morely waiting for them, leaning easily against a tree cradling a pump action shotgun.

“I think it best that you leave town very soon. Please be assured that I will be checking.” And off they went.

Once back in the States, their report digested with a degree of incredulity, the Movement’s intelligence machine had swung into overdrive. This was superbly provision with well placed, sympathetic, sources in all of America’s plethora of intelligence agencies, and information flooded in.

The first task had been to place the cottage in France under close observation, rather more adeptly than the Reverends had proven capable of. Everything, every detail of its occupant’s life, was noted for analysis.

Identifying and investigating that occupant proved confusing: Duncan Michelson-Morely did not exist and had never existed. No record of his birth, marriage or death could be found by the extensive network of tentacles the Movement possessed.

The man who lived in the house was named Eric Michelson-Morely, so it was presumed that he was adopting the very thin cover of changing his first name for some reason yet to be discovered.

Eric Michelson-Morely most certainly did exist, but the extensive information gathered – including photographs from various sources – was highly contradictory.

Born 62 years previously in Chepstow, Eric Michelson-Morely had received a decent if undistinguished education and had passed some 37 years working as a provincial solicitor. He had never married and his medical records indicated a decidedly fragile constitution. His interests included amateur dramatics and a near obsession with roses.

On the other hand, Eric Michelson-Morely had cropped up a number of times since his retirement in some unlikely places for a man of previously conservative character; in particular he had gambled, won and lost in spectacular fashion in Las Vegas, frequenting at least one casino controlled by the Movement.

But this was the only tenuous connection that could be found, and nothing whatsoever in Eric Michelson-Morely’s history gave reason to suspect that the Reverends Kelly and Steve should have had any problems whatsoever with him.

And yet the bruises were clear to see, and despite extensive and repeated de-briefing neither man budged one iota from their stories.

What was obvious was that there was no way that Eric Michelson-Morely could ever have assembled the information he was threatening to broadcast. So the Movement began to search for an intelligence connection. And they struck pay dirt.

It was discovered that a recent incomer to the nearby town of St Louis sur Baq was a man who had previously worked for France’s most secretive agency, the DCINCD. His reasons for being so far from Paris were unclear, but the words “special assignment” were whispered locally. And his arrival in the region coincided with the arrival of the first letters.

This was most promising indeed.

To add credence to the notion that any scandal emanating from France and aimed at the Movement was baseless and mischievous, the Movement decided to provide a motive, and in short order the Reverend was on his hind legs announcing that, as President, one of his first tasks would be to pass the “France Sanctions Act” forbidding the performance to the “sinful” Can-Can on American soil and making trade between the two nations unlawful.

This was met with wild cheering (and a certain amount of foaming at the mouth) from the faithful and a two point gain in the polls. The enraged fulmination from the French embassy was music to the collective ears of the Movement.

The Movement then set-about building a back-up laundering system that was to be kept “cold” until the threat posed by Michelson-Morley could be neutralised. Any investigation of his claims post mortem would find nothing.

Finally the means for that neutralisation had to be arranged. To this end, a small dissident group had been established named the Popular Front for the Liberation of Andorra. This had caused a certain amount of bewilderment amongst the law enforcement personal called into to investigate the setting fire to litter bins and the painting of false beards and glasses on statues of President de Gaulle that the PFLA claimed as their work. For a start, Andorra appeared to be liberated already, but Europe was full of vociferous factions making all kinds of statements, so they sighed and got on with it.

They didn’t expect for one moment that the PFLA would involve themselves in assassination.

But what had been missing was one final piece of the jigsaw, a physical link between Michelson- Morley and Pierre – Yves Pompodore de Frou-Frou, and that had finally been established. The previous evening they had been sighted in the same bar where, in accordance with established trade craft, they had steadfastly ignored one another. The watchers waited for something, something out of the ordinary, and they got it.

Without warning, the DCINCD man had consumed every drink on the table in front of him, behaviour so bizarre that it had to be significant, at least to intellects blunted by frustration, greed and an unhealthy love of conspiracy theories.

So now the meeting moved towards a decision. Liquidation was the word they used.

“How long will it take to get the necessary assets in place?” asked the Reverend.

“Not more than a month.”

“Good.” The holy man smiled broadly. “Let’s get on with God’s work then shall we?”