‘Once I phone the Prefecture will have this raid on record. I think we should find out a little more first.’
‘I think …’
‘Don’t tell me what you think or I’ll remind you that you’re supposed to have stayed down behind the wainscoting.’
‘Okay,’ he said. We both tiptoed up the small staircase that joined the first floor to the second. Loiseau’s men must be fretting by now. At the top of the flight of steps I put my head round the corner carefully. I put my head everywhere carefully, but I needn’t have been so cautious, the house was empty. ‘Get Loiseau up here,’ I said.
Loiseau’s men went all through the house, tapping panelling and trying to find secret doors. There were no documents or films. At first there seemed to be no secrets of any kind except that the whole place was a kind of secret: the strange cells with the awful torture instruments, rooms made like lush train compartments or Rolls Royce cars, and all kinds of bizarre environments for sexual intercourse, even beds.
The peep-holes and the closed-circuit TV were all designed for M. Datt and his ‘scientific methods’. I wondered what strange records he had amassed and where he had taken them, for M. Datt was nowhere to be found. Loiseau swore horribly. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘must have told Monsieur Datt that we were coming.’
Loiseau had been in the house about ten minutes when he called his assistant. He called long and loud from two floors above. When we arrived he was crouched over a black metal device rather like an Egyptian mummy. It was the size and very roughly the shape of a human body. Loiseau had put cotton gloves on and he touched the object briefly.
‘The diagram of the Couzins girl,’ he demanded from his assistant.
It was obtained from somewhere, a paper pattern of Annie Couzins’s body marked in neat red ink to show the stab wounds, with the dimensions and depth written near each in tiny careful handwriting.
Loiseau opened the black metal case. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Just what I thought.’ Inside the case, which was just large enough to hold a person, knife points were positioned exactly as indicated on the police diagram. Loiseau gave a lot of orders and suddenly the room was full of men with tape-measures, white powder and camera equipment. Loiseau stood back out of their way. ‘Iron maidens I think they call them,’ he said. ‘I seem to have read about them in some old schoolboy magazines.’
‘What made her get into the damn thing?’ I said.
‘You are naïve,’ said Loiseau. ‘When I was a young officer we had so many deaths from knife wounds in brothels that we put a policeman on the door in each one. Every customer was searched. Any weapons he carried were chalked for identity. When the men left they got them back. I’ll guarantee that not one got by that cop on the door but still the girls got stabbed, fatally sometimes.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘The girls – the prostitutes – smuggled them in. You’ll never understand women.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Nor shall I,’ said Loiseau.
21
Saturday was sunny, the light bouncing and sparkling as it does only in impressionist paintings and Paris. The boulevard had been fitted with wall-to-wall sunshine and out of it came the smell of good bread and black tobacco. Even Loiseau was smiling. He came galloping up my stairs at 8.30 A.M. I was surprised; he had never visited me before, at least not when I was at home.
‘Don’t knock, come in.’ The radio was playing classical music from one of the pirate radio ships. I turned it off.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Loiseau.
‘Everyone’s at home to a policeman,’ I said, ‘in this country.’
‘Don’t be angry,’ said Loiseau. ‘I didn’t know you would be in a silk dressing-gown, feeding your canary. It’s very Noël Coward. If I described this scene as typically English, people would accuse me of exaggerating. You were talking to that canary,’ said Loiseau. ‘You were talking to it.’
‘I try out all my jokes on Joe,’ I said. ‘But don’t stand on ceremony, carry on ripping the place apart. What are you looking for this time?’
‘I’ve said I’m sorry. What more can I do?’
‘You could get out of my decrepit but very expensive apartment and stay out of my life. And you could stop putting your stubby peasant finger into my supply of coffee beans.’
‘I was hoping you’d offer me some. You have this very light roast that is very rare in France.’
‘I have a lot of things that are very rare in France.’
‘Like the freedom to tell a policeman to “scram”?’
‘Like that.’
‘Well, don’t exercise that freedom until we have had coffee together, even if you let me buy some downstairs.’
‘Oh boy! Now I know you are on the tap. A cop is really on the make when he wants to pick up the bill for a cup of coffee.’
‘I’ve had good news this morning.’
‘They are restoring public executions.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Loiseau, letting my remark roll off him. ‘There has been a small power struggle among the people from whom I take my orders and at present Datt’s friends are on the losing side. I have been authorized to find Datt and his film collection by any means I think fit.’
‘When does the armoured column leave? What’s the plan – helicopters and flame-throwers and the one that burns brightest must have been carrying the tin of film?’
‘You are too hard on the police methods in France. You think we could work with bobbies in pointed helmets carrying a wooden stick, but let me tell you, my friend, we wouldn’t last two minutes with such methods. I remember the gangs when I was just a child – my father was a policeman – and most of all I remember Corsica. There were bandits; organized, armed and almost in control of the island. They murdered gendarmes with impunity. They killed policemen and boasted of it openly in the bars. Finally we had to get rough; we sent in a few platoons of the Republican Guard and waged a minor war. Rough, perhaps, but there was no other way. The entire income from all the Paris brothels was at stake. They fought and used every dirty trick they knew. It was war.’
‘But you won the war.’
‘It was the very last war we won,’ Loiseau said bitterly. ‘Since then we’ve fought in Lebanon, Syria, Indo-China, Madagascar, Tunisia, Morocco, Suez and Algeria. Yes, that war in Corsica was the last one we won.’
‘Okay. So much for your problems; how do I fit into your plans?’
‘Just as I told you before; you are a foreigner and no one would think you were a policeman, you speak excellent French and you can look after yourself. What’s more you would not be the sort of man who would reveal where your instructions came from, not even under pressure.’
‘It sounds as though you think Datt still has a kick or two left in him.’
‘They have a kick or two left in them even when they are suspended in space with a rope around the neck. I never underestimate the people I’m dealing with, because they are usually killers when it comes to the finale. Any time I overlook that, it will be one of my policemen who takes the bullet in the head, not me. So I don’t overlook it, which means I have a tough, loyal, confident body of men under my command.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So I locate Datt. What then?’
‘We can’t have another fiasco like last time. Now Datt will be more than ever prepared. I want all his records. I want them