‘Is it a coincidence that other supermarkets and a jeweller’s shop in the Vosges have been robbed by this gang in the last two weeks? Gerardmer, La Bresse, Baccarat; this morning, Epinal.’
‘I don’t read the papers.’
‘You bought one this morning.’
‘I give no weight to local crimes.’ If Effie’s involved, thought Harvey, plainly she’s in this district to embarrass me. It was essential that he shouldn’t suggest this, for at the same time it would point to Effie’s having directive authority over the gang.
‘I still can’t believe that my wife’s involved,’ said Harvey. He partly meant it.
‘Three of them, perhaps four. Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. You’d better look.’
‘You recently bought the chateau. Why?’
‘I thought I might as well. It was convenient.’
‘You’ve been a year at the cottage?’
‘About a year and a half.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘I’ve already explained —’
‘Explain again.’
‘I found the cottage,’ recited Harvey, ‘because I was in the Vosges at that time. I had come here to Epinal expressly to look at the painting Job
‘How much rent do you pay?’
‘I have no idea,’ Harvey said. ‘Very little. My lawyer attends to that.’
(The rich!)
This interrogator was a man of about Harvey’s age, not more than forty, black hair, blue eyes, a good strong face, tall. A chief-inspector, special branch; no fool. His tone of voice varied. Sometimes he put his questions with the frank lilt of a query at the end; at other times he simply made a statement as if enunciating a proved fact. At the end of the table where they sat facing each other, was a hefty policeman in uniform, older, with sandy hair growing thin and faded. The door of the room opened occasionally, and other men in uniform and ordinary clothes came and went.
‘Where did you learn French?’
‘I have always spoken French.’
‘You have taken part in the French-Canadian liberation movement.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t believe in it?’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Harvey. ‘I haven’t lived in Canada since I was eighteen.’
‘You say that your wife’s sister has been living with you since last October.’
‘That’s right.’
‘With a baby.’
‘Yes. My wife’s baby daughter.’
‘But there was a woman with a baby in your house for a year before that.’
‘Not at all. The baby was only born at the end of June last year.’
‘There was another infant in your house. We have evidence, M. Gotham, that there was a small child’s washing on the line outside your house at least from April of last year.
‘That is so. But there wasn’t any baby, there wasn’t any woman.’
‘Look, M. Gotham, it is a simple trick for terrorists to take the precaution, in the case of discovery, to keep a woman and a child in the house in order to avoid a shoot-out. Rather a low and dangerous trick, using a baby as a cover, but people of that nature —’There was no baby at all in my house, nobody but myself,’ Harvey explained patiently. ‘It was a joke — for the benefit of my brother-in-law who came to visit me. I brought some baby clothes and put them out on the line. He obviously thought I had a girl living with me. I only put them out a few times after that. I told my brother-in-law that I did it to keep women from bothering me with offers of domestic care. As they do. They would assume, you see, that there was a woman. I suppose I’m an eccentric. It was a gesture.’
‘A gesture.’
‘Well, you might say,’ said Harvey, thinking fast how to say it, ‘that it was a surrealistic gesture.’
The inspector looked at Harvey for rather a long time. Then he left the room and came back with a photograph in his hand. Effie, in half-profile, three years ago, with her hair blowing around.
‘Is that your wife?’
‘Yes,’ said Harvey. ‘Where did you get this photograph?’
‘And the woman you are living with, Ruth, is her sister?’
