The Only Problem

‘Perhaps not technically. I was definitely invited to come along to the commissariat. I went.’

‘I wonder,’ said Stewart, ‘why there’s been so little in the press about Nathan Fox. I only heard on the radio that he’d disappeared suddenly from your house. And they don’t include him in the gang. Maybe they couldn’t find a photograph of him. A photo makes a gangster real.’

‘There was an identikit of Effie in the papers the day I was hauled in,’ said Harvey.

‘Did it look like Effie?’

‘I’m afraid so. In fact it looked like Ruth. But it would pass for Effie. It looked like Job’s wife, too. You know, it was a most remarkable thing, Stewart, I was sitting in the museum at Epinal reflecting on that extraordinary painting of Job and his wife by Georges de La Tour, when suddenly the police —’

‘You told me that last night,’ said Stewart.

‘I know. I want to talk about it.’

‘Don’t you think,’ said Stewart, ‘that it would be odd if Effie wanted alimony from you simply to finance the FLE, when she could have sold her jewellery?’

‘Hasn’t she done that?’

‘No, it’s still in the safety-box at the bank. I hold the second key. There’s still enough money in her bank to meet the standing orders for insurances and charities. Nothing’s changed.’

‘Well, why did she want to fleece me?’

‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t have tried to get maintenance of some sort from you. It’s true that her child by Ernie Howe damaged her case. But you walked out on her. She behaved like a normal woman married to a man in your position.’

‘Effie is not a normal woman,’ said Harvey.

‘Oh, if you’re talking in a basic sense, what woman is?’

‘Women who don’t get arrested in Trieste for shoplifting are normal,’ said Harvey. ‘Especially women with her kind of jewellery in the bank. Whose side are you on, anyway, mine or Effie’s?’

‘In a divorce case, that is the usual question that the client puts, sooner or later. It’s inevitable,’ said the lawyer.

‘But this is something different from a divorce case. Don’t you realise what’s happened?’

‘I’m afraid I do,’ said Stewart.

Next day was a Saturday. They sat in Harvey’s cottage, huddling over the stove because the windows had been opened to air the place. There had been a feeling of spring in the early March morning, but this had gone by eleven o’clock; it was now winter again, bleak, with a slanting rain. As Harvey unlocked the door of his little house Stewart said, ‘Lousy soil you’ve got here. Nothing much growing.’

‘I haven’t bothered to cultivate it.’

‘It’s better up at the chateau.’

‘Oh, yes, it’s had more attention.’

This was Harvey’s first visit to the cottage since the police had pounced. He looked round carefully, opening the windows upstairs and downstairs, while Stewart lit the stove. ‘They haven’t changed the decor,’ Harvey said. ‘But a few bundles of papers are not in the places I left them in. Shifted, a matter of inches—but I know, I know.’

‘Have they taken any of your papers, letters, business documents?’

‘What letters and business papers? You have the letters and the business papers. All I have are my notes, and the manuscript of my little book, so far as it goes — it’s to be a monograph, you know. I don’t know if they’ve subtracted the few files, but they could have photographed them; much good might it do them. Files of notes on the Book of Job. They did take the photograph of Effie; that, they did take. I want it back.’

‘You’re entitled to ask for it,’ said Stewart.

From the window, a grey family Citroen could be seen parked round a bend in the path, out of sight of the road; in it were two men in civilian clothes occupying the front seats. The rain plopped lazily on to the roof of the car and splashed the windscreen. ‘Poor bastards,’ Harvey said. ‘They do it in three— or four-hour shifts.’

‘Well, it’s a protection for you, anyway. From the press if not from the terrorists.’

‘I wish I was without the need for protection, and I wish you were in your office in London.’

‘I don’t go to the office on Saturday,’ Stewart said.

‘What do you do at the week-ends?’

‘Fuck,’ said Stewart.

‘Do you mean, fuck the question or that on Saturdays and Sundays you fuck?’

‘Both.’

‘Don’t you ever go to a concert or a film on Sundays? Never go to Church?’

‘Sometimes I go to a concert. I go away for the week-ends, often. I do the usual things.’

‘Well, you’re wasting your time here,’ Harvey said.

‘No, because first you’re my most valuable client. That’s from a practical point of view. And secondly, I’m interested in your Book of Job; it just beats me how a man of your scope should choose to hide himself away in this hole. And thirdly, of course, I’m a friend; I want to see you out of this mess. I strongly advise you to come back to London here and now. Do you have your passport?’