The Only Problem

about Harvey and his Bible-sect, his wealth, his chateau, and by details of the unfortunate policeman’s family life.

It was not till after lunch on Monday that he was invited to the commissariat at Epinal once more. Two security men from Paris had arrived to interrogate him. Two tall men, one of them in his late forties, robust, with silvering sideburns, the other fair and skinny, not much over thirty, with gilt-rimmed glasses, an intellectual. Harvey thought, if he had seen them together in a restaurant, he would have taken the older man for a business-man, the younger for a priest.

Later, when he chewed over their questions, he was to find it difficult to distinguish between this second interrogation and the first one of a few days ago. This was partly because the older man, who introduced himself by the name of Chatelain, spent a lot of time going over Harvey’s previous deposition.

‘My house is surrounded by your men,’ said Harvey. ‘You have your young woman auxiliary in my house. What are you accusing me of?’ (Stewart Cowper had advised him: If they question you again, ask them what they have against you, demand to know what is the charge.)

‘We are not accusing, Mr Gotham, we are questioning.’

‘Questions can sound like accusations.’

‘A policeman has been shot dead.’

And their continual probe into why he had settled in France:

Harvey recalled later.

‘I liked the house,’ said Harvey, ‘I got my permit to stay in France. I’m regular with the police.’

‘Your wife has been in trouble before.’

‘I know,’ said Harvey.

‘Do you love your wife?’

‘That’s rather a personal question.’

‘It was a personal question for the policeman who was killed.’

‘I wonder,’ said Harvey, conversationally. He was suddenly indignant and determined to be himself, thoughtfully in charge of his reasoning mind, not any sort of victim. ‘I wonder … I’m not sure that death is personal in the sense of being in love. So far as we know, we don’t feel death. We know the fear of death, we know the process of dying. From the outside it looks the most personal of phenomena. But isn’t death the very negation of the personal, therefore strictly speaking impersonal? A dead body is the most impersonal thing I can think of. Unless one believes in the continuity of personality in its terrestrially recognisable form, as opposed to life-after-death which is something else. Many disbelieve in life after death, of course, but —’

‘Pardon? Are you trying to tell me that the death of one of our men is trivial?’

‘No. I was reflecting on a remark of yours. Philosophising, I’m afraid. I meant —’

‘Kindly don’t philosophise,’ said Chatelain. ‘This is not the place. I want to know where your wife is. Where is Effie?’

‘I don’t know where Mine Gotham is.’

And again:

‘A policeman has been killed by the FLE gang. Two men and a girl, all armed. In the eighteenth arrondissement in Paris.’

‘I’m sorry that a policeman has been shot,’ said Harvey. ‘Why in the eighteenth arrondissement?’

‘That’s what we’re asking you,’ said Chatelain.

‘I have no idea. I thought these terrorists acted mainly in popular suburbs.’

‘Was your wife ever before in the eighteenth arrondissement, do you know?’

‘Of course,’ said Harvey. ‘Who hasn’t been in the eighteenth? It’s Montmartre.’

‘Have you and your wife any friends there?’

‘I have friends there and I suppose my wife has, too.’

‘Who are your friends?’

‘You should know. Your colleagues here went through my address book last week and checked all my friends.’

In the middle of the afternoon Chatelain became more confidential. He began to melt, but only in resemblance to a refrigerator which thaws when the current is turned off. True warmth, thought Harvey at the time, doesn’t drip, drip, drip. And later, in his cottage, when he reconstituted the scene he thought: And I ask myself, why was he a refrigerator in the first place?

‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise with you, Mr Gotham,’ said Chatelain, on the defreeze. ‘Not to know where one’s wife is can not be a pleasant experience.

‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise with you,’ said Harvey. ‘I know you’ve lost one of your men. That’s serious. And I sympathise, as everyone should, with his family. But you offer no proof that my wife, Effie, is involved. You offer only a photograph that you confiscated from a box on my table.’

‘We confiscated …?’ The man consulted Harvey’s thick file which lay on the desk. ‘Ah, yes. You are right. The Vosges police obtained that photograph from your house. Witnesses have identified that photograph as the girl in the gang. And look — the identikit, constructed with the help of eye-witnesses to a bank robbery and supermarket bombings, some days prior to our obtaining the photograph. Look at it — isn’t that your wife?’

Harvey looked at the drawing.