A Dressing of Diamonds by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Turn the page to continue reading from the Henri Castang Mysteries

Wolfnight

A dogday was ending.

Sometimes, just before twilight, the sky will go a washed pale blue. After a still, beautiful day at the very end of autumn. The sun has gone, but scattered feathers of cloud are glowing and sparking from the bushfire that has just passed. Castang stared out of his window in the PJ offices.

Some clock-watching computer had switched the car-park lights on; a pinkish orange like anaemic gladioli on their long curving stems, hanging insipidly in the sky. They had the effect upon Castang of instant impotence; the self-pity known to the poets as Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair. You piddling little man.

It was still a dogday, and still not time to go home. It is always Time for something, if not Christmas then Elections, if not chocolate then apple-blossom-shampoo. All those executives are still out there Marketing, and I’m sitting here doing nowt.

Now he was a family man, it was due to his position to be a Commissaire, and so he was; recently enough to feel uneasy about it, wondering what it meant. He was the same, wasn’t he? Only a Commissaire-Adjunct, the lowest kind. But the Step: money, standing, position. He was exactly where he had been, doing exactly the same work. In nominal charge of the Serious Crimes Brigade, in a provincial city in France, of something under half a million souls.

Commissaire Richard, too, was exactly where he had been. A divisional commissaire, the highest kind, but that was the end. Richard was pushing sixty, and would no longer be called to Paris for the choice desk, after which you become Comptroller, Sub-Director and Director of the Police Judiciaire. Those are political jobs, and Monsieur Richard had said, once too often, “You know, it’s possible to be a cunt. I’m one myself. But when it comes to being an Abject cunt …” Richard would not get sent to the Basses-Alpes, or even the Basses-Pyrénées. He would just stay the way he was. Finish.

You got promoted—it’s Buggins’ turn next—and between forty and sixty you too would go tranquilly on until you too—in Pau perhaps, or Valenciennes.

Lasserre was gone. There had been malfeasance if not malpractice: the less said the better. It had not splashed over on to Richard. A tightlipped person from the Inspectorate had spent hours closeted. Prosecution had been avoided. Lasserre, a Principal Commissaire, was replaced by a person who really had come from Pau; had in his office a banner to prove it; green and white, colours of the Section Paloise rugby club. A nicer person than Lasserre. But what’s all this Nice and Nasty? They’re all just cops.

And Cantoni was gone, promoted like Castang and replaced at the head of the violence brigade by yet another close-knit, loose-moving tricky runner with a mongol moustache. But Castang hadn’t been sent to Pau or even Valenciennes. Perhaps it was meaningless: most things in Administration are. Some professed to read subtle

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