The back of the north wi.., p.1
The Back of the North Wind, page 1
Also by Nicolas Freeling
The Seacoast of Bohemia
You Who Know
Flanders Sky
Those in Peril
Sand Castles
Not As Far As Velma
Lady Macbeth
Cold Iron
A City Solitary
No Part in Your Death
The Back of the North Wind
Wolfnight
One Damn Thing After Another
Castang’s City
The Widow
The Night Lords
Gadget
Lake Isle
What Are the Bugles Blowing For?
Dressing of Diamond
A Long Silence
Over the High Side
Tsing-Boum
This Is the Castle
Strike Out Where Not Applicable
The Dresden Green
The King of the Rainy Country
Criminal Conversation
Double Barrel
Valparaiso
Gun Before Butter
Because of The Cats
Love in Amsterdam
The Back of the North Wind
A Henri Castang Mystery
Nicolas Freeling
To Roland: for, among much else, taking me up Eggardon
The Greek historian Herodotus refers to a people ‘living at the back of the north wind’. This reference is sometimes held to apply to prehistoric Britain.
The Back of the North Wind
A man went on holiday to England. He had set foot there only once before; forty years ago; the times had not been normal. An exotic time, and he had behaved in eccentric fashion. In fact emotional: he did not count himself an emotional man. A European war was then still a notion to stir the blood, at nineteen years old. Things would be very different now. Things and times were very different now: today’s nineteen-year-old could scarcely grasp the concept of a war between peoples of the peninsula that is Europe. We amuse ourselves now with war-games about wine or mutton … Landing in England again produced sensations that he could laugh at or shrug away: he did neither. He was alone, and no attitudes were needed.
He wore a dark blue jacket, at once raincoat and parka: it would in Brittany be recognisable as officers’ issue of the Marine Nationale: a corps he had nothing to do with. Perhaps in a sense it was a disguise: he was generally seen in tweed jackets, neat, a bit countrified, and bow ties. The detail has no importance, there being little to mark out this quiet greyish man, neither tall nor short, with regular features scarcely to be called handsome, carefully shaved and, despite many years of desk-work, straight-shouldered, and no slop around the waist. A Frenchman sixty years old, of the northerly or Frankish type with the long head, the narrowish chinny face, hair that has been fair, and pale grey eyes.
His luggage was on his back. It was early enough in the summer for there to be fewer tourists. He hoped to eat and sleep in country pubs. The food would be indigestible?—he would pay no heed. It would rain a great deal?—his jacket was of excellent quality. He spoke little English?—he would understand what was said to him and had little to reply. He was a solitary man. Much devoted to his wife, and if she accompanied him upon journeyings he was content, but if she chose to stay at home then not malcontent. The weeks of his holiday would be well spent in listening and in looking. In this land of the Hyperboreans—strange and secret island—he might catch scraps of voices within himself, glimpses of a man he knew little. There were discoveries to be made. He knew the countries of peninsular Europe well, was attached to them, but of these close and yet far-away neighbours he knew little. Concerning one another both French and English had strange misleading notions, preconceived, arrogant, and quite ridiculous. Among ourselves, is it not much the same? This person we have lived with for a varying quantity of years, we imagine we know and understand well; but leave aside habit, sloth, the wish for comfort, and we find that vanity and fear, the twin powerful motors of our thought and action, blind us to reality. This man, to close acquaintances, to neighbours, to colleagues at work was a little-known and somewhat mythical figure. Was he not his own closest neighbour and oldest friend? He had gone on holiday, come here, with the wish to search, to find out. Leaving aside that absurd militarist adventure of forty years ago he had been for more than those forty years a police officer. He had risen towards the top of his profession, would rise no further. What he had done might be thought enough to satisfy a man. Now he was past sixty it no longer satisfied him or his wife, dark and little-known woman.
He was Adrien Richard, a Divisional Commissaire of the French National Police. The chief of a regional service of Police Judiciaire. Not counting Paris there are sixteen to cover the national territory and his responsibility carried one of the largest districts and one of the ten principal provincial cities. It needs a little explaining. In the countryside one finds the Gendarmerie, a paramilitary force whose officers hold army ranks. It is more like a fire brigade; the separateness is felt. An urban centre has its municipal force, the larger ramifying into many specialised groups. Defined with a deliberate lack of precision (a notion of checks-and-balances is at work somewhere) the PJ has authority both in town and country; is a body suspect of élitism; puts its nose into everything, does not wait like Scotland Yard ‘to be called in’ though it is the same type of skilled and trained body whose work is criminal investigation.
One is a cop, under orders; going where sent at wish or whim of government. One may end in Paris commanding a well-publicised sector (television appearances, a star …) or in the island of La Réunion at the head of four drunks and a worn-out jeep. It’s all according. And an able officer, because of inertia and inbred conservatism, may well be left where he is for many years. Richard had begun his career in urban brigades, been promoted to C.I.D. for being bright, and for a ‘good war record’, risen to command, and been given ‘a good province’ for being a good administrator. And then been left there.
He might have expected one of the final plums of his service but for lacking an essential quality; the ability, and wish, to ingratiate. Despite many turpitudes (only the worst cop, thorough-paced pig, has a saintly conscience) he remained his own man. A quality that displeases the mighty: they may respect it; they will sanction it, leaving you a little pointedly in the ditch that you have dug. Richard could feel content at not having been banished to Martinique, at having many years of continuity in a serene senior post. Perversely, he was discontented. An illogical, even asinine comportment. Could this be analysed? It was among his purposes, here.
He had got on the ferry and this was Southampton. England: to the average French person (remaining exactly as Stendhal described him with acidity in 1837) here be sea monsters. It seemed now oddly a scruffy, turbulent and rich-smelling place. It seemed now oddly placid; sad, and even pathetic: well, he was much the same himself. Nothing to feel surprise about. He took a railway ticket to Dorchester (had looked in the atlas at home, Made Plans). The train was full of jolly persons from London, going for a day by the sea. They were friendly, and talked: he smiled, made himself small. The French believe the English to be stiff: the definition applies—as in France—to a humourless and self-important bourgeoisie; not to real people.
English faces, bumpy, irregular, brim-full of feature: most peculiar. Marked eccentricity of dress and behaviour. Some very odd old ladies got out at Dorchester. As he walked away from the station he passed a middle-aged gentleman of mild, even academic aspect, fierily clothed in parachute overalls, corduroy trousers with holes in embarrassing places, a walk as though wearing spurs. Richard was pleased. In this island lived an exceptionally tiresome people of knobbly and madly dotty sort, such as he could get on well with, reconciling him to his shortcomings.
He felt better still in his first pub, amid a collection of what the English soldiers of his youth had taught him were lahdidah accents. Expensively dressed young men of loutish aspect, superannuated pederasts, a woman with immense goggling eyes and no chin whatever: plainly, inbreeding flourished as in the deep of the Dauphiné and he felt quite at home. The beer was not warm, tasted delicious: myths were crumbling about him. Allegro assai; he had shed a skin of egoism such as chills and hardens the heart. In rain and wind and sometimes sun he hoped to peel away more: was he an onion? What was at the centre?
The tourist hereabout is grockle. Hard for the French mouth to compass, since the English 1 occurs somewhere at the back of the throat instead of the tongue on the teeth, and he said ‘Grocko’ several times like a demented cockyolly bird, to the entertainment of grinning natives. Their feelings towards this breed were contemptuous but not spiteful. It seemed to him that he had known too little that was not mediocre.
A countryside suiting this people, sudden and secret. From the bare chalk escarpment one plunged into the water valley, streams tinkling along through cresses; toy millrace, tiny weir, enchanting series of miniature landscapes seen from narrow roads so crooked between their thick hedges that one scarcely saw a hundred paces before one. Disconcerting. The striding spaces of France have amplitude, and often majesty; often too aridity. The French, said Stendhal furiously, cannot see a beautiful tree but they must cut it down for the sake of two miserable louis. This is like the bocage, thought Richard, the back-country of Normandy. Peopled likewise by sorcerers and spellbinders, faith-healers layi ng on hands?—quite probably: it was not at all long since witches had been burned in Dorchester. He worked his way along, like an earthworm.
He climbed hills. Like Maiden Castle: he had expected a great robber stronghold, massive and terrible like Coucy or Château Gaillard. He didn’t have the right kind of imagination. Very large, yes. Colossal ditch and rampart exceedingly remarkable, yes. Thousands of people with antler-picks or whatever working at that damned hard chalk reminded him of Egypt: pyramids yes, and monstrous temples. All exceedingly boring. In the pub they tried to frighten him, telling him to go up there at night. What—he’d been a cop for forty years: thistles and cowpats are the same at night.
It was a different sort of hill altogether that changed his mind—steep, vicious. A flint axe flung at his head, rearing above valleys of sinister woodland, dark and close. Wouldn’t want to get stuck here in winter, thought Richard: snow in your eyes and you’d die of exposure in half an hour. Challenged, he had to go to the top. The summit curved, wicked as a scythe blade from the blunt end to a precipitous spur, appalling him. It would not do to fall off here: those splinters might be only chalk but looked razor-sharp. Dangerous as hell; a puff of wind would take you over. If a fog blew up … not at all a place to go up at night. Or by day either, not even this one, in a soft southwest breeze and the haze off the friendly, not too distant sea wrapping the sky in a madonna-blue veil. The place stinks of violence: get off quick.
Instead of getting off he sat down; lit—his head under his wing like a damned seagull—tobacco; thought about violence. There should be nothing a forty-year cop does not know about violence. When man-made. Mean and silly, senseless and futile. And bloodshed is mostly farcical, a grand-guignol, like most obscenities.
There was very little here that one could find comic: a place of sacrifice. Ordinary human violence diminished here to a burned-out match. Rasped upon an abrasive surface the human being catches fire, burns a moment. Everyone understands the simple chemistry of the match. And nobody understands the nature of fire, which is metaphysical. A moment of violence, enough for pipe or cigar as for rape or murder. Leaving a twist of carbonised fibre. But have I lived this far, thought Richard, and understood no more? A whole career. I have done here and there some small good, perhaps, and everywhere much harm. And it all seems very little up here. Was that what I came to find? That the violence of nature is noble and just, while the violence of man can never be anything but ignoble and base? Hastily, before this led to theology, he scrambled off this frightful hill.
Halfway down and slithering he met a kindly, serious Englishman; seriously and kindly involved in flying a large model glider: it effaced vertigo.
“What is the name of this place?”
“Eggardon,” he was told politely.
And in the pub they went on again about Thomas Hardy, of whom he had already heard too much: a looming local presence as great a bore (he felt sure) as Dostoyevsky. Only artists understood crime, and violence, as he never would nor could.
“Fuck Thomas Hardy,” thought—and said—Commissaire Richard.
“Great strides altogether,”—in every pub there is an Irishman—
“your man does be making with the basic English.” Yes, perhaps he had acquired a scrap or so of useful knowledge …
Commissaire Richard had gone on holiday. Castang, likewise, was On Holiday. One had little choice in the matter: half of France was O.H., so that administratively speaking it was the quietest time of the year. Serious crimes do sometimes get committed during August; a great mistake, for judges are also away, and the committer finds himself clapped in jug by shorthanded and thus cross policemen and left there (totally forgotten) for up to two months.
Castang did not want to go away. Meeting fellow citizens in great numbers on the beach is even worse than meeting them at home. Greased bodies lying, be they prone or supine, are vile. Where had Richard gone? Nobody knew. On foot, wearing peculiar clothing, vanished. The general feeling, that Richard was an impenetrable enigma, was enough. There are things it is no use trying to penetrate.
Richard had been ruthless: Monsieur Castang would please take off. The PJ would survive, animated by the serious-crime senior inspector, with as regent Richard’s adjunct, the Person from Pau: neither Castang nor Richard had heard of the Person from Porlock, but both would have said fervently they knew him.
Castang had a remedy for not going away: moving house. A cottage had been found on the city’s outskirts, where remnants of village life could sometimes be seen: semi-ruinous, with crab-apple trees in what had once been an orchard. The obstinate old lady living here died at last: her one surviving grandchild lived in Montreal. Saving this property from the claws of speculative builders, financing the purchase without recourse to usurers, winning necessary permissions for repairs and alterations from the bowels of municipal administration—this would occupy long and boring pages to describe.
The holiday month was passed thus by Richard wandering about like Wotan in a Wagner opera, and by Castang digging out layers of antique filth, making crude repair of the more obvious dilapidation. Frightful job, but how else would it have been cheap enough to buy? September arrived as it does, with brilliant weather so that everyone who has been on holiday in August comes back cross. Richard reappeared, tanned. Castang tanned, despite tales of a month spent in a damp cellar. The person-from-Pau went on holiday, and the chief of the Economic-crimes, and Fausta. There were no very urgent matters afoot: just as well. Nobody who had come back had any zeal. It takes a month in France to recover from anything as strenuous as holidays. The city recovered from tourists: ancient, historic, occasionally beautiful, the city attracted many tourists. Grockle, said Richard. Most of them were gone by the end of August, but a long and involved governmental directive arrived (this was a year of socialist new-brooms) and all about delinquency. One would almost rather tourists.
Castang, appearing in Richard’s office upon a brilliant, sunny morning, found the divisional commissaire studying statistics. He looked up and said “Agitated.” It could apply to Castang, to the authors of this prose; not, surely, to himself. Was there an interrogation point, or did the slight rise in intonation betoken only a slight reproachful emphasis?
“Violence,” said Castang in much the same voice.
“I’m reading about it. They’re worried. I am to be worried, meaning you will be much more worried. According to the figures for last year, violence—in criminal terms of reference—cost this country eighteen hundred million francs. Do you find that a lot?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might: so did I. Until I got to the bit saying that non-violent, generally termed economic crime, cost this country during exactly the same period seventy thousand million. Putting things, I should hope, in proportion. However, you didn’t come here just to say you were shocked, did you?”
“No. The great outcry is about the delinquent being so very juvenile. I—,” Castang’s valuable conclusions on this subject were interrupted by two telephones ringing at once. Numbers of people (sounding agitated) saying it would be a good idea to get there quick, meaning before France-Soir: a crime, he was given to understand, of violence.
Richard had already put his phone down.
“Well Monsieur le Commissaire,” said he pleasantly, “I’d better not delay you.”
“You already? …”
“Yes, that was the Substitute.”
“You don’t propose? …”
“I’m too old to go running round scenes of crime. This sounds anyhow an unenviable example. You’d better take everybody you can get.” That ‘you aren’t getting me’ was apparent. It was nothing abnormal. Richard was a person to lift a large file off his desk and hand it across, saying, ‘Haven’t looked at this. Don’t propose to.’ Do something silly and he would cover for you; at least in public. The subsequent private interview with him would be something else again.
Castang went to review the troops, found Orthez struggling with paperwork about delinquency, and Liliane, the senior inspector, talking to a small female delinquent and getting small thanks for that.
