Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Over the past few years David. Williams has been concentrating on a police series featuring the Welsh Inspector Parry. Suicide Intended (Harper Collins), the fifth and most recent Parry adventure, sold out in hardcover in both the U.S. and the U.K. The paper-hack, released in late 1999, is still available. Critic William F. Deeck calls the hook, “A fine, civilized and fair-play police procedural.” Whatever this author writes, we can depend on its being finely wrought.

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“They are the perfect couple for your... your very generous gift, Monsieur Talbot,” said Pierre Boulanger, a thin, gaunt, stooping figure, thin-lipped, hesitant, and unctuous in his choice of words. He wore small, steel-rimmed spectacles with round lenses and walked always with straight arms held close to his sides. Never given to true familiarity with either of us, he was invariably deferential toward me, and somewhat nervous when my wife Helen was about. I kidded her that he probably lusted after her in spirit.

But, in the end, I was wrong, even about that.

To describe the scam we planned to pull as “generous” was typical Boulanger euphemism. From the start, three months before this, he had chosen never to refer to the illegal side of it, nor even to admit that it owned one. True, we had encouraged him in this, but we had never expected to recruit a collaborator who would enter into the spirit of things with the righteous enthusiasm of a parish priest engaged in unimpeachable good works.

Aged forty-five — three years older than me — Boulanger was a minor official in the regional health office of the French Social Security Ministry, and lived with his widowed mother in a Bordeaux suburb. We had met him when Helen was reclaiming the cost of having had her appendix removed at the local hospital. Because we were both British citizens resident in France, there had been extra formalities to go through.

Boulanger had volunteered to come to the château after Helen had explained on the telephone that since we were in the middle of the grape harvest, and she was still in a delicate state, it would be impossible for either of us to get into town easily for several weeks.

In fact, after speaking with him for a few minutes, my perceptive wife had concluded that he could be the helpmate we had been seeking unsuccessfully for months. His whole manner had exuded selfless, eager cooperation. In the matter of the payment for the appendectomy, he had seemed to be almost ready to waive the formalities and approve it on the phone. But Helen, still following her hunch, had cunningly protested that we couldn’t possibly allow him to do anything irregular or risky, and certainly not before he had even met us. He had replied that while the risk was immaterial, it would be a privilege to make our acquaintance.

He had arrived that first time in the most dilapidated little Citroen Dyane (the rattlebones model with the canvas roof) that I had ever encountered still capable of movement under its own power. The comedy was that he drove the machine as if he was competing in the Monaco Grand Prix — at all of thirty miles an hour maximum, and that only when he was travelling downhill with a following wind. It was droll to watch the car crawling up our curved drive, the driver’s hands, arms, and shoulders, usually so inert, wrestling as if he was desperately trying to control the wheel before he brought the vehicle to a terminal sort of halt somewhat short of the front door. You felt the wheels might at least have thrown up a showering of loose gravel, but they didn’t.

Boulanger had been dressed that day — as he was on most subsequent days — in a worn, fawn cotton jacket, equally shabby but well-creased grey trousers, and a black beret. He had pulled off the beret courteously but with great economy of movement — head inclined to allow the minimum upward and downward action of his right hand and arm — the exercise exposing a glistening, prematurely-bald head.