Dial M for Merde by Stephen Clarke

half-shark.’
    â€˜That’s it,’ I said. ‘Did you see just one?’
    â€˜Yes, only one. But why are you so interested in them, anyway?’
    Good question. What could I say to allay his suspicions?
    â€˜Photography,’ I blurted out. ‘My girlfriend, she takes photos of fish.’
    Any further conversation was ruled out when the van lurched into movement, its engine rattling like a tumble dryer full of spanners, causing the seats to vibrate so much that one of the English girls said she was going to buy one for her bedroom.
    We drove along the promenade, away from the phallic church. The van edged its way through the crowds of curious tourists, who took photos and filmed the seminudity through the windows as we passed by. A couple of the girls stood up to flash their boobs at the cameras. To them it was all part of the party.
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    We were unloaded in a brightly lit car park, then herded across chilly tarmac into the entrance hall of the gendarmerie. Here, we were greeted with a shocked silence. Two cops at the coffee machine stopped feeding in coins and gaped. An old lady who had come to register some kind of complaint broke off in mid-sentence and clung on to the edge of the reception desk for support.
    The officer on duty barked an order at the arriving gendarmes, and we were shoved into a corridor with five or six doors leading off it and a long bench running along one wall.
    â€˜Sit down and shut up,’ a gendarme told us. Two of the soldiers and four of the women were completely naked, and perched gingerly on the edge of the seat. The blond guy was still gesturing at me. Now he was giving me the thumbs-up. Bloody hell, I thought, didn’t he think we were in enough trouble already?
    I tried to get talking to my sturgeon informant again, but we weren’t allowed to hang around for a chat.
    â€˜You, in there. You, in there.’ An officer strode down the bench, assigning interview rooms. ‘You, you, you, you, you and you, don’t sit on the chairs until someone brings paper towels.’
    I went and sat in a tiny cubicle just big enough for two chairs and a desk. It was a modern plastic-and-steel space, the only decoration a large, labelled diagram giving the French names for every part of a door, a doorframe and a lock. This was presumably so that burglary victims could describe exactly how their house had been broken into. I thought it would probably be just as useful to have a similar diagram of the human body. If you were grabbed by a visiting hen party, you’d be able to give a precise medical description of your attackers. ‘I noticed that one of the girls had a very pronounced ventral cyclops, and a tattoo that ran right down to her rectal fibula …’
    I was still smiling at this idea when a painful thought hit me. The computer on the desk was almost certainly going to reveal that the French police and I had had dealings before. There was the little matter of a car crash after which the guilty party had not only left the scene of theaccident but also blamed it on me. And, worse, there was the fine for refusing to translate the menu of my English tea room into French on the grounds that ‘sandwich’ was already English, and if you didn’t know what a ‘cup of tea’ was, then you were too stupid to drink one anyway. This disdain for the French language would tie in all too neatly, I thought, with my apparent lack of respect for public decency. They’d put me down as an amoral outlaw and lock me up with lots of men, who would see the arrival of a half-naked young Englishman on the cell block as a gift from the gods.
    Despite the cold, I started to sweat.
    My arresting officer came in and shut the door behind him. He booted up the computer with brisk little gestures. He was very thin and clean-cut, his hair shaved to exactly one black millimetre all over, his uniform neatly pressed, even though he’d just been out on a