Dial M for Merde by Stephen Clarke Page A

mission. All the tags and buttons were in place, and the leather of his belt shone as if he’d painted it with nail varnish.
    He asked for my name, address, age and whatnot, and then got down to the interrogation itself. I could hear voices murmuring along the corridor. We were all getting the same treatment.
    â€˜Now tell me what happened,’ he said, not at all accusingly. He had an open, almost gentle face. I found it hard to believe that he’d be good at the truncheoning and shooting parts of his job. Or interrogation, for that matter. ‘Give me the whole truth, and it’ll be OK,’ he told me. ‘No need to be ashamed.’
    â€˜Well, I was having a drink on the beach …’
    â€˜OK.’ The gendarme made a sign for me to stop while he typed the beginning of my statement.
    â€˜I was having a drink on the beach, talking to a soldier,and then suddenly the Anglaises and the other soldiers began to …’ The next bit involved a delicate choice of verb, but the gendarme nodded and told me that he was typing that I’d seen certain men and women disrobing. So far so tame.
    â€˜And when I, er, saw this, what you said, there were suddenly maybe eight or ten people, er, you know, on the sand.’
    The policeman nodded again. ‘So they were engaging in heterosexual relations in public?’
    â€˜Oui,’ I confirmed, and he typed out this sentence that could never have come from my limited linguistic repertoire.
    â€˜And?’ The policeman was looking hopeful.
    â€˜And then the police arrived,’ I said.
    â€˜Yes, but you were not a participant,’ he said.
    â€˜Yes, please say, you know, I do not do these things on the beach with drunken women.’ I left it to my interpreter to express this in decent French.
    â€˜Exactly.’ He typed a long sentence.
    â€˜I have done other things,’ I said, referring to the two misdemeanours he was going to find out about when he hooked me up to his database, ‘but I don’t do that.’
    â€˜No.’ He typed some more, and then lifted his fingers from the keyboard with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Now, I’ll read this back to you, and you can sign it.’
    He began to read, and I began to lose consciousness.
    Apparently, I’d been chatting on the beach with my boyfriend, engaging in some manly horseplay that had resulted in my torn shirt, when we were shocked to find heterosexual relations being conducted nearby. We naturally found this repulsive, and had been in the act of leaving the scene to alert the authorities when the police arrivedand arrested everyone present. As a morally upright homosexual, it was unthinkable that I could have been involved in, or approve of, the indecent acts that I’d been forced to witness on the beach today.
    â€˜No, no,’ I pleaded. ‘I am – how do you say? – happy for gays to be gay. But I am not.’
    â€˜Listen, mon ami,’ the gendarme whispered. ‘If you want to escape this charge of indecency, tell the truth and you will be OK. I guarantee it. You know, we’re much more interested in discouraging these gangs of Anglaises than … anything else.’
    â€˜But … Oh, merde.’ I’d do anything to get out of here, I thought. What did a little fib about my sexual preferences matter? Besides, how could they prove anything? They weren’t going to get me to shag a guy on oath. I hoped. ‘OK,’ I said.
    He printed out the statement and I signed.
    â€˜Wait here a moment.’ The gendarme stood up, my false confession in his clean white hand. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
    â€˜Yes, please.’ With brandy and morphine, I wanted to add.
    He left me sitting there, shivering.
    A minute or two later, there was a commotion in the corridor and my door burst open. In strode a short, stocky man with close-cropped grey hair and a battered leather jacket. He didn’t look