The Stone Leopard by Colin Forbes Page B

the first floor at the rear of the Elysee, a room with tall windows which overlooks the walled garden laid out with lawns and gravel paths. Facing the president as he sits at his Louis XV desk is a Gobelin wall tapestry of 'Don Quixote Cured of his Madness by Wisdom', and there are two telephones on the desk, one black and one white. A third instrument stands on a side table close to his right hand. As the door was closing behind Grelle he heard the chiming of one of the hundred and thirty-seven clocks which furnish the Elysee. 11 am. A large Alsatian dog bounded across the room, reared up and dropped its forepaws on the prefect's shoulders.
    `Kassim, get down, you brute,' Grelle growled affectionately. The prefect himself, who was fond of dogs, had personally found the animal when requested to do so by Florian soon after his election. It was said in the Elysee that only two people dared touch the animal: Grelle and the president himself. Removing the forepaws, the prefect bowed and then sat down opposite the most powerful statesman in western Europe. Typically, Florian waited for him to speak.
    `I was very disturbed to see that you again walked back from the Place Beauvau on the evening of 9 December,' Grelle began. 'And only twenty-four hours after the appalling incident. . .'
    Florian lowered his lean, intelligent head like a small boy caught in the farmer's apple orchard. It was the kind of gesture, coming from a president, which would have disarmed most men, but Grelle's expression remained grave. 'It will not happen again,' Florian assured him. 'You saw the pictures in Friday's papers, of course?'
    `I was thunderstruck.'
    `But you are no politician, my friend. The street was swarming with detectives—at a discreet distance so the photographers would not include them in the pictures! But it is good politics, you see—the president walks the streets again only one day after the incident!' Florian grinned impishly. 'It is all nonsense, of course. Tell me, am I forgiven ?'
    Grelle returned to the prefecture reassured that from now on the president would stay behind the security fence erected to guard him. Only one question remained: was the security fence foolproof?

    `Come in, close the door and lock it,' Grelle told Boisseau as he settled himself on the edge of his desk. It was a habit of the prefect's when disturbed to perch his buttocks on the edge of a desk or table so he could start pacing about more easily if the inclination took him. Boisseau sat in a chair, took out his pipe and relaxed, waiting. With less nervous energy than his chief, he had the look of a patient squirrel, and behind his back that, in fact, was what his staff called him. Andre the Squirrel.
    `I checked the visitors' register at the Elysee for the evening of 9 December for the hour 7.30 to 8.30,' Grelle said abruptly. `Before I go on, remember that the only physical description we have of the Leopard concerns his height—over six feet tall. . .
    `You have found something ?' Boisseau suggested.
    `Someone—more than one, as it happens. Florian himself arrived back on foot at eight o'clock from the Place Beauvau—that won't happen again, incidentally. The interesting thing is three other ministers also arrived on foot—they had come from the meeting at the Ministry of the Interior. . .'
    The two men exchanged cynical smiles. Normally everyone would have returned from the Place Beauvau in his own ministerial car, but because the president had walked back they had felt obliged to adopt the same form of locomotion. `And, of course, they hoped to get their own pictures in the papers,' Grelle observed, 'knowing there were photographers in the Place Beauvau.'
    `Who else came back ?' Boisseau asked quietly.
    `Pierre Rouget for one—we can dismiss him, of course.' They smiled again. Rouget was the nominal prime minister, the man the reporters called 'Florian's poodle'. An amiable man—`with a backbone of rubber' as Grelle sometimes remarked—no one