12 February 2025
Wednesday. I will not take the lift. I have said so to the manager, to my superiors and to the lift itself.
I call her Madame. She is gilded, she is beautiful and she stops exactly when it suits her and never when it suits anyone else. Every party of suspects begins its evening inside her, and every party is stuck there for a while, until somebody has the sense to get her going again. It is the first test of the evening. Some pass it with style. Some pass it with shouting.
A young man named Ashwin asked me, before he went up, whether it would be a squeeze. It is not. Madame is a lift, not a cupboard, and there is nowhere in the whole hotel that one must crawl or wriggle. I told him that if the idea worried him he should say so at the desk before he started, and they would talk him through it. He did, and they did, and he went up whistling.
Croissant also refuses the lift. We take the stairs together. It is the only exercise either of us gets.
— Insp. A. Brochard, Gendarmerie
