A Free Range Wife Read online

  “‘I gambled on the Guide Kléber.’

  (The little garçon winced.)

  ‘If this is your cuisine minceur,

  ‘Bring me some that’s minced.’”

  “Beautifully read, sir. Needs polishing, of course. Might ’ave to cut it. The proof of the padding is in the deleting.”

  “I give up. Who needs Tennyson? Incidentally, who’s Ann Dora?”

  “Ann Dora who?”

  “That’s what I said. Who?”

  “Don’t tell me that Cherokee joker’s been larking about with my report. Come on, let’s get it right. Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Ann Dora.”

  “Ann Dora who? God, look, you horrible—”

  “Andorra, tosh, is a semi-feudal, practically invisible state in the Pyrenees under the joint suzerainty since the thirteenth century of the President of France, currently Monsieur Mitterand, and the Bishop of Urgel, in Spain, whose name escapes me. The official language is Catalan and the inhabitants are by and large a handful of Spaniards, plenty of sheep, ski-freaks, a ton of smugglers and tax-dodgers, and possibly an arms-dealer named Becker, acquainted with the late Charles Spence and his lady, and perhaps with Mrs. McCluskey. If he’s not an arms-dealer he could still be worth a look at because what we seem to have, speaking as an innocent, is a widening network of blokes, some dead and mutilated, one dead and unmutilated, though painted, others alive, between whom the link—’ow’s my grammar so far?—the link between whom, for what it’s worth, might be Mercy McCluskey.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Knew you’d think so. Andorra’s not that far. I can see the Pyrenees from here, if that’s what they are. Probably do it in ’alf a day. Up to you, darling. I’m happy where I am. Haven’t seen the town yet. Haven’t even seen a miracle.”

  “Go, for God’s sake.”

  “Really?”

  “Henry?”

  “Oui?”

  “You got any days off owing?”

  “I’ve got months off owing.”

  “Take them. Take Miriam—”

  “I just phoned ’er. There was a terrible amount of silence. Not sure whether I was talking to anyone or not.”

  “Andorra’s the place, Henry. Go skiing. Smuggle a sheep. Henry?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t phone us, we’ll phone you.”

  “Ah, no you don’t. Changed my mind. I’m coming back today. You’re trying to exclude me, that’s what. When I get back there’ll have been a putsch. My trench coat will have been confiscated. I’ll have lost my desk by the radiator.”

  “You’ve already lost it. The redskin’s taken it. ’Bye Henry.”

  “Toodle-oo. I’ve got a poem coming on anyway, I can feel it. My word, if the muse is hopping in Lourdes, what’s she going to get up to in snowy Andorra? And-oral hygiene’s sure to please the fleas that tease in the High—forget it. Catalan story short, nothing your end I ought to know?”

  “Yes. I’ve got a screaming headache. Five minutes ago I was fine. Also, hate to tell you this, the weather’s marvellous. And if it’s any use, someone named Hector McCluskey isn’t in Hong Kong. Never was, according to what I’ve got here. Never arrived.”

  “What ’appened to the cookery competition?”

  “Who cares what happened to the—”

  “The cooks care, that’s who. Blimey, you’re insensitive. All those meat patties growing cold. So where is he?”

  “Missing.”

  “Try Buffalo. He went to the funeral of Ziegler, his mate, another chef, one of the amputated ones.”

  “He didn’t. He wasn’t there. Far as Buffalo knows he was never in Buffalo. Last seen on the sixth when he left Mordan for Orly Airport.”

  “You’re not by any chance telling me we’re going to turn up another dead and mutilated cook?”

  “There’s only been one. Charles Spence wasn’t a cook.”

  “All you know. His freezer’s full of lamb chops.”

  “All I’m saying is Hector McCluskey’s missing. You say Mrs. McCluskey’s in Lourdes, why don’t you ask her?”

  “I’ve gone off ’er. She’s a fibber and she’s too tall. Gives me vertigo. She’ll have left anyway, if she didn’t oversleep, like some of us.”

  *

  Mercy McCluskey had not overslept but she had not yet left Lourdes, though she had been about to. She was on her way to her car, standing at a pedestrian crossing waiting for the lights to change, when she saw him.

  He had not seen her. He was reading, alone and sunlit at a table on the sidewalk outside the Café de la Terrasse.

  At least he was reading, and chewing, not looking for her. Maybe he was looking for her at that. He was weird enough to look for people by sitting in cafés.

  Weird, not stupid. She would have liked to have known what he knew, to have seen anything he had written about the night before last, about Jerome, everything.

  When the pedestrian light turned green she did not cross but backed towards the refuge of the shops, watching him.

  Arva-a-ay, Arva-a-ay, Arva-a-ay Mare-e-e-yaaa . . .

  The greeting chorused boomingly through loudspeakers atop hotels, banks, boutiques, restaurants, and blossoming chestnut-trees. Sunshine sparkled on the circular tables, warmed the top of Peckover’s head, and toasted his very late breakfast croissant.

  This was his third croissant, and out of a blue Pyrenean empyrean he had realised that he preferred a baguette loaded with butter and marmalade. Croissants were on the sweet side and had a gluey texture. Simply, they had seemed the obvious breakfast for France. His first he had dunked in his coffee, with misgivings, but he had noticed the natives so behaving. His second he had eaten undunked, its flakes scattering down his lightweight jacket and onto his burgundy lap. This third he was chewing because if he managed to work his way through it he would be able, he believed, to skip lunch and return to Miriam with a waistline not too obviously impaired in spite of yesterday’s lunch.

  When he returned. Beside his coffee-cup lay, pristine, a guide to Andorra. Squared-off on the guide were Lourdes brochures from the Syndicat d’initiative, because he had not yet seen the Grotto of the Apparitions. He had also not seen the Panorama of the Life of St. Bernadette, the Miraculous Medal, the basilica, the fort, or the several museums. He had not visited the caves, ridden round the lake on horseback, or up the Pic du Jer on the funicular.

  Squared-off on the brochures was his notebook, open at a blank page, awaiting the muse.

  Arva-a-ay, Arva-a-ay . . .

  The must was plainly the Grotto. After that he would see, but he needed to be on his way fairly soon if he were to reach Andorra by evening. Easier to say what he would skip. The Piscine Miraculeuse for one. On peak August days pilgrims immersed themselves in the miraculous baths, or were immersed, at the rate of one a minute. About fifteen hundred a day.

  Three million pilgrims a year to Lourdes, almost all of them in the summer.

  All right, May was not August. Today there might be only a thousand immersions. He still believed he would not feel deprived if he kept away from the miraculous baths. Best not get too involved.

  Unless you watched it you got involved, ruminated Peckover, involved against his will, this after all being his long weekend off, or having started out that way. He remained resolutely cheerful, apart from croissant number three, the last half-masticated mouthful of which he now gulped. Last night had been a solid achievement, not involving himself socially with the Widow Spence or professionally with Mercy McCluskey.

  But what did he imagine he was doing in barmy Lourdes and now off to batty Andorra? Unless you stood your ground, said a firm no thank you, you were sucked in. You started off saying yes to giving a half-hour to a simple English-language interview, there being all those jolly figures on the expenses sheet to consider, and before you could blink you were immersed, the liquid closing over your head, more merdeuse
than miraculeuse. Right, a copper was at a disadvantage saying no, someone had to sort out the knaves and ruffians, that was the job, and he was all for it. Just the same. Not every day, after all, did he find a body in a bath.

  He should, he knew, have been looking for Mercy McCluskey, but he looked first at his watch, next at the waiter, who having nothing better to do came sauntering. That final mouthful of dough required additional coffee if it were to be floated off the back of his breastbone where it had lodged.

  *

  She watched him with some difficulty. The view through the traffic—stop-start, stop-start—was leading to eye-strain. Not that there was much to watch. All he did was eat croissants. He looked like someone aiming at a slot in the Guinness Book of World Records by eating every croissant in the town.

  She would have liked to have known where he was going from here. Back to Mordan? Could be he was staying in Lourdes. How long did she stand here among this ghastly religious kitsch, watching? When he walked away, did she follow? Follow a cop for Chrissake?

  Mercy McCluskey stood inside the souvenir shop watching through what would have been the window had there been a window. These numberless, windowless boutiques, one after the other, a thousand of them displaying the identical conveyor-belt souvenirs, were open to the street: here in shadow, on the other side of the street glistering in the sun, dazzling and tinkling as from ten thousand crystal fragments. Macy’s, Saks, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s, where are you?

  To the pious who bought it, rubbish it was not; and if people had not bought it, it would not have been here.

  Just the same, came the day of reckoning, the last trumpet sounding, and the hordes flooding into Main Street, Lourdes, for string, sealing-wax, toothpaste, bread, what were they going to find? Fifty thousand plastic Virginshaped bottles for holy water and fifty million devotional medals, carvings, candles, chaplets, and picture postcards.

  Starting to watch her, waiting for her to buy or get out, stood the proprietress, a death-camp door-keeper with black hair in a bun and eyes like glass splinters.

  *

  Peckover watched the traffic. Stop-start, stop-start. He liked best the lurching mastodon tankers filled with yoghurt and truffles. How café society coped when they wanted to hear themselves speak he could not imagine.

  She was a fibber and what had he to gain from more fibs? Last night he had gone out of his way to avoid her: past the recommended Hotel Impérial, where she might have been, on to the Galilée-Windsor. But last night was last night. She might not be co-habiting with her spouse but did she know he was missing?

  She might not care of course. She might be delighted.

  If she did know Hector McCluskey was missing, just what did she know? If she did not know, how would she react when told?

  She was not an expert liar. Mrs. McCluskey was up to her fine white teeth in the little drama. Stage centre. She could hardly cast herself in the role of innocent spectator when two walk-on players whom she had known had been murdered; a third had gone the same way just along the corridor from where she had been having it off in the Isle of Skye Room, if that was where she had been, what she had been doing; and now her husband might be a body awaiting discovery.

  She was immersed. Guilty or innocent she should have stuck to her loom. She had beaten him to the Widow Spence in pursuit of anything which might link her with Charles Spence, then made a hash of it by actually listening to the widow and leaving believing there was nothing. She could hardly have made it more obvious she had been acquainted with Charlie if she had announced it over the loudspeakers.

  Why should she not lie? If she had been having affairs with them, whose business was it but hers? What was wrong with lies in the cause of peace and harmony?

  Assuming she had left her hotel, here was as good a place as anywhere to look for her. The world and his wife were passing by. Assuming she had not yet left Lourdes.

  Arva-a-ay Mare-e-e-yaaa . . .

  Through the loudspeakers the decibel count was high, gamely competing with the spurt and grind of the traffic. His square metre of pavement space was at a hilly, lively intersection, downtown, if such a commercial term were acceptable for so revered a place of pilgrimage. Peckover thought it might be. Looking for Mercy McCluskey he could look four ways, and which ever way, uphill or downhill, the view was of shoppers and an identical dance and glitter of sunlit holy junk in the shopfronts. Would the croissants cost extra because of the loudspeakers’ inescapable hymning?

  He remembered how as a young man on his first trip abroad, low on spending, money but forewarned, he had chosen for his Champs-Élysées café one without music. No flies on the Young Peckover, Acting Detective-Constable on leave. When the bill for one beer had requested roughly the equivalent of two days’ pay, and courageously he had queried it, raising moreover—O green and headstrong youth!—the question of the café’s music, which was to say its absence, the waiter had informed him that he could hear the music from the adjacent café.

  Not until several years later had the maturer Peckover learned from an article in the Guardian the infallible tactic for surly waiters. You accidentally nudged your empty glass over the edge of the table. Were the waiter exceptionally surly you nudged the table’s entire contents overboard. With or without an apology, but guarding at all cost your sang-froid you then put down the money for whatever you had had and walked away. Peckover had never tried this but he had stored the information. Seldom did the public prints come up with advice of such practical value. Whether from dented machismo, docked wages because of breakages, or the public humiliation of being left to sweep up the debris, even the surliest waiter, marooned amid broken glass, was apparently left whimpering.

  Peckover watched the shoppers and strollers along the boulevard. North, south, east, west. To see south he had to lean sideways in his chair and twist his head through a hundred and eighty degrees. He knew he was looking south because beyond the roof-tops and tops of pines and palms stretched a horizon of sugar-coated peaks.

  No leaning and neck-craning were required to observe the high proportion of the halt and lame: groups with sticks and crutches, people in Bath chairs. A small boy with red hair sat rug-wrapped in a wheelchair pushed by an older boy in a yachting cap. Almost as numerous were hale, grey nuns, and priests in black carrying books and parcels, and in some instances the handbag obligatory for French males. Peckover guessed the priests with handbags were French, or at any rate Continentals, rather than Irish. Fumes belched from the cars stopping at the lights.

  How many in this rubber-necking throng, Peckover tried to guess, were criminals? One in fifty? One in twenty? Pickpockets mainly. Pickpockets, petty pilferers, con men. The summer pilgrimages must have brought them to Lourdes like locusts. The brochures he had collected were silent on the matter but he knew. The town seethed with them.

  Pickpockets, priests, pilgrims in wheelchairs. The sick and crippled confused him by failing to look miserable. They might not have looked radiant but all the same they were physically ill, not daft, so they should at least have had an air of being cowed. People you saw walking about looking radiant in London were usually soft in the head. Not being soft in the head, this lot came to Lourdes not for a miracle, he judged, or even for a cure, but for something else. What? Reassurance? Joy?

  No Mercy McCluskey.

  Becker was a new name out of the hat and an unlyrical one. Peckover preferred McCluskey. He even preferred Peckover. He wrote on a white page:

  The widow, keeping up her pecker—

  Something unconvincing about that line for a start but he could work on it later.

  Rode the Poplar double-decker

  Crying, in her role as wrecker,

  “Copper, get that snotrag Becker!”

  Around the quatrain he drew careful squiggles, then squiggled densely through and over it, achieving a rhododendron bush. He did not want to disappoint Susan Spence but he failed to see himself getting Becker, whoever he migh
t be, apart perhaps from an upstanding citizen and charmer who had told her adieu.

  Who he might be was an arms-dealer pal of Spence, which could be fruitful if he were willing to talk, unlikely as that seemed, even if he were in Andorra and discoverable. The more honest reason for driving to Andorra was that he had never been. When all was said he was on his hols, dammit, and it was there, Andorra, with its sheep, skiiers, and smugglers, somewhere among the icing-topped peaks.

  How many of the blatherers propping up the bar back at the Factory had seen Andorra, mountain-girt land of romance? Once he had them cornered he’d blather them into the floor.

  *

  She bought a television set. When she held it out and opened her purse the death-camp door-keeper did not weep and embrace her, but neither did she snarl.

  The television set was plastic and fitted in the palm of her hand and in her handbag. It would also fit in any trash-can. The battery was extra. When you fitted the battery and pressed the button the screen lit up, illuminating the Virgin Mary. If she gave it to Heinz would he roll about laughing or cringe? She had to admit she did not know him well enough to be sure.

  She decided on two more minutes. Okay, five. The cop might be on duty, looking for Mercy McCluskey, cerebrating about stabbed Jerome, or he might not. He looked as if he had settled in for the season. Personally she had a journey ahead of her and her life to live.

  Diagonally across the intersection, deluged in sunshine, the waiter was unloading coffee.

  *

  The coffee was black as Beelzebub and gritty as if the filter had split. Peckover would have liked to have returned it to the waiter and told him, “I’ll have grounds more relative than this,” but in English it would have been wasted and he could not have managed the French. The gun-running, an equally black business, he was sceptical about.

  Guns were profitable or they were nothing, surely. Whether Charlie had been trying to flog the IRA Exocet missiles or blowpipes, all he had left his widow was a house in Lourdes of all places. Even taking into account the champagne and girls he should have done better than that, though as in every profession there would be those at the top, coining it, and the also-rans with holes in their socks, scrabbling for the crumbs. Peckover realised he was beginning to muddle gun-running and arms-dealing. He had no experience of either but he was ready to accept Frank Veal’s guess that gun-running at any rate was irrelevant. Gin-running was the business the Widow Spence would have preferred.