A Free Range Wife Page 12

  In any case, guns were by definition a dangerous business. Not as dangerous as casino politics on the Côte d’Azur or riding a bike round Hammersmith Broadway but even the gigglers and blatherers at the Factory would hardly have loosed him abroad into a demi-world of gunrunners without at least a small file on the subject, and possibly a gun.

  If gun-running were irrelevant, what was relevant? Peckover, eyeing the morning crowds, tried visualising Mrs. McCluskey as a gun-runner, or a gun person of some sort, a Ma Barker or an Annie Oakley transplanted to provincial France and requiring that Mr. McCluskey, a man of probity, her husband, breathing down her neck, be expunged so that she could run guns in a free and liberated fashion.

  No good. Throughout the whole succession of killings and cuttings, knives, not guns, had been the instrument. More plausibly she might want her husband out of the way so that she could run her boy-friend, Jean-Luc, in a free and liberated fashion.

  France had precedents for ladies with knives. Charlotte Corday and that geezer in the bath, the one who had caught a disease by hiding in the sewers. Murat or Marat. Not Monet or Manet, who were also confusable. Ironic if his first name, Marat or Murat, stabbed in his bath, had been Jerome.

  Not that France had a tradition of imported American lady assassins, as far as he knew. Charlotte Corday had been French and her motive, if he rightly remembered, political, not an affair of the heart. Today she would have made brief headlines as another fanatic, darling of one of the fashionable terrorist groups.

  How about Jean-Luc as cleaverman? The provincial prof, avid for possession of Mercy, the exotic American, the prize from across the ocean, someone to brag about in the staff room, boast about to acquaintances on the boulevard, but himself possessed by a jealousy, a Gallic dignity which required her to be unattached, widowed even, shorn of husband and lovers, past or present, even though this meant killing them off and cutting their member off, that vile appendage which had presumed to pollute and defile the fairest . . . oh, poppycock. In a manner of speaking.

  “Monsieur? Tenez. Vous me permettez?”

  Peckover turned his head. He was being offered a tract or something by a cigar-smoking pilgrim in a Bath chair.

  *

  Time to go, decided Mercy McCluskey, suddenly cold on the shady side of the street and suspecting that all hell might be about to break loose.

  Chapter Nine

  “Oui, thanks—ah, merci beaucoup,” Peckover told the man in the Bath chair, taking and glancing at the leaflet. He dug in his pocket.

  Would five francs be too little, an insult, if he had five francs? If the pilgrim were not seeking money, any money at all might be a worse insult. Impossible to know; and at my time of life, thought Peckover, hard to care. Purveyors of unsolicited anything put the public in a false position. The leaflet was something about La Vierge Immaculée and an Association Catholique.

  “British?” the man in the wheelchair said.

  “Yes.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” The man beamed as if in gratitude for unmerited blessings, placed the wad of leaflets in his lap, transferred the cigar to his left hand, and extended his right. “My name’s Balderstone. This is my fourth pilgrimage. I’m from Birmingham. Hockley Hill, if you know it?”

  The only bit of Birmingham Peckover knew was Winson Green Prison, whither he had travelled at one time on a series of escort duties. He shook the man’s hand a trifle perfunctorily, not for want of sympathy but in case he was frail. He did not look especially frail, and his grip was firm, but from the waist down he was swathed in a rug, so perhaps the trouble was his legs. His complexion was pinkish and the delicate features might have been more suitable for a girl. His hair and beard were clipped so uniformly short that the colour remained in doubt, but might also have been a sort of pink. Fair anyway. The cigar was not excessive, it was more a cigarillo or cheroot, but in the policeman’s view the man should not have been smoking at all, not if he were in a wheelchair. Perhaps he came to Lourdes for a miracle to stop him smoking. Peckover brought from his pocket not money but a tissue and dabbed his nose.

  “Lovely day,” said the Brummagem in the Bath chair.

  “Certainly is,” said Peckover, looking around at the day.

  There she was.

  “’Scuse me,” Peckover said, pushing back his chair.

  She was inexpert at everything. She had not wanted him to notice her or she would not have been in such a rush, colliding with fellow pedestrians as she crossed the crossing. Another half dozen paces and she would have been on the southbound boulevard and out of sight, unless he went into his neck-craning act. But she looked directly at him as she strode. She as well might have carried a banner proclaiming I Am Mercy McCluskey. Had she looked ahead and walked normally he quite possibly would not have noticed her in spite of her height. She wore red trousers and a billowing grey jacket and over her head a knotted silk square, as if on her way to horse-trials. They stared at each other. When he pushed his chair back she started to run.

  He had not paid. Leaving his beret, brochures, and Andorra guide as a sign of good faith, he ran after her. He could not cross the road because the lights had changed and the traffic was gathering speed, bumper-to-bumper. He ran along his side of the boulevard, past souvenir shops, side-stepping priests and pilgrims, looking for a gap in the traffic. He had lost sight of her but she was there somewhere, beyond the accelerating roofs and roof-racks, on the other side of the boulevard. When a dozey saloon car left a gap between itself and the van in front he darted through and became marooned in the middle of the road, awaiting a similar gap in the traffic seething from the south and honking at him with the satisfaction of the morally justified. When he reached Mrs. McCluskey’s side of the boulevard she was not there.

  He ran along the pavement, looking and cursing. People stepped aside and stared. He looked into shops. He ran back and down a side-street she might have entered but failed to spot her. He came back to the boulevard and tried the next turning, twenty yards from the crossing where they had eyed each other.

  She was less hopeless than he had supposed. His pits were damp and he had lost her.

  He stood for another minute or two in case she should canter up to him and say, “Hi,” breathless as if late for a date. Then he tramped back to the Café de la Terrasse. The waiter hovered with an air of menace. An outsize woman in a shawl, neither nun nor pilgrim, was lowering herself into his chair and her shopping bags to the ground. At least Mr. Balderstone, tract-distributor, had departed.

  Peckover sorted change for his breakfast, unfurled and put on his beret, then looked once, twice, through his brochures. He looked on the ground, at the shawled hippopotamus who had taken his seat, round about him at oblivious customers, and at the waiter’s pockets. He felt in his own pockets but failed to find his notebook.

  The missing notebook was a run-of-the-mill Woolworth’s notebook with a wire spiral without lines, about ten inches by six. That was to say, it was not a run-of-the-mill policeman’s notebook, being too large to slip easily into the pocket. Peckover preferred his notebooks unlined because lines imposed limitations. Sometimes he liked to write small and sometimes big. He did not know why this should be: that was something for psychoanalysts. He preferred a largish notebook because he liked to see the stanzas of his verse complete on one page rather than on page after page, jostled by tedious names and addresses, train times, time of the break-in, and so forth. This the Woolworth’s notebook allowed because normally he was not writing Paradise Lost.

  In the notebook was nothing of interest to anyone apart from possibly generations of poetry-lovers to come, and off-hand he was unable to recall whether he had lately composed anything deathless. Neither was there a single entry, he believed, he could not do without. The sole item of moment was the address of Becker and that he was able to remember. He would not have remembered the telephone number but there had been no telephone number.

  The cheek of it was what. The im
pertinence.

  He stepped to the waiter. “Le monsieur dans la chaise, wheelchair, chaise avec les roues—où? Quelle direction? S’il vous plaît?”

  “Comment?”

  Peckover sat on air, mimed wheelchair wheel-turning. When the waiter started to snigger and look about for customers to share the joke against the idiot Brit, Peckover thrust his face close to the waiter’s, grinned and hissed. The waiter blanched. His lips wobbled and he pointed west.

  Dodging tourists and pickpockets, dazzled by sunlight bouncing off the souvenirs stalls, Peckover trotted west. He passed clerics, pilgrims in wheelchairs, and one supine, smiling pilgrim on a trolley pushed by a man in shirt-sleeves. Ahead, briskly trundling along the downhill boulevard, there came into sight a wheelchair’s padded back and above it shoulders and a head of fair, close-cropped hair. Peckover trotted faster. Catching up, he caught hold of the wheelchair and dragged it to a stop. It weighed a ton. Mr. Balderstone looked up and round with startled, pale eyes.

  Peckover presented him with a smile because who knew? As well at least to start amiably. Discovering whether Mr. Balderstone had nicked his notebook might take the rest of the day. He could hardly hold a Lourdes pilgrim upside down and shake him in the full public gaze. What if under the rug there were no legs?

  “Mr. Balderstone? Hello again.”

  Peckover stood with his back to an acre of shimmering mementoes. He leaned forward from the waist, watching Mr. Balderstone’s delicate physiognomy for signs of embarrassment, an apology, perhaps even production of the notebook. Mr. Balderstone flipped the rug off his legs. There lay the notebook in his lap. Simultaneously he rose, bringing the top of his bristly skull with vigour and impeccable aim into Peckover’s belly.

  “Oooumph!” gasped Peckover.

  Folded double, he went backwards into the boutique, sat on a loaded counter with a crash which engulfed the loudspeakers’ hymning, and still sitting, continued travelling backwards for another metre or two to an accompaniment of further explosive crashings of souvenirs counters. The din and airborne glitter amazed. Holy-water bottles and medallions flew. Glass and plastic crunched beneath the policeman’s two hundred pounds. He covered his face with his arms because at last he was at rest, grievously winded, the air was filled with colourful little missiles, and hurtling towards him, shoved and released by a blurry Mr. Balderstone, came the empty ton of wheelchair: jolting steel and a whirr of monstrous wheels.

  Had the wheelchair’s aim been as true as had Mr. Balderstone’s skull, firemen, in Peckover’s opinion, would have been needed to cut him free from its frame and the trellis of shattered planks and joists from the counter, now fastening his limbs. The wheelchair missed by the breadth of a breviary and smashed into a hitherto undemolished section of counter. Peckover’s beret sat awry. Some fool, sex unknown, was screaming in his ear. He would have screamed back had he had the breath, though he believed it was starting to return, and that he was winded rather than wounded. In front, assembling on the pavement, he observed the confused inactivity of the public when granted a spectacle which was free, dramatic, and unintelligible. Mr. Balderstone had departed on uncrippled legs, leaving behind his wheelchair and rug, but not, as far as Peckover could see, a Woolworth’s notebook.

  “Un miracle!” shouted someone, watching the fleeing pilgrim.

  Peckover flung timber from off his legs, plucked a Marian water-bottle out of his lap, and achieved a squatting position. Heaven knew what he had been sitting in but his rump was beginning to prickle and tingle, suggesting glass as an answer. The shrilling in one ear, perhaps from an aggrieved shopkeeper, was now counterpointed by bass barkings in the other ear. A bony hand had gripped the back of his jacket collar and was tugging as if intent on throttling him. Sick of the entire shower, persecuted Peckover lashed out, punching upwards and behind him with both fists. He was rewarded with a yelp to his left, a stifled bleating to his right, and impressed diminuendo all round. He found a wrist at the back of his neck, twisted it, and heard a shriek. Then he was on his feet, though lurching somewhat.

  The assembly on the pavement appeared to be divided between two main groups: those goggling at him, and those turned to their right, goggling after the decamping Mr. Balderstone.

  “Un miracle, c’est un miracle!” chorused some of those who were turned to their right, though not all.

  Peckover barged through. Shedding glitter and wood splinters, he started off at a run down the avenue. Ahead was the flitting figure of Mr. Balderstone, travelling well, and now left-turning, vanishing round the end of the avenue.

  Peckover ran harder. His wind had more or less returned, his size eleven shoes pounded. He felt in passably good shape in spite of everything, such as the croissants and possibly a wounded bottom. Most people on the pavement scattered but some stood there, whether from surprise or defiance, forcing him to tack. A sourpuss dame in a black fur coat, he guessed the town lunatic, actually started towards him, making faces and raising both arms as if casting a spell. He was tempted to ward her off with the straight-arm technique, which is not technically a punch but with which Welsh Rugby internationals, and even players of lesser nations, are able to break an opponent’s jaw.

  He dodged past her. Someone blew a whistle. Some copper. Typical. Chain-smoking his head off in a back street while the yeggs and cutpurses of this thieves’ kitchen were out there snaffling notebooks, and now that it was too late blowing his bloody whistle.

  Later Peckover was to learn what he had already guessed: that the crime rate for Lourdes was more than double the French national average for small towns. Higher in the high season than London’s or anywhere on the Continent except possibly West Berlin. Even priests and pilgrims—genuine unwell pilgrims, not masqueraders like fit Mr. Balderstone—had been known to join in the commonest crime, which was nicking. Of the usual targets of footpads and the light-fingered, only shops were more or less immune, there being in most of them nothing worth tuppence.

  Notebooks were fair game.

  Sprinting round the end of the avenue, Peckover was less concerned about crime statistics than in one ratbag criminal and a notebook. Why anyone would want to pinch his notebook defeated him. Why the Brummagem who had done so had made such a performance of it, playing the chairbound pilgrim, becoming violent and bolting, was another enigma. Bugger enigmas—where was he?

  Peckover ran through open spaces, though they would have been more open without the trees. He did not see Mr. Balderstone. At the same time, judging which way he had probably gone was no problem. An elderly man who sat on the concrete esplanade sat with an air of having landed there unexpectedly. Most people were staring in roughly the same direction. One or two were calling out to no purpose.

  The sky was a blue bowl. A hundred yards distant rose a rocky hill fringed with green. The immediate landscape, now he had dashed past the trees, was a wilderness of concrete like a parade-ground. The people who dappled the parade-ground appeared unhurried, unlike himself, and Mr. Balderstone, now eminently visible again, turning his head to look back as he raced in the direction of a monster church. In spite of the sunshine, a majority of the parade-ground military were bundled in rugs in their wheelchairs and on stretcher-trolleys, and though Peckover knew they were not the military, he fancied that any stranger parachuted in, in ignorance of St. Bernadette and the Grotto, might have taken them for ex-military: soldier casualties of war enjoying their daily dose of sun. The mainly male nurses and porters, some in shirt-sleeves, some beefy, others scrawny, trundled the chairs and trolleys, or stood talking with each other, and now gazing after the brace of sprinters who had disrupted the calm. One, crouched beside his charge, was reciting the rosary. A mixed group sang in competition with the loudspeakers.

  All this Peckover fleetingly took in as he adjusted his angle of pursuit and lengthened his stride. He was gaining, had already considerably gained. Twenty yards? One Olympic, gold-medal burst would do it. Or might if the bugger would trip, twist an ank
le.

  Laud-a-arr-tay, laud-a-arr-tay . . .

  Peckover hoped he was still gaining because his breathing had become like sandpaper, his legs were watery, and he had a stitch. Mr. Balderstone, plainly aware of being pursued, was running harder too, or trying to, but Mr. Balderstone was losing ground.

  Having changed his mind about the church as sanctuary, if that were what he had had in mind, the Birmingham ratbag had veered north, thus running along two sides of a triangle to Peckover’s one. A policeman’s whistle, perhaps the same chain-smoking policeman’s, pierced the May morning. Peckover knew he was in the heart of Lourdes, the point of the place. The parade ground was the processional esplanade; the towering, off-white church was the basilica; those on stretchers were pilgrims; and somewhere was the Grotto. He ran on fading legs. Mr. Balderstone was rushing past people on benches, and next hurdling over astonished pilgrims on stretchers parked in a line facing the cliff. At a rocky concavity in the cliff, thronged with pilgrims who kneeled, sang, or simply stood and stared, were candles, a glass screen, and high up in a niche a statue of the Virgin in listless blue and white, none of which Peckover saw, nor was he to, though this was the Grotto. He was intent only on skirting rather than hurdling the stretchers because a boot on an inert pilgrim was something he preferred not to risk, principally for the pilgrim’s sake but also for the explaining that would be called for later.

  Here between basilica and Grotto, pilgrims and tourists were more numerous than on the parade-ground, and to weaving, charging Peckover they seemed to be growing yet denser. Where quarry and copper barrelled through, the crowd was also resentful, if too surprised to raise a clamour, or not before the circus had passed. The squash told in his favour, Peckover realised, though with no sense of consolation. When once or twice he lost sight of Mr. Balderstone’s bobbing head he was able to follow with reasonable confidence the swathe cut by the ratbag through the press of bodies.