A Free Range Wife Page 13

  “Police!” Peckover shouted.

  He believed that Mr. Balderstone, barely a dozen paces ahead, had no better idea of his surroundings or where he was going than he had himself, and no goal other than escape. Why for God’s sake did none of this idle lot tackle him, infirm or not!

  “Police! Assassin!” Peckover pantingly cried, particularly pleased with “assassin,” which was a slander on Mr. Balderstone but more colourful than whatever was French for “robber.” He had never in his life used the word “assassin,” as far as he remembered, either in French or English. He supposed he retained it from old Jean Gabin films. He charged along the channel carved by the ratbag through the mêlée which stood, sat, and lay outside a low, functional-looking stone building, and into an iron railing.

  “Blast!”

  He vaulted over the railing and into a youth on crutches. The crowd was singing a hymn under the leadership of an amplified divine. Mr. Balderstone was shouldering through the scrummage, then through a door.

  Peckover shouldered after him into a building which was not a basilica, he believed, though it was proximate, and there was a Madonna, signifying very little because Madonnas were everywhere, including possibly a portion of a miniature one embedded in his backside. Humanity lined more benches. The subdued babble may have been praying, or grumbling about the greater clamour of song and grievance in the queue outside. The smell, a rich damp, he failed to identify. Mushrooms? Sweat? His own sweat, doubtless, much of it in his eyes. He charged after Mr. Balderstone, who had disappeared behind a shower curtain of striped Marian blue and white. He could have reached for and collared him, almost, had he been capable of charging even a grain, a whisker, harder. Had he been able to see through the sweat.

  Impeded by striped curtains, flesh, and cubicle walls, Peckover reached fruitlessly for Mr. Balderstone. Mr. Balderstone had gone. Blinking through sweat, Peckover found himself reaching for a hairy, nippled chest. Not Mr. Balderstone’s. The outside clamour seemed to be moving inside, augmented by an echoing effect, new shouts, and the whistle of the imbecile, chain-smoking gendarme blowing virtually in his ear.

  “Balderstone, you bugger!” someone shouted.

  Himself.

  At least he was in the men’s domain, he believed. Blokes. Stone and tiles, unrefreshing smells, steps leading down to a tub of soupy water. The bath was sunken, as was the bath in his little Versailles, his Rob Roy Room—O Miriam!—at which point all resemblance ceased. Towelled porters, or they might have been life-guards, were lowering into the liquid murk a pilgrim, naked apart from the blue cloth round his waist. Mr. Balderstone, sprinter and hurdler, was on present evidence a non-swimmer. He had turned left round the edge of the bath. One of the miraculous baths, for blokes.

  Your mistake, mate, Peckover silently informed Mr. Balderstone, side-stepping a life-guard. He had only to follow a straight line through the water to cut the ratbag off on the opposite side of the bath. Then, joy, the kicking of him from one end of the bath to the other! Feet first, Peckover plunged in.

  The water was no more than knee-deep. He had waded one step when a hand grabbed his arm. Gawd, what next! Next, other hands arrived on other parts of him including the hair on his head. Probably a foot hooked his feet from under him. There were hands, feet, and abuse enough—the gabble was French but he assumed it was abuse—for a regiment of life-guards.

  Your mistake, old matey, Peckover reproached himself as the water closed over him and too late he shut his mouth and eyes against the miraculous water and microbes. He would have pinched his nose and plugged his ears had he been able, but the life-guard regiment held him. Already he had swallowed sufficient streptococci and staphylococci to leave him with typhoid for the rest of his days, which would be few.

  He was waiting for the kaleidoscope of his former days to flash through his mind when the hands jerked him to his feet with a sucking shwooosh. Peckover retched and opened his eyes. What concerned him still was Mr. Balderstone. No sign of him of course.

  A familiar beret floated on the soup. The hands refused to let him go, and in his head persisted outraged gibbering.

  “Oh, sod off, all of you,” was the best Peckover could manage.

  *

  Seven hours, much aggravation, one new suit, and the final breezy handshaking with a squad of Lourdes police later, at dusk, Detective Chief Inspector Peckover drove past unconcerned customs and immigration buildings into Pas de la Case, Andorra.

  The suit was a superlatively stylish needlecord of a beaten-gold hue in which he believed he looked like a god. The beaten gold was polished as well as beaten, so the effect was perhaps just a little glittery, but even Miriam was going to have to admit he had chosen well. The BBC World Service had further lifted his spirits. He had enjoyed “Play of the Week,” which had been Uncle Vanya, the “Merchant Navy Programme,” “Nature Notebook,” “Business Matters,” “Sports Report,” “Classical Record Review,” “The Farming World,” and numberless current affairs discussions. The foothills of the Pyrenees, then quite suddenly the Pyrenees proper, had been magnifiques. Escaped Balderstone he had erased from his mind, as good as. If ever they met again he would know the ratbag. What principally taxed Peckover was whether typhoid was what he was going to catch, or cholera. Which would be worse? Was it possible to have both at once?

  Seen through the car windows, Pas de la Case was a disappointment. Peckover hesitated between finding a room here for the night, as he had intended, and flogging on. He had never seen Guatemala or El Salvador, and in the light of what he read in the newspapers, he doubted he ever would, but Pas de la Case was much as he imagined a Guatemalan frontier town, without the gun-fire: fly-blown concrete supermarkets besieged by rubble and abandoned bulldozers.

  If Pas de la Case meant “Not the Case,” it had a point. At the same time, here could be a place to get shut of microbes. Out of dismay at where he had brought them they would roll over on their backs and give up.

  Chapter Ten

  “Liebling,” he breathed.

  When he went into his mother tongue, things, she knew, were hotting up. Not that she needed to hear words to know when things were hotting up.

  “Darling,” she heard herself murmur.

  “Oh, meine Süsse!”

  “Oh,” whispered Mercy, on guard, on exactly the occasion when what she least needed was to be on guard.

  But the next endearment was likely to be the one which made her want to laugh, or at least to wonder. She had intended asking him for a translation and always she forgot until now, now being hardly the time or place. She supposed she should try the dictionary. Again not now. She closed her mouth round a piece of him so that if he said it, and if she giggled, at least it would be a muffled giggle. Maybe he might interpret it as ecstasy.

  “Oh, mein Schatz!”

  Mercy bit and moaned. A funny kind of a moan, she would have been the first to admit: staccato, more of a sequence of stifled hiccups, a muffled guffaw. She guessed it was fine though, it would come across as ecstasy. He would construe it as such, being a male pig, and a disappointment.

  Mercy, honey, when will you learn?

  Hell’s fangs, nothing had changed, what was she beefing about? He was the same charmer who had loved her and left her in a lather of anticipation apropos this next, this now. She the same optimist who adored and opened herself wide, wide, to let the sunshine in. An understandable condition when you were twenty, Mercy reflected, though no less painful when the occasional thunderbolt arrived through the sunshine and hit you where it hurt. But when you were wise and—um, fortyish.

  She was prepared to allow, just, fortyish. She could not believe she was fortyish though, or that she thought it mattered, as clearly she did. She lay, more precisely she huddled, balletically, with her mind unstarrily compos mentis and his bony elbow, or shoulder, something, in her tit, God knew how, but if that was what he wanted.

  All this distance for one night of romance! Okay, it wa
s to have been several nights until his unexpected business commitment somewhere the other side of Europe. A likely story. Yet she believed it, more or less. Even if he had not had to leave tomorrow—or today was it?—she would have made her own excuses. She had business commitments too: up front, meeting and greeting.

  All these damn languages were to blame. How could you be two hearts beating as one with someone who called you his Schatz?

  She loved him in spite of it, she assured herself, as she might love a selfish, vulnerable little boy. She would love him still more if he would get rid of his elbow. Would she be here if she did not love him, driving God knew how many miles to him, still bushed in spite of a night’s sleep which he had not interrupted more than sixty or seventy times?

  French was different and okay, she knew enough French to cope. Even so. First time Jean-Luc had started singing out his “Oh, mon coeur!” they had been almost there on the tippy-top of the crest of the wave and he had loused it up with his crazy “Oh, mon coeur!” She had thought he was having a coronary. Loused it for her, of course. Mercy checked herself from brooding on her grimmest anxiety-fantasy, second only to the death of her children in car wrecks or by drowning: namely, the lover you were in the sheets with snuffing it from a heart attack. Did you polish away the fingerprints and light out fast? Put on a funny accent and call the hospital? Slink into another room and pretend it wasn’t you, you were never there?

  No chance of wave-crests for her now, the Schatz had seen to that, but Heinz was on his way and she could mime and moan a little. For Heinz. Not his fault he reverted to German. Kind of a compliment. What was so side-splitting about being his Schatz?

  What wasn’t? Mercy heard muffled hiccupping and guffawing. To halt it before it passed beyond control she gasped and moaned a little.

  “Heinz, oh!” Mercy moaned. “Chéri!”

  Damn! Chéri? Had he noticed? Who would he think she thought she was talking to?

  He was oblivious. Another male with his brains in his dong. He had made no mention of Jean-Luc’s lovebites. How oblivious could you be? Unless he was being discreet, or postponing the query, or indifferent, because he must have noticed. They were two days old and fading but they were there in spite of her powdering, massaging, creaming, tinting with sun oils, and baring herself to the sun through the windshield on the car safari to Andorra.

  The drawn-out grumbling sound she had been listening to she now identified as a car outside. She had assumed the noise to be Heinz’s rapture, then for a moment thought it might have been her stomach, though he had fed her adequately last night: the obligatory smoked salmon, partridge he had shot himself, so he had said—she had cleared away its frozen package with cooking instructions when he had allowed her to wash the dishes—champagne with everything, a semi-unfrozen gateau. He might be a fairly lovely lover, she supposed, though dwindlingly, but he was pretty pittsville in the kitchen. Anyway that had been last night. Now was mid-morning, if not noon, judging from the glare through the slats in the shutters, and her stomach would be starting up with blitzkrieg noises if she did not get at least some coffee into it.

  Whether or not Heinz had heard the car he was doing nothing about it, not for the moment.

  The engine-noise had ceased. Postman? Garbage man come for the partridge carton and empties? Hardly, in this mountain eyrie, twenty times higher and remoter than Hector’s shebeen. Still, nothing to do with her, for once. Mercy believed she might be maliciously amused if a doorbell started ringing.

  No doorbell, not an electric one, now she remembered. Electric doorbells were verboten along with telephones, television, and anything else which might get in the way of the Shangri-La illusion. A nonsense when you thought of it, considering his central heating, freezer, electric can-opener, all that. You made known your presence at the door either by jangling the authentic donkey-bell done up with primary-coloured wool handle and tassels, or by knocking with the carved ram’s-horn knocker. Which was the more hideous, Mercy had not decided.

  Da-da di dum-di DUM.

  The visitor had opted for the ram’s horn. The tattoo sounded distantly but with spirit. After a pause it was repeated.

  Heinz disregarded it.

  There followed a longer pause. Then the visitor went to work on the donkey-bell. Jangle-clangle. Pause. Clingle-clangle-jangle. Pause. Jingle-jangle-clangle-clingle.

  Heinz seemed to have finished. He was removing himself. Mercy assumed the interruption must have infuriated him but she found it hard to be sure. He had terrific control. All the same, she would not have cared to have been the donkey-bell jangler.

  He said, “Here is a fine kettle of fish.”

  His English was not up to Jean-Luc’s but it was excellent, and would have been even better if he had not drenched it with idioms. He rarely got the idioms wholly wrong but he seldom seemed to get them quite right. Last night after the exploding of the cork from the third or fourth bottle and champagne spurting over both of them, he had said, “That’s put the cats into the pigeons.” When seducing her, so he had thought, and comparing her favourably with Helen of Troy and other people, he had called her a horse of a different colour.

  He was stepping into exiguous briefs which made him look like an ad for a deodorant, which by now, Mercy considered, he was beginning to need. Next into one of his thousand-dollar robes spun from the silk of the finest Pyrenean silkworms. He closed the door behind him.

  Mercy tripped to the nearest shuttered windows. She could not have said whether these would give her a view of the postman, not yet having mastered the geography of the Villa Azul, which she thought possibly L-shaped, certainly stairless, though with steps galore for coping with split levels, and with roofs angled every which way, mostly precipitously, like a contemporary church. She opened the windows. Agonisingly slowly, trying to avoid creakings, she lifted the bar which held the shutters. She opened the right-hand shutter an inch. Two inches.

  A blue sky dazzled. Mercy breathed chilly mountain air. There he was. Jesus, wouldn’t you know it!

  Clangle-jangle-jingle.

  What in hell was he wearing? He looked like a canary. He was tugging the tasselled donkey-bell and hopping from one foot to the other. Whether because he was cold or because he had rhythm, Mercy did not want to know.

  *

  “Name’s Peckover. Scotland Yard. Mr. Becker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Routine inquiry, sir. On behalf of the French police. And Andorran, goes without saying. Won’t take a minute. Not interrupting anything, I ’ope?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. May I come in?”

  “You will perhaps return later. At the moment—”

  “Routine but urgent, reasonably,” Peckover said, smiling and stepping past the sun-tanned weapons-merchant into Hernando’s Hideaway, cha-cha-cha. “I’ll keep it short as possible. No need to put on a tie, sir, but if you wanted to shave, make a cup of tea”—organise your love life—“I’ll be right here. Like me to lay the fire?”

  In the fireplace were the paltry ashes of a fire which had been lit but not refuelled. Lit in the cause of romantic atmosphere and expired for want of interest owing to distractions, Peckover judged. There was a stack of logs and kindling. Longer logs made up at least one wall of the vast living-room. The hearth’s brick surrounds occupied another wall. The brick was terraced, the terraces were strewn with cushions. He was in a rich man’s log cabin.

  The owner offered a perfunctory bow from the waist with rigid arms and clicking heels—tricky, clicking bare heels, Peckover was ready to acknowledge—then about-turned and disappeared into the cabin’s depths. The policeman heard doors open and close, and later, running water.

  Mainly he heard silence. He gazed for a while through a picture window at the Pyrenees, an ennobling panorama for a calendar, empty of roads, aerials, even as far as he could see of sheep. He sauntered, opening heavy shutters and closing again the windows. The books in the pine bookcas
e appeared to be recent best-sellers and mysteries in paperback and a variety of languages. No Goethe. No Wagner in the record collection, which seemed to be mainly classical jazz. Not even “Lili Marlene.” Peckover opened a cabinet gingerly, not expecting nuclear warheads, but you never knew. Boring booze, glasses.

  “Eine, Kleine, Na-ha-ha-achtmusik,” he was singing when his host returned with combed wet hair and coffee. Heinz Becker was casually dressed for the European slalom championships, which definitely he would win. Only a knotted silk scarf could have heightened the casualness. His feet were still bare, his skis had gone on ahead with the staff.

  “Shall we be mother?” Becker said, gesturing to the policeman to sit. “Milk and sugar?”

  “Drop of milk. I’ve finished with sugar.” Supposed to have, along with salt, white bread, butter, cheese, eggs, jam, chocolate, ice-cream, chips, anything fried, everything tinned, and pretty well anything that was not coloured green. A sensible plate of raw broccoli, that was the stuff. Jerry here in his jogger’s clobber and bare feet, Peckover divined, had chosen to be amiable. “Might I ask ’ow long you’ve known Susan Spence, sir?”

  “Ah. I cotton on. You have been talking with Suzy.”

  “Good friends, are you?”

  “Were. Simple past tense, is it not so? After her husband, you understand, one was sympathetic. One is not saying we have drawn daggers. But it is over.”

  “When did you first meet?”

  “One would have to think. November?” Becker presented a milky cup of coffee. “Charles brought her to the Château de Mordan. About a month after he hit the bucket, poor fellow, she telephoned. We met a half dozen times.”