A Free Range Wife Read online

  No two ways, she’s a knock-out, thought Peckover.

  “I know it’s not important but you left that,” she said, and put his notebook on the table between the winebottle and bread-sponged plate. “I was going to give it to Miriam for you but as you’re here.”

  “Been through it?”

  “I haven’t even opened it.”

  “So how d’you know it’s not important?”

  “It’s all up here.” She tapped her forehead with her finger. “That’s what you said first time we met. ’Bye then.”

  “Siddown.”

  She had been turning to go. He supposed he must have sounded severe. What he felt was rising panic. She did not sit down but she stayed put.

  “Where’d you find it?” Peckover said.

  “Heinz did. On that box doodad with the magazines.”

  Peckover, flipping the notebook’s pages, dimly recalled a box doodad with magazines. After the bookcase he had avoided the magazines. He had assumed they would have been too specialised for him. Tax and sex. Whoever had deposited the notebook, whether Mr. Balderstone or a passing goatherd or the King of Siam, he had not forgotten it. You didn’t forget a stolen copper’s notebook. So what kind of signal was being sent out in the Andorran fastness?

  None in the notebook that he could discover, nothing in a foreign hand. How many visitors had Becker had anyway?

  He said, “In Lourdes yesterday, when you ran, that bloke in the wheelchair . . .”

  “Hector?”

  Quite so. The notebook seemed to signal that Hector McCluskey no longer cared. No more wheelchair deceptions. He had flipped, as Americans might say, unless they had a more recent expression. Worse, he seemed to be shrilly signalling, “Come and get me, copper!”

  “Come on,” Peckover said, standing.

  “C’mon where? I’m going back to Mordan.”

  Bearing down was an Andorran policeman in a plumcoloured jacket and music-hall hat. His uniform was the worst-tailored Peckover had seen outside a Christmas pantomime. In one hand the man held a whistle, in the other a cigarette.

  “You’re badly parked,” Peckover told Mercy McCluskey. He put too much money on the table. “Get in. We’re going back to Becker’s place.”

  “Like hell we are. I’ve just given him my everlasting goodbye.”

  Peckover feared she was closer to the truth than she knew. He took her arm. She was protesting and he was not listening. Steering her across the pavement, holding her as if otherwise she might run, not for the first time, he offered the approaching policeman a smile and placatory gesture. He insinuated Mercy McCluskey into the driver’s seat, hopped round the front of the car, tried the handle of the passenger door, and rapped on the window.

  Mercy was not clear why she leaned, reached, and unlocked the door. Because he was capable, she supposed, of hanging on to the handle and galloping alongside if she had driven off without doing so. Because above all his merry yellow needlecord he wore a worried look. She believed she had never seen anyone look so anxious.

  “Take the first right, down there, and round and back,” he said.

  Nothing further was said. Mercy drove back along the duty-free road along which they had both come. His silence left her increasingly tense, swelling her own anxiety and causing her to drive faster, then still faster. He made no complaint. After they had turned off the road onto the track up to the Villa Azul he began peering past her towards the woods.

  Peckover failed to spot the pale blue car which had been parked, perhaps still was parked, among the pines. He accepted that it might be there and he had missed it. Either way he had not expected to see it.

  When she drew up in front of the house he told her, “Wait there,” and climbed from the car. No one came to greet them. Mercy discovered she was shivering. The door into the house was ajar and she watched the policeman go straight in with no warning rattle of the ram’s horn or jingle of the donkey-bell.

  Having started towards Becker, Peckover halted by the six-seater sofa, there being no need to go further. No need for pulse-taking or holding a looking-glass to the lips. Becker lay among the ashes in the fireplace, the top of his slalom suit shredded, the trousers round his knees. He was bloody and memberless. Blood was everywhere.

  Peckover penetrated deeper into the cabin, past a kitchen, a guest bedroom, a loo, a bedroom with an unmade double bed. In the bathroom he looked at the bath, sink, towels, floor. Nowhere was immaculate but nowhere did he see blood. That probably ruled out Mercy McCluskey, whose gear and hands and fine white teeth had shown no signs of blood either. Whoever had slaughtered Becker must have been soaked in the stuff. No one had tried unsoaking themselves here in the last couple of hours.

  He had never suspected her. Not, he assured himself, because he fancied her but because women did not do such things. She had been the last but one to have seen this boy-friend alive, not the last. The last, Peckover supposed, had been her husband.

  He did not suspect her, but standing in the bathroom, staring at pointless soap and porcelain which never again would be needed by Becker, he blamed her. She was responsible. Jerome, the pianist, he could only guess about. But for the others—shadowy Ziegler, Charlie Spence, Heinz “Death Merchant” Becker—she had been pretty literally the kiss of death.

  Slag. Slut. Drab. Whore.

  Leaving the cabin, Peckover saw across the floor, on the door handle and splodging the paved area outside, bloody stains which he had failed to remark on entering. He climbed into the Mercedes. If she’d had a scrap of imagination, he thought, she would have driven off and left me rather than face me.

  “Dead,” he told her. “Like your others. So the second thing you do will be write out a list, as many as you can remember, every Tom, Dick, and Harry. They ought to be warned, wouldn’t you say? Given a chance to dig themselves in? First, you get us to the nearest telephone.”

  She drove with less energy than before. Her shaking and sobbing was at first so soft that he was unaware of it. When her misery grew noisy and he became aware, sod her, he thought. He stared through his side window, away from her. When her shaking became convulsive and she put her head on the steering-wheel and the Mercedes swung from one side of the track to the other, Peckover grabbed the wheel and shouted at her to stop.

  They changed places. Driving, trying to remember if he had driven a Mercedes before, and to dwell on Miriam, family, cocoa futures, anything in order to be ignorant of the miserable, collapsed, sobbing heap in the passenger seat, Peckover refused to accept that all he was conscious of was the heap.

  Sod bloody everyone, everything, he thought.

  *

  From a glass booth in the foyer of a half-built hotel on the duty-free road Peckover dialled the police. He identified himself and in fractured French and nursery English revealed that one of their part-time tax-exiles, Heinz Becker, awaited them at his Villa Azul, murdered. He would phone again, he said, he would try to present himself, but for the moment everything was rush. He replaced the receiver. How much of what he had tried to say had been understood he did not know. He brought Mercy McCluskey into the booth. On the assumption that her French was more effective than his he told her she was about to call the Mordan Hôtel de Police.

  They stood pressed unpleasurably against each other, sorting coins and disagreeing about dialling codes listed in the front of the directory. The world record for the highest number of people crammed into a telephone booth would have been ten or twenty, Peckover guessed. Something astounding. But none would have been the size of himself and Mrs. McCluskey.

  “You say who we are and where we are, and we’re on our way back to Mordan,” he said. “You say another friend of yours has been stabbed, Heinz Becker, and I’m urging that your ’usband be found, all the stops out, and held for questioning. You ask ’em to relay that back to the police here, Andorra, and if they’ve got a Spanish or Catalan speaker, tant mieux. You tell them Jean-Luc Fontanille could be in dan
ger and should ’ave police protection until Hector McCluskey’s in custody. Then I’d better ’ave a word—Arsenal Rules okay?—so they’ll know it’s on the up. Got it?”

  She nodded. She had calmed somewhat but she still fumbled, dropping coins, then the directory, sniffing unappealingly and failing several times to elicit even a ringing tone before a voice answered, “Police. Mordan.”

  The booth was airless and smelled of tobacco and fried sardines. Peckover turned his head, aiming his luncheon breath against the glass door; but he faced her, nodding and interpolating when she began narrating into the mouthpiece. He heard answering French. Mercy McCluskey’s French seemed to contain almost as much English as his own but he judged she was doing all right considering the shape she was in. She was pale enough to faint. Not surprising, Peckover conceded, in view of what had been done to her lover and who had done it. Correction. Lovers. She was offering him the telephone.

  “Somebody called Gouzou. He speaks English, he says.”

  She left the booth and waited outside, blonde head tilted back against the glass. Peckover made no effort to detain her. Impossible she could have heard or would have wanted to but he turned his own back and lowered his voice just the same.

  “C’est moi. Peckover. Bonjour. Allô? Ne quittez pas.” Bloody marvellous, fantastic French, so it sounded to him, even if there wasn’t much response from the other end. “Enquêteur Gouzou? . . .” What was crucial, très important, was protection for Monsieur Fontanille, Peckover affirmed, because the bloke was Mercy McCluskey’s lover, amant, and possibly with the exception of the château pianist the connection between the victims was that they all had been her lovers, Ziegler, Spence, now Becker, each one stabbed to death—stabbed, knives, les couteaux—then chopped.

  “Comment?”

  “Chopped. Lopped.” Cropped, dropped. “Couper, right?”

  “Hng?”

  “Avec un couteau.” Jesus. “Cut. Excised.”

  “Customs and excised? Les douanes?”

  “Who? Hold it. Non. Pas les douanes—”

  “At frontière, oui, is French customs douanes, mais après, faites attention, Monsieur Peckover. Is not finish. In France is flying douanes.”

  Gawd. “Cleaved, hacked, hewn, severed, sliced, snipped, sundered, scythed. Forget douanes, can we? We’re talking about Becker. Wait—amputate.” Eh voilà! That was the word. Clinical, unemotive. “Vous avez raison. Not excised—”

  “Excised, non,” agreed the frog linguist, confident to the last. “Circumcised? Is that you mean it?”

  Is not that I mean it, though in a sense the bloke was on the right track. Peckover wiped his moist forehead, said “Merci, merci,” and hung up. He gathered Mercy McCluskey, led her from the hotel, and inserted her behind the wheel of the Mercedes. He got in beside her, a little apprehensive, but driving, he believed, might help her take her mind off distracting trivia. Life and death. Husbands and lovers.

  “Next stop that Café Cataluña,” he said. “Think you can manage?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Want to eat?”

  “Nuts.”

  “Nuts?”

  “Go . . . please, d’you mind?”

  Good. He wasn’t for eating either. What she had wanted to say was, “Go screw yourself,” and quite right. Her tone had become fairly savage, which was promising. Better than the vapours. He did not know how many stages of shock a case like Mercy McCluskey had to go through but she seemed already less distraite, to have gone from bleak to pique, from flopping about to hopping about. Not literally hopping about but her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and her foot trod the accelerator into the floor with more feeling than sense.

  Neither had anything further to say. They reached the restaurant soon after six, whereupon Peckover said, “Next right,” and after she had done so, “Stop here, anywhere.”

  His hired car stood like a relic from another epoch: pre-chips, notebook, and dead Becker. He transferred his case and bits and pieces to the Mercedes, locked up, and at Mercy’s side fastened again his seat-belt. The hire-car firm would think of a number, double it, charge it, and with a laugh on their lips the British taxpayer would pay.

  “Onward,” Peckover said. “I’ll take over at the frontier or wherever you like. Try the left there, then back up to the road. If you run over that policeman, if that’s what he is—that one, Sancho Panza, in the Ruritanian costume—I’ll give you a quid. Why do they never stop smoking if they’re on duty? If they’re not on duty why do they dress like that?”

  Mercy missed the Andorran policeman, recovered the main road, and after a mile or so, when the emporia had sufficiently thinned for green to be visible between gaps in the concrete, and she had settled into a somnolent cruising speed, she heard the policeman say, “I take it you were not having it off, ma’am, with your late pianist?”

  Peckover waited so long for an answer that even for the jackpot he could not have dreamed up the replies she was aching to let rip. She settled for a longish sigh, and “No.”

  Taking no to mean yes, she was not, he said, “No. Right. Your ’ousekeeper though, Madame Costes?”

  “Ask her, don’t ask me.”

  “Why was he killed?”

  “Christ, how would I know?”

  “Your ’usband killed ’im, why?”

  “I’ve said I don’t know.”

  “I know that. But you’ve got an opinion.”

  “I’ve got no opinion.”

  “Try. Reach out. You’ve got no opinion but I’ve got you, ma’am, and it’s what—five, six hours to Mordan? Coppers are so thick all they have is persistence, did you know? Bloody tedious for both of us, I’ll tell you. I don’t mind if your opinion’s not interesting as long as it’s honest. Why did Hector kill Jerome?”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “Go on.”

  “Hell, go on how? I wasn’t there.”

  “Fortunately for you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re not saying a mistake like the knife slipped, really he was trimming his beard?”

  “I’m saying Hector never intended to kill Jerome. Who said he killed him anyway? Or anyone? It’s all so sick. I don’t believe any of it.”

  “You’ve been trying not to believe it for some time.”

  “Look, whatever, Hector didn’t aim to or want to, not Jerome. Why for Chrissake? But if Jerome saw him and he was supposed to be in Hong Kong and . . . Oh God.”

  Hong Kong, Timbuktu, or anywhere the action was not, such as Portland, Peckover agreed. Thank you, Mrs. McCluskey. Not necessarily Hercule Poirot standard, more Henry Peckover standard, which roamed between D-minus and B-natural depending on his liver. All the same. Success in the detection factory resulted from plod-plod, expensive contacts, a comprehensible filing system, once a decade a lucky guess—referred to in the textbooks as the imaginative leap, or analytical deductive ratiocination, as if you were either Einstein or a computer—and a healthy, functioning liver.

  Hector McCluskey had aimed to kill someone that Saturday night because no sharp instrument had been found and none had been found missing, or not before the circus had departed for Lourdes and points south. So the maniac had brought his own and taken it away with him. Presumably he had hoped to expunge Jean-Luc and Mercy but he had blundered into the wrong room. Plausible, if he had been lurking outside the château, dripping with jealousy, avoiding Peckover among the begonias, and watching the light going on and off in the bedroom which should have been empty apart from daytime decorators. He was not to know that on the other side of the corridor the light was going off and on in the Over the Sea to Skye and Vive l’alliance France-America Room, though as boss he must have been aware his château was a medieval fornicatorium dragged throbbing and thrilling into the twentieth century. When he burst in—did he burst or sidle?—lucky Madame Costes was absent gathering more eiderdowns because of his Scots can
niness with the central heating, or borrowing champagne, or why not changing her mind and deciding she preferred her own bed after all? But Jerome was there, in or around the bath, pomaded chevalier of the Château de Mordan in the buff, scenting and powdering himself in readiness for the joust, the tilt with his paramour under the eiderdown. “Sacré parbleu, patron, mais vous êtes in Hong Kong,” quoth Jerome, fatally, and on seeing the patron’s snickersnee hoisted high, he snatched the nearest defensive weapon, which was not his Right Guard roll-on or Bay Rum or Vaseline or even a safety razor, but the cerise undercoat, which sploshed everywhere, for a time, until the snickersnee went in and he screamed.

  He might have screamed earlier, he might have been already in or half in the bath, and if not, Hector manhandled him in. Superhuman strength, these cuckolded Scots. Hector poured in what remained of the pot of cerise because why not? Perhaps he liked the colour. He was a chef accustomed to sloshing liquids about. There may have been deep personality reasons which he, Peckover, knew nothing about: and ahead of him a further score of loose ends.

  Peckover watched the grey-green mountains a little sorrowfully. In a moment they were going to be gone, obliterated by a fresh stretch of the glass and concrete duty-free. Not for the first time he tried to put himself in the paint-sodden shoes of Hector, standing by the bath and its bloody contents, the pot in his hands. He too might have tipped in what remained, though he might not. But if you could hack like a latter-day Macbeth at a guiltless pianist, you could tip paint over him afterwards. Who looked for reasons from someone who had lost his reason? What you did not do was cut his cock off, because why would you, this not being the cock that had offended? You had erred, here was not Jean-Luc, even your whoring wife would not have looked twice at this perfumed knight errant. The cock which had to be removed was the lunging, plunging Jean-Luc cock, which filled your wife. O Lady Mercy! O belle dame sans merci! O blessed damozel! You wrapped yourself in a dust-cover to hide the cerise and yourself and off you bunked. Seen bunking, you had doubtless given birth to a legend of a Château de Mordan ghost which would entertain customers and add another 10 per cent to the bill for as long as there were customers.