A Free Range Wife Read online

  Customers or not, the château was going to have to find itself a new governor. A new chatelaine too, Peckover suspected, though that might depend on how passionate the present one was about Jean-Luc. He had the impression she was not passionate about the château, or being in France.

  No problem for her, of course, if Hector reached Jean-Luc before the police did. No Jean-Luc—no problem.

  One problem at a time, he thought. The Mordan gendarmerie had several hours’ start on Hector. They should have had Jean-Luc cordoned off already. All should be well.

  In his belly sooner than in his brains Peckover knew that all was not well. Hector was behaving too desperately, as if doomed and knowing it, as if capable of running up to the cordon at high noon and tossing a grenade over it into Jean-Luc’s lap. A man at the end of his rope. The Mr. Balderstone masquerade. The two-fingered defiance with the notebook, depositing it so as to blow the Mr. Balderstone masquerade. Despatching Becker.

  Killing Becker merely added fresh confirmation of the link between the dead, chopped men. Hector knew that; he was not simple. But he seemed to have given up even trying to cover up. Caution flushed away, cunning flung to the wind.

  Suicidal was the word. He was behaving like someone who resented Mitterand for having done away with the guillotine.

  Peckover watched Andorra slide by: consumer goods and mountains. Hector McCluskey’s damning of the consequences might not have bothered him quite so much if the life of Jean-Luc alone had been at risk, though heaven knew that was bothersome enough. But Hector intended killing his wife too. Again it was the belly talking; but Peckover believed that his brains would have told him the same, and still might, if they had been sharper.

  Frightening, the kamikaze pilots. The nose-thumbing school-boy who knows the wrath is to come and has nothing further to lose. The desperate Highland stag at bay.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What made you tell me that fib about not having seen Ziegler for two years?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Course I wouldn’t, I know that. I’m making conversation. What made you?”

  “It was automatic. Scarlet women get to be very automatic. As autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa, so fall the lies.”

  How, Peckover asked himself, did you question someone in shock? Shocked, uncomprehending, and plainly bitter, probably asking herself how guilty she had to feel. He had experience, she was not the first, but he had never learned. Patience? Tranquillisers? A separate, distracting shock such as a smack across the face? If he smacked this one’s face she’d likely drive the two of them into the wall of the nearest supermarket. Driving might be all that was keeping her from collapsing in a heap.

  “I could be pompous and say you lied to a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

  “The only performance you were interested in was on the drums. What you were most interested in was getting out and buying your truffles.”

  “Asparagus. Can’t afford truffles. Why did you lie about Ziegler?”

  “You’re a sensational conversationalist. I didn’t want Hector to know, okay?”

  “Scared?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt him. I said you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Why would he have known? You were telling me, not Hector.”

  “Oh, come on. Everything becomes public. Somebody hears, everybody hears.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me, place the size of Mordan. You should have had more sense. As well try to keep an affair quiet in Chipping Sodbury—Apple Creek in your case.”

  “This wasn’t Apple Creek and it wasn’t Mordan, it was Paris. I met Rick for two lousy days, not even that, and one of Hector’s buddies, I don’t know he was even a buddy, some shopkeeper who’d once sold him cut-price cutlery, he saw us in a night-club, dancing. First time I’d danced since practically high school. How’d you like that? The news of the year got relayed back, natch. Your sins will find you out.” Smoothly she overtook a caravan, a Fina petrol tanker, and a chain of lorries. “Can we talk about something else? I can’t explain and I don’t feel like trying. You won’t have realised this but you just insinuated I was looking for an affair, so I got one on my own doorstep, in Mordan, and that was stupid but I wasn’t aware I had much choice. Just to enlighten you, I wasn’t looking and the word ‘affair’ doesn’t enchant me, though I guess it’s only a word. I happen to have three kids, a husband, work at the château, my own selfish interests like the arty-crafty bit, simpleton that I am, and there aren’t enough hours in the day. But if you fall in love, you fall in love.”

  “You don’t think you choose to fall in love?”

  “What does that mean?”

  Peckover, ignoramus, was not sure. He believed he meant that it did not necessarily have to be bigger than both of us, though then again it might be, in some cases. Who was to say?

  He said, “You love Hector?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And whassisname—Jean-Luc Fontanille?”

  “Why the hell not? Don’t start trying to tell me you can’t love two people at the same time.”

  “Blimey, no. Or three, why not? Or seventeen?”

  “Merde to you.”

  Peckover was not wholly sceptical. He accepted he was an innocent in these matters and fair game for her contempt. He was fortunate in loving his wife, most of the time anyway, and nobody else, not in the same everyday sort of way, or not so far at any rate. If his chauffeur in her red trousers and silky, swanky white blouse had sounded a little too adamant about loving her husband, she was perhaps reassuring herself. She had loved him, doubtless. But did one go on loving a killer? She had not married a killer. You were not, say, a weaver until you weaved, and you were not a killer until you killed. People married, then changed. There had to be change, without which came stagnation, which bred death. In the case of the McCluskeys too much change had bred death. Rick Ziegler, Charlie Spence, Heinz Becker . . . For Hector McCluskey the change in his wife from helpmeet to adulteress had been too momentous. Peckover inhaled, exhaled, and squeezed his eyes shut, attempting to clear his mind.

  People married, changed. You fetched up married to someone different. You could read about it all the time in the Sunday supplements: articles on open marriages, second marriages, standards, separation, custody, division of the spoils. Helpful stuff to be found between the think-pieces on disarmament and the football and racing.

  “If you fall in love, you fall in love,” she was saying, not contemptuous so much as plain insistent. Was she out to convert him? “Simple,” she insisted. “Fact of life. End of argument. You’re better off not falling in love, obviously. I would have been. That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is it happens. Why are you trying to complicate something that’s simple?”

  Peckover put on his beret, which was still damp from immersion in the miraculous bath. He took it off and said, “I’d have thought it possible to wake up and think today I could press on with my weaving—not you especially, ma’am, I mean generally, people—I could press on with my stamp-collecting, or gardening, or I could fall in love. Must be a school of thought which says love’s the word we give an elementary, animal urge so as to posh it up, lend it soul. Not that I’d subscribe to that. ’Orribly cynical. Mean, look at history—Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet.” He refrained from offering Héloîse and Abelard, who in the circumstances, considering what became of Abelard, might have been apt but in rotten taste. “Adam and Eve, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard—”

  “If you’ve got to make conversation, why not the scenery?”

  “Sex, falling in love, it’s all smashing. Who needs excuses? You’ve been lucky. You say if you fall in love, you fall in love, and for all I know it’s exactly that, purest chance. Far as I can make out, you fell in love with four geezers at the same time, roughly. That’s apart from loving your ’usband. If not at exactly the same time, pretty smartly one after the other, with overlappi
ng.”

  Her mouth opened then clicked shut, a closing of white picket fences from the green fields of Vermont. Withering silence wrapped Peckover as he tried to sort out her recent love-life. Charlie Spence, first for the knife, dead in January in the Paris Hilton: probably the briefest and passion-wise the most tepid. Around the same time she was cheek-to-cheek with Mr. Ziegler, an old friend, possibly flame, who had surfaced in Paris but who was put to rest in the U.S.A. only last week. Why? Well, the cut-price cutlery witness who saw them dancing might not have passed on the news until last week. Ziegler might have been only briefly in Paris and Hector too tied up with business until last week to make his Hong Kong noises and pursue him to Portland. Or Hector had decided to let Ziegler off with nothing worse than curses but was goaded beyond endurance by finding a lover on the Mordan doorstep and perhaps another who was an arms-salesman. Thumbs down on all lovers, whoever and wherever, past or present. After Ziegler, the bungled attempt on Jean-Luc Fontanille, resulting in one cut forearm. Then the fiasco with the pianist. Now Becker, on whom a competent job had been done, thanks to the gift of Becker’s name and address in the notebook.

  “How much did you tell Hector about Heinz Becker?”

  “I haven’t seen Hector for ten days.”

  “Did you tell ’im Becker existed? You were seeing him?”

  “I hardly was.”

  “So you didn’t. Expect you realise you’ll not get away with non-answers when serious coppers question you. That’s by the way. Same with Jean-Luc, was it? Kept it quiet? Tried to?”

  “I did not. We discussed it.”

  “He knew Jean-Luc’s name, everything?”

  “Certainly.”

  “He accepted it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Civilised and tolerant?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  What he was trying not to say was that she was in as much danger from her civilised, tolerant husband’s knife as was Jean-Luc. Always had been. More so now. If she knew that, likely she’d drive into the nearest tree. Anyway, he could be wrong.

  Peckover did not think he was. Hector’s ideal was to interrupt his wife in flagrante delicto. She would watch him dispose of—she would be given no choice—the lover, whomsoever. Then, Peckover guessed, before she were disposed of, she would be required to listen to a sermon on virtue, fidelity, and the marriage bond. Alternatively, or after the lecture, particularly if Southern Comfort were to hand, he might hold her hand and weep a little. Then stab her.

  Impossible to have realised this aim with Ziegler because before Hector knew what was going on his erstwhile pal was back home being a restaurateur, many thousand miles apart from his Mercy. Impossible with Charlie Spence because that affair probably was over before Hector knew about it. Disappointing, yet so far as avenging himself went, irrelevant. If they were not to be sacrificed while in each other’s arms, lover and mistress, they would have to be sacrificed independently, and first the lovers: polluters, corrupters, whose flesh had defiled for evermore flesh that was his, and his hers, by holy sacrament at the altar.

  What had nagged him from the start, his first ten minutes with the squalid business, meeting Madame Mercy in her bathrobe among the looms and drum kits, had been the hop-scotching kids or the monkey—Hector anyway—trying to break into the bedroom. Why the bloody hell did anyone try to break in at nine o’clock in the bloody morning and the place occupied by loving lovers?

  Same with Becker. Hector had wanted Becker and Mercy together between the sheets. He would have entered like God’s avenging angel, ended the death-merchant’s career before any chance of retaliation with defensive weapons or skis, then lectured, sobbed, and killed at leisure his Desdemona. But Hector had arrived too early, Mercy was not yet there, and talking about her he got pissed. He left, parked his blue car among the pines, and saw her arrive, drive past, if he were not too pissed. But when he returned to the villa in the small hours when they would be supremely awash with sweat and sperm and saliva the place was a fortress, a tougher proposition than even Mercy’s Mordan flat. When the door finally opened the sun was shining and the visitor was the copper who had harried him through Lourdes. After the copper left, patient Hector gave the couple an hour to recover from coppers and get back between the sheets. Instead of getting back in, Mercy swept past in the Mercedes, possibly to do the shopping but from the face on her more likely a goodbye-for-ever-girl, done with lover-boy. Foiled again. So Hector had killed lover-boy anyway.

  Peckover watched discreetly his chauffeur, white-knuckled, the merest glimmer of white enamel showing between parted lips, driving with the assurance which he supposed Americans acquired around the age of fourteen or fifteen. Her complexion had become off-white. With the proceeds from selling the château would she move to Florida and contract one of the burned, creased complexions derived from retirement in the sun? And after a proper interval start falling in love again? Assuming, that was, that Hector in his prison cell gave her the château for selling. Assuming he was found and locked in a prison cell. Assuming she survived to retire.

  He recalled having read somewhere long ago that in crimes passionnels a young cuckold killed the cuckolder. The old cuckold killed his wife. Or was it vice versa? As generalisations went this one must have intrigued him or he would not have remembered it. Half remembered it anyway, forgetting only the point.

  “How old is your ’usband?”

  “Forty-three.”

  Voilà! Living, breathing statistical evidence of the generalisation’s truth. In middle age the cuckold killed both wife and lover.

  “Tell me about ’im.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Anything you like.”

  “He’s from Glasgow. He works hard and he’s made it. He’s a celebrity in a small way, if you’re into cuisine. It’s all been in the press, he’s been written up a score of times.”

  “What else?”

  “His wife’s a fallen woman, what about that? Nineteen unsullied years before she fell but so what? You’re not going to believe it anyway.”

  “Unsullied but humdrum.”

  “You could say that. In some ways.”

  “In one particular way.”

  “Gosh, golly, you’re quick.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “Here, France. He was fresh out of Glasgow’s College of Catering, the ink wet on his diploma, washing the celery in a restaurant in Nice. I was fresh out of Bennington. There were three of us, dewy Bennington girls on the grand tour, first time overseas, on this packed beach, all pebbles and flesh, you practically had to stand. If you stood you got rubbed against by these Algerians with baskets selling peanuts. Don’t know what we were singing, probably the first Beatles hit ever, whatever that was. We were two guitars and Donna played the flute. Hector was studying his recipes, trying to, ten inches away, and looking daggers. It was droll. There we were jamming it, softly, well-bred Bennington style, and no one caring or listening except this pallid character with the cookery books. He was the pallidest guy on the beach except he was going red and blistering. He’s got this very fair skin and he’d sooner fry than pay out for sun oil. He didn’t even have sun-glasses. Coming from Glasgow he’d probably never seen sun-glasses, though I didn’t know where he was from, not then, he could have been from the North Pole.”

  A little breathless, she clicked shut the picket fence. Her jaw jutted, her brows frowned. For a moment she had forgotten where she was and why, who, what, and how.

  “Who spoke first?” Peckover said.

  “What does it matter who spoke first?”

  “It doesn’t. I was interested.”

  “Probably Donna, she was the yakker, asking him either to quit staring or start singing. He was low. Black Dog with doubts. That was early Hector—doubts, all tensed up with soul-searching and ambition. He’d become unconvinced cooking and restaurants were his bag. Out of hotel school with a string of A-pluses and into pee
ling potatoes, which he stuck with anyway. He was older than me, not much, I was twenty-one when we met, but he’d gone into the Black Watch when he was eighteen, that’s some Scots regiment. I guess you’d know. Three years a soldier before having his first career doubts, packing it in, and switching to la bonne table. If he’d stayed a soldier he’d have been a colonel or something now and I’d have been on the cocktail circuit with the wives. Except if he’d stayed a soldier he’d not have gone to Nice and we’d never have met.”

  She dried. Her eyes stared through the midge-spotted windshield. That, concurred Peckover, would have been best.

  He said, “When did you marry?”

  “Four months later. Only time ever he’s acted without taking for ever weighing up every angle of fifteen hundred angles.”

  “Until now.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Careful, is he, as a rule? Cautious? Weighing up the angles?”

  “It ought to be a fault, Jesus knows it sounds dreary, but it isn’t, not with Hector. Sure he’s careful. He’s not mean but he’s careful, like he’ll never throw anything away, you wouldn’t believe his recycling in the kitchen. If you didn’t know him you’d say he was dour, maybe insufferable, but he can be very funny. He can laugh at himself. Okay, he’s not bouncing with spontaneity, he’s never told me, och woman, pack a bag we’re off butterfly-hunting. But he’s reliable and gifted, he applies himself. If he starts something he finishes it. Like he’s a musician too. On the beach he was going on about how I should have modulated from C major to D major because my G had been serving D as the subdominant. Some such gibberish. How the flute generically included the fife and the flageolet.”

  Sorry, ma’am, but he sounds pretty insufferable to me, thought Peckover.

  “What you’d call a whirlwind romance,” Mercy McCluskey said. “It blew me off course. I was never going to look at a man who wasn’t taller than me, let alone marry one. Hector must have had to swallow a whole dollop of pride because he’d have preferred to tower, I guess. He always said he would but who knows? People are too complicated for me. What musical instrument does he play?”