A Free Range Wife Read online

  Approaching the customs building, weary, far from satisfied with his part in the whole sorry business, Peckover none the less enjoyed a surge of relief, his first for some days. It was finished, as good as. If Hector were here, he was not in Mordan murdering Jean-Luc Fontanille.

  Not getting the car’s registration, that was a pest. Even so, the next hour should see Hector McCluskey collared. Two hours at most.

  Sorry, Hector, your chopping days are over, Peckover thought, mistakenly.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mercy McCluskey lay curled in her knitted jacket and under the cop’s canary jacket on the back seat of the cruising Mercedes. She no longer needed either jacket because the heater was blazing like a furnace. She needed them, and rugs and blankets too had there been any, only when he wound down the window and let in a blast of night air, as he did frequently. On one occasion when he rolled the window down he stuck his head out and shouted into the darkness what sounded like, “Chacun à son goût!” And after a pause, “Autres pays, autres moeurs!” On another, he started singing at the top of his voice the Cole Porter song about loving Paris in the springtime, but he stopped in mid-phrase, wound up the window fast, and embarked on shushing noises. Did he imagine she was asleep?

  She would not have said no to a bottle of sleeping-pills. The whole bottle. Fergus, she believed, would miss her most. Angus least. Angus had always preferred his father. He shared Hector’s moral rectitude. He would reason that her death, though unfortunate, even in some ways sad, was fitting, and a warning. He would interpret it as the inevitability of natural justice. Ishbael probably wouldn’t notice.

  How did you keep going as the wife of a mass-murderer? Even as the ex-wife, because whom God had brought together lawyers were now going to have to put apart.

  Was “mass-murderer” correct? Four murders were not masses. How many before you qualified?

  She was shivering again, and hot, and the policeman’s jacket had slid to the floor. God! Why her? Why, Chrissake, anyone? An affair, so what? Didn’t everyone? Why the fuss and nightmare—why? There were betrayed wives, oh yes, one or two, she had heard of husbands who played around, but did their wives go killing the girl-friends?

  Jesus, she hoped so!

  No she didn’t. She hoped nothing because there was no hope, nothing ever again. The whole sexual swindle was kissed goodbye. If only he had told her, talked to her! Outrage possessed Mercy. He had deceived her a thousand times more cruelly than she had him, pretending he accepted, he understood. She had not even deceived him, or not at first. Even later she had never deceived him; if she had not told him her every coming and going it was simply because he understood, and to save him the hurt to his pride. But at first she had tried to explain and he had been understanding.

  What an actor! Twenty years and only now was it plain she had never understood the man she had married.

  If I reach out, Mercy thought, God will trickle sleeping-pills into my palm, a river of them, and I shall suck them like candy, like when I was little in another age and another country. One hand was flat against her stomach, the other was between her teeth trying to stifle noises. The cop would not want to hear.

  What matter if he did? His lousy job, he’d be immune, there’d be people weeping all round him all the time. He was okay though, on her side, Mercy thought, though he had not committed himself. His job would be to be neutral. Over an hour, best part of two hours, they had spent with the flics, hanging on for word that Hector had been arrested. Every mobile cop in the South-West was apparently looking, including the douanes volantes, the customs men in vans and on motorcycles who might waylay you even a hundred miles past the border. There would be road blocks. Oh, Hector, give it up, it’s over!

  The telephone had not stopped. The limey had telephoned Scotland Yard, and Miriam, whose voice was managing a marvellously improved rustling sound, he had told her doubtfully. He had proposed that she, his Yankee burden and travelmate, telephone Jean-Luc, just to reassure each other, but she had not felt like it, and the last place she would telephone would be his home, where the wife might answer. According to the Mordan police, Monsieur Fontanille was well and at home, the house patrolled by a plain car.

  Odd she should have felt pleased, still did, to have been able to help the Scotland Yard man with his French. Surely she was beyond feeling anything? Pleased was perhaps pitching it strong. And talk about the blind leading the blind! But he was game, the big ox, he struggled, and you could see how he would have loved to have slugged the one who kept saying, “Comment?” She wouldn’t have blamed him, he hadn’t been all that incomprehensible, she would have thought, though maybe it took an English-speaker to get the gist of another English-speaker’s French. Certain he had been less incomprehensible than the elderly bloodshot Frenchy who had had the wine, fancied his English, which hardly existed, and kept on about La Guerre de Cent Ans, five centuries ago, and Magg-ee Tatch-air, and les Anglais being his chers amis malgré tout, and how in 1959 he had spent two weeks in Bournemouth, which he pronounced Bun-mousse, like some kind of pudding. Guesswork and close attention to his gestures and face-twitchings had been needed both by herself and the lost, weirdo, cockney copper to grasp what he had been trying to say. The sobs which filtered through Mercy’s knuckles became gulped laughter. “Comment?” He had congratulated the French cop on his English, beaming, admiring, placing a hand on the blue shoulder—for a moment she had feared kisses—and announcing, “Mon vieux, your English is execrable,” which had so delighted the bloodshot flic he had launched anew into paeans on Churchill, Magg-ee, Scotch whiskey, and La Guerre de Cent Ans.

  They had returned to the Mercedes only after a blue Citroën had been found abandoned, or at any rate unattended, at Foix, an hour away, and identified as more than likely the car used by Hector. Stolen in Toulouse the day before, according to thirty seconds’ cerebration by the police computer. Filled with possibly Barbudos butts, which she had confirmed was a cigar smoked by her husband; on the door, dashboard, and driver’s seat, smears which probably were going to turn out to be Heinz Becker’s blood, in the limey cop’s opinion. Now it was up to Foix.

  Unless he had found another car and was already approaching Mordan, if that was where he was going. The computer had no opinion.

  “What time is it?” Mercy said, sitting up.

  “’Ello there. Midnight.’ Ad a good sleep?”

  “Where are we?”

  “Not lost, not yet. Trying to avoid Lourdes. Go back to sleep—unless you’d like a singsong. D’you know the one about taking me out to the ball game? It’s American. You could teach me the words. Something about—” Peckover started singing—“‘Buy me some peanuts—’”

  “Do you get promotion for all this?”

  “All what?”

  “Hector.”

  “Why, what’ve I done?” Apart, Peckover thought, from mileage. He had found two bodies but they did not promote you for that, not automatically. He did not think they did. “There was a link anyone would have seen, couldn’t ’elp seeing. Not going to award me the Légion d’honneur, are they?”

  He would not have said no to an invitation to join the Académie Française. He could read them some of his structuralist stuff at the annual lunch, once he had got round to writing it. They would sit there with their ice-cream and boudoir biscuits, all the greybeards, regarding him over their half-moon glasses and grunting, “Comment?”

  “What link?” Mercy said.

  “What d’you mean? You. Isn’t any other, is there? Don’t tell me Mr. Ziegler was a secret arms-salesman.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Exactly. Well may you ask. Apart from your pianist all the dead and mutilated were your boy-friends, or had been. I’m sorry. Still, Monsieur Fontanille is going to be the exception.”

  “What’s ‘mutilated’ supposed to mean?”

  “You know. Their thing cut off.”

  “What thing?”
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br />   She was leaning forward, hands on top of the passenger seat, chin on her hands. The headlights’ glare was two amber cones illuminating the road ahead and to either side a swathe of flat countryside. Peckover silently swore. Dammit, didn’t she know? But why would she? The Ziegler and Spence choppings had not been publicised. She had not seen Becker dead.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “What thing?” she repeated. “Whose?”

  “Theirs of course. Whose d’you think? His own?”

  “Own what?”

  Was she naive, or frightened to hear stated what she only suspected, or mocking him? Peckover, mountingly angry, did not risk an answer. He was angry with her persistence and the entire wretched business: people, wandering husbands and wives, the whole boiling. Most of all he was angry with his mealy-mouthedness.

  He took a breath. “Male member.”

  “Ah.”

  “All right?”

  “That the same as the virile member?”

  Peckover wound the window half-way down, inhaled, and wound the window up.

  “You sure spell things out,” Mercy said.

  Unmoving and unmoved, she watched the amber road. She felt nothing. She imagined she should have felt nauseated but it was too late. Must have been. She no longer felt sick, shocked, hot, cold, anything. She hoped she had passed beyond feeling for ever.

  “So what did he do with them?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I said what did he do with them? He must have done something with them. Even if he did nothing, if he just left them there—”

  “He didn’t just leave them there.” Didn’t he? Peckover had no idea. He had not thought about it. At the Villa Azul he had neither observed nor conducted a search. “He’s a chef, isn’t he?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well then. You said he was careful. Not mean but careful is what you said. Never threw anything away.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “How the hell would I know what he does with them? He keeps them in a shoebox and brings them out at Halloween.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Gladly.”

  The Mercedes slowed for a village, though not much. St. Joseph. Half the villages in France, Mercy guessed, were named St. Joseph. Most of the rest were St. Antoine or Villeneuve-sur-somewhere. Not a light showed. Not a cat. Already the village was behind them.

  She heard herself saying, “Good old Hector. Quite right too.”

  “Mind passing me a beer?”

  “Wasn’t he right, seriously? God knows they’re pretty unappealing. Not what you’d call appetizing, aesthetically. If I were president of the world I’d abolish them, by decree, a quick operation, every last one. Away with them.”

  “You might meet some resistance.”

  “Not from women. It’s not even they’re ludicrous or they’ve caused more misery than anything since time began. They’re just damn boring.”

  “If you say so,” said Peckover, doubtful whether Mrs. McCluskey of all women were the woman to say so. If they were so boring why did she keep on? He saw a signpost with a mention of Mordan. Fourteen kilometres.

  He wondered whether her bitter, inconsequential chat were a sign she was surviving or was she already round the bend? She had fallen silent. In Mordan he drove the wrong way down a deserted one-way street, looking for the Rue du 17 Août. He parked on the pavement behind the boulangerie. Cartons of rubbish and blue half-sized dustbins had been put out on the corners of the street. Dogs from the alleys had upturned most of them. Peckover hauled both suitcases from the boot.

  “I’m your guest,” he said. “If you insist we can go to the château. I’ll still be your guest.”

  Mercy shrugged. Had she protested, he would have explained, but she did not. Did she suspect she herself was not safe until Hector was shut away or did she not care? In the flat he checked first the bedroom windows and shutters. Next every other means of access, as they called doors, windows, and chimneys at the Factory. They were few. He took his tooth-brush and pyjamas to the bathroom.

  The divan bed he pulled into the middle of the sitting-room so that it was aligned with the door into the flat, the bedroom door, and the bedroom window.

  “Leave your door open, would you mind?” he said. “I’ll give you clean sheets.”

  “No need. Change them tomorrow. Go to bed.”

  He placed a table lamp on the floor and switched it on. He switched off the main light, got into bed, and closed his eyes. He ought to have been telephoning, checking whether Hector McCluskey had been caught, because if he had all this palaver was wasted effort. But he preferred to sleep.

  *

  The telephone awoke him. Ten past eight. A blade of light pierced the vertical join in the sitting-room shutters. Peckover looked through the open bedroom door. Under the bedclothes Mrs. McCluskey was stirring.

  Enquêteur Gouzou of the trendy gear sounded excited and irritated in equal measure. He had been trying, he appeared to be saying, to telephone Monsieur Peckover at the Château de Mordan, he had not known he had spent the night with Madame McCluskey. Jean-Luc Fontanille arriving for an eight o’clock class had been stabbed in the staff parking behind the lycée.

  “Mort?” Peckover said.

  “Non. Is wounded at the neck. Is on route at l’hôpital.”

  “Bon—ni mort ni mutilé?”

  “Is okay maybe. Agent Blois is ’urt at the genou—knee.”

  “Have you got Hector McCluskey?”

  Presque. Almost. L’assassin, having fended off the policeman Blois, and failed to kill Jean-Luc Fontanille, had driven off in a grey Simca, matriculation 3061-HK-09.

  “Since twenny minutes. Twenny-five maximum. Is only now time question. Le commissaire arrive, et le préfet. In Mordan. Big action. Everybody demand Chief Inspector Peckover. You come ’ere au lycée, ou à l’hôpital?”

  “L’hôpital. Donnez-moi quinze minutes.”

  *

  If everybody had been demanding Chief Inspector Peckover, believed by Peckover to be the least likely event of the week, they were no longer. For a start, the commissaire, in steel-framed Gestapo glasses, far from demanding him, did not want to know and plainly resented his presence in France. After a peremptory handshake he turned his back to talk to a policeman wearing a kepi.

  The prefect wore an advertising executive’s striped suit. From the shirt collar with sober silk tie emerged a thick, mottled neck and solidly above it a peasant’s shorn head, big-featured and weather-beaten. He was affable, doubtless brilliant—his English was excellent—and possessed of a roving eye which, having lighted on Mercy McCluskey, roved no further. He asked Peckover, while eyeing Mrs. McCluskey, to convey his regards to his friend Commander Bray of A Division. He urged Peckover to sample the tournedos Henri IV at the Restaurant de la Gare, and looked forward to reading the account of his activities over the past day or two, when available, at Mr. Peckover’s convenience. But he could not have been called demanding. What he might demand of Mercy the moment he was alone with her was something else. Peckover doubted he would get far.

  Not in demand, Peckover stayed close to Mercy. He would have done so anyway. His sole function was to remain at her side until her husband was found and locked away. At its first serious test this priority took a slap on the face because she strongly did not want to see Jean-Luc, and Peckover thought he should, if only for a moment.

  Still, if she were not going to be safe with the prefect, the commissaire, and a dozen police in the corridor, none of them smoking, one or two of them built like mountain forts, they might as well all curl up and die. The man he had seen in the Loch Lomond Bar with Le Monde and the Bloodsucker cocktail, bussing Mrs. McCluskey, now lay bandaged in a room where eddied white nurses and doctors, too many police, and a girl with a typewriter and tape-recorder who was not a journalist. He had had twenty-two stitches. You’ll be able to invent and adapt a bit, Peckover tho
ught sourly, and boast of it in years to come as a lovebite from an American woman with fine teeth. Regaining the corridor, he observed that the prefect had a rival. Inspector Pommard had homed in: two lechers bombarding impervious Mercy with smiles and sympathy.

  Peckover led her away for coffee and croissants or whatever she might want. A sleep and a forgetting more than likely.

  Then to the Hôtel de Police, where she regarded the same page in the magazine, and from time to time her fingernails, while he telephoned silent Miriam, and Scotland Yard, and hunched for two hours over a typewriter, typing and muttering, asking at one point for the spelling of “McCluskey,” and cursing the French keyboard with its strewn accents and upside-down question mark.

  Then to the château. Mercy did not appear to care whether she went or what she did. Her one murmured preference was for seeing none of her children: not just yet.

  They stayed only briefly at the château. Madame Costes believed Fergus was here somewhere with two friends, which left Mercy visibly jumpy. Miriam, in the kitchen, looked up at her husband and cringed, as if he bore down on her with a smoking knife in each hand and blood dripping from his teeth. Peckover considered this an exaggerated reaction to what eventually he gathered was his beaten-gold needlecord. Fortunately her voice had not yet returned, and gent’s suiting apart she seemed happy to see him, as he was her. But she was concentrating on her lemon curd. If it turned she was going to be cross as a chicken, so he kissed her and said he would be back later, though it might be evening.

  Their eyebrows, Miriam’s and Madame Costes’s, had lifted for news. At the reception desk the woman with teeth like the Klondike asked right out if Monsieur McCluskey had been found. Peckover was evasive. Both within and without the château were plainclothes men failing to look like guests.

  To Peckover their presence was gratifying. Here was a small but unneglected corner of the big action which had excited Enquêteur Gouzou. Mordan itself had been hopping with police going through the motions. Trouble was, surmised Peckover, going through the motions was about all. From the brass at the hospital he had gained two impressions. One, that he personally was not in demand, an affront which had not stopped him in his tracks. Two, that wherever Hector McCluskey might be, in the opinion of both the prefect and the commissaire—and such opinions had a way of seeping down from the summit—he was not going to be in Mordan.