A Free Range Wife Read online

  Peckover disagreed. From the reception desk he telephoned the Hôtel de Police.

  “Non, monsieur. Pas encore.”

  He drove back towards Mordan, Mercy at his side. The local force had no need of him. Other than keeping Mrs. McCluskey close and his eyes alert there was nothing for him to do.

  Nothing, only looking after Mercy and killing time. Every copper was expert in killing time. Here ought to have been the place to kill it. The sun shone. Pink and white blossom loaded the trees. By the river the fields were green, brown, and sumptuous yellow. He saw an ancient couple hoeing or thinning or whatever, the grandpa wearing his blues, the grandma in black and a straw hat, as in an impressionist painting. Even in the car he could smell the lilac, almost.

  Mercy said, “I appreciate all this. I’m sorry, honestly, about everything. You don’t have to stay with me. Hector—okay, I know. But he loves me. I think so. He’s not that much of a . . .” She failed to find the word. “Drop me at my apartment. I’ll be fine. Go back to Miriam.”

  “I can arrange for a couple of policemen to keep you company.”

  “Would you prefer that?”

  “I thought you were suggesting you would.”

  “What did I say?”

  “I wasn’t listening. I was looking at spring in downtown France. There—are those swifts? Everything’s out and burgeoning, it’s bloody marvellous. What’s that yellow stuff?”

  “Rape?”

  “Not while I’m driving, ho-ho.”

  “Rape-seed—colza.” Mercy smiled, surprising herself. Her first encounter with this cockney ox, she remembered, through the peep-hole, she had wondered about rape. “Take the next left if you like. It’s the scenic route touristique.”

  “Are you going to give me lunch?”

  “Hadn’t thought. Am I?”

  “Very light. Something salady.”

  *

  They had grilled trout and a salad of broad beans and avocado at the sitting-room table. After cheese, Peckover telephoned the Hôtel de Police. Negative. He decided he should try to limit his query to no more than one every hour.

  He asked her to weave and show him the magic of the loom, which she did. At first the deft, rhythmic clunk of the shuttle, if shuttle was what it was, riveted him. Eventually the monotony drove him to finish the claret. They washed the dishes, read, and found nothing to say.

  At four o’clock Peckover stood up. “Good. The thé dansant, okay? Lead the way. I’ve got claustrophobia.”

  First he telephoned.

  “No, monsieur . . .”

  She took him to the Café de la Paix on the boulevard. At a pavement table they watched the traffic and drank tepid tea made from a used tea-bag, or so it tasted to Peckover. He watched the customers and passers-by. As well as his beret and notebook he had brought a street map, believing they might walk, and in an alley walk into cowering Hector, succeeding where the massed police were so far failing, and thereby bringing to an end the tedium. Tedium, he considered, was not quite the word for this waiting for Hector to strike at his wife.

  The beret had dried out with a mysterious rigidity, like pemmican. An ingredient from the miraculous baths, he supposed. Mercy flipped open the notebook.

  “Is it private and secret?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “‘Two pounds neck lamb,’” she read aloud. “Is that a clue?”

  “It’s a code and it’s none of your business.”

  “So what’s it mean?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “‘Yeast extract. One small granary.’” She flipped pages, peering at the scratchy longhand. “You’ve got a conference with someone called A, Wednesday, nine o’clock.”

  “Last week. Don’t frighten me.”

  “A poem. May I read it?”

  “No. What poem? I suppose so. If you promise to like it.”

  “You’ll never know anyway. I’ll pretend to like it.” She eased her shoes off under the table. “I get straight A’s for pretending, always did. The yellow jersey.”

  She read.

  Marriages of Inconvenience, 2

  Having cheated her past measure,

  Perhaps nine hundred times since when

  He said, “I do, I will,”

  He startled her: “Seek sexual pleasure.

  Ours has long staled. Go out with men.

  Be free, fulfilled. I love you still.

  Deprivation sours. My life, my treasure.”

  *

  When she replied, “I have, I do,”

  He did again surprise her

  With a looping left which loosened two

  Bicuspids and the lower right incisor.

  “Yes,” she said. “Mm. I’ll have to—”

  “Look at me and try to smile,” Peckover told her.

  He was neither smiling nor looking at her. He was staring ahead to the far side of the boulevard where Hector stood, staring back.

  Peckover put a hand on Mercy’s hand, his other hand on her cheek, and kissed her on the mouth.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The monstrous Common Market lorries bearing surplus wine, butter mountains, and overproduction of all manner of overpriced everything pounded along the boulevard, spouting fumes, grinding to a stop at lights, and as they moved roaring and vomiting on in bottom gear, causing the foundations of every building in Mordan, medieval and modern, to shudder. Motorists kept patiently their distance, though here and there a thrusting young salesman would show the world by swinging his company car out of the lane and overtaking, beeping his horn and flashing his lights in a display of maniacal bravura.

  Mercy McCluskey, who had been kissed before, began to wonder when this kiss would stop. More than anything she would have appreciated advance notice. Had she known kissing was going to figure in the tea break she would have brushed her teeth vigorously before leaving the apartment and been extravagant with her Femme. There had been a time in Vermont, she reflected, when such a kiss in a public place would have brought the justices galloping up and prompted editorials in the Clarion on shamelessness, vile concupiscence, and the slide to Gehenna.

  At least he was keeping his tongue to himself. Far as she recalled, he hadn’t cleaned his teeth either, he had been too busy telephoning, but he smelled clean enough, she was unlikely to be about to catch anything. O he has herpes and she has his. Hang in there, Mercy, he is the boss man. As kisses went it was one of the least thrilling of her experience, considering its duration. On the other hand it was not obnoxious. It was a fence-sitting, middle-of-the-road kiss, lacking commitment, like a floating vote. Actors and actresses probably felt similarly detached, Mercy thought, or they strove to do so, in order not to become inflamed and forget their lines.

  She opened one eye. Simultaneously the policeman opened one eye. One-eyed they blinked at each other, seeing only a bright, beady smear of eyeball. Mercy thought: This really is where we came in, moons ago, eyeball to eyeball through a peep-hole. Peckover thought, mystified: Fried egg. Abhorring mysteries, he traced the thought back through an association of useless ideas to eggs fried on one side only, in the States, which were “sunny side up” or sometimes, he believed he had somewhere heard, “with one eye open.” He drew back and looked across the boulevard. Hector had gone.

  Peckover pushed back his chair. His eyes searched the far pavement as it became visible, now one stretch, now another, through the traffic. He looked both ways along his own pavement and at the trickle of prams, mothers, and old men on the zebra lower down the boulevard. Not a copper in sight, naturally. Like London. Though here they had good reason: they were all elsewhere looking for Hector McCluskey.

  If they were not, time they bloody well started.

  He stepped off the kerb for a better view of the far pavement though he knew he was not going to see him. Where Hector had watched from outside a corner window filled with guns and fishing tackle—P. Bonnet—Pêche, ch
asse—there stood two boys dividing into each other’s palms something out of a paper bag. An alley along which Peckover believed he would be wasting his time led away from the fishing tackle shop. He stepped back to avoid being squashed by a pantechnicon. Mercy, on one foot, leaned on him briefly as she pulled a shoe on.

  She said, “Hector?”

  “He was there, where those lads are. There’ll be a phone in the café. Or would it be quicker on foot—the police station?”

  “Same. Simpler to go if we hurry. He saw us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like he saw us at the customs?”

  “More or less.”

  “Baiting the trap, is that what it’s called? That what you’re doing?”

  “Any luck there’s going to be no need for baiting traps. Maybe this lot will now get their finger out.”

  *

  After a spell at the Hôtel de Police listening to the reassurances of Inspector Pommard, Peckover and Mercy walked to the Mairie, where the prefect apparently was. Increasingly anxious, alert for a Glaswegian with an uplifted knife, Peckover was of the opinion that the prefect should have come to him. He had the impression he was the only copper in south-west France taking the business seriously.

  Well, no, he exaggerated. But the quiet confidence of this mob he believed to be misplaced. A minor point but had they even thought to ask themselves, for example, which of them would be Hector’s priority—himself or Mercy?

  The prefect offered Monsieur and Madame an eau de noix which he described as exceptionelle. His eyes roved over Mercy, up and down, side to side, finding her equally exceptionelle. If they were in doubt where to eat that evening, he said, might he recommend the Belle Époque, which offered a very fair cou farci à l’oseille? He audibly sighed at Madame, indicating without hypocrisy or sniggers that paradise would be precisely that: cou farci à l’oseille and Madame, in no particular order, perhaps both together.

  As for Monsieur McCluskey . . . Temporarily the prefect forsook sighing and ogling to look with reluctance at Peckover. Everything that could be done was being done, monsieur. Photographs distributed. A watch on all roads in and out of Mordan, the rail station, the airport seventeen kilometres away. Surveillance at the Château de Mordan doubled. The prefect’s lip-lifting betrayed his scepticism, as he intended. Every policeman in the department had been brought back to duty, day or evening off or not. Hector McCluskey would be found, monsieur, and soon.

  Peckover shared the prefect’s scepticism about the château, though probably not for the same reason. Hector would turn up at the château only if he and Mercy were there. The prefect’s reassurances were intelligent, lucid, even reassuring.

  Peckover was not in the least reassured. “If you ’aven’t got him by midnight, I’ll be with Mrs. McCluskey in her flat.” He held out his glass for a refill, more in desperation than because he enjoyed the sweet, sticky stuff. “Might I suggest you keep it closely watched? I also suggest you don’t keep it obviously watched, like a ’undred men with linked arms, because if that’s what he sees he’s going to bugger off and we’re back where we started, right? I ’umbly suggest the discreet deployment of a half dozen of your best. Armed.”

  “You persist in this belief of a threat to Madame?”

  “You could say that.”

  Those of the local lot who had believed that wherever he might be, Hector McCluskey would no longer be in Mordan, probably now believed it a hundredfold. Spotted on the boulevard by the interloper from Scotland Yard, would not the butcher of Mordan have put a kilometre or two between himself and Mordan? Peckover unfolded his beret. Those who had disagreed or had not much thought about it no doubt agreed now that Hector McCluskey, sighted, would be heading for the South Seas.

  Walking with Mercy back to the Rue du 17 Août, Peckover crossed to what appeared to be the better lit north side of the boulevard. They had no small talk. He steered her into a pokey grocery and patrolled the shelves. They left with three boxes of peanuts and a bottle of Bell’s.

  “I’m depending on you to look after me,” he said. “Me and us. If you see the level reach around half-way, tip the rest down the sink.”

  In the flat he checked windows and shutters. He pulled the divan bed from the wall and pushed it against the locked, bolted door. He telephoned the number he knew by heart.

  “Non, monsieur . . .”

  “Sorry,” Peckover told Mercy. He sat in the cushioned, creaking, canework chair where he had sat on his first visit four days ago. Only four? As long as that? More or fewer than four days he would have accepted but four did not seem right. “It’s a pest. Bugger everything. Does Hector have a key?”

  “Couldn’t say. He never comes here. He organised the spyhole and locks, so he might. He didn’t use it last week when he tried to break into the bedroom.”

  “You think that was Hector?”

  “I do now.”

  “Why didn’t he come in the door?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have a key. Maybe he heard you banging the drums.”

  Maybe, Peckover conjectured, he preferred the drama of the bedroom window. God’s Presbyterian angel exploding through windows to visit judgement on the coupling sinners.

  “Scotch?” he offered.

  “Yes please.”

  “Shall we have some music?”

  Mercy put Verdi’s Requiem Mass on the record-player. After side three and the sanctus she switched to Dolly Parton. “Daddy Won’t Be Home Anymore.” Peckover looked at his watch.

  “Twenty to eight. Cou farci at the wherever it was?”

  “Oh sure. Terrific. A night on the town.”

  “Glad you agree.”

  They ate bread and cheese in the kitchen and finished the peanuts.

  “What’s on at the flicks?” Peckover said.

  “Flicks?”

  “Flicks, right. I just had a whiff of nostalgia, a yen for whelks off a barrow and hearing someone say, ‘Full up, no standin’ inside.’ I’m not interested in a movie or un film but a flick might pass the time. Will it be Gerard Depardieu?”

  “No idea.”

  “In my day every French film had Jean Gabin by law. No bad thing either. Then it was Alain Delon. Now it’s this bloke Gerard Depardieu. It is in the films that come to London.”

  He telephoned the Hôtel de Police. Zero.

  Watchful, Peckover stepped out with Mercy McCluskey through the empty market, past the Café du Centre, past the Priory, across the boulevard, and into the Palais. They sat in the balcony and saw Gerard Depardieu in a comedy set in a high-income milieu within whistling distance of the Eiffel Tower. There were comic adulteries, a comic gangster, and comic policemen speaking French far too fast for Peckover to grasp more than the occasional Alors and Voilà. He did not like to ask Mercy for explanations in case she was having difficulties too.

  He suspected her chief difficulty might not be the film but holding on.

  *

  While Mercy McCluskey and Peckover sat in the balcony of the Palais, Hector McCluskey let himself into his wife’s flat. He sauntered abstractedly, drank a glass of water, then entered the bedroom and closed the door behind him. He lifted the patchwork quilt and slid under the bed.

  *

  The film seemed to end happily with everybody with somebody in bed, having been to bed, or about to go to bed. From a telephone-box in the foyer, Peckover telephoned.

  *

  “Non, monsieur . . .”

  “I know. Find your Monsieur le Préfet and remind him about la surveillance, s’il vous plaît. L’appartment de Madame McCluskey. He’s probably eating. Somewhere exceptionel.”

  They walked back along the boulevard, Peckover needlessly vigilant, though he was not to have known. Apart from an occasional car, Mordan was dead. He hoped the occasional cars might at least be police cars. In the Rue du 17 Août a shadow, cat, some movement or other, was shiftingly there, then gone.

  “Wait,” muttered
Peckover, and he stepped into the alley down which had vanished the shadow.

  In a doorway stood a man in a sensible hat and coat who nodded and said, “Bonsoir, m’sieu’.”

  Peckover thought he remembered him from the hospital corridor. Mainly he remembered the man’s size. He was about seven feet tall, as if imported from Texas. Not a surveyor who could be easily disguised as a cat but not one to come at with a knife.

  “Vous êtes seul?” Peckover said.

  “Nous sommes cinq.”

  “Bonne chance.”

  “Bonne nuit, m’sieu’,” said the surveillant: not Texas but Mordan and environs.

  *

  Supine beneath the bed, his nose inches from the wooden slats supporting the mattress, Hector McCluskey heard the door into the flat close. He turned his head and reached out to lift the patchwork quilt. Light shone beneath the bedroom door. The voices he heard were indistinct murmurings.

  *

  “Coffee?” Mercy said. “Tea?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Scotch?”

  “Look, Mercy—ma’am—I’m sorry about all this. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you can think of a better way, heaven’s sake say.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not sure you understand. We’re going to bed together.”

  “I understand. I said don’t worry about it.”

  Easy to say, Peckover thought. He brought the drum kit from beside the wall and arranged it piece by piece like a minefield in front of the door into the flat. He changed his mind and moved it back against the wall. Either he wanted Hector McCluskey to come right into the bedroom itself or he did not. From the fireplace he collected the brass poker. If Hector were going to be discovered before he killed again, Peckover believed, it was going to be by seeking out and discovering the pair of them as lovers.