A Free Range Wife Read online

He had time. He picked needlework bristling with needles from the chair’s cushion, arranged it on the rug beside the chair, and sat. The wickerwork creaked.

  He said, “It’s probably nothing. Your French police asked if I’d have a quick word. When I say ‘your,’ what I’m saying is ‘their.’ France’s French police. Rick, er, Ziegler.” He hesitated over the name. His smile had become uncertain, as if the name Rick Ziegler must so obviously be the invention of a Hollywood script-writer that merely to utter it rendered himself, too, unreal, or at best an accessory after the fact. “I suppose Rick is Richard. Does the name register?”

  “He had a restaurant in Portland. He was a friend of my husband.”

  “Was?”

  “He died last week.” By lifting a leg she could have sat on the edge of the table. She remained standing. “I guess it was last week.”

  Holding the lapels of the plaid robe to her throat, Mercy was aware that more was expected of her. But her concentration was on keeping her eyes from flitting to the bedroom door behind which Jean-Luc was behaving impeccably. His silence was monumental. What was he doing?

  “He was murdered,” she said. “Mr. Ziegler. In Portland.”

  “Stabbed.”

  “Right. Sorry. You obviously know more than I do. What I’ve said is it. All I know. Hector—my husband—he flew over for the funeral.”

  “From Hong Kong?”

  “From Paris. He went on to Hong Kong after the funeral.”

  “In Portland?”

  “Buffalo. Rick was from Buffalo. He used to say Vermont snow was frosting, like decoration, compared with Buffalo snow.”

  Was her imagination on overdrive or was the cop as alert as she was to the closed door into the bedroom? Jesus, it was too silly! She wished Jean-Luc would breeze out, shake hands, and make coffee. What did it matter? What business was it of this cop whom she was never going to see again anyway? A routine inquiry, like he’d said. When it was homicide they’d have to ask everything, everywhere. There’d be police networks, country-to-country.

  Poor Rick. Horrible.

  For the here and now it mattered not a pin if this Inspector Pecker, Peccadillo, Peck-a-dildo, whoever, if he knew she had a hairy swain on the other side of the door or not. He was not going to shout it in the streets. He would not even find space for it in his notebook.

  Too late now for introductions. To avoid embarrassment either you were honest in the first ten seconds or you kept your little peccadillo going and hoped for the best.

  She said, “I really didn’t know him, Mr. Ziegler, Mr., er, Inspector—”

  “Peckover. ’Enry.”

  “So what can I tell you?”

  “Blessed if I know!”

  Hugely smiling, thrusting his head forward, the policeman made the pronouncement with an air of manic wonder. Mercy thought: Is he flying? Is he on speed? From behind the bedroom door sounded a faint scraping noise. Silence followed.

  The cop was leaning forward in the wickerwork chair, grinning like one of the gargoyles over the Priory’s west door.

  “Fact is, ma’am, I’m on my hols. Sort of. A long weekend. Longer the better, I can tell you. France is all right.” His voice dropped as his delight mounted. He was a hushed, thrilled conspirator, a prizewinner, not yet at liberty to divulge the prize to the world at large. “So what am I doing ’ere inquiring about this Ziegler, you’re asking yourself, when I’m on ’oliday—and a Brit to boot?”

  Mercy nodded. He was wrong. She had not asked herself.

  “’Ow’s your French?”

  “My French?”

  “The parleyvoo.”

  “Not hot.” Honey, thought Mercy, you flatter yourself. “I get by.”

  “But not fluently.”

  “I’m okay on the weather. Pluie. Soleil.” She wished he would gather his hat and go. “I can buy bread and gas.”

  “If you asked for bread and you got gas, would you be amazed?”

  “I’d be ecstatic. A baguette’s a couple of francs, gas works out—”

  “All right, if you asked for a barometer and they handed you an aubergine.”

  “Happens all the time. Look, my French is weak. Not the pits, we’ve been here three years, seven when you count before Milan, but it’s not sensational. Neither’s my Italian. I’m ashamed. Now, can I help you?”

  “You do, you have. I’m here in what might be described as a translating capacity.”

  “You speak French?”

  Mercy was astonished. Yet it was possible. His English was so weird, the accent—cockney was it?—he might well, as compensation, have flawless French. German, Finnish, Xhosa too.

  “Ils ne passeront pas,” he said, abominably.

  “Hunh?”

  “Inquiries are taking place, ma’am, into the murder in Portland, Oregon, of Rick Ziegler, restaurateur. Bit of a puzzler, I understand. They’re building up a picture. Trying to. Statements. You and Mr. McCluskey were among those who knew ’im.”

  “I haven’t seen Mr. Ziegler for two years.”

  “I’d never heard of him until yesterday. I’ve been asked to ’ave a word because, one, I ’appen to be here, two, I have the Queen’s English, and three, they’re bone idle.”

  “Portland?”

  “Mordan. Inspector Pommard. Know ’im?”

  “Sounds like a wine.” The way this character pronounced it, the wine had gone off. As for the Queen’s English, if he had it, it was because the Queen hadn’t wanted it. “I don’t know any policemen.”

  “He knows you. Rimless glasses. The only English they can manage, the whole barrel of ’em, is ‘Do you speak English?’ Whereupon guffaws and slapping of thighs. Inspector Pommard thought your French was about the same level. So, Buggins of the Yard happening to be dropping by with his Michelins, red and green, his Worcestershire sauce—”

  “Rimless glasses?”

  Last time she had presented herself to have her identity card renewed, the fat cop who had taken down the details had worn rimless glasses. When she had signed her name left-handedly he had asked if she did everything with her left hand. Yes, she had said. Everything, madame? he had asked with a God-almighty leer. Everything except complaining to the Prefect about adolescent cops, she had told him, which had been a pretty toffee-nosed thing to say, and she’d had to try about four different ways of saying it before he got the gist. But he had got the gist. She could believe he might have been reluctant to see her again, about Rick or anything else.

  “Two years,” the cockney copper was saying, “you say, since you saw ’im, Mr. Ziegler. What—April, May?”

  “August.” Mercy tightened the robe’s belt and put her hands in the pockets. He was taking up her time and her chair but he did not leer. “Nearly two years. My mother’s in Vermont. We go every summer, or I do, with the children.”

  “Vermont eh? That’s up at the top. Sounds green. Verdant Vermont. Now, sorry about this one, ma’am, it’s going to have a melodramatic ring, but did ’e have any enemies you know of?” Instead of waiting for an answer, the policeman, leaning still further forward in the creaking chair, hurried on. “Probably not. Matter of motive, you understand. Motive’s half the battle. What I’m askin’ is, is there anything else at all you can think of?”

  “Can’t think of anything.”

  “Splendid!” The policeman, beaming, sprang from the chair. “That does it then. Immensely obliged, ma’am. Great assistance. Apologies for troubling you.”

  “No trouble.” She watched him scoop up the needle-work and replace it on the chair. “You don’t write it down or anything?”

  “Write down what?”

  “I guess there wasn’t much.”

  “It’s up ’ere, ma’am,” he said, smiling, tapping his head with a forefinger, and heading for the table.

  Mercy picked up the brown hat and offered it.

  “Merci beaucoup. It’s just possible I’ll be back for a statement
, very short, but between you and me, ma’am, unlikely. ’Ope not anyway. Nothing personal. Speaking for myself, I’ve a load of ambience to get in before Monday. Meeting my wife at ten if she can get away.” Walking, he looked at his watch. “She’s lost her voice.”

  “Hey! She’s not the one from London, your Royal Archeological Society or something, the cordon bleu, three weeks—”

  “That’s ’er.” His smile spread. “Miriam.”

  From behind the bedroom door sounded a crash and a cry.

  Then silence.

  At the door to the passage the man and woman looked at each other, Mercy with one hand on the doorknob, the policeman with his smile evaporated, his eyebrows hiked high. He was slightly the taller but he was wearing shoes.

  “Mice?” he whispered.

  Mercy sought explanations. She believed she was not going to find any.

  The policeman said, “Dropping his tooth-glass, I expect.”

  “It was outside. In the courtyard. Kids. They have this game.”

  “Don’t I know it. Kids and dogs, it’s the same everywhere.”

  She opened the door, and with a bow and a cheerful smile he was gone, padding along the passage towards the outdoors, ambience, and a cordon bleu wife who had lost her voice. Mercy closed the door, bolted it and sprinted to the bedroom.

  Beyond the bed with its enveloping patchwork quilt, on the floor under the window, sat Jean-Luc, pale and naked amid broken glass. He stared across the patchwork towards Mercy, rocking slightly, and nursing a bloody forearm around which he had attempted, was still attempting, to wrap her nightie. The breeze from the courtyard billowed the curtain. One curtain was still drawn across the window; the other, partly drawn, had been slashed in two places. In winter Mercy closed the shutters, but not now, when in the morning she could peel back the curtains and watch the sun over the courtyard, and the swifts wheeling and darting.

  “Someone was outside,” Jean-Luc said. “When I went to look, the window smashed. I saw only the knife when it came through the curtain. I tried to hold his arm.”

  He looked down in disbelief at his own nightie-swaddled arm and wrist. Then, in French, he started methodically on a succession of expressions which Mercy did not believe she could have translated word for word, but of which she got the drift.

  Chapter Two

  Detective Chief Inspector Peckover, vibrating with energy and expectation, looked both ways along the Rue du 17 Août, locating his bearings.

  The street was of the medieval sort and the town was taking care of it. There were no glass banks or airline offices, or not so far. “Vive le roi,” Peckover told the street. “Crème caramel. Où sont les neiges d’antan?” In this street jerry-pots were once emptied from high windows by housewives who cried, “Watch your head!”

  Saturday marketeers plodded with loaded baskets and trussed livestock. A stately woman dressed in layers of flowery sarong-type garments, progressing with a disdainful air, had her basket on her head. Normally, Peckover would have looked the other way, out of politeness, but as he was on holiday and the woman wore such a lofty get-me look, he looked. Portuguese, would she be? Senegalese? He had the impression that the cunning French had quietly clung to some of their colonies, but where the colonies were and whether they were of any use he had no idea. “Hey, cumbanchero,” he told the woman balancing the basket, almost loudly enough to be heard. “Mañana.” He lowered his voice an octave. “Take me to the casbah.”

  Beyond one end of the street, in the market square, rainbow-coloured brollies over fruit and vegetable stalls presaged either sun or snow. To Peckover the morning seemed weatherless, a neutral occasion where the weather would do nothing, though then again it might. The natives would know. If they had their brollies up, something was going to happen. He trod right and right again through massive, weathered doors beside which a plaque on the stone said Porte du XVIIe Siècle.

  A tree ablaze with blossom filled most of the courtyard. Chestnut? May? Mirabelles perhaps. Against one wall was propped a motorcycle with the front wheel missing. There were piled crates and mysterious rods and pipes abandoned by a plumber; or vitally precious pipes for all Peckover knew. Washing adorned a grid which jutted from an upper window. The lower windows in the left-hand wall were black and broken. To the right, at the far corner of the courtyard, a pair of shutters were shutting. He heard the grate of the lever clamping them closed.

  He headed right, beneath the tree, treading through blossom. Through the first window he dimly saw a loom. Drums. Furniture not acquired from the friendly neighbourhood hypermarket. The second window revealed the empty kitchen.

  The third, newly shuttered, was the bedroom. It had to be. Peckover looked behind him, around, and up. He looked down at broken glass. The shutters were as shut as prison gates. He tucked two fingers under a slat and pulled, but there was no movement.

  There was blood, though, on the stone sill. Specks and splashes. Had he touched the splashes they would have been wet. Tacky anyway. Had he been able to see through the shutters he would have seen more blood, he suspected, and on the curtains, if there were curtains.

  There would be curtains. An intricate weave in antelope or humus. She was a run-them-up-yourself woman. Classical taste with a dash of the bizarre for gas. He was guessing. Miriam would have been able to tell him.

  These days, hell’s teeth, the games kids played! Broken glass and blood! He leaned against the shutters, listening, watching the empty courtyard, searching the ground for toffee-wrappings.

  Only the fiery, snowy tree. Blossom, plumber’s pipes, a scrunched Gauloises packet. But no toffee papers. No ice-cream cartons or chalked squares for hopscotch. No kids, no sound. An accordion?

  Peckover hoped so. He walked from the courtyard and along the street. Accordions were France. Accordions, waltzes, smells of frying garlic, fresh coffee, fresh cat in the alleys, urine from drains in the heat of summer. Most of the town’s signs pointed up alleys to the Vieux Quartier, where he assumed he already was. Others directed him to restaurants. On the boulevard he followed a sign pointing to the Hôtel de Police, which whatever else was not going to be a hotel for policemen.

  In two minutes he found it, a building of orange concrete behind a Talbot car showroom. The shiny foyer was deserted apart from a concierge who sat with a typewriter and telephone at a desk in a glass cage, bullet-proofed against attack by Corsicans.

  Non, the woman regretted, Inspector Pommard was not in. Could she help?

  She could tell him, Peckover said, that Monsieur Peckover had dropped by—Peck-over—and would be in touch. Outside the American lady’s bedroom window, in the courtyard, was blood. Sang. As well get a sample before the rains came. For the file. Just so everyone was covered. He would be at the Café du Centre for the next half hour or so. Ça va? Compris?

  The concierge listened with her face contorted in incomprehension, interrupting with frequent nasal “Nghs?” and “Comments?” But some of it she got down. When finally Peckover raised his hat and left he did so with exultant heart.

  That was it, finished. Acquitted of his responsibilities. Yet he had worked, in theory he was still working, and that meant expenses. Out of the blue the long weekend paid for: the flight, the château, the foie de veau aux oignons, as many beakers full of the warm South as he could manage. Pity he could not spin it out for a couple of weeks.

  “I loff Paree in ze zpringti-i-me,” Detective Chief Inspector Peckover warbled, tacking through boulevard traffic.

  In the market progress was difficult, no one but himself wanting to move. Either they stood shaking hands and kissing, blocking the gaps between the stalls, or they stood at the stalls pressing their thumbs into the vegetables. The waltzing accordion sounded from loudspeakers at a records stall, though the music was no longer accordions but tambourines and castanets, and a wailer wailing. Peckover sat at a table on the pavement outside the Café du Centre, waiting for Miriam.

  Those labouring
slaves back at the Yard, if they could see him! Grinning, tapping a suede foot in time to the wailer, Peckover had to restrain himself from waving to the mob of marketeers. None of the other tables was occupied, so with luck the café was shut. He wanted neither a drink nor a waiter. He would keep his breath wholesome for Miriam.

  When he got round to it he would give consideration to the McCluskey woman, but not yet. At the kerb a farmer’s wife with skin like tree-bark awaited customers for her live rabbits, dead ducks, and towers of flat, black, beret-sized, rubbery items which looked as if they might be useful for upholstery but which he feared were for eating. From the plastic bag in his pocket he took Michelin guides, a phrase book, a street map of Mordan, and a dozen mint, misty postcards of the local scene: sheep at sunset, toiling peasants, a font, a geezer drinking out of a soup plate. Which was aptest for the assistant commissioner? Whichever, the AC would think he was being got at and he would be right. Peckover squared off the books and cards, moved them aside, and took out notebook and pencil.

  He had liked the Yankee woman’s voice, which had been low, and her teeth, which had been—what, he mused, apart from white, had her teeth been? They must have been something or he would not now have been thinking about them. Not gold-filled like the receptionist’s at the château, or protruding like Britain’s gymkhana set, or caricatures of them, or not exactly protruding.

  Miriam was late. She had not been sure she would be able to get away at all. A convoy of Dutch in big cars were expected for lunch. After three weeks filling in for the head chef she was beginning to resemble one of the Amnesty International prisoners for whom she demonstrated and wrote letters: someone who for three years or thirty had lost weight, heart, and seen no daylight. She was insisting she was fine but he suspected she would be more than ready to fly home in another week at the end of her stint. For himself, three days to go, it was pathetic, unthinkable.

  What had the McCluskey lady said? “I haven’t seen Mr. Ziegler for two years . . .” That was a lie but perhaps she simply had not been thinking. She had been so anxious about the beast in the bedroom that he had felt for her: protective, paternal even, or he might have felt paternal had there been more than two years difference in their ages.