A Free Range Wife Page 20

  If Hector did not discover them as lovers, would he ever hang around long enough, like a moment or two, for the wrestling which Peckover believed he, the strong arm of the law, ought to win? If this time Hector succeeded in coming through the shuttered window—God knew how, but no future in puzzling how if he achieved it—and he found his wife a chaste, solitary Sleeping Beauty, would he linger? Wasn’t retribution what the poor bloke was after, vengeance delivered on his whoring wife and lover? Would he even think to harm his Mercy sleeping chastely alone?

  Yes, he might. Who the hell knew? But again, if he came through the door and found the copper celibate in the divan bed, unloverly and blameless, he was pretty certainly going to light out at a sprint, slashing at anyone who stepped in his path, as he had slashed at Jean-Luc’s flic in the lycée car-park.

  Was he? In spite of the kiss in the café?

  The question was not going to arise if they were together in bed, lovers. That was what Hector expected to find, and finding it, testing his snickersnee on the pad of his thumb should delay him for the two seconds needed for the collar. Might be longer than two seconds. He might want to deliver a sermon first.

  It’s me who needs his head examined, Peckover thought. He wanted to take his jacket off but he was aware of dampening patches under the arms of his shirt. When he spoke his voice was quiet, listening being more to the point than talking; listening for a noise at a window, a key in a lock.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” he said. “Hector, I mean. But just supposing he turned up. He won’t but he’s out there somewhere. Supposing he did? Can’t you be brilliant, think of something better?”

  “No.”

  “You and me, we’re not going to touch each other, obviously. But it’s better if, if there’s any sense in this at all, if it’s going to work, well, better if we seem to be, that’s to say, attached. With what that implies. Pertaining to, for instance, dress. Let me explain.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes, yes. I must.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “I can cope. Anyone arrives, I’ll hear. You won’t know anything, you’ll be asleep.”

  “You think he’s going to come, don’t you?”

  “How? There are five coppers outside.” He could not have explained why he did not feel more confident. “What ’appened to that drink?”

  She brought the bottle, water, and two tumblers.

  Later she said, “I’m looking after you just like you asked, captain. I’m watching the level. It’s not half-way.” Her laugh was perilously close to a giggle. “If you measure from the bottom up.”

  “You’re going to sleep like a top, ma’am.”

  “Mercy. Who’s this ma’am?”

  “Mercy.”

  “Beddy-byes now, is it? Timber Hill? One for Timber Hill then. Alcohol heightens non-performance, did you know? Might as well finish the bottle.”

  “Leave it. You go first.”

  Light bathed the bedroom, illuminating the patchwork walls of Hector’s space. The bed’s slats squeaked above his nose. A clunk of dropped shoes.

  The wardrobe sighed open, then closed. Bare feet as soft as silence. Silence itself. Next, shower sounds, farther away. From the sitting-room a male grunt and mutter. A clatter of something heavy in the fireplace and a curse.

  Another half-hour passed and a multitude of shameless, putrid bed-going rustlings and patterings before the coloured walls of his space went black.

  *

  “Don’t talk. Where’ your hand?”

  “Here, captain. Who’s talking?”

  “Now, go to sleep.”

  “Sure thing, captain.”

  They spoke in whispers. Peckover because he needed to listen, one ear for the window, the other for the door into the flat. Mercy because the cop whispered.

  He held her hand in brotherly fashion, until he pressed it. To reassure her, she guessed. She pressed back. He withdrew his hand. She turned on her side, away from him.

  Peckover lay on his back with his eyes open, listening, looking into blackness, and doing his best to ignore the woman beside him. The only sound was a ticking clock. The night was going to be a long one. He doubted his ability to stay awake. But that was the exercise. He saw himself finishing up by sitting up saying his thirteen and fourteen times tables and pinching his cheeks.

  She turned onto her left side. “What’re you going to tell Miriam?’

  “Ssh. Tell her what? Nothing to tell ’er.”

  “She’ll have had ten separate reports by now of that kiss this afternoon. Mordan isn’t London.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “Two in every five French wives are unfaithful, can you believe that? One in every four thinks of some other guy while she’s making love. The magazines here are stuffed with sex statistics. I love them. You don’t have to believe them. What else? One in five has group sex and the same number dream about it. I’d sooner spend a year in a salt-mine. Half of all couples make love for up to half an hour once every three days, usually with the light on. Half the women have fantasies to keep going, like they’re doing it with a bisexual Martian or on a motorway.”

  “I’m glad for them. Can you sleep now?”

  “It isn’t easy.”

  “Get off the bloody motorway. Think of Vermont.”

  He found her forehead and started to stroke it, stroking her to sleep. His fingertips caressed the hair-line above her ear. His knuckles brushed her ear, up and down, on and on.

  Idiot, he told himself. Raving idiot lunatic.

  She was already moving closer, as he was.

  *

  Hector McCluskey listened to the ticking silence. He tested the point and edge of the butcher’s knife with the pad of his thumb, though they needed no testing.

  How long did fornication take? His one hesitation was whether to allow them to or not. Perhaps they already had. They were whispering again. A slat creaked.

  Now they were not whispering.

  On elbows, back, backside, and rubber heels, he started to inch towards the patchwork wall.

  *

  Not, Mercy knew, that a happening was going to happen, not with her of all people, the woman in the case, Jezebel McCluskey-O’Toole, fallen, free-range wife and divorcée-to-be, maybe widow if Hector, as she believed possible, chose to kill himself, which could be the best for him.

  Oh, some best. She could not think about it and she could think of nothing else. Almost. The cop’s hand was on her though motionless.

  Not that she minded one way or another whether he made love to her, being numb and finished with the love swindle for ever; though he might have been a gas, in another country, another time, there being warmth, possibilities of hilarity perhaps, something, in the brute. So she was content to leave it to him, whatever he wanted or did not want, except if he did not want or wanted to put his honour first she would still have given plenty to have heard what for Pete’s sake the soppy, hairy brute said, if he said anything, in his moments of passion, because it wouldn’t be “Oh, mein Schatz” or “Oh, mon coeur.”

  “Oh, gorblimey, knees up Muvver Brown?”

  Peckover thought: This is mad, I must recite the names of the wives of Henry VIII, I must think about England and Nelson, and my expenses, and matters in hand.

  Trying to concentrate on the precise position of the poker he had propped in snatching distance against the wall beside the bed, he found himself boring himself with thoughts of pokers as tiresome Freudian symbolism, as what was not? Under his hand was Mercy’s breast, not only not tiresome but the softest, most stirring, inexcusable place in God’s world for a Scotland Yard man’s hand to be.

  He was listening though, wasn’t he? Listening dutifully for the door and window? Mercy’s breathing was a soundless warm patch on his chest.

  His arm was round her, her head was high on his chest. Her fingernails absently and slow-motionly scrunched in
the hair on his chest, either not knowing what they were doing or knowing what they were doing. That was to say, they had been on his chest, scrunching and tracing, absently or otherwise, but now were tracing in the hip region somewhere. Mercy hoped the hand on her breast was glad. She assumed it was. Glad hand, backhand, hand to mouth, hand in glove, handsome is as handsome does . . . She liked the hand there. They turned their heads at the same time and found each other’s mouths.

  Oh yea yea.

  Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn.

  Slow, slow enough to go on, on, for ever, the warmth. Peckover believed for ever would do nicely. Anne Boleyn the one with six fingers each hand long ago m’dear what matter now? Where, wondered Mercy, had all the swindle numbness gone to flowers every one? The fingernails moved into stripy Marks and Sparks hundred per cent cotton or could be polywhatsit to fit male waist thirty-three thirty-five made in UK maybe Taiwan Catherine Anne Boleyn Seymour Jane Anne Somebody. This was no bloody good, Peckover decided, suddenly shifting.

  He reached down to the stripy knickers because blokes on the silver screen might make love with their pants on but he for one had never fathomed how.

  *

  Hector preferred to come up on the policeman’s side of the bed, if he had a side, if both were not dead centre. The whispering had ceased. The patchwork wall had a blitzed feel with here a gap, there a bunched, irregular fall which sometimes moved, dragging against his fingers. No hurry.

  He preferred the policeman’s side because any resistance would come from there, where he would strike first. Not that there had ever been resistance yet.

  Soundlessly, holding the knife against the seam of his trousers leg, he edged from under the bed, through patchwork in disarray which now moved, now was still. He inched backwards towards the wall, then started to lever himself up. His crooked elbow behind him touched something which made a scratching sound as it slid to the floor with a thud.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The poker’s fall was no shattering cacophony but it was distinct enough. Its thud penetrated Chief Inspector Peckover’s preoccupied state, and Mercy’s, with the celerity of a long drip of syrup.

  Had he been sitting up, working on his thirteen times table, the thud must have alerted him three, four seconds sooner. Time to have girded himself and acted, which he would have admitted had been the point of his presence in Mercy’s bed. The poker itself, his only weapon, now was undiscoverable in the dark; not that he had seen himself swinging it except as a last resort. Such as now.

  Unarmed, ungirded for anything other than love, Peckover was aware through several senses of the shape above him: almost above him, still a little to his left, but rushing closer. There came a whirring sound as of dead leaves in argument with the wind and a whiff of fear and tobacco which may have been Barbudos. In the next instant there would be more than a touch of steel, haphazardly stabbing. The steel would stab him at random, anywhere. Peckover flung Mercy bodily from him and himself after her.

  But they were still on the bed. Not too far from his back, perhaps a centimetre, he felt and heard a thump and tearing. Then another, and probably more, though now there were too many rival noises to be sure: Mercy falling to the floor as he thrust at her again, his first effort having achieved no great distance; a man’s sobbing in unison with the thump and rending of the knife; and the breeze of his own flailing fists as he tried to rise, wobbling as his foot buckled on squirming Mercy, but trying again, and flailing windmill arms to keep away the berserk shape, the crazed, cuckolded McCluskey of Inverbrae. Mercy was screaming. On the bed her husband competed with incoherent foghorn hootings. Peckover’s fist landed high on possibly Hector’s head: on some part of him, for the blow elicited a howl. But the knife was slashing again, its gleam all that was visible in the dark.

  Peckover swayed back, stumbling over Mercy. The gleam vanished, the animal hooting ceased.

  Whatever the new tactic might be, Peckover decided, best give him no time for it. Groping forward, he grabbed two fistfuls of patchwork quilt. He hoisted the quilt in front of him and sprang to where the knife had last gleamed: the bare-arsed bloke with the net and trident ensnaring the gladiator. Except he was bare-arsed without a trident. He ensnared something but not enough.

  It was a leg, ferociously kicking, as was a second leg. Peckover let go of the patchwork and punched and flailed. The gleam passed in front of his eyes. Something cracked against his shoulder. He caught hold of what he believed to be an arm, twisted it, heard Mercy distantly and irrelevantly scream, felt pain, and found himself grappling and falling, though not far. Fighting to keep hold of Hector’s arm, he lost it. He wanted to shout to Mercy to go, get out of it, but he had no breath. When he punched, his knuckles hit the wall. The gleam came at him from the left and in ducking he butted the side of Hector’s head. Either his head or the wall again. The gleam hovered. Peckover snatched, aiming behind the gleam, and found the wrist.

  Two-handed he twisted the wrist until Hector cried out. The gleam planed through the dark, vanished, and clattered. A knee, fist, foot, something from crying Hector, put Peckover on his back, where he awaited the battery of kicks and punches which at least would not be the knife.

  Nothing. No pain. Had he somehow lost and was dying, already dead? A second knife perhaps, or one of the blows had been the knife, not the wall.

  Sounds of sobs and choking. Bumps, scrabblings. The bedroom door opening.

  Get after him, Peckover wanted to say. But he needed to say it to Sergeant Sutton and a bevy of the lads, not to Mercy. He heard the door to the flat open but not close. Departure not arrival. There fell what would have been sweet silence but for himself and Mercy: weeping, sighing, puffing, swearing.

  He was able to stand.

  “You all right?” This was himself asking, was it? “Can you find the light?”

  He opened the window, the shutters, and shouted into the subfusc courtyard, “McCluskey! Police!”

  Christ, wake yourselves, effing Mordan!

  “Police!” Peckover bawled.

  Perhaps he imagined an answering, unidentifiable something. A shout or a wail. Cats on the roof-tops. The bedroom light came on.

  She’s pretty old: well, anyway, not a teenager, Peckover unchivalrously considered, looking at leaning, naked Mercy, her hand on the light switch, mouth open and drooped, showing too-prominent teeth, her terrified eyes staring back at him through sticky hair. There were reddening blotches on her from where he had fallen and trampled, or from where her husband had fallen and trampled. Sod your husband, I love you, he thought.

  Others before him had said exactly the same and mostly they were dead. He had forgotten. Sod the others too.

  “Oh my God,” Mercy was saying, staring at him through her matted hair. “Oh my God.”

  Peckover glanced down at his own pathetic nakedness. He saw a fair amount of blood. Smeared though, not flowing, didn’t seem to be. Not necessarily his own even.

  He believed he might be cut a little. Perhaps his back. Out of view on his bum was a wound from a holy-water bottle, but that was old and trivial. New was a good deal of ache, both general and particular. He delved in the turmoil of patchwork and sheets for his pants, finding first her nightie, then the Marks and Sparks, and seeing on the floor beyond the bed, where he would leave it for those who came to mop up, Hector’s knife. Twelve inches of Sheffield steel, or maybe the Ruhr, with an admirably stout black handle. Through the open window sounded a police whistle. Not near, not far. Then either an answering whistle or the same whistle repeating, enjoying itself. A distress signal in the night.

  He had blown it because of her. Because of himself. The old sodding Adam. Why couldn’t everyone become bloody monks! He would be the first in line for registration.

  She said, “You’ve got to get to hospital.”

  “What about you? Anything broken?”

  “No.”

  “Get dressed.”

  He was going to no h
ospital. Jean-Luc territory. Perhaps now she was ready to leap into her prof’s arms.

  Lord, was he jealous? Already? It was a contagion.

  “Hector’s out there,” she said.

  He had never heard a tone so plaintive. She loves him, he thought. Hector. Oh Christ! Hopeless, hopeless.

  He said, “Not for long. Daybreak, ma’am, you gather up your children and go to Vermont. A reviving holiday until everything’s, you know, all right again.” Well, it was a thought. He had had worse. “Look, he’s your ’usband, ma’am—”

  “Mercy,” she corrected him, blotched and sobbing, propping up the wall by the light switch, not looking at him.

  “Darling Mercy.” He wanted to go over to her. Instead he climbed into his pants. “You know ’im, your ’usband. What does he do now?”

  “If he gets away again?”

  “If. Right.”

  “He goes home.” How, Mercy wondered, would he do it? How end it for himself?

  “Glasgow?”

  “The château.”

  “Never. What makes you say that? The château’s crawling with police.”

  “He said it. He didn’t say it in words. I don’t know—he sounded it, as if it was finished. I’ve never heard him like that. Those noises.” She was pushing back her hair, wiping her face with both hands. “How long does he go on and on? His gear’s at the château. The letters we used to write, oh ages ago, when he was away cooking.”

  “You’d better get into the bathroom.” He brought the nightie and a blanket. “There’s company.”

  First, two plainclothes men, failed surveillants. Then the uniform branch. None was amiable. Peckover had the impression he was being held responsible for this latest flit of Hector’s. He understood about one word in fifty and no longer cared. The alleys of Mordan were a labyrinth, he believed he was being told, something to that effect. His informant was a fleshy plainclothes flic with red lips and what he, the flic, plainly believed to be a penetrating look. A brigade, the flic might have been saying, would not have been sufficient. But it would be minutes only. At most a half-hour possibly. He was on foot, l’assassin. He had been sighted, almost certainly, running south, across the Pont Neuf.