A Free Range Wife Read online

  Something like that.

  South was not the château. South was Lourdes, Andorra.

  Africa. Sympathy surged through Peckover. He hoped Hector would make it to Mozambique. Zimbabwe. Grow a beard, change his name. Quietly prosper as chef to the Zimbabwe-Scotland Association. Find a quiet wife. Live out his days.

  “Our Monsieur McCluskey, he’s taken—” Peckover queried—“French leave?”

  “Comment?”

  *

  At five o’clock there remained still an hour until dawn and the raiding and darting of a thousand swifts round the walls and turrets of the Château de Mordan.

  Mercy and Peckover sat at a furrowed, oak work-table in the château’s kitchen, between them a pot of tea. If any guests or staff had stayed up later than they might normally have done, hoping to be in on a resolution, if not action, they had long ago gone disappointed to bed. The only visible presence was scattered but substantial police, some drowsy on sofas in the public rooms, others in doorways, or wandering, checking. Miriam was in bed. He had peeked in. Madame Costes too, presumably, though he had not peeked. Pedro the barman, and the bullfighter-waiter. His dancing partner, if she were still here, what was her name? Martha and Arthur someone.

  Mercy said, “Hector used to walk here from Mordan. Through the woods.” She was remembering, not pretending this was what he might now be doing or planned to do. “It took him an hour, thereabouts. Unless there were blackberries or stuff. In November he’d come in with great bags of mushrooms.”

  Peckover, made melancholy by the past tense, nodded.

  “He was an outdoor man,” she explained. “Bet that surprises you. He could find cèpes like he’d been born here.”

  “Those the big slimy ones?”

  “Listen.”

  He was already listening. Somewhere a child had started crying. But though distant, the wailing, keening, throbbing was too powerful to be a child. Listening, heads angled, they watched each other across the cold teapot.

  “Wait here,” he told her, though she was on her feet with no intention of waiting. “Is it from the private wing—Hector’s bit? Can you tell?”

  She was neither telling nor pausing to chat. She ran from the kitchen and along the corridor. Past the Loch Lomond Bar and upstairs. Another corridor, dingy and uncarpeted, with walls in need of paint. As they crossed a landing at the head of more stairs a young policeman with tenderly cultivated tufts of hair on his cheeks joined them.

  “It’ll be one of his records, he has all these Black Watch records,” Mercy said, panting and weeping, turning down a side corridor.

  Peckover had never seen this part of the château, which was dilapidated, as had been the staff wing. The doleful skirling was now stereophonic. Round the next corner two policemen were in the initial stages of trying to open a locked door. One was pointlessly knocking, his rat-a-tat inaudible through the din of the pipes. The other was trying passkeys. Peckover’s sole thought was to keep Mercy from entering, finding her husband hanging, bleeding, whatever.

  Should he though? By what right? Husband and wife . . .

  “J’ai gagné!” cried the policeman with the keys, triumphant, turning the lock. He beamed, licking his lips and looking round for applause. He opened the door.

  Peckover grasped Mercy by the arm but she was thrusting her way into the room, pushing aside the policeman with the keys. Peckover was hauled in her wake.

  The room was a spacious, untidy living-room with armchairs, bookcases, and framed family photographs on a baby grand piano. Neither the shutters nor curtains had been closed. Above a gilt mirror over the fireplace hung a flag, the blue cross of St. Andrew, such as was waved at Ibrox Park and Murrayfield when the Scots scored against the Sassenachs, or come to that against the Welsh, Irish, and French, and waved whether they scored or not. Now the din deafened. How, Peckover pondered, did pipers keep from permanently deafening themselves?

  Neither hanged nor bleeding, not at any rate bleeding from anything more recent than an affray earlier in the night in his wife’s bedroom, Hector McCluskey was slow-marching round the perimeter of the living-room playing his bagpipes. He might have been piping in the haggis. He wore full dress regalia: kilt with a pin in it, sporran, lacy shirt, jacket with silver buttons, and a magnificent slouchy black bonnet with curling feathers of a deep greenish sheen. He was marching with funereal tread away from the door, his back to Mercy and the policemen. He did not turn when they came in, though whether because he did not hear or because he was indifferent, Peckover could not have said. The tune, so far as there was a tune, was not a golden oldie, not “Auld Lang Syne,” or “I Belong to Glasgow.” Peckover guessed it to be an authentic, ethnic lament, a pibroch for the long dead of Inverbrae, for the mists and ghosts of home, for ancestors, the yet-to-be-born, and the piteous everywhere.

  As Hector left-turned at the far end of the living-room, the policeman with tufts of hair on his cheek-bones reached him and with a punch to the head knocked him down. The feathered bonnet fell off, the bagpipes dropped with a rattle of spokes and a whimper. The flic bent over him, lifting his fist.

  “No!” Mercy cried. “Please!”

  The young policeman looked at her, startled. Peckover wondered if this were the worst of all worlds: Hector in some French dungeon or asylum for the rest of his years, a living reproof to Mercy. The hairy-cheeked flic and the one with the keys were dragging him to his feet. They hauled and pushed him through the living-room. The punched, delicate face, running with tears, was turned to Mercy. His red eyes implored—who knew for what?—but he said nothing. In the next moment he had been dragged through the door.

  Mercy stood with her arms by her side and her head back, weeping aloud.

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