A Free Range Wife Page 3

  Who ever the beast in the bedroom had been, it had not been Mr. Ziegler.

  Peckover opened the notebook at a clean page. He put a finger in his ear and bit his pencil. He no longer heard the hum and babble of the market. When he glanced up, the farmer’s wife was selling a batch of her rubber puddings to another farmer’s wife who ought to have known better. He bent over the notebook and wrote.

  Dear Auntie Flo, no news

  From Mordan, downtown France,

  Except baguettes, they’re up 10p,

  Please send a small advance.

  *

  Meat’s up, and Camembert.

  Petrol’s up as well;

  Dear Aunt, just as in Merrie,

  Inflation’s struck La Belle.

  *

  Some bloke’s baguette is up

  A Yank, five metres long.

  The baguette or the Yank, you ask?

  (Her husband’s in Hong Kong)

  *

  Pas mon affaire, the morals

  Of the international set;

  Laissez-faire, I always say.

  Affectionately, Chet.

  Chet was a Yankee first name out of the same bag as Rick. Rick, Chet, Chip, Rip, Skip, Brewster, and Hancock. But how could he sign himself “Henry”? What rhymed with “Henry”? The closest he had ever come was “dispensary.”

  “M’sieu’?” a voice was saying in one ear. In the other ear susurrated sea sounds, the rustle of a spring tide.

  A youth in a turtle-neck jersey, not a white jacket, but holding a tray and a cloth, stood above him, reaching out to flick the cloth at the table top. Above Peckover to his other side Miriam was positioning a chair. As she descended, he rose, timing the manoeuvre to catch her cheek with a kiss.

  “’Ello, love. What’ll you ’ave? Don’t answer if it hurts.”

  She wore her mac from a Burberry’s sale of four years ago, and round her neck a woolly scarf which he did not think he recognised, though he would not have risked raising the matter in case she had had it since school-days or, worse, he had given it to her. In spite of her new gauntish look she was still, in Peckover’s opinion, the pick of the market, of Mordan, of this half of France, and the other half, and the rest of the Continong. She was shaking her head, pulling her chair up to the table, and pointing to her mouth.

  “Food?” Peckover queried. “A slice of the local loaf spread with something regional?”

  She reached for his notebook and pencil. Laryngite de catarrhe, she wrote, and as an afterthought, Catarrhal laryngitis?

  Peckover took the pencil and wrote, Stone the crows.

  Miriam wrote, No talking for two months!

  Peckover wrote, You or me?

  He had hoped she might at least have smiled but she opened her mouth and wagged her head, miming Ha-ha-ha. When he started to write, Did the doc—she snatched the pencil and pointed to his mouth.

  “Not hungry,” Peckover said.

  She whispered, “Hulking imbecile.”

  “That’s not very nice,” he said. “How many whispers are you allowed a day?”

  She lifted two fingers at him.

  “Monsieur?” said the waiter, fascinated.

  “Deux cafés, s’il vous plâit,” Peckover said, and he took Miriam’s hand. “I don’t believe any of this. Two months? What’s Sam going to say?” For a two-year-old currently doted on by grandparents and an aunt, Sam had something to say about everything. “You sure it’s not painful? Shouldn’t you be lying down?”

  She shook her head.

  “What was the doctor like? Any use?”

  Miriam wrote, Devastating, and smirked.

  “Bleedin’ frog. Is he qualified?”

  Her answer was a contemptuous skyward gaze.

  “Bleedin’ quack,” Peckover said. “What do we know about ’im? He didn’t prescribe any of those bombs up the bum, did he? It’s all bombs up the bum in France, you know that? Bombs and great cupboardsful of powders and potions. The doctors are in league with the chemists. Here—what is it?”

  She was nodding at him, her eyes filled with love and despair. Frightened, Peckover took both her hands, but she withdrew them to grapple with her handbag. She brought out a folded form which she unfolded to disclose more paper, a loose white sheet with doctor’s scribble. Prescriptions. A list as long as a marathon.

  “Which one’s the bomb up the bum then,” growled Peckover, picking up the pencil. “We’ll ’ave that out for a start.”

  “Monsieur?”

  Glaring at the paper, vainly seeking the bombs prescription, Peckover assumed the interruption was the waiter with coffee. When none landed, and he looked up, looking down through rimless glasses was paunchy Inspector Pommard. At his side stood an eager lad with an inadequate moustache: scrappy, accidental hairs on his upper lip.

  “Monsieur Peckover, qu’est-ce que c’est ce singe? Singe—monkey, yes? We find no monkey. Zis ’ere Enquêteur Gouzou spik English.”

  Enquêteur—inquirer? Detective constable, Peckover assumed, regarding the cub’s wispy lip and trendy leather jacket. He presented Miriam, who moved her lips silently. A waiter arrived with coffee and additional chairs. No reports, Enquêteur Gouzou urgently said, of missing monkey received. Monsieur Peckover will describe monkey details please? Will draw picture.

  “Don’t be daft, I can’t draw,” Peckover said. “What kind of monkey? Small and cuddly? One of the mauve kind?”

  “Is your monkey. You make draw. We find.”

  Though imperfect, like his moustache, Enquêteur Gouzou’s English was superior to his senior officer’s, towards whom he now glanced as if to ask, How am I doing? From behind their spectacles the eyes of Inspector Pommard were glintingly on Miriam.

  Peckover would have preferred to have practised his French, but now probably was not the time, not if the monkey business were urgent. What was the lad talking about? Somewhere he, Peckover, had missed the point, as if he had turned two pages at once. Miriam could have helped, or before she had lost her voice she could have. Her French was largely culinary, limited to such expressions as bain-marie and videz cinq poissons, but he believed they complemented each other, as husband and wife should, his French being less exact but perhaps wider-ranging, the scrapings and leavings of songs and films. Plaisir d’amour and La Belle et la bête and such. He was eager to have a go. Whether Miriam’s culinary French embraced monkeys he could not have said but he did not exclude the possibility. The French ate some funny things.

  Even when the confusion between sang and singe had been laughingly ironed out, Peckover profoundly resented the mishearing by the woman in the glass cage. His accent might not have been out of whatever the French equivalent of the BBC was, or the BBC before it had started recruiting from bus conductors and left-wing tobacconists, but common sense should have told her. Paunchy, raunchy Pommard had dragged his eyes from Miriam to consult with his flunkey.

  At the kerb the farmer’s wife was selling a batch of rubber puddings to a young housewife with designs on her husband’s life.

  “Monsieur,” Peckover heard Gouzou telling him. “Is information from Paris to you. Confidential. If Madame was perhaps leave—zut!—if Madame is off—”

  “Madame not off, Madame stay,” Peckover said. “What information?”

  “You telephone please. They ask you go Lourdes.”

  “Where?”

  “Is more inquiry.”

  “Lourdes where they ’ave the miracles?”

  “Les miracles, oui. You telephone.”

  “Why Lourdes?”

  “Is inquiry. More murder. You telephone Paris or your Scotland Yard either maybe. For consolation.”

  “Confirmation.”

  “Okay.”

  Peckover lifted his eyebrows at Miriam. Lourdes. Our Lady of. South, towards Spain, wasn’t it? They could go together. Surely she could swing a day or two off. If she were late back for her archeologists someone
would stand in for her, they were not going to riot, banging their plates with their spoons and carolling, “Mi-ri-am! Mi-ri-am!” Half of them had such delicate stomachs they never ate anyway.

  The other half ate like goats: those who spent their lives in the field, on their knees in Peru or Carthage, grubbing for shards under a broiling sun and eating and drinking locusts, the stale of horses, the gilded puddle.

  Miriam’s eyes beckoned to him over the rim of her coffee-cup. She lowered the cup and moved her lips. Peckover, inclining his head away from the gaze of the police pair, sent a discreet kiss in return, whereupon Miriam began to pout and arrange her lips in contortions unattempted since the salad days of their passion. Or was she trying to tell him something and he was to lip-read? He might have been watching a silent movie. The musical accompaniment from the records stall was not galloping horses but it was an apt piano all the same. Liberace ripples from another epoch. The love scene.

  “I love you,” Peckover lip-read. Or it might have been, “I leave you.”

  Another alternative was, “I’ll eat stew.” As a professional cook, Miriam often talked about food. On the other hand, this was early to be thinking of lunch.

  “I love you too,” Peckover soundlessly mouthed across the table.

  Miriam’s mouth clamped shut. Her face was thunder. She gathered her handbag and pushed back her chair.

  “’Old on, I haven’t paid the bill yet,” Peckover grumbled.

  He gathered up books and hat and went into the café in search of the waiter. When he came out, Inspector Pommard was holding Miriam’s hand in what might have been a farewell handshake, if the imagination were stretched. At least she was taking the experience impassively. He told Gouzou he might be along to the Hôtel de Police to telephone shortly, or he might telephone from elsewhere. He nodded at Pommard, extracted Miriam from the lecher’s grip, and guided her away through the market.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand. So it was all right, whatever it had been. Peckover’s pleasure at being in France surged back, to the exclusion of Miriam, whom he forgot, including her hand in his, while he looked about, inhaled, and rejoiced in the squat throng, the berets and shawls, the alien smells, the hubbub, the loudspeaker’s dreadful thumpings, and the unabashed Peugeots and Citroëns honkingly forcing themselves through the crowd on their way to or from the side-streets off the market square. One stall-holder, weighing artichokes with handscales, was using gross sawn-off carrots as weights. With whisperings and the finger-tracing of letters, first on a wall at the edge of the market, next on the backs of each other’s hands as they threaded along the boulevard, Peckover and Miriam conversed.

  She had to get back to the château to look after the saffron soup. Also the pigeons casseroled with asparagus, the trout stuffed with preserved duck—Miriam grimaced and made a clutching gesture at her heart—because that was why she was here, why they both were here, and though the Dutch party might eat gigantically and blindly, one or two might also be aware what they were eating. He was not to come with her unless he intended to chop onions. He must explore old Mordan and profit from every moment. Especially if he were going to have to dash to wherever—Lourdes? She would not be free before around three o’clock, and then only for two hours at most. If he had dinner in the restaurant he must promise her not to touch the foie gras, or the stuffed goose neck which she would be cooking for three hours in goose fat, or the fritters. Whether the Yard were paying or not.

  Lunch where what you? she traced on his hand.

  “Thought I might ingest a little raw cauliflower, with a glass of mineral water,” Peckover said. “I’m not going to Lourdes either, or anywhere. I’m staying with you.”

  Balls, traced Miriam.

  “Balls yourself. You’re ill. I’m not leaving you. You’d ’ave no one to talk to.”

  He watched her drive away along the boulevard in the loaned château car which had been part of the contract: car, keep, return air fare, two days off a week—in the last two weeks she had apparently managed one half day—and a salary 50 per cent above what her archeologists brought her. The McCluskey bloke, the boss, the one off judging meat patties in Hong Kong, had not argued, not seriously. With his regular chef in hospital having a nervous breakdown, the assistant chef scarpered overnight to the galley of a tycoon’s yacht bound for the Greek islands, and two replacements in one week having been sacked for drunkenness and theft, McCluskey had not had much choice. He himself did no cooking these days, being too busy writing food columns, exposing himself on the box, and jetting hither and yon judging pastry contests. Word having seeped along the European cooks’ grape-vine, Miriam had made herself available. Château de Mordan had two crowns in the Michelin, though admittedly for the bird-song and furnishings rather than the food.

  Château Rip-Off, in Peckover’s view. What he had seen of it. Crossed carnations on the Châteaubriant, and a welter of Scottish imports—tartans, antlers, busts of Burns and Scott—which lifted the rates still higher on the basis that customers were being treated to not one but two experiences: Gallic and Gaelic, the auld alliance. His first night he had spent uncomfortably but gratis in Miriam’s cell in the staff annexe. Now that he was on duty, working and laughing, and the Yard would be picking np the tab, he had moved self and Miriam to a double in the château proper. The Rob Roy Room. Peckover had giggled and sobbed when he had seen the price of the Rob Roy Room printed small but clear on a card behind the door. Question was, would a question be asked in the House of Commons?

  “Would the Right Honourable Home Secretary state whether he considers a bill for a thousand million francs reasonable for a chief inspector of our Metropolitan Police for three nights at? . . .”

  Gnrrr, shuddered Peckover, striding and starting to hum. He would take a speedy turn round the vaunted Priory so that it would be off his conscience. Then a beer or three at one of these boulevard cafés: a pavement table from where, reaching forward, the customer could touch the passing juggernauts. Then the phone call to the Factory.

  *

  “Cock?”

  “Henry? That you? Took your time. What’re you up to? Picking grapes?”

  “Sweatin’ at it, mate. I envy you lot, feet up, scratching yourselves. It’s round-the-clock ’ere. Ought to warn you, the expenses are climbing. I’ve seen the woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “Go back to sleep. I’ve met the local lot too, an Inspector Pommard, he of the raging libido and filmy eyes. I’m at the cop shop now only there doesn’t seem to be anyone else ’ere, they’ll be having the long lunch. Miriam’s lost ’er voice but she’s learned how to stuff bat. Stuffed bat’s wings, specialty of the region. Weather stunning. Dancing in the streets, goes without saying. It’s all go. The woman, McCluskey, she lied about Ziegler. Said she ’adn’t seen him for two years.”

  “Who’s Ziegler?”

  “None of your business. We ’ad a monkey on a window-ledge.”

  “And an elephant in the bath?”

  “I’ll send a Telex about five o’clock. ‘The File on Madame McCluskey.’”

  “Sonnet sequence?”

  “Rhyming couplets. What’s this about Lourdes?”

  “Bad. Bite on the bullet, Henry. Ready? Australia, a hundred and fourteen for no wicket—that’s the lunch score.”

  “Lourdes, not Lords, you mooncalf, sir. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lou-u-rdes.”

  “Henry?”

  “No, you don’t pronounce the s. I think. It’s like this. Lou-u-ur-da. I’ll be honest, I’m not even sure you pronounce the d. Lou-u-urrrgh!”

  “Henry?”

  “This part of the world, mate, if you don’t get your pronunciation spot on, you’re sunk. They take you for a tourist.”

  “Henry! Can I speak? I wanted to know if you were all right. Seriously.”

  “Seriously, tiptop, old fruit.”

  “E
xactly the impression that was coming across loud and clear. What’s wrong?”

  “Whaddyer mean, what’s wrong?”

  “I mean d’you want to be pulled back tonight, today, immediately? Personally, I’m ravished you should be so perky, but you know well as me, if it gets round you’re enjoying yourself, if the Guv’nor hears, you’re going to be summoned back home on the first bus to Victoria. Got a pencil?”

  “Wait. Who’s perky? I’m not perky. Listen.” Peckover snarled into the mouthpiece, then he sobbed chokingly. The echoes bounced, fading, off the office walls. “’Ow’s that? I’ll do it again. Can you get it on tape?”

  “Susan Spence. She’s a widow residing at eighteen, Rue Jacques Brel, Lourdes. If you prefer, Lou-u-urrrgh. Got it?”

  “Roughly.”

  “I’ll spell it.”

  No sense of theatre, the young ’uns, Peckover decided. Give ’em a snarl and a sob and they turned stone sodding frigid. All right, Superintendent Veal must have been all of a year younger than himself, perhaps two years, but they were calendar years. What about experience years? What about wear-and-tear years? Had Veal suffered obloquy and demotion for writing limericks on lavatory walls at the Yard?

  Tasty limericks too, the best of them, those about the assistant commissioner.

  “The husband, Charles Fordyce Spence, he was a businessman.”

  “From Portland, all this, is it?” Peckover said. “By way of the Factory, and Paris, with all computers agreeing that if he’s in the area, Our ’Enry, let ’im have a word with whassername—Susan Spence.”

  “You’re asking boring questions, Henry. Ask why Mrs. Spence is a widow.”

  “Why is Mrs. Spence a widow?”

  “That’s a good question. New Year’s Eve, it says here, that’s four months ago, Mr. Spence was found stabbed to death in his bed at the Hilton in Paris. Now ask if Mr. Spence was mutilated.”

  Detective Superintendent Frank Veal, CID, Scotland Yard, feet up, scratching himself, listened to several bars of silence along the air waves.