A Free Range Wife Read online

“Sorry if ‘mutilated’ offends but it’s the word I’ve got here, one of them,” he went on. “Mutilated apart from being stabbed, naturally. No details of the actual stabbing, you’d have to get on to Paris, or Portland. Go on then, ask.”

  “That’s the link, is it? They both lost their modus vivendi? Ziegler and Spence?”

  “I’m just a clerk here. I’m not Hercule Poirot.”

  “I’m not bloody Hercule Poirot either. The plot sickens.”

  “What plot? Don’t get fanciful. All you do is talk to the Widow Spence, in English, and send us the sonnet sequence. You’re lucky. Think of the kudos. You could be on your way to unmasking a new, international Jack the Ripper, and who knows—likely the first gay Jack the Ripper.”

  “What if Jack the Ripper is Suzy the Chopper?”

  “The Widow Spence is pure lavender and lace. She’ll serve you jasmine tea.”

  “Let ’er serve it to the Lourdes lot. I’m not ready to lay my manhood on the block.”

  “When she comes in with the jasmine, keep one hand in your trousers pocket. Wear your cricket box, that should delay her.”

  “What’s a cricket box? What you keep crickets in?”

  “You know, against the fast bowlers.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t play cricket.”

  “If you see her actually picking up a cleaver, phone us sharpish. There’s no rush getting there, she’s not expected back until tomorrow. She’s in Gstaad with a boy-friend, leaving tonight. G-sta-a-ad. How’s my accent? Incidentally, the mutilation bit, it’s still not public, so keep it under your beret. Paris is terrified of copy-cats and Portland’s playing along—for the moment. You haven’t asked about the deceased, the Widow Spence’s bloke, what business he was in.”

  “I didn’t like to pry.”

  “He was a gun-runner.”

  “Wouldn’t have minded being a gun-runner myself. All that wrapping the Winchesters in calico and buckskin, nailing the crates, loading ’em in the chuck-wagon.”

  “Lourdes, chum, not Laramie. He called himself a travel agent.”

  “Course ’e did. So would I. Wait. Lourdes. We’re not talking about the IRA?”

  “All we’ve got is a whisper from Belfast. They’re holding a disillusioned Provo. Tomorrow we’ll read about it in the papers. I’d say it’s totally irrelevant to your inquiries—”

  “I’m not inquiring, I’m coming ’ome.”

  “—but Charlie boy was a trading-post for the IRA and the Basques, or trying to be. Possibly.”

  “What time’s that bus to Victoria?”

  “Coward.”

  “Dead right, mate. I’ve nothing against the Basques, all I know is they wear berets, but I’m not messing with the IRA. Come to think of it, the IRA wear berets, don’t they? At funerals?”

  “Buy yourself a beret. Told you, it’s irrelevant, I offer it as background. Don’t want to go naked into the Widow Spence’s conference chamber, do you?”

  “Up yours.”

  “You’re sounding better already. Our ’Enry, the old grouch, sour as a lemon.”

  “And you, cock, are one sour grape. You’re stuck in your plate-glass hutch with one thought. Sabotage the bugger’s weekend. Listen to this then.” Peckover held the telephone at a distance and sang Caruso-like, “I loff Paree in ze zpringti-i-ime . . .”

  Ere Chief Inspector Peckover had reached the point of loving Paree in the fall, Superintendent Veal had hung up, and the office door had opened to admit Messrs. Pommard and Gouzou, who entered but a step before stopping to stare, and to cast anxious glances at each other.

  Chapter Three

  “Bonsoir, monsieur, madame,” Mercy McCluskey said, smiling hostessly, carrying matches and menus, and bearing down like a pirate schooner through the aquamarine ocean of carpet. She wore a sleeveless black gown and her blonde hair was up, held by a forest of combs. “Une table à deux?”

  They were not going to want a table for fifteen but you had to greet them with something. This pair she identified as Parisians, probably, though they had a forlorn air which she did not associate with Parisians, who considered themselves lords of the universe and expected to be treated accordingly. Possibly Belgians? They might be Dutch, though usually the Dutch arrived in groups. Not English anyway, and certainly not Irish. You could tell. The English were rumpled. The better bred they were, the more heavily rumpled, and they arrived in good humour after a stopover at the bar. The few Irish she had greeted, parties of millionaire cattle-breeders or flushed politicians with a mistress in tow, arrived glassy-eyed and hinge-kneed, either singing or speechless, after a bar session which might have begun in midafternoon. The French, Germans, Dutch, all the Continental rich, elbowed the bar and came straight in to eat.

  “Why don’t we have that table right there, where we had breakfast?” the man said. “Arthur and Martha Rickett. We have the Gleneagles Suite. Bonjour.”

  Davenport, Iowa.

  Mercy, full-rigged, listing as she rounded the restaurant’s Doric columns, led the couple to the empty table in front of the piano. At least she was able to converse with English-speakers, and usually was willing to, her condition as expatriate being that of more or less uninterrupted homesickness, for the English language above all. But today had been wearing. She was disinclined to chat. She was not homesick for Davenport, Iowa.

  The table was immaculate but busy: geometric place-settings with goblets for red and white, a mysterious folded card like a wedding invitation, finger-bowls with floating rose petals, bulbous candles, a crystal vase sprouting an orchid of breath-takingly sickly nastiness, napkins in coronet shapes, and an imitation Fabergé ashtray which large numbers of guests pocketed. The card recounted highlights from the history of the Château de Mordan. “In 1631, Gilles, Duc de Mordan, hanged his wife upside down in chains, for the whole of Lent, from the window of the south turret, now the linen room . . .”

  The Ricketts arranged themselves: he in grey, she in navy blue. Mercy applied a match to the candles and handed over the calfskin-bound menus embossed with an assemblage of cones like witches’ hats, purporting to depict the château’s sixteenth-century towers. At least the pianist was missing. Arthur took spectacles from his pocket.

  “So what,” he inquired, “do you have for us tonight, little lady?”

  Little lady? He must have been blind. Martha too was putting on glasses. Attached to hers was a silver chain which fell to her bosom, then abruptly looped up, swept over one shoulder, round the back of her neck, and out of sight. To what, wondered Mercy, was the chain’s disappearing end attached? What was certain was that if their French was as suspect as their eyesight she might be able to keep up the pretence that she was French, therefore unable to understand a word they said. That would nip in the bud Davenport small talk. One of the candles went out. “Shit,” muttered Mercy, and coughed to cover the error. She reignited both the candle and her smile. For her meeting and greeting duties she was glad that her teeth were white and plentiful. A smile that’s snappy keeps the customer happy, she reminded herself, aware that frequently a smile did no such thing, in fact to the contrary, especially where the customer was a Parisian. Arthur and Martha were frowning into their menus, turning the pages.

  Mercy looked round for the waiter who ought by now to have been gliding up and taking over. Though the glow from the candles and electric chandeliers was carefully subfuse, she always felt she should be shielding her eyes from the dazzle of carpet, the polished plaster pillars, the gilded Louis XIV chairs from a factory in Nantes, and the clashing gold-and-heliotrope, Regency-stripe wall covering. Saturday night and the restaurant was half empty: or half full, as Hector used to insist, encouraging her to think positively in the days of their first puny restaurants in Vermont and New Jersey two decades ago. The pianist, the gigolo Jerome, was sidling into place, back from a swallow of whatever was open and available in the kitchen, and a grope of whoever was open and available among the kitchen mai
ds. Mercy was conscious of him massaging his fingers and cracking his knuckles as if he were Horowitz.

  She avoided his eyes. He was all of twenty-two, beautiful with his flat stomach and curly black hair, and so aware of it that confidence as much as the lounge-lizard looks must have been what felled the girls. These days, if their eyes met, his leered and solicited. Impertinent brat. Knowing that all was not a hundred per cent between the foreign McCluskeys, man and wife, that indeed the wife was having a happening with a local prof, he presumably saw her as ripe for plucking.

  Why would he not have known? Everyone knew. Anyone who succeeded in keeping anything dark in poky, potty, petty, picturesque Mordan deserved a medal. Even had the townsfolk preferred not to know, and gone out of their way to be blind and deaf, what hope was there when Jean-Luc was so thrilled at his luck, like a boy with a new bicycle, that he could not help but boast to everyone of his catch, this cultured, warm mistress, this jewel of womanhood, the American at the Château de Mordan? Rumour was, he, the pianist, who was neither blind nor deaf, whose constant massaging of his fingers rendered them supple, had made Madame Costes. Madame Costes, the housekeeper, was well into her forties: mother of four, ravishing, bright, organised, her own woman, and not a subject of gossip, or not as far as Mercy knew. Against her nobler instincts, such as they were, Mercy did not believe the rumour was mere rumour either, and not believing, she could not for the life of her fathom what a whippersnapper gigolo had to offer a woman such as Madame Costes, apart from the obvious. At her time of life she must have known sufficient of joy, disaster, and men, to have remained indifferent to the sighings of a juvenile, practically a minor, a time-wasting, trainee boulevardier. Wouldn’t she have sent him packing with pennies for candy? Told him to go change his diaper? What did they talk about before and after, for God’s sake? There had to be a before and after even if lasting only long enough to fill the hot-water bottle. What did he leave her with for her reflective moments? He was hardly in a position to give her the wisdom of the ages or mink, so what had he to offer beyond his flat stomach? Piano lessons?

  Flowers, promises, telling her he loved her?

  Yes. What more was needed? “I love you” with feeling was all that it took. Mercy felt ashamed for her feeble, female sex.

  “Whaddya say, honey?” she heard Arthur say to Martha.

  They were turning menu pages and mumbling. Had they been French, Mercy might have felt obliged to point out that the truffles in the Périgueux sauce were from Bergerac and that the rolled pig’s head with pistachios was a Lyonnais specialty. For Davenport, Iowa, there was little point. They knew what they were going to eat. So did she. Steak and salad. Perhaps with a bottle of nice laxative Evian. Martha, looking marginally the more adventurous with her looping silver chain, just might risk the steak with green peppercorn sauce.

  Well, the steak would cost them. Tonight’s sirloin out of the freezer was cut in the shape of a Charolais steer’s skull with handle-bar horns.

  Last night’s sirloin in fact. The temporary chef, the replacement, the limey cop’s wife with the bust and good bones, had complained in writing. The unwanted scrap of paper, gravy-stained, had been brought to Mercy by the ancient commis who had been slicing vegetables in the kitchen since probably the days of Gilles, Duc de Mordan. Having complained that the sirloin was less than daisy-fresh, the woman had observed in the same breath, or more precisely the same paragraph, that the bull’s-head shape was idiotic, wasteful, a mockery of a noble beast, and there was too much boring steak on the menu anyway.

  She was probably right. But who did she think she was? What did she know about a joint like the Château de Mordan, where the exercise was to blind the customers with stage effects, with plushery, tushery, odours of Araby, views over the vasty fields of France, and the sense that each male was a caliph, each female a Scheherazade. Mercy had been willing to propose to Mrs. Peckover that she get on with her cooking and keep her opinions to herself. She had seemed a reasonable enough woman, for a cook, the occasions they had met. She had presented her observations in writing, for example, not because she was a lawyer or a union official but because she had lost her voice. But the risk in suggesting she zip her lip was too great. What if she downed saucepans and walked out?

  They were a touchy breed, top chefs, never mind the smiles they wore for the glossy magazines, photographed with their filets de sole Prince des Gastronomes. The heat and panics, the cognac always to hand, left them taut as a banjo string. A chef flinging the sauce hollandaise across the kitchen and then stamping out was common enough to evoke from the staff a shrug. But there might be sympathy, mutiny even, for a chef who had lost her voice stamping out. A woman, moreover, far from home and voiceless. The combination boded ill. Hector was going to be less than ecstatic if he returned to a kitchen on strike, sauce hollandaise everywhere, smeared on the walls like in some prison protest.

  The day was ending as it began, in vexation and danger.

  For all his massaged fingers Jerome was playing not Rachmaninoff but “Falling in Love Again.” Could be his choice might win him a tip too. Could be he was stirring in Arthur and Martha memories of steak and foxtrotting in downtown Davenport circa 1938.

  “Je vais chercher le sommelier,” Mercy sweetly lied to them, and swinging stern about, she sailed through the aquamarine, by chance walking into the wine waiter as she veered round a pillar.

  “Table two,” she told him. “Say hullo to arrivals if there are any. Be right back.”

  She headed out of the restaurant. Lovely Heinz, she thought, and wondered why suddenly she should think of Heinz.

  Ah. Ja. “Falling in Love Again.” La Dietrich. Germany.

  Not that anything about Heinz conformed to the stereotype of a German: lederhosen, a foaming stein, a tuba band oom-pah-pahing. Was there a German-playboy, ski-champion-type stereotype? Even so, Heinz was not flaxen-haired. She would have been hard put to say exactly what he was. In a way she hardly knew him. Three days in his shack in Andorra had scarcely been enough to discover the soul of the guy. He quite likely had the soul of a bastard. Mercy passed through the wide, verbena-scented spaces of the lobby, smiling at memories and lively possibilities.

  “Hi,” she said to diminutive Madame Costes, who crossed her path, liftwards, carrying a clipboard and a red rose wrapped in cellophane.

  If it had not been a clipboard and a red rose it would have been a five-kilo carton of Tide. Housekeepers, in Mercy’s experience, were always carrying something. Carrying something or carrying on: with a pianist in Madame’s case. She envied Madame Costes her ability to get it all together, always, from shoes to ear-rings, with no evident effort, and without looking as if she were being paid to model something. Very French. Shame she could do no better than Jerome.

  “Bonsoir, madame,” murmured Madame Costes.

  Mercy swung into the passage to the Loch Lomond Bar, and in lieu of absentee Heinz, to the only person, if he had arrived, capable of soothing away the vexation. Later in the evening anyway.

  Trouble was, brooded Mercy, stepping out, her hostess smile blown away, trouble was that Jean-Luc’s company soothed away the vexation but—unless her imagination was out of control—increased the danger mightily.

  *

  Saturday night in the Loch Lomond Bar, Château de Mordan, was different from Saturday night in the Loch Lomond Bar, Sauchiehall Street. Such was the opinion of Chief Inspector Peckover, alone and at ease at the table furthest from the door.

  He knew Glasgow hardly at all but supposed that if a Loch Lomond Bar existed there the Saturday-night problem would be forcing a road through the mob to the counter. Here he counted seven customers including himself. Eight humans if you included the sneering barman, which you did only grudgingly. How did such weasely dagoes—Peace, O Race Relations Board, Peckover, hiccupping, reflected without guilt—how did such sleek rodents, if a weasel were a rodent, find jobs serving ordinary, agreeable blokes such as himself?

&nbs
p; He was slipping: bars such as this seldom served ordinary, agreeable blokes. They served the toffs, or at any rate characters with more money than sense.

  To put it another way, the booze was slipping. Slipping too easily down. He might refuse his next round to himself. After a couple of sickly pastis to help the French economy on its way, he had switched to bottled beer, the existence of which plebian muck in a gilded salon such as this—salon, not saloon, his meandering thoughts stressed—might have surprised him had not the price been three quid a bottle, near enough. He was going to have to recoup somehow, filch some receipts from somewhere.

  “To hospitality for Mordan Gendarmerie, taxis, telephones, portable filing cabinet, subscriptions to essential French magazines, oil for handcuffs, repair to truncheon, disguise kit no. 27 comprising beret, goatee, easel and palette . . . £213.35.”

  Merry as a lark and 90 per cent sober, in his own opinion, Peckover was also of the opinion that he looked good and smelled good, having bathed and scented himself and changed into the maroon three-piece which he had bought at Selfridge’s: or to be exact, which he had bought but Miriam had chosen, since she preferred that he did not enter men’s outfitters on his own. Plus tie, of course, tweedy but remorselessly tasteful, a tie being only seemly for evenings at the Château Rip-Off. Tieless, would he have been bounced out into the night?

  He continued to wonder at and revel in his presence in France. Perhaps it was the preliminary pastis, perhaps the degraded foreigner behind the bar, but he had not the least sensation of being in Scotland. This was in spite of every endeavour by the management and its interior designers. Top of the bill in the Loch Lomond Bar was a stuffed stag with branched antlers.

  Peckover had at first considered the dead beast an unsuitable ornament for a bar, obscuring as it did his view of about one third of the dim room, unless he leaned sideways. The stag stood on a platform of polished mahogany with a pole like a shooting-stick rising from the platform to the creature’s belly as support, or to prevent it from lying down. Now he found himself more tolerant, even with sympathy for the brute, compelled as it was to suffer the presence, day in day out, of the villainous barman. The curtains were tartan, the wallpaper sported a heathery motif. Heather or parsley. Or fleece, might it be? Tufts of Highland sheep fleece caught on the spiky corners of burns and braes? Fleece—“to fleece,” verb, transitive, meaning “to strip,” “plunder”—was after all the motive behind the motif, the music, and every conceivable aspect of this mountain fort.