A Free Range Wife Page 6

  Lovers? This was the country of lovers. The occasional murder. With mutilation.

  Peckover held his breath, listening and watching.

  A poacher perhaps, poaching mushrooms.

  Nothing.

  Bloody DTs, mate, you want to get a hold of yourself, Detective Chief Inspector Peckover advised himself, sliding from the wall and starting back along the drive.

  In the restaurant he looked without success for his hostess. Gawd, quarter to ten! If he were the last to eat, keeping the staff on their feet, and Miriam, who had been slaving all evening, all day, over a hot stove . . .

  Fear no more the heat o’ the stove,

  Nor the maître d’s neuroses . . .

  A man in a morning suit led him to a table. A sinewy young bullfighter in a red waistcoat and with greased flat black hair, a sprig, definitely an apprentice bullfighter, presented a menu.

  Thou hast stirred in bay and clove,

  Basted well and prayed to Moses . . .

  A piano was playing. Scattered customers were still eating or finishing eating: except for one couple dancing on a patch of parquet beside the piano.

  Gourmets, gourmands, piggies, must

  At some point leave the trough, or bust.

  “I’ll ’ave the ’ouse wine, a jug of it, and let’s see,” Peckover said, opening the menu, fearful of delay. “To start, snails. D’you have snails?”

  “Les escargots?” said the bullfighter, bending at the waist to point truly and cleanly at the fine escargots au vin rouge with a finger gored at many a true and fine corrida. “One snails. Après?”

  “Chips.” Tell the chef I love her, Peckover considered adding but decided against it. Every kind of complication might arise, beginning at the moment the message reached the wrong chef. “Wine, no starters, and a nice plate of snails and chips, okay?”

  He did not want snails, he merely wanted to get them over, because you could not decently spend a long weekend in France without a few snails, never mind you could get them any day of the week at the fancier dinettes in Islington. He waited for the red waistcoat and lacquered hair to perform truly and bravely a couple of veronicas, but the lad being dead on his feet all he did was gather the menu and hobble away towards the kitchen. Grease under pressure.

  Peckover dipped his fingers into the finger-bowl, swashed them about, and trapped a rose petal. Mercy McCluskey had come into the Loch Lomond Bar to speak to Jean-Luc Fontanille, for no other reason. Her excuse for not dallying with himself had been her meeting and greeting duties elsewhere, which was reasonable. So why had she not meeted and greeted him?

  The pianist pressed on down Memory Lane, sidling crab-like out of “Deep Purple” and into, with an introductory hip-wiggle on the piano-stool, Peckover did not doubt, “Begin the Beguine.” Peckover was unable to see the pianist for pillars but he pictured a man with a wig and make-up who once had played for the bouillon-drinkers aboard the Mauretania. Or a woman with a chin too many who once had performed for café society, who had loved Hutch, or Carroll Gibbons, or their Parisian equivalents, and filled in for them when they had had flu.

  Anyway, there she was, his hostess, beyond pillars, by the door. Peckover half stood, arm aloft, and held the position until finally she looked his way.

  The wine arrived first. Not a jug but a bottle with a menacing label. Perhaps the house wine, perhaps the last bottle of its kind in France, dug from the deepest recesses of the cellar. The waiter poured a driblet.

  Snails arrived with tongs, a spike, and a dish of raw carrot, cucumber, cauliflower, pepper, and tomato.

  Mrs. McCluskey arrived not at all. Having seen him, she had gone again. Out of the restaurant.

  Peckover plied spike and tongs. Perhaps, having considered, she had concluded he was no threat, not being one of the local boys in blue, but an interloper, a foreigner of no consequence, whose writ did not run in Mordan, and who could be talked to or not, as she chose. Of course, she was right, in a way.

  The first snail came out of the shell a treat. Hard to tell it was a snail through all the breadcrumbs. Tasted all right. Garlicky.

  The wine, fine. Piano, fine. Dancing couple the hit of the evening, him in his Lyceum Ballroom grey, she in midnight blue, quick-stepping the night away. Between them they must have totted up a hundred and twenty years.

  Shouldn’t there have been bread?

  Second snail, okay. Not much to them, snails. He might already be going off snails. The third snail tasted a little tired. Perhaps it had been jogging.

  Peckover lofted an arm, and when his bullfighter arrived, said, “Bread please. And I’d like a word with Mrs. McCluskey. About finances, tell her.”

  If finances did not bring her, nothing would. True, this was not a restaurant where the owner’s wife sat by the door like the Ogpu, seeing all from behind a desk with a cash register, counting her banknotes, tits resting on the desk. But most people had two obsessions, money being the other one, and he did not see why this Yankee chatelaine should be immune.

  The bread, when brought, was brown, stale, and sliced to the thickness of communion wafers. Other customers’ bread was straightforward succulent country bread. The level in the bottle had dropped alarmingly. Evaporation, that was the snag to these vintage wines. The snails and raw veg having been polished off, a piece of cod arrived, possibly baked but not in cream or in anything. Peckover lifted the fish with a fork, looking for the folded note which would say, “That’s your lot.” He did not know how she would know he felt the night was young, that he had this urge to lead the remaining customers in a singsong, but she knew. She would be cross and apprehensive that he might be embarrassing.

  No note, though. No chips either and there were not going to be any. Miriam’s foot was down. He pointed pointedly at the empty bottle and clinked it with a spoon for good measure. He lowered his head towards the fish, examining it for signs of wheat germ.

  There were signs of something. Perhaps it had been on the floor. With Miriam in the mood he suspected she might be in, could be mouse poison.

  “Everything all right?” said Mrs. McCluskey.

  “Not really.” He rose, then sat. “It’s Miriam. She sent this note saying, ‘My French peasant soup is made from the finest French peasants, with whom you may sleep tonight, for I have aided and abedded you long enough. Yours sincerely, Miriam.’ What it is, it’s the wine on the breath and the snoring. Can you blame her?”

  “Sorry?”

  Wine arrived. Mercy McCluskey was smiling professionally. The smile lacked joy. Well tough, thought Peckover. If she lacked joy because of conscience she could try sitting down and talking about it. She could talk about the cod or even about Ziegler.

  “If everything’s okay then,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you before you go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Well, leave. Isn’t your reservation for three days?”

  “How about the bar in fifteen minutes? A nightcap.”

  “I don’t know. It’s the weekend. There’s stock-taking.”

  “This time of night? I’ll be there. Meanwhile, a favour. Would you take this to the chef?” Peckover poured wine into his second glass. “Congratulations, tell ’er, on the cuisine, apart from the chips. From an admirer.”

  Mercy McCluskey took the glass and departed. I wouldn’t have volunteered information about Rick Ziegler either, Peckover ruminated. He speared cod. Rick Ziegler did not exist, never had. How could anyone believe in anyone named Rick Ziegler?

  Rick Ziegler knew that the redhead fished out of the East River was Lola Pianola, Ace Darrow’s moll, because the slug in her heart of gold had been put there by Coco Delmonico, who had fingered Clint “Curry Puff” Alcatraz the day the Battery Boys raided the Bink Bank and Schultz “Born-Again” Scholtz had counted out one thousand gees for his night of romance with Patty Bunratty, companion to Zizi Uffizi, the airline hostess . . .

  “Salade, monsieur?” suggested the bullfi
ghter.

  “Any chance of seeing your upside-down pudding, the orange-flower water cream . . . the trolley?”

  In sorrow the bullfighter shook his head.

  “Thought as much. Cheese? Spot of Camembert? The one that’s supposed to smell like the feet of God.”

  “C’est possible. I ask.” He hobbled away.

  Peckover stood with care. He skirted the patch of dance floor upon which the couple were backing and advancing. “Jealousy . . .” he heard the pair singing with soft intensity as he passed. He had never mastered the tango. The only Latin capering he had ever managed was the conga. More his meat in long-ago adolescence at the Hammersmith Palais and the Bethnal Green Labour Club’s New Year’s hop had been the last waltz, so crucial to the evening and to the heart. Last waltzes, veletas, gentlemen’s excusemes, military two-steps, spot dances, the Palais glide.

  “’Ow about ‘Underneath the Arches’?” he told the pianist.

  “Hng?”

  “Doesn’t ’ave to be, but if you could finish with the tangos. Tangos, no good. Tangos, pfffft. No reflection on your playing, monsieur. No, no. Very artistic. ’Ow about a slowish quickstep?”

  This character had never heard of the Mauretania. He was post-war. He was practically post-Vietnam. In the epoch of Hutch, the Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Beecham, the storm-clouds gathering, this berk never would have been allowed through the doors into the Savoy. From the same class as himself, Peckover would have bet. One of the plebs, except this one was sneery with it. Too much curly black hair, the five o’clock Latin shadow nurtured to display virility.

  Thing was, he probably was virile, he’d have women waiting in line, probably only had to flash his teeth, strum an arpeggio, and they were his. Gall was all.

  Militarily upright, swaying not so much as a centimetre, yet nonchalant withal, Peckover stepped round the piano and onto the parquet.

  “Madam? Sir? Pardonnez-moi. Might I be permitted the pleasure?”

  The bloke in grey blinked and beamed. The lady looked from the intruder to her man and back to the intruder. The big fellow in the maroon three-piece asking for a dance would be a modest memory, Peckover guessed, so why not? Course, if he tripped, toppled on top of her, the two hundred pounds of him, that would be a more enduring memory.

  “Son, you have chosen the loveliest lady in the land,” the man said.

  Peckover did not sweep off the loveliest lady in the land in a dazzle of dancing pumps and swirl of crinoline as Tyrone Power did to Maureen O’Hara in—was it?—The Black Swan. Neither did he clasp her closely and put his cheek against hers. They stepped decorously, Peckover hoped, although concentrating on his feet without watching them, and simultaneously trying to take in what his partner was saying, took no small effort. He held his head at an angle so that his breath, richly fermenting, would steam past her right ear and over her shoulder, well away from her nostrils.

  “We’re Martha and Arthur Rickett . . . such a wonderful trip . . . five days at this beautiful château . . . so restful after Paris . . . you’re from England?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  Quick-quick-slow. Wait. Was it slow-slow-slow? What the devil was the pianist playing? Peckover glimpsed Arthur seated at a table, waving to them. When he discovered he was searching the restaurant for a sight of Mercy McCluskey, he admonished himself. Smack botty. One thing at a time.

  Quick-slow-quick-quick?

  They circled the parquet. At what point might he decently hand Martha back to Arthur? She had probably had enough and they never could continue indefinitely without calamity. Cornering was the dicey part, as it always had been. At least she was a dancer. Feathery. Kept her feet out of the way.

  If he fell he would release her instantly and try to keel over either sideways or backwards. Afterwards he could explain that he had a war wound which often took him unawares, shattering his equilibrium.

  “. . . sidewalk cafés with all those young people at three in the afternoon . . . couldn’t figure it, can you? . . . Unemployment . . . Mr. Reagan . . . wonderful job . . .”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  A gallant hand on her arm, agreeing and bowing, Peckover conducted Martha back to Arthur.

  “Sir, ma’am . . .”

  “Son . . .”

  Peckover tracked out of the restaurant. Fifteen minutes at least since he had told Mrs. McCluskey, “Fifteen minutes.”

  She was not in the Loch Lomond Bar. Only the svelte couple and Pedro were there. After half an hour the svelte couple left. Peckover ordered another Armagnac. Same as cognac far as his palate could tell but the equivalent of one, not two months’ salary, this make anyway. Not that he was paying. Armagnac, cognac, tomorrow he would be sorry.

  He was not going to go looking for her. Probably she was on her way back to Mordan. He was no longer sure he even wanted to question her again.

  She had more or less denied knowing two men. What it came to. Possibly she had not known Spence but her denial had come very smartly and he saw no reason why he should believe her. What Ziegler and Spence had in common was that she had denied them and they were dead.

  Had she denied them while they were alive or had she known them, in the biblical sense, and what if she had? If Jean-Luc were to become dead would she deny having known him?

  She had done so already, pretty well. “He’s a regular, kind of, he drops by sometimes.” The description lacked the smack of intimacy.

  If Jean-Luc were the jealous kind and had been around for some time, which was to say around Mercy, and she had been seeing Spence, and Ziegler, he might have removed them, or had them removed. How much did a professor of English earn and what was the going rate for a hit man in this corner of France?

  Highly unlikely. He’d have had to have been painfully, possessively jealous, Jean-Luc. Had another rival for Madame’s favours cut up his arm with window-glass or was that an accident due to too ferocious shutting or opening the window?

  Final question: What had any of this to do with him? Answer: Nothing really. He was the temporary English-language interviewer in these parts, and while he thought of it, how about another of these Armagnacs? He had once cut a heading out of a travel agent’s brochure—Condom in Armagnac—and sent it to Private Eye. They had not printed it.

  Half past eleven. He would not have minded a dance with Miriam but he knew better than to seek her out and ask. Miriam was contre fermenting breath. In any case, the pianist would have packed it in by now.

  “What car does Mrs. McCluskey drive?” he asked.

  “Citroën Diane, grey,” said Pedro. He had thawed somewhat. “Sometime black Mercedes if Diane foutue—busted.”

  Peckover left the bar, and the hotel, and weaved in good heart along the drive. Finding himself kneeling among azaleas, he assumed he had weaved off the drive. The ground was soily and dewy and his nose was in an azalea.

  “My good man, pull yourself together,” he told the azalea.

  Crunch, sounded twigs and leaf-mould somewhere in the dark.

  On all fours, Peckover listened to the silence. The noise, he eventually decided, had been one of nature’s insoluble noises: a woodland mole, a nightjar—wasn’t there a bird named a nightjar? He levered himself to his feet. In his absence the parking area had been moved.

  He sought the car-park on the drive and among the pines. When he emerged from the trees and came upon the cars he knew they were the same cars as before because there aslant stood Miriam’s château car.

  There too Jean-Luc’s Simca; also a Diane which may well have been Mrs. McCluskey’s, and a Mercedes. By now, close on midnight, surely the pair should have been moving on, either separately or together.

  “Vive l’amour,” Peckover said, looking up at the floodlit castle walls. Some windows were shuttered, some not. Even as he looked a light came on in one high window.

  Perish the thought that Mrs. M. herself had had a finger in the demise of two boy-friends, if boy-frie
nds they had been. All the same, thought Peckover, he might have worried had he been Jean-Luc.

  Chapter Five

  Long live love was not for the moment a sentiment with a hold on Miriam’s heart. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror with her mouth open, striving to see her throat. Past midnight, probably coming up to one o’clock, and where was Henry?

  When he drank too much he was so stupid, he snored, he smelled. Disgusting.

  Not violent though, she realised with a jolt, astonished that after so many years here was a phenomenon she had never given thought to. His non-violence when boozed she had always taken for granted. Yet half the violence he had to cope with as a policeman arose from drunkenness. More than half to hear Henry tell it.

  Curious because sober he could be violent. Not with her of course. She’d like to see him try! But twice at least, provoked by ne’er-do-wells he had particularly not cared for, he had gone over the top and got himself into trouble. When he broke that gangster’s arm, Willie somebody, and been demoted from sergeant to constable, the family income had dropped with a bump.

  Emotional but violent only in cold blood. People were peculiar. The most peculiar were those closest to you.

  Very insightful, Miriam Runner-up, Insights of the Year Contest.

  Standing in her nightie in front of the mirror in the terrifying bathroom, peering into the reflection of her mouth, agape as if for the dentist, to see if she could see what catarrhal laryngitis looked like, and seeing nothing untoward, Miriam wondered if in his occasional cups a little painless violence might not be preferable to soppiness and silliness.

  The Rob Roy Room’s bathroom was mostly mirrors. What was not mirrors was streaky, granity stuff, purplish and black, including the sunken bath, which was also streamlined, as if about to rev up and go somewhere. Did it sink into the room below, creating a streamlined bulge in the ceiling? Probably not. The floors in a fort like this, walls too, must have been five feet thick.

  She was unable to make up her mind whether the bathroom, and even more the bedroom, was exquisite or vulgar. Whichever they were, they missed being the other by a whisker.