The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (15 page)

‘You could have delivered them already.'

‘No. I received them by Monday's post. All my movements on Monday morning were reported, and he read the covering letter from my secretary in Lille. He will expect me to return to Alderton.'

‘It won't work.'

‘It will if he doesn't know I
have
returned.'

‘But he must know if, as you believe, his organisation is keeping an eye on the place.'

‘No, he won't.'

‘Why not?'

‘That's my business. If you refuse me protection, I'll protect myself. I'll set up my own organisation. And meanwhile you find out from some other department who Lukash is! Here's you and here's Mr Spring and I can guess you're in the same game like one is in accounts and the other in sales and you don't get together till there's a row up top. So between you, you ought to be able to find out.'

Setting up his own organisation sounded fine. But Zia must on no account be involved. So the only members were Daisy and Irata with Paul watching from the sidelines, which was all that could be expected of him. It was not an impressive cell.

That crook from MI5 didn't think so either.

‘I must warn you, Mr Rivac, that if your village cronies—I suppose you have something of the sort in mind—so much as mention Fyster-Holmes the Law must take its course.'

‘They won't. If I told you where Miss Fodor is, could you slip her back into Hungary?'

‘I could not. And the last thing I want to know is where she is. Would you like to tell me how a certain Rippmann fell overboard?'

‘Certainly. Very heavy sea and reaching for his false teeth.'

‘Was Appinger content with that explanation?'

‘He was not.'

‘I'd love to have heard that interrogation. He took you seriously?'

‘He took Kren's brochures very seriously indeed.'

‘Then for God's sake be careful, man! A bit of British caution in the French
élan
! By the way, some colleagues of mine have told me about your father. I am sorry I had to greet his son so formally. But I hope you understand.'

The grey face became human. It smiled. It rose to its feet and shook his hand. So, to his astonishment, did Herbert Spring. Georges felt more charitable. Crook? Well, in that job what else ought he to be?

He returned to the hotel and went up to Zia's room. The door was open; the housemaids were busy, and he could not see her bag. His first thought was that she had been so disturbed by his behaviour that she had decided to leave; his second—now that he had time, too much time to think about it—was that her resistance had been far from determined; his third that her reason for leaving in a hurry had nothing to do with breakfast.

He did not ask at the desk if she had gone, since the less evidence there was of a Rivac-Fanshawe connecton the better. All he could do was to wait anxiously in his room for her to telephone. Eventually he heard her voice.

‘Georges, this is Mary. I hear they have managed to trace your sister.'

He nearly replied ‘where are you?' but followed the example of her discretion.

‘Good Lord, Mary, how exciting! I am sure she shouldn't be in London.'

‘That's what I thought too. How did the interview go?'

‘Very well. I'll tell you all about it some time.'

‘Will you be at your aunt's?'

‘I'm going to import wine for a bit.'

The reference to the cellar beat her for a moment.

‘Spanish wine,' he said.

‘Oh, I see. Will you have a job for me?'

‘No. No, certainly not.'

‘So long as I know where you are. Goodbye for now, my darling, darling, darling Georges.'

He was about to respond without any discretion at all, to say that nothing mattered and he had to be with her; but she must have foreseen what was coming, for she had promptly cut him off. And how right! There was no reason why the waiter that morning should have known the number of his room and his name, but they had been together in the lounge the day before and if the hotel telephone operator had a good memory for internal calls she could confirm that they knew each other.

It must be Paul who had let her know that the police were after Mrs Fanshawe and it was possible that Paul himself was in trouble. Risky or not, he had to have a word with him before going underground with Irata. He had not yet any plan of campaign, though sure that his instinct to return to Alderton was right, but if there was police interest in Mr Rivac of Lille the game was going to be twice as difficult.

He cleared out of the hotel and took a train to Bicester, having got rid of the cheap suitcase he had bought for show and substituted a knapsack. If Appinger was not to know that he was back in Alderton, the village had to be reached on foot and after dark. No lifts, thank you very much.

Avoiding all passing cars while he was in the well-known lanes, he took to the fields until he reached the paddock and garden of the Manor Farm. The only light was in Paul's study. Watching from the darkness Georges was impressed by his concentration on vast sheets of accounts, at intervals making notes and doing quick sums on his calculator. That side of Paul was probably familiar to his associates in the City and allowed him to get away with what he called his image: a fashionable playboy on the make.

The fact that he had not bothered to draw the curtains was probably deliberate. Any interested person would see at a glance that he was busy and unworried. Georges threw a small clod of earth at the window without leaving the darkness. Again Paul was at his best. He could not help starting, but then performed an operation on his calculator, entered the result and left the room as casually as if he needed a drink. He came out of the back door and circled the garden until he arrived at Georges's position.

‘Trespassing in search of game, Georges?'

‘Learning by experience. But not so well as you.'

‘Wait here till I've shut down the study. Then I'll turn on the bedroom light to show that I have gone to bed and leave the back door open.'

‘What about servants?'

‘Now that I am a bachelor, Georges—permanently I hope—I refuse to be compassed about by witnesses. I am looked after by the sisters Marlene and Muriel. 'Ussies, Daisy calls them. But they prepare an excellent breakfast, clean the place up and return in the evening only if I have guests.'

Georges crept through the darkened house and into the bedroom. Too impatient to sit down or even to reply to Paul's enquiry as to what he wanted to drink, he asked what had happened and why Zia bolted from the Regency?

‘I think brandy and soda at this time of night,' Paul said. ‘And try the bed if you don't like chairs. Well, I was having a lie-in this morning after all I've been through the last few days when Spring woke me to say he expected you. Then the police came when I was shaving. Good God, one might as well be in Russia and have a knock on the door at 4 a.m.! How did the interview go?'

‘Never mind that! What about Zia?'

‘The fuzz—our latest jargon for coppers, Georges—got on to her very quickly. Someone in the bar noticed the make and part of the number of Irata's motorbike when Zia rode off behind him. He wondered about it but didn't take any action. Like most of us he thought he might be wrong and disliked being one of those busybodies who go to the police just for something to do. But on Friday he did go. The chap at the White Hart made it worse by whispering that Mrs Fanshawe was employed by her husband on a secret mission. An official of some allied commission in Germany had booked the room for her.

‘Police check army Fanshawes, if any, and come to me. I informed them that she had told me her husband was a general, that she was house-hunting and that she wanted to buy one of my horses. The White Hart had said that she came out here on the back of a motorbike, so I had to admit it. The police asserted that they had reason to believe she had stayed the night with me. What a reputation!'

‘Look at the way you jump to conclusions about an innocent breakfast!'

‘Well, if she looks as sweet in bed as out of it . . .'

‘Get on with your story!'

‘OK. It was lucky I didn't fall into their trap and give her an alibi. They knew damn well where she was that night. Fingerprints, I suppose. That meant that they would be checking hotels for a Frenchwoman with no passport. So I called her immediately to clear out of the Regency and keep in touch.'

‘And has she?'

‘Not yet.'

‘I'm going in with Irata. Don't visit us on any account!'

‘Georges, you lay down the law like a boardroom tycoon. What's happened to you?'

‘I've got religion.'

‘But what the hell will you do in the cellar?'

‘Wait for something to turn up—with Her Majesty's approval which she will instantly disown if I am wanted by the police.'

‘Daisy can probably feed both of you. Water is the trouble.'

‘I can manage that from the house at night.'

‘If you do you'll get dysentry from what I've heard.'

‘Nonsense! There's a rainwater butt at the back. What worries me is Irata. He's now a good Euro-communist, but he won't like betraying hardline comrades even when they are out to get him. Have you still got his motorbike?'

‘I have. Why?'

‘Your story about the general's wife and the horse won't stand up. Too many loose ends! We can't rule out a police search of the farm.'

‘I'll wheel it over to grandmother's house before dawn. I have a spare key. How can I let you know when Zia surfaces?'

‘By Daisy.'

‘She doesn't know that you and Mrs Fanshawe are friends.'

‘All the better if she does.'

‘I see. Love me, love my dog! Hand in hand on visiting day to see Master Georges in Dartmoor!'

‘I'd settle for that if Zia is in the clear with her own people.'

‘Got religion, did you say? Well, well, I suppose we can call it that while it lasts.'

Georges slipped out into the darkness and made his way to his grandmother's empty house which lay in a shallow bottom out of sight of the village, approached by a narrow lane if you were on wheels and across the fields if you were not. As always the trees on each side of the little valley seemed to close in at night more than in the sunlit day when they formed a private and pleasant boundary to a sheltered human habitation. The Victorian brick house looked damp and unloved, very different from those years in the middle nineteen-fifties when it had echoed with laughter of friends—unless he and Paul had good reason for silence.

The cellar, as Georges only realised when boyhood was long past, was not a cellar at all but an ice-house excavated centuries before by the owner of some earlier house on the site when winters were harder and the marshes of nearby Otmoor undrained. Between the trees on the ridge and the garden the steep slope had been allowed to go wild and had become an impenetrable thicket of struggling sycamore seedlings, in places close as a stockade, interspersed with stunted elder and trailing briars on which the pale wild roses showed even at night. There Paul and he cutting their way into the mess—pocket knives for machetes and conspiratorial village cats for jaguars—had come upon a depression and around it a few moss-covered stones which seemed to form a section of an arch or bay. They thought at first it was an old well and treated it with caution; but clearance of the undergrowth showed that it was an entrance into the ridge, blocked up by silt trickling down from above and forming a fertile bed for nettles which over the years had added their topsoil.

The boys—ostensibly after rabbits—had secretly dug their way in, finding half a dozen ruinous steps and a considerable chamber under the hillside so dry that there were still traces of straw. There they hid themselves, plotted and lived out their fantasies whenever they were sure that grandmother and Daisy believed them to be far away and they could safely approach by crawling through the trees on the skyline, then following their zigzag path through the scrub.

Georges on arrival did the same, but the passage was now too easy. He could see that Paul on Tuesday night had been over with a bill hook before consigning Irata to the depths. The debris needed to be cunningly replaced. As it was, anyone passing along the crest—especially a small boy—might wonder where the rough pathway led.

The chamber was empty. It had been made habitable with a camp bed, plenty of blankets, candles, a basin and a table and chair. There was an open book upside down—a treatise on economics with Paul's over-stately bookplate in it—and the candle wax was still soft; so Irata must have cleared out as soon as he heard Georges's inevitably noisy approach and was not far off.

Georges called softly in Spanish:

‘Don't fear,
compañero
! It is I. We meet again. I see my friends have been looking after you.'

Kneeling at the entrance he shone his torch quickly on his own face. Irata appeared from the bushes farther down the slope.

‘The devil! So you got away!'

‘Thanks to you and
señora
Fanshawe.'

‘So why am I kept here any longer?'

‘To protect you.'

‘Cannot your secret service do that?'

‘Not yet. None of the men they want is known by sight.'

‘And Fyster-Holmes?'

‘He is dead. According to the police, you killed him.'

That seemed the simplest way to keep the impatient Irata out of circulation; but Georges realised at once that he had made a mistake.

‘I? I do not commit murder. I would not kill a comrade who trusted me. I am a man of honour. Where is my motorcycle? Give it me back! To hell with you and the police! I will make my own way back to Spain without you'

‘Your motorcycle can neither fly nor swim, friend. And under what name will you go?'

‘My own.'