by Tom Sharpe
He packed a bag, found his passport, took the file containing the photographs of the Countess’s letter, together with several sheets of crested notepaper and envelopes, and was ready to leave when his mother returned from her shopping.
‘But I thought you said you were going to stay home this summer,’ she said. ‘After all, you had a continental holiday at Easter and it’s not as though you can afford to go gallivanting about …’
‘I shall be back in a few days,’ said Slymne. ‘And I’m not gallivanting anywhere. This is strictly business.’
He left the house in a huff and drove to the bank for more travellers’ cheques. That afternoon, he was in Dover and had joined the queue of cars waiting for the ferry when he was horrified to see Glodstone’s conspicuous green Bentley parked to one side before the barrier to the booking office. There was no doubt about it. The number plate was GUY 444. The bastard was disregarding the Countess’s instructions and was leaving earlier than he was meant to. Crossing to Calais and sending a telegram from the Countess addressed to Glodstone care of the Dover–Ostend ferry was out of the question. And Slymne was already committed to taking the Calais ferry himself. As the queue of cars slowly moved through Customs and Immigration and down the ramp into the ship, Slymne’s agony increased. Why the hell couldn’t the man have done what he was told? And further awful implications were obvious. Glodstone’s suspicions had been aroused and while he was still committed to the ‘adventure’, he was following an itinerary of his own. More alarming still, he was travelling on the same ship and might well recognize Slymne’s Cortina on the car deck. With these fears plaguing him, Slymne disappeared into the ship’s toilet where he was prematurely sick several times before the ship got under way. Very furtively, he went up on deck and stared at the retreating quay in the hope that the Bentley would still be there. It wasn’t. Slymne drew the obvious conclusion and spent the rest of the voyage in a corner seat pretending to read the Guardian and hiding his face from passers-by. He was therefore in no position to observe a young man with unnaturally black hair who leaned over the ship’s rail and was travelling under a temporary passport made out in the name of William Barnes.
In the end, unable to stand the suspense, Slymne slipped down to the car deck as soon as the French coast was sighted and made a hurried inventory of the cars. Glodstone’s Bentley was not among them. And when he drove off the ship at Calais and followed the Toutes Directions signs, he was even more confused. Presumably Glodstone was crossing on the next ferry. Or was he going to Boulogne or even sticking to his original instructions to travel by Ostend? Slymne turned into a side road and parked beneath a block of flats, and, having considered all the permutations of times of ferry crossings and destinations, decided there was only one way to find out. With a sense of doom, Slymne walked back to the office and was presently asking the overworked clerk in broken French if he could trace a Monsieur Glodstone. The clerk looked at him incredulously and replied in perfect English.
‘A Mr Glodstone? You’re seriously asking me if I can tell you if a Mr Glodstone has crossed, is crossing or intends to cross from Dover to Calais, Dover to Boulogne, or Dover to Ostend?’
‘Oui,’ said Slymne, sticking to his supposedly foreign identity, ‘je suis.’
‘Well you can suis off,’ said the clerk, ‘I’ve got about eight hundred ruddy cars crossing on the hour by the hour and thousands of passengers and if you think—’
‘Sa femme est morte,’ said Slymme, ‘c’est très important …’
‘His wife’s dead? Well, that’s a different matter, of course. I’ll put out a general message to all ferries …’
‘No, don’t do that,’ Slymne began but the man had already disappeared into a back office and was evidently relaying the dreadful news to some senior official. Slymne turned and fled. God alone knew how Glodstone would respond to the news that he was now a widower when he’d never had a wife.
With a fresh sense of despair Slymne scurried back to his car and drove wildly out of Calais with one overriding intention. Whether Glodstone arrived at Calais or Boulogne or Ostend he would still have to come south to reach the Château Carmagnac, and with any luck would stick to the route he’d been given. At least Slymne hoped to hell he would, and since it was the only hope he had he clung to it. He might be able to head the swine off and the best place to start would be at Ivry-La-Bataille. The place had the sort of romantic picturesqueness that would most appeal to Glodstone, and the hotel he had booked him into there was Highly Recommended in the Guide Gastronomique. As he drove through the night, Slymne prayed that Glodstone’s stomach would prove his ally. He need not have been so concerned. Glodstone was still in Britain and had worries of his own. They mostly concerned Peregrine and the discrepancy between his appearance, as altered by dyeing his hair black, and that of William Barnes as depicted on his passport. The transformation had taken place in the London hotel. Glodstone had sent Peregrine out with instructions to get some dye from a chemist and had told him to get on with it. It had been a bad mistake. Peregrine had been booked into the hotel an unremarkable blond and had left it sixteen hours and ten towels later, looking, in Glodstone’s opinion, like something no bigoted Immigration Officer would let out of the country, never mind allow in.
‘I didn’t tell you to take a bath in the blasted stuff,’ said Glodstone, surveying the filthy brew in the tub and the stained towels. ‘I told you to dye your hair.’
‘I know, sir, but there weren’t any instructions about hair.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’ said Glodstone who wished now that he had supervised the business instead of protecting his reputation as a non-consenting adult by having tea in the lounge. ‘What did it say on the bottle?’
‘It was a powder, sir, and I followed what they said to do for wool.’
‘Wool?’
Peregrine groped for a sodden and practically illegible piece of paper. ‘I tried to find hair but all they had down was polyester/cotton mixtures, heavy-duty nylon, acetate, rayon and wool, so I chose wool. I mean, it seemed safer. All the other ones said to simmer for ten minutes.’
‘Dear Lord,’ said Glodstone, and grabbed the paper. It was headed ‘DYPERM, The Non-Fade All-Purpose Dye’. By the time he had deciphered the instructions, he looked despairingly round the room again. ‘Non-Fade All-Purpose’ was about right. Even the bathmat was indelibly dyed with footprints. ‘I told you to get hair-dye, not something suitable for ties, batik and macramé. It’s a miracle you’re still alive. This muck’s made for blasted washing-machines.’
‘But they only had stuff called Hair Rinse at the chemist and that didn’t seem much use so I—’
‘I know, I know what you did,’ said Glodstone. ‘The thing is, how the devil do we explain these towels … Good God! It’s even stained the shower curtains, and they’re plastic. I wouldn’t have believed it possible. And how on earth did it get up the wall like that? You must have been spraying the filth all over the room.’
‘That was when I had a shower afterwards, sir. It said rinse thoroughly and I did in the shower and some got in my mouth so I spat it out. It tasted blooming horrible.’
‘It smells singularly foul too,’ said Glodstone gloomily. ‘If you’ll take my advice, you’ll empty that bath and try to get the stain off the enamel with some Vim, and then have another bath in clean water.’
And retreating to the bar for several pink gins, he left Peregrine to do what he could to make himself look less like something the Race Relations Board would find hard to qualify. In the event DYPERM didn’t live up to its promise and Peregrine came down to dinner unrecognizable but at least moderately unstained except for his hair and eyebrows.
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said Glodstone. ‘All the same, I think it best to get you on the most crowded ferry tomorrow and hope to hell you’ll pass in a crowd. I’ll tell the manager here you had an accident with a bottle of ink.’
‘Yes, sir, and what do I do when I get to France?’ asked
Peregrine.
‘See a doctor if you feel at all peculiar,’ said Glodstone.
‘No, I mean where do I go?’
‘We’ll buy you a rail ticket through to Armentières and you’ll book into the hotel nearest the station and be sure not to leave it except to go to the station every two hours. I’ll try to make it across Belgium as fast as I can. And remember this, if you are stopped at Calais, my name must not be mentioned. Invent some story about always wanting a trip to France and pinching the passport yourself.’
‘You mean lie, sir?’
Glodstone’s fork, halfway to his mouth, hovered a moment and returned to his plate. Peregrine’s peculiar talent for taking everything he was told literally was beginning to unsettle him. ‘If you must put it like that, yes,’ he said with an awful patience. ‘And stop calling me “sir”. We’re not at school now and one slip of the tongue could give the game away. From now on I’ll call you Bill and you can address me as … er … Patton.’
‘Yes, si … Patton,’ said Peregrine.
Even so, it was a worried Glodstone who went to bed that night and who, after an acrimonious discussion with the hotel manager on the matter of towels, took the Dover road next morning with Peregrine beside him. With understandable haste, he booked him as William Barnes on the ferry and by train to Armentières and then hurried away before the ship sailed. For the rest of the day, he lay on the cliff above the terminal scanning returning passengers through his binoculars in the hope that Peregrine wouldn’t be among them. In between whiles, he checked his stores of tinned food, the camping-gas stove and saucepan, the hamper and the two sleeping-bags and tent. Finally, he taped the revolvers to the springs below the seats and, unscrewing the ends of the tent-poles, hid the ammunition inside them. And as the weather was good, and there was no sign of Peregrine being dragged ashore by Immigration Officers, his spirits rose.
‘After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ he replied tritely to a gull that shrieked above him. In the clear summer air he could see the coastline of France faint on the horizon. Tomorrow he’d be there. That evening, while Peregrine struggled to explain to the desk clerk that he wanted a room at the hotel in Armentières and Slymne drove desperately towards Ivry-La-Bataille, Glodstone dined at a country pub and then went down to the ferry terminal to confirm his booking to Ostend next morning.
‘Did you say your name was Glodstone, sir?’ enquired the clerk.
‘I did,’ said Glodstone, and was alarmed when the man excused himself and went to another office with an odd look on his face. A more senior official with an even odder look came out.
‘If you’ll just come this way, Mr Glodstone,’ he said mournfully, and opened the door of a small room.
‘What for?’ said Glodstone, now thoroughly worried.
‘I’m afraid I have some rather shocking news for you, sir. Perhaps if you took a seat …’
‘What shocking news?’ said Glodstone, who had a shrewd idea what he was in for.
‘It concerns your wife, sir.’
‘My wife?’
‘Yes, Mr Glodstone. I’m sorry to have to tell you—’
‘But I haven’t got a wife,’ said Glodstone, fixing the man with his monocle.
‘Ah, then you know already,’ said the man. ‘You have my most profound sympathy. I lost my own three years ago. I know just how you must feel.’
‘I very much doubt if you do,’ said Glodstone, whose feelings were all over the place. ‘In fact, I’d go as far as to say you can’t.’
But the man was not to be denied his compassion. The years behind the booking counter had given him the gift of consoling people. ‘Perhaps not,’ he murmured. ‘As the Bard says, marriages are made in heaven and we must all cross that bourne from which no traveller returns.’
He cast a watery eye at the Channel but Glodstone was in no mood for multiple misquotations. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know where you got this idea that I’m married because I’m not, and since I’m not, I’d be glad to hear how I can have lost my wife.’
‘But you are Mr G. P. Glodstone booked for the Ostend boat tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes. And what’s more, there isn’t any Mrs Glodstone and never has been.’
‘That’s odd,’ said the man. ‘We had a message from Calais just now for a Mr Glodstone, saying his wife had died, and you’re the only Mr Glodstone on any of the booking lists. I’m exceedingly sorry to have distressed you.’
‘Yes, well since you have,’ said Glodstone, who was beginning to find the message even more sinister than the actual death of any near relative, ‘I’d like to hear who sent it.’
The man went back into the office and phoned through to Calais. ‘Apparently a man came in speaking French with a strong English accent and wanted to find out on which ferry you were crossing,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t speak English and the clerk there wouldn’t tell him where you were landing, so the man said to tell you your wife had died.’
‘Did the clerk describe the man?’
‘I didn’t ask him and frankly, since …’
But Glodstone’s monocle had its effect and he went back to the phone. He returned with the information that the man had disappeared as soon as he’d delivered the message.
Glodstone had made up his mind. ‘I think I’ll change my booking,’ he said. ‘Is there any space on tonight’s ferries?’
‘There’s some on the midnight one, but—’
‘Good. Then I’ll take it,’ said Glodstone, maintaining his authority, ‘and on no account is that fellow to be given any information about my movements.’
‘We don’t make a habit of handing out information of that sort,’ said the man. ‘I take great exception to the very idea.’
‘And I take exception to being told that a wife I don’t have has just died,’ said Glodstone.
At midnight, he took the ferry and was in Belgium before dawn. As he drove out of the docks, Glodstone kept his eyes skinned for any suspicious watchers but the place was dark and empty. Of one thing, Glodstone was now certain. La Comtesse had not been exaggerating the brilliant criminal intelligence he was up against. That they knew he was coming was proof enough of that. There was also the terrible possibility that the message had been a warning.
‘If they touch one hair of her head,’ Glodstone muttered ferociously, and adjusted his goggles as the Bentley ate the miles towards Iper and the obscure frontier crossing beyond it.
10
‘Gosh, it’s good to see you, sir … I mean Patton, sir,’ said Peregrine when the Bentley drew up outside the railway station that morning. Glodstone peered at him from behind his one-eyed goggles, and had to admit that he was fairly pleased to see Peregrine. He was terribly tired, had had no sleep for twenty-four hours and the border crossing Slymne had chosen for him had been so obscure that he’d spent several hours trying to find it.
‘I’ll get some breakfast while you fetch your kit from the hotel,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to be delayed here too long. So step lively. You see, they know I’m coming but that you’re with me they do not know.’
And with this strangely accurate remark, Glodstone climbed down and entered a café where, to his disgust, he was forced to make do with café au lait and croissants. Half an hour later the Bentley, which had attracted a disconcerting number of vintage car buffs around it, was once more on the road.
‘We’ve stolen a march on them so far,’ said Glodstone, ‘but there’s no doubt they know La Comtesse has been in communication with me. Which goes to show she has been badly served. And so, from now on, we must be on our guard and keep our eyes open for anything suspicious.’ And he recounted the story of the man who had visited the booking office at Calais and had left the warning message. ‘Which means they may be holding her against our coming.’
‘Your wife?’ asked Peregrine. ‘I didn’t know you had one.’ For a moment Glodstone took his eye off the road to glare at him and looked back just in time to avoid crushing a herd of cows
that was blocking the way.
‘La Comtesse, you oaf,’ he shouted as the car screeched to a halt.
‘Oh, her,’ said Peregrine. ‘In that case, why did they say your wife was dead?’
To vent his fury and avoid actual violence, Glodstone sounded the horn. Ahead of them, the cows mooched on their way unperturbed. ‘Because,’ said Glodstone, with barely controlled patience, ‘not even the most brazen swine would walk up to a booking clerk and say, “Tell Mr Glodstone that if he comes any further La Comtesse will die.” The last thing they want to do is bring the police in.’
‘No, I suppose they don’t. Still—’
‘And another thing,’ continued Glodstone before Peregrine could send his blood pressure up any further by his obtuseness, ‘the fellow enquired which ferry I was taking, which tells me this: they don’t know I was crossing via Ostend. At least they didn’t last night and it will take them time to find out and by then we must have reached the Château. It’s surprise that counts, so we’ll press on.’
‘When those cows get out of the way,’ said Peregrine. ‘You don’t suppose they’re blocking the road on purpose?’
For a few seconds Glodstone eyed him incredulously. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’
Presently they were able to drive on. As they drove, Glodstone’s mind wrestled with the problem of hotels. La Comtesse had arranged the bookings to enable her to communicate with him en route and if he avoided them and pushed on there was the danger that he might miss a vital message. Against that there was the need for speed. In the end, Glodstone compromised and when they reached Gisors, where he had been scheduled to spend the first night, he sent Peregrine in to cancel the room.