by Tom Sharpe
‘Explain that I’ve been taken ill and won’t be coming,’ he said, ‘and if there are any messages for me, collect them.’ He parked the Bentley out of sight round the corner and Peregrine went into the hotel. He was back in five minutes. ‘The manager spoke English,’ he said.
‘So the blighter should. After all we’ve saved them from the Hun in two World Wars and a fat lot of thanks we’ve had for it. Bloody butter mountains and wine lakes and the confounded Common Market,’ said Glodstone, who had been looking forward to a short nap. ‘And no message or letter for me?’
Peregrine shook his head and Glodstone started the Bentley again. All day, the great car ate the miles and a vast quantity of petrol, but Glodstone pushed along the side roads of Slymne’s tortuous route. It was afternoon by the time they came to Ivry-La-Bataille and Glodstone was able to totter into the hotel and remove his goggles. ‘I believe you have a room reserved for me. The name is Glodstone,’ he said in French that was a shade less excruciating than Slymne’s and infinitely more comprehensible than Peregrine’s.
‘But yes, monsieur. Number Four.’
Glodstone took the key and then paused. ‘Has any message come for me?’
The clerk looked through a stash of envelopes until he came to the familiar crest. ‘This was delivered this afternoon, monsieur.’
Glodstone took the letter and tore it open. Five minutes later the key to his room was back on the board and Glodstone had left. ‘You can stop bringing the baggage in,’ he told Peregrine, ‘La Comtesse has sent a message.’
‘A message?’ said Peregrine eagerly.
‘Shut up and get in,’ said Glodstone, casting a suspicious eye round the street, ‘I’ll explain while we go.’
‘Well?’ said Peregrine when they were clear of the little town.
‘Take a good look at that,’ said Glodstone, and handed him the letter.
‘It’s from the Countess, asking you on pain of her death not to come,’ he said when he had read it through.
‘In that case why was it delivered by a man with an English accent who refused to speak English? In short, our friend who left the warning at Calais. And another thing, you’ve only to compare her handwriting with that of the earlier letters to see that the devils have tortured her into writing it.’
‘Good Lord, you mean—’ began Peregrine. But Glodstone’s mind had already fabricated a number of new conclusions. ‘Just this, that they know the route we’re following and where we’re going to stay the night, which may be to their liking but doesn’t suit my book.’
‘Which book?’ asked Peregrine, browsing through a mental library from The Thirty-nine Steps to The Day of the Jackal with more insight into the workings of Glodstone’s mind than he knew.
Glodstone ignored the remark. He was too busy planning a new strategy. ‘The thing is to put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we’re being watched or waited for. And they know we’ve had that message yet we’re going on. And that will give them pause for thought. You see, we’ve been warned off twice now. I think it’s time we played their game. We’ll turn back at Anet and head for Mantes and there we’ll spend the night. Tomorrow we’ll rest up and tour the sights and then tomorrow night we’ll take the road again as soon as it is dark and drive for Carmagnac.’
‘I say, that will confuse them,’ said Peregrine as the Bentley turned left across the Eure and headed north again.
*
But Slymne was already confused. Having driven all night to reach Ivry-La-Bataille, he hadn’t dared stay there but had gone on to Dreux. There in a hotel he had penned the letter from La Comtesse and had slept briefly before returning with the ominous message for Glodstone to pick up. After that, he had watched the road from a track and had seen the Bentley go by. With a muttered curse he started his Ford Cortina and followed at a discreet distance in time to see the Bentley cross the bridge and turn a little later onto the Mantes road. For a few minutes Slymne was delighted before it dawned on him that, if Glodstone had intended to give up the expedition, there would have been no need for him to have left the hotel or to have taken the road south in the first place. The natural thing to do would have been to spend the night in Ivry-La-Bataille and head back towards Calais next morning. But Glodstone hadn’t done the natural thing and moreover, to complicate matters, he wasn’t alone. There had been a passenger in the Bentley. Slymne hadn’t been able to glimpse his face but evidently Glodstone had persuaded some other damned romantic to join him on his adventure. Another bloody complication. With a fresh sense of exasperation, he followed the Bentley and wondered what to do next. At least the great car wasn’t difficult to spot and was in fact extremely conspicuous while his own Cortina was relatively anonymous and could easily match the Bentley for speed.
As they reached the outskirts of Mantes, Slymne made another plan. If Glodstone left the town travelling north, well and good, but if he turned south, Slymne would drive for the Château and be ready to take action before Glodstone could get to see the Countess. What action he would take he had no idea, but he would have to think of something. In the event, he was forced to think of other things. Instead of leaving Mantes, the Bentley pulled up outside a hotel. Slymne turned into a side street. Five minutes later, the Bentley had been unloaded and then driven into the hotel garage.
Slymne shuddered. Obviously Glodstone was spending the night but there was no telling when he would leave next morning and the idea of staying awake in case the blasted man decided to make a dawn start was not in the least appealing. Slymne wasn’t remaining where he was in a side street. Glodstone might, and, by all the laws of nature, must be exhausted but he was still capable of taking a stroll round the neighbourhood before going to bed and would, if he saw it, immediately recognize the Cortina. Slymne started the car and drove back the way he had come before stopping and wondering what the hell to do next. He couldn’t send yet another message from the Countess. Unless the old cow possessed second sight she couldn’t know where Glodstone had got to, and anyway letters didn’t travel several hundred miles in a couple of hours.
Slymne consulted the map and found no comfort in it. All roads might lead to Rome, but Mantes was a contender when it came to roads leading from it. There was even a motorway running into Paris which they had driven under on the way into town. Slymne dismissed it. Glodstone loathed motorways and if he did turn south again his inclination would be to stick to minor roads. By watching the intersection on the outskirts of the town he would be in a position to follow if Glodstone took one. But the ‘if’ was too uncertain for Slymne’s liking and in any case following was insufficient. He had to stop the idiot from reaching the Château with those damning letters.
Slymne drove on until he found a café and spent the next hour gloomily having supper and cursing the day he had ever gone to Groxbourne and even more vehemently the day he had set up this absurd plan. ‘Must have been mad,’ he muttered to himself over a second brandy, and then, having paid the bill, went beck to his car and consulted the map again. This time his attention was centred on the district round the Château. If Glodstone continued on his infernal mission he would have to pass through Limoges and Brive or find some tortuous byroads round them. Again Slymne considered Glodstone’s peculiar psychology and decided that the latter course would be more likely. So that put paid to any attempt to stay ahead of the brute. He would have to devise some means of following him.
But for the moment he needed sleep. He found it eventually in a dingy room above the café where he was kept awake by the sound of a jukebox and by obsessive thoughts that Glodstone might already have left his hotel and be driving frantically through the night towards Carmagnac. But when he got up groggily at six and, after drinking several black coffees, walked back into town he was reassured by the sight of the Bentley being washed down by a young man with black hair who looked strangely familiar.
Slymne, passing on the other side of the street, did not linger but went into the first clot
hing shop he could find and emerged wearing a beret and the blue jacket he supposed would make him look like a typical French peasant. For the rest of the day Slymne lurked round corners, in cafés that commanded a view of the hotel, in shop doorways even further down the street, but Glodstone put in no appearance.
He was in fact faced with almost the same dilemma as Slymne. Having driven for twenty-four hours without sleep, he was exhausted and his digestion had taken a pounding from rather too many champignons with his steak the night before. In short, he was in no condition to do any sightseeing and was having second thoughts about La Comtesse’s letter. ‘Clearly the swine forced her to write it,’ he told Peregrine, ‘and yet how did they know we would be staying at Ivry-La-Bataille?’
‘Probably tortured her until she told them,’ said Peregrine. ‘I mean, they’re capable of anything.’
‘But she is not,’ said Glodstone, refusing to believe that even a helpless heroine, and a Comtesse at that, would give in to the most fiendish torture. ‘There’s a message for us here if we could read it.’
Peregrine looked at the letter again. ‘But we’ve already read it. It says …’
‘I know what it seems to say,’ snapped Glodstone. ‘What I want to know is what it’s trying to tell us.’
‘To go back to England and if we don’t she’ll be—’
‘Bill, old chap,’ interrupted Glodstone through clenched teeth, ‘what you don’t seem to be able to get into that thick head of yours is that things are seldom what they appear to be. For instance, look at her handwriting.’
‘Doesn’t look bad to me,’ said Peregrine, ‘it’s a bit shaky but if you’ve just been tortured it would be, wouldn’t it? I mean, if they used thumbscrews or red-hot pokers—’
‘Dear God,’ said Glodstone, ‘what I’m trying to tell you is that La Comtesse may have written in a trembling hand with the intention of telling us she is still in trouble.’
‘Yes,’ said Peregrine, ‘and she is, isn’t she? They’re going to kill her if we don’t go back to Dover. She says that.’
‘But does she mean it? And don’t say yes … Well, never mind. She wrote that letter under duress. I’m sure of it. More, if they could murder her with impunity, why haven’t they done so already. Something else is different. In all her previous messages, La Comtesse has told me to burn the letter but here she doesn’t. And there’s our cue. She means us to go on. We’re going to draw their fire. We’ll leave as soon as it’s dark and take the road we would have gone if we’d never read this letter.’
Glodstone got up and went down the corridor to the bathroom with a box of matches. He returned to the room with a fresh wave of euphoria seething up inside him to find Peregrine staring out of the window.
‘I say, Patton,’ he whispered, ‘I’m sure we’re being watched. There’s a Frenchie on the corner and I swear I’ve seen him before somewhere.’
‘Where?’ asked Glodstone, peering down into the street.
‘I don’t know. He just looks like someone I know.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ said Glodstone, ‘I mean where is he now?’
‘He’s gone,’ said Peregrine, ‘but he’s been hanging about all day.’
‘Good,’ said Glodstone with a nasty smile. ‘Two can play that game. Tonight we’ll be followed and so we’ll go armed. I’d like to hear what our watcher has to tell us. And let me know if you spot him again.’
*
But Slymne did not put in another appearance. He had had an appalling day and his feeling about thriller-writers was particularly violent. The sods ought to try their hands at skulking about French towns pretending to be peasants and attempting to keep a watch on a hotel before they wrote so glibly about such things. His feet were sore, the pavements hard, the weather was foully hot and he had drunk more cups of black coffee than were good for his nervous system. He had also been moved on by several shopkeepers who objected to being stared at for half an hour at a time by a shifty man wearing dark glasses and a beret. He’d also had the problem of avoiding the street outside the hotel and this meant that he had to walk down a back-alley, along another street and up a third to vary the corners from which he watched. All in all Slymne made a rough calculation that he must have trudged fifteen miles during the course of the day. And for all his pains he had learnt nothing except that Glodstone hadn’t left the hotel, or if he had, he hadn’t used the Bentley.
And it was the Bentley that most interested Slymne. As he wandered the streets or stared so menacingly into shop windows, his mind, hyped by too much caffeine, tried to devise ways of following the car without keeping it in sight. In books it was quite simple. Reality was something else again. So were boys. On the other hand, if he could only bring the Bentley to a halt in some lonely spot, Glodstone would have to leave the car and go for help. Slymne remembered the time when an enterprising fourteen-year-old at Groxbourne had stuffed a potato up the exhaust pipe of the Art master’s car to such good effect that the man had had to have it towed away and the engine stripped before anyone had found out what was wrong. And there had been talk of another master’s car which had been wrecked before the war by adding sugar to its petrol tank. Inspired by these memories, Slymne went into a café and ordered a calvados. Under its influence, and that of a second, he reversed his order of priorities. If Glodstone started south again, Slymne could stay ahead of him by sticking to the main roads. But not in the Cortina. One glimpse of its number plate would give the game away.
Slymne left the café in search of a garage where he could hire a car. Having found one, he moved his luggage from the Cortina to a Citroën, bought two kilos of sugar, another kilo of nails, several large cans of oil at different garages, and parked near the hotel. If Glodstone left that night, he was in for a nasty surprise. Wearily he looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock. He would give Glodstone until midnight. But at ten-thirty the Bentley’s bonnet poked cautiously from the garage, paused for a moment and then swung south. Slymne let it go and when it had turned the corner started the car and moved after it. Five minutes later he watched it turn onto the Anet road. Slymne put his foot down, doing ninety on the N183, and before Glodstone could have entered the Forêt de Dreux, the Citroën was six kilometres ahead of him.
11
In the event, he need not have hurried. Glodstone was taking his time. Twice he had turned down side roads and switched off his lights.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘I want to give them a chance to go by. They’ve been waiting to see what we’re going to do and they’ll follow. But they won’t know which road we’ve taken and they’ll have to look.’
‘Yes, but when they don’t find us, won’t they watch the roads ahead?’ asked Peregrine who was enjoying himself unstrapping the revolvers from their hiding places beneath the seats.
Glodstone shook his head. ‘They may later on, but for the moment they’ll assume we’re travelling fast. I mean, they would if they were in our shoes. But we’ll move slowly. And France is a big country. If we lose them here they’ll have a thousand roads to search much further south. And here, I think, they come.’
‘How do you know?’ whispered Peregrine as a Jaguar shot past the side road. Glodstone started the Bentley.
‘Because French headlights are yellow and those were white,’ he said, ‘and if I’m not mistaken, our Englishman at Calais is the link man. He’s probably above suspicion too. Some wealthy member of the Bar whose club is White’s and who moves in the best circles. Now a Jag may be a shade too flashy in London but it’ll do very well in France for speed.’
And with this pleasing invention Glodstone drove the Bentley out into the road and turned sedately after the disappearing tail lights.
*
In the Forêt de Dreux, Slymne completed his preparations. He had chosen the end of a long straight with a right corner on it for his ambush, had parked his car on a track well out of sight round the bend, and was ready to swill a can of oil on the road as soon as he saw the Bentley’s he
adlights. It was a desperate measure but Slymne was a desperate and partially drunk man and the memory of being called Slimey had inspired him with a grim determination. Glodstone had to be stopped, and quickly. As he waited, Slymne made some further calculations. The Bentley would slow before the bend, would then hit the oil slick and skid. Slymne considered its next move and decided that a log in the road would help. He found a fallen branch and had just put it down when the headlights appeared. Slymne emptied the can of oil and crossed the road to be on the safe side. There he lay in the forest waiting for his man.
In the event, he was proved wrong. It was less a man than an entire family, Mr and Mrs Blowther from Cleethorpes and their two children, who were enjoying the privilege afforded by straight French roads of travelling at a hundred miles an hour in their brand-new Jaguar when they hit the oil slick. For a moment they continued on their way. It was a brief respite. A second later the car slewed sideways. Mr Blowther, under the misapprehension that both his front tyres had blown, slammed his foot on the brake. The Jaguar spun like a whirling dervish before encountering the branch and then somersaulted through the air. As it landed on its roof and with a crescendo of breaking glass and tearing metal shot upside-down round the corner, Slymne knew he had made a ghastly mistake and was running for the car. Or trying to. After the brilliance of the now shattered headlights, the forest was pitch black and filled with an extraordinary number of hollows, barbed bushes and invisible trees. As he came abreast of the wrecked car the Blowthers, still miraculously alive, were crawling from the windscreen and giving vent to their outraged feelings. Mr Blowther, convinced that the fallen branch had caused the catastrophe, was particularly vehement about fornicating French foresters and flaming fir trees, and only stopped when Mrs Blowther more maternally began moaning about saving the children.