Vintage Stuff

by Tom Sharpe

‘Oh, my God,’ whimpered the Major. He could see now he’d made a terrible mistake.

  22

  The Countess sat in the coffee-lounge in Weymouth waiting for the Bentley to come through Customs. She had sent Peregrine along to the statue of George III and would have made herself scarce too if it hadn’t been for the gold bars. She had bought the Daily Telegraph and had learnt that the assassination of Professor Botwyk was already causing an international furore. Like Slymne, she knew the efficiency of the French police and she was lumbered with two halfwits. Without her to think for them they’d end up in the hands of Scotland Yard and with the American government now involved the FBI would backtrack her to California and through her various aliases to her arrival in the States and Miss Surrey and finally to Selsdon Road and Constance Sugg. She could see how easily it would be done. Anthony at Groxbourne, the missing revolvers – she’d made a terrible mistake there – Glodstone’s account of her ‘letters’ and Peregrine’s pride in being such a good shot … Worst of all, whoever had set her up had done a spectacular job.

  Once again she cursed men. All her life she had had to fight to maintain her independence and now just when she had it all made to be her quiet suburban self she was being forced to think ruthlessly. And think she did. By the time the Bentley nosed off the ferry, she had made up her mind. She got up and walked down the road where Glodstone could see her and waited for him.

  ‘No problems with Customs?’ she enquired as she climbed in behind him.

  ‘No,’ said Glodstone glumly. ‘Where’s Peregrine?’

  ‘By the statue. He can wait. You and me are going to have a quiet talk.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘This,’ said the Countess, and put the newspaper on his lap.

  ‘What’s it say?’ said Glodstone, almost killing a pedestrian on a zebra crossing in his anxiety to get away.

  ‘Nothing much. Just that the French government have assured the State Department that the killers of Professor Botwyk will be caught and brought to justice. The Russians appear to be taking a dim view too. Apparently your boyfriend shot their delegate as well, which must confuse the issue more than somewhat.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Glodstone, and turned down a side street and stopped. ‘What on earth possessed you to write those bloody letters?’

  ‘Keep moving. I’ll tell you when to stop.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘No buts. You do what I say or I’m cutting loose and calling the first cop I spot and you and Master C-B will be facing an extradition order inside a week. Turn right here. There’s a parking lot round the corner.’

  Glodstone pulled in and switched off and looked at her haggardly.

  ‘Firstly, I didn’t write those letters,’ said the Countess, ‘and I want to see them. Where did you stash them?’

  ‘Stash them? I didn’t. You told me to burn them and that’s what I did.’

  The Countess breathed a sigh of relief. But she wasn’t showing it. ‘So you’ve no proof they ever existed?’

  Glodstone shook his head. He was almost too tired and frightened to speak.

  ‘Well, get this straight. You can think what you like but if you seriously imagine I needed rescuing you’ve got to be insane. Right now, you’re the one in need of a rescue operation and with what you’ve got between the ears that’s not going to be easy. Every cop in Europe is going to be hot on your trail before the day is out.’

  Glodstone dragged his mind out of its stupor. ‘But no one knows we were at the Château and …’

  ‘Whoever wrote those letters does, doesn’t he just. You’ve been set up, and a little anonymous call to the police is all it’s going to take to have you in the net. You haven’t a plastic bag’s hope in hell of getting away. One glass eye, this old banger and a youth with an IQ of fifty. You were made for identification and if you ask me that’s why you were chosen.’

  Glodstone gazed at a bowling green and saw only policemen, court rooms, lawyers and judges and the rest of his life in a French prison. ‘What do you suggest we do?’ he asked.

  ‘You do. Count me out. I don’t mind thinking for you but that’s as far as it goes. First off, I’d say your best bet is to do a Lord Lucan but I don’t suppose you’ve got the money or the friends. And anyway, that still leaves that juvenile mobster on the loose. What’s his background?’

  Glodstone told her.

  ‘Then one eminent solicitor is in for a very nasty shock,’ said the Countess when he’d finished, ‘though from what I’ve seen of his offspring I’d say he’d been cuckolded or his wife had a craving for lumps of lead when she was pregnant. Doesn’t make your situation any cosier. Mr Clyde-Browne’s going to have his son plead insanity and hurl the book at you.’

  ‘What on earth can I do then?’ whimpered Glodstone.

  The Countess hesitated. If she suggested going to the police he might just do it and she wasn’t having that. ‘Isn’t there any place you can hang out for a few days and nobody ever comes?’

  Glodstone tried to concentrate. ‘I’ve got a cousin near Malvern,’ he said, ‘she may be away and anyway, she’d put us up.’

  ‘Until the police came. Think, for Chrissake. Think where you wouldn’t go.’

  ‘Margate,’ said Glodstone suddenly, ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead there.’

  ‘Then that’s where you’ll go,’ said the Countess, with the private thought that he probably would be seen dead there. ‘And buy a pair of dark glasses and shave your moustache. And if I were you I’d sell treasure here to the first dealer you can find.’

  ‘Sell the Bentley?’ said Glodstone. It was the final straw. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘In that case, stew in a French hoosegow for the rest of your natural. You don’t seem to know what your prospects are. Well, I’m telling you. They’re zero minus forty. Permafrost all the way to the Judgement Day. Amen.’

  ‘Oh God. Oh God! How did this ever happen? It’s too horrible to be real.’

  For a moment the Countess felt a twinge of pity for him. The world was full of people like Glodstone who played at life and only discovered reality when it kicked them in the face. ‘Roast lamb and abattoirs,’ she said inconsequentially, and was surprised when he picked up the message.

  ‘Or to the slaughter.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Think about it. You go and fetch Butch Cassidy. On foot. If I’m not here when you get back, stay at the Marine Hotel in Margate and register as Mr Cassidy. I’ll call you there.’

  ‘Is there a Marine Hotel in Margate?’

  ‘If there isn’t, choose one with two AA stars and I’ll call them all.’

  Glodstone trudged disconsolately from the car park and found Peregrine eating an ice-cream and studying some girls in bikinis with an almost healthy interest. When they returned to the car the Countess had vanished. She was sitting in the bus station waiting for one that would take her to Bournemouth and from there she’d catch a train to London.

  ‘I don’t trust that woman,’ said Peregrine grimly.

  ‘You’d better,’ said Glodstone. ‘She’s all that stands between us and the reintroduction of the guillotine.’

  *

  ‘I tell you the whole thing was a joke,’ said the Major, ‘I did not drop by parachute so I don’t know where it’s buried.’ He was standing by the roadside surrounded by armed gendarmes. Nobody else thought it was a joke.

  ‘Monsieur chooses to play games with us,’ said the Commissaire. ‘Ah well, we too can play games. Back to the station.’

  ‘Now hang on,’ said the Major, ‘I don’t know what Glodstone’s done but …’

  ‘Glodstone? Who is this Glodstone?’

  ‘Hasn’t Slymne told you? I thought …’

  ‘What did you think? No, I want to hear from you what this man Glodstone is.’

  Major Fetherington told him. He wasn’t going through Slymne’s experience before he cracked and obviously Glodstone had asked for it.
/>   ‘It fits the description of the one who called himself Pringle,’ said the Inspector when he had finished, ‘but he rescued Botwyk. Why should he then shoot him?’

  ‘Who knows why the English do things? Only the good God knows that. In the meantime, put out a full alert for him. All airports, frontier posts, everywhere.’

  ‘Do we ask Scotland Yard?’

  Commissaire Ficard hesitated. ‘I’ll have to check with Paris first. And I want these two grilled for every bit of information they’ve got. They must have known more about the operation than they’ve admitted so far or they wouldn’t be down here.’

  He drove off in a hurry and the Major was shoved into the back of a van and taken back to Boosat. For the rest of the day he sat answering questions and at the end of it no one was any the wiser. Inspector Roudhon made his report to an incredulous Commissaire.

  ‘An adventure? The Countess wrote to him asking to be rescued? He came down in an ancient Bentley? And they come looking for a boy called Peregrine Clyde-Browne because his father wanted him back? What sort of madness is this?’

  ‘It’s what the other one, Slymne, told us.’

  ‘So they had a ready-made story. We have a major political assassination to deal with and you expect me to believe it was carried out by an English schoolteacher who …’ He was interrupted by the telephone. When he put it down, Commissaire Ficard no longer knew what to think.

  ‘A man answering that description and driving a Bentley crossed from Cherbourg this morning. Ticket made out in the name of Glodstone. I’ll inform Paris. They can decide how to play it from now on. I am a policeman, not a bloody politician.’

  ‘What shall we do with these two?’

  ‘Put them in a cell together and tape every single word they say. Better still, install a video camera. If they pass messages I want to know. In any case, it’s the sort of thing that’ll impress the Americans. They’re flying ten anti-terrorist specialists in from Frankfurt, and they’re going to need some convincing.’

  Slymne was still gibbering when they came for him. He was too feeble to resist and what he said made even less sense than before but they carried him down the passage and put him in a larger cell.

  ‘God Almighty,’ said the Major when he was led in too. ‘You poor sod. What did the buggers do to you, use electrodes on your bollocks or something?’

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ squealed Slymne, squinting at him.

  ‘I don’t intend to, old boy. Count me out. All I do know is that Glodstone’s got something coming to him.’

  *

  In his hotel room in Margate, Glodstone looked at himself in the mirror. Without his moustache and wearing dark glasses he did look different. He also looked a great deal older. Not that that would help matters in the slightest if they caught him. He’d be over eighty by the time he was released – if they ever bothered to let people out who had been partly responsible for assassinating American political advisers. He rather doubted it. He was also extremely dubious about having followed the Countess’s advice but he’d been too exhausted and numb with terror the day before to be able to think for himself. And Peregrine had been no help. He’d made matters worse by wanting to lie low in a hole in a hedge like the man in Rogue Male.

  ‘Nobody would think of looking there,’ he’d said, ‘and when it’s all blown over …’

  ‘It isn’t going to blow over, damn you,’ said Glodstone, ‘and anyway, we’d come out stinking like a couple of ferrets with BO.’

  ‘Not if we found somewhere near a stream and bought some soap. We could stock up with tins of food and dig a really deep burrow and no one would ever know.’

  ‘Except every farmer in the district. Anyway, cub-hunting’s coming up shortly and I’m not going to be chased across country by a pack of hounds or earthed up. Use your loaf.’

  ‘I still don’t think we should do what that woman said. She could have been lying.’

  ‘And I suppose you think the Daily Telegraph’s lying too,’ said Glodstone. ‘She told us it was an international gathering and she was bloody-well right.’

  ‘Then why did she write you those letters? She asked us to—’

  ‘She didn’t. Can’t you see that? They were forgeries and we’ve been framed. And so’s she.’

  ‘I can’t see why. I mean …’

  ‘Because if we’re caught and we say she wrote those letters she can’t prove she didn’t.’

  ‘But you burnt them.’

  Glodstone sighed, and wished to hell he hadn’t. ‘She didn’t know that. That’s how I knew she was telling the truth. She hadn’t a clue about the damned things. And if she’d been going to do us down she’d have gone to the police when she went off to get petrol. Surely that told you something?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Peregrine, only to bring up the question of the revolvers. ‘The Major’s going to be jolly angry when he finds they’re missing from the Armoury,’ he said.

  Glodstone stifled the retort that what Major Fetherington felt was the least of their problems. If the damned man hadn’t trained Peregrine to be such an efficient killer they might not have been in this terrible mess. And mess was putting it mildly. Their fingerprints were all over the Château, the French police must be looking for an Englishman with a glass eye, and even if they’d had the revolvers to put back, the forensic experts could easily match them with the bullet that had killed Professor Botwyk. Finally, what made it insane to imagine they could resume their old lives or pretend they’d never been to France was what the Countess had said; whoever had set them up would undoubtedly drop the word to the police. After all, it would pay the bastard to. He hadn’t killed anyone and they had, and it would get him off the hook. And only the Countess could save their necks – if she chose.

  So Glodstone had driven to London, had changed his travellers’ cheques and, leaving the Bentley with a reputable dealer in vintage cars with orders to sell as soon as he received the registration and licence papers, had caught the train to Margate. Peregrine had travelled in a separate carriage and he’d found himself a room in a guest-house. Glodstone spent half an hour changing and shaving in a public lavatory and had booked into the first two-star hotel to have a spare room. He hadn’t been out since. Instead, he had hung about the bar, had watched the news on TV and had read the latest report in the papers of the terrorist attack in France. But for the most part he had stayed in his room in an abyss of self-pity and terror. Life couldn’t be like this. He wasn’t a criminal; he’d always detested murderers and terrorists; the police were always right and they should never have stopped hanging. All that was changed and he was particularly grateful that capital punishment had been abolished in France. He’d lost faith in the police too. It had been all very well to talk about going outside the law but now that he was there he knew no self-respecting policeman who would believe his story and if he did, it would make not the slightest difference. And being inside meant just that. Whatever some damn fool poet had said about stone walls and iron bars, Glodstone knew better. They made prisons, and French ones at that. He’d never have a chance to urge his house on at rugger or knock a ball about in the nets again and the train set in the basement … He’d be known as Glodstone the Murderer and go down in the school infamy as Groxbourne’s equivalent of Dr Crippen. And how Slymne would gloat … He was just plumbing this new hell when the phone rang beside his bed.

  Glodstone picked it up and listened to a now familiar voice.

  ‘My, my, brother John, it’s just taken me for ages to reach you.’

  ‘Yes, well, the thing was …’ Glodstone began before the Countess cut him short. She was thinking about girls on switchboards.

  ‘I’m down by the pier so meet me there in five minutes and we’ll have ourselves some lunch. Alone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Glodstone. The phone went dead. With as much nonchalance as he could muster, he walked downstairs and out into the sunshine. The promenade was crowded with the sort of people he would normally have a
voided at all costs, but today he was grateful for their presence. The Countess had known what she was doing when she had picked on Margate. All the same, he approached the pier cautiously, horribly conscious that he might be walking into a trap.

  But the Countess was sitting on a bench and rose as he came up. ‘Darling,’ she said to his surprise, and put her arm through his. ‘Gee, it’s just marvellous to see you again.’

  She dragged him across the road and down a side street to a car. ‘Where’s Peregrine?’ she asked as they got in.

  ‘In the amusement park probably, shooting things,’ said Glodstone. ‘It’s called Dreamland.’

  ‘Appropriately,’ said the Countess. ‘Right, so that’s where he stays temporarily while I debrief you.’

  ‘Debrief me?’ said Glodstone, uncertain after that ‘Darling’ how to interpret the word.

  ‘Like with astronauts, and guys that have been taken prisoner. Somewhere along the line there’s got to be a connection.’

  ‘Between what?’ said Glodstone, more confused than ever.

  ‘Between you and me. Mister Letter Writer. Someone who wanted to screw us both and succeeded. Go back over those letters again. Was there anything peculiar about them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Glodstone vehemently, ‘there bloody-well was. They …’

  ‘No, sweetheart, you’re not reading me. Did you see where they were posted?’

  ‘In France. Definitely in France and in your envelopes. The ones with the crest on the back.’

  ‘And in my handwriting. You said all that but how could you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I’ve got your other letters to me about Anthony’s allergies and whatnot. The handwriting was identical.’

  ‘So that puts it back in my court. Now what did they say, and I mean exactly.’

  As she drove slowly out of town Glodstone went through the details of the letters and their instructions with a total recall born of fear.

  ‘Hotels you were booked into? Crossing via Ostend? Your whole route mapped out for you? And you did just what they said?’