by Gavin Lyall
‘My secretary, Miss Helen Jarman.’ He stood there, waiting for me to say something else. All I could tell of him in the dark was that he was a square, solid man in a dark coat, no hat, and the glint of spectacles. His voice had a flat, metallic tone like a bad dictaphone.
Somebody else crunched up the shingle and stopped beside Maganhard. ‘Is everything all right?’
A clear, cool, and unmistakably English voice. Nobody could ever imitate that upper-crust-girls’-school accent. Or perhaps nobody ever wanted to.
She looked fairly tall, with dark hair and a dark coat that glistened softly in the rain.
Maganhard said: ‘I believe so. Has our luggage come?’
She looked back and a sailor arrived carrying two cases. Maganhard tramped past us over the shingle bank. Harvey patted me on the shoulder, and took two fast steps to arrive just behind Maganhard’s right shoulder, just where a bodyguard should be.
I tagged on behind the procession, just where a chauffeur should be.
The sailor dumped the two cases, both expensive solid-looking lumps of horsehide, into the boot of the Citroen. He got a nod from Maganhard and headed back over the bank.
Harvey was standing beside Maganhard, looking out into the night but at the same time making sure he was blocking the most likely lines of fire at Maganhard. Shooting back is only the second half of a bodyguard’s job: the first half is trying to be in the way of any bullets.
I asked: ‘Where d’you want to sit, Harvey?’
‘Up front.’
The girl said: ‘Mr Maganhard may wish to sit there.’
‘He might,’ I agreed, ‘in which case he’ll be disappointed. Harvey arranges the seating.’
Maganhard said: ‘Mr Lovell – you are the bodyguard?’
Harvey said: ‘Yes.’
‘I told Monsieur Merlin I did not need a bodyguard. A driver would have been quite enough. I do not like shooting.’
‘Don’t like it myself,’ Harvey said evenly, still watching outwards. ‘But just you and me don’t make a majority.’
‘Nobody is trying to kill me,’ Maganhard said. ‘That is just Monsieur Merlin’s idea. The only danger is in being stopped by the police.’
I said: ‘I had that theory, too. But when we picked up the car tonight in Quimper, there was a dead man in it.’
The rain pattered softly on the roof of the warm, dry car beside us.
Then Maganhard said: ‘You mean killed? ‘
‘I mean killed. I imagine he was the man who was supposed to deliver the car to us.’
The girl said: ‘Dead inthis car?’
‘Only the front seat. And he isn’t even there any more.’
‘What did you do with him?’
I didn’t answer. Maganhard said: ‘Do you really wish to know what these men do with the bodies, my dear?’ But I wasn’t sure his heart was in the crack.
Harvey said wearily: ‘If we’re ever getting into the car, I want Maganhard behind me, on the right.’
They got in, and even into the right places, without arguing. So maybe Maganhard was a little shaken, at that.
Past Tréguennec I turned on the headlights. But I wasn’t even out of second gear yet: I didn’t want to leave any impression of hurrying. Merely coming up from the sea was suspicious enough at that time.
We went through Plonéour-Lanvern and I got into third. The rain spattered steadily on the windscreen and was flipped away by the wipers, leaving a small, unswept patch in the middle. I tried to find a comfortable position leaning over to my left, against the door.
After a while, Harvey said: ‘D’you think they’ll be laying for us in Quimper?’
‘Don’t know. They could be.’
‘Can we dodge it?’
‘Not without a hell of a detour. We’ve got to cross the river, and there’s no bridge below Quimper and nothing for about ten kilometres above it.’
From behind us, Maganhard asked: ‘Why should anybody be waiting for us?’
‘I’m thinking about the man in the car, Mr Maganhard. Somebody knew about him. So perhaps they know about us.’
Maganhard said: ‘They could have followed you or Mr Lovell from Paris.’
‘No.’ I didn’t need to consult Harvey on that one.
Maganhard said crisply: ‘Can you be certain?’
‘We know how to be certain.’
The Citroen scurried along the wide rough road, empty and lonely between the rough dry-stone walls. The Mauser was back in my briefcase, and I’d changed my shoes for a pair of nasty grey moccasins that would be a lot more comfortable on a long drive than the normal hard-heeled jobs.
After a time, Maganhard said: ‘I hope you will try to avoid trouble, rather than attempt to defeat it.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have much choice of routes until we’re out of Brittany – another two hundred kilometres. You were on time, so we may as well make use of that: just move as fast as we can. They may not be quite ready for us.’
I wasn’t sure I believed that myself: somebody had been ready for the driver of the car more than two and a half hours before. But I still didn’t have any choice.
We came down into Quimper. I changed down into second with more of a thump than I’d intended; it takes longer to learn to change down on a strange car than change up. Harvey lifted his elbow off the big arm-rest on the door and felt down by his ankle. We snaked quietly towards the Quai.
Apart from the line of parked cars, it was dead and empty under the rain: a blotchy, shiny tunnel of light from the street lamps half hidden in the trees on the riverside. The Citroën trembled gently across the cobbles.
Then Harvey said: ‘You should have turned right there. You’re on a one-way street the wrong-way.’
‘I know. I hoped they wouldn’t expect that.’
I snapped off the side lights to darken our number plate and pushed gently on the accelerator. We picked up speed. Then we were at the end of the Quai and swinging right across the river – again wrong way on a one-way bridge. Slight swing right, hard left, and we were legal again, accelerating past the station on the N165. I switched on the lights. The town began to dwindle around us.
‘Did anybody see anybody?’ I asked.
Nobody answered. Then Harvey said: ‘I wouldn’t jump anybody in the middle of town, anyhow. Too much publicity. They must be expecting us to shoot back by now: they know we found the guy who was delivering it.’
‘They left us the car, too. So perhaps they just wanted us to get clear of this part of the world.’
We were out of the town by now, and I was up to ninety-five kilometres an hour. In top gear for the first time. Now, we were starting to run.
Maganhard asked suspiciously: ‘Why would they do that?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe they thought one body was enough for one town. You must know more about these people than I do, Mr Maganhard.’
His voice went stiff. ‘You believe I know such people?’
‘It’s you they’re after, not us. We’re here because you’re here.’
‘I am sorry: I do not know any hired gunmen socially. I lead a very narrow life.’
I glanced at Harvey and caught the quick twist of a smile in the backlash of light from the headlamps.
But perhaps there was still something Maganhard could tell me. ‘So you think they’ll be hired gunmen, do you?’
‘I imagine that if, as you and Monsieur Merlin believe, somebody is trying to kill me, then that would be the easiest way.’
I shook my head. ‘Not necessarily. Professional gunmen – real ones – are very rare birds. Most killings arepassionel or just mistakes; the average crook doesn’t like risking a murder charge. You might be able to pick up a pathological case or some doped-up teenager who likes waving a gun around – but they aren’t pros and they won’t do a pro job. To find somebody you can depend on, you’ve got to know France pretty well.’ -Monsieur Merlin found you,’ he pointed out.
‘Merlin knows
France.’ I thought about saying that even so, he’d ended up picking a driver who hadn’t done much of-this sort of thing since the war, and a bodyguard who was at least on the edge of alcoholism. But there’s no point in apologising until the customer starts complaining.
‘But the people who’d be doing the hiring,’ I persisted. ‘Do they know France?’
There was a long pause. Then he said slowly: ‘I am afraid I do not know whois doing the hiring.’
I reached down beside my seat and lowered the car’s hydraulic springing a couple of notches now we were on a reasonably good road. I was holding one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour with the headlights on high beam and the road to ourselves.
The rain came down with the same weary relentlessness. The front and back seat heaters were both going, and with everybody starting off wet, the atmosphere inside had developed like a cosy Turkish bath. But we were moving.
Coming into QuimperléI nearly ended the journey right there, on a downhill left-hand curve that was fast but not as fast as it looked. The front wheels” had a brief moment of forgetfulness, then I lifted my foot, the wheels took more weight, and gripped again. When we were straight again, I glanced at Harvey. He was sitting comfortably, his hands still and relaxed in his lap, not looking at me. Getting on with his job – and leaving me to mine.
In Quimperléitself they were celebrating the start of the tourist season by tearing up the cobblestones into big ragged heaps, but once we were through, the road was open and empty again.
I got out my cigarettes and passed them to Harvey. Without saying anything he lit one, gave it back to me, then lit up one of his own Gitanes.
He smoked quietly for a while, then said: ‘You know, if you don’t want our number to show, I could go back and kick in the lamp.’
I thought about this. ‘No, I don’t think so. The gendarmes would be likely to chase us just to tell us the lamp was out. We want to look clean and law-abiding on the surface.’
He blew smoke into the stream of air from the dashboard fresh-air grille. ‘Yeah, I noticed that on the one-way street back in Quimper.’
‘That was what the generals call a “calculated risk”.’
‘I thought that was just when they won by accident. But if that’s what you want, we should have used a panel truck – small van. Nobody’d suspect that.’
‘They’d suspect the number plate. Any cop would get suspicious of a local delivery van wearing a Paris number out in Brittany or on the Swiss frontier.’
‘Maybe. So we should have got a long-distance truck – acamion.’
‘From where? And I’m nocamion driver.’
For a while he just smoked, using his left hand. He’d got it so that by now he looked naturally left-handed – unless you realised what he was keeping his right free for.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘what I mean is I wish we’d had more time to plan this thing out.’
‘If there’d been more time, we wouldn’t be in it.’
‘I guess so.’ He looked across at the dashboard instruments. ‘When d’you need to get gas?’
‘Not yet.’ The gauge was showing nearly full. ‘I hope we won’t need any until after it gets light – when there’s more stuff on the road.’
‘Sunrise at about five-thirty.’
I raised my eyebrows; I hadn’t even bothered to check the sunrise time, although I should have done. I had to keep remembering that Harvey had been in this sort of game more often and more recently than I had. He had his own problem, of course, but when that wasn’t showing he was a hard, cool, intelligent character.
I looked at him sideways. His face was calm and his hands were still when he wasn’t lifting his cigarette. But his eyes were watching ahead, carefully vetting each wall, house, tree as they grew in the headlights and then ran away behind us, proven innocent.
The car seemed to dwindle around me, fitting more closely, feeling more a part of me. Back-seat passengers don’t breathe down your neck in a big Citroën, and we hadn’t heard a squeak from them in half an hour. They had faded, had become no more weight or individuality than a couple of vague memories. The car was just Harvey and me in a dim cockpit, flickering through the night with the precision of a high-powered bullet.
It was one of those times when you know exactly, canfeel exactly, what the car will do – and the road also. It felt familiar, although it wasn’t. I understood the pattern of it: what it would do next, how tight its bends would be, how steep its slopes.
It happens. And when it happens, you’re right and you’re safe. But it doesn’t last. And you’re never more wrong, more dangerous, than when it’s stopped lasting and you don’t realise it.
The dashboard clock said three-thirty. Two hours to dawn. Sixteen hours to Liechtenstein.
SIX
At four o’clock we were running down a tree-lined avenue into Vannes. It was the biggest town we’d meet for another hour.
‘There’s a Michelin Guide in the pocket in front of you,’ I told Harvey. ‘Look up this place and find me the post office. I want to ring Merlin, if there’s a phone box there.’
‘Why?’
‘He wanted me to keep him in touch. And he may be able to find out something about the shooting in Quimper. It could help.’
After a while he said: ‘Turn right in a moment. Alongside this square. Post office on your right in a couple of hundred yards.’
I drew up and switched off the engine alongside a dark telephone box. The silence was a sudden thing, rushing in on me, making me feel how noisy we must have been moving. Then I shook my head: it was far too early to start getting jumpy on this trip. I stepped out into the rain.
The box was open, and after a while I got the operator to wake up. I asked for Henri’s private Paris number.
It rang several times, then a woman’s voice said sleepily:‘Allo?’
‘Est il possible de parler à Henri? Voici Caneton.’
There was a pause, then: ‘//vous donnera un coup de téléphone dans quelques minutes. Quel est le numéro?’
I gave her the number, hung up, then went back to the car.
‘Didn’t get him yet,’ I told Harvey. ‘He’s ringing back.’ I slid into the front seat and started lighting a cigarette.
Maganhard asked: ‘What are you ringing for?’
‘To tell him what happened to his boy in Quimper. And see if that means anything to him. He might have some suggestions.’
Maganhard’s voice got slightly harder, more metallic. ‘I thought you were an expert?’
‘An expert is a man who knows when to call in experts.’
The phone in the box jangled and I jumped for it.
Henri said:‘Monsieur Caneton?’
‘Hello, Henri. Bad news: your cousin in Brittany is ill, very ill.’
That is bad news. How did it happen?’
‘Suddenly – very suddenly. Anything you think I should do?’
‘Is he – he is well looked after, yes?’
‘He’s okay where he is for a day or two, anyhow.’
Then, perhaps I think you should go on as you go. You are at Vannes?’
‘Yes. I’m just worried that what he’s got might be – infectious. You haven’t heard of any disease he’s been near recently?’
‘I have heard nothing. But now – in the morning – I will ask. You will ring me again?’
‘Sure. Night, Henri.’
‘Au ‘voir, Caneton.’
I got back into the car. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’ I started the engine again. ‘We could turn off here and go for Rennes, then Le Mans and the northern route. But the road isn’t as good. I think we’ll keep going for Nantes.’ A big yellow Berlietcamion growled round the corner ahead and trundled past us, shivering the ground.
Harvey said: ‘Well, let’s roll. The road’ll be full of those things by breakfast.’
The road was straighter and faster now, the farmland around it looked thicker and richer in the headlights. We were almost o
ff the Brittany peninsula.
But the spell had broken. I wasn’t feeling the road as I had been before. We were covering ground, but the magic had gone.
There were occasionalcamions and farm lorries, the spray blowing away from their rear wheels like smoke. I realised we must be trailing a wake like a torpedo boat: nobody had a hope in hell of reading our number plate.
Nobody said anything. Just the flicker of light as Harvey or the girl behind me lit a cigarette. It was the last low hour before the dawn. The time when you know you haven’t built up strength enough for a new day; the time when sick men decide the night has been too long, and give up and die. The time a good gunman knows to lay an ambush.
But nobody did. Soon after five we were winding through the industrial desert of Nantes, by-passing the centre through the northwest suburbs.
Harvey asked: ‘How’s the gas?’
‘Wearing out. But I think we can make Angers. We’ve only done about two hundred and fifty kilometres so far.’
The girl asked: ‘Can we stop to get some breakfast? ‘
‘We’ll get something in Tours.’
‘Why wait till then?’
‘It’s more of a tourist town than anything this side of it: they aren’t so likely to remember strangers.’
We went on. Up the valley of the Loire, on the N23. A good, fast road except where it suddenly twisted into descending turns down to the riverside villages. There was more traffic now; lorries carrying fish up from the sea, others bringing vegetables down from farmlands. And morecamions, carrying whatevercamions carry: Berliets, Somurs, Saviems, Unies, and Willeme tankers. All with the square, solid military look of French Légionnaires -and the same habit of walking over anything that got in their way.
The night began to wear thin around us; the shapes of trees and houses separated from the sky; the headlights grew pallid. Even the rain was thinning out; with the wind behind us, we were probably outrunning the front.
When it was light enough I twisted the rear-view mirror to have my first good look at our passengers.
Maganhard must have been about fifty and in one way he looked it: a heavy square face frozen in a suspicious frown. But the details were missing. The face was quite unmarked, unworn; the hair a thick pure-black mass swept carefully back from a sharp widow’s peak. It looked like a metal sculpture from the twenties or thirties when they got the shape exactly right but made everything smooth and stylized to show that it was Really Art.’