They were quite sorry to part company with the troll-like man at Lewes, or more precisely just outside where the artic stopped at a drivers’ café. It was early yet, but the café was open. Shard had half an eye on breakfast, but a lorry was about to pull out for Newhaven so he took the offered opportunity.
*
It was not going to be a good crossing; Hedge took care to remain in the open air. He sat on a hard wooden bench, glowering at grey water as the ferry came past the end of the breakwater and out towards the open sea. There was already a nasty motion and he could only hope the seasick pills would prove effective. He made a dismal-looking tourist, not happy with his travelling companions, of which many were children and French at that. School parties. The ferry was French too, and appallingly dirty. The children were very badly behaved, racing dangerously about, quite out of control and making a lot of noise. Two of them sat for a while on Hedge’s bench, giggling and making sotto voce remarks about him. Hedge closed his eyes and pretended not to hear. In fact it was unlike French children to make nuisances of themselves, French school discipline was very much better than was to be found in England, where there was none at all. Perhaps, he thought, they were having a last fling or had simply been led into bad ways by contact with the English.
Hedge simmered. When the children ran off, shrieking and yelling, they were replaced by a young couple who, once seated, immediately intertwined themselves just as though they were already in bed. Hedge left them to it and staggered up and down the open deck until he came across another bench, empty, which gave him more privacy. He thumped himself down gloomily. He was furious still at having been sent into the field. He was too senior, it was infra dig. It was all Shard’s fault; if Shard hadn’t gone on about that ridiculous woman in the hippie commune … and all the time he was away trouble was going to be piling up in Whitehall, trouble over dead Asipov. Hedge racked his brains: where, oh where, did Stanislav Asipov fit into the scheme of things? He simply had to have some sort of significance, and there was certainly a possibility that he impinged in some way upon the Foreign Secretary’s visit to Paris.
Hippies, Hedge thought angrily, there were all too many of them aboard the ferry. People who could be hippies, anyway: such curious clothing and an unwashed look, and many of them intertwined even in motion, like the stationary couple on the last bench. It was really disgusting. Two of them were leaning over a rail at the after end of the next deck up, looking down upon him. Filthy though they were, the man’s hair wasn’t as long as one expected of hippies and they were not intertwined, though close. They seemed to be enjoying a joke and Hedge had the feeling he was the cause of it. After a while they drifted away, and a change took place in Hedge’s immediate neighbourhood: an elderly woman got up from the next bench and her place was taken by a middle-aged man wearing a check tweed jacket and dark grey trousers, very respectable-looking with a neat blue striped shirt and dark glasses. He opened a book. He had read no more than a page when a woman came past, looked down at him, and stopped.
“Why, Vicar, what a surprise!”
Confusion. The mufti-clad parson was caught off balance. “Well, well, Mrs Marks. It’s you, fancy that.”
“I was just saying to my husband, I thought it was you — how lucky. I wanted a word about the harvest festival …”
Hedge was virtuously pleased. It served the parson right, an excellent reminder that even when you embarked on a dirty week-end in Paris the eyes of the parish were upon you. The Church was as bad as anything else today.
*
There had been no contact between Hedge and Shard, but from the deck above Shard had caught Hedge’s eye. He had seen no hint of recognition.
“Test passed,” he said to Eve Brett, grinning. “How about a drink?”
They went to the bar, even there suffering the children like Hedge. In Dieppe they shuffled past the immigration control and customs; they could see Hedge ahead of them, saw him go aboard the Paris train standing in the dock siding. They went across the railway lines to the street, had rolls and coffee, expensively, in a café. The smell of France enfolded them, an aroma made up of drains or the lack of them, coffee, heat striking from the pavements, and, here in Dieppe, the smell of turgid water and oil fuel. They had a long haul ahead of them, right down to the Ardèche and the valley of the Rhône. The hippie commune was between the towns of Bourg St Andéol and Orange, around five hundred miles south-east from Dieppe. But once again luck was with them: leaving the café they went down past the docks towards the main railway station of the town and found a Dormobile with a British registration and a flat tyre. A young man and a girl were staring at it helplessly; inside the vehicle a baby screamed blue murder.
“Want a hand?” Shard asked. They were very grateful. Shard changed the wheel; conversation elicited the fact that the couple were making for Clermont Ferrand, very nicely on the way. There was no difficulty about a lift. That night they slept, deep in the French countryside, and by lunch time next day Shard and Eve Brett had been off-loaded in Clermont Ferrand and were looking for transport on the next leg south.
*
Hedge had found the Paris train quite excellent compared with British Rail: it was clean, there were little receptacles in which to place rubbish, it was air conditioned and it ran dead on time. The refreshment car gave excellent service and the doors between coaches actually worked, closing automatically as they were meant to, without fuss and heave. On the dot the train pulled smoothly into the Gare St Lazare and Hedge puffed along importantly to find a taxi. That was not so good; his taxi contained a ferocious-looking Alsatian that occupied the front seat next to its master, and hung its head in possibly friendly fashion over the back of the seat, mouth open, tongue lolling close to a frightened Hedge, the lips drooling rabies germs down onto his knees. When he edged away, the mouth followed. One nip and that might be the end of him. The drive was a nightmare of dog and traffic. The near misses were too many to be counted, as were the oaths and shaken fists. Paris traffic worsened each year, Hedge thought frantically as the taxi fought its way through a roundabout and whizzed violently across the Place de la Concorde where, many years earlier, the crazy French had guillotined their aristocracy. If they’d had cars in those days, they might have been saved the trouble.
Hedge was bound for the Hotel Aviatic in the Rue de Vaugirard, and this destination had caused the taxi driver some heart searching: the Rue de Vaugirard was long and was one way. It would be hit or miss, an apt enough phrase on the Paris streets, and it turned out to be a miss. The driver made contact with the Rue de Vaugirard at the wrong point and Hedge had to disembark or face a long detour at the end of which there was no guarantee of success. The hotel, the driver said, was not far to walk.
“Scandalous,” Hedge said in approximate French. The driver made a rude gesture and demanded twenty-five francs. Conscious of being diddled as an English tourist, Hedge added no tip and was hastened on his way along the Rue de Vaugirard by a stream of abuse. The Alsatian, wretched dog, barked at him. The walk was a very long one and Hedge had his bag to carry. He arrived at the Hotel Aviatic in a foul temper and wet through with sweat. Having checked in, he was taken up to his room on the fifth floor, and found it clean and comfortable; that cheered him. From his bag he brought a flask of whisky, then rang down for Vichy water, not trusting French taps — water in France was always suspect and at the very least led to diarrhoea if not dysentery. Room service was speedy and the girl was polite. Hedge poured and drank, felt better, unpacked and examined some tourist leaflets that he had picked up at the reception desk, since he was ostensibly a tourist … One of the attractions leapt to the eye immediately: starting after dark, a coach would leave on a Sex Tour of the Place Pigalle and other nefarious places. The price was approximately thirty pounds sterling plus extras, unspecified. Hedge muttered to himself: the French were, of course, sex mad and thought the English were the same.
He went down in the lift and left the hotel to make a telephone
call. It was his duty to check in with the British Embassy. When at last he found a telephone and was answered, he was put through to the First Secretary. The First Secretary was easy and urbane, but Hedge detected an undercurrent. Perhaps Hedge, the First Secretary suggested, would find it convenient to come along to the Embassy?
*
Shard had found another lift, this time in a clapped-out truck full of chickens going to Bourg St Andéol. With WDC Brett he clambered aboard, squeezing into the cab with a mountainous Frenchwoman who thereafter drove as though she was demented, spending a good deal of the time with her body turned almost fully round to the back so she could watch the chickens, which were not in cages but bouncing about freely beneath a sort of criss-cross spider’s-web of decrepit netting stretched over the open body of the truck. Every now and again she slammed a heavy foot on the brakes as a hen was disgorged onto the road in a squawking heap of disordered feathers. Each hen took some while to recover; Shard and Eve Brett helped in the operation, a messy one. As a result of this, despite the truck’s lunatic speed, their arrival in Bourg St Andéol was late. In the town they asked the way to the hippie commune and were met by indrawn breaths and a lot of voluble comment. No decent person went near the commune, there were such goings on as could not be mentioned in polite conversation. They would have to walk; it was not many miles to the south, down in the Rhône valley. They would probably see a blaze of light, unholy light from flares and lanterns, and hear song and musical instruments, guitars mostly.
They set out. By this time they looked fully authentic and smelled it too. When at last they saw the promised light ahead, below them in the valley’s depths, not far now, and heard the racket, they were still to some extent covered in chickens’ feathers more or less glued to their clothes and bodies with chicken excrement; being hurtled to the ground at speed had been bad for the fowls’ nerves.
The noise increased as they came closer. The guitars strummed. Naked bodies cavorted beneath a bright flare, and onlookers made loud comments and there was laughter. There was a gateway into the field, which was a large one, and the gateway was guarded by a skinhead clad in leather with many badges and other adornments including what looked like chain mail from the days of the Crusades, and carrying an iron spike with a ball at its end, the ball itself being covered with smaller spikes.
This person, chewing gum, barred their way.
He said, “Fuck off.”
“Place is big enough,” Shard said. “And free.”
“Full house, man. Full house.”
“We’ve come a long way.”
“Go a long way back, then.”
“All the way to England? Not us, man. We’ve come to join you … come to join Tex —”
“Tex, eh?” The skinhead stared back at them, chewing, hands on hips, spike dangling. “Tex. You converted?”
“Converted, man, yes. So let us in.” Shard pushed forward. The skinhead took a pace backwards and lifted the spike, held the ball in Shard’s face.
“Not so fast, not so fast. What’s your names?”
“Simon and Eve.”
“Eve, that’s good. You want to come in, you wait here.” The skinhead put a couple of fingers in his mouth and blew a blast, a loud, piercing whistle. From the circle of light a fat body emerged, a cigarette dangling from thick lips. There was a smell of pot. The face was bearded but not thickly, and behind the hair pimples showed, large and pink in the light from the flares. More hair sprouted from the armholes of a filthy, tattered vest. This man said, “Yeah?”
“Go get Tom Tit.”
“Right.” The man coughed, spat and turned away. The skinhead stayed silent, swinging his spiked ball, staring at the two visitors. Beneath the light, the entertainment continued to the accompaniment of the guitars. Somewhere in the distance a voice sang; Shard couldn’t make out the tune or the words. Naked bodies passed, uncuriously. The night was warm and dry; Shard wondered what it was like when it rained and turned the field to mud, the bodies to goose-pimples with wet hair. There was a weird feeling in the air, a feeling of unknown menace, almost primaeval, almost Satanic. Those ridiculous UFOs … were all these people really waiting to embark, waiting for death to set them free of the twentieth century, fornicating their time away meanwhile? It was, he supposed, a belief of a sort and obviously a congenial one.
They had a long wait; they sat down on the grass verge of the road, outside the gate into the field. The iron spike and ball went on swinging, reflecting the light. From somewhere came a long-drawn scream, a woman’s scream … Shard’s basic police instincts came to the surface. It sounded like murder; here in the commune, rape would hardly raise such a scream. Rape would be no more than passing the time. He controlled his instincts; he had a job to do and his official rank would get short shrift here.
Tom Tit arrived at last. He was a blatant gay, swinging narrow hips, clad only in a vest and bother boots, a strange sight. A gay but a dangerous one, with a vicious narrow face and a slit for a mouth. Cheeks sunken as though he had no teeth … he was an oldie, all of fifty Shard believed, but he appeared to carry authority.
“What is it, Frigger?”
The skinhead swung his spike towards Shard and Eve. “These. Want in. Says they’re converted, the feller does.”
Tom Tit moved up closer. He stank like a sewer. He looked the two of them up and down, eyes narrowed. “Away from here,” he said, “what do you do? Or did do, before you dropped out?”
Shard quoted their passports. “My girl’s a student — was. Art student. I’m a writer. Ran out of inspiration. Or lost interest. It’s all phoney, second-hand. I can’t take any more.”
Tom Tit asked, “You want to take a trip? I mean up there.” He waved a hand towards the dark sky dappled with stars.
“That’s right,” Shard said. “There’s peace, up there. No more hassle, right?”
“Right,” Tom Tit said. “You could have to wait, duckie. There’s a long list. Could even be years. Another thing: you’ll be put through a test. That okay?”
“Yes,” Shard said, not knowing to what ordeals he might be committing Eve Brett. He took a deep breath. “Look,” he said to Tom Tit, “who’re you in the set-up? I’ve heard about Tex, but —”
Tom Tit broke in sharply. “Tex, he’s the Saviour, see, man? I’m number two … like I’m Jesus Christ’s mate. You’ll see Tex later. Come inside.”
They went in. Tom Tit minced with them through the crowd, side-stepping the bodies, some of whom were asleep. There seemed to be no shelter anywhere, and once again Shard wondered about inclement weather. Perhaps that was part of the purgatory that pointed up the paradise parts. And when the UFOs took off at some time in the future, there would be no more rain, no more tears. They went with Tom Tit to the far side of the field towards a line of trees beyond. Between the field and the trees was a hedge. “Get down and sleep,” Tom Tit said. He left them, after saying there would be a meal in the morning, early. The hippies were early risers, he said. Before breakfast there would be prayers, and they would see Tex.
As the gay minced off, Eve said uneasily, “I don’t see any likely connection between this place and Asipov. Do you?”
“Not at the moment. It’s early days.”
“Yes, but … how do we contact little fat Annie?”
Shard grinned at her in the darkness. “We don’t rush it, for a start. We just keep our eyes skinned for a girl who’s little, and fat, and whose name is Annie. Right? I don’t think we’ll have all that much trouble identifying her, somehow.”
Dead tired as they were, neither of them slept much that night. There was too much noise, for one thing, that went on until the early hours with the dawn not far off — the hippies must have iron constitutions. And Shard was only too well aware that time might be short, an awareness that inhibited relaxation. Back in London, urgency had surrounded Asipov. And next day the Foreign Secretary was due to arrive in Paris.
4
The First Secretary’s name
was Roberts-White and he was well known to Hedge. Hedge was equally well known to Roberts-White, who could have done without his presence in Paris at a busy and difficult time; but crosses had to be borne with diplomatic equanimity and Roberts-White was politeness itself as he welcomed Hedge to his office in the Embassy.
“Delighted,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
Hedge grunted; there had been something not far off a mob in the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré and he had arrived breathless and a shade distraught. “What’s all that in aid of?” he asked, jerking a hand towards the windows. “Blasted French …”
Roberts-White gave a cough. “Yes, well. Oh, it’s nothing much —”
“Blasted Latin temperament, I suppose. But it must have a purpose, surely?”
“Certain sections,” Roberts-White said smoothly, “are against the Foreign Secretary’s visit. HE’s not too worried, but of course we do face problems of security as you’ll be well aware, naturally.”
“It’s what I’m here for. And I suppose that’s what you wanted to talk to me about.” Hedge added with a touch of plaintiveness, “I’ve not eaten yet, you know. Dinner.”
“Yes, quite. Same here. Unfortunately I can’t get home — you’ll understand, I’m sure — or I’d have suggested you dine with us.” The First Secretary told a glaring white lie on his wife’s behalf. “Elizabeth will be disappointed not to see you, Hedge.”
“Nice of her,” Hedge said. “And I her.” This was true; Elizabeth Roberts-White was an honourable, the younger daughter of a viscount no less, and the snob in Hedge was always well to the fore. Roberts-White went on to say that he would arrange for a meal to be sent up, to be taken while they discussed the security arrangements, managing to make it discreetly clear that he meant he would fill Hedge in on what had already been decided. Hedge was to be the gingerbread-work, the gilt that had to be accorded a VIP such as the Foreign Secretary. Hedge could read between the lines. His field was to be no more than a ceremonial lawn.
The Executioners Page 4