“They said we shouldn’t have brought in the cases.”
“Yes, but what was all that stuff about Germany?”
“It was the way the Germans behaved during the war, they said. I told them not to be such fools, we’d been their allies. Then they said we’d bombed them. Idiots.” There were bright spots on her cheeks. “You weren’t much help, for all your Wainwright education.”
“French isn’t my strong subject,” I said with dignity.
“What is?”
I was carrying both the cases and now I dumped them on the pavement. “I wanted to find a hotel straight away, or at least check these bloody things in at the station. It’s not my fault we’re landed with them, and we’re not going to be landed any longer.” Some masterful gesture was needed, and luckily at this moment I caught sight of a cab, hailed it, and told the man to take us to the Hôtel Oeil d’Or.
Inside the cab she said, “I didn’t mean – it’s all right for you, you don’t have to worry about money, but I’ve come over here to try and find out about my uncle, not to gawp at Paris.”
“I don’t know why you think I’m rich. I’ve used up my allowance to come here.”
“And won’t there be more where that came from?” I had no answer to this. “I don’t know why you took a taxi, we’re not going to have any too much money.”
“We’re getting rid of these cases. We’re staying at the Oeil d’Or.”
“Supposing it’s expensive?”
“Do you think that’s likely, after the other place?”
The Hôtel Oeil d’Or, however, did not at all resemble the Hôtel les deux Pigeons. The rue Mallarmé was shabby but quiet. The hotel was shabby too, but bright and clean. It had also, mercifully, a receptionist who spoke good English. Rooms with breakfast were a hundred francs a night each, not much more than fifteen shillings. They were small but clean, and they had wash-basins. Both rooms had views across neighbouring roofs. I raised my eyebrows at Elaine, and she nodded. The two cases were deposited at last – as I put them down I wondered why I had become so exasperated about them, for they were not very heavy – and we went down to sign the register. I said to the receptionist, “We were recommended to come here by a friend of mine. His name is Stiver.”
He repeated it, and I repeated it back to him. He shook his head.
“But he stayed here.” A thought occurred to me. “It may have been before you came.”
He was a small man with a large nose, a wide mouth, and thin hair plastered down and carefully combed to hide the bald patches. He almost visibly swelled at my words. “Monsieur, I am the proprietor. My name is Pasquin.”
I was disconcerted. Elaine said, “That’s odd, Monsieur Pasquin, because our friend mentioned you. He came over to England for a few days and now he’s back in Paris. We’d been hoping to find him here.” Pasquin was shaking his head. Elaine suggested that I should describe our friend, and as I did so Pasquin began to smile. His smile became a broad beam of pleasure. I broke off. “You know him?”
“Of course, but why do you call him Stiver? It is Monsieur Blackney. Come along. I show you.” He took us into a small sitting-room and began to look through the drawers of a battered desk, muttering to himself as he did so. He was looking through photographs, and at last found the one he wanted. I picked it up. The photograph showed two men standing outside the hotel. One of them was Pasquin, and the other was the man who had called himself David Wainwright.
I looked up to see Monsieur Pasquin unlocking with a key a small corner cupboard. He produced from it three small glasses and a bottle of Armagnac, poured tots carefully into each of the glasses, and ceremoniously handed them to us. We raised them and drank. The brandy ran down inside me like a pleasant river – no, hardly a river, a vein – of fire. Suddenly Pasquin’s wide smile was changed to a frown. He had a mobile, changeable face. “But why am I drinking? He owes me money, Percy.”
“Percy. Did he call himself that?” Elaine said. Something stirred in my memory and then faded.
“I thought he was a friend,” Pasquin said solemnly, and then corrected himself. “I still think of him as a friend, he is my friend.”
“You don’t know where he might be now?”
“If he were in Paris he would come to see his friend Pierre Pasquin. Or would he come?” Pasquin shrugged, a man who had been much and often deceived. He needed no invitation to talk and we sat in his little sitting-room drinking Armagnac and listening to a story which, while it told us more about David, didn’t make very much sense.
Blackney had come to the Hôtel Oeil d’Or some fifteen months earlier, had taken a room for a fortnight, and had stayed on. Pasquin had been in the Resistance, admired the English, and got on well with Blackney from the start. As the little man talked and told us something of his own history, it seemed to me that the visiting Englishman fulfilled some romantic dreams of his own. When the war ended he and his wife had bought the hotel and he had settled down to the routine of peacetime life. They had no children and Madame Pasquin, whom we met a little later, was a large rock-like woman with legs like tree trunks and the arms of a miner. She was, Pasquin conveyed to us, an earthbound practical creature, concerned with the price of vegetables and meat, the iniquities of the maids, the problem of making a living. Blackney must have represented for the little man the dream life that he had hoped might await him at the end of the war. He was unmarried, he had no permanent job, he worked sometimes teaching English to French families, in the summer as a courier for travel firms showing visitors around Paris, occasionally for a short time as a night watchman at some big store. He was often hard up but he was free, or at least that was the way it seemed to Pierre Pasquin. I asked whether they had talked much about the past.
“About the war a little, yes, not very much. Percy was a flyer, in a bomber.” He brooded. “He had many missions over Germany, then he was shot down and the Germans caught him.”
This fitted in with David. “And then?”
“I do not know. They sent him to a camp. He did not like to talk about that. There were marks on his body, I saw them once. It was not a thing to talk about. Percy was gay, you understand, he did not talk of such things. Then sometimes he was sad.” He hesitated.
“We know he took drugs,” I said.
He shook his head. “That was bad, very bad. I spoke to him often, but no good. He said to me he liked them, had to have them. Once he said, ‘I am dead, Pierre, and this brings me to life again’.”
“He never talked at all about his family in England?”
He shook his head. The recital seemed to have made him gloomy. He was in the act of pouring more Armagnac when the door opened and a woman immediately recognisable as Madame Pasquin appeared. She addressed her husband at length, in a manner plainly uncomplimentary and connected with the Armagnac. When he offered to pour her a glass she brushed away the suggestion with one sweep of her brawny arm. He introduced us in a resigned manner. “English. Friends of Percy Blackney. They are staying here.”
She began to upbraid him again. He stopped her. In a way he was absurd, yet there was something dignified about him. “Please speak in English.”
His wife looked from him to us with an expression on her slab-like face that was evidently not friendly. She managed to summon four words of English and then turned on her heel, banging the door furiously behind her. The words were,
“I ’ope they pay.”
Pasquin handed us the glasses of Armagnac. His hand trembled a little. Elaine said, with what was for her surprising gentleness, “Did he owe you much money?”
“Money, what does it matter? We were friends. He told me that he would be rich, he would pay me back.”
“When did he say that? Just before he was leaving you?”
“Before? Oh, yes, before. When he had the lessons.”
“Lessons? What sort of lessons?”
But this proved hard to establish, partly because Pasquin was himself not quite sure, partly because of t
he language problem. They were lessons “en comportement,” that was the nearest we could get to it, and Blackney had seemed to regard them rather as a joke. It seemed that we were approaching the heart of the matter, but who had given Blackney these lessons in comportment or deportment, where were they conducted? Pasquin didn’t know. In his time at the Hôtel Oeil d’Or Blackney had had very few visitors, and there seemed to be nobody that we knew among them. Women? No, there had been no women, and the little man did not seem inclined to elaborate upon this point. I described Ulfheim, but Pasquin had not seen him. Could he remember any visitors at all? There had been a young man named Maurice Fallon who had come often at one time, and it seemed that Pasquin had not approved of him. It was during the period of the lessons, which had lasted for several weeks, that Blackney had talked about getting a lot of money, and Pasquin had been pleased for his friend. And then in April Blackney had disappeared. One morning he was there, he did not return all day, and when late in the evening Madame Pasquin had gone up to his room to see if he was ill, she found the room stripped of his few belongings. He had evidently packed the things in his suitcase and then walked out. He had left owing a bill, and perhaps he had borrowed money from the little man as well. Pasquin did not say.
We were still asking questions when an angry bellow could be heard. “Pierre. Pierre.” Pasquin looked at us, went to the cupboard and locked it carefully, and picked up the glasses. “You will excuse me. That is Madame Pasquin.”
We excused him. When we were all out of the sitting-room he disappeared down stairs that obviously led to the kitchen. Elaine put a hand on my arm. “Look in the register. It might tell us something, where he came from perhaps.”
The register, a big red book, was on the desk, and Elaine looked at it while I kept watch. I heard her turning the pages, and then there was an exclamation. She was laughing. She pointed to an entry. I read: “P Blakeney.” His nationality was given as British, the place of residence was left blank. The writing was straggly, very much like what I remembered of the letter Lady W had shown me. I could not understand why Elaine was laughing.
“Don’t you see? It’s not Blackney, it’s Blakeney. And his name’s Percy. Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. A joke.”
It seemed to me that there was something wrong about that, although I could not be sure what it was. Later I sat on the bed in her room, and we talked about what we had learned. Elaine ticked off points on her fingers. She stood against the window in the fading light, and her neat delicate profile reminded me of a figure in one of the wall tapestries in my bedroom, a young girl who held in her hand some kind of jug, and gravely faced her equally youthful lover. It was the first time I had thought about her, or about any girl, in that way. There was nothing obviously sexual in the thought, but I was conscious that I should like to hold and kiss her.
“First, we know that Percy Blakeney as he called himself came here in April of last year. He did odd jobs that paid for his wants and for his drugs, perhaps he sold drugs himself. About January he began taking these lessons. Obviously he was being taught what to say when the time came for him to pose as David Wainwright, agreed?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” She turned towards me full face. She was frowning.
“When was Lady Wainwright taken ill?”
“She’s been ill since last November, but nobody knew how serious it was until a few weeks ago.”
“Last November. That’s when he started the plan.”
“Who?”
“The man who gave Blakeney the lessons. Then in April Blakeney leaves here, goes to the awful Hôtel les deux Pigeons under another name. I think the object of that was to cover his tracks a bit, agreed? Meanwhile the lessons go on. If some member of the family comes over, there he is in a hotel where nobody has known him for long. I suppose Stiver was chosen as another joke, I haven’t got a stiver, that kind of thing. The lessons go on, they get news that Lady Wainwright is very ill and may die, and the plan is put into operation. What do you think of that?”
“I dare say it’s true as far as it goes, but the important thing if you’re right is, who’s behind Blakeney?”
“Then Blakeney does something wrong, Thorne realises he’s a fake, he has to kill Thorne. He gets cold feet and comes back here. But where is he?” She was still frowning. “You might say we’re at a dead end. I don’t see what else we can do.”
While we had been talking to Pasquin my vision of Paris had temporarily faded, but now it returned in full force. “We could go to that place Durcet mentioned.”
“What place?”
“He gave you a card.”
“Oh, that.” She felt in her pocket and brought out a grubby card. It said Taverne Maximilien Robespierre, with a telephone number and an address, 59, rue Babeuf, 4e. She said without much enthusiasm that we could go there if I liked.
I was staring at the card. I could not describe my thought sequence, which was as inconsequential as some of those Sherlock Holmes talked about to Watson, but Robespierre reminded me of Blakeney, Blakeney reminded me of a scene in an old film in which Sir Percy was looking at a miniature preparatory to disguising himself as a French nobleman shown in the miniature who was to be saved from the clutches of the villainous Chauvelin, and the miniature reminded me – but let me make a jump and say that I saw quite clearly before my eyes the photograph that I had held in my hand years ago when Lady W had first talked to me about David. It showed him with the rest of his crew, and by closing my eyes I could see David again in the middle of the group and the others round him, with their names beneath. “Flt.-Sgt. M Billings, Sgt. V J Copp, Flt.-Lieut. D Wainwright, Sgt. R H T Williams, Cpl. J H Crump, Cpl. R Shalson,” and then at the end, “Flt.-Sgt. P Blakeney.” I opened my eyes to find Elaine staring at me in astonishment. She asked if I was feeling well.
“Yes. I knew there was something, I knew I should remember.” I got up and put my arms round her in my excitement. She did not resist, but merely disengaged herself. I sat down again. “I knew I’d heard the name Blakeney before, seen it rather. It was on a photograph of David’s air crew. He was one of them, Sergeant P Blakeney. He was on that last flight. As a matter of fact David mentioned him when he was spinning his story to us after he arrived, said Blakeney had been killed with the others.
“Don’t you see? David was killed, but Blakeney wasn’t. The Germans must have taken him and kept him in prison camp. That’s how he knew about David in the RAF, it explains all that. The name is real, not a pseudonym. There isn’t even anything odd about it, I expect lots of parents named Blakeney call their sons Percy.”
“Bloody fools,” she said without rancour. “It certainly explains some things.”
“It explains a lot. Very likely he picked up that little book of David’s poems after the plane crashed, and the wallet too. Or maybe the Germans found them, thought they belonged to him, and Blakeney just accepted it. When he told his story he simply changed the person who was saved from Blakeney to Wainwright and added in the stuff he’d invented about the Russian labour camp. If he found out something about the early days of the Wainwrights he’d be in a good position to come back and pose as David, at least for a little while.”
“There are some big holes.”
“I don’t see any.”
“Well, one question is why the Germans didn’t say that there was one survivor when the plane was shot down. I mean, these things usually get known, don’t they? But obviously the biggest problem is the question of who told him about the early days. He didn’t just have superficial knowledge according to you, he knew all about David’s childhood and friends. He couldn’t just have picked that up.”
It was almost dark in the room. I could not see her face. “Yes, that’s a problem. But you agree, don’t you, that it would be too much of a coincidence that there was a man on that last flight named P Blakeney. It must be the same man.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t help much. Of course, there’s one person who could have told him about the
early days of the Wainwrights.”
I felt suddenly that I wanted to see her face. I switched on the bedside light which, like so many lights in hotel bedrooms abroad, was dim. She stood by the window, face averted from me, her fingers playing with the acorn on a window blind. “Who do you mean? What person?”
“Why, David himself.”
“You mean David’s alive?” I couldn’t take it in. “But that’s crazy. Why didn’t he come back himself?”
“Isn’t it obvious? He killed my uncle. If he came back himself he was afraid he’d be arrested.”
It took a little while for the idea to sink in. Then I said, “But if you’re right, what was the point of sending Blakeney? If he was accepted as David, then he’d be arrested too.”
“There must have been what you might call an escape clause. Something like this. What David hoped was that everything would go smoothly, Blakeney would be accepted, nobody would make trouble about a case that was nine years old. But suppose the worst happened and the police were going to arrest Blakeney, then he would be able to prove that he wasn’t David.”
“How?”
“Oh, how do I know? Perhaps he had some birthmark, perhaps he had relations in England who could have identified him.”
“Perhaps. It’s very theoretical.”
“All right, produce a better theory.”
That I couldn’t do, but I didn’t accept any theory that ignored the mysterious Ulfheim and his suggestion that Sullivan’s death had had something to do with German agents operating in Kent during the war. I didn’t want to argue, however, what I wanted was to get out into the Paris streets again, and in particular to get to the Taverne Maximilien Robespierre.
When we were downstairs again I looked for Pasquin, but found only his mountainous wife. I began to speak to her but Elaine took over from me, and seemed for once to conduct successfully a quite lengthy conversation. Afterwards in the street, I said, “What was all that?”
The Belting Inheritance Page 16