A Free Range Wife

by Michael Kenyon

  “Through there” was a green baize door like an upended billiards table, barring further access along the passage.

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe, alors?”

  Peckover turned. He might have tweaked the ear of the bald busybody in pyjamas had it not been for the reinforcements: the Ricketts, the svelte pair from the bar now in svelte dressing-gowns, a woman with a black plait which hung over a bosom and down to her hip like a mamba. About half the guest complement, Peckover judged. Arms spread, he herded the delegation back along the passage, round the corner, and still further back, reliving crowd-control days in the Mall and Trafalgar Square.

  “To your rooms, please, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing to see, promise you. Messieurs, mesdames. A little co-operation.”

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”

  “Alors . . .”

  “Qui est-ce, ce type?”

  “We most surely heard . . .”

  Over the tops of the guests’ heads Peckover glimpsed Jean-Luc scooting across the landing and disappearing down the stairs. He continued herding, advancing, and ignoring questions. With difficulty he refrained from hurrying the bald man backwards by placing a hand on his stripy chest and pushing. At the door to the Isle of Skye Room he reached out and turned the handle.

  Locked.

  “Goodnight, mesdames, messieurs. Merci.”

  Peckover hastened back along the passage and round the corner. No housekeeper. He continued on and opened the green baize door.

  “Madame?”

  She halted, turned, waited.

  “You were about to show me,” Peckover said.

  “Is nothing.”

  She was almost certainly right. If there were something and it was concealed, the chances of his ferreting it out were probably zero. He would have needed a dozen reliables from the flying squad and half the dog section to have turned this warren over. While neither recognising nor remembering these passages, Peckover believed that it may have been here somewhere, in the staff annexe, that he had spent his first night. He wished he were back in bed. Couple of minutes, he would be.

  But you went through the motions. Someone had screamed.

  Of course, could have been entirely innocent. Horseplay. Foreplay. Saturday night at the Chateau de Mordan, springtime, there’d be a fair amount of both. A fellow and his bird getting experimental, exaggerating a bit. Late-night jinks and some character trapping his toe in a light socket.

  Yes, yes, quite, or how about, envisaged Peckover, guiding Madame forward, rehearsals for the Mordan Thespians? One of the Greek tragedies. There was a fair amount of screaming in some of the classical stuff.

  “No need to introduce me,” he told the housekeeper. “Just ask ’em what they heard. Where. What they know about it.”

  Eight or nine staff had assembled on a landing in a haze of cigarette smoke and a variety of night attire. The only face Peckover recognised was his greased bullfighter from the restaurant wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Peckover nodded and was rewarded with a wide smile. There were no flowers, statuary, or chandeliers. In place of carpet was dung-coloured linoleum; the flaking brown paint on the walls dated from the era of Gilles, Duc de Mordan. Peckover, patient, listened to the interrogation. He had the impression the housekeeper was making little headway with her questions. Among the staff was much honest headshaking, a degree of nudging.

  She told him, yes, they had heard it, but not know where or who, nothing. Certain not here in staff wing. In guest wing.

  Peckover was inclined to agree. He doubted whether from the Rob Roy Room he would have heard a scream screamed in this staff annexe. Presumably quite a few staff were not here, he suggested, aware that he should be getting the names of those who were here, just in case, and equally aware he was going to do no such thing.

  Madame Costes told him, yes, many staff not here, sleeping maybe, or go Mordan after work. Les boîtes, discos. Saturday night.

  “Could you find out what that’s all about?” he said, nodding in the direction of a group of nudgers and whisperers.

  They were mainly girl-staff, one of whose number, subject of the nudging and pushing forward, was a nervous teenager in flowery pyjamas and woolly slippers. Beckoned by Madame Costes, she advanced a reluctant step, then retreated into the refuge of the group. She answered in hushed monosyllables, and quite inadequately in the opinion of her fellows, who began cueing her, then finishing her sentences, then starting them, and finally taking over from her entirely, narrating on her behalf, with or without embellishment, what she had seen. Peckover watched and strained his ears. The word which seemed to keep recurring sounded like fantôme, which he would have guessed, had he been challenged, meant “phantom.”

  Madame Costes informed Peckover that what the girl said she had seen was a ghost. She was Sylvie Delpech, a chambermaid who had been availing herself of leftovers in the kitchen when she had heard the scream. Her second unlawful act had been to avail herself of the guest stairs because they were quicker than the staff stairs and at that hour nobody would be about. Apart from ghosts. She had been turning the corner into the passage to the green baize door when she had heard a door close, looked back, and seen it. For an instant only, vanishing round the corner towards the stairs up which she had come. The white flapping, evidently, of a traditional ghost.

  “An Arab?” Peckover suggested.

  “We have not Arabs,” Madame Costes told him very stiffly.

  Peckover looked at Madame more closely. She might have been a Jew. She might, come to that, have been an Arab. If she were a Jew she had every right to be anti-Arab even apart from the price of petrol. And vice versa. She might have been a gentile Mordanoise or Mordanesque descended from generations of local Huguenots. She was not Jamaican or Japanese. How did one recognise, by looking, an Arab, unless there were a burnous and a falcon, or a Jew unless there were the nose and shaggy beard as in the colour picture of Shylock in his Shakespeare? She was bloody toothsome whatever she was. Had he not been spoken for, he would have raised no objection to sharing her eiderdown.

  Down, you feminists, down I say! said Peckover to himself, guilty but unbothered.

  “Ask her,” he said, “how long between the screams and when she saw the ghost.”

  Madame Costes and Sylvie Delpech parleyed.

  “Quick,” the housekeeper told him. “Few minutes. More quick maybe. Is in fright like shock, la jeune fille. She not with us long in Château de Mordan.”

  Peckover was unclear whether this meant la jeune fille had not been a chambermaid at the Château de Mordan long enough to be precise about times and distances up and down stairs, or if she were about to be sacked for infringing château by-laws, or if she suffered from a mortal ailment and was not long for either the château or the world.

  “Grateful,” he told the gathering. “Merci. Just thought I’d ask. Why don’t we all get some sleep?” He placed his hands together as if for prayer and rested his cheek on them. “Au revoir.” He tightened his Mordan Mauler belt. “I’ll see you to your room, madam.”

  “Is not necessary.”

  “I insist.”

  Gallant, a half step behind, he accompanied the housekeeper back along the corridor. She stopped at the last door before the green baize.

  “This one?” Peckover asked, opening the door.

  He found the light and took a step inside. The room was not to be compared with the Rob Roy Room, or doubtless with any guest-room, but personally he preferred this bachelor-girl bed-sit with its bookcases, family photos, lived-in chairs, and spruce kitchenette. Obligatory cushions and a rag doll decorated a divan bed for one. Where though the eiderdown she had carried earlier?

  Had she been bringing the eiderdown or taking it away? Why patrol the guest corridors with an eiderdown at one o’clock in the morning?

  Bloody ’ell, why not? Someone had been cold. Bedding was a housekeeper’s job.

  “Through there,” he said, nodding towards a
door beyond the baby cooker and curtained kitchenette area. “That the bedroom?”

  “Bathroom.”

  So the divan was her bed and lately she had not slept in it. Alternatively, hearing the scream, and leaping from between the sheets, she had immediately made the bed.

  “I’d be obliged if you’d lend me your keys to the guest-rooms. One of ’em. Won’t take a tick.”

  “You will ’ave to ask—”

  “I’m asking you. I’m a policeman, ma’am. Someone screamed. Someone could be suffering. They could be dying.” Come to that, he refrained from adding, you don’t look too chirpy yourself. “Accompany me by all means. You’re being of great assistance. Might I ’ave your name?”

  “Costes.”

  “Mademoiselle?”

  “Madame.”

  Perhaps a divorced Madame, divorced or separated like everyone else, nowadays even the family-minded French, reflected Peckover, waiting while she went first to a drawer for keys, then through the door into the bathroom: a shivering, diminutive, fetching wraith of a woman.

  On telly, cops-and-robbers hour, now we’d hear a bang, Peckover mused, or nothing at all for so long that I’d rush in and there’d she be lying in a lake of blood. He took a fast step through the room. Madame Costes came from the bathroom having changed out of the peignoir into a mainly black kimono with a chrysanthemum motif.

  Why? wondered Peckover. “What ’appened,” he inquired, holding open the green baize door for her, “to the eiderdown?”

  “Someone is cold.” She headed along the passage. “Telephoning reception saying so cold, is guest, ’usband wife customers, chauffage heating not always work perfect, c’est normale. Needing more you say blanket but l’armoire à linge is on floor under so I ’ave come up from lift pass your room . . .”

  Peckover had stopped listening. She had it all written out in her head. If he had not asked she still would have told him.

  “. . . le cerf also come up in lift pressing button with nose, yes?”

  “What?”

  “Le cerf. The stag?”

  Touché. A sidelong glance showed him a hint of a smug smile. When he looked ahead again along the passage, towards the landing, there in the stairwell looking at him were the head and shoulders of Mercy McCluskey in fur collar and peaked Lenin cap. They disappeared down the stairs.

  Peckover was in no mood for chasing Yankee six-footers down stairways. The whole rollick was a nonsense, a bedroom farce, people appearing and disappearing, doors opening and closing. You either fell about or you left after the first act, and personally he intended to leave, first opportunity, which would be tomorrow, daybreak. Probably the French invented bedroom farce, and there must have been memorable ones, but a little went a long way.

  In any event, they had reached the Isle of Skye Room.

  “This one,” he told Madame Costes. “Mrs. McCluskey, she usually works this late?”

  “Not know.” The housekeeper unlocked and opened the door. She switched on a light.

  “Ta.” He sauntered into and around another too exquisite guest-room. Only a plashing fountain was lacking. A gamboge telephone echoed topaz, saffron, and daffodil shades of walls, carpet, and furnishings. The effect was less the Isle of Skye than the Yellow Peril.

  He eyed the carpet for dropped hairpins or a bandage but saw none. At an admiral’s inspection the tumbled, unmade four-poster would have required someone to have been tied to the yard-arm. Damp soap and towels in the bathroom called for a further twenty lashes.

  “Fine, thanks, grateful,” he said. “Goodnight.”

  *

  In the passage outside his and Miriam’s room stood Rudolph, dry-nosed, expectant, as if about to suggest, “Walkies?”

  “’Ello, sweetheart.” Peckover had to roll him backwards before he could open the door.

  Semi-supine with a magazine, propped on pillows, Miriam failed to rush to greet him. Instead she gave him a look and pointed, presumably over his shoulder, towards Rudolph. Her fingers made a flicking get-rid-of-it gesture.

  “All’s well,” he said with a smile. She had wheeled Rudolph out of their Rob Roy Room but she had not, he noticed, picked up his hat. Still, at this hour he was on the side of peace and love. “All quiet. Touch of fornication ’ere and there. Not everywhere, I’m not saying that. Some of ’em are having midnight feasts. Cocoa and sardines.”

  Miriam, deep in her magazine, pretended not to hear. Peckover sighed, shut the door, and with one hand on an antler, the other on what he believed might be a haunch, steered Rudolph along the passage. Finally the Château de Mordan seemed to be sleeping. On the landing at the head of the stairs he paused, reaching out to touch the cerise smear on the banister.

  Wet. Smelly. He wiped his fingertips on an adjacent patch of banister. It was going to need a go with turps anyway.

  Abandoning Rudolph, he searched the carpet for similar smears but saw none. None outside or on or near the door which had been opened an inch by the little old lady in the hairnet. Opposite, outside the Gleneagles Suite, was similar spotlessness. Peckover tiptoed sprightily from the Gleneagles door before it should be opened by his dancing partner and her spouse, hand in hand declaring, “Hi.”

  He reached the further side of the landing. The Burns Room. “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose.” Was this where the bald man was lodged? Peckover believed not, the baldy had been in the next room down, though the coming and going had been a mite confused, he would not have cared to have sworn to anything. If not the baldy, who had the Burns Room? A cerise smudge decorated the porcelain door handle.

  Peckover put his ear to the door. Nothing. Positioning thumb and forefinger as far as possible where the porcelain was unsmudged, he turned the handle and opened the door.

  More nothing. No snores, protests. An outline of the compulsory four-poster and a reek of paint. The light switch was where it ought to have been.

  Peckover closed the door behind him and surveyed ladders and a trestle table piled with buckets, brushes, and rolls of wallpaper. Most of the furniture had been piled into a corner and covered with a dust-sheet. No dust-sheet was in evidence for the four-poster, and no curtains, canopy, or bedding either, though on the mattress lay the eiderdown which Madame Costes had carried, or if not the same eiderdown, a similar. The colour scheme ordained by the interior decorator, so far as could be judged from one partly papered wall and glimpses of unprotected carpet and furnishings, was rubescent variations on cyclamen, coral, and carbuncle. No paint pots were visible, no flushblush start on doors or skirting had been made, yet the paint smell was powerful.

  The footprint splodges, Peckover observed, led from not to the bathroom. Their gaudiness at the closed bathroom door faded with each step across the dust-sheet. Where he stood they no longer existed, which was fortunate for the unprotected carpet in the passage outside. He stepped alongside the prints, listened at the bathroom door, and entered.

  Here anyway was the paint: stinking, streaking the granity floor, splashed across mirrored walls, in places possibly still on the move at one millimetre per hour down the glass like melting red icicles, though Peckover did not think he would be staying to take measurements. On the floor lay a cerise-sodden towel which may have served for wiping feet on, though not thoroughly if the wiped feet were those which had crossed the dust-sheet. Peckover’s bare feet stepped with care over and round sploshed paint.

  Most of the paint had gone into the sunken bath. At the taps’ end, on the oily, red-flecked surface of substantial bathwater, floated an empty five-litre paint drum from which, Peckover guessed, the paint had not involuntarily leaked, but deliberately been poured. The paint had sunk like syrup through the water, coating the bottom of the bath from end to end, and the naked body which lay there.

  The eyes and mouth were open and paint-filled. On the neck, chest, and belly the cerise had mingled with a darker red from stab wounds. Peckover swallowed and stared. At least the bloke’s cock w
as intact, if it mattered. He believed the body was the pianist from the restaurant. Paint was thick over the face.

  He walked out of the bathroom, past ladders and the trestle-table, and opened the door into the passage, where he stepped into Madame Costes in her black kimono.

  “Good, just comin’ to see you,” he said. “Phone the police, you’ll do it better than me. No, sorry—not in there. Your eiderdown’s safe, it’ll wait.”

  “Qu’est-ce que—?”

  “Just phone, please, and come straight back. The police will ask the questions. Tell ’em we’ve got a murder. Quick!”

  Hercule bleedin’ Poirot where are you? Peckover, sentinel in the passage outside the Burns Room, saw what remained of the night reaching ahead in whorls of tobacco smoke, end-to-end coffee-cups, and questions and statements in gibberish French.

  Tomorrow too, except he was not going to be here tomorrow. He had his instructions. There were gun-runners’ widows to be talked to. His own statement would take fifteen minutes. Well, thirty.

  “Stuff you, mate,” he told Rudolph, watching him from beside the stairs.

  He had never felt more sober.

  Chapter Seven

  Susan Spence, widow, being weary and in a vile temper, having twenty-four hours earlier and five hundred miles away been sorrowfully told by her lover that they were incompatible, or to put it another way—though he had not, being diplomatic and cowardly—that she was ditched, cried out when the doorbell rang, “Piss off, whoever you are!”

  Whoever it was, it was no one she wanted to see. She had no friends in this dump nor wanted any. Couple of days, soon as she had sorted out the packing and the removals men, she was going to be able to lift two fingers and never see the place again.

  If the ringing was not sneery, unintelligible house-hunters who would spend the next hour poking in cupboards, prodding the walls, probably it was the house agent come to tell her again that for a quick sale she should drop the price twenty thousand, and to write endless figures. His ones looked like sevens, his fours were a zigzag lightning-flash, his sevens he crossed out, and his nines were a g for “git.”