A Free Range Wife

by Michael Kenyon

  She walked across the landing to the oriel window and looked down on jungle contained by a redbrick wall and a fancy white gate fashioned with knobs and curlicues. Beyond the wall, leafy, blossom-bright Rue Jacques Brel was filling up with the cars of chemists, lawyers, and accountants returning home after a hard day’s lunching and counting their money. God, the garden was a mess! The big question was, would it pay to have a gardener to hack and trim? Would there be garden-lovers among the house-hunters who would write a cheque on the spot if the garden looked like Kew?

  Charlie would have known. He might have been wrong but he’d have known. One thing about herself she had discovered, a woman on her own, was that she had never cared whether decisions were right or wrong so long as Charlie had taken them. Some decisions anyway. The boring ones. If he decided right, fine. If wrong, too bad, at least she hadn’t been to blame.

  Below, besieged by pampas-grass and nettles, the big fellow in the beret was having another bash at the doorbell. Persistent. Susan Spence blew cigarette smoke from the corner of her mouth, away from the glass. He was not the house agent, though he may have been a prospective buyer. He may have been a gardener who thought he had found himself work. She dropped her cigarette into a vase, one of a clustered dozen awaiting crating, recrossed the landing, and in the bathroom mirror gave herself a once-over. To hell with it, she thought. She trod downstairs and opened the door.

  “Mrs. Spence?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Name’s Peckover. Scotland Yard. Won’t keep you a tick, ma’am. Purely a formality. May I come in?”

  She almost succeeded in not grimacing. She stood back while he came in, looking about him at the crates and piled junk, taking off the beret, which, she would not have been surprised, probably still had the price inside. She led the way into a sitting-room in disarray, motioned him towards a tan leather armchair, seated herself in a second such, crossed her trousered legs, and lit a cigarette.

  A hard case, possibly, Peckover thought, tightening his jaws against a yawn. She intends making me work. Where, he wondered, was the lavender and lace? She was all right on looks: on the tough side but stunning bones and body. She was also nicotine-fingered and had wrecked the curve of her left tit by stuffing the cigarette packet into her shirt pocket. Her eyes were watery and jaded, as if she had been up all night studying calculus.

  We’re all jaded, darling, you’re not the only one been up all night, Peckover was inclined to inform her. Including rewrites, his statement for Inspector Pommard, with copies in triplicate to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, New Scotland Yard, had in the end taken him the best part of three hours. The stag had been tricky, wording the riding of a stuffed stag along château corridors at one in the morning so that nothing could have seemed more natural. Conjecture had occupied a two-page addendum. The person or persons of whom he had been aware while taking the air outside the château, for example, may have been the pianist’s murderer, or murderers, engaging in surveillance, watching bedroom lights going on, or off. The ghost sighted by Mlle. Delpech may have been the murderer in a dust-sheet worn either to conceal his, or her, identity, or paint stains, or as a protection against paint stains.

  He had also added as conjecture that Madame Costes may have been having it off, or had been so intending, with the deceased. This conjecture he had expunged as conjecture and inserted in the body of the statement when in the chilly small hours Madame Costes had admitted this was the case to Inspector Pommard.

  He had escaped at dawn, surprising Pommard by his departure, leaving him muttering and refusing to believe either in the usefulness of the Lourdes expedition or that the irresponsible, stag-fixated husband of the château’s cook would be back tomorrow or ever. The muttering would doubtless have been even more vehement had the thought probably not come to him that, with the husband gone, there might be opportunities for waylaying the cook and pinning her against a wall. The best Pommard had managed in revenge for being deserted by the non-help from perfidious Albion was to fail to come up with the loan of a car.

  So, in a rented car with a radio on which he had succeeded in tuning out the foreign claptrap and tuning in, albeit with atmospherics, the good sense of the BBC, he had arrived: travel-stained, yawning in spite of three hours’ sleep along a farm track unvisited since the epoch of Pepin the Fat, and cheerful.

  Murder he did not find cheerful. He could not have said he was immune, hardened; that murder was his stock-in-trade. In more than twenty years a copper, murder had seldom come his way. But he had managed to keep passably detached, and when, in spite of his refusal to look, a stabbed cerise pianist had slotted in front of his eyes like a perverse joke in a lantern-slide lecture, he had looked, accepting it, and eventually it had gone away.

  But the compensations! The sun had shone. Driving on the right had been easy-peasy. The countryside, true, had been a mite flat, the outskirts of the small towns a little dreary with their concrete bungalows and petrol stations, but none the less it had been France and a knock-out. And lunch . . . ah, the lunch.

  For months he would be able to bore anyone in hearing with details of the little undiscovered country restaurant where he had eaten seven courses for thirty-five bloomin’ francs. Four quid, call it, including the tip. Forty quid it would have cost in Islington, if you could have got it, which you couldn’t. Not that there had been what you would call elegance. It was the sort of caff you would never find if you were looking for it, a dingy house decorated with a dingier scrap of bunting between petrol stations, scruffy without, fly-infested within: flies, paper tablecloths, smells, darkness, lorry drivers mopping their plates with bread, others playing cards, a silent waitress aged nine, and through a door a glimpse of flying chicken feathers and a whiskery woman aged ninety. He had gone for the cheapest of the three set menus without studying it beyond an unsuccessful search for chips. No matter, a snack had been all that was required for a long-distance copper en route for English-language chat with a gunrunner’s widow.

  The soup had been tepid, filled with soggy bread, and so tasty that he had eaten his way through most of the contents of the tureen. A mistake but how was he to have known? The hiatus before the main course he had filled by testing several glasses of the plonk, but instead of the main course there had arrived a platter of cold sliced sausage, ham, pâté, blood pudding, butter, more bread, and beetroot, tomatoes, and radishes, which should have been the main course but wasn’t. The main course was an aromatic beef stew with a bowl of sloppy haricot beans cooked in duck fat, he judged, and hopping with garlic cloves, enough for four dockers, which had left him panting, unbuttoning buttons, and mightily relieved when he had swallowed the last mouthful because if you were paying for it you did your best to eat it. Then appeared main course number two: half a roast chicken and sufficient crunchy, salted chips to have fed the dockers’ wives and children.

  He had supposed there had been an error, that somewhere sat a customer waiting, starving; but the nine-year-old who should have been either giggling or vomiting never batted an eye. Salad, cheeses, apple tart . . . Queasy with the memory, Peckover regarded the crate beside his armchair. Framed pictures half filled it but they were stacked upright, preventing him from seeing whether they were Rembrandts or charging elephants. The absence of pale rectangles on the walls indicated they had not hung there long whatever they were. The Widow Spence got up, gathered an ashtray, and sat with it.

  Silent Suzy, there’s steel in her, or experience, or, thought Peckover, perhaps she simply has a clear conscience and doesn’t like visitors. Coppers did not panic her, obviously, and she had resolved that this one made the running. Should he mention Ziegler? If she knew nothing, no. Play it by ear.

  He said, “You’re moving out?”

  “I’m not bleedin’ moving in.”

  “So where are you off? The Bahamas?”

  “That your idea of somewhere exotic? You haven’t seen much. I’ve been in Nassau.”

/>   “Brighton then?”

  “This what you’re here for? Guessin’ games?”

  Peckover was not wholly clear why he was here. Veal, the Yard, they had thought it a good idea.

  One, there was what Charlie Spence had in common with the American, Ziegler, apart from having been stabbed to death. What, more exactly, they had lost in common.

  Two, both victims may have been known to Mrs. McCluskey. She had known Ziegler. She may have known Spence.

  “’Ow long have you lived here, ma’am?”

  “Too long.”

  “If you could be more precise.”

  “Last June, nearly a year. Off and on.”

  “Skipping out when you could?”

  “Dead right. Mind my asking what’s the point of all this? I had questions for ever after Charlie was killed. Questions, questions. You’ve had it all. Cross-indexed.”

  “Was he queer?”

  “What?”

  “Did we have that?”

  “You mean a poofter?”

  “Was he?”

  “You rubbishy copper!”

  “What’ve I said?”

  “Swannin’ in here! Suggestions! I’d like to have seen you ask Charlie that. He’d have done you over, big as you are. Here, mind if I see your warrant card?”

  Peckover brought out his wallet. He reached forward, presenting the blue card, keeping hold of it.

  “Detective chief bleedin’ inspector,” Susan Spence said, blowing smoke at the card. “I’ve news for you, copper. I know a superintendent with your lot. Johnny Davis. Okay? He was a chum of Charlie’s.”

  “When were you last inside?”

  “Eh?”

  “Holloway, was it? Expect you knew the warden too, Carmichael, or was that before your time? Aiding and abetting, my guess. Taking care of Charlie’s tearaway mates in your back bedroom.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Took care of ’em a treat, I bet. How often you change the sheets?”

  “Pig!”

  “On the game, were you?”

  “Shut your hole!” She was on her feet. “Get out!”

  “Get out,” mimicked Peckover, not moving. “You’re from down my way, right? Poplar?”

  “Out!”

  “Know the Duke of Devonshire in Thornley Street?”

  “Course I do. What of it? Bleedin’ slum, they ought to tear the place down. You’d know it. Just your style.”

  “Horse and Groom’ll be more your style.”

  “What’s wrong with the Horse and Groom?”

  “Toffs.”

  “What’re you on about, toffs?”

  “Bookies, hairdressers. East End toffs.”

  “More flamin’ class than your Duke of Devonshire.”

  “Nice pint of Whitbread at the Duke of Devonshire. Horse and Groom’s all lager and fizz and cabaret night.”

  “What I said. Meet your friends.”

  “Get your hair permed while you listen to the reggae.”

  “All you get at the Duke of Devonshire’s a dose.”

  “You can get that from the telephone, did you know?”

  “Get it at the Duke of Devonshire soon as you go in. Only pub in London you catch the clap just by breathin’.”

  “No problem. There’s the clinic in the Commercial Road, round the corner.”

  “Go there often, do you?”

  “Used to. Mondays nine o’clock for the check-up. I’m in Islington now. Gentrified, my bit of it. Different class of clap.”

  He was grinning at her. Suddenly she smiled. Equally abruptly she glared.

  “You said some nasty things. They’re not true.”

  “Didn’t mean ’em, dear. You got very excited by a question about Charlie. It was only a question. Anyway, you’ve probably answered it.”

  “Good. It was a stupid question.”

  “From a stupid copper?”

  “I never said that.”

  “I never knew your ’usband. I’m not a psychiatrist either. But speaking out of long inexperience I’d have thought what was done to him might’ve been, just possibly, sort of an act of sadism by a feller. Not inconceivable. I wouldn’t have thought it something a woman would do.”

  “Shows how much you know about women.”

  “You don’t mean that. I mean, you’re right, I don’t. But you’re not saying a woman might do it.”

  “Hell, how do I know? Look, I’ve been asked all this—well, not that. But what are you anyway, a fresh mind?”

  “Buttercup-fresh, love. Fresher than your friend, Johnny Davis. You’re right, he outranks me, but then we’re not on the same floor. Know what he’s in?”

  “I don’t know anything. He was Charlie’s friend.”

  “Dogs.”

  “What dogs?”

  “Dog section. He shares out the Bow-Wow Bikkies. Sees their ears are clean.”

  Susan Spence giggled. “That’s Charlie. Typical. Just the sort of high-powered contact he’d have. Me, I’m having a gin. Want one?”

  “Wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea. Philanderer, was he? Sorry, love—don’t scratch my eyes out.”

  She did not. Whatever “philanderer” meant, she said, if it meant putting your hand up every skirt in sight, that was Charlie, and any copper on the case who didn’t know it must have just arrived from the moon. In the kitchen she put on the kettle, poured gin and lime, and swore when every ice-tray proved empty. Peckover sat at a table manipulating his beret: folding it, rolling it up.

  “Didn’t it bother you, Charlie’s shenanigans?”

  “Course it bleedin’ bothered me. Tell you, I scratched his eyes out a thousand times. But what do you do? See, Charlie had magnetism. They all fell for him. Charlie made you laugh. The bastard.” She stood by the sink, forgotten gin and lime in her hand, looking through the window at back jungle. “He wasn’t witty or anything. He never said anything you’d remember. It wasn’t making faces either, falling about on banana skins. It was kind of how he said things. He was just bleedin’ funny.”

  Peckover, allowing her time to remember, watched her remembering and swallowing gin.

  “Funny,” she said, “but he’d have made people laugh even about what was done to ’im. I know he would. I’ve thought about it.”

  “Can’t be much consolation to you but at least it doesn’t ’appen every day, to others, what was done to Charlie. After he was dead.”

  “No.”

  “Ever heard of someone named Ziegler? Rick Zeigler?”

  “Don’t think so. There was a singer, Ziegler, wasn’t there? A woman. My Mum had her records.”

  “Left you all right, did he, Charlie—financially?”

  “You’re joking. He didn’t leave a penny. This house is it. The lot.”

  “Where did it go?”

  “Where does it ever go? Gear, grub, this and that.” She filled a teapot. “We travelled, mind. Always first-class, champagne and stuff. Nothing but the best for Charlie. I’ve been on Concorde.”

  Bully for you, Peckover thought, and for all the birds Charlie was forever making laugh, who had probably cost him a quid, because if there was something some ladies might be more susceptible to than laughing their heads off it could be laughing their heads off over a bottle of Krug while the big, side-splitting spender tucked a sparkly gewgaw from Asprey’s down their stocking-top.

  He let it go. “Still, in his business, you’d have thought he’d have put by a sovereign or two.”

  “A travel agent? Don’t make me laugh. He wasn’t bleedin’ Thomas Cook.”

  “I was thinking of the guns.”

  “What guns?” she said too quickly, too astonished.

  “We know what he was doing, love. Question is, is what was done to him the IRA’s latest line in some spooky, sick sort of symbolism?”

  For all Peckover knew, that might be the question, being unlikely enough. Truncate A
ll Traitors. Enemas To The Enemy. He found himself envying, and resenting envying, the kitchen units and flashy gadgetry, or at any rate the easy money which had bought them.

  Not that the money could have been all that easy if you fetched up dead.

  The refrigerator was behind panelled doors in a dresser, as television sets were once genteelly behind doors. The wall clock was digital, without tick or hum, its figures soundlessly shifting.

  “Start of a new glamorous tradition,” he went on, “like kneecapping and tarring and feathering, you know?”

  “No, I bleedin’ don’t know. You’re off your nut.”

  “No milk or sugar, love. Ta. You’re not suggesting it was the Basques?”

  “What Basques? I wouldn’t know a Basque from my backside.”

  “Because your ’usband was running guns for both the Basques and the IRA. The Lourdes connection, you might say. It’s happened before, using the pilgrims as a cover.” He knew it had happened before because years ago he had wasted an evening with Barney Quinlan in the Shamrock Club in Kilburn High Road getting nowhere, apart from stotious on Jameson’s. “You’ll not remember but there was a charter plane for pilgrims from Cork to Lourdes and back, only it was intercepted. Stuffed with Czech guns. Summer, seventy-two—”

  “Seventy-one. Charlie was hardly out of school, so you’re not sticking him with that one. Wasn’t Cork either, it was Dublin.” Confused, she poured more gin. “I dunno. Dunno anything. Must have read about it.”

  Peckover let that go too. No reason why the Widow Spence should not have been deeply political. She might have scrapbooks on the Irish question. Others on Cambodia, Latin-America. Of course, she might not, but he had no stomach for hitting a widow when she was down, or at any rate groggy.

  “How long have you known Mercy McCluskey?”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, love. The woman’s angle. It sometimes helps. What’s your impression of ’er?”

  “Dim. I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Really. Here’s something I’d say you genuinely don’t know. Ready? I consider I’m being very patient.”