When he rolled the gunman over on his back, Carver found himself looking into the open black eyes of an unknown corpse.
The gunman, startled by Amy’s shout, had looked up at the moment of firing, and the rock, travelling at murderous speed, had smashed his forehead between the eyes, and depressed the thin bone behind the bridge of his nose, driving it backwards into his brain. His face looked grotesquely flat. The eyes were wide open, and already beginning to glaze. Blood came sluggish from the open mouth, the pump which should drive it already still.
Carver reached down and picked up the rifle. It was a sniper’s weapon, a modified British Army Number 4, the old wood easing stripped away from the fore-end of the barrel and a sausage of metal wrapped in canvas laced around the muzzle.
The silencer was crude, but Carver could testify to its effectiveness. He cranked the action and felt it slide slick as satin in its bed. There was a battered telescopic sight mounted to the left of the receiver, and when he held the weapon to his shoulder, the picture through the sight was crisp and clear.
The round which dropped into his waiting palm was a simple .303 round. Nothing special.
In two World Wars it had killed millions.
Behind him, Amy said: “Is he dead?”
Carver stepped back and turned carefully, the rifle still in his hands.
“Yes,” he said. “He is dead.”
She rose from behind a rock over to the left of her original position, and walked towards him, the shape of the big pistol dangling from her left hand. She was an incredibly erotic vision with the light reflected from the lake behind her.
“I thought you didn’t know where it was?” Carver said quietly.
Amy looked down at the big gun, hanging like a cannon by her naked thigh.
“It was in the blankets,” she said. “I found it when I rolled over just now. I thought he had hit me.”
“Thanks to you, he damn nearly hit me,” said Carver. “Why did you shout at that particular moment?”
She was close enough, now, to hand him the pistol and she began to reach out with it. He pushed it aside with the barrel of the sniper’s rifle.
“Careful. You could blow me in two with that. Give it here.”
She relinquished the pistol, and then put her arms round his neck.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispered into his ear. “I really thought you were killed and … And that would leave me alone in the woods with him...”
There were tears running down her cheeks and into the hollow of his shoulder, and he held her close for a long time, before he smoothed them away and led her back to the blankets. Their love-making this time was so savage that for a moment he wondered if she had found the idea of being left alone in the woods with a gunman quite such a frightening prospect as she pretended.
As they packed the things back into the Fourtrak, he said:
“So how did he find us, kid?”
She turned wide eyes to him.
“I never saw him in the mirror, but he must have followed us somehow. How else?”
“Yeah,” said Carver in English. “How else?”
He lay on the track again and rolled under the front end of the jeep, checking with his fingers along the body members and flanges which criss-cross the bottom of every modern car. After a moment, he gave a short sigh and rolled into sight again, holding in his hand a small, shiny object.
“That’s why you didn’t see him in the mirror,” he told the staring girl. “He was following a bleeper.”
He put the bleeper on the ground and rolled back under the oar, where she could hear him fumbling around again. After a moment, he emerged, and changed his position, searching the rear end of the ear. There was another short, sharp inhalation of breath.
“Two,” he said flatly.
He rolled out again and put a second alongside the first. A further period of searching failed to produce anything else, and he came out from under the car for good.
“The question is, when did they put them on?” he mused. “I parked the car in the street and it could have been anywhere in Paris.”
“It is a very easily identifiable car,” Amy pointed out. “And there cannot be many of them in Paris. If they knew how you crossed the Channel ... in fact, it could have been put on while you were on the boat.”
Carver dusted down his trousers and went to wash his hands in the lake. He was watching the woods along the trail carefully. When he had finished, he took the sniper’s rifle and disappeared among the trees.
Amy waited by the car, and when he came back half an hour later, she handed him a glass of wine. He drank it, frowning, and then tucked the rifle under the blankets in the beck of the car.
“Where did you go?”
“These guys work in pairs. One to drive and the other to track the bleeper.”
“Was there another?”
“Well, I found out where the car had been parked. He’d gone. Stupid of me, I should have known. Only thing...”
He paused, frowning.
“What?” she said.
“He would have had us off-guard. Why not finish the job? Why just go?”
He shook his hand and scooped up the two bleepers from the track.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The bar in the newly built hotel outside the walls of Carcassonne had been designed by a Marseilles businessman’s wife and it looked as though her mother had once been frightened by a Hilton.
The walls were decorated in black leather rich with heraldic shields. The seats were mock medieval thrones, the waiters dressed like unfrocked Grand Dukes, and the prices would have made a profligate Greek shipping millionaire go and lie down for a long time in a darkened room with a cool, damp cloth on his forehead.
Luther thought it was delightful.
“Bit of class,” he told the barman approvingly. “Not like the pokey little holes you get down in the old town, right?”
The barman, whose family had been raised in Carcassonne over ten generations, and regarded the 19th century renovations by Viollet le Duc as a vulgar modern intrusion in the city’s respectable decay, nodded happily.
He was much more comfortable talking in Occitan than French, and his understanding of English was fragmentary at best.
In any case his family disapproved of the English. They could remember the Black Prince burning nearby Castelnaudary in 1355 and considered them untrustworthy.
“Anozzer, monsieur?” He began to assemble the makings of the sixth cocktail on the bar menu, down which Luther had been working his way ever since he had arrived, half drunk, from the Cité.
“Yeah, why not?” Luther was normally a heavy but a careful drinker, able to pace himself so that he arrived at the truly sodden and unpleasant stage only after midnight.
His period of enforced abstinence, though, had left him purged of alcohol and liable to the misjudgment any Costa Brava brave could have warned him about. He had been drinking large amounts of spirits during the heat of the day and only a stupefyingly large helping of cassoulet in the early afternoon had so far kept him on his feet.
At the moment, however, the cassoulet was acting as a false friend. Nature will have its way and though a large dish of beans and pork will delay the effects of a skinful, it will not prevent those effects forever.
Five cocktails, even allowing for the fact that the barman was watering the gin, were doing their work. Luther felt distinctly queasy, and he naturally blamed his discomfort on the work of the most vulnerable person around.
“Here,” he said suddenly, stabbing at the barman with a rigid forefinger. “Here, what you putting in these things, then? That last one tasted different from the one before, right?”
The barman smiled and nodded.
“Different each time,” he confirmed.
“Why?” Luther gazed at him through eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“You order different,” said the barman, hardily.
>
Along the bar, a waiter heard the edge on his colleague’s voice, and slipped discreetly out of the door. Three Americans sipping Grolsch at the far end of the room began to gather their bags and sunhats together.
“Why does it taste different?”
“Las’ time monsieur order a Negroni” said the barman uncertain as to the nature of the complaint, but pretty certain that whatever happened it was going to turn out to be his fault in the end.
“This time, monsieur ask for a Gin Fizz.”
Luther looked at the pictures on the bar menu, and was surprised when the colours slowly separated before his eyes and began to swim.
“What you put in that last one, then?”
“Gin, monsieur, and lemon juice, a little Grenadine, some soda…”
“Give me the same again, then. Make it a double, right?”
The deputy manager, summoned by the waiter, materialised at Luther’s elbow and summed up the situation with one practised glance.
He was a large man and trained in Marseilles, so ejecting quarrelsome drunks was second nature to him. The trouble was that even a Marseillaise trawler man on a bender did not match Luther by several degrees of nastiness.
“Good afternoon, monsieur,” said the deputy manager. “Is there some way I can help you?”
Luther, who could recognise a bouncer when he saw one, drunk or sober, stepped back from his bar stool and prepared for trouble. All he needed to complete the pleasure of his afternoon was a good punch-up, and he reckoned it had just walked up to him.
“Hello, Frog’s Legs,” he said with a grin. “Hop off to the bar and get me a drink!”
The bar manager, embarrassed by the stares from the American tourists, and feeling the necessity to establish his authority in front of his staff, stepped forward to take Luther by the sleeve. It was his first mistake and he did not get the chance to make another.
Moving by instinct, Luther took hold of his extended wrist and pulled hard. The manager, who had been expecting to be pushed off, fell forward off balance, and in falling met Luther’s knee on the way up. His nose broke messily, and he fell, stunned, against the bar.
Luther began, with enjoyment, to kick him, and the remainder of the bar staff fell on Luther and bore him to the ground, smothering him with their weight, and in the end rendering him helpless. By this time, however, he had inflicted considerable damage on two of them, and bruises on all.
The hotel manager arrived on the scene after it was all over, cast one appalled look at the damage which had been caused to his bar, and told his secretary “The police – and quickly!”
Then he saw Lefeu standing in the doorway and gesturing at him urgently, and said “Cancel that. Wait there.”
Lefeu had been looking for Luther for two whole hours before he caught up with him. He had been told off as Luther’s driver and minder, and aware that he was already in deep disgrace for the little affair over the girl, was doing his best to rehabilitate himself.
He had been promised a job which was far more to his liking, so long as he managed to keep Luther out of trouble and return him intact to the castle. Now, he could see his prospects of further employment slimming by the second.
Termination of employment at the Château was, he knew, usually fatal.
Using every argument at his disposal, he did his best to impress upon the hotel manager that the Castellan of Bram would be flattered and obliged if his friend and colleague could be returned to the Château without the involvement of the police.
A great deal necessarily went unsaid. A few bad words put about in the district by a man who held the respect of the local population would be all that was needed to give the new hotel an uneasy reputation. Vegetables would be difficult to get, or not of the right quality. At the very least it would mean that the new hotel, which was already locally unpopular because of its uncompromising modernity, was off on the wrong foot.
Sensitive to the slightest threat to his hotel, the manager eyed his craggy visitor dubiously, recognised the real anxiety in his hard, grey eyes, and decided on discretion.
“Take him away,” he said. “And don’t bring him back. Not even when he is sober. I shall send the bill for repairs to the Château.”
As far as Lefeu was concerned, he could make it into little paper aero planes and fly them out of the window, once he had Luther safely back in his bed, and out of sight.
He was, however, quite unprepared for Luther’s xenophobia, which was by now rampant.
“Take you hands off me, you mother-fuckin’ bastard!” Luther told him succinctly as Lefeu tried to steer him towards the van in which they had driven down from the Château.
In Jersey, whence Lefeu had been driven by his outraged neighbours for exactly that offence, the locals would have known better than to raise the matter. It was with great difficulty that he restrained himself now. He covered the moment of outrage by stubbing out the cigarette he was smoking and lighting another instantly.
Luther started to walk unsteadily back towards the bar, and Lefeu grabbed at his arm, then ducked to avoid a wicked swing at his face.
He was reaching behind his belt for the plaited leather sap he carried there when a thickset, dark man alighting from a large four wheel drive vehicle said pleasantly: “Need any help, fella?”
Luther focused with difficulty, and his eyes widened.
“You!” he said, and swung again.
The newcomer swayed back and let the sizzling right pass his chin, then kicked Luther solidly in the crotch, and clipped him alongside the jaw as his agonised face swung forward.
Luther dropped like a plateful of wet spaghetti, and Carver smiled modestly at Lefeu’s resentful stare.
“Where d’you wanna put him?” he asked. “Wanna leave him here?”
Lefeu shook is head hurriedly.
“I must take him back to Château Bram immediately,” he said. “Put him in there.”
He held the door while Carver dumped Luther onto the bags of vegetables and boxes of provisions inside.
“They allow visiting parties up at Château Bram?” said Carver casually. “Wife and I are seeing all the Châteaus we can find while we’re on our honeymoon.”
“No visits. It’s private property,” said the Jersey man, afraid that he might already have said too much. He turned to the driving seat of the van, noticed that his cigarette was broken, and stopped to replace it with another. As he did so, the other man flicked a Zippo and his face stood out, dramatic in the yellow light.
“Light?”
“Oui. Merci,” said Lefeu. He drew deeply on the cigarette, nodded, and slid into the driving seat. He was aware of a dark girl standing back in the shadows beyond the other car, and took pleasure in lighting up her legs with his headlights as he drove off. But he never saw her face.
*
“At a time when I need to remain more than usually discreet,” said Sigmund Dark in a voice chilling in its soft, modulated tones, “you choose to draw attention to me.”
Luther’s eyes watered in his effort to keep them in focus on his employer’s face. There was a dull ache in his groin, which was competing with the throb in his jaw, which was in turn taking his attention from his deep embarrassment.
His hangover was of that deep-laid variety, which makes the victim believe that the flesh is rotting and slowly detaching itself from his bones in festering patches. Almost every part of him hurt in some way, and there were bits which were promising to hurt when it was their turn.
But worst and most painful of all was his bitter personal humiliation at the beating he had received last night.
Typically, he fastened the blame on the barman who had mixed his drinks. He sincerely believed that the man had deliberately spiked them and poisoned him, and then hidden behind a bunch of strong arm boys to evade the consequences of his action.
Just why a perfect stranger should have done such a thing was not clear to him, but Luther him
self had occasionally mounted a similar trick in order to humiliate or embarrass a client at one of his brothels purely for entertainment. He could easily believe other people might have the same motives.
At this moment, insofar as his mind was capable of coherent thought, it was obsessed with one idea: to dose himself with the hair of the dog which had savaged his liver last night, and then to return to the scene of his humiliation and beat the barman to a bloody, oozing paste.
Sigmund Dark, a non-drinker himself, was incapable of appreciating the misery caused in others by the various toxins which go to make up a hangover. His fury at having the attention of the neighbourhood attracted to his entourage only the day before a major sale – and a sale, moreover, which he could not now cancel – was exacerbated by his personal contempt for people who let their pleasures get the better of them.
He was also feeling that glow of self righteous disapproval common to the sober in the presence of the hungover drunk.
So he was unaware that much of the fury he was pouring onto Luther’s throbbing head was running away unnoticed. No reproaches of his could match those which Luther had already levelled at himself.
He was also ignorant of Luther’s desperate need for revenge – revenge on someone, somehow, irrespective of their involvement in his humiliation.
“From now until Monday, when the sale is over and tidied up, you stay here, you stay quiet and by God, you stay sober!” Dark told Luther.
He was standing by the vast window and glowering out at the countryside when he said it or he would certainly have noticed the rebellion which flamed in the bloodshot eyes staring murderously at his back.
“No more visits to the town. Not for any reason,” he said flatly. “Now get out.”
Luther rose with difficulty from his chair and made his way back to his own quarters. One of his plans last night had been to bring a contraband bottle back with him to help deal with his hangover, but the events of the evening had prevented that too, so he was feeling particularly vengeful.
As he walked into his flat and closed the door, Yasmin came from the bathroom. She had accepted delivery of the unconscious body last night, and endured Luther’s drunken, and in any case pointless, attempts to use her. In the end, exasperated, she had deserted him and slept on the far side of the room on the settee.
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