by Lex Lander
Now bewilderment merged with my misgivings.
‘Presumably,’ I said, in some exasperation, ‘you intend sooner or later to decode this gibberish into plain English, like wot she is spoke.’
He tittered behind his hand. ‘Quite right, old boy.’ He peeled off his spectacles, levered his round body out of the chair, and began to pace back and forth behind his desk in a peculiar hop-skip gait.
‘I understand you were close to Mrs Power.’
‘I am close to Mrs Power, yes,’ I said, rejecting his use of the past tense. Ramouz had also slipped into the historic when speaking of Clair. The portents were obvious and ominous.
‘Quite so. I do apologise.’ He left off pacing to fix me with an earnest gaze. ‘However, we must face up to the possibility that Mrs Power may not …’– cough – ‘… be restored to us.’
‘Yes.’ I had faced it the previous day, even as the BMW had blasted off down the highway.
The Consul was no longer pacing but standing at ease, regarding me, directly below the forty-year-old portrait of the monarch that hung on the pastel green wall. Neither of us spoke. I was lost in my thoughts, anxiety for Clair being uppermost. Someplace in the room a clock ticked. Even with the air-conditioning churning, it was hot. The Consul took out a large white handkerchief and passed it across his forehead.
‘Have you any idea why Mrs Power was taken?’ he said.
I said I hadn’t but told him as much as I knew of her background and circumstances, pretty much the same fiction I had fed Ramouz.
‘So you were going to marry her?’
I wasn’t about to quibble over distinctions.
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Good.’ The nod was unqualified satisfaction. My apprehension came rushing back. ‘That being the case, I take it you will be willing to accept responsibility for Elizabeth in the event that …’ Another cough, a clearing of the throat. ‘In the worst eventuality?’
It was out in the open at last and less of a shock to the system than it deserved to be.
‘It needn’t be official, old boy,’ the Consul said hastily, interpreting my silence as rejection, ‘and it most certainly wouldn’t be permanent. After all, the girl has an uncle in Spain, I believe. We shall be contacting him at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, someone has to step up to the plate and accept responsibility. A family friend like yourself, for instance. It’s important for Elizabeth’s peace of mind and stability. A strictly temporary measure, I assure you.’
If it was an appeal, it was unnecessary. The idea of abandoning Lizzy had never crossed my mind.
I said, ‘Just so long as you understand that my relationship with Mrs Power is of very recent vintage. Elizabeth might not want me as a stand-in custodian. She knows nothing about me.’
The Consul rubbed his hands together, clearly pleased by my tractability. ‘Let’s find out, shall we? Let’s ask her.’
He hop-skipped to the door in the corner, flung it open.
‘Would you care to join us, my dear?’ he cooed into the room beyond.
As he stepped back, Lizzy came out – a pale, woebegone travesty of the Lizzy I knew, with red-edged eyes and slumping shoulders. Until her gaze alighted on me, a friend in a wilderness of strangers.
‘Oh, Alan!’ she cried, and came to me at a run.
I held her as I had done once before, not so very long ago, both the giver and receiver of comfort, making vicarious contact with Clair.
The Consul, standing on the sidelines, beamed approval. He had his answer.
Twelve
On leaving the Consulate Lizzy burst into tears, starting a trend that was to continue on and off through afternoon and evening. What with the bitter pill and worry of Clair’s disappearance, the further niggle of my suspended passport, and now the burden of responsibility for a teenage girl, I wasn’t feeling too chirpy myself. Lizzy and I were confederates in doom and gloom.
We had returned directly to the hotel. The staff at the front desk had learned of the drama, and much sympathetic clucking and head-shaking came with the key cards. This provoked renewed snivelling from Lizzy, and I hustled her up to her room where she agreed to lie down for an hour, on condition I didn’t leave her alone. So, while she curled up on her bed and felt miserable, I sat out on the balcony and felt miserable. With the sun past its meridian, it was moving into shade. A pair of Clair’s sandals lay under the other chair, toes pointing inwards like a little girl’s. Somehow, seeing them there, waiting to be reclaimed, heightened the unreality of the situation. It also deepened my desolation, which drove me to telephone room service for a bottle of vodka. Stupid, weak, pathetic bastard, I silently berated myself as I hung up.
With the vodka came Yusuf. By then Lizzy had dropped off into a restive slumber, so thankfully I could drink without an audience to pass judgment on me. As I drank, I contemplated the view and the various courses of action open to me. I steadily became ever-so-slightly smashed. A familiar pattern.
I also prayed for the telephone to ring. It didn’t, of course.
In the early evening Lizzy woke up and shuffled barefoot out onto the balcony. Listless, hair a mess, a sodden handkerchief balled in her fist. A lost, lonely waif.
‘Sit down,’ I said, trying for an avuncular smile.
She sank into the chair. ‘What are you drinking?’
I rotated the bottle so the label was on her side.
‘Vodka,’ she said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. ‘You can keep it.’
‘That’s a relief.’
My feeble humour drew an equally feeble tremor from her lips.
‘Pour me one anyway, will you?’
I sent her to fetch a tooth glass.
‘I don’t expect there’s been any news about … about Mummy,’ she said watching the colourless liquor splash into the glass.
‘No, honey. No news.’
She looked at me, misery drawing lines that were obscenities in so young and lovely a face.
‘Who … ?’ she began to ask. ‘No, I mean why? Why did they do it? Mummy isn’t rich. Or important. Only to me.’
‘And to me,’ I said, a gentle nudge that she wasn’t on her own in this.
She sipped her vodka. No change in expression.
‘I’d forgotten how tasteless it was.’ She smacked her lips. ‘Give me beer any day.’
‘There’s some in the ice box.’
She twisted the handkerchief round and round.
‘Do you think she’s all right, Alan? I mean really all right.’
Desperate not to hurt her, I resorted to white lies.
‘Bound to be.’ The words reeked of platitude. ‘Kidnappers always treat their victims well.’ Not true. ‘If they didn’t, the ransom wouldn’t be paid.’ Not true. ‘To them it’s a business, you see. A way of getting rich quick.’ That was true, at any rate, only Clair didn’t have any money or any rich relatives as far as I knew. ‘Your mother is just a piece of merchandise to be sold back to the people who care about her.’
‘But who’s going to pay?’ Lizzy stared at me. She had unerringly put her finger on the weakness in my postulations. ‘Will you pay, Alan?’
Would I? Yes, the private me replied, quite firmly and at once. I would pay to get her back.
‘Yes, Lizzy, I will. If they ask me.’
‘How much? How much will you pay?’
No deception was required. I would pay the price of Clair’s freedom even if it took all I owned. Although I didn’t love her as I had loved Marion, or even Gina, who had died accidently at my own hand less than a year ago, I had been ready to build my future around her. If, God forbid, she was never seen again, it wouldn’t wipe out what we’d had together, short-lived though it was. It’s called obligation.
It was thus with an untroubled conscience that I was able to say, ‘Whatever it costs, I’ll pay.’ I reached for her hand, gave it a squeeze. ‘We’ll get your mother back.’
It was a meaningless pledge
. Unless I was a whole three hundred and sixty degrees off-track, no payment would ever be demanded, for Clair was not a conventional kidnap victim. And if I was correct in that surmise, I could also say with certainty who had masterminded the operation.
Rik de Bruin.
‘Any news, Commissaire?’
‘No, Mr Melville. We have heard nothing. And we have found nothing.’ Meaning no corpse had turned up yet.
‘Oh, well done.’
Sarcasm is cheap but I couldn’t help it. It was Sunday morning, nine o’clock-ish. The abduction had taken place on Friday, a whole forty hours ago. Forty hours of no bloody progress.
‘We will keep you closely informed, Mr Melville. Be assured.’
I smashed the phone down. Be assured. Standard cop humbug and about as reassuring as my own placatory drivel about kidnappers and ransom money.
Lizzy was sleeping in her own room. After my chat with Ramouz I went to rouse her and ran into a deputation outside my door: Brigadier Hordern and a handful of picked cronies.
‘Morning,’ I said, a trifle curtly.
‘We heard about Mrs Powers.’ This from the old Miss Scraggy Neck. Her face was that map of tragedy that some people can turn on and off at will. ‘How absolutely dreadful.’
‘Power,’ I corrected. ‘No “s”. Yes, it’s a bloody mess.’
They meant well, these throwbacks to the sunset of the British Empire but they were no use to me.
‘Actually,’ the Brigadier said, knuckling his moustache, ‘we came to see if you need any help. With Mrs Power’s daughter, don’t you know? Must be a bit difficult for you … a single man, what?’
Idiotically perhaps, I resented the suggestion that I wasn’t cut out to be a caretaker guardian. It wasn’t that I disagreed, but I’d have taken the orphan population of Tangier under my wing sooner than admit it to this crowd. Or maybe he was hinting at something else; impropriety, for instance. Man of a certain age with an under-the-age-of-consent nymph.
‘Thanks, but I’ll manage.’
I pushed past them into the corridor and walked the few yards to Lizzy’s door with the do-gooders at my heels.
‘If you’re quite sure …’ Mrs Scraggy Neck’s tone implied that, sure or not, the task was beyond me.
I rapped on the Lizzy’s door.
‘Quite sure.’ Hearing Lizzy’s invitation to enter, I slipped into her room and gently, smilingly, shut out the circle of wrinkled faces.
Lizzy was on the balcony, dressed in black leggings and a red T-shirt many sizes too large, with a Virgin motif across the front – Richard Branson’s company logo, not a statement of her chastity. Her eyes were still a bit pink and swollen, but she had brushed her hair and was outwardly in control of her grief.
‘All right?’ I enquired.
‘Oh, more or less. I was just thinking … you know, Mummy is out there somewhere; probably not very far away.’
‘In the next building even.’
Her hand jumped to her mouth.
‘Not that close. She couldn’t be.’ She leaned out over the balcony, peering along the promenade as if she expected to see her mother waving to her from a window. The Virgin motif was on the back of her T-shirt too.
I dragged her away. ‘Let’s go and have breakfast.’
‘No … no, I couldn’t eat.’
‘Try, at least,’ I said, doing my guardian stuff. ‘Then there are some things I must do.’
The Consul had offered a baby-sitter facility, ‘in case of emergency’. An acknowledgement that I might wish to go into round holes where a fifteen/sixteen-year old girl would be the squarest of pegs. Was he thinking of a brothel?
Whether or not, in making the offer, he had brothels in mind, he reacted with mild surprise when I took him up on it.
‘So soon, Mr Melville?’
‘Only for a few hours. An urgent business meeting.’
Lizzy, being Lizzy and clinging to me like grapes to the vine, was even unhappier about the separation.
‘It’s very important, honey,’ I soothed. ‘There’s an outside chance I’ll dig up a lead on your mother.’
It wasn’t smart of me to raise her hopes, but this was one jaunt I had to do all on my own.
Next, I organised transport, renting a newish Renault Megane from the same company as before (they were most understanding about the incineration of the Fiat, maybe because it had been clapped out). A spate of form-filling later I was heading east out of town at somewhat more than the speed limit.
De Bruin was staying in a rented villa, coincidentally not so far from that of the reprieved Abdul Al’hauri. No secrecy need shroud this visit to the Petit Europa. Up the private road and round the first bend in a squeal of rubber. The road forked. The left fork bore the name Rue du Bord de la Mer. A couple of hundred meters on I came to a street with no exit: Impasse de Florentin. This was the address given to me by Lizzy from the card de Bruin had given Clair in the hope that she would accept his invitation to a cosy evening in front of the telly. Number 5 was my destination. I drove into the street and up to the last house. It bore a discreet 5 beside a bell-push on the right pillar of a massive timber gate that would not have disgraced a mediaeval castle.
The gates were not guarded, nor were they locked. I walked right in, making no attempt at stealth. Weaponless; the thread of my credibility with Commissaire Ramouz was too slender to bear the strain of another gunfight. In putting my own safety at risk I was gambling that de Bruin would flinch from a second assault. I hoped that one literal bloody nose was enough for him.
The grounds of the villa were not quite up to the opulence of Al’hauri’s pad but your average multi-millionaire would find little to carp about. The lawns were watered to an emerald green, their borders crammed with flora from everyday marigold to exotic bougainvillea. Trees had been planted so as to provide large tracts of shade, mostly palms, pine, and oak, their foliage browned by ozone, while in a corner, where two walls met, was a great rampart of bamboo. Water dribbled from a waterfall of rocks into a crescent-shaped pond crossed by an ornamental bridge. Some landscape architect had been given a spade and a blank cheque, and told to get on with it.
My appraisal of all things horticultural was ended when a young blond-haired man in baggy swimming trunks stepped out from behind a fat palm, barring my path. I recognised him as de Bruin’s watchdog, the beefcake boy. From the trapezium-shaped foresight I also recognised the stubby revolver in his fist as a Ruger GP-100 Magnum. Nice gun. If nothing else it showed I had been upgraded from the status of harmless sucker to dangerous sucker.
‘You are trespassing,’ he said in English with Germanic undertones.
‘So I am. Where’s de Bruin?’
‘Mynheer de Bruin is not here.’
I weighed the prospects of taking the gun away from him without getting holed. And then of matching his two-hundred-plus pounds of lightly-oiled muscle and sinew against mine. Not to mention a probable fifteen year age discrepancy in his favour.
‘When will he be back?’ I asked reasonably.
‘Next year.’
I didn’t take this seriously. ‘I’ll wait.’
Beefcake waggled the gun. ‘He is not coming back, I tell you. He has returned to home.’
‘To Holland’
‘Sure.’ A sneer. ‘If you want to see him, you got a long walk, mister.’
From an unseen part of the lot a girl’s voice called, ‘Christiaan!’ and then what sounded like ‘Flook!’
Beefcake alias Christiaan cocked his handsome head sideways to bellow ‘Houd je mond!’ which, if I recalled my phrasebook Dutch correctly, was an impolite way of saying ‘be quiet’.
I took advantage of this distraction to push past him, reckless in my resolve. Ignoring his shout, I broke into a trot and rounded the corner of the building a couple of lengths ahead of him. And went no further.
Two girls adorned the poolside: Bea and Margot, de Bruin’s little pieces of fluff from the Chico Bar. Both were naked but for
a sheen of sun oil and a red choker around Margot’s throat. If that were all, I might have taken it in my stride. What pulled me up was not their nudity but the naughty things they were doing to each other. Right under the drooling lens of a movie camera, complete with crew: cameraman, boom operator, clapper girl, and the rest. I was still held in thrall of this epic-in-the-making when Christiaan came up behind me, announcing his presence with a gun barrel in my kidneys. I let out a grunt of pain. A battery of eyes swung towards me. A tall, skeletal man with an upsweep of grey hair as high again as his forehead stepped clear of the group, yelled ‘Cut’ to the cameraman, and fired off a terse challenge at Christiaan.
Christiaan’s answer was lengthy and complicated, only the words Engelsman and Engelse, Dutch for Englishman and Englishwoman, conveying anything at all to me.
The skeletal one contemplated me warily, as if I were a chained beast and the length of my chain indeterminable.
‘I am called Martens,’ he said, switching to fluent English. ‘Mr de Bruin has gone away. Now will you please do the same.’
‘Not until I find out what he’s done with Clair Power.’
‘We know nothing of this lady. Can’t you see we are making here a movie?’
I could see. I could also see what kind of movie they were making.
‘Now please go,’ Martens insisted, his voice petulant.
While this conference was going on, the girls had come out of their clinch. Bea, the younger one, was now flat on her back, dragging her hand in the water, remote from the controversy around her. Margot had assumed a crouch, legs spread unnecessarily wide, mine to drool over. Out-and-out exhibitionism.
Christiaan made a grab for me, but I elbowed him away. I was too committed now to back off meekly, confident anyway that nobody was going to put a bullet in me just for gatecrashing.