The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (17 page)

‘Where to? What for?' Zia asked in panic. ‘May I see Mrs Taylor?'

‘We are investigating certain activities in and about Alderton. Mrs Taylor is helping us with our enquiries.'

This was appalling. Then they must have picked up Georges, too, and everything would come out.

‘Where is she?'

‘For the moment she is over at the house she looks after up the valley.'

She pulled herself together. It wouldn't do much good to fence with police but at least she could parry until they forced her to hang up her foil and come quietly.

‘Does she? I didn't know.'

‘Your full name please.'

‘Tessa Fanshawe.' She threw in the Tessa because the police must have intercepted her message. It was no good lying when they had only to run her over to the White Hart for identification.

‘How did you come to know Mrs Taylor?'

A catch question. Lunge and let's see the strength of his wrist.

‘Oh, she's been friends with my mother for years. And so when she knew I was camping in Alderton Wood she asked me to look out for a flower which she had heard was there.'

‘How did she know you were in the wood?'

‘She told me it was a good place to camp.'

‘You are not British, Miss Fanshawe. What are you?'

Miss
Fanshawe? He could hardly have made a mistake and ought to know very well that she was French or pretending to be.

‘I was brought up in Switzerland. Please, sir, this is my first visit to England.'

‘Our information is that she told you to dig up a flower.'

‘Yes, but I hadn't got anything to dig it up with.'

‘Why did she tell you to come here at night with it?'

‘I don't know. Somebody said it might be a protected species. Is that possible?'

‘Now, now, Miss Fanshawe! You know very well that it was not a flower which she asked you to look for.'

Relief, fear and light at last! There were only two places where the brochures could possibly have been hidden when Georges was grabbed—Daisy's cottage or Alderton Wood—and he could very well have buried them temporarily in the wood if he believed he was in danger. In fact Georges had felt fairly secure; but from their point of view he had been so desperate that he killed Rippmann.

The man was standing back and she could not see his face clearly; nor had she seen the boatman very clearly, but they could be one and the same. Obviously he knew nothing at all about the Mrs Fanshawe who was badly wanted by the real police and must be wondering whether this commonplace young camper with a pack on her back was or was not the mysterious woman in the marsh at the escape of Georges Rivac. He had not mentioned the name of Rivac, which was promising. She had to convince him that she was just Daisy's innocent stooge.

‘But it
was
a flower!' she insisted. ‘It was a pink form of Honesty.'

‘What did you find alongside it?'

‘Nothing. I hadn't a trowel or anything to dig it up with. I told you.'

‘We will see what Mrs Taylor has to say to that. You will kindly come with me.'

‘Yes, of course, if I'm needed.'

It seemed unlikely that Daisy was really at the house. Appinger would hardly dare to detain a respectable old lady for questioning and risk bringing the full force of the police down on his unsuspected organisation. To kidnap Rivac, the foreigner without any base except the cottage of an old retainer, was quite a different project and comparatively safe. Should she yell for Daisy and the neighbours? It was a temptation but she boldly resisted it. She must show herself quite convinced that she was in the hands of police and go with this man like a good citizen. The only other alternative was to run; but that would prove guilt, and she could not be sure of getting away.

She walked side by side with the uniformed stranger along the field path to the grandmother's empty house in its melancholy screen of trees. The door was not locked, suggesting that Daisy had opened it and could be inside after all. Her companion never showed a light till he was in the house and then pointed his torch at the floor as they passed down a passage and into the kitchen. Opening out of it was a scullery with a trapdoor thrown back and steps down to a cellar. So it was all up. They had Georges and Irata. Her own story might still be credible unless they searched her and found the Hungarian passport of Fodor, Terezia.

The stranger ordered her—still with the cool politeness of the police—to go down the steps, followed and closed the trap. A lantern was then switched on. Another man in plain clothes was standing there. Neither Georges nor Irata were in the cellar and she saw no sign that they ever had been. The place was empty except for a crate of bottles, a box of tattered children's books and some old garden furniture. The cobwebs had not been disturbed. The uneven brick floor was uniformly dusty.

‘Where is Mrs Taylor?' she asked.

The plain-clothes man replied that she had been taken to Oxford police station.

‘I think this lady is quite innocent,' his uniformed companion said, ‘and there is no more point in detaining her.'

The other put a few questions which she easily parried. No, she had not been alone in Alderton Wood. Another girl, a Miss Zwingli was with her, also on her first visit to England. She had moved on while Tessa tried to carry out Mrs Taylor's request—though they both thought it was a bit of nonsense—and they had agreed to meet in Oxford and see the colleges.

‘Can you tell us exactly where Mrs Taylor instructed you to find this pink flower?'

It was all clear now. Her guess had been correct. They had made a sound, logical and utterly wrong deduction from her note to Daisy. Believing that Georges could have hidden the brochures in Alderton Wood, what more natural than that he should have asked Mrs Taylor to recover them, warning her that she might be watched? The arrival of this girl had presented her with the perfect opportunity.

Zia described the course of the stream, the half arch of hawthorn and the supposed pink Honesty among the purple. There was only one such flower, she said, and it could not be mistaken.

They asked her to follow them upstairs. Simultaneously one shone a light on her face, and the other a light on what was undoubtedly Irata's motorcycle pushed into a deep, narrow larder. She managed to remain expressionless or at least only puzzled, looking from one to the other.

‘Have you ever seen this machine before?'

A plain ‘no' would be too prompt. She examined it carefully.

‘I don't think so,' she said. ‘But one doesn't notice all the motorbikes that pass.'

‘Very well, Miss Fanshawe. I hope you will accept our apologies. We will take you to Oxford and drop you wherever you like.'

‘At the bus station, if you would be so good,' she replied. ‘My friend will be waiting there.'

The general air of British police at their best changed abruptly. Someone in the passage whispered urgently:

‘Quick! Take her away! I'll stay.'

She recognised the hoarse voice as that of the man alongside the driver in the ice-cream van. So that was how they had got hold of her message. The two salesmen, covering the same villages and not competing with each other, would naturally be friends, and fish might have mentioned his strange errand to ice-cream among others. It had almost certainly never been passed to Daisy at all and the reply invented.

She was hurried off by the back door and on to the point where the two lines of trees met at the head of the little valley. Beyond them a black van was waiting on an upper road. It did not look like the regular police cars with which she was by now familiar and could well be the van which had carried off Georges. The uniformed man, carrying her pack, got in the back with her where they could not be seen. The other joined the driver in the front.

The pretended cop took off his tunic—which she noticed was much too tight under the arms—and laid it on the locker.

‘Now I have to ask you to open your pack,' he said, and spread it out on the floor.

Unexpected and deadly and no escape possible. As if eager to show her innocence she helped him to undo the zips of the pockets and while he was examining her clothes managed to extract her handbag and slip it under his tunic. It passed through her mind that pocket—picking was really too easy, but of course this scratch organisation would not be as experienced in searches as Hungarian police.

When he had finished, she rolled up the pack and threw it as if accidentally on top of his tunic.

‘Oh, I am so sorry,' she exclaimed. ‘I didn't notice it was there.'

She pulled out the tunic carefully, gave it a motherly shake and held it out for him to put on.

‘No, no! Thank you very much! One is so glad sometimes to get out of uniform.'

He put on a sports coat which went very well with his blue police shirt, and took off his tie. The alteration was enough. If the van was stopped for any reason no one would suspect that he had been impersonating police.

Relations with this shy girl who asked silly questions about criminals remained amicable all the way to Oxford bus station. Zia gathered up her roll, under it the bag in her hand, and got out. They waited to see her greet her friend. Fortunately there was a girl standing indecisively outside the waiting room. Zia embraced her affectionately and as the van drove away rattled off apologies for mistaking her for somebody else, switching to German when she discovered that the lost loiterer was desolate as only a German or a puppy could be. It was then very difficult to get rid of her, but at least she provided some protective colouring. Two young foreigners in Oxford with packs on their backs were only worth a glance from any passing police car, whereas for one single girl resembling the badly wanted Mrs Fanshawe the car might pull in to the curb. For the moment she was more worried about Georges than herself. It was likely that either he or Irata was the person whose approach had startled the fake police.

It was nearly midnight and the crowds were thinning. Action had to be taken quickly. Georges was somewhere unknown and the only possible way to get in touch with him was through Paul Longwill. She still considered it too dangerous to call him at the Manor Farm, so he must be contacted at his London office where telephones were unlikely to be monitored. London was where her German friend wanted to go, so Zia suggested that they should take the last bus out along the London road to the terminus and then try to cadge a lift. As the
fraülein
appeared afraid of rape, she pointed out that there were two of them and that the English were not in fact so addicted to rape as continental papers supposed.

When the pair had got off the bus and were all alone on the edge of a dark lay-by where it had already started to rain, Zia felt she had been too impulsive, foreseeing that if they got their lift they would arrive in London before dawn and she would have to wait in empty streets, inviting curiosity, until Paul turned up at his office. She did not underestimate the interest of the Law in Mrs Fanshawe. A well-known retired diplomat had been murdered. Mrs Fanshawe was strongly suspected of having been present. Worse still she was known, according to Paul, to have travelled on the pillion of a motorcycle on the night in question, and whose was it if not Irata's?

The luck ran for her. A six-ton lorry bound for London Airport stopped at their signal. Her companion, who wanted to take refuge with a friend in some northern suburb, turned it down. Zia insisted, for London Airport would allow her to vanish among faceless people until Paul was available.

When the kindly driver—in fact so chivalrous that Zia gave him a kiss for his own sake—had dropped them off and proceeded to the Freight Terminal, the pair entered Terminal 2 and made themselves comfortable alongside a party of students waiting for a chartered flight to leave at first light. It was safe to relax. She fell into the deep sleep of exhaustion, waking to find that the students had gone and so had her German companion—probably mistrustful, now that she had time to think, of Zia's behaviour from the Oxford bus station onwards.

It was nearly nine and she was all alone—in the sense that no one was within three yards of her. When she got up a man approached and addressed her in French. Though only just awake she had the sense to answer in German and then in heavily-accented English. She noticed that he followed her at a discreet distance to the lavatories, unsure of the possible identification. Once inside she washed her tired eyes until they sparkled, and returned without make-up and with her bed roll on her back looking, she hoped, too young and innocent to be Mrs Fanshawe. He let her pass, apparently intent on a timetable. That was encouraging, showing that the police had never traced her to Harrods and had no description of her present appearance. Even so when she took the bus to the town terminal she realised that she might still be under observation, since she had deliberately given the impression of waiting for a flight and yet had left the airport.

On arrival at the Cromwell Road she walked straight out and then played her former game of changing from one form of public transport to another regardless of destination. She reverted to her own feet in an unknown part of London where a maze of roundabouts, fly-overs and road junctions would make it difficult to pick up her trail if anyone had ever been on it. Opposite her was a station called Kew Bridge and a telephone box. Waiting till she was sure that nobody was paying any attention to her she dialled Paul Longwill's office, by-passing an officious secretary by saying she was Mrs Daisy Taylor.

‘It's not Daisy and I am calling from a box.'

‘Give me the number and stand by.'

The stand-by seemed interminable. She reminded herself that he had to telephone from outside his office. Meanwhile some damned salesman—whose grandmother was a whore—occupied her box and proceeded to pass a sheaf of orders to his headquarters. Eventually it was free and it rang.