The Tiger In the Smoke (36 page)

‘Isn't there something in the car?' It was Meg, her cheeks bright and her eyes dancing as Elginbrodde must have seen her when scarcely out of her teens.

‘No.' Geoffrey linked his arm through hers possessively, and his virility and happiness were aggressive in the little space. ‘No, Albert's right. It's delicate, you see. My letter stressed that. You be patient, sweetheart. No good coming all this way and smashing the thing. We'll go down to the village. You and Amanda can get us rooms at the pub while we hunt out the workmen. I think it might be easier to move the whole thing… What's up, Amanda?'

‘Nothing.' The older girl drew her red head into the building again. ‘I thought I heard something, but it was only the door swinging back. Go down to the village, shall we?'

‘You three go back. Amanda can see to the hotel, Geoff can get hold of the authorities, and Albert can hunt up a mason. Let me stay.' Meg spoke earnestly and disengaged her arm.

‘I shouldn't,' said Amanda promptly. ‘You'll only get cold if you don't fall over the cliff.'

‘But I'd like to stay with my Treasure. Do you mind, Geoff? It matters to me rather. Do you mind?'

Mr Campion did not interfere. In these matters he was a very old bird. His pale eyes rested on Geoffrey's face where a fleeting flame of jealousy had flared and died of shame.

‘Do anything you like, my dear,' Levett said awkwardly at last. ‘Stay if you want to. It'll make us hurry back.'

‘That's what I thought.' She was as delighted as a child. ‘I'll just sit here and look at it and wonder what the Sainte-Odile mystery can be. Hurry, or I shall die of curiosity.'

The
Sacred Mystery of Sainte-Odile
. A private hollerith in Mr Campion's mind went smoothly into action. He was a boy of ten again, standing behind his redoubtable Mama in the Église de la Collegiate at Villeneuve over the bridge from Avignon, struggling to translate the rolling phrases booming from the official guide.

‘This work of art miraculous without something-or-other alone in the world except for a sister (that must be wrong) in the custody adoring of the family private of one of the most big gentlemen in France. They call it the Mystery, the Mystery Sacred of Sainte-Odile-sur-Mer.'

‘My hat!' he said in sudden excitement. ‘This is going to be interesting. Let us do as Geoff suggests. We'll just go and get a truck and cart the whole thing down to the hotel. We'll leave you there to fix things up with them, Amanda. You stay here, Meg, since you want to, and we'll do it under the half-hour.'

He swept Amanda out with him, and Geoffrey, hesitating, turned and kissed the girl. He was not often demonstrative and she was taken by surprise.

‘Darling, how very nice.'

‘Are you going to be all right?'

‘Don't be silly. Hurry back and we'll see what it is.'

‘Right. Twenty minutes. Don't go too near the hole in the wall.'

‘I won't.'

Meg sat down on the deserted plinth and put her fur-lined sleeve on the base of the statue. It was exquisitely quiet. She heard the car start quite distinctly and listened to the sound of the engine dying gently away until it was lost in the deeper and more caressing growl that was the sea. The sun was still shining and the tinsel streaks on the water so far below had become a deeper gold. The little boat was still there but a sail had altered slightly. She watched it with eyes narrowed hopefully. Perhaps it was going to open out like a red butterfly.

There was another boat, too, far away as yet and beetle-sized. It was dark, with a long white tail of foam which showed its speed.

The roar of a plane passing very low over the garden spoiled the peace and she resented it mildly.

She ran an exploring finger round the plaster filling of the cast and thought of Martin with great tenderness but no sorrow. The process of her mourning was complete. He had been gay, he had been kind, he had been brave, and he had been absorbed into the fabric of her life which was the richer for him.

She was very anxious to see her new responsibility, and as she rubbed the plaster idly a shallow disc of it flaked away, exposing a deep rift in the packing. She was so interested in its possibilities that she did not hear the soft rustle of the box bushes outside in the garden, and by the time she had opened her bag and unearthed a long nail-file nothing could have disturbed her.

Her fragile steel wand probed the weak spot cautiously and unexpectedly a whole chunk of the dry, powdery composition came away, disclosing a dusty bulge covered with something which must at one time have been a blanket. Feeling very guilty, but incapable of resisting the temptation, she worked on and very soon had a cavity nearly a foot deep and wide enough to take her hand.

She was so excited that the step on the stone behind her was purely welcome and she turned her head briefly to catch a glimpse of a blue jersey and beret dark against the bright doorway.

‘Bonjour,' she said politely, and returning to the work went on without looking at him. ‘Qu'il fait beau. Est-ce que – ?'

‘Speak English.'

‘English?' she said. ‘What luck. I wish you'd appeared before.'

Another piece of plaster had broken away and she was absorbed in edging it gently out. His voice had sounded husky, but it had made no deep impression on her. No dominant force had been revealed in it.

‘Do you work here? Or no, I suppose you're fishing. Is that your boat?'

Another lump of plaster came away as she spoke. She set it down carefully beside her and put in her hand for more, still chatting with the easy friendliness of her age.

‘Doesn't it all look wonderful from here?'

Havoc did not move. He had slept for an hour on the boat but no more, and now he could feel the earth heaving under his feet like the sides of some vast animal, alive and uncertain. He was nearly done, nearly exhausted. The final effort up the cliff had drained the barrel of his resources, but he had made it.

He put one hand on the doorpost, spoke, and was frightened by the lifelessness of his own voice.

‘What are you doing?' The question was ridiculous. He could see what she did, and none of its significance was lost on him. He did not expect her to answer. Her appearance there was as unreal to him as every other fortuitous happening had been ever since he had gone back to the church at night and the old man had told him without even the asking the one thing he wanted to know.

From that moment the Science of Luck had ceased to be a cult which he followed painfully, a mere series of opportunities which he could seize or miss. From then on it had revealed itself as a force which had swept him on without even his connivance. It had been a whirlwind nightmare in which everything went right without once losing the essential nightmare quality which is fear. The sequence of events had been dreamlike and in his exhaustion had seemed one. He remembered the old woman at the bakery, hiding them in the shed where the van stood. He remembered Roly knowing the way, the deserted roads where no one stepped out to haIt them, the dinghy already afloat at the lapping water's edge. It all passed through his mind like the slow-motion details of a fall, or a car smash, smooth, irrevocable, and a finality.

The moment of lunacy had occurred when Tom greeted the
Marlene Doreen
with a cry of recognition, a crazy belief in which he had persisted despite all his brother's angry arguments. She was the same sort of boat as their old man's, that was all, but Tom thought he knew her and the brothers could handle her, and on her smooth planks they stood taller and became different men.

They were on her now, still sitting there expecting him to return, the blamed fools; blissfully trusting him, even though Bill, who was lying sick as a dog in the bows, was swearing pitiably at them for their idiocy.

They would still be sitting there when the police launch came up. By all he had heard, the French coppers carried rifles on a job like this. However, one way and another they would all be busy for quite a reasonable time. The old Science was certainly holding. The Luck was more than just with him: he couldn't go wrong.

There was only Doll even to be considered. Havoc had seen him drop into the water while he himself was still lying panting on the cliff after the climb which had become so much more gruelling since he had achieved it last. Doll had seen the red light and come after him. The old brute was shrewd and he was game, and the Treasure had got him. But he'd never make the cliff. He must be somewhere on the face now, just under that second overhang perhaps, clinging there, looking like a white slug with a black head. Tiddy Doll with one eye working and patent dancing pumps.

Meg's reply to his question took him utterly by surprise. As an obstacle she was so negligible he had forgotten her existence. Sex had long ceased to interest him, and her fragile beauty, graceful in the flowing fur and wool, made no impression upon him. She might have been a grasshopper sitting there at the mouth of his treasure cave.

But her voice when he heard it reminded him of itself when she was a child, clear and kiddish and with an irritatingly better accent than his own. He remembered that absorption in her, too, which had hurt his pride then and struck him as fantastically ridiculous now when at least she should have seen her danger.

‘I'm trying to get something very fragile out of here without breaking it,' she was saying. ‘It's something which has been left to me and I don't know quite what it is. I've got to get all this packing out, you see. It's still held quite fast, or it may be just very heavy. You wouldn't care to have a go at it, would you? Be very careful.'

He lurched forward, stumbling as he let go the post. He was much weaker than he had thought. But what did that matter? It was all being done for him, wasn't it?

He saw her horrified look as the light from the breach in the wall fell upon him and his first thought was that she had recognized him from their childhood. But her exclamation dispelled that flattering illusion.

‘Good heavens, are you all right?'

Her concern reminded him infuriatingly of Avril.

‘You look most terribly ill. Please don't bother about this. The others will be back in a minute, anyhow. This doesn't matter in the least. I'm awfully sorry. I didn't realize. Can I do anything for you?'

‘Get out of the way.' There was no power in him. He noticed it and thrust the thought aside just as he thrust aside the hand she put out to steady him.

As for Meg, he looked so ghastly, his skin so pallid under the three-day beard, his bones sticking up through the shoulders of his jersey and his eyes so dull within their caked rims, that she saw no tiger there.

She rose from the plinth and he dropped on to it and thrust his hand into the cavity she had made. He worked feverishly, his powerful fingers breaking away the plaster and clawing it out into the gully. The stimulus of touching the long-sought hiding-place fanned the ashes of his energy, and she watched him, fascinated, misled by the show of strength.

The hard core of the discovery, a bundle wrapped in several thicknesses of cement-soaked blanket, began gradually to take shape. It appeared to be roughly cylindrical, about five feet long and the base not quite two in diameter. Twice before he had cleared the inner end of it he made attempts to drag it out bodily, but it resisted him and he went back feverishly to his scraping and shovelling. The white dust covered him, turning his hair and the blue jersey he had found in the
Marlene Doreen's
locker to matted grey.

Meg eyed him dubiously. She was not afraid
of
him, but for him, and she was relieved to hear the vague buzz of activity which was becoming slowly more and more noticeable both from inland and the sea. She was inexperienced in illness, but he looked very bad, she thought.

A plume of spray streaking across her living seascape caught the corner of her eye and she turned just too late to see the craft whose wake it had been. The little boat with the red sails was no longer visible either. Its wings must have opened after all.

‘Your boat has moved,' she said. ‘Did you know ? Perhaps I can see it if I come round here.'

‘It's not mine. Pull the side of this thing.'

The command had come back into his voice and it surprised her into immediate obedience. She stepped down into the gully and took hold where he indicated.

As she moved, there sounded very faint and far away from the sea below a splatter of sharp little noises, followed by a long bodiless cry like a seabird's. It was only just audible and barely a tone higher than the ceaseless soporific soughing of the waves. Havoc heard, but his busy hands did not falter. Rifles. He thought so. Doll's pallid torso must have made a wonderful target.

The whole incident had passed clean over the girl's head, he noticed. The Science was not faltering, the Luck was holding. He could feel it sweeping him on.

At last the bundle moved. ‘Pull,' he commanded, ‘now.' And again, ‘Pull.'

She had as much strength as he had, he realized, and it bothered him fleetingly. It was queer to find it in a girl. The flaking mass slid forward on the slippery powder.

‘Pull,' he repeated, unaware that he whispered. ‘Pull.'

‘No. Look, it's caught. There. See?'

She touched the side of the original opening.

‘This stuff on the base is harder than the rest. It's this jagged bit here, that's what's stopping us. Wait a minute.'

She tried to dislodge it with her ridiculous file.

‘What we need,' she said, splitting the words as she made her futile efforts, ‘what we really need is a good – strong – knife.'

She was not looking at him and anyway, even under his mask of plaster, his face did not change. He felt under his jersey. His fingers found the familiar sheath, and he sighed as the knife handle slid comfortably into his palm.

Meg laughed aloud as she saw the blade on the cement.