The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (16 page)

‘And how long will you last when your late friends find you?'

‘If the police already know what Fyster-Holmes was, I am not worth killing.'

‘The police do not know. They believe you quarrelled with him, cut his throat and ran. It is all in the papers.'

‘But you can give evidence for me. You know Fyster-Holmes was alive when I left.'

‘He may have been. But I cannot swear to what happened outside my room.'

‘How did you escape? Who are you?' Irata asked sullenly.

‘Who do you think?'

‘I think you are a Spaniard who has lived long out of the country.'

‘So I too might want to return and take you with me if you trusted me.'

Georges felt a twinge of conscience at jumping at the lead Irata had given him. Yet it could be a vision of coming reality. If the grey-faced man wanted to avoid any trial or public enquiry and police were hot on the trail of Rivac and Irata, he must agree to smuggle them abroad.

‘When does somebody come here?' he asked.

‘Always at dawn—a fat lady who brings food and drink. She is very kind and is not afraid to be alone with the filthy, unwashed
pícaro
that I must appear.'

‘She sees only what is within a man, friend. And who else?'

‘Once the
tio
who brought me here came back. He does not please me. A little capitalist, very proud to own land.'

Typically Spanish, that acute and deadly summing up! But superficial. It omitted Paul's loyalty and humour.

‘Well, you'll have me for company now. Lend me one of your blankets and as we can't tell spades from clubs in the dark tell me about the home which is so near your heart.'

A little later both of them heard a rustling among the weeds and grass which had overgrown the approach to the house. The night sky was clouded and nothing could be distinguished but a light inside which was quickly flashed on and off. Then there was the click of the front door latch as it was closed. The cautious visitor could only be Paul.

‘That was our friend hiding your motorcycle.'

‘Why should he?'

‘The police must not find it in his house.'

‘What am I to say if they catch me?'

‘Just tell them that you left without notice because you so badly wanted to return to Spain. Don't mention Fyster-Holmes's politics or that you too were a communist or that there was a prisoner. Then I promise you have nothing but the KGB to be afraid of. The evidence against you won't stand up.'

Georges had fitful intervals of sleep but started to worry at dawn when there was no Daisy. Hour after hour all was still until the church bells of Alderton began to rejoice that it was Sunday and summer. The warm brick of the house below radiated the sun with only butterflies among the nettles to bask in it. Irata was restless and impatient. Georges started an argument over Syndicalism, maintaining that if there were any logic in politics Franco should have been a hero of the Left, not of the Right. That successfully evaded the two topics at which Irata was continually and clumsily hinting: the name of his companion and for whom he was working.

Daisy did not appear till her village world was at Sunday dinner, moving quietly up from the house by some route of her own instead of down from the trees. She greeted Georges with joy and astonishment.

‘Well, I guessed you ‘adn't never gone back to Lille, Master Georges, and was in trouble as usual, but I didn't expect to find you 'ere along of this nice Spanish gentleman. Relative of yours, is he?'

‘Not exactly, Daisy, but we're in much the same trouble. Does she always do you as well as this?' he asked Irata.

‘No complaint,' Irata replied, smiling for the first time. ‘It's the best gaol I ever was in.'

Daisy's basket held a cottage loaf, butter, cheese, spring onions, a roast loin of pork and two litres of dark wine supplied by Paul who, she said, had told her that Spaniards could not eat without it. Yes, and Mr Longwill had had a visit from the police asking about that Mrs Fanshawe who had been staying at the White Hart. A detective had called on Daisy too. She could only tell him that Mrs Fanshawe was house-hunting and had been interested in the empty place of which she kept the keys. He said that the lady hadn't got a husband, at least not in the Army, and that she had been in the district on some shady business that they'd like to know about.

‘Did he mention my name, Daisy?'

‘No 'e didn't. Did 'e ought to have done?'

‘He didn't ought to have done. But if Mrs Fanshawe ever comes to you for help, please do what you can, Daisy dear.'

‘Ah, so that's the way it is! Well, if I didn't suspect nowt, no one else won't neither. But what's 'er 'usband going to say, Master Georges?'

‘She hasn't got a husband, Daisy. She's keeping quiet like me and this gentleman here. Any enquiry about him?'

‘No. Not about Mr Irata.'

‘What makes you think that's his name?'

‘There ain't that number of runaway Spanishes round 'ere, so I guessed it when I read in the papers that 'e was wanted. But I knew 'e wasn't no murderer or you and Mr Paul wouldn't 'ave aught to do with 'im. All the same I aren't happy, dear Master Georges, though I was never a one for 'aving faith in me bodings like you were.'

‘I give you my word that Mr Irata is quite innocent, Daisy.'

‘Oh, it ain't that. But I keep 'avin' a feeling that I'm bein' watched. That's why I'm late today. I didn't want to go on leavin' me back gate before sun-up when I couldn't give no reason for it. So this morning I takes my cleaning things and puts 'em on top of the basket and comes out 'ere to give the floors a polish which everyone knows as I do to the old place when it needs it. And when all was quiet and I sees it for sure I comes up through the bushes instead of the way as Mr Paul showed me, and I'll go back down with an armful of dog daisy and crab apple on top of the basket as if I'd been a gatherin' of them which is what I was doin' when I first came on your bury and wouldn't 'ave you disturbed no more than a pair of dancin' fox cubs.'

If anyone was indeed watching her movements he would be a lot easier to see in daytime than before dawn. Georges asked her to go ahead with her wild-flower picking and take her time over it. He then left Irata with breakfast and wriggled his way cautiously up the slope as in youth. From time to time he could see Daisy's head bobbing about and twigs of crab apple blossoms springing back from her hands. Nobody was on the opposite slope which was fairly open, nobody in the lane or on the field path leading to the house.

In the shelter of the belt of trees he rose to his knees. Daisy could be right. At the far end of the ridge and also just within the trees a man was standing. He had a clear view of one side of the village and of Daisy's back gate and garden. He could have seen her leave and then by changing his position her arrival at the house. It was unlikely that he had ever observed her earlier visits in the half light, for in that case he could have followed her straight to the cellar and Irata. Why he should have watched her movements this particular morning was a puzzle. It was probable that he had an entirely different objective: to observe Monsieur Rivac when he returned to recover the brochures.

The figure remained intent on the village, so Georges returned to Irata and asked him to come up as quietly as he could. The silent feet of a manservant could not compare with those of a mildly delinquent juvenile trained in the country, but sound was masked by the ridge and the watcher heard nothing. Georges pointed him out.

‘Do you know him?'

‘I cannot see his face.'

Georges imitated the squeal of a rabbit caught by fox or stoat. The man turned round sharply.

‘Why do you want to know?' Irata asked.

‘Because neither of us wish to go to Russia and he is too close for comfort. Simple!'

‘He sold ice-cream from a van.'

‘What was his round?'

‘From Oxford down the Thames. Sometimes he called at the house. He may have brought messages. Fyster-Holmes would not allow his telephone to be used on business.'

The watcher stayed where he was until Daisy returned to her cottage with flowers on top of her basket and a long, light feather brush for cleaning cobwebs as a pretext for her journey. He then made off to the far end of the village and out of sight.

A devoted agent of the Party presumably, and in the most innocent of professions. From village to village he drove his ice-cream van, tinkling a tune on his bell to announce his approach to children and their mothers. It was hard to see how at short notice he had been able to change his round from the upper Thames to the farming lowlands east of Oxford, but no doubt Daisy would know.

Chapter Seven

As soon as she received the warning from Paul Longwill, Zia quickly packed and paid her bill. It must have been a close thing. The desk asked if she had her passport on her. She replied that of course she had not, that she was a British subject by marriage. Another clerk then addressed her in French, very politely inviting her to see the manager for a moment. She answered haltingly in the same language that she infinitely regretted she had a train to catch and no time. He hesitated. Obviously he had been expecting her to be French and was momentarily disconcerted when he recognised from her accent that she was not. Before he could start again she swept out and on to a passing bus.

She got off at the first Underground station that came into view and took a train without knowing or caring where it was bound. As a bunch of fellow passengers changed at Piccadilly Circus she changed with them and returned to the surface at Knightsbridge, feeling reasonably certain that if she herself did not know where she was the police wouldn't either. Harrods, that familiar name, appeared in the distance. It ought to have somewhere comfortable for a fugitive to change her clothes and think out the next move.

The fourth floor presented a panorama of capitalist glamour intimidating even to a travelled Hungarian. Searching through dreamlit hall after hall devoted to the languorous enhancement of beauty, she found at last a cloakroom fit to receive a general's wife in no immediate need of rejuvenation. First she called Georges at the Regency so guardedly that no one listening could guess who she was. It occurred to her that the idiot was quite capable of thinking she had run away from him, so she threw in three passionate darlings and cut him off before he could respond. That done, she sat down in the adjoining café with a glass of Madeira to consider how to dispose of Mrs Fanshawe.

Georges had said that the interviwew with Herbert Spring had gone very well. That surely must mean that the enigma of Kren and Lukash was near to being solved and that somewhere must be a secret and powerful ally. If she could hold out for another day or two without the name of Terezia Fodor ever appearing in the English press or Hungarian police files, her uncle and his club would be secure and she could safely return to work.

Hold out—but where in this foreign country and how? She was warned not to visit Georges in his mysterious cellar and it would be wise not to communicate with Paul while his connection with her was being investigated. Yet she must let them know where she was. Hotels were to be avoided. Whatever the efficiency of British police it was impossible that every receptionist could be advised to look out for her, but she would at once be in trouble if her accent or an inadequate story aroused suspicion and she was asked to identify herself.

It was then that Alderton Wood occurred to her. It was so near to Georges that if she was forced by any emergency to get in touch with him she could do it secretly or by way of the Manor Farm. ‘He must be very fond of you to take you there,' Paul had said, and she had coolly replied that it was business not romance. Yet it was there in the wood only last Monday that she had first realised that she would be far from sorry if business, for at least a mischievous moment, were forgotten.

The first essential was to buy a map. When she spread it out all her movements, including that fatal and dreamy wandering off on to the downs instead of turning left to the river, jumped from vagueness into reality. She remembered from her first journey to Thame that buses stopped wherever there was a village or a turning to one, and made a note where she should get off. It seemed to be more or less where Georges had accepted that disastrous lift, but that did not disturb her. She was not in the least afraid of Appinger and his friends who only knew that some woman had been present at the death of Fyster-Holmes and had no description of her. The ever present danger was the police.

She bought a sleeping bag to carry on her back and then returned to the top floor to transfer a few intimate possessions—in mind the thought of her next meeting with Georges—from suitcase to bed roll, and changed. She was going to look a bit too formal for one of the determined young hikers of the English roads, but the trousers which she had worn on the night of Georges's rescue were dirty enough to pass and the coat could be rolled up and carried. Leaving her case with the attendant and saying she would pick it up later, she carried out her plan: a train to Aylesbury where the police had no reason to expect her and she could safely wait for dusk. She bought bread, wine, a length of salami, a pound of tomatoes and a flashlight, and took a late bus to that turning she had marked on the map.

If she was not to lose her way in the darkness she had to pass the White Hart. She managed that by crossing fields while keeping the lit windows of the bar in sight and then picked up the path she knew and the low stars visible down the length of the glade. After several vain plunges into the thicket she at last found the stream and followed it to the bank where she had sat with Georges. There she slept happily under the snow of the hawthorn until awakened by the clamorous dawn chorus of, as it seemed to her, more birds than in all Hungary and most of those in England.

Her problem was to get a message to Georges without showing herself in any nearby village. After staying six nights at the White Hart her face was familiar to too many people. In this district of small and friendly communities everybody seemed to know everybody else or, if not, was able to fit a name to a face. She had to find a person who had perhaps gossiped about her but had no reason to recognise her.

She spent an hour composing a message to Daisy who would be acute enough to guess that it was meant for Georges in his cellar; it had to be unintelligible but must be plausible. She had learned that many of the older generation in their pretty cottages took a surprising interest in minor details of their countryside—these noisy little birds for example. But she didn't know enough names of birds. Flowers then. Flowers might do. Georges had made a fuss over this purple thing he called Honesty. After editing various versions it seemed to her she had arrived at a good one.

Would you please tell Mrs Daisy Taylor that Tessa has found the flower she wants in Alderton Wood and what shall she do about it?

Daisy of course would see no sense in it, but Georges would—especially if he remembered that Tessa was the English diminutive of Teresa as Zia was in Hungarian. She practised her message over and over again so that her accent was as strained and correct as in an English class for foreigners.

It was a reasonable morning in early June with the soft mist clearing by eight o'clock and restoring warmth to limbs chilled by an inadequate sleeping bag and a brain wasting heat to work out its puzzle. Stopping to look around her, hurrying on, stopping again in imitation of Georges's movements she made her way to the road to Alderton. There she leaned on a stile from which she could see approaching traffic and disappear behind the hedge if it was useless to her. She recalled the various vehicles which did the round of the villages, stopping in the main street to serve customers: the baker, the travelling grocer's van, the County Library Service. Some of them ought to pass sooner or later on the road to Alderton and all the drivers would know Daisy. At this hour in the morning there might even be the red Post Office van, though she doubted if it was wise to send a message by the postman. As a government servant he might, for all she knew, make a daily report to police.

None of them passed and very little traffic at all. A distant peal of bells reminded her that it was Sunday. Hell! But it appeared after all that religion did not affect the Sunday dinner. The fried fish van came along, its chimney polluting the morning with the reek of steaming oil which the English seemed to enjoy. She decided that it would not do, that if Daisy ate fish, she would cook it for herself. Shortly afterwards the fish-frier was followed by a gaudily painted ice-cream van, ambling along with a red and light green canopy over a white body. Her motives for not stopping it were still vaguer. Surely mothers and children bought ice-cream, not comfortable widows? And the Hungarian colours (or Italian for that matter) were unnatural in this empty, pastoral quarter of Oxfordshire.

Ridiculous feminine reasons! She reproached herself for irresolution and determined to stop the next likely person who turned up. This was a man on a rusty, black bicycle, in his kindly fifties and probably a prosperous farm labourer; at any rate, bicycle and all, he belonged to the land. Zia popped up and asked him if he was going to Alderton.

‘Trying to catch up the fish—that's what I am.' he answered.

She said she was sorry. She had wanted to send a message to Alderton.

‘Ah, I can do that for you. Who'd it be for?'

‘Mrs Daisy Taylor.'

‘I knows 'er as who doesn't. But I tell you how it is, young lady. The missus goes off to church and she says to me: “Bill,” she says, “don't you forget to buy a nice piece of cod for dinner, 'cos I won't be out in time 'cos Alice's baby is bein' christened and I just want to see 'ow she can look the vicar in the face, not knowin' who the poor mite's father was or likely to.” And blast it if it didn't slip my mind being busy with the lettuces, so I'll catch the fish up and be back with it fresh as out of the sea, like. And I'll tell 'im to tell Mrs Daisy. 'E won't forget. Always obliging he is when it comes to taking a parcel or seein' that the cat 'as her little bit.'

Zia gave him her message which he repeated.

‘What sort of flower is it you found, Miss?'

That was a question she had not foreseen. George's purple thing would have to do, but made to sound as if it was worth reporting to Daisy.

‘A pink form of Honesty,' she said.

‘Want an answer?'

There was no answer Daisy could give, but it was a pity to waste the informal means of communication which had offered itself. So Zia compromised, saying that it didn't really matter unless Mrs Taylor thought it did.

‘Camping, are you?'

‘Yes, one or two of us.'

‘Well, you be here around three o'clock. It's likely the fish will be passing on his way 'ome, but if 'e ain't someone else will.'

Zia returned to her sanctuary under the hawthorn and waited, now uneasy at being dependent on an outer world. The stream which flowed past her, rippling out of an unknown source and on into an unknown future, was, she felt, so much in keeping with her desperate life of the last ten days in England. At three she was at her stile again, not too closely hidden and with her map half open as if she were just considering whether to turn right or left on the road. No passers-by paid any attention to her until the ice-cream van came along and stopped further up the road. In the front seat were two men: the white-aproned salesman-driver and a companion in a plain business suit who got out and walked back to her.

‘Are you the young lady who sent a message to Mrs Taylor?' he asked.

‘Yes, that's me.'

‘Well, she says you're to dig it up and bring it round tonight to the gate at the back of the garden. I hope it's not a protected species, Miss.'

‘I don't think so. Just a freak colour.'

‘Must be the cold spring, I reckon.'

She thanked him and was about to accompany him back to the van and buy an ice-cream, but he did not wait for her and was off.

She returned to the wood comforted but a little puzzled. The fish for some unknown reason had passed the message to the ice-cream. If he had forgotten to deliver it or changed his route, that seemed to be in keeping with the helpful tendrils of the village grapevine. But Daisy must have been remarkably quick to understand and to respond so cunningly to the unknown Tessa. Perhaps Georges had been in her cottage at the time and had prompted the reply. ‘Dig it up' could not mean anything at all and was simply thrown in for verisimilitude.

She was not at all happy at the thought of committing Mrs Fanshawe to Alderton, even to a back entrance at night. Also she doubted if she could find her way round the village in the dark and whether she could recognise the right gate.

Setting off in the dusk, she got as near to the village as she dared before the light failed. She could not see Daisy's cottage, though the lane she had taken to it on her single visit was plain enough; so were the open, rolling fields behind it across which she was meant to approach. Georges had said that he went that way if he did not want to be observed. But when darkness came down she realised that she would far rather have looked for a missing tourist in the stews of Marseille than launch herself into dogs, cows, hedges and indistinguishable open spaces which were not open at all when you tried to find your way out of them.

At last she discovered a footpath with several garden gates opening on to it. Only one had a hen house, so that must be Daisy's. No light showed in any of the cottages to reassure her that she was in the midst of human beings. She told herself that anyway the last thing she wanted was to be seen and questioned and that it was perfectly natural for there to be no light. The good people were sitting in their front parlours watching television or mending or both. At the back were only kitchen and bedroom windows. Washing up had finished and bedtime had not yet arrived.

She waited, not knowing whether to go in and knock at Daisy's back door. It seemed imprudent. Instructions stated the garden gate and carefully said nothing about coming in. The village was silent except for the occasional shutting of a door. Down the lane some dogs barked, but not with any conviction. Beyond Daisy's hedge she could see nothing but the outlines of the hen house and the cottage. She had to admit that the rendezvous was very well chosen, but Daisy or Georges should by now have been on the look-out for her and appeared. Twice she imagined that she heard them.

A light was quickly shone on her face and switched off.

‘Good evening, Madam. I am a police officer and must ask you to accompany me.'