Caravan to Vaccares, Page 7

  ‘I’m ready,’ Cecile said.

  Bowman looked round in mild astonishment.

  She was, too, even to the extent of having combed her hair. A strapped suitcase lay on her bed. ‘And packed?’ Bowman asked.

  ‘Last night.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, I can’t just walk off without – ’

  ‘Lila? Leave her a note. Say you’ll contact her Poste Restante, Saintes-Maries. Hurry. Back in a minute – I have to collect my stuff.’

  He left her there, went quickly to his own room and paused briefly at the door. The south wind sighed through the trees and he could hear the splash of the fountain in the swimming pool but that was all he could hear. He went into his room, crammed clothes anyhow into a suitcase and was back in Cecile’s room within the promised minute. She was still scribbling away industriously.

  ‘Poste Restante, Saintes-Maries, that’s all you’ve got to write,’ Bowman said hastily. ‘Your life story she probably knows about.’

  She glanced up at him, briefly and expressionlessly over the rims of a pair of glasses that he was only mildly surprised to see that she was wearing, reduced him to the status of an insect on the wall, then got back to her writing. After another twenty seconds she signed her name with what seemed to be a wholly unnecessary flourish considering the urgency of the moment, snapped the spectacles in the case and nodded to indicate that she was ready. He picked up her suitcase and they left, switching off the light and closing the door behind them. Bowman picked up his own suitcase, waited until the girl had slid the folded note under Lila’s door, then both walked quickly and quietly along the terrace, then up the path to the road that skirted the back of the hotel. The girl followed closely and in silence behind Bowman and he was just beginning to congratulate himself on how quickly and well she was responding to his training methods when she caught his left arm firmly and hauled him to a stop. Bowman looked at her and frowned but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

  Short-sighted, he thought charitably.

  ‘We’re safe here?’she asked.

  ‘For the moment, yes.’

  ‘Put those cases down.’

  He put the cases down. He’d have to revise his training methods.

  ‘So far and no farther,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve been a good little girl and I’ve done what you asked because I thought there was possibly one chance in a hundred that you weren’t mad. The other ninety-nine per cent of my way of thinking makes me want an explanation. Now.’

  Her mother hadn’t done much about training her either, Bowman thought. Not, at least, in the niceties of drawing-room conversation. But someone had done a very good job in other directions, for if she were upset or scared in any way it certainly didn’t show.

  ‘You’re in trouble,’ Bowman said. ‘I got you into it. Now it’s my responsibility to get you out of it.’

  ‘I’m in trouble?’

  ‘Both of us. Three characters from the gypsy caravan down there told me that they were going to do me in. Then you. But first me. So they chased me up to Les Baux and then through the village and the ruins.’

  She looked at him speculatively, not at all worried or concerned as she ought to have been. ‘But if they chased you – ’

  ‘I shook them off. The gypsy leader’s son, a lovable little lad by the name of Ferenc, is possibly still up there looking for me. He has a gun in one hand, a knife in the other. When he doesn’t find me he’ll come back and tell Dad and then a few of them will troop up to our rooms. Yours and mine.’

  ‘What on earth have I done?’ she demanded.

  You’ve been seen with me all evening and you’ve been seen to give refuge, that’s what you’ve done.’

  ‘But – but this is ridiculous. I mean, taking to our heels like this.’ She shook her head. ‘I was wrong about that possible one per cent. You are mad.’

  ‘Probably.’ It was, Bowman thought, a justifiable point of view.

  ‘I mean, you’ve only got to pick up the phone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The police, silly.’

  ‘No police – because I’m not silly, Cecile. I’d be arrested for murder.’

  She looked at him and slowly shook her head in disbelief or incomprehension or both.

  ‘It wasn’t so easy to shake them off tonight,’ Bowman went on. ‘There was an accident. Two accidents.’

  ‘Fantasy.’ She shook her head as she whispered the word again. ‘Fantasy.’

  ‘Of course.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘Come, I’ll show you the bodies.’ He knew he could never locate Hoval in the darkness but Koscis’s whereabouts would present no problem and as far as proving his case was concerned one corpse would be as good as two any time. And then he knew he didn’t have to prove anything, not any more. In her face, very pale now but quite composed, something had changed. He didn’t know what it was, he just registered the change. And then she came close to him and took his free hand in hers. She didn’t start having the shakes, she didn’t shrink away in horrified revulsion from a self-confessed killer, she just came close and took his other hand.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ Her voice was low but there were no shakes in it either. ‘Riviera?

  Switzerland?’

  He could have hugged her but decided to wait for a more propitious moment. He said: ‘Saintes-Maries.’

  ‘SaintesMaries!’

  ‘That’s where all the gypsies are going. So that’s where I want to go.’

  There was a silence, then she said without any particular inflection in her voice: ‘To die in Saintes-Maries.’

  ‘To live in Saintes-Maries, Cecile. To justify living, if you like. We idle layabouts have to, you know.’ She looked at him steadily, but kept silent: he would have expected this by now, she was a person who would always know when to be silent. In the pale wash of moonlight the lovely face was grave to the point of sadness. ‘I want to find out why a young gypsy is missing,’ Bowman went on. ‘I want to find out why a gypsy mother and three gypsy girls are terrified out of their lives. I want to find out why three other gypsies tried their damnedest to kill me tonight. And I want to find out why they’re even prepared to go to the extraordinary lengths of killing you. Wouldn’t you like to find those things out too, Cecile?’

  She nodded and took her hands away. He picked up the suitcases and they walked down circumspectly past the main entrance to the hotel. There was no one around, no sound of any person moving around, no hue and cry, nothing but the soft quiet and peacefulness of the Elysian Fields or, perhaps, of any well-run cemetery or morgue. They carried on down the steeply winding road to where it joined the transverse road running north and south through the Valley of Hell and there they turned sharply right – a ninety-degree turn. Another thirty yards and Bowman gratefully set the cases down on the grassy verge.

  ‘Where’s your car parked?’ he asked.

  ‘At the inner end of the parking area.’

  ‘That is handy. Means it has to be driven out through the parking lot and the forecourt. What make?’

  ‘Peugeot 504. Blue.’

  He held out his hand. ‘The keys.’

  ‘Why? Think I’m not capable of driving my own car out of – ’

  ‘Not out of, chérie. Over. Over anyone who tries to get in your way. Because they will.’

  ‘But they’ll be asleep – ’

  ‘Innocence, innocence. They’ll be sitting around drinking slivovitz and waiting happily for the good news of my death. The keys.’

  She gave him a very old-fashioned look, one compounded of an odd mixture of irritation and speculative amusement, dug in her handbag and brought out the keys. He took them and, as he moved off, she made to follow. He shook his head.

  ‘Next time,’ he said.

  ‘I see.’ She made a face. ‘I don’t think you and I are going to get along too well.’

  ‘We’d better,’ he said. ‘For your sake, for my sake, we’d better. And it would be nice to get you to that altar unscar
red. Stay here.’

  Two minutes later, pressed deeply into shadow, he stood at the side of the entrance to the forecourt. Three caravans, the three he had examined earlier, still had their lights burning, but only one of them – Czerda’s – showed any sign of human activity. It came as no surprise to him to discover that his guess as to what Czerda and his headmen would be doing had proved to be so remarkably accurate, except that he had no means of checking whether the alcohol they were putting away in such copious quantities was slivovitz or not. It was certainly alcohol. The two men sitting with Czerda on the caravan steps were cast in the same mould as Czerda himself, swarthy, lean, powerfully built, unmistakably Central European and unprepossessing to a degree. Bowman had never seen either before nor, looking at them, did he care very much whether he ever saw either of them again. From the desultory conversation, he gathered they were called Maca and Masaine: whatever their names it was clear that fate had not cast them on the side of the angels.

  Almost directly between them and Bowman’s place of concealment stood Czerda’s jeep, parked so that it faced the entrance of the forecourt – the only vehicle there so positioned: in an emergency, clearly, it would be the first vehicle that would be pressed into service and it seemed to Bowman prudent to do something about that. Crouched low, moving slowly and silently across the forecourt and at all times keeping the jeep directly between him and the caravan steps, he arrived at the front end of the jeep, edged cautiously towards the near front tyre, unscrewed the valve cap and inserted the end of a match into the valve using a balled-up handkerchief to muffle the hiss of the escaping air. By and by the rim of the wheel settled down until it was biting into the inner carcass of the tread. Bowman hoped, fervently if belatedly, that Czerda and his friends weren’t regarding the front near wing in any way closely for they could not have failed to be more than mildly astonished by the fact that it had sunk a clear three inches closer to the ground. But Czerda and his friends had, providentially, other and more immediate concerns to occupy their attention.

  ‘Something is wrong,’ Czerda said positively. ‘Very far wrong. You know that I can always tell about those things.’

  ‘Ferenc and Koscis and Hoval can look after themselves.’ It was the man whose name Bowman thought to be Maca and he spoke confidently. ‘If this Bowman ran, he could have run a very long way.’

  ‘No.’ Bowman risked a quick glance round the wing of the jeep and Czerda was now on his feet. ‘They’ve been gone too long, far too long. Come. We must look for them.’

  The other two gypsies rose reluctantly to their feet but remained there, as Czerda did, their heads cocked and slowly turning. Bowman had heard the sound as soon as they had, the sound of pounding feet from the patio by the pool. Ferenc appeared at the top of the steps, came down three at a time and ran across the forecourt to Czerda’s caravan. It was the lurching stumbling run of a man very close to exhaustion and from his distressed breathing, sweating face and the fact that he made no attempt to conceal the gun in his hand it was clear that Ferenc was in a state of considerable agitation.

  ‘They’re dead, Father!’ Ferenc’s voice was a hoarse gasping wheeze. ‘Hoval and Koscis. They’re dead!’

  ‘God’s name, what are you saying?’ Czerda demanded.

  ‘Dead! Dead, I tell you! I found Koscis. His neck is broken, I think every bone in his body is broken. God knows where Hoval is.’

  Czerda seized his son by the lapels and shook him violently. ‘Talk sense! Killed?’ His voice was almost a shout.

  ‘This man Bowman. He killed them.’

  ‘He killed – he killed – and Bowman?’

  ‘Escaped.’

  ‘Escaped! Escaped! You young fool, if this man escapes Gaiuse Strome will kill us all. Quickly! Bowman’s room!’

  ‘And the girl’s.’ Ferenc’s wheezing had eased fractionally. ‘And the girl’s.’

  ‘The girl?’ Czerda asked. ‘The dark one?’

  Ferenc nodded violently. ‘She gave him shelter.’

  ‘And the girl’s,’ Czerda agreed viciously. ‘Hurry.’

  The four men ran off towards the patio steps. Bowman moved to the offside front tyre and because this time he didn’t have to bother about muffling the escaping hiss of air he merely unscrewed the valve and threw it away. He rose and, still stooping, ran across the forecourt and through the sculptured arch in the hedge to the parking space beyond.

  Here he ran into an unexpected difficulty. A blue Peugeot, Cecile had said. Fine. A blue Peugeot he could recognize any time – in broad daylight. But this wasn’t daytime, it was nighttime, and even although the moon was shining the thickly-woven wickerwork roofing cast an almost impenetrable shadow on the cars parked beneath it. Just as by night all cats are grey so by night all cars look infuriatingly the same. Easy enough, perhaps, to differentiate between a Rolls and a Mini, but in this age of mindless conformity the vast majority of cars are disturbingly alike in size and profile. Or so, dismayingly, Bowman found that night. He moved quickly from one car to the next, having to peer closely in each case for an infuriating length of time, only to discover that it was not the car he was seeking.

  He heard the sound of low voices, but voices angry and anxious, and moved quickly to the archway. Close by Czerda’s caravan, the four gypsies, who had clearly discovered that their birds had flown, were gesticulating and arguing heatedly, holding their council of war and obviously wondering what in hell to do next, a decision Bowman didn’t envy their having to make for in their position he wouldn’t have had the faintest idea himself.

  Abruptly, the centre of his attention altered. Out of the corner of an eye he had caught sight of something which, even in that pale moonlight, definitely constituted a splash of colour. This brightly-hued apparition, located on the upper terrace, consisted of a pair of garishly-striped heliotrope pyjamas and inside the pyjamas was no other than Le Grand Duc, leaning on the balustrade and gazing down towards the forecourt with an expression of what might have been mild interest or benign indifference or, indeed, quite a variety of other expressions as it is difficult to be positive about those things when a large part of what can be seen of the subject’s face consists of jaws champing regularly up and down while most of the remainder is concealed by a large red apple. But, clearly, however, he wasn’t in the grip of any violent emotion.

  Bowman left Le Grand Duc to his munching and resumed his search. The inner end of the parking lot, she had said. But her damned Peugeot wasn’t at the inner end. He’d checked twice. He turned to the west side and the fourth one along was it. Or he thought it was. A Peugeot, anyway. He climbed inside and the key fitted the ignition. Women, he thought bitterly, but didn’t pursue the subject with himself, there were things to be done.

  The door he closed as softly as he could: it seemed unlikely that the faint click would have been heard in the forecourt even if the gypsies hadn’t been conducting their heated council of war. He released the hand-brake, engaged first gear and kept the clutch depressed, reached for and turned on the ignition and the headlamp switches simultaneously. Both engine and lamps came on precisely together and the Peugeot, throwing gravel from its rear wheels, jumped forward, Bowman spinning the wheel to the left to head for the archway in the hedge. At once he saw the four gypsies detach themselves from the rear of Czerda’s caravan and run to cover what they accurately assumed would be the route he would take between the archway and the exit from the forecourt. Czerda appeared to be shouting and although his voice couldn’t be heard above the accelerating roar of the engine his violent gesticulations clearly indicated that he was telling his men to stop the Peugeot although how he proposed to do this Bowman couldn’t imagine. As he passed through the archway he could see in the blaze of the headlamps that Ferenc was the only one carrying a firearm and as he was pointing it directly at Bowman he didn’t leave Bowman with very much option other than to point the car directly at him. The panic registering suddenly on Ferenc’s face showed that he had lost all interest in usin
g the gun and was now primarily concerned with saving himself. He dived frantically to his left and almost got clear but almost wasn’t enough. The nearside wing of the Peugeot caught him in the thigh and suddenly he wasn’t there any more, all Bowman could see was the metallic glint of his gun spinning in the air. On the left, Czerda and the two other gypsies had managed to fling themselves clear. Bowman twisted the wheel again, drove out of the forecourt and down towards the valley road. He wondered what Le Grand Duc had made of all that: probably, he thought, he hadn’t missed as much as a munch.

  The tyres squealed as the Peugeot rounded the right-angle turn at the foot of the road. Bowman drew up beside Cecile, stopped, got out but left the engine running. She ran to him and thrust out a suitcase.

  ‘Hurry! Quickly!’ Angrily, almost, she thrust the case at him. ‘Can’t you hear them coming?’

  I can hear them,’ Bowman said pacifically. ‘I think we have time.’

  They had time. They heard the whine of an engine in low gear, a whine diminishing in intensity as the jeep braked heavily for the corner. Abruptly it came into sight and clearly it was making a very poor job indeed of negotiating the right-hand bend. Czerda was hauling madly on the steering-wheel but the front wheels – or tyres, at least – appeared to have a mind of their own. Bowman watched with interest as the jeep carried straight on, careered across the opposite bank of the road, cut down a sapling and landed with a resounding crash.