Алистер Маклин - Caravan to Vaccares

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.’

‘Saintes-Maries!’

‘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 unscarred. 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.