Gavin Lyall - Midnight Plus One

I introduced Miss Jarman and Harvey. He wasn't looking his best: the lines on his face weren't any deeper, but the whole face had frozen.

Ginette said: 'I believe you are wounded. If you will go inside, Maurice will bandage you.' I saw the grey-haired, white-jacketed character hovering in the background, up on the terrace in front of the windows. I went up and shook his hand, and the old brown crab-apple face crinkled into a vast grin. We asked each other how things marched, and said they marched as well as one could hope. Then he said it was quite like old times, grinned again, and led Harvey off inside. The others came up on to the terrace. Maganhard said: 'How long are we staying here, Mr Cane? I believe we have gone less than one hundred kilometres today.'

Ginette said: 'We needn't discuss that just now. Giles, will you give Mr Maganhard a drink?' She swung round on the girl. 'My dear, let me show you your room.' She collected Miss Jarman, who was looking a bit pale, and led the way.

Nothing inside the Château seemed to have changed much – but no reason why it should when you've got a big house filled with furniture that's taken a century to collect. The front room on the right as you went in was still a sort of office/drawing-room, and the booze was still tucked away in a solid dark Louis Treize cupboard facing the window.

I peered in at the bottles. 'What'll you have?'

Maganhard said: 'Sherry, if you please.'

'Sorry, the French don't drink the stuff.'

'A weak whisky and soda, then.'

I hauled out a bottle of Scotch and mixed him one. I poured myself three fingers of it, neat.

Maganhard sipped. 'What do you plan now, Mr Cane?'

'I want to cross into Geneva early tomorrow morning -just before dawn.'

'Dawn? Why not before?'

I found a slightly crumpled packet of Gitanes and lit one. 'We've got to cross illegally – we daren't show our passports now. So we've got to wait until night. If we get there just after dark, we'll be stuck in Geneva overnight; it'll be too late to hire a car and I don't like overnight trains. The Swiss don't use them much – we'd be too conspicuous.

'But if we cross just before dawn, we won't have to hang around looking obvious. The streets'll start filling up, we can get moving quickly.'

He frowned into his glass. 'I believe Monsieur Merlin said he would be in Geneva. If we rang him there now, he could have a car waiting for us. So we could cross immediately after dark.'

I shook my head wearily; he wasn't going to like what 1 was going to say. Hell, he probably wasn't going to understand it. 'Things have changed since I spoke to Merlin yesterday. Somebody's been tracing us; they could have done it by tapping Merlin's phone. If so, why shouldn't they be doing the same thing in Geneva?'

'You said the police would not dare do that to an important lawyer.'

'That doesn't apply to the Other Side – and it's them been doing the tracing.'

He frowned. 'Is it so easy to intercept a telephone?'

'No – in a city it's damn difficult; that's why I wasn't worried about it yesterday. But after this morning, we know a bit more about these people: if they know enough to hire a man like Bernard, then they could know anything.'

'Mr Lovell thought it was the people in Dinadan who had betrayed us.'

'Yes, but he hadn't thought that through. The Meliots wouldn't have known who to betray us to, except the police. Nobody could have got at them in advance because nobody knew we were going there.'

He took a sip of whisky to help him swallow this. Then he said: 'I must have Monsieur Merlin with me in Liechtenstein.'

'All right – but we won't ring him until we're across the frontier. From here, nobody rings anybody. I'm putting a complete ban on that phone.' I finished my Scotch with a gulp-Then I said carefully: 'Of course, there was another phone call made last night.'

I felt him staring at me. 'My secretary rang my associate in Liechtenstein,' he said stiffly.

'She says.'

After a moment he said: 'You mean that she may have rung somebody else? That is impossible.'

'I didn't listen, so I wouldn't know. But if I wanted to get at you, the one person I'd like on my side is your privatesecretary.' And this time I met his stare.

The door opened and Maurice, with his Louis Treizeexpression firmly in place, announced:'Messieurs sontservi.'

There were only three of us: Ginette, Maganhard, and. myself. Harvey didn't apparently feel like food, and Miss Jarman had gone straight off to sleep.

Ginette gave me a slight frown and asked: 'What have you been doing to that child, Louis?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe killing people near her.'

'This morning?'

I nodded. 'We got jumped, up near Dinadan.' I took a deep breath. 'One of them was Bernard.' She'd known him, in the war.

But she just went on stirring hersoupe au pistou.'I had heard he and Alain had gone to – to that sort of work. After that, I suppose it does not matter who kills them.'

I started to say that it had been Harvey, not me, then decided she must have guessed. She'd thought a lot of me at one time – but never that I could beat Bernard.

But it hadn't been quite the gay chatter you can switch round to the spring fashions, the latest Mexican divorces, and who-elected-A/m-anyway? We finished the soup and started anomelette aux fines herbesin the general atmosphere of a funeral feast at a Home for Incurables.

By the time Maurice brought in grilled trout I either had to say something cheerful or ask for half an hour alone with the gas oven.

I said: 'Thank God for fish. Now I won't have to drink your Pinel.'

Ginette leant back and looked at me reproachfully. 'You used to say that trout were the only fish that weren't an excuse for a rich sauce. That was why I ordered them.'

'Oh, I still say it. Anybody who cooks trout in a fancy way is a grave robber, a violater of children, and cheats at cards, too. But here, they're doubly welcome. They mean I don't have to drink your dreadful wine.'

She made a graceful gesture of despair and looked at Maganhard. He was carefully staying out of the conversation, doing a surgical job on his trout – and probably remembering he'd called Pinel an 'overrated wine' last night.

She said: 'Isn't it fascinating to hear the English giving opinions on things they know nothing about? Theysound so convincing.'

Maganhard quickly shoved a piece of trout into his mouth.

I said: The British are essentially a humble people. They long ago realised it would be a terrible pride to try andbe right. So they concentrated onsounding right. And there you have the basis of the English upper classes, the public schools, the late Empire.'

Maurice leant over my shoulder and poured me a new glass of white wine, smiling gravely to himself. He knew a lot more English than he tried to speak.

'And what do the English think of the French reputation for logic and diplomacy?' Ginette asked.

I waved a fork. 'An insufferable pride. Anyway, the British have never believed it.'

She sighed. 'I know. They still think we are a wild, emotional people who crash cars and stamp on grapes. But, mon Louis,' – she pointed her knife at me in a most un-Comtesse-like way – 'but now you have competition from the Americans. They also can sound very right.'

'Quite true.' I tasted the new wine: a cold, sharp white Burgundy. 'But they do it by setting up million-dollar research programmes. It's easy to sound right when you do that: our way's far cheaper. Still, we've had to give up sounding right about nuclear physics, I believe – but we've doubled our opinions on wine. Millions of dollars will never prove us wrong there. You should go to London, Ginette: you've no idea how right we can sound about wine these days.'

I glanced at Maganhard. He was smiling a bleak smile into his trout.