Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

Lunch at Les Roseaux by Neil Schofield

Like the owners of Les Roseaux in this story, Neil Schofield is a Brit who decided to settle in France. He once worked in the corporate world scripting and producing corporate videos, but for the past several years he has devoted himself primarily to fiction writing. One of his many stories is included in the anthology Small Crimes, edited by Michael Bracken and reviewed in this month’s Jury Box.

Walker came back to the café table where his wife was waiting, threading his way through the summer Deauville crowds. She watched his tall, rather too fleshy figure coming through the tables and thought, Diet for you, my lad, when we get home. He settled in his seat next to her. “Right,” he said. “George is expecting us for lunch.”

“Is that a good idea?” Fiona said, “getting all cosy with him.”

“Couldn’t get out of it.”

He signalled to the waiter.

In the car, Walker began to thread his way through the Deauville traffic, peering at the road signs.

“The A13, I think, that takes us to the Normandy Bridge and then north.”

She was examining her makeup in the vanity mirror and running a comb through her straight blond hair.

“Didn’t he ask how you’d managed to find him?”

“No.”

“I would have.”

“half-expecting me or someone like me to turn up. Or at least he wasn’t entirely astonished.

“What I don’t understand is why it is you and not someone else.”

“We’ve been through all that. There’s nobody else to do it. Gordon’s in hospital, Bernie’s in America, and the others — well, I wouldn’t trust them with this.”

“You could have — well, hired somebody. I bet Gordon knows lots of people like that. Quick people. Efficient.”

He took a deep breath. “There wasn’t time. And that sort of thing would have made too much noise. This way, it might just look completely natural.”

“Let’s hope so,” she said.

As he put down the phone, George Read had thought they had a hell of a cheek ringing up out of the blue like that. What’s more, it was worrying. It wasn’t as if he and Hilda had ever had what you might call a close relationship with the Walkers, or even a distant one. After all, an accounting worker bee like George, relatively low down in the food chain, didn’t fraternize with a main board director like Rod Walker. Their socializing, such as it was, had been limited to the occasional company do, even more occasional drinks with other distant acquaintances. So what on earth was there to have lunch about? There was something about this that caused a major tick of worry in George’s chest.

After the phone call, and after telling Hilda that they had people for lunch, which she responded to with her normal silent acceptance, he went out into what he liked to call the back acre, although it was rather more than that, nearly three-quarters of a hectare, watched the goat, and allowed himself some fairly heavy-duty worrying.

How had Walker found him? It wasn’t that George had deliberately hidden himself and Hilda away, but he had been very careful to be extremely vague about their plans in the months before his retirement eleven months earlier. Neither he nor Hilda had any relatives to speak of — Hilda had a remote cousin in New Zealand and that was about it. Only children of only children, both of them, which made them both statistically improbable, and which meant few blood relations. They hadn’t had many close friends to speak of, either. They weren’t the sort of people who made close friends. Acquaintances is what they had, mostly, and very few of them. Not the sort of acquaintances you wrote to or telephoned. He couldn’t think of one person who knew exactly where they were. If anyone had ever shown any interest in their plans, he’d always said, “Travelling.” Full stop.

So anyone who did know had to have gone out and looked for them.

Dropping off the edge of the map had turned out to be, in the end, pretty simple. They upped and went. They had rented a small house in Rouen for a few months while he looked around, and then, after an agreeable search, he had found and bought the house for a price which was less than half what it would have cost in England to buy the equivalent. It was a long, thatched house on a hillside which overlooked a pleasant, rolling, wooded valley not far, he was amused to learn, from one of Falstaff’s chateaux.

He had pointed this out to Hilda, but she hadn’t seemed too bowled over. She had made a speciality of this, not being bowled over, ever since they had left Guildford. She had gone into a sort of self-induced coma. He’d asked her quite a few times, but all she would say was that she was perfectly happy. But she wasn’t perfectly happy, that was obvious. Perhaps he’d underestimated the shock it would be to uproot and move to a different country. He had explained all the advantages very carefully: the price of property, the cost of living, how much more they could do with his pension and the money he had put away. Of course, she didn’t know about all the money he’d put away, but then she didn’t have to. He’d pointed out how crowded England had become, and that France was two and a half times the size of Great Britain with the same population.

He hadn’t asked her, of course, he never had. Hilda had always done what he said without question. But he went through the motions of persuasion, anyway.

It hadn’t seemed to take. There they were with a beautiful, picturesque house with a superb view that people in England would give their eyeteeth to have and she’d turned into this drifting, sighing creature.

He had wondered if she might be still yearning after the house in Guildford. So he had taken her to Paris, to Maple’s, for God’s sake, just like being in the Tottenham Court Road, and let her choose and order the furniture. He seemed to have been right, because what she chose, he had realised, were exact replicas of the furniture in Guildford. At nearly twice the price, bloody French. But that hadn’t cheered her up. He’d worked like a slave planting the garden with all the varieties of flowers that he’d had in Guildford so that she’d have something familiar to look at, and even that hadn’t made a difference. She drifted around, sighing a lot and staring endlessly across the front garden into Normandy.

Then, quite suddenly, five months before, she had changed, God knows why. It was really very weird. Overnight she’d turned into this eerie, cheery person he’d never known. She’d completely perked up. Which was more than his bloody flowers had. They were a disaster, except for the roses. Something in the soil, it must be. Bloody France.

She was in the kitchen at the moment, singing away happily to herself, peeling vegetables for this lunch they were going to give the bloody Walkers. He could see her large face through the leaded window, beaming as she shelled peas or some damn thing. She’d changed into one of her summer frocks, a loose flowing number with large red flowers on it that made her look like a seed packet.

He stared moodily at the goat, who was munching grass with that look of vacuous contentment animals of that sort always seemed to have. He was proud of the goat. He had bought it to keep that grass down, and with some fuzzy notion of making goat’s cheese, but it was the wrong sort. It ate the grass, though; it ate everything it came across. Like a lot of things, the goat didn’t seem to be working out as planned. Like the flowers.

How had bloody Walker got his phone number? Well, he supposed that if you had the means to find someone you also had the means to find out the telephone number. But why would you do that? No, the more he thought about it, the more worrying it was. He wished he’d had the nerve to say, No, you can’t come, sorry, we’re going away today for several months, sorry and all that. But he hadn’t said that, and now they were coming.

He had to calm down. It was all a coincidence. There were no loose ends. Everything had been tucked away neatly and cleverly. This was simply a blip.

The blip was due to arrive at one o’clock, so he went into the house to shower and shave and help Hilda.

The Walkers arrived on time, rolling in their BMW up the long, rutted track that ambled though the plane trees and the chestnuts up to the house. They paused at the gate to take it in. A sloping lawn stretched up to a long, double-storied thatched house with dormer windows set into the thatch and a terrace in front that ran the whole length.

“Very impressive,” said Fiona Walker.

“It’s called a chaumiere,” said Walker.

“How clever of you to know that,” she said. “I didn’t know that. And what are those on the top of the house?”

She pointed to the long terra-cotta trough planted with flowers that ran along the ridge of the thatched roof.

“Irises,” said Walker. “It’s traditional in this neck of the woods.”

She looked at him admiringly. “You do know stuff, don’t you, Rod?” she said.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to know stuff.”

Walker was about to get out and open the gate when, on the terrace, George’s long bony figure uncurled itself from one of the chairs set beneath a large red beach umbrella. He waved and began walking towards them, down the gravel drive.

“You know,” said Fiona Walker, “I can’t even remember having met him. At all.”

“You probably did, at some do or other. But he’s not the most memorable person.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Fiona Walker, “he’s not going to want to say goodbye to all this.”

“I know,” said Walker. George reached the gate and gave a little wave as he opened it. Walker gave a little wave of his own, put the car into gear, and they coasted up the drive, between the flower beds.

Fiona Walker said, “Are you sure it’s wise telling him everything?”

He shrugged. “What we all agreed. And it can’t hurt, can it? Given the alternative. We’re not monsters, after all.”

There was no reply to this. She simply looked at him.

“We’re not,” he insisted.

She said, “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“And I hope you know what you’re supposed to be doing. And I hope you’re up to it,” he said, looking at her. She looked back at him steadily.

“Don’t you worry, Rod. I know, all right. And I’ll be well up to it, if the time comes.”

“Well, that’s good, because otherwise, it’ll be you saying goodbye. To all sorts of things.”

Fiona held his gaze for a moment and then turned to look out at the garden and the faded grey wilting things in the flower beds.

“Well, I don’t imagine he’ll be sorry to say goodbye to his flowers, do you? Doesn’t seem to be much of a gardener.”

“His roses seem to be doing all right,” said Walker, nodding towards some distant bushes.

“Roses. Anyone can grow roses,” said Fiona Walker, “even I can grow roses.”

They parked in front of the front door, and George caught them up, panting slightly and red in the face. He opened the car door for Fiona, who got out, smoothing creases out of her skirt. She was at least as tall as he was, with a good-looking, angular face, spoiled by a pair of rather thin lips. Rod got out and came round the car to shake George’s hand with a grin on his wide, over-handsome face.

“George,” he said, “good to see you. You remember Fiona?”

George stuck out his hand to Fiona, but she leaned towards him with her head tilted and he was obliged to give her a self-conscious peck on the cheek.

“Welcome to Les Roseaux,” George said. He seemed to be waiting for something.

Rod nodded. “Roseaux,” he said to Fiona, “means ‘reeds’ in French.”

“Reeds. Oh. Reads. I see,” said Fiona Walker. “Jolly good. Nice one, George.”

“Come you in,” said George, ushering them to the massive oak door, “come and have a look at the place.”

He had the air of a man about to take a driving test after too few lessons. He went first to the door and shouted, “Hilda! People!”

He ushered them in.

The house was split in two. To the right, a door opened into a dining room, and a passage led, judging by the smells and noises, to the kitchen. And to the left was the living room. Fiona Walker surveyed the room. It was huge, occupying the entire height of the house, with the original beams and cross-bracings showing. At the far end was a monumental fireplace and at this end an open staircase led up to an open landing where a door led presumably to the bedroom corridor.

In this vast room, the furniture which Hilda had chosen looked lost, a group of orphan children wandering in a cathedral. Even two sofas flanking the fireplace did nothing to fill up the acreage, and the multitude of little end tables and occasional tables and sideboards and cabinets simply served to accentuate all that vastness.

“Very nice, George,” said Walker.

“Charming,” said Fiona Walker, “really very charming.”

George smiled shyly.

“We like it,” he said, as Hilda entered from the kitchen.

“Hilda,” George said, “you remember Rod and Fiona.”

“Yes,” said Hilda, and advanced upon them. She was a large woman — Walker remembered, now — with a large face on which the features were somehow crowded too close together, not quite filling the space available, a bit like the furniture in this enormous room.

“Drinkingtons, I think,” said George, after Hilda had bestowed hesitant kisses upon the two Walkers. “Sit you down, both of you.” He led the way to the sofas.

“Nothing for me, thank you,” said Hilda. She had a soft, hesitant voice. “I have lunch to finish. I’ll have a glass of my cordial in the kitchen.” And she went back to the kitchen.

George served the Walkers with the gin and tonic and the vodka and tonic they asked for and then poured himself a large whisky from a large bottle of Islay malt.

Walker looked at his wife.

“George obviously still appreciates the good things in life,” he said, nodding at the bottle. Fiona nodded, very briefly, just once.

“That’s one thing about France,” George said, sitting down, “drink’s half the price it is in England. Cheers,” he added, raising his glass.

“Your continued good health, George,” said Walker.

“Salut,” said Fiona Walker.

Then they sat making light conversation, and avoiding the only thing that there was to talk about, which was why the Walkers had come.

Lunch was truly appalling. The only eatable thing was a tomato salad which, Walker supposed, nobody could bugger up. But the leg of lamb was overdone to a turn, the potatoes were at once floury and undercooked, and the runner beans were stringy and tough. Hilda was evidently an awful cook, in the classic tradition of awful English cooks. There was a Camembert which was ripe to the point of insolence and that was it for the lunch. The only redeeming feature was the wine, a halfway reasonable claret which George dispensed with what was, for him, abandon. The conversation was stilted, and limited to France, the French, their traditions and customs, and their irritating habit of saying “hein?” at the end of every sentence.

When it was clear that no more inedibles were to appear, Walker nodded at Fiona.

“Right,” she said immediately, “I think the boys should go out on the terrace and do some catching-up, don’t you, Hilda, while I give you a hand with the dishes.”

Hilda nodded. “I’ll bring coffee out presently,” she said. This was almost the first thing she had said since they arrived.

So the boys went out onto the terrace with a bottle of Calvados and two glasses. They sat at the white table under the red parasol. George poured two careful measures and Walker looked at the rolling sunlit countryside.

“Splendid view you have.”

George said, “Oh, yes, it is nice, isn’t it? We’re a bit isolated here, but there are compensations, like the view. I don’t suppose much has changed since Henry the Fifth rolled up through these parts.”

Walker looked uncomprehending. George waved a hand to the north.

“Agincourt’s only about eighty miles from here. Though that was October, and I don’t imagine it was much fun for an archer on foot, mud up to his shins, freezing rain.”

Walker nodded and sipped his Calvados.

“Once more unto the breach and all that,” he said.

George shook his head. “That was Harfleur,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder towards the south, “back that way. Although you’ve got the right campaign.”

Walker smiled. “I never was much of a one for history. Ancient history, that is. More recent history, that interests me a lot more.”

George tilted his head on one side and eyed him, like a bird.

“You’re getting to it, aren’t you? Why you’re here. All that.”

“All that,” said Walker. “Yes, I’m getting to it. I have to, George.”

“All right. I’ll ask the question. Why are you here?”

Walker sipped again at his Calvados, and squinted into the sunlit landscape. “How long has it been? Since you retired, I mean.”

“About a year,” George said.

“And you announced your intention of retiring six months before that.”

“Yes.”

“You see, it was funny, that, we all thought it was funny. Man like you, in the prime of life, only what, fifty-five? Suddenly upping and going like that. We all thought it was funny. Gordon and I did, anyway. You remember Gordon, the Financial Director? Of course you do. He was your boss, after all. We had quite a few chats about you. We didn’t mention it to the other members of the Board, of course, and still less to the Chairman. Poor old Eddie lives in another world anyway.”

“You and Gordon,” said George, nodding.

“Just we two. And Gordon went off very, very quietly and started squirrelling, very, very delicately, not upsetting or alarming anybody, you understand, just having a little poke around in things. Usually at night. Played hell with his social life for a bit, I remember.”

George was still nodding. “And what did he find?”

“He found you, George. Or rather, he found you out. I don’t know how he did it, the details were a bit complex for my tiny mind, something to do with cross-invoicing between the subsidiaries, if I have it right. He said it was bloody clever and practically undetectable.”

George smiled. “Not wholly undetectable, apparently.”

“Not quite. Not if someone set out to find it. There was a little slip-up somewhere. You’ll understand, George, I’m not an accountant like you and Gordon.”

“So Gordon worked it out, did he?”

“Yes, he did. Bloody good mind, Gordon. He explained it to me, in simple images, George, because I’m only a simple marketing man, after all. He said if you imagine Ballistic PLC, the holding company, as a great big bucket, and you imagine that great big bucket being surrounded by lots and lots of smaller buckets and all these buckets have different amounts of water in them and water is constantly being passed between the big bucket and the smaller buckets and between some of the smaller buckets themselves, because they’re suppliers and customers some of them, well, with all that water sloshing back and forth no one notices if there’s a tiny little bucket catching some of the sloppings. Because there are bound to be sloppings. And you were there with your tiny little bucket, giving one of the bigger buckets a little jog every so often.”

George laughed. “It’s a bit simplistic, but yes, as an image, it’s not bad.”

“Gordon said to me that according to his figures you’d managed to slop over about two hundred thousand quid.”

“That’s about right,” George said calmly, “near enough two hundred thousand.”

Walker nodded. “What puzzled us at the time was why you did it.”

George Read said nothing at first. He looked out over the countryside.

Then he said, “Ever been to Agincourt? No? We went up there a bit ago. That’s a grim place to be on a morning if the weather’s bad. Horrible. Just this great long field slightly hourglass-shaped; that’s how the French chivalry got theirs. Got funnelled into a confined space, and then the arrows. An English archer could fire eight or ten arrows a minute. Sort of medieval Gatling gun. So at any one time, with two thousand archers, there’d have been about six thousand arrows in the air. And an arrow from a bow with a hundred-pound pull went straight through the armour.”

Walker waited to see where this was going.

“Your archer, he had a club on his belt as well, you see. And one of his jobs when the killing was done was to go out and finish off the wounded. And if he was really lucky and in there among the first, he might come upon a chevalier who would be worth quite a bit of ransom. So even the poor bloody infantry, soaking wet, up to his knees in mud, on fourpence a week could go home worth a fortune. Quite a few did, apparently.”

“The poor bloody infantry,” said Walker, understanding a little.

George turned to him. “Do you know what my pension amounted to after thirty-five bloody years with the company? No. Well, I won’t bother telling you. And I won’t bother telling you what my insurance was going to be worth after a two-year stock-market crash.”

“I see. So you decided to do something about it yourself.”

“Yes. Not very much. Nothing that would hurt anybody. A few pounds here, a few pounds there. Really nothing at all when you consider what the Group turns over in a year.” He smiled. “Nothing to be noticed. Unless you went looking for it really hard.”

Walker nodded again.

George said, “So, I’m supposed to come home and face the music, is that it?”

Walker sat up straight. “Good Lord, no. That’s the last thing we want, George. Dear me, no. Perish the thought. No, we’ve got quite another suggestion to make.”

George looked at him beadily, with his head cocked on one side.

“I think you’d better tell me just what’s going on. Because I suppose something’s going on. Isn’t it?”

Walker shifted in his chair.

“The thing is, George, I’ll be perfectly frank with you; you’re into the Company for a little more than you thought.”

George said, “I don’t understand. Can you make that a bit clearer, please?”

“Well,” Walker said carefully, “after Gordon found out about your — your—”

“Peculation is a good solid word,” said George.

“Right. Jolly good. Peculation. After Gordon found out about it, we had a little think and a little chat. Actually, it was mostly him chatting.”

“He was always ready for a chat, as I remember.”

“Yes. Well, the burden of his chat was, look, we’ve got a chap here who’s busy squirrelling away some of the company’s cash. In normal times, Gordon said, he’d have said good luck to him.”

“But these weren’t normal times?”

“Far from it, old George. Gordon had just taken a frightful bashing on New Tech stocks. And he — he was a Name at Lloyd’s, did you know that?”

George shook his head. “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. He’s the sort who would be.”

“Yes. Well, he’d just had the most horrendous call from Lloyd’s, somewhere in the high six figures. Put too fine a point on it, Gordon was up against it. And so was I–I won’t bore you with the details — so he came up with this wheeze.”

“What sort of wheeze?” George asked warily, but with a look that said he knew the wheeze wasn’t going to sound good.

“We — he, rather, because it was all his idea — he decided we were going to piggyback you.”

George’s forehead was creased in perplexed lines.

“What?”

“Well, to put it simply, Gordon said, we’ve got a chap here who’s milking the company a little, why don’t we up the ante, and make him milk the company a lot?”

“I’m out of my depth, I’m sorry, what exactly does that mean?”

“Gordon decided that with very little effort, we could take some for ourselves. And we could do it quite without risk, if it was done in the right way, because if it ever came to it, it would appear that you’d been doing the taking. Piggybacking, you see. Riding on your coattails, as it were. So to speak.”

George said, “He always was a slithy tove.”

“Oh, I agree absolutely. A total swine. But a brilliant total swine.”

“So how did he work it, this wheeze of his?”

Walker shrugged. “Well, at first, he simply duplicated all of your little operations. He used all of your techniques, used all of your channels, your very clever channels, may I say, for diverting money and then hiding it. Of course we had to bring a couple of people into it, it was too complicated to work by himself. People we could trust, like-minded people, you get the idea. Bernie Middleton, the head of the Chemicals Division, was one, Dick Broom from Bramwells was another.”

“Bramwells? The auditors?”

Walker smiled. “If you’re poaching,” he said, “it’s good to have the gamekeeper on your team. And Dick Broom had his problems like the rest of us.”

“You said, ‘at first.’ What does that mean?”

“Well, the problem was, you were retiring in a few months. What were we going to do after that? Well, then Gordon came up with a real corker. He set up a whole new nonexistent subsidiary, operating out of Andorra.”

“Ah.”

“Precisely. Ah. Set it up with you as Chairman and Managing Director, did it all by post and Internet, and then he really got to work. Intercompany loans, lots of cross-invoicing, and all with your name on the letterhead. As a matter of fact, it’s still operating.”

George’s face was creased in admiration.

“Nice one. And my footprints are all over this — subsidiary.”

“’Fraid so, George. Yours is the only signature that ever appears on the memorandum and Articles, and if anyone ever looks really closely at the signatures of the company officers—”

“They’re clearly in my handwriting.”

Walker nodded.

“And how much did you — as you put it — squirrel away in the end?”

“I’m afraid you’re down for four million, give or take, if it ever comes out, George. And I’m very much afraid it’s going to.”

“Why’s that?”

Walker’s face wrinkled with either pain or amusement, or a little of both.

“Gordon had a massive coronary. In June. Hardly surprising given the way he was carrying on. He’s still in hospital. Due for a triple bypass any day now. If he lasts.”

George laughed. “That must have given you a heart attack as well.”

Walker smiled sourly. “Almost. But I haven’t told you the worst. In view of the fact that he’ll never be fit again, the Board decided to retire Gordon with a fat payoff, and they hired someone else.”

“Who?”

“Gerstein. The New York bloke.”

An appalled look swept across George’s face.

“Gerstein? The Glitchfinder-General?”

“That’s the one. He’s due to take over next week.”

“Oh my God, but he’s dreadful,” said George. “I’ve heard some really terrible stories about Gerstein. He’s vicious, and he’s clever, and he’s a computer genius. Did you ever hear the stories that came out of that Shanghai bank? He went back through eleven years of accounts. Eleven years. Three people went to prison and there were scores of sackings.”

Walker waved a hand.

“That’s all academic, George. I know all that. He’s already been around. According to what I heard, he’s going back five years.”

George said, “Well, you’re done for, that’s all there is to it.”

Walker paused.

“Well, not necessarily, George. You see, he’s going to come after you, isn’t he?”

“He’ll have to find me first.”

“I found you. And as you say, your footprints are all over this thing. He’ll have blood in his eye and it’ll be your blood.”

“Yes, but you don’t think I’m going to admit to a four-million-pound fraud? If it came to it, I think I’d confess to the little bit I did and tell them the rest, what you’ve told me.”

Walker said, “You might get away with it. We’d deny everything, you’d expect that.”

“Gerstein’s good. Once he heard my side, he’d sniff out something. There’ll be some little thing, some tiny thing that I couldn’t possibly have done that will prove somebody else was involved.”

“You’d have to be pretty sure of that, George. I must say, I wouldn’t bet my life on it.”

George considered.

“You said — at the beginning — you said you had a suggestion. What was it?”

“We don’t want unpleasantness, we don’t want more sniffing around, we don’t want you to go to jail, George. What we need is for you to be not so easy to find. I found you, with very little trouble. The Fraud Squad would probably have even less trouble than I did. And arresting you in France and getting you back to England — no problem.”

“So Gordon’s come up with a wheeze, is it?”

“Wheeze is all he does these days. Rather painful talking to Gordon these days, tell the truth. But yes. We’ve got a proposition. We want you to make yourself impossible to find. Do a runner. Tuck yourself and Hilda away in some other corner of the world where you can’t be traced and if you are, you can’t be got back. South America’s nice, I’ve heard.”

“You mean, just drop everything and go? Just like that?”

“Naturally there’d be some compensation; we realise the inconvenience involved would be considerable.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

“Two hundred thousand out of four million?”

Walker smiled ruefully.

“Most of it’s gone, I’m afraid, George, on this and that. But with what you have tucked away already, and the house and everything, you should have a nice little sum. Enough to live on comfortably in the sun for the rest of your days. Easily enough.”

“So, I’d be the only obvious guilty one and the dreaded Gerstein would look no further. Is that it?”

“In a nutshell, that’s it.”

George poured Calvados into both their glasses. He sipped at his for long moments, staring off into the distance.

He said, “How long do I have? To decide, I mean.”

“Not very long, I’m afraid,” said Walker, “not very long at all. This afternoon’s about the limit, in fact.”

George nodded and drank some more Calvados.

“South America,” he said musingly, “South America.”

“Doesn’t have to be South America,” said Walker. “There are lots of little corners of the world.”

“No,” said George suddenly.

“What?”

“No.”

Walker sat up very straight. He was pale.

“Now look, George, think about it.” There was a slightly panicky edge to his voice. “Don’t say no just straight out like that. Think about it, man. The offer on the table’s very generous. Even you have to admit that. And I suppose we could spice it up a bit if we had to. Say two hundred and fifty. Be reasonable, George. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“What’s the going rate, do you know?” asked George.

“What going rate? What are you talking about?”

“The going rate for stealing two hundred thousand. Five years? A bit more? That’s not too bad, considering. Time off for good behaviour. I’d be in a nice open prison doing gardening, good, healthy work. And I could probably get a good chunk of that knocked off if I cooperated, helped Gerstein. Even made a bit of restitution to show good faith.”

“George, you’re mad. What about — what about Hilda?”

George looked at him. “That’s it, you see, I couldn’t do it to her. I wrenched her out of Guildford without asking her advice. I thought Normandy, well, it’s a bit like England, shouldn’t be too much of a shock. I couldn’t make her pull up her roots all over again and go heaving off to South America. She wouldn’t like it.”

“But Hilda would do whatever you asked her to, George.”

“I know. And that’s the problem. She does whatever I tell her to. Always has.”

“Well, then?”

“No, Rod. I can’t do it. The answer is no. And you can talk as long as you like, the answer will still be no.”

Walker slumped back in his chair. His face was very grave.

“George, you’re an idiot. You don’t know what you’re doing. You simply have no idea.”

Hilda came out of the house with a tray of coffee cups. Fiona followed her with the jug. Hilda placed the tray without a word and went inside. Fiona looked at George and Walker carefully. She put down the jug.

“I don’t suppose — I don’t suppose you’ve seen my handbag?” she said hesitantly.

Walker looked at her for a long moment.

Then, “No, Fiona, I haven’t,” he said levelly.

She stared at him.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely positive,” he said.

“Right,” she said, “right.” And she went into the house.

George and Walker sat in silence for a good twenty minutes with their coffee and their thoughts. There was nothing to say.

At one point, Walker said, “George—”

But George held up his hand and said, “There’s really no point. It’s ‘no.’ ” So Walker fell silent again.

Finally, George stirred and finished his Calvados.

“I really don’t know what I’m going to do about those flower beds,” he said.

Walker tried to feel a little interest.

“They do look a bit sad,” he said.

“I’ve tried everything, feeding the soil, fertiliser. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with the stupid things. Zinnias, petunias, hyacinths, hydrangeas, tulips, they grow anywhere. Anywhere. And just look at them.”

They looked at the grey, drooping wrecks in the flower beds.

“’Fraid I’m not much of a one for the old gardening,” said Walker. “I wouldn’t know how to help you.”

George nodded. “Nor me, I’m afraid.”

Fiona came out of the house, carrying her handbag. She sat down suddenly in a chair. Rod looked at her.

“Feeling all right, old thing?”

“Rod, I’m sorry to break this up, but I really think we ought to think about going, if we’re going to catch the SeaCat.”

George got up. “I’ll call Hilda,” he said. But Hilda was already appearing carrying two glasses of light pink liquid.

“Just before you go, I’d like you to try a glass of my cordial,” she said. “It’s very refreshing, especially when you’ve got a long hot drive ahead of you.”

George nodded.

“It’s not bad,” he said, “and it’s particularly good after you’ve been drinking.”

So Walker and Fiona drank the cordial.

“It’s very good,” acknowledged Walker. “What’s in it?”

“Elderflowers mainly,” said George, “and a touch of hawthorn, is it?”

Hilda nodded shyly. “Just a touch,” she said.

Walker put down his empty glass and looked at Fiona. “Well,” he said.

George and Hilda stood at the gate waving at the BMW until it was out of sight down the rutted track, then George closed the gate.

Hilda glanced at him as they walked towards the house.

“I think it went off rather well,” she said hesitantly.

“What?” George seemed rather distracted. “Oh yes, I suppose so. Yes, all things considered.”

“And did you and Mr. Walker catch up on things?”

“Yes,” George said, “I think you could say we caught up on things.”

“Good,” she said, “so that’s all right, then.”

“Yes,” he said. “Right, I’m going to have a stiff whisky and then have forty winks. What are you going to do?”

She looked around vaguely.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “I think I’ll just potter.”

“Right,” he said. “Jolly good.”

And they went inside.

The Walkers had reached the N15, a national road with constant pounding traffic. They had driven in silence from Les Roseaux. As Walker waited for a gap in the seemingly endless stream of trucks and semis, Fiona turned to him.

“I did it, you know.”

“I know.”

“I actually did it. I can’t believe it, but I did.”

“Yes, Fi, I know.”

She was pale and her face intense. She needed to talk it through, he saw.

“When I came out and you said, ‘No, Fiona,’ God, for a moment I couldn’t remember whether No meant Do It or Don’t Do It.”

“But you did it.”

“Yes, when she was out feeding leftovers to the bloody goat. I had lots of time, God knows, there were enough leftovers.”

“It was pretty grim, the lunch.”

“Deadly.”

She was quiet for a moment.

He said, “Where did you put it?”

“In the Islay malt. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. That’s perfect.”

“How long does it take?”

“I told you. It’s very quick. Or at least that’s what Bernie said. He’s head of the Chemicals Division, for God’s sake, he’s a scientist, so he should bloody know.”

“And it’s undetectable. You’re sure about that?”

“Look,” he said, with an edge in his voice, “all I know is what Bernie told me. It’s a molecule with a name two lines long that I forgot the moment after I heard it. It causes a massive cardiac arrest. End of story.”

“So, embezzler has heart attack in France. And the trail ends there.”

“Something like that.”

Fiona was silent again.

“I wonder what she’ll do. Hilda,” she said. “When it happens, I mean.”

“With a bit of luck, she’ll have a stiff whisky,” said Walker.

“Poor Hilda,” she said.

Hilda had been out in the garden for an hour and a half, doing some vague tidying. Then she had gone to the outhouse to fill a watering can and mix in some of the crystals from the large packet she’d found months before and which she had kept carefully hidden ever since. Today she had noticed that some of the zinnias seemed to be showing signs of perking up a little and she wanted to nip that in the bud right away. As she watered the beds she eyed the roses. She was going to start on them next. That would really infuriate him.

Well, he deserved it, dragging her off to France like that. She hated Normandy. The weather was just the same as it was in England, so what had been the point in leaving Guildford?

The goat came round the house on the end of its line and watched her in that stupid way it had. She considered it. Perhaps... She wondered what effect the crystals would have on a mammal. Like his precious goat. She could always give it a try. Well, actually, she had given it a try, but the irritating thing was, she’d never really know. But they’d never be seeing them again, the horrible Walkers. Not after the lunch and the cordial farewell. She must remember to pour the rest away. There was no point in inviting an accident.

Fiona Walker said, “Can you slow down a bit, please?”

Walker was driving fast, too fast for her, and the traffic hurtling around them was making her stomach wobble. Or perhaps it was that appalling lunch.

Walker turned to her. He looked perfectly dreadful.

“I—” he said, and then quite suddenly he was crouching over the wheel vomiting in wrenching, whooping spasms.

Fiona shrieked a very un-Fiona-like curse, tried to pull him back and grab for the wheel. She was very quick and quite successful but she was far too late to avoid the giant Berliet doing seventy in the opposite direction, carrying twenty tons of sea-dredged aggregate.

There was a twenty-kilometre tailback in both directions for the rest of the afternoon while the sapeurs-pompiers and the gendarmerie and the ambulance men tried to extricate what was left.

Hilda glanced at the bedroom window. George had been up there now for nearly two hours. That was a lot longer than usual. She’d go up soon and wake him. But before that she would knock his precious whisky bottle off the table accidentally-on-purpose. That would show him.

She looked round the garden. Bloody France. If he’d wanted to drag them off somewhere, why couldn’t it have been somewhere warm all the year round? All her life, she’d longed to see South America. But of course nobody had asked her. Nobody ever did.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Neil Schofield.