Vintage Stuff

Chapter 9

In Ramsgate, Slymne hardly slept. Away from Groxbourne and in the saner atmosphere of his mother's house, Slymne could see considerable weaknesses in his plan. To begin with, he had forged two letters from the Countess and if Glodstone hadn't followed instructions to burn the confounded things and actually produced them to her, things could become exceedingly awkward. The woman might well call the police in and they would probably find his fingerprints on the letters. At least Slymne supposed they could, with modern methods of forensic science, and even if they didn't there was still the matter of the hotel bookings. As far as he could see, this was his most fatal mistake. He should never have made the bookings by telephone from England. If the calls were traced the police would begin looking for motive and from there to his own progress across France during the Easter holidays...Slymne preferred not to think of the consequences. He'd lose his job at the school and Glodstone would gloat over his exposure. In fact he could see now that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, a mental aberration that was likely to wreck his career. So, while Glodstone and Peregrine drove to London next day and booked into separate rooms, one with a bathroom, Slymne concentrated on means of stopping the scheme he had so successfully started. Possibly the best way would be to send a telegram to the school purporting to come from the Countess and countermanding the instructions. Slymne decided against it. For one thing they always phoned telegrams before sending the printed message and the School Secretary would take the call, and for another Glodstone had probably left no forwarding address. To make absolutely certain, Slymne took the opportunity, while his mother was out shopping, to put a large wad of cotton wool very uncomfortably in his mouth to disguise his voice and phone the school. As he anticipated the Secretary answered.

'No, Mr Slymne,' she said, to his horror, 'you've just missed him. I mean he was here till yesterday but he's gone now and you know what he's like about letters anyway. I mean they pile up in his pigeonhole even in-term-time and he never does leave a forwarding address. Is there anything I can tell him if he comes back again?'

'No,' said Slymne, 'and my name isn't Slymne. It's...it's...er...Fortescue. Just say Mr Fortescue phoned.'

'If you say so, Mr Fortescue, though you sound just like one of the masters here. He had ever such bad toothache the term before last and '

Slymne had put the phone down and removed the wad of cotton wool. There had to be some way of stopping Glodstone. Perhaps if he were to make an anonymous phone call to the French Customs authorities that Glodstone was a drug smuggler, they would turn him back at the frontier? No, phone calls were out, and in any case there was no reason to suppose the French Customs officials would believe him. Worse still, the attempt might provoke Glodstone into some more desperate action such as crossing the frontier on foot and hiring a car once he was safely in France and driving straight to the Château. Having opened the Pandora's box of Glodstone's adolescent imagination it was going to prove exceedingly difficult to close the damned thing. And everything depended on Glodstone having burnt those incriminating letters. Why hadn't he considered the possibility that the man might keep them as proof of his bona fides? The answer was because Glodstone was such a fool. But was he? Slymne's doubts increased. Putting himself in Glodstone's shoes, he decided he would have kept the letters just in case the whole thing was a hoax. And again, now that he came to think of it, the instruction to burn every piece of correspondence was distinctly fishy and could well have made Glodstone suspicious. As his doubts and anxieties increased, Slymne decided to act.

He packed a bag, found his passport, took the file containing the photographs of the Countess's letter, together with several sheets of crested notepaper and envelopes, and was ready to leave when his mother returned from her shopping.

'But I thought you said you were going to stay at home this summer,' she said. 'After all, you had a continental holiday; Easter and it's not as though you can afford to go gallivanting about.'

'I shall be back in a few days,' said Slymne. 'And I'm not gallivanting anywhere. This is strictly business.'

He left the house in a huff and drove to the bank for more travellers' cheques. That afternoon, he was in Dover and had joined the queue of cars waiting for the ferry when he was horrified to see Glodstone's conspicuous green Bentley parked to one side before the barrier to the booking office. There was no doubt about it. The number plate was GUY 444. The bastard was disregarding the Countess's instructions and was leaving earlier than he was meant to. Crossing to Calais and sending a telegram from the Countess addressed to Glodstone care of the Dover-Ostend ferry was out of the question. And Slymne was already committed to taking the Calais ferry himself. As the queue of cars slowly moved through Customs and Immigration and down the ramp into the ship, Slymne's agony increased. Why the hell couldn't the man have done what he was told? And further awful implications were obvious. Glodstone's suspicions had been aroused and while he was still committed to the 'adventure', he was following an itinerary of his own. More alarming still, he was travelling on the same ship and might well recognize Slymne's Cortina on the car deck. With these fears plaguing him, Slymne disappeared into the ship's toilet where he was prematurely sick several times before the ship got under way. Very furtively, he went up on deck and stared at the retreating quay in the hope that the Bentley would still be there. It wasn't. Slymne drew the obvious conclusion and spent the rest of the voyage in a corner seat pretending to read the Guardian and hiding his face from passers-by. He was therefore in no position to observe a young man with unnaturally black hair who leaned over the ship rail and was travelling under a temporary passport made out in the name of William Barnes.

In the end, unable to stand the suspense, Slymne slipped down the car deck as soon as the French coast was sighted and made hurried a inventory of the cars. Glodstone's Bentley was not among them. And when he drove off the ship at Calais and followed the Toutes Directions signs, he was even more confused. Presumably Glodstone was crossing on the next ferry. Or was he going to Boulogne or even sticking to his original instructions to travel by Ostend? Slymne turned into a side road and parked beneath a block of flats, and, having considered all the permutations of times of ferry crossings and destinations, decided there was only one way to find out. With a sense of doom, Slymne walked back to the office and was presently asking the overworked clerk in broken French if he could trace a Monsieur Glodstone. The clerk looked at him incredulously and replied in perfect English.

'A Mr Glodstone? You're seriously asking me if I can tell you if a Mr Glodstone has crossed, is crossing or intends to cross from Dover to Calais, Dover to Boulogne, or Dover to Ostend?'

'Oui,' said Slymne, sticking to his supposedly foreign identity, 'Je suis.'

'Well you can suis off,' said the clerk, 'I've got about eight hundred ruddy cars crossing on the hour by the hour and thousands of passengers and if you think '

'Sa femme est morte,' said Slymne, 'C'est très important...'

'His wife's dead? Well, that's a different matter, of course. I'll put out a general message to all ferries...'

'No, don't do that,' Slymne began but the man had already disappeared into a back office and was evidently relaying the dreadful news to some senior official. Slymne turned and fled. God alone knew how Glodstone would respond to the news that he was now a widower when he'd never had a wife.

With a fresh sense of despair Slymne scurried back to his car and drove wildly out of Calais with one over-riding intention. Whether Glodstone arrived at Calais or Boulogne or Ostend he would still have to come south to reach the Château Carmagnac, and with any luck would stick to the route he'd been given. At least Slymne hoped to hell he would, and since it was the only hope he had he clung to it. He might be able to head the swine off and the best place to start would be at Ivry-La-Bataille. The place had the sort of romantic picturesqueness that would most appeal to Glodstone and the hotel he had booked him into there was Highly Recommended in the Guide Gastronomique. As he drove through the night, Slymne prayed that Glodstone's stomach would prove his ally.

He need not have been so concerned. Glodstone was still in Britain and had worries of his own. They mostly concerned Peregrine and the discrepancy between his appearance, as altered by dyeing his hair dark brown, and that of William Barnes as depicted on his passport. The transformation had taken place in the London hotel. Glodstone had sent Peregrine out with instructions to get some dye from a chemist and had told him to get on with it. It had been a bad mistake. Peregrine had been booked into the hotel an unremarkable blond and had left it sixteen hours and ten towels later, looking, in Glodstone's opinion, like something no bigoted Immigration Officer would let out of the country, never mind allow in.

'I didn't tell you to take a bath in the blasted stuff,' said Glodstone surveying the filthy brew in the tub and the stained towels. 'I told you to dye your hair.'

'I know, sir, but there weren't any instructions about hair.'

'What the hell do you mean?' said Glodstone who wished now that he had supervised the business instead of protecting his reputation as a non-consenting adult by having tea in the lounge. 'What did it say on the bottle?'

'It was a powder, sir, and I followed what they said to do for wool.'

'Wool?'

Peregrine groped for a sodden and practically illegible piece of paper. 'I tried to find hair but all they had down was polyester/cotton mixtures, heavy-duty nylon, acetate, rayon and wool, so I chose wool. I mean it seemed safer. All the other ones said to simmer for ten minutes.'

'Dear Lord,' said Glodstone and grabbed the paper. It was headed 'DYPERM, The Non-Fade All-Purpose Dye.' By the time he had deciphered the instructions, he looked despairingly round the room again. 'Non-Fade All-Purpose' was about right. Even the bathmat was indelibly dyed with footprints. 'I told you to get hair-dye, not something suitable for ties, batik and macramé. It's a miracle you're still alive. This muck's made for blasted washing-machines.'

'But they only had stuff called Hair Rinse at the chemist and that didn't seem much use so I '

'I know, I know what you did,' said Glodstone. 'The thing is, bow the devil do we explain these towels...Good God! It's even stained the shower curtains, and they're plastic. I wouldn't have believed it possible. And how on earth did it get up the wall like that? You must have been spraying the filth all over the room.'

'That was when I had a shower afterwards, sir. It said rinse thoroughly and I did in the shower and some got in my mouth so I spat it out. It tasted blooming horrible.'

'It smells singularly foul too,' said Glodstone gloomily. 'If you'll take my advice, you'll empty that bath and try and get the stain off the enamel with some Vim, and then have another bath in clean water.'

And retreating to the bar for several pink gins, he left Peregrine to do what he could to make himself look less like something the Race Relations Board would find hard to qualify. In the event DYPERM didn't live up to its promise and Peregrine came down to dinner unrecognizable but at least moderately unstained except for his hair and eyebrows.

'Well, that's a relief,' said Glodstone. 'All the same, I think it best to get you on the most crowded ferry tomorrow and hope to hell you'll pass in a crowd. I'll tell the manager here you had an accident with a bottle of ink.'

'Yes, sir, and what do I do when I get to France?' asked Peregrine.

'See a doctor if you fell at all peculiar,' said Glodstone.

'No, I mean where do I go?'

'We'll buy you a rail ticket through to Armentières and you'll book into the hotel nearest the station and be sure not to leave it except to go to the station every two hours. I'll try to make it across Belgium as fast as I can. And remember this, if you are stopped at Calais, my name must not be mentioned. Invent some story about always wanting a trip to France and pinching the passport yourself.'

'You mean lie, sir?'

Glodstone's fork, halfway to his mouth, hovered a moment and returned to his plate. Peregrine's peculiar talent for taking everything he was told literally was beginning to unsettle him. 'If you must put it like that, yes,' he said with an awful patience. 'And stop calling me "sir". We're not at school now and one slip of the tongue could give the game away. From now on I'll call you Bill and you can address me as...er...Patton.'

'Yes, si...Patton,' said Peregrine.

Even so, it was a worried Glodstone who went to bed that night and who, after an acrimonious discussion with the hotel manager on the matter of towels, took the Dover road next morning with Peregrine beside him. With understandable haste, he booked him as William Barnes on the ferry and by train to Armentières and then hurried away before the ship sailed. For the rest of the day, he lay on the cliff above the terminal scanning returning passengers through his binoculars in the hope that Peregrine wouldn't be among them. In between whiles, he checked his stores of tinned food, the camping gas stove and saucepan, the picnic hamper and the two sleeping-bags and tent. Finally, he taped the revolvers to the springs below the seats and, unscrewing the ends of the tent-poles, hid the ammunition inside them. And as the weather was good, and there was no sign of Peregrine being dragged ashore by Immigration Officers, his spirits rose.

'After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained,' he replied tritely to a gull that shrieked above him. In the clear summer air he could see faint on the horizon the coastline of France. Tomorrow he'd be there. That evening, while Peregrine struggled to explain to the desk clerk that he wanted a room at the hotel in Armentières and Slymne drove desperately towards Ivry-La-Bataille, Glodstone dined at a country pub and then went down to the ferry terminal to confirm his booking to Ostend next morning.

'Did you say your name was Glodstone, sir?' enquired the clerk.

'I did,' said Glodstone, and was alarmed when the man excused himself and went to another office with an odd look on his face. A more senior official with an even odder look came out.

'If you'll just come this way, Mr Glodstone,' he said mournfully and opened the door of a small room.

'What for?' said Glodstone, now thoroughly worried.

'I'm afraid I have some rather shocking news for you, sir. Perhaps if you took a seat...'

'What shocking news?' said Glodstone, who had a shrewd idea what he was in for.

'It concerns your wife, sir.'

'My wife?'

'Yes, Mr Glodstone. I'm sorry to have to tell you '

'But I haven't got a wife,' said Glodstone, fixing the man with his monocle.

'Ah, then you know already,' said the man. 'You have my most profound sympathy. I lost my own three years ago. I know just how you must feel.'

'I very much doubt if you do,' said Glodstone, whose feelings were veering all over the place. 'In fact, I'd go as far as to say you can't.'

But the man was not to be denied his compassion. The years behind the booking counter had given him the gift of consoling people. 'Perhaps not,' he murmured, 'As the Bard says, marriages are made in heaven and we must all cross that bourne from which no traveller returns.'

He cast a watery eye at the Channel but Glodstone was in no mood for multiple misquotations. 'Listen,' he said, 'I don't know where you got this idea that I'm married because I'm not, and since I'm not, I'd be glad to hear how I can have lost my wife.'

'But you are Mr G. P. Glodstone booked for the Ostend boat tomorrow morning?'

'Yes. And what's more, there isn't any Mrs Glodstone and never has been.'

'That's odd,' said the man. 'We had a message from Calais just now for a Mr Glodstone saying his wife had died and you're the only Mr Glodstone on any of the booking lists. I'm exceedingly sorry to have distressed you.'

'Yes, well since you have,' said Glodstone, who was beginning to find the message even more sinister than the actual death of any near relative, 'I'd like to hear who sent it.'

The man went back into the office and phoned through to Calais. 'Apparently a man came in speaking French with a strong English accent and wanted to find out on which ferry you were crossing,' he said. 'He wouldn't speak English and the clerk there wouldn't tell him where you were landing, so the man said to tell you your wife had died.'

'Did the clerk describe the man?'

'I didn't ask him and frankly, since...'

But Glodstone's monocle had its effect and he went back to the phone. He returned with the information that the man had disappeared as soon as he'd delivered the message.

Glodstone had made up his mind. 'I think I'll change my booking,' he said. 'Is there any space on tonight's ferries?'

'There's some on the midnight one, but '

'Good. Then I'll take it,' said Glodstone, maintaining his authority, 'and on no account is that fellow to be given any information about my movements.'

'We don't make a habit of handing out information of that sort,' said the man. 'I take great exception to the very idea.'

'And I take exception to being told that a wife I don't have has just died,' said Glodstone.

At midnight, he took the ferry and was in Belgium before dawn. As he drove out of the docks, Glodstone kept his eyes skinned for any suspicious watchers but the place was dark and empty. Of one thing, Glodstone was now certain. La Comtesse had not been exaggerating the brilliant criminal intelligence he was up against. That they knew he was coming was proof enough of that. There was also the terrible possibility that the message had been a warning.

'If they touch one hair of her head,' Glodstone muttered ferociously and adjusted his goggles as the Bentley ate the miles towards Iper and the obscure frontier crossing beyond it.