Murder on French Leave

by Anne Morice

  ‘Listen now, Tessa,’ Robin said, when I had concluded this dreary farce. ‘There are two things I want you to do. When the time comes, I think you should let Lupe carry your suitcase down to the car.’

  ‘Only one case for all this lot?’ I asked, gazing helplessly at my mountain of possessions.

  ‘Yes, I think so. In the first place, you’ve told her that it’s only for a few days and we want to keep that pretence going. Also it would look more authentic to any watchers who may be hanging around. You’re supposed to be at death’s door and in no condition to pack ten or twelve cases. The natural thing would be to have the bulk of it sent on after you.’

  ‘Okay. What else?’

  ‘At some point during the morning, I want you to tell Lupe that you’re going to leave her the old set of keys, so that she can return them to the office, some time or other. You can be quite casual about it and not refer to it again until you are actually getting in the car. If she reminds you, herself, at this point, so much the better. The important thing is for the driver to see you hand her a bunch of keys. Got it?’

  ‘In one. You’re brilliant.’

  ‘Thanks. With any luck, their interest in this flat will cease, once you’ve left on schedule. If we should get any kind of a break, or if anything were to go wrong, at least I’ll be here and able to take it up from that point.’

  ‘By anything going wrong, I suppose you mean they might double-cross me and not get Ellen to the plane at all.’

  ‘It’s unlikely, but it has to be taken into account.’

  ‘Not by me,’ I told him firmly. ‘I mean to tell myself with every breath I draw that she will be there; that she’ll come bouncing on with all flags flying and this nightmare will be over. How else could I get through it? And you believe it, too, don’t you, Robin?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. With all my heart.’

  Nothing was to turn out quite as we both pretended to be so confident in predicting, but at least his assurance gave me the courage to complete the preliminary stages without faltering, and at twenty minutes to three, wrapped in a fur coat and leaning on Lupe’s arm, I went downstairs to the waiting car.

  (ii)

  The driver was a rat-faced, surly little man, very different from spirited old Pierre, with dark hair and complexion. He did not stir from his seat or attempt to open the door when Lupe handed me in, and although we managed the business with the keys exactly according to plan, I had the sensation that we were playing to an empty house. Not a ripple of curiosity disturbed his sour expression, and when Lupe stood back and waved goodbye, the tears pouring down her face, he ignored her completely, slammed the car into gear and shot away from the pavement. As it happens, I think they were tears of joy for the impending happy event, rather than that other brand of sweet sorrow, but the sight of them was not much of a backbone stiffener.

  In one respect, it was a relief to be in the company of this callous individual, for I find it hard to ignore friendly overtures, from whatever source, and I saw that I should have no problem over that part of the instructions which forbade communication with the driver. However, I could not tell how much he might be observing, and it behoved me to be cautious. At one point we halted at some traffic lights, before turning into the Boulevard de Grenelle, and I glanced up at the rear mirror and saw his eyes, insolent and inimical, fixed steadily upon me. Apart from anything else, I did not consider this to be quite the safest way to drive through Paris and, to discourage it, pulled my collar up round my face, leant back against the cushion which Lupe had provided and closed my eyes.

  This meant that I could only guess at our rate of progress, but the route had become moderately familiar and, by exerting all the other senses to their full capacity, I could trace most of it in my head. There was the usual long hold up at the Porte de Versailles, followed soon afterwards by the even longer one as we edged towards the peripheral road at Montrouge. Once through this, we put on a good spurt and, almost before I was ready for it, I could hear the muffled swishing sound which indicated that we were circling the tunnel leading to the auto-route proper.

  The longest part of the journey, in time if not distance, was now behind us and the remainder should have been plain sailing, as indeed, for the first few miles, it was. Then, unaccountably, we slowed down, limped forward a few yards, crawled again and finally stopped. Nothing whatever happened and a blinding sense of fear and frustration took hold of me. All at once it struck me that I had been tricked into making this preposterous journey, that the driver had never had the remotest intention of taking me to the airport, and that we had now arrived at some completely different destination.

  It was not so. Panic had made me open my eyes and I saw at once that we were still on the road. Moreover, the cars ahead and on either side were also stationary. Simultaneously, my eye lighted on some familiar shapes away over to the left and I realised that we were at Rungi. The knowledge brought some comfort, for Robin had pointed it out on a previous journey, explaining that these new buildings now housed Les Halles, which had been moved out from the centre of Paris. For a brief spell, I was able to convince myself that there must be dozens of lorries continually leaving and joining the road at this junction, which could easily account for the hold-up.

  Unfortunately for my peace of mind, this rational view was not shared by my fellow motorists. Like an orchestra tuning up, tentative at first, then growing full-throated and confident, their horns went into action. In a few seconds the hideous blare was all around us. As though this were not enough, a new instrument could soon be heard to join in. Faint and faraway, from the back of the orchestra came the mournful bleat of sirens. Gradually, the volume increased, blotting out all other noise, and two police cars followed by an ambulance went careering past on the wrong side of the road, headlights blazing, to warn the oncoming traffic.

  I turned my head away and peered down at my watch. Forty minutes had passed since leaving the flat. Even if an advance were to begin immediately, we could not reach the air terminal in under twenty minutes behind schedule.

  A secondary torment was the atmosphere inside the car, for we were in open country, with no shade, and my fur coat was like a dead weight with hot wires running through it. Just as once before, in Adela’s drawing-room, I became overpowered by a mounting suffocation. But this time terror was the principal element and, with such strength as still remained to me, I willed myself to believe that Ellen and her captors were somewhere in this queue, perhaps even in the car in front or behind. The alternative, too dreadful to contemplate, was that they had driven to Orly from another direction, were already waiting and watching for my arrival and would never know how meticulously I had striven to keep my side of the bargain.

  Five or six minutes went by in this fashion and then there came a small reprieve. Up to this point the driver had appeared to take no interest whatever in the proceedings, showing neither dismay at our situation nor curiosity as to the cause of it. I assumed that he was too stupid even for that. When the traffic moved he moved with it, and when it stopped he stopped, and that was the beginning and end of it. However, this was not the prevailing attitude, as I could tell horn the raised voices and slamming of doors. One man, perhaps in search of a fresh audience to complain to, came up and tapped on my driver’s window. For a moment I thought he would ignore it; then, to my intense relief, he wound down the window and gave an enquiring grunt.

  The immediate effect was to freshen the stifling atmosphere and the draught of clean air so far revived me that I was able to pay attention to the stranger’s harangue. He spoke too fast for me, using unfamiliar words, but nevertheless I could pick up the gist of it. Some items were predictable, others less so. The cause of the delay, for instance, was an accident involving several vehicles, but whereas I had pictured the line of stationary traffic as stretching ahead to eternity, it transpired that we were not more than fifty metres from the scene of disaster. I also learnt that the accident had been brought about by some y
oung hooligans in a diplomatic car overtaking a lorry at the same moment as its driver had also moved out to pass another car, with a trailer attached. No one, I gathered, had been killed, but the destruction was indescribable and many were gravely wounded. So far as I could follow it, our messenger then had some stem observations to deliver on the subject of the arrogance of commercial drivers and the iniquitous laws which allowed the sons and daughters of embassy officials to drive around the country like maniacs; but he had hardly got into his stride before he was brusquely interrupted. There was a sudden flurry of activity all around us and my driver ground the car into gear and lurched forward, without even pausing to wind up the window. Our visitor looked wildly around, with an aghast expression on his face, then shot off down the road to his own car.

  We were on the move at last, inching forward in spasmodic bursts, but I no longer cared. Ten minutes earlier I had been convinced that I had touched the depths of despair, but there was still another layer at the bottom of the barrel. Even before our informant was so rudely cut off, I had been visited by a premonition far more terrifying than anything which had gone before. The longer my imagination dwelt on that carnage we were now creeping up on and on the mutilated human beings being loaded on to the ambulance, the stronger grew my certainty that I knew who two of them were. Had it not been for the succession of jerks which accompanied this train of thought and which kept shaking me back into awareness, I think I might have fainted. Coinciding with the fifth or sixth of these punctuation points, there was yet another diversion, on an even more dramatic scale. I heard a shout of anger from the front seat, and the nearside passenger door swung open. I caught a blur of green and red tartan and heard a perky voice say:

  ‘Okay, Tessa, you can sit up now. The operation’s over.’

  So I did as I was told and when my eyes had taken in the full glory of the scene I decided to postpone the fainting for a bit.

  Ellen’s face, a little pinched and pale, but smiling valiantly, was all in one piece under the check cap, and Jonathan had both arms inside the driver’s window and wrapped around the steering wheel. I flung him the cushion, which he caught one-handed and pressed into the driver’s face.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ I said. ‘Stay here for a few minutes and keep him quiet. Ellen, you come with me. I’ll need all the help I can get, but we’re going to talk those policemen into getting a call through to the flat, if it’s the last thing we do. If Robin goes into action now, he can catch those fiends before they get away.’

  Twelve

  ‘I told as many lies as I could think of,’ Ellen said modestly. ‘I thought it might help if I got things a bit mixed up.’

  ‘They were that all right,’ I assured her.

  ‘You’ve all been so tricky and clever,’ my agent sighed. ‘Unlike me. If I hadn’t been waiting for this call from California about a deal I’m putting through, I’d have remembered Tessa’s boring old appendix and realised you were in some kind of a jam.’

  ‘It was all for the best,’ I told her.

  ‘I wonder you should say such a thing,’ Toby remarked sadly. ‘I never saw anyone who looked more in need of medical attention than you do. It’s not surprising. Going abroad invariably ends in this kind of disaster. Let it be a warning to you.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be. It was that hair-raising drive which temporarily knocked me out, plus the ghastly premonition about Ellen and Jonathan being the young couple in the crash. But I shall be as sound as a bell in the morning, and Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho it’s off to work I go.’

  Using my agent as intermediary, we had managed to waylay Toby practically as he stepped ashore and he had broken the rule of a lifetime by loading himself on to the evening plane. For some reason not precisely defined, my agent had chosen to accompany him. Whether her mission was to minister to his heart attack when the wheels left the ground or merely to jump on the band wagon was uncertain. Her own explanation was that she feared I might have a little difficulty in putting things right with the film studios and had nobly dropped all her urgent business in London to be on hand. However, I had long ago ceased to believe a word she said and guessed that, whatever the reason, it was not that.

  Lest there be any hint of churlishness in the foregoing, I should add that we were all delighted to see her. Having worked ourselves into the ground, going over and over the events of the past two days, it was like an injection of concentrated vitamins to begin again with a fresh audience.

  Naturally, we had started by giving the floor to Ellen, the abducted heroine, but so far she had been unusually reticent and this was the first mild little boast we had heard from her. Perhaps she realised that by enlarging on the horrors of her capture and incarceration in the stables at Assy-les-Cygnes she would sooner or later provoke Toby into pointing out that she would have been better off with Miss Hacker, after all. Respecting her motives, I offered the stage to Jonathan:

  ‘It was brilliant of you to think of looking for her there,’ I told him. ‘However did you hit on it?’

  ‘Just logical thinking, I guess,’ he replied, meaning it.

  ‘He’d stayed there, himself, you see,’ Ellen explained, more forthcoming on his behalf than her own. ‘At least, not in the foul bit I was in, but where it was half converted. So he knew all the ropes.’

  ‘Which is why he ran away from us on Sunday?’ Toby suggested. ‘He didn’t fancy being rounded up by his mother and forced to spend another night in the straw?’

  ‘He wasn’t in the room when we made the plan about lunching at Assy, you see. It came as a bit of a shock to find himself on the Müllers’ doorstep.’

  It was all too easy to talk about Jonathan as though he had temporarily gone to the moon and I noticed that we had all slipped into the habit. Making a feeble effort to curb it, I said: ‘Anyway, I forgive you for stealing the money. Naturally, if you were going to borrow your mother’s car and drive through the dawn to Assy and then the airport, you needed every penny. In fact, I applaud it as a fine example of logical thinking.’

  ‘We didn’t dare come back to the flat, you see,’ Ellen said. ‘We guessed they’d be watching it.’

  ‘Who’s they?’ Toby asked me.

  ‘Her and her spy friend, of course. He was the real one. The other poor wretch was just a blind.’

  ‘The other poor wretch being Sven?’

  I glanced at Jonathan to see how he was taking this, but his reactions had reverted to the totally negative. So I turned back to Toby: ‘That’s right. She used Sven as a cover, but all the time she was running this affair with a man at one of the Iron Curtain embassies, and shooting around wherever she pleased in her sporty old C.D. car. Poor Sven, she deceived him on every level, even to trying to get him nailed for murder.’

  ‘I guess he had it coming to him,’ Jonathan said bitterly. ‘He’s such a puffed-up, darned old fool.’

  Robin said thoughtfully: ‘I wouldn’t dismiss him quite so contemptuously. We all know what you think of your stepfather, but he’s not quite a fool, and he was certainly noble. When he got into real trouble his first thought was to protect his true love. And we should remember that she was his true love, from way back, long before he met your mother.’

  ‘He was quite clever, too, in a funny way,’ I admitted, ‘in so far as there was usually method in his madness. Take that business with the script. It was such a crazy scheme, but it did achieve its object.’

  ‘What script?’ my agent asked, sitting up and taking considerably more notice.

  ‘The one he was so keen to foist on me that he went to the lengths of pinching my suitcase and hiding it in the consigne. It was clever old Ellen who worked that out,’ I said, smiling at her, but she still refused to be drawn.

  ‘You said that he achieved his object,’ Toby remarked, ‘but you didn’t tell us what it was.’

  ‘There were two, and one was to foster the acquaintance. He was the world’s most dedicated name-dropper, for a start, and no scalp was too small or obscure
to add to the collection. The other was to ensure that I read this script he was so proud of. At first, Robin and I couldn’t make out which of us was the attraction. When he cut me dead in the cinema, we concluded it must be Robin, but then I remembered an incident at Heathrow, when we were waiting for our plane, and the significance of it suddenly hit me.’

  ‘Bring out your sledge-hammer,’ Toby said, ‘and let the significance of it suddenly hit us.’

  ‘I should tell you that he had pretended not to know who I was, or that I had anything to do with the movies.’

  My agent gave a gasp of incredulity, or at any rate a gasp, and Robin said:

  ‘This has been nagging at Tessa for days. I swear it’s what induced her to embroil herself in the case. Would you ever believe she could be so petty?’

  ‘I’m not petty about not being recognised,’ I protested, ‘only about being recognised one minute and forgotten again the next.’

  ‘I should think we all might be,’ Toby said indignantly. ‘Is that what he did? The filthy swine!’

  ‘He really did. I daresay you’ve forgotten this, Robin, or didn’t notice it, but when you first introduced us you said to him wasn’t it funny how I’d been so convinced he had something to do with show business?’

  ‘Vaguely, I remember.’

  ‘Well, it made a much greater impact on him. He was so thrilled that he temporarily forgot himself and said something about, coming from me, he took it as a big compliment.’

  ‘Did he? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘It is the kind of tribute which the recipient is likely to remember longer than anyone else,’ Toby reminded him, ‘so we had better take her word for it.’

  ‘I’ll make it easier for you by explaining that it was not I, personally, who counted. Anyone in my world would have done equally well. Anyway, having said it, he instantly realised his mistake, and to cover up he coyly asked me if I was going to Paris to do some modelling. Now, I ask you! If he really thought I might be a model, not even a well-known one, why should he be so bucked about my taking him for a script writer?’