‘Ah, of course – I recall your telling me about this girl – a German girl?’
‘Quite right. For similar reasons, I left a variety of things unsaid in my dealings with the police, and I will do the same in my own report at home. That is why I thought it better to have a conversation with you before going back to Amsterdam.’
‘Now I begin to follow.’ Mr Canisius had finished breakfast. He was in less of a hurry now to get rid of Van der Valk. He took a Super Maden from a square yellow box and lit it with an elegant waft of delicate Egyptian tobacco that went well with the hotel smell.
‘I am very pleased,’ he went on carefully, ‘that you have shown the very qualities of discretion that were needed. If the press had chosen to make a drama of this affair it might have been most unfortunate.’
‘I’m only a policeman, and I have not very much experience of millionaires. I’ve seen quite a bit of Mrs Marschal.’
‘Very sensitive, highly-strung woman,’ said Canisius gravely. ‘You had to break the news to her, of course – a most disagreeable duty, I’m afraid. She took it badly?’
‘She was quite calm. But she behaved oddly.’
‘I see it all,’ Canisius broke into a warm, friendly smile. ‘She feels that her husband’s death should be blamed on someone, isn’t that it?’ He had got up and was walking about with a kind of jerky animation. ‘Quite possibly she has made meaning hints as to some malign influence I had upon her husband, who I’m afraid had rather a weak character. Something like that, hey?’ He waved his cigarette at Van der Valk in quite a roguish way.
‘Yes, various remarks have been made. Nothing substantial.’
‘Well well, that’s all quite easily explained. An explanation is certainly due you after all the pains you have taken, and one must certainly be given you. I shall have to let you into a few confidences.
However, unfortunately – most unfortunately – that will have to wait a little. Perhaps this evening. Yes, this evening, since you cannot be kept hanging round here, can you, though Biarritz is quite an agreeable spot, what? Now why don’t you pass a quiet day here – all your expenses continue to fall to my charge, naturally, and may I suggest then that you come to dinner with me here tonight – would eight o’clock suit you? – and I’ll straighten all this out, and then you can go back to Amsterdam and write your report, because I’ll tell you quite frankly that your superior officer has no more information than you had yourself at the start of this. Dear dear, I had no reason to believe that it would have a tragic end, though of course I was alive to the possibility of something unbalanced. That was why I chose a responsible police officer, and not one of these private agents, persons with little sense of responsibility. Interested in nothing but the amount of money they can succeed in making for themselves. I’m delighted, simply delighted, at your acumen and tact. But yes, we’ll discuss all that this evening, shall we?’ He had gone milky again.
‘Sure.’ I hope we can both of us count on this evening appointment, thought Van der Valk.
‘Now I’m afraid I must interrupt this, interesting though it is, since my car will be waiting for me in just half an hour. This evening then? Perhaps seven thirty, in the bar here? Splendid, splendid.’
Van der Valk, who hated lifts, walked down two broad flights of ambassadorial stairway contentedly. He wasn’t sure that splendid was the right word. But Mr Canisius had talked too much. From viewing Van der Valk’s sudden appearance in Biarritz with a lack of enthusiasm he had suddenly become that gentleman’s very closest friend. Endearing of him.
*
He walked about the public rooms with nonchalance, staring a good deal out of the windows, amusedly aware that an underporter was keeping an eye on him just in case he was planning a raid on some old biddy’s jewels. There was no sign of Anne-Marie, nor of a grey Opel. Was he imagining the whole thing? Had he been strung up by fatigue and the dramatic performances of the Marschal family into imagining a romantic curtain to the third act? That was quite an easy conclusion to reach, but he did not think it was the right one. Tired as he was he had still two sides to his head, he hoped.
Jean-Claude Marschal was the northern type he had thought about that night and morning walking round Innsbruck, the theatrical type, who commits crimes, such as suicide, theft-of-a-government-helicopter, or abduction-of-a-minor-of-the-female-sex with a flourish and a bow to the audience. Anne-Marie was not like that at all; lying in wait for somebody with a gun was no stranger to her than it was to a Corsican farmer whose sister-in-law has an assignation with the farmer-over-the-hill’s Lothario of a son. There was nothing, he had thought and still thought, intrinsically improbable about this at all, though it was not an idea that would occur to a Dutch policeman.
There was no need for her to hang about a hotel entrance waiting for Canisius to show himself. She almost certainly knew Biarritz well, and might also know all about Canisius’ business there: presumably there was no secret about the little towers of beach apartments. (They were very big, but looked little, he thought, because they looked so flimsy – they were invariably the kind of architecture you get when you build a tower of matches laid across each other at right angles.) Quite the contrary, those things were a sure-fire moneyspinner for the Sopexique; they sold like icecreams on a hot day at the zoo. It was possible that once knowing that Canisius was in Biarritz she would know perfectly well he would travel along the road leading to the border and Irun.
Knowledge like that made this one of the easiest kinds of assassination going, as everybody in the world knows since the day Mr Kennedy took a ride in an open auto through Dallas. Nor was there anything odd about a woman getting the idea. A rifle, one tends to think, is essentially a man’s weapon, but any woman can learn to shoot, once she is not afraid of the gun. It is simply a question of the right position, uncramped and comfortable, and then looking along the sights: lying down, a woman can shoot as well as a man can. A highpowered rifle has a big kick-up from the recoil – but that is after the shot. At a range of say one hundred metres, and with a slow-moving target, one shot would be all that was needed, with a bullet that size. It would be similar enough to shooting with the old Lee-Enfield of Van der Valk’s army days; at three hundred metres the rawest recruit learned in a day to bang down a target four foot square. Which meant a man at one hundred.
Anne-Marie, an ex ski-champion, was not going to be either scared of the bang or disconcerted at any technical difficulty – loading the thing, adjusting the sight, getting the safety off. He tried to remember whether the rifle had had a telescopic sight.
Canisius coming out of a hotel door would make an ideal target. But there was no square or anything with handy windows; opposite the Prince de Galles was nothing except the pompous boulevard and the still silky Atlantic: no perspective and no cover.
Somewhere along the road, where there were little hills, patches of greenery and shrubbery, clumps of trees …? But the auto would be running at fifty kilometres an hour. Unless one was dead in line, the sights nearly parallel to the road, the shot was impossible: it would be like trying to shoot a partridge with a twenty-two. Where then would the auto slow down? At the frontier, obviously, to show the papers, but he had understood, from his acquaintance in the customs with whom he had gossiped at the station that morning, that the frontier was in Hendaye, where the National Ten ran straight out of the little town across the bridge over the Bidassoa slap into Spain. It would be tricky to find cover there, too, but he would see; he intended to be close by when Canisius went sailing over that bridge. If Anne-Marie saw him, and realized he had guessed her move, she would, at least, be disconcerted. She might not be put off, but the bare fact of seeing him would be grit in the wheels: it might, for instance, easily spoil her aim.
There came Canisius; talking to two other dim financial fellows, one doubtless the echo of himself, probably the Paris office of the Sopexique. The other was more sunburnt, and much more wrapped up – local man, in a tweed jacket. Local manager or su
pervisor in charge of the building work, or possibly the architect. The city types were dressed the way city types do dress at seaside resorts full of palm trees and casinos and singing sunshine. Canisius made a marvellous target, thought Van der Valk gloomily; cream tussore suit like Mr Khruschev, oh dear, and a Panama hat! He was wearing straw-coloured plaited shoes too, and had something of Mr K’s world-familiar waddle. The other, a smaller, thinner type with sleek shiny hair and a bald top, was fanning himself with his hat – in the sunshine it was a good twenty degrees, though it was still only March.
And the auto! That perhaps belonged to the Paris man; one of the gigantic six-litre Mercedes battleships that are longer than a Cadillac – and the top down! A chauffeur in riding boots and a peaked hat shaped like a German policeman’s was holding doors open, and the porter of the Prince de Galles was making dignified fluttering movements and making sure there was no orange peel under the feet of his distinguished guests. The tweed coat got in at the front – the two from the Sopex at the very back. Van der Valk got a sudden sinking feeling as he thought that from nearly any of the hotel balconies it was a dead easy shot, a sitting cock pheasant if ever there was one. But no shot came: Anne-Marie had not booked in to the Prince de Galles.
The Mercedes rippled off with a noise like a woman’s fingers smoothing a satin evening skirt and Van der Valk climbed into the hired Renault, which made a noise like a dock hand stacking empty oil drums, but the employees of the Prince de Galles were far too distinguished to look.
Keeping up was easy: the huge black car was very sedate. They slid through St Jean de Luz without as much as a toot, Van der Valk the regulation hundred metres in the rear, in his shirt sleeves. They crossed the bridge – but instead of sailing on along the coast to Hendaye the Mercedes suddenly swung abruptly to the left at a main road junction and Van der Valk grabbed at the Michelin on the seat beside him. Oh oh. There was another road, damn it, as well the National Ten, that skirted Hendaye and crossed the Bidassoa a kilometre lower down, the type of road described by guidebooks as ‘picturesque stretch’. Which it was: here the foothills of the Pyrenees came down towards the narrow coastal strip where one squeezes through the Irun. A thick Mediterranean vegetation with cork oaks and umbrella pines was looking very springlike in the hot sunshine, though at the thousand metre level the snow was still waist deep. As the Mercedes slowed for the frontier post Van der Valk was realizing uneasily that the shooting cover was perfect. Nothing had happened, and nothing happened now. Yet the idea had taken possession of him in a way he recognized, for instead of a vaguely troubling theory he had a sudden wave of fierce feverish certainty: somewhere, somehow, there had been eyes along that road, eyes along a gun barrel.
He stopped the auto before the frontier. There had been no sign of the grey Opel, which could perfectly easily have passed into Spain. Here the hills took a dip into the valley of the Bidassoa, and the river, swollen now by the melting snow, passed under the bridge that formed the frontier. There was a tiny centre of activity around the customs house, where three or four autos were parked, a tricolour fluttered lazily in the puffs of pine-scented air off the hill, and the striped trousers of two customs men leaned together over the guardrail at the shoulder of the bridge, probably speculating about trout. Van der Valk backed the Renault on to a flattish strip of uneven ground, turned it, and felt sweat creeping down his spine, though it was not hot here. The sun was warm, yes, but a little breeze offshore was making the pine-trees whisper, and it came from the higher ground, where the snow still lay. There was goose-flesh on his bare arms: he wondered whether it came from the chilly little breaths of air, or that terrifying feeling of complete certainty. He was very tired, and was not certain whether his judgement was good. His shirt was soaking under his arms, which was a disagreeable feeling; he took his binoculars and tried to think coldly.
All along the road there were flat patches, a mixture of gravel, old pine-needles and a thin sprinkling of earth with coarse grass: people in summer parked their autos there and climbed up to one of the ledges for a picnic. At the curves the road had been cut into the hillsides, and the shoulders were revetted with stone. The little watercourses running in irregular stony streaks down the slope vanished under the road in culverts that would all be dry in summer but were now active and talking.
As he looked he was not impressed by the possibility of a shot at an auto stopping for the frontier. It was a long shot, and blocked from too many angles. To get a clear sightline one would have to go too far back and too high, he thought. He was trying to see how he would have done it himself. Suppose that I were looking for a good place …
There was time in front of him. Canisius would not be back for several hours and one would have leisure to find a good spot. But he knew obscurely that the good spot had been found. It was not only the feeling of eyes somewhere that had made him sweat: he knew too that these plans cannot be carried out spontaneously. They need rehearsal. If he had been behind the gun he knew he would have let the big Mercedes pass unhindered too; the important thing was to get a good notion of how fast it went, what sort of target was presented, whether any unforeseen factor blocked the view and the shot. The woman was a skier; she knew something about terrain, about slopes and dips and humps of ground. She had the right blend of cold judgement to add to her boiling fury.
He started the motor and swung the boxy little Renault back the way he had come. There was little traffic on the road; it was too early in the year. The road led nowhere but into Spain, and plenty of people, especially the local people who had business over the border, took the coast road by the railway line. Duller but more direct. It was only later in the year that the floods of little cars like his and the big broad-bottomed touring coaches would be tempted by the ‘pretty road’. People then would clamber in quantities up the dried watercourses and pick the aromatic leaves that smelt of turpentine and eucalyptus, and throw greasy bits of paper and beer cans around, and set the woods on fire too, no doubt. There were notices in curly French lettering every couple of hundred metres. ‘Fire is the woods’ worst enemy. Your cigarette or your match can cause death and devastation. Negligence is criminal.’
At this time of year, the road was not even perfectly secure; the melting snow coursing down the steep slope that ran up in places almost vertically above the road could cause accidents that would not occur in summer. The falling water brought away loose stones and pebbles, bits of dead branch – occasionally even a tree might come down. Nothing really unsafe, of course; that would be seen to by Eaux et Forêts or Ponts et Chaussées or whoever the French authority was.
There … Coming up a slope, and swinging out for a sharp bend, quite a large stone suddenly crashed on the roadway in front of him at a spot where the hill went up abruptly in a tangle of thin undergrowth. He braked and stopped. A stone the size of his two fists. There were a few pebbles and dead twigs on the road surface – but if that stone had landed on his bonnet … He got out and went to look at the slope. It ran up for some fifteen metres over his head with little flat heathery bushes – some kind of broom? It was perfectly sound and safe, not crumbling or insecure looking in any way. It was hard to see where the stone had come from. He picked it up and tossed it over on to the valley side. He was walking back to the auto when the sweat started all over his body and he put his hand up in an unconscious gesture to his neck. He had stopped his car! Anybody within a hundred metres of him anywhere could have had a shot at him. He got into the driving seat and pressed his body hard back against the cushion, feeling his leg muscles strain and his shirt sticking to him. With an awkward hand – his fingers seemed difficult to articulate – he lit a cigarette. Then he got out of the auto again with a jump. The shot would not have come from anywhere within a hundred metres. It would come from where the stone had fallen.
The stone had not fallen: it had been thrown.
He stood still a long moment, the cigarette forgotten in his hand. The metal of the bonnet was warm and dusty under
the other hand. Anne-Marie Marschal could have been watching where the road forked in St Jean, she could have followed at her leisure. She would have seen the little Renault behind the whale-like Mercedes, but she had not looked at it: there were ten thousand such in France. There was nothing to connect him with it; when he had accompanied her it had always been in her own auto. When it had come back along the road it had meant nothing either. The stone – it had been a rehearsal …
But he had got out, and she had certainly seen him. The plan had been a good one; to throw a stone in front of the Mercedes – not big enough to cause a revolution, but enough to cause comment. Curiosity. Anybody would stop, slightly indignant, a little frightened – the chauffeur too would walk up and look in a puzzled way to see where it could possibly have come from, before tossing it over off the road, so as not to incommode other people. It had been well thought out, there would be a delay of two minutes, enough to lie down, take a careful unhurried sight – and send a bullet straight into Mr Khruschev’s cream tussore bosom.
A sudden cold anger flamed in him. She had seen him – and he was the last person she wanted to see, the last person she would have chucked a stone at. Very well: the yob, the clot, the Dutch peasant, the illiterate nosy parker from the police was going to climb that slope.
He got into the auto, backed it with a grind and a tearing noise of little stones clear of the stream running along towards the next culvert, and let it go till he reached a patch where he could get it off the road altogether. He took his binoculars and started to walk forward, looking for a good place to climb, and stopped suddenly, thinking he heard a sound. It was hard to tell; the chuckle of water and the whisper of the wind in the boughs covered anything but a loud noise. A person moving would not necessarily be heard. He was not much of a scout; he hadn’t even a gun. Old Shatterhand Van der Valk. He puffed and crashed through the undergrowth on the steep in a very un-Apache way.
The King of the Rainy Country Page 16
