I bent down and stepped through it into the narrow back alley-way.
As I straightened up, something hit me. It caught me full on the chest, and I staggered back against the gates, pinned there by my assailant’s weight, and with his breath on my cheek.
22
Needs must when the Devil drives
(Proverb)
Before I had time to do more than draw breath for the scream I dared not utter, my attacker gave a little snuffling whine and began licking my face.
‘Rommell’ Relief made me weak. My legs shook, and I wanted, insanely, to laugh. I pushed the delighted dog down with a warning whisper and a hand over his muzzle, while my other hand groped for his collar. The inevitable piece of string was there, about two feet of it, the end snapped and frayed. David must have tied the dog up when he went into the shop, and the poor beast had eventually broken the string and come wandering in search of him. As I ran down the back alley in the direction of the Rue Mirabell I was busy with the new and minor problem; what on earth could I do with the dog?
I could abandon the poor beast, of course, if he would let me, but something in me shrank from such an action. I could leave him in my hotel, but the thought of the fuss, the explanations, the waste of time, was more than I dared face. He was running happily beside me, panting with the pleasure of having at last found a friend, and it occurred to me, too, that I was in no position to reject help of any sort. I might yet be glad, even, of Rommel’s friendship.
I was proved right about thirty seconds later, as we plunged across the Rue Mirabell into another dark little alley, and a drunken Negro rose straight out of the shadows to lurch across my path. I tried ineffectually to dodge him and slip by, but, even as he gripped my sleeve, Rommel gave a snarl, and leaped for him, hitting him in the groin. The man doubled up and staggered back with a curse, reeling against the wall. I fled by, and Rommel with me, the pleasure on his silly face greatly enhanced by the satisfactory little episode. For me, remembering suddenly the reputation of the city through whose dubious streets I was adventuring alone, the sound of the dog’s lolloping feet and excited panting were now enormously comforting. I gripped the frayed string more tightly, and we ran out of the alley into a street that I vaguely remembered.
This was a main street, well lighted, the road, in fact, down which I had come from Avignon into Marseilles. I had turned off it some way further west, in my attempts to dodge Richard, so the garage of Bergère Frères must lie somewhere in the maze of streets between this one and the docks. It couldn’t be far, I thought hopefully, as Rommel and I crossed the street and hesitated on the further pavement; I remembered that I had not walked a great distance before re-crossing this street and finding the hotel in the Rue Mirabell.
I looked round me. It was not a street of cafés, and there were surprisingly few people about. The newspaper kiosk at my elbow was shut, so was the boulangerie in front of me, but thirty yards away was an open garage, the lights of its petrol-pumps glowing like beacons. Someone there would certainly know the way to the garage in the Rue des Pêcheurs. I tugged Rommel in that direction.
One garage-hand was busy at the pumps, attending to a car, but as I hurried forward another emerged from the garage door, carrying a bucket. He put this down, and, at my breathless query, pushed the beret back on his head and scratched his hair.
‘Rue des Pêcheurs, mam’selle? Why yes, but—’ he eyed me dubiously. ‘It’s no sort of place for you to be going, this time of night.’
‘But I must!’ My insistence was such that his stare became curious. ‘It’s most urgent. Which is the way?’
He rubbed his ear, still staring. ‘I’ll point the way out to you, sure enough. But I tell you—’
‘I must!’ I cried again. He meant kindly, no doubt, but my heart was hammering in my throat, and the engine of every car that passed was like the whining hum of a minute-gong. I took a step towards him. ‘Please, m’sieur!’
His stare was all over me now, taking in my smudged hands, my dusty sandals, the plaster-marks on my coat, the desperation in my face. There was a glint in his eyes now that was more than curiosity. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do.’ He passed his tongue over his upper lip, and smiled quite pleasantly. I wondered if he were thinking of telephoning the police. ‘I’m off in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘If you like to wait I’ll take you there myself.’
I grabbed at the edges of my patience and politeness. ‘M’sieur, you are kindness itself. But I repeat, this is urgent; I cannot wait. I have to leave Marseilles immediately, and I must have my car. So—’
‘Car?’
‘Yes. At Bergère’s garage. It’s in the Rue—’
‘I know that. But it’s shut.’ He spoke curtly; he was losing interest. He half turned away and picked up his bucket.
‘Shut?’ The world stood still, then began to spin. ‘Are you sure?’
He shrugged slightly. ‘Mais certainment. It’s a repair garage: it shuts at eight.’
‘Perhaps someone–it’s so very important … where do they live?’ I found myself beginning to stammer; I was groping for words, my French slipping from me as my brain panicked again: ‘I could go to the house—’
He spoke a little more gently: ‘I don’t know where they live. You could perhaps ask at the houses near the garage.’
A tram bucketed down the street behind me, the noise of its speed mocking me. A car turned in beside the petrol pumps, and the swish of its tyres on the gravel made the hairs prickle along the nape of my neck. I dropped Rommel’s string on the ground, set my foot on it, and began to grope in my handbag with shaking hands.
‘No, that’s no use. I’ve no time. I must go now. I must hire a car. Please get one out immediately and fill it up. How much—’
‘There is no car.’ Interest, curiosity, perhaps even compassion, these were still in his eyes, but deepening there, too, was suspicion. Heaven knows I didn’t blame him: if he could read my face as I read his, he must be able to see something sufficiently out of the ordinary. My whole bearing must speak my fear. I dragged at a handful of notes and held them out. ‘A car, m’sieur, for God’s sake—’
He eyed the notes, but made no move to take them. ‘It is the truth. We have no car for hire. I am sorry.’ His shrug of regret was genuine, and final. He turned away.
I just stood there, numbly, clutching the notes, and in me, the hope that had never been a hope at all, drooped and died. It was no use. Richard was dead. I could go to the Rue des Pêcheurs, I could knock from door to door, breathless, hurrying, desperately fumbling for words. I could find M. Bergère; I could explain to him: I could persuade him to open his garage. I could get my car out, and drive along the coast road to Aiguebelle and the parasol pines, I and this silly fluffy dog of David’s. And when I got there there would be nothing to see except the moonlight on some car-tracks in the dust, and nothing to hear except the grating roar of the sea on the shingle at the foot of the cliff. I was too late …
Rommel turned his head and wagged his ridiculous tail. Someone spoke behind me.
‘Mrs. Selborne!’
I turned, as in a dream. A tall man in a dark suit was standing by the petrol-pumps, looking at me. He spoke again, in English, and took a step towards me.
‘It is Mrs. Selborne, isn’t it?’
I knew him now: it was the handsome Frenchman from the Tistet-Védène. I smiled mechanically. ‘Monsieur – Véry?’
He smiled back and gave a charming little bow. ‘I never expected to see you here, madame; this is indeed a pleasure.’ Then as I, at a loss, stammered something, his eyes fell on Rommel. They widened, and he turned on me a look half amazed, half quizzical, and wholly amused.
‘So it was you?’ he said. I did not reply, but he appeared to notice nothing odd in my demeanour. He laughed. ‘Tell me, where have you hidden him – the little boy you stole?’
‘I – I—’
He made a gesture. His dark eyes were alight with amusement. ‘Figure to yourself, m
adame, what it was like at the hôtel, this morning! The cries, the tears—’
‘Tears?’ I repeated the word dully. I was not taking this in. All my attention was on the trivial task of folding the notes very neatly, and putting them back into my bag.
‘We–ell, perhaps not tears.’ He grimaced slightly. ‘There is no love lost there, hein? But you’ – his eyes were dancing – ‘you the criminal! Tell me, why did you do it? He was unhappy, the little one? Did he tell you, perhaps—?’
‘No, no. I didn’t—’
‘You haven’t been caught yet, anyway?’ He chuckled. ‘Bon. You caused a lot of trouble, you know, but it was fort amusant, just the same. I thought I was going to have to miss the end of it; I had to leave today for Nice, and I was désolé that I should never know what happened. And now, by the purest chance, I pull in here’ – he gestured to the pumps – ‘and here you are, with the evidence of the crime, red-fingered … or is it red-handed?’
But I was not listening. My eyes had followed his gesture, and for the moment my whole world was filled with what they saw.
The mechanic was just screwing the cap back into the petrol-tank of Paul Véry’s car. And what a car! Long, low, and open, with power written along every gleaming line of her, the Mercedes-Benz lay along the garage-front like a liner at a fishing-jetty. From where I stood she looked about thirty feet long.
‘Monsieur Véry—’ It stirred in me, that crazy little hope that wouldn’t die. My heart began to thud.
At something in my face his expression changed. The amusement dropped like a peeled-off mask. His eyes scanned me. ‘I am sorry. I shouldn’t have jested about it. You are in trouble.’
‘Yes. Great trouble.’ I came close to him and put out a hand that was not steady. ‘You’re going to Nice, you say … could you, would you, take me with you part of the way?’
‘But of course. The boy—?’
‘It’s to do with the boy,’ I said shakily. ‘I know where he’s gone. Please understand – it’s terribly important to hurry; let me explain as we go. I – it’s so urgent—’
His hand closed over mine, for a brief, reassuring moment. ‘Don’t worry, ma belle; we shall hurry. That car – it is difficult, with her, to do anything else.’
Two minutes later, with Rommel safely tied in the back seat, the Mercedes flicked through the traffic in the Canebière, and turned her nose to the east.
23
Tyger, Tyger—
(Blake)
Almost at once, it seemed, the glare and rattle of the Marseilles streets thinned around us, and we were threading the tree-lined suburbs, whose ever-sparser street-lamps and high shuttered houses flickered past in a gathering darkness. If there was a speed-limit here, Paul Véry ignored it. He drove fast, cutting dangerously through the remaining knots of traffic in a manner that made me at one moment feel glad of the speed we were making, and at another wonder if he reckoned the risks he took. If we should be stopped by the police … for the Mercedes made no secret of her speed, it did not need the klaxon blaring at the crossing to advertise her coming: on a rising snarl she swept through the last of the thinning streets, and roared down the tunnel of her own undimmed lights, racing like a homing tiger for the forests of the night.
The gleaming tram-lines of Marseilles vanished from under our wheels: the lights of the last house flickered through its cypresses and were gone; and we were in the open country. A wind had risen. The wind of our own speed beat against us, whining along the great bonnet and clawing at the wind-screen, but I could tell from the drift of the high clouds against the starlight that the upper air, too, was alive. The moon had vanished, swallowed by those same clouds, and we raced through a darkness lit only by faint stars, save where the car’s great lights flooded our road for what seemed half a racing mile ahead. And down that roaring wedge of light she went, gathering speed, peeling the flying night off over her shoulder as a comet peels the cloud. Along that rushing road the pines, the palisaded poplars, the cloudy olives, blurred themselves for an instant at the edge of vision, and were gone. The night itself was a blur, a roar of movement, nothing but a dark wind; the streaming stars were no more than a foam in our wake.
The road whipped wickedly under us like a snake. The world swung in a sickening lurch as the tyres screamed at a bend. Then we were straight again, tearing hell-bent down our long tunnel of light.
Paul Véry glanced at me with a little smile. ‘Is this fast enough for you?’
‘No,’ I said.
In the glow of the dashboard I saw him look momentarily disconcerted, and I realized that, in taking so literally my demand for speed, he had expected me to be scared. Even at that moment I could feel a wry twinge of amusement at the idea that anyone who had lived with Johnny could ever be afraid of speed again: this bat-out-of-hell flight through the roaring darkness had been Johnny’s normal way of driving home. But then, Johnny had been – Johnny: I admitted to myself, on a second thought, that I had had several qualms tonight already as we had bullied our way out of Marseilles. I had been in this kind of car too often not to know just what she could do with half-a-second off the chain.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Paul Véry, decelerating, ‘it is as fast as is safe.’ He, too, then, had felt that moment at the bend when the tiger had nearly got away from him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was worrying. I’m watching all the time for their tail-light, and I spoke without thinking. I’m most terribly grateful to you for taking me at all.’
‘It’s a pleasure.’ He accompanied the formal words with a smile so delightful that, in spite of my heart-aching fear and apprehension, I smiled back. I found myself watching him as he leaned back in his seat, and settled the car down to a steady sixty-five, his eyes narrowed on the extreme arrow-tip of light ahead. In its reflected glow his face was a handsome mask of concentration.
The road tore towards us. Once my heart jumped and fluttered in my throat as a red light appeared in the blackness ahead, but it was only a small car, stationary, with a couple in it, a man and a girl. I sank back in my seat, and the blood seemed to seep back from my tingling finger-tips and slowly start to feed my heart again.
Paul Véry had glanced sideways at me, and now he spoke.
‘That is not the tail-light you are looking for, I take it?’
‘No.’ I smiled a little uncertainly at him. ‘I suppose you must be wondering what it’s all about?’
His gaze was back on the road. ‘But naturally. You talk of urgency, and you are anxious and afraid. Who would not wonder, madame? Believe me, I am eager to help … but there is not the least need to tell me your affairs if you would rather not.’
‘You’re very good. I – I told you it was something to do with the boy David.’
‘Eh bien?’
‘I didn’t take him away, you know. But I do know where he is now. That’s where I’m going.’
His hands moved a little, as if with surprise, on the steering-wheel, and the car gave a wicked swerve. He cursed it under his breath.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. But the rest of my story’s a good deal more startling than that. I told no more than the truth when I said I was in trouble. I am: desperate trouble.’ My voice wavered as the spectre of that desperation once more gibbered at me out of the dark. ‘Life-and-death trouble,’ I said, on a little sob.
‘And you need help – badly.’ It was almost a question, spoken very softly, without looking at me. There was a curious lilt to his voice, and I turned my head to look at him, the sob caught in my throat. Help … of course I needed help. Up to this moment, stupid with weariness and dazed by my terror for Richard, I had thought of Paul Véry only as a miraculous means of my reaching the little road beyond Aiguebelle. Further than that I had not gone. But now … the miracle was complete: I and Rommel were alone no longer, we had an ally, and our immediate objective was apparent. André was ahead of us, with Richard and David, and he was alone on the job. It was by no mean
s probable that Jean, also, was before us: he would have had little, if any, start of us, and, at the rate we were going, we would almost certainly by now have caught any car going at a more normal speed.
André was alone, and there were two of us – and Rommel.
My heart lifted, and I turned gratefully to my companion. He was smiling; he looked extremely handsome, and also, I realized, entirely formidable.
‘And where are “they” taking this little boy, hein? And who are “they”?’ The strange note was back in his voice, and all at once I knew it for what it was. It was enjoyment. He sounded amused, excited, and not at all apprehensive. He had, of course, no idea yet of the real danger of the situation: it was the unusualness of it, the lady-in-distress touch, the mad speed through the dark – all this must be appealing to some sense of adventure in him. But I knew, too, as I looked at him as it were with new eyes, that no threat of danger to come would damp that enjoyment.
I found myself heartened by his demeanour, the lift of excitement, almost gaiety, in his voice and look. It was catching, and it was certainly, to anyone in my desperate plight, heartening, to be suddenly given an ally at once so eager and so redoubtable.
And redoubtable was by no means too strong a word. There was about him an impression of force, of energy leashed in only precariously … the whole personality of the man was, at such close quarters, almost overwhelming. I had, I realized, failed to estimate Monsieur Paul Véry. It was not only the headlong speed of the car that snatched at my breath as I began the explanation that was his due.
‘It’s a long story, and a nasty one,’ I said quickly, ‘and I mayn’t have time to tell it all to you before things happen. But the main thing is that David, whose real name is David Byron, is going to be murdered tonight, along with his father, if we can’t do something to prevent it.’