“I don’t think I lock-in on that one.”
She shrugged plump shoulders. “You’ll have to talk to Mr Amis, son. I just turn down the sheets around here.”
They had halted at the door of chalet number eleven. Mrs Shooter winched up a key from her cleavage and pressed it into Peter’s hand. It felt very warm. He nearly dropped it.
She indicated the door with a roguish nod. “Anyone going to carry me over the threshold?”
The three young men looked blank.
Mrs Shooter knew better than to wait long for pleasantries to root. She reclaimed the key from Peter and opened both the door of number eleven and that of chalet twelve. “I’ll let you have your own keys when you come back to the office,” she told them.
Her re-interment of the master key in its place of safety was effected with considerably less coquetry than had been its production. Nevertheless, it displayed, as did all her actions, a certain stylishness, a quality of flourish.
Bernard made a jotting on his note clip:
Security—sharpen-up master key (motel) situation?
Joxy and Todd appeared, laden with baggage. They put the cases down outside the door of number eleven and stumped away again. Joxy glanced back from the further side of the square and met the placid but calculating stare of Bernard, note clip at the ready. Bernard gained the impression that Joxy was saying something violently disparaging. He wrote:
Management-staff relations: resentment-eradication?
They examined their quarters. Eleven was larger than twelve and contained two divan beds instead of one. The furnishings otherwise were similar. Each chalet contained a built-in wardrobe, a plain square dressing table and a small bedside table: all new and faced with ivory-tinted plastic laminate. There was a rose-coloured telephone on the table.
Behind a partition of opaque glass, patterned with simulated raindrops, were shower, wash basin and lavatory.
“Adequate,” said Peter, after they had made a rapid survey of both cabins.
The others nodded agreement, then Bernard said: “You notice the typical provincial negativism in relation to bidet-acceptance.”
“Julian,” said Bernard, “had better move into the single. He’ll need the space on his own for the books.”
“You the accountant, then?” Mrs Shooter asked, making the word sound vaguely spicy.
“Viability assessment,” murmured Julian.
Mrs Shooter regarded him thoughtfully. Her tongue tip grouted around her back teeth in search of breakfast fragments; the effort imparted to her face a disturbingly sardonic expression.
“I could tell you a thing or two,” she said, between cleanings, “about accountants.” Her gaze shifted for a moment to the one article that seemed out of keeping with the chalet’s strictly functional furnishing scheme.
It was a huge, adjustable mirror on a mobile frame standing close to the wall opposite the bed.
“I suppose,” persisted Mrs Shooter, undeterred by her guests’ clear disinclination to be sociable, “that fellows in dull jobs need a bit more taking out of themselves.”
There was no response. Even Peter, whom she had correctly adjudged sensitive to warm keys, was now fathoms deep in his vocation. He was doing some rapid mental re-reading of the introductory chapter of the Mackintosh-Brooke manual of personnel procedure, “You and the MB Method”, for this was his first excursion from the office on a team assignment and he thought he had detected already in his colleagues’ otherwise friendly manner towards him just a trace of carnivorous conjecture.
Chapter Ten
“Where—or what—is Flaxborrow, for God’s sake?”
“Flax what?”
“Burrow. Flaxburrow. Or borrow. Could be Flaxborrow. Flaxborrow, England.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Yesterday, you hadn’t heard of Hamburg, Germany.”
“OK, so today it’s this Flaxborrow’s turn. I just shift my ignorance around a little. Keeps it at full stretch.”
Lieutenant Varney and Sergeant Bast would not normally have been conversing in this manner, but for nearly a week they had been closeted together in a mind-punishing exercise known in the police department as nut mail duty. This consisted of making a first reading of all those letters and cards of mysterious authorship and often unintelligible purpose that senior officers, for whose eyes are reserved only the least whacky winnowings, are pleased to call “communications from members of the public”.
“This one,” said Bast, after reading and re-reading the single sheet of rough grey paper several times in silence, “claims to be a tip-off.”
Without looking up from his own pile of messages, Varney waved a tired hand towards one of four wire baskets that lay between them in the centre of the big, battered, burn-pocked table. In this basket already reposed the confident, if somewhat imprecise, announcements of eight forthcoming bank robberies, an assortment of projected homicides, and one kidnapping.
Bast shook his head and gave a little growl of doubt.
“Those are all home territory. This has foreign connections. Maybe West ought to see it.”
Varney looked pained.
“Here.” He reached over, took the paper and leaned far back in his tilted chair, holding the letter close to his belly. As he read, he kept the tip of his nose pressed flat with his left forefinger. Like an elevator button, thought Bast.
“Put it with Assassinations,” said Varney at last. “That one.” He pointed to the third basket.
A head shake and a negative grunt.
“Why not? Look, Mike, it’s nearly five o’clock.”
“Assassinations,” said Bast, “are for secretaries of state and on up. Ambassadors, maybe. This Flaxborrow—I doubt if it even rates consuls. West would know.”
“And West would keep us here until this time Tuesday. No, thanks.” Varney slid the letter back across the table.
Bast painfully and protestingly hauled himself out of his chair. He clipped the letter to its envelope. With a final look of reproof at Varney, he opened the door and went out.
Captain Jacklin West was accounted the Precinct’s oracle whenever matters of political or international nicety needed to be settled. He had been to law school and was, compared with most of his colleagues, a widely travelled man, having once trailed around Europe for a year as one of a diplomat’s body-guards.
Perhaps the long and uncongenial hours spent lurking in solitude outside hotel bedrooms in that era were to blame for Captain West’s sole vice: a tendency to prolong conversation. Bast wouldn’t know and didn’t care. He was rockily conscientious but impatient with overspill (“So damn rude, that man,” West pronounced him, not without admiration).