But Botwyk was no longer interested in anything to do with publicity. He was more concerned with the state of his own health. In addition to being strangled, dropped into the river and made the victim of Glodstone's suggestion that he might have broken his back, he had also been subjected to the attentions of the Château's sewage disposal system. Being hit in the face by an unidentified sanitary napkin had particularly affected him. With a haunted look he was hauled up the bank and helped into an ambulance. Glodstone was brought up too and together they were driven up to the Château. Only then did Botwyk open his mouth briefly.
'Just get me into a disinfectant bath and a bed,' he told Dr Voisin as he stumbled out into the dawn light. 'If you want any further information, ask him.'
But Glodstone had his own reasons for being reticent. 'I just happened to be in the right place at the right time,' he said, 'I was passing and saw him fall. Swam across and got him out.'
And conscious that he was now in the enemy's camp, he followed Botwyk and the doctor miserably up the stairs to the bathroom.
From the far side of the valley Peregrine watched these proceedings with interest. It was good to know that Glodstone was still alive but rather disappointing that the swine who had said he was dead had somehow survived. Anyway, there was nothing he could do now until darkness came again. He wriggled back to the bivouac and hung his clothes out to dry and climbed into his sleeping bag. For a moment he wondered if he shouldn't take the precaution of moving somewhere else in case they tortured Glodstone into telling them where the base was, but Gloddie would never talk no matter what they did to him. On this reassuring note he fell asleep.
Deirdre, Comtesse de Montcon, never slept in the Château during the holiday season. She would never have slept there at any other time if she could have helped but during the summer she had her anonymity to think about, and besides, by staying the night in Boosat, she was sure of getting the best vegetables in the market and the finest cuts of meat at the butcher. Nobody at the Château Carmagnac could complain that the cuisine wasn't excellent or the service poor. Nor would they know that the expert cook was a countess. More importantly, no one would suspect that the woman who drove up in the Renault van each morning and spent the day scurrying about the kitchen and shouting orders to the other servants was English or that her greatest ambition was to retire to an even greater anonymity in her bungalow in Bognor Regis. Above all, they must not know that she had a past.
Born Constance Sugg, of 421 Selsdon Avenue, Croydon, she had risen by a series of changed identities and useful adulteries to her present title. In fact it could be truthfully said that she had a great many pasts. She had been Miss Croydon at seventeen, a starlet in Hollywood at nineteen, a masseuse in an extremely dubious parlour in San Francisco at the age of twenty-two, a hostess at a dude-ranch three years later and for ten years the wife of Siskin J. Wanderby. By then Wanderby, a man who believed in putting his money where his mouth was, had made and lost several fortunes and Constance, now Anita Blanche and mother of Anthony B. Wanderby, had divorced him on the grounds that never knowing from one week to another whether she was the wife of a millionaire or something destined for Skid Row constituted a particularly sadistic form of mental cruelty. At the time, Wanderby had been on the point of making a fortune out of capped oil wells in Texas and had looked good for a gigantic alimony. Instead, the oil glut had put paid to her hopes and she had been forced to provide for her own future. Since she was in Las Vegas she had changed her name to Betty Bonford and had stayed on as sucker-bait at Caesar's Palace. It was there she met her future husband, Alphonse Giraud Barbier, Comte de Montcon.
At fifty, the count had already gained a considerable reputation as a playboy, a gambler and a piss-artist, a consequence of his having followed his widowed mother's advice to the letter. 'Don't marry for money, Alphonse,' she had told him, 'go where money is.' And Alphonse had. By the time he landed in Las Vegas he had been to almost every expensive hotel, ski-resort, exclusive club and casino in Europe and was down to his last million francs and the Château Carmagnac. He was also under orders to marry the first rich woman who would have what was left of him. Again the Count had done what he was told and had proposed to Deirdre Gosforth (she had changed her name once more for this eventuality) in the mistaken belief that a woman who could win a hundred thousand dollars three nights running in crap games had to be loaded. The fact that it was the dice that were, and that she handed back her winnings to the management, never occurred to him, even when she had steered him in an alcoholic haze through a marriage ceremony and onto a jet to Paris taking with her, for once, all her winnings.
It was only when they reached the Château that the Count realized his mistake and the new Countess knew that in hooking her last sucker she had been hooked herself. Worse still, there was no way she was going back to the States with a hundred grand of the Syndicate's money. She had reconciled herself with the knowledge that any man who breakfasted on black coffee laced with Armagnac was heading for the hereafter at a rate of knots and as his widow she'd be able to flog the Château. The illusion hadn't persisted. The Count's constitution proved stronger than his intellect and while the Château might be in his possession it couldn't be in his will. Without an heir it would revert to the family and the Count's two sisters had no intention of losing it to a Yankee gold-digger. In fact they had done their damnedest to get the marriage annulled. Deirdre had fought back by keeping the Count's alcohol level too high for him to remember where he'd been married, or to care.
In the ensuing vendetta neither side could be said to have won. Deirdre's premature announcement that she was pregnant had driven the two sisters to consult the family lawyers while her efforts to achieve the only partially desired result had killed the Count. Since the traumatic moment when she had realized his brandy droop was terminal and that for the past ten minutes she had been having coition with nothing more responsive than a corpse with a strangulated hernia, the Countess had come to an accommodation with the family.
'You want me out, you buy me out,' she told the relatives after the funeral, 'and that means a million.'
'Francs?' asked ancient Uncle René hopefully.
'Dollars.'
'Impossible. Impossible. Where would we get such a fantastic sum?'
'By selling this dump.'
'Only a madman would pay...'
'Not as it stands,' said Deirdre, 'We turn it into a Château de luxe. Best food in France, the finest wines, get top ratings in the Guide Bleu. We climb on the cuisine gravy train and charge through the nose.'
The relatives had looked at one another thoughtfully. Money talked, but they had their family pride to consider.
'Are you expecting us to become restaurateurs?'
'Leave it to me,' Deirdre told them, 'I run the joint and '
'The name Montcon means something still in France. We are not petit bourgeois,' said one of the sisters.
'So we don't muddy the name. I'll take the flak. You can keep your hands clean and inside five years we put it on the market and scoop the pool.'
After a great deal of argument, the family had agreed and the Countess, now plain Deirdre, had set to work only to discover that she had been taken for a sucker yet again. The family had no intention of ever selling. She could have her cut of the profits but that was all. Even her threat to drag the name of Montcon through the mud of the courts had backfired. The family no longer existed and the sisters and nieces were content with their husband's names and the income they drew from Deirdre's efforts. Worse still, the youngest sister of the late Count had married Dr Grenoy, the Cultural Attaché to the Embassy in Washington, who had used his position to look a little more closely into Deirdre's background. From that moment, Deirdre had become a dependant. Dr Grenoy had made that clear enough. 'There are...how shall I say?...certain gentlemen in a town renowned for gambling and violence who have long memories. It would interest them to know where their money has been invested.' Deirdre's eyes had hardened and Dr Grenoy continued. 'However that need not concern us. In France we are more civilized. Naturally we will have to readjust your percentage to prepare for any unfortunate contingencies...'