Vintage Stuff

Glodstone pulled in and switched off and looked at her haggardly.

'Firstly I didn't write those letters,' said the Countess, 'and I want to see them. Where did you stash them?'

'Stash them? I didn't. You told me to burn them and that's what I did.'

The Countess breathed a sigh of relief. But she wasn't showing it. 'So you've no proof they ever existed?'

Glodstone shook his head. He was almost too tired and frightened to speak.

'Well, get this straight. You can think what you like but if you seriously imagine I needed rescuing you've got to be insane. Right now, you're the one in need of a rescue operation and with what you've got between the ears that's not going to be easy. Every cop in Europe is going to be hot on your trail before the day is out.'

Glodstone dragged his mind out of its stupor. 'But no one knows we were at the Château and...'

'Whoever wrote those letters does, doesn't he just. You've been set up, and a little anonymous call to the police is all it's going to take to have you in the net. You haven't a plastic bag's hope in hell of getting away. One glass eye, this old banger and a youth with an IQ of fifty. You were made for identification and if you ask me that's why you were chosen.'

Glodstone gazed at a bowling green and saw only policemen, court rooms, lawyers and judges and the rest of his life in a French prison. 'What do you suggest we do?' he asked.

'You do. Count me out. I don't mind thinking for you but that's as far as it goes. First off, I'd say your best bet is to do a Lord Lucan but I don't suppose you've got the money or the friends. And anyway that still leaves that juvenile mobster on the loose. What's his background?' Glodstone told her.

'Then one eminent solicitor is in for a very nasty shock,' said the Countess when he'd finished, 'though from what I've seen of his offspring I'd say he'd been cuckolded or his wife had a craving for lumps of lead when she was pregnant. Doesn't make your situation any cosier. Mr Clyde-Browne's going to have his son plead insanity and hurl the book at you.'

'What on earth can I do then?' whimpered Glodstone.

The Countess hesitated. If she suggested going to the police he might just do it and she wasn't having that. 'Isn't there any place you can hang out for a few days and nobody ever comes?'

Glodstone tried to concentrate. 'I've got a cousin near Malvern,' he said, 'She may be away and anyway she'd put us up.'

'Until the police came. Think, for Chrissake. Think where you wouldn't go.'

'Margate,' said Glodstone suddenly, 'I wouldn't be seen dead there.'

'Then that's where you'll go,' said the Countess, with the private thought that he probably would be seen dead there. 'And buy a pair of dark glasses and shave your moustache. And if I were you I'd sell treasure here to the first dealer you can find.'

'Sell the Bentley?' said Glodstone. It was the final straw. 'I couldn't do that.'

'In that case, stew in a French hoosegow for the rest of your natural. You don't seem to know what your prospects are. Well, I'm telling you. They're zero minus forty. Permafrost all the way to the Judgement Day. Amen.'

'Oh God. Oh God! How did this ever happen? It's too horrible to be real.'

For a moment the Countess felt a twinge of pity for him. The world was full of people like Glodstone who played at life and only discovered reality when it kicked them in the face. 'Roast lamb and abattoirs,' she said inconsequentially and was surprised when he picked up the message.

'Or to the slaughter.' He paused and looked at her. 'What are you going to do?'

'Think about it. You go and fetch Butch Cassidy. On foot. If I'm not here when you get back stay at the Marine Hotel in Margate and register as Mr Cassidy. I'll call you there.'

'Is there a Marine Hotel in Margate?'

'If there isn't, choose one with two AA stars and I'll call them all.'

Glodstone trudged disconsolately from the car park and found Peregrine eating an ice-cream and studying some girls in bikinis with an almost healthy interest. When they returned to the car the Countess had vanished. She was sitting in the bus station waiting for one that would take her to Bournemouth and from there she'd catch a train to London.

'I don't trust that woman,' said Peregrine grimly.

'You'd better,' said Glodstone. 'She's all that stands between us and the reintroduction of the guillotine.'

'I tell you the whole thing was a joke,' said the Major, 'I did not drop by parachute so I don't know where it's buried.' He was standing by the roadside surrounded by armed gendarmes. Nobody else thought it was a joke.

'Monsieur chooses to play games with us,' said the Commissaire. 'Ah well, we too can play games. Back to the station.'

'Now hang on,' said the Major, 'I don't know what Glodstone's done but...'

'Glodstone? Who is this Glodstone?'

'Hasn't Slymne told you? I thought...'

'What did you think? No, I want to hear from you what this man Glodstone is.'

Major Fetherington told him. He wasn't going through Slymne's experience before he cracked and obviously Glodstone had asked for it.

'It fits the description of the one who called himself Pringle,' said the Inspector when he had finished, 'but he rescued Botwyk. Why should he then shoot him?'

'Who knows why the English do things? Only the good God knows that. In the meantime, put out a full alert for him. All airports, frontier posts, everywhere.'

'Do we ask Scotland Yard?'

Commissaire Roudhon hesitated. 'I'll have to check with Paris first. And I want these two grilled for every bit of information they've got. They must have known more about the operation than they've admitted so far or they wouldn't be down here.'

He drove off in a hurry and the Major was shoved into the back of a van and taken back to Boosat. For the rest of the day he sat answering questions and at the end of it no one was any the wiser. Inspector Ficard made his report to an incredulous Commissaire.

'An adventure? The Countess wrote to him asking to be rescued? He came down in an ancient Bentley? And they come looking for a boy called Peregrine Clyde-Browne because his father wanted him back? What sort of madness is this?'

'It's what the other one, Slymne, told us.'

'So they had a ready-made story. We have a major political assassination to deal with and you expect me to believe it was carried out by an English schoolteacher who...' He was interrupted by the telephone. When he put it down Commissaire Roudhon no longer knew what to think.

'A man answering that description and driving a Bentley crossed from Cherbourg this morning. Ticket made out in the name of Glodstone. I'll inform Paris. They can decide how to play it from now on. I am a policeman, not a bloody politician.'

'What shall we do with these two?'

'Put them in a cell together and tape every single word they say. Better still, install a video camera. If they pass messages I want to know. In any case, it's the sort of thing that'll impress the Americans. They're flying ten anti-terrorist specialists in from Frankfurt, and they're going to need some convincing.'

Slymne was still gibbering when they came for him. He was too feeble to resist and what he said made even less sense than before but they carried him down the passage and put him in a larger cell.

'God Almighty,' said the Major when he was led in too. 'You poor sod. What did the buggers do to you, use electrodes on your bollocks or something?'

'Don't touch me,' squealed Slymne squinting at him.

'I don't intend to, old boy. Count me out. All I do know is that Glodstone's got something coming to him.'

In his hotel room in Margate, Glodstone looked at himself in the mirror. Without his moustache and wearing dark glasses he did look different. He also looked a great deal older. Not that that would help matters in the slightest if they caught him. He'd be over eighty by the time he was released if they ever bothered to let people out who had been partly responsible for assassinating American political advisers. He rather doubted it. He was also extremely dubious about having followed the Countess's advice but he'd been too exhausted and numb with terror the day before to be able to think for himself. And Peregrine had been no help. He'd made matters worse by wanting to lie low in a hole in a hedge like the man in Rogue Male.