The Melting Man rc-4 Page 15

  I lit a cigarette and shook my head.

  'You insist?'

  'I insist,' I said. 'And what is more I insist on my rights. Unless you are going to make some charge against me, I wish to leave. Okay?'

  I turned to go.

  Aristide said, 'I think we had better join Albert first. He is a good man, Albert. Solid, a little slow-thinking, but a first-class driver. He comes from Brittany where they make a coffee substitute out of chickpea and lupin seeds. This way.'

  He held out a hand with a gun in it and pointed towards the door on the far side of the kitchen through which Albert had gone.

  I went through the door and he followed me. At the end of the corridor I could see Albert waiting. I'd been down here before when I had first searched the house. There were a couple of storerooms and a cellar. Albert was standing outside the cellar door.

  As we approached he turned the key in the lock and opened the door for us. They stood aside and motioned me in first, Aristide switching the light on behind me.

  One wall held racks of wine bottles. There was no window and there were empty crates and cartons stacked against another wall. Along the wall that faced the door was a big deepfreeze unit. The lid was pushed back, resting against the wall, and an internal light was burning in it, throwing a soft glow up to the ceiling.

  One of them prodded me gently up to the deep-freeze. Lying inside, knees bent up, head sunk between his shoulders was Max Ansermoz. On a pile of frozen spinach cartons rested the gun with which Najib had killed him, and I didn't have to be told, because I already had been, that my fingerprints would be on it, placed there by Najib while I lay knocked out in the main room. Najib wasn't the kind of man to throw anything away that one day might come in handy.

  'Well?' said Aristide at my side.

  I stepped back. 'You'd better get the lid down,' I said, 'or the rest of the stuff will spoil.'

  'You killed him,' said Aristide. 'I didn't — and you know it.'

  'I only know it if you know where the car is. Otherwise we go to an examining magistrate. Your prints will be on the gun.'

  'That won't surprise me.'

  'If you know where the car is it will save endless complications… the slow progression of the law to establish innocence… the procés-verbal. Have you any idea how long it all takes?'

  'How,' I asked, 'can I tell you where the car is if I don't know?'

  Aristide studied me, shook his head and said, 'If only one could tell whether a person is telling the truth or not.'

  'It would make police work simple, and cause a lot of confusion in domestic life.'

  Aristide nodded and then said, 'Search him, Albert.'

  Albert came over, turned me round, perhaps out of respect for the dead, to face the door, and then went through my clothes. He did it very thoroughly and handed his find to Aristide. Aristide shuffled through the stuff, passport, credit cards, wallet and so on, and then handed the lot back to me.

  I said, 'Look, Aristide, you know I didn't kill Max. That doesn't mean to say I'm not glad he's dead — but I didn't do it. What you are doing is just falling for a gag — from another interested party — to keep me from finding that car.'

  'It could be true, mon ami, but it is equally true that I don't want you to find that car, so… it is very convenient to have something to keep you busy elsewhere for a time.'

  At this moment there was a bark outside the door and the poodle came bounding in. It ran a circle round the three of us and then got up on its hind legs and danced, begging, in front of Aristide.

  He beamed.

  'Mignon, non?' His calloused, police heart was touched.

  'Don't fool yourself, Aristide. He just sees you as one big chocolate biscuit.' But as I spoke I was glad of the diversion. Both the men were watching the exhibition from the fool dog with happy grins on their faces. I stepped back to give the poodle more room for its act and, putting my hand behind me, got hold of the neck of the nearest bottle in the wine-rack. I jerked it out and slung it at the naked electric light-bulb. There was a crash and the light went out, followed by another, louder crash and a roar from Albert, but by this time I was at the door arid out, slamming it shut and turning the key in the lock.

  I sprinted for the kitchen and was beaten by the poodle. Trust a dog to get the hell out of danger before anyone else.

  I dashed through into the main room, picked up the shotgun, the map from under the cushion, and my suitcase and headed for the door, the poodle following. The cellar door was stout but I couldn't give it more than five minutes of pounding from Albert's big shoulders.

  Outside I pumped both barrels of the shotgun into one of the rear tyres of Aristide's car. The noise sent the poodle, yelping hysterically, streaking for the woods, and then I ran for the Mercedes, wondering whether it was burgundy or claret which I had slung at the light. Either way Aristide was going to be angry. Wine, I was sure, was something which he always treated with respect.

  * * *

  The place where Otto and Tony had carried out the payroll robbery was St Jean-de-Maurienne, a small town of about seven thousand inhabitants on the N6, which is the road that runs eastwards from Chambery across Savoie to the Italian border at the Col du Mont Cenis and then on to Turin. It had been well chosen because it left them only about seventy-odd kilometres to reach the border. Fourteen kilometres east of St Jean there was a town called St Michel and some way out from this on the road to the border they had turned left-handed up into the mountains to their lake. From St Bonnet it was quite a drive, and no direct route to it. I reckoned I would make the lake sometime in the early afternoon. The payroll robbery, I learned later, had been from a small light engineering firm which had set up business on the eastern outskirts of St Jean-de-Maurienne. And later still, I learned that Otto had had this fixed pattern of hold-ups — knocking off a payroll in eastern France and then making quickly for the Italian border.

  Dawn came up with a slight drizzle as I left St Bonnet and headed north. The rain slicked the road and cut down my speed. I stopped for coffee around nine o'clock in a small town and also bought myself a face-mask and snorkel, swimming trunks and a rubber-jacketed hand torch. For all I knew the lake water might be as clear as gin, but I wanted to be prepared. One thing I knew was that it would be as cold as hell.

  I reached the lake soon after midday. It was two miles up a side track that climbed all the way through pine woods. It was still drizzling and, as I got higher, wisps of cloud began to sweep through the trees. The track ended, clear of trees, on a wide grassy plateau that overlooked a lake almost as big as the one O'Dowda had back in Sussex. On this side the ground was fairly level, broken with large grey boulders pushing through the bracken and scrub. On the other side — visible now and then through the mist — the ground rose steeply to a small crest. The surface of the lake was still, and the colour of gun metal.

  I got out and walked to the edge of the plateau. Faintly in the thin grass I could make out the marks of Otto's car, and at the edge a big piece of ground had been broken fairly recently. There was a sheer drop of about fifteen feet into deep water. Looking down into it I could see nothing. It looked cold and uninviting and I felt a thin rise of goose pimples move across my shoulders and arms. I went back to the car, turned it round, and then stripped and put on the bathing trunks and the mask and went back to the bank. The cloud mist was thickening fast.

  Somewhere down there was the car and Otto. I could rely on that because I knew Tony would never risk a lie with me. I didn't have to dive down and say 'hello' to Otto. I didn't have to grope about and recover what rested behind the air-intake grille. I could just go to the nearest phone and give O'Dowda the location and then send in my bill. All I'd been hired to do was to find the car. Whatever was hidden in it was no business of mine. O'Dowda and Aristide wanted it, and Najib wanted it for his employers. They could get on with it. It was no day for swimming and diving. All I had to do was to mind my own business. Simple. Except that few of us can resist mi
nding other people's business — because just now and again it gives the chance of taking a commission on it. If Wilkins had been there she would have put her foot down firmly on ethical grounds and ordered me back to the car before I caught double pneumonia.

  I scrambled down the bank until I was two feet above the water and then I jumped in feet first. I went in and nearly didn't come up. The cold hit me like a great hand squeezing the life from me. I surfaced, gasping for breath, blowing and swearing and in no mood to waste time. I didn't want my fingers to drop off before I could get down to that car.

  I swam out a few yards, adjusted the mask and snorkel, took a deep breath, and went down, rubber torch in hand.

  Underwater it wasn't as dark as I had imagined it might be, and I saw the car almost immediately. It was about ten feet away from me on the angle of my dive. It was lying tipped over to one side on the slope of the lake-bed. The driving-wheel side was the farthest away from me. I made it to the right-hand door, grabbed it to anchor myself and flicked on the torch. The window of the door was wound down. I beamed the torch around the inside and saw Otto at once. He wasn't a nice sight. He was wedged up like a grotesque carnival balloon against the roof of the car, his arms and legs dangling, marionette fashion, from the movement of my grasping the door. I took the torch off him quickly, swung it to the air intake to locate its position and then I let go and surfaced.

  I trod water for a moment or two, wondering whether I was going to be sick, then took a deep breath and went down again. This time I worked without the torch, not wanting to see Otto buoyed up against the roof. I held the door with my right hand, shoved the torch into my trunks and reached in with my left hand. I got hold of the circular grille face and turned it. For a moment or two it wouldn't budge, then as the last of my breath was going, I gave it a jerk and felt it move.

  I went up for a fresh supply of air and hung on the surface for a while like a played-out fish. The clouds had come lower and there was a dense, moving succession of mist wraiths wafting across the water. Somewhere up the slopes on the far side of the lake I thought I heard the soft tinkle of a cow-bell.

  I went down again, and this time the grille turned easily and came away in my hand. I dropped it and reached into the aperture. I felt something flat and thick and pulled it out. It was about the size of a good fat book. I groped around to make sure there was nothing else in the compartment and then went up quickly without taking time for a goodbye to Otto.

  I surfaced, pushed the mask back, sucked in great gulps of cold, misty air and looked at the object in my right hand. It was wrapped in thick brown oiled paper and banded all over with scotch tape. Shivering, hardly able to feel my hands or feet, I turned to make for the bank.

  It was then that I saw — standing up above me on the plateau edge, a little fogged with the mist patches that swept by them — Miss Panda Bubakar and Najib Alakwe. They stood there and watched me as I stopped swimming and trod water.

  Panda had a short leather coat flung open, her hands on the hips of a green mini-dress, her long, tight-encased legs seeming longer from the angle at which I viewed them. She was so tall that at times her head was lost in the moving patches of mist. But when her dusky face was clear I could see that she was giving me a cheerful, predatory smile and a chance to admire the sparkle of her white teeth. Najib, though I had little time to be surprised about it, was wearing a neat, sober grey suit and a dark tie on a white shirt. He stood back a little so I couldn't check whether he still had his ginger shoes. But I could see clearly that he was holding a gun in his right hand.

  'Hello, hello, Rexy-dexy boy,' called Panda. 'Just keep swimming. You're on the right track. Big welcome awaits.'

  'And be careful not to drop the parcel,' said Najib. Just to emphasize the need for care, he fired a shot into the water two feet from me which made me leap like a running salmon, and he called, 'No need for any alarm over personal safety. Just hand over the parcel and all is forgiven.'

  'And Mamma will come up with a big brandy and nice rub down with rough towel. Whoof-whoof!' She gave that big, dark brown laughing bark of hers and did a couple of high kicks that would have left a Bluebell girl grounded.

  I shook my head. 'Sorry,' I said, 'but I promised myself I would do a couple of lengths before I came out.'

  'You come on straight out, lover-boy,' said Panda, 'otherwise you gonna freeze and lose all your accessories. Come on, come to Mamma. Mamma soon make baby warm.'

  'Come on in,' I said. 'It's lovely. Don't know what you're missing.'

  I turned, stuck the parcel between my teeth and flattened out into the nearest thing to a fast crawl that I could manage, heading away into the mist. I knew that Najib wouldn't fire at me. He didn't want me to drop the precious parcel. On the other hand that wasn't much consolation. I might make the other bank before they got round to it but I didn't fancy being stuck up in the mountains wearing only a pair of trunks. Even if I made a road I was going to have trouble thumbing a lift. The French aren't all that broad-minded.

  After about twenty yards or so, I stopped, took the parcel out of my mouth and got some air. The mist hid the grass plateau now. That was good. But it also hid everything else. I hadn't the faintest idea which way to go. You can blindfold some people, dump them down in the dark and they can always tell where north is. Well, I could have been a homing pigeon but it still wouldn't have helped because I didn't have any home.

  Just then, I heard Panda's delighted bark-laugh come through the mist and there was the crisp sound of a body diving into water. That scared me. She was after me, over six brown feet of human torpedo, impervious to cold water, and with a built-in radar device that could pick up a man and home on him from any distance. Once she got her long arms and lovely legs around me in the water I would have less chance than a minnow with a pike.

  Parcel in my mouth, I went full ahead for a hundred yards, hoping to hit the bank. But I couldn't find any bank. I stopped, panting, no sensation in my body at all, and wondered how long it would be before Otto had company. From behind and to my right, some way away, I heard the water threshing as Panda screwed herself along. Then the sound stopped. All sound stopped. There was just the mist and the cold ripple of water around me. Then there was a sound. Up ahead of me I caught the brief tinkle of a cow-bell. I got moving. I swam thirty yards and then stopped. Somewhere behind me I heard Panda swimming. She didn't sound as though she were going fast; just heading steadily in my direction, keeping the blip of her screen dead centre. Over the noise of her swimming I heard the cow-bell tinkle again, but this time it was away at an angle to my right and the unpleasant thought occurred to me that there could be more than one cow browsing along the far shore. I did the only thing. I took a mean between the two bells and swam down it. Very sensible. In the circumstances.

  But not good navigation. A mean course can land you in trouble. That's the catch with averages, they always give you a cock-eyed answer like the average English family has one and a half cars. I ran straight into Panda, simply because I hadn't allowed for the acoustic factor that sounds in a mist don't come from where they seem to come.

  She came out of the mist four feet ahead of me, went astern to brake her way and gave me a big white tooth-flashing smile. Held in her teeth was a nasty-looking knife. She took the knife out of her mouth and said, 'Hiyah, honey. Come here often?'

  I took the parcel out of my mouth, and through chattering teeth, said, 'You come a foot nearer and I chuck this overboard.' I held up the parcel.

  She said, 'How we going to get warm if we don't get close?'

  I said, 'Just switch your radar on the nearest cow-bell and lead the way.'

  She shook her head and said, 'We do it side by side, lover-boy. And don't play no tricks on a poor girl what's achin' for love. You drop that parcel and I'm gonna slit you from gizzard to crutch and to hell with the waste of a good man.' She winked at me, and added, 'Anyone ever tell you you got nice shoulders? Kinda square and sexy — and I like 'em that blue colour. Goes
well with the red face. Start tracking.'

  We swam, four feet apart, and Panda just leading the way. I wasn't concerned with what was going to happen. I just wanted to get out of the freezing lake. My body was frozen, my mind was in need of de-icing, and my arms and legs moved as though I were swimming through mud. Only my eyes worked normally to help me keep station alongside Panda.

  She grinned at me and said, 'Kinda nice, havin' the whole place to ourselves. Awful crowded in summer they say.'

  I didn't answer. I had a mouth full of parcel. But I kept my eyes on her as we swam on.

  She was stripped to her bra and long tights, pink, with a little balloon of trapped air swelling up over her backside, and every now and then she twisted her head to give me a beaming smile, which had a lot of mixed emotions bubbling in it. The least I could expect when we got to the bank was to be raped, then knifed. I thought of praying but decided against it. It never did a male mantis any good in the same circumstances.

  Panda's radar worked. We bit the bank dead on the cow. It was a big brown-and-white beast, standing between two pines, blowing great gusts of vapour through its nostrils and it watched us with large, liquid, uncurious eyes.

  Panda slid out of the water, and said, 'Hi, cow! Nice lake you've got here.' And then, water rolling over her brown arms and shoulders and rippling down her tights, she held the knife at me as I stood in six inches of water and mud at the verge. 'Just come out nice and easy, man, and then toss the parcel to Mamma. Business before pleasure, uh?' She threw her head back and bellowed, 'Najib! Najib!'

  From somewhere through the mist distantly came an answering call.

  Panda stood waiting for me. She was no fool. I might not know what was in her mind, but she knew what still dimly survived in the icy depths of mine. I didn't want to give her the parcel.