Ten and a Quarter New Tales of Read online

  He had never been into the Sacré Coeur, but he knew that a series of flights of steps fell away from this point to the street below, and below that, not too far away, was the Pigalle Metro station. Meanwhile he was an easy target for Marie Laure’s gunman-lover.

  Where was he now? Biding his time perhaps, or creeping up on him by some other way which he would know well. Sandy ran to the wall that surrounds the terrace and to the head of the flight of steps that leads down, through thick bushes, on the left-hand side. He had hardly reached the shelter of these winding narrow stairs and the obscurity of the bushes when he heard footfalls on the terrace. The footsteps moved slowly, hesitantly, as if the man who made them was uncertain, was searching.

  Sandy clambered in among the shrubs, his hands scrambling in earth, torn by the spines of a thorn tree. But now the footsteps were approaching with a sure firmness of purpose.

  Could the man smell him? Was his ear so supernaturally sensitive that he’d heard the whisper of turned soil and the gush of blood from Sandy’s prickled hand? Almost fainting now, Sandy cowered back. Wild thoughts of begging for mercy, of taking a beating so long as his life were spared, brought him to his knees, and he was on his knees, gasping, when the branches were pushed aside and he looked up into the eyes of Denis Crawford.

  ‘You wished to see me, Monsieur le Commissaire?’

  ‘You are very punctual, Monsieur Crawford. Please take a chair. First let me express the sympathies of the police department on the loss of your friend.’

  Denis Crawford gave a slight grave nod. He sat down and faced the official across the polished desk.

  ‘I doubt if I can help you, Monsieur,’ Denis said. ‘I went to the cinema last night and retired early to bed. I can only tell you what, I believe, my colleagues have already told you, that Monsieur Vaughan went out last night to keep an appointment with a man who had damaged his car.’

  ‘But you were of the opinion, according to Monsieur Shaw, that this man was, in fact, the lover of a woman with whom Monsieur Vaughan had been having relations? Monsieur Shaw has told us you warned Monsieur Vaughan not to keep this decidedly suspicious appointment. How unfortunate your good advice was not taken! If it had been, Monsieur Vaughan would not have been found in the grounds of the Sacré Coeur this morning with a Luger bullet through his head. Another such bullet has been found in the woodwork of the Garage Rivery buildings. It would appear that Monsieur Vaughan was pursued but was not, alas, able to escape his attacker. You can throw no light on this man’s identity, I suppose?’

  ‘None, I regret. Monsieur Vaughan did not tell me this woman’s name or address. But if the gun has been found, I foresee no difficulty in your tracing its owner.’

  ‘Unfortunately, there will be great difficulty. How many Frenchmen possess such a weapon, obtained by themselves or their fathers pendant la guerre? During the war large numbers were taken from the bodies of German soldiers. No, c’est difficile. But we shall try, we shall make all efforts. The telephone number that we discovered in Monsieur Vaughan’s address book – freshly inscribed there, we believe – is a Paris number but that of a most respectable dental surgeon. Nor do we know the numbers of the notes, five hundred francs, which Monsieur Shaw has informed me Monsieur Vaughan was carrying on him last night and of which he was robbed. So it will not, as you see, be an easy case. Now, Monsieur, you return to London today, do you not?’

  ‘With your permission.’

  ‘Certainly you have my permission. You are acquainted with the widow of Monsieur Vaughan?’

  ‘I know her slightly.’

  ‘Then will you do the police department the great service of returning to this unfortunate lady certain possessions of her husband, his watch, his wedding ring, and so on?’

  ‘It will be, Monsieur le Commissaire, if not a pleasure, a willingly undertaken duty.’

  They shook hands. The Commissaire thanked Denis Crawford for his cooperation, complimented him on his French, and expressed the hope that he would return to Paris under happier circumstances.

  Denis took Sandy’s watch and wedding ring to Diana Vaughan. Then, in his old-fashioned way, he set about a decorous courtship of her. She seemed grateful for his attentions and enjoyed being taken out by him for drives with her children. He arranged for the sale of the Renault and came to her house two evenings a week to coach her little boy in French for his coming examination. On her birthday he sent her red roses.

  When a year had gone by since Sandy’s death, he could wait no longer. He asked her to marry him.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said with a little laugh that was only a shade less derisive than Sandy’s, ‘didn’t you know? I thought everyone knew by now. I’m engaged to Malcolm Shaw. I don’t suppose it matters your knowing, but we were lovers for ever so long before Sandy died. We’re getting married next month.’

  Denis Crawford put 500 francs on the table. ‘Buy yourself a wedding present,’ he said, and he walked out of the house.

  The Price of Joy

  Daniel Derbyshire had once seen a cartoon in which a thug held a woman captive and bound while his henchman, on the telephone for a ransom, was remarking, ‘Her husband don’t answer. There’s just hysterical laughter.’ For a while he kept the newspaper in which it appeared and thought of cutting out the cartoon and pinning it to his office wall. But it was in deplorable taste, so he threw it away.

  He was fifty and rich. The newspapers, when they mentioned him, referred to him as a tycoon. In the past they had been in the habit of mentioning him quite often, for his successes, for his business coups, and for the fact that he had been married four times. His first wife was named Joy. She was the mother of his children, and he had been happy with her until a crescendo of success, building up fast but not too fast for him to cope with it, altered his style of living and made Joy appear to him as suburban and commonplace.

  At his request she had divorced him so that he could marry Vivien, who in her turn had divorced him so that he could marry Jane. In common with Henry the Eighth, he had had one wife who had set him free by dying before he could rid himself of her, and his Jane, like Henry’s, had died. After her death, when he was 45, he had married Prunella.

  At the age they had been – she was six years his junior – men and women are supposed to know their own minds. At last, he thought, he had found someone with whom he could settle down comfortably for the remainder of his life. But her dullness, when the first flush of sexual novelty was over, had nearly driven him mad. What, he sometimes wondered, in her education and her experience, had led her to believe that a man of his sort worth five million wanted love in a cottage, with cosy, suffocating evenings at home, a quiet society-shirking life? It never occurred to him to answer that it was he who had led her to believe it.

  And then he met Joy again.

  Of course, they had never entirely lost touch. The upbringing of their children, of whom she’d had custody, had seen to that. But for years they had communicated with each other mostly through their lawyers and by way of messages carried from one to the other by their now grown-up children. Five years after his fourth marriage he met Joy at a party, quite by chance.

  It was remarkable what the years had done. As a girl, Joy had been rather plain. At fifty-two she was statuesque, elegant, her carefully dressed silver hair surmounting a face that was handsome, wise and sardonic. The alimony she’d had from him had enabled her to travel and buy a mews house in Mayfair. She had met many men, though she had never remarried.

  Joy, when young, had never been desired by any man but himself, but now she was surrounded by men – as he learned when he telephoned her as, these days, he often did. And then, after asking him how he was, she would tell him to hold on for a moment, and he would hear her whisper, ‘Oh, Philip, bring me an ashtray, would you?’ or ‘That’s the front doorbell, John. Be an angel and see to it, my dear.’

  Her attraction for others made her even more attractive to him. He wanted her again. He saw, in what he observed of h
er lifestyle and her manners and her dress, that she would be a perfect hostess for him, entertaining his friends as Prunella never could.

  He wanted her apart from that. Those children of his would have stared in disbelief had they known with what youthful lust he wanted her, as if they had never made love all those years ago, and he had never grown weary of her.

  ‘You really want to marry me again, Dan?’

  ‘You know I do,’ he said. ‘We should never have separated.’

  ‘It was you who separated us. You broke my heart.’

  ‘They say it’s never too late to mend, Joy. Let me mend it.’

  ‘And what,’ said Joy, ‘about Prunella?’

  One can get used to anything, and Daniel was used to discarding wives. The cumbersome and frightening machinery of the law which keeps many ill-matched couples together, the crippling payments demanded, held no fear for him. ‘That won’t last, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a quiet divorce fixed up, one of those incompatibility jobs.’

  ‘Not on my account, you won’t,’ said Joy. ‘Maybe Vivien didn’t care about me when she got hold of you, but I’m thirty years older than she was and I do care. I like Prunella, what I’ve seen of her, and I won’t do to her what Vivien did to me.’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t want to marry me?’

  ‘No. I’d like to marry you again. I’m still very fond of you, Dan. If Prunella were in love with someone else and left you, that would he a different story.’

  ‘Or if she were to die, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course. But don’t have any ideas about getting rid of her, please. I wouldn’t put it past you. You’re always quite ruthless about getting what you want, and then when you’ve got it you don’t want it any more.’

  Daniel, however, hadn’t the remotest notion of murdering his wife, and Joy’s suggestion slightly shocked him. But those failings in Prunella which had always irritated him now fanned his exasperation to fever pitch. He was more than ever impatient with her timidity which made her shy of appearing with him at distinguished functions, frightened to drive her own car in London, and unwilling to make the simple speech required of her when asked to open the fête in the village where they had their weekend home.

  He was nearly enraged when she refused an invitation for them to join a party on a peer’s yacht on the grounds that they liked to spend their holidays alone together and quietly in the country. And it was particularly annoying that at this time there appeared in a Sunday-paper supplement an effusive feature about his private life, with many coloured photographs of himself and Prunella in tweeds, himself and Prunella with bounding dogs, himself and Prunella confronting each other tenderly against the background of a log fire.

  The captions and text were even worse. Had he really said those things? Had he truly told that reporter that he had come home to port after a long voyage on stormy seas? Had he claimed to have found the Right Woman at last after so much trial and error? He was obliged to admit that he had. But those feature stories take so long to appear, and he had said all those embarrassing things long before he had re-encountered Joy.

  The idea that Prunella might fall in love with someone else and leave him – that was an attractive idea. But he was too hard-headed and too much of a realist to hope seriously for it. Prunella was eight years younger than Joy, in his eyes she looked older. And she never met any men except the happily married José who, with his wife, kept house for them, and the elder driver of the minicab she employed whenever she wanted to cross London to visit her mother. (How profoundly this annoyed Daniel, that she should be driven about in a car belonging to a shabby minicab company, when she could have used his Rolls-Royce and his chauffeur.)

  Moreover, despite her total lack of dress sense, her preference for costume jewelry over diamonds and her taste for drinking sparkling champagne cider, Prunella was fond of money. She liked spending it on her mother, her sisters and her scruffy nephews and nieces. She had a horse, eating its head off and growing fat in the country. The dogs alone – and they were her dogs – cost a thousand pounds a year in food and veterinary care.

  If she left him for another man, he would, of course, contribute something toward her support, but that something would be nothing to what she could skin him for if he left her. And she knew it. She had the examples of Joy’s and Vivien’s alimony before her.

  So Daniel did nothing – that is, he did nothing positive. His negative actions took the form of neglecting Prunella thoroughly, seldom going home before midnight and phoning Joy every day. He saw Joy whenever she allowed him to, but that wasn’t often.

  ‘I lead such a hectic life, darling,’ she said on the phone. ‘For instance, there’s Max’s private viewing tonight, and naturally I shall be at the première of Ivan’s film tomorrow – hold on a moment, would you? Be an angel and get me a drink, David – I’d like to see you, Dan, but really it’s so difficult.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be so difficult if you wanted to,’ growled Daniel, whose desires were greatly inflamed by all these references to the glossy living in which his wife was taking part, and taking part, no doubt, with grace.

  ‘Not much use wanting, is there, Dan? – thank you, David, that’s delicious – I’m afraid you’ve made your bed, my dear, and you must lie on it. With Prunella.’

  When they did meet she was affectionate and charming. But, no she wouldn’t have an affair with him. It was marriage or nothing, and she had to admit that, at her age, she did rather incline to the companionship and security of marriage.

  ‘But we can be friends,’ she said sweetly, adding that things between him and Prunella couldn’t be that bad. She too had seen the Sunday supplement in which they looked so cosy and contented with each other. ‘And they say the camera doesn’t lie, Dan dear.’

  Things went on in this way for another six months. Daniel hung about after Joy like a lovesick adolescent, and Prunella took to spending two or three nights a week at her mother’s. Then, one Monday lunchtime, he received a telephone call at work. His secretary was temporarily out of the room, and he took the call himself.

  A man’s voice said, ‘We have your wife.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Daniel.

  ‘You heard. We have your wife. There’ve been enough kidnappings lately for me not to have to spell it out. She’s quite safe and nothing’ll happen to her – if you pay up.’

  ‘I shall go straight to the police,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid. Good God, I’d have thought a bloke who’s made your kind of money’d have had a bit more brains. Don’t you read the papers? Haven’t you ever read a thriller? You go to the police and we shall know. The moment the police get word of this I’ll chop off your wife’s right hand and send it to you by first-class mail.’

  ‘You must be mad.’

  ‘I’ll call you at home. Seven sharp. You’d better be there.’ The phone went dead.

  Daniel sent for his secretary, told her he was feeling unwell, and to cancel the conference scheduled for that afternoon. His chauffeur drove him home. The first thing he did was ask José where Mrs Derbyshire was.

  ‘She left by cab at ten this morning, sir, to see her mother.’

  But Prunella’s mother hadn’t seen her since the previous Friday. Daniel told her some reassuring lie, then phoned the minicab company. The boss answered.

  ‘Jim was to pick her up at ten, you say? Hang on. Did you pick up Mrs Derbyshire this morning, Jim? No? No, he didn’t, Mr Derbyshire. The booking was cancelled by phone at nine-thirty.’

  The gang, whoever they were, must have known Prunella’s movements thoroughly, cancelled her booking, and sent her a substitute of their own. He wondered where they were holding her and what sort of ransom they were going to ask. At 7:00 he found out.

  ‘Hallo again,’ said the same voice. ‘Sitting comfortably? Good. I suppose you’re very fond of your wife, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Of course you are
. As a matter of fact, it was all those pictures of domestic bliss in that rag that gave us the idea.’

  Daniel cursed the Sunday supplement. Nothing but trouble had come of it. First it had set Joy against him, and now there was this. ‘Get on with it,’ he snapped.

  ‘Since you’re so fond of your wife, you’d pay anything to get her back, wouldn’t you? Mrs Derbyshire has admitted to us – under a little pressure – that you’re worth five million. So two hundred and fifty thousand pounds wouldn’t be asking too much, now, would it?’

  ‘A quarter of a million?’ said Daniel, aghast.

  ‘Five percent of what you’ve got. You won’t even notice it. Like to talk to your wife?’

  Before Daniel could reply, Prunella had come on the line.

  ‘Oh, Dan, you will give them what they want, won’t you? I’m sorry I told them you were so rich, but they made me.’

  ‘Are you all right, Pru?’

  ‘At the moment, but I’m cold and I’m frightened.’ She gave a little sob. ‘I want to go home. I want to get out of here.’ A shriek followed as if someone had stuck a pin in her.

  The man came back on.

  ‘A quarter of a million in twenty-pound notes,’ he said. ‘I quite understand it’ll take a day or two to get it. It’s Monday now, so we’ll say Thursday for delivery date, Thursday evening. You can go to your stockbroker in the morning. Go, not phone. We’ll have his premises under observation. If you don’t go, I’ll send you your wife’s left little toe in a matchbox. Call you tomorrow, two o’clock. Okay?’

  A couple of sleeping pills afforded Daniel a night’s rest. He went into the office as usual. Naturally, he must phone the police – it was a citizen’s duty to do that, however unpleasant the consequences. If everyone in this kind of trouble went straight to the police, there would be less of this kidnapping nonsense.

  On the other hand, the idea of Prunella’s being mutilated wasn’t agreeable to think of. She had nice hands, though he was obliged to confess he couldn’t remember what her toes looked like. His stockbroker would think it very odd to sell shares at this time amounting to £250,000. Presumably, his bank would have to be notified in advance, as they certainly wouldn’t have a quarter of a million lying about in twenty-pound notes. By two o’clock he hadn’t phoned the police or been to see his stockbroker. The phone rang.