Aiding and Abetting (10 page)

Across the aisle, on his left, were a couple of men, one older than the other. They, too, were busy with their drinks, talking together quite softly but audibly. Lucan disliked homosexuals; what he disliked most about them was what he claimed to be their sentimentality. No ruthlessness; no sense of destiny; no idea that what had to be done had to be done, like the murder. It was a blunder but it was destiny, it was the throw of the dice. The couple beside him across the aisle were a man of about fifty and one of about twenty-five. The older man had shoulder-length hair. The younger had a close-cropped head and was bedecked with worked-silver earrings. They were discussing a film. (Gone were the days when it happened to Lucan that he would overhear people at the next table, in a bus or a waiting room, discussing him.) “It was all too obvious,” said the older man. “All you had to do after the halfway mark, more or less, was sit through it to the end.”

“I thought the sex scenes kind of cool,” observed the younger man.

“Did you? I thought they looked contrived. They did it in their underpants.”

The hostess came along with their trays and they started to eat in the silence due to the task. Suddenly, from the seat in front of them, the seat diagonally in front of Lucan’s to the left, came the electric word “Lucan,” quite discernible amongst the patchy fuzz of their conversation. A bald man of about sixty with a pretty fair-haired woman in her thirties. Lucan released his seatbelt; he stood up and out into the aisle to see them more clearly from the height of his 6´2?. They had a large quantity of newspaper cuttings on the table in front of them. Yes, indeed, they were all old cuttings, some from the long past, all about him.

lucan disappears

body found in u.s. mail sack

who killed sandra rivett?

countess bleeding in hospital

lucan at large

Lucan went to the lavatory, came back and settled in his seat. By this time the couple had put away their papers and were eating their meal with a good deal of appetite. Good God, it is Joe Murray-or is it? Yes, he would be about that age now. Clearly it was Joe, who had been at St. Columba’s monastery with his girlfriend, Maria Twickenham’s daughter, snooping into his whereabouts. It was Joe and this girl who had trailed him down from the north up to the gates of the house with that fortuitous wedding. Yes, it was them. Ambrose had said he’d given them cuttings, bloody fool. Lucan now applied himself to his book, turning pages at due intervals. Lucan had brought only hand luggage. As soon as the plane stopped and the passengers were allowed to shuffle out, he reached up into the baggage compartment and fetched down his bag. He hastened.

“Funny,” said Joe to Lacey, as they followed the tall dark-spectacled fellow to the exit, “how, if you concentrate on a subject, you seem to see examples of it all over the place. I could have sworn that the man along there, three people in front, resembled Lucan. But of course . . .”

Lacey had to tiptoe to see the indicated passenger. So many of the people now pushing up to the exit or reaching for their luggage in the upper compartments were, it seemed to her, excessively big, blocking her view of the possible Lucan. What she managed to see were hefty people, men and women. One of the men was wearing dark glasses, but as soon as he had pulled down his bag he took them off and put them in his breast pocket; hardly the gesture of a Lucan wishing to hide himself. Lucan was already on the Paris Center-bound bus by the time Joe and Lacey retrieved their luggage from the roundabout. It was only then that Joe, standing still, said, “Lacey, you know I believe that man in the plane was Lucan. He caught my eye very rapidly, you know; I think he recognized me; and yes, I recognized him, I really did. But too late; what an old fool I am.”

“We could have had him stopped, even arrested, right there on the plane,” said Lacey. “The captain has the power to do that.”

“I wouldn’t really have cared to call the captain,” said Joe. “Suppose we’d been mistaken?”

“But aren’t you sure?”

“In fact, yes, I’m sure. It’s difficult to say what one would do.”

“Oh, Joe,” she said, lifting her luggage and ready to move off with it, “I thought you wanted to help me.” “Yes, I do.” He looked round the crowded hall. “He’s gone, of course. Gone. We’ll find him in Paris, maybe, though. At least we’re almost sure he’s in Paris, now.” “Oh, Paris,” said Lacey. “Come on, let’s get a taxi.”

Jean-Pierre, in his ample, cluttered workshop, was restoring a gramophone of the 1920s for someone with more money than sense, when a tall black young man came to the glass door and rang. Jean-Pierre sometimes kept this door locked even when he was inside, with the shutters up; the area was a rough one.

Jean-Pierre opened the door to this decidedly tranquil customer.

“We’ve been on the phone,” said the man in English. “I’m Dr. Karl K. Jacobs, patient of Dr. Hildegard Wolf.”

“Come in.”

“You rang me up.”

“Yes, I know. You said you were fed up with Hildegard; something like that. Have you any news of her?” Jean-Pierre moved a pile of old magazines and catalogs off a chair, and pushed it with a foot towards Dr. Jacobs. “Sit down.” He himself sat opposite on a rickety work stool.

“I had enough,” said Jacobs. “She was always talking about herself, enquiring about the voodoo cults of the Congo, the medicine men. I had enough interrogation. The concierge at the rue du Dragon told me where your shop is.”

“Enough, but you’ve come for more?” said Jean-Pierre.

“What do you want to know?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Where she is,” said Karl Jacobs. “I was recommended to consult her but all she has done is consult me. Then-off.”

“That’s her way.”

“She not only consults, she insults. She wants to needle me, reminding me always of my background as she thinks it is. I come from the center of Africa but I haven’t just walked out of the jungle. What about the voodoos, the witch doctors? she wanted to know. How should I know about the medicine men, all those frauds? I am a qualified M.D.”

“Where do you work?” said Jean-Pierre. “I’m at a private nursing home north of Versailles, I live near the Marais. I get in and out by autobus, sometimes I use the Metro and change. What have I got to do with jungle magic and blood rites?”

“Blood rites?”

“Yes, blood is important in these activities. Why does she worry me?”

“That’s something between you and her,” said Jean-Pierre. “I can offer you a cup of instant coffee or a glass of wine.”

“Wine.”

“I know,” said Jean-Pierre as he poured two glasses of red wine, “that Hildegard is interested in superstitions.” “Yes, but why should she be interested at my expense?

I paid her for those sessions. I have my own problems.” “Psychiatrists have their methods, you know,” said Jean-Pierre.

“But I paid her for her advice.”

“Women are expensive,” said Jean-Pierre. “Look-I’m trying to trace her whereabouts, I don’t deny. Do you have any clue where she might be?”

“London.”

“Why do you say London?”

“It’s where I’d go if I wanted to hide.”

“How do you know she wants to hide?”

Karl Jacobs was neatly dressed in a dark business suit, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a gray striped tie with dark-blue dots. He sat with his long legs stretched forth. An effortlessly athletic man. Jean-Pierre repeated his question, “Why should she hide?”

“Her interest in voodoo, in blood cults and fraudulent mystifications, was very genuine. I think it was probably personal. She could be connected with someone like that.”

“Do you know anything, Dr. Jacobs, about these practices?” “Call me Karl. My name is Karl Kanzia Jacobs. My father was a judge, he’s dead. My mother is alive. She is a very important citizen of Kanzia.”

“And Kanzia is where?”

“It’s an independent entity of central Africa, slightly north of the Equator.”

“But certainly they wouldn’t have any witchery and magic there, I imagine,” ventured Jean-Pierre. “Oh, indirectly, I know something. My grandfather Delihu is still a paramount head man. My uncle was a voodoo chap, he died. He was definitely what you would call in your terms a witch doctor. He performed great good, especially with rites and totems and herbs and of course the terror of beliefs. Beliefs are essential. I can confirm as a medical man that these witch men can cure, but there is also a lot of mumbo-jumbo, like you say. It’s a question of cutting a fine line, Jean-Pierre, and Dr. Wolf was interested in that aspect, the question of responsibility on the part of the self-styled healer. Myself, I feel it is a treachery to scientific practices to agree with her. And yet . . . She said, if a cure is effected does it matter whether or not there was an actual miracle to cause it?

Why should the healer be prosecuted, or at least blamed, if in fact he heals? She put that very question to me. I told her no. I told her there should be no blame, but all this was at the expense of my pocket. I paid for those sessions.”

“Perhaps I can reimburse you on her behalf?”

“Certainly not.”

“But surely,” said Jean-Pierre, “it is always worthwhile conversing with Hildegard? If it isn’t, what are you doing here?”

“She is very fascinating,” said Karl Jacobs, gloomily. Jean-Pierre asked if they might keep in touch, and assured Karl that once Hildegard returned, as surely she would, he would see to it that she would give him the full sessions he was due. “If you have any other brainwaves or intuitions about where she has gone,” said Jean-Pierre, “call me at once. I intend to have her back. She’s my girlfriend and my life companion for more than five years and I can’t live without her. London might well be the place. I’ll work on that.”

When Karl had gone, Jean-Pierre took out of his pocket a sheet of paper on which he had made notes of all the replies to his enquiries of Hildegard’s patients. He scribbled the word “promising” beside the name of Dr. Karl K. Jacobs. Then he studied the list again. Only one name, of course, was equally promising: that of Mrs. William Hane-Busby.

Madrid-the Paradiso-He had already called there without success.

Seelach Gasthof-There were so many guest houses which could fit that description. However, none of them had yielded Hildegard. Then London. “London is where I’d hide,” Jacobs had said with a quite definite tone. “London at Queen’s Gate . . .” Mrs. Hane-Busby had mused.

Jean-Pierre decided to hunt up in the directories all the hotels and boarding houses at Queen’s Gate, London. It was only five-thirty in the afternoon, but he shut up shop.

Hildegard lay in her bath trying to trace back the source of a slightly disconsolate and disagreeable sensation that lingered over from the day. It was 6:30 p.m. The best feature of the hotel was its constant, really hot water; Hildegard profited by it frequently before dinner: soothing power of a hot bath. What was her feeling of uneasiness due to? She had left the hotel that morning at ten and taken a bus to Marble Arch. From there she went to several department stores in a leisurely way all along Oxford Street. Hildegard had brought few clothes with her, and now she was beginning to need a change. Gradually, that morning, she had acquired a woollen jacket, a pair of suede boots, four pairs of nylon tights, a pair of brown jeans, a brown cotton shirt and a bottle of English toilet spray called Amours de Boudoir. It was here that Hildegard’s pondering in the bath was arrested. Walking along the ground-floor aisles of the shops that afternoon, she was reminded of her days as a student, earning a poor living from a part-time job at the handbag counter of a department store in Munich. At the cosmetic counter, Hildegard had stopped to try the toilet-water samples being offered by a young woman. It seemed to Hildegard that this woman looked away, and looked again and looked away. Hildegard was taken back to the store of her youth. It was the cosmetics girl who had unwittingly given her the idea of assuming the false stigmata. The cosmetics girl, Ursula, could make up and transform the most ordinary faces. Hildegard had been fascinated. Ursula did a romantic scar, one day, on the left cheek of a young man who happily said he was going to pose as having been involved in a duel.

Ursula, when the time came, made a deep, false indentation in the palm of Hildegard’s hand. Hildegard, then Beate Pappenheim at the height of her success, would get Ursula to come around each month at the time of her menstruation and put the touches of reality on her “five wounds so that they could be photographed.” Could that young woman in the department store in Oxford Street be really Ursula? She looked so like Ursula, it was incredible, and then her furtive glances at Hildegard, her look, her look away, her look again, her look away . . . Did she recognize me? Hildegard asked herself.

And then she realized how perfectly ridiculous her idea had been. Ursula twelve years ago must have already been over thirty. Now she would be in her mid forties, much older than the young woman in the department store of today. Hildegard, pulling her thoughts together, apprehended how she herself must have looked strangely at the girl in order to provoke the strange looks she returned. Hildegard had allowed herself to be sprayed by the scent, had bought some and left. Amours de Boudoir-oh, well . . .

All the same, Hildegard was aware that she could still be discovered, exposed. She felt more vulnerable in London than she had ever felt in Paris, perhaps because she looked very French with her dark short-cut hair clinging to her egg-shaped head? She had lost her German look simply by living in France, eating French food, breathing French air. Her skin was still pale, but her waistline small, which had not been so much the case when she had first fled from Munich. She mingled well in Paris, but in London? “If you want to hide a pebble the best place is the beach”-an old and true maxim. Hildegard-or as she was, Beate-when the scandal broke took eventual refuge in Spain, at Avila, birthplace of two famous Catholic visionaries, St. Theresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross.

Nobody thought of looking for her in that atmosphere of heated romantic ecstasy. She was considered to be a fraud. Nobody was looking for her at Avila where a truly holy stigmatic would be likely to linger. In fact she stayed in a convent at Avila for six months, impressing the nuns with her devotion and goodness, her daily visits to the cathedral, to the house of St. Theresa, to the birthplace of St. Theresa, and with her meditative walks in the shadow of Avila’s great and ancient walls. After all, she had mused then (and, in her bath in her London hotel, mused now), I did apparently effect a number of cures, perhaps by the power of suggestion, it’s true. But people were cured by me in my stigmatic days. I felt the part. She wondered, then, if she would change her hair to fair. If one of the Lucans in fact caught up with her, she had better disguise herself a little.

Among the names of Lucan’s friends published in newspapers in those days after the murder was that of Maria Twickenham, now a widow. Her interview with the police was one of many; it obtained prominence largely through Maria’s glamour and beauty. Her picture was a good accompaniment to the sensational articles. All the articles were by the nature of the case sensational. A peer was wanted for a brutal murder. He had bashed his children’s nanny to death with a length of lead piping, specially prepared to deaden the thuds. Had there been a relationship with the nanny? No, there hadn’t. Far from it, he had meant those thuds for his wife. Having removed the light bulb on the basement staircase, he had mistaken the young nanny descending the stairs for his young wife. On discovering his blunder, he then attacked the wife, reported the papers. She was now in the hospital with severe head wounds.

That night Lucan, in a panic, visited some of his friends. The main one in London was Maria Twickenham. Hildegard knew that all Lucan’s other friends were either still in the country and no doubt not accessible to enquirers, or dead.

Hildegard in her anxiety to defend herself from Lucan and Walker with their threatening knowledge, and in an increasingly neurotic state from her confinement to a small London hotel, had still plenty of courage to make a decision. Apart from having her hair dyed a mild beige color, she wanted to do more than just hide. Looking through the books that had been written on the Lucan case, all of them were generously illustrated by photographs:

Lucan at Eton, Lucan’s engagement portrait, Lucan with his friends in his favorite gaming clubs: oh, look at these people, look close. Hildegard was looking close:

Doris McGuire, said the subtitle, Charles McGuire-Maria Twickenham. Yes, it was Maria Twickenham, who, according to the telephone directory, still lived in the same house in Lennox Gardens as she had occupied at the time of the murder.

Hildegard, with her talent for summoning up new fighting energy, was already on the offensive. She would hunt Lucan, threaten him if absolutely necessary; not he, her.

She would chase Lucan, she would hunt him down, confront him, challenge him, dare him to reveal her secret. “You are charged with the crime of murder and attempted murder,” she could say, “and I am not. You haven’t a chance, given the state of the evidence; you have no extenuating arguments to support you; I have.” And she thought: not to speak of my personal documents so carefully prepared in Marseilles.

It was a question, perhaps, of getting to know Maria Twickenham. That for a start.

Hildegard had not sat in her hired car near the house in Lennox Gardens frequently enough to realize that it was no longer the smart one-family residence of twenty-five years ago. It was still verging on smartness but it was broken up into flats. There had been a coming and going of men and women in their thirties, businesslike and attractively dressed; they largely left home around 9 A.M. and returned around 6 P.M. Some passed in and out about lunchtime. A white-haired, large woman of about sixty, who might well have been an older version of Maria’s photograph, dressed in a woolly jacket and trousers, emerged every morning and returned with at least one full shopping bag. She must be Maria Twickenham, thought Hildegard. But no, on following her with some difficulty to the nearby supermarket, Hildegard managed to squint at the name on her credit card. It wasn’t Twickenham, Maria’s name, the name in the phone book. It was Louise B. Wilson.

At least this waiting and watching and surreptitious stalking was more to Hildegard’s taste than the boring, very boring, daily brood in her hotel room. She set forth once again to sit near the white front door of the Twickenham house with its shining brass door-plates. It was Hildegard’s fifth wait when a taxi pulled up, and a tall, thin woman in her sixties emerged from the house under the evening lamplight. She stepped into the cab. Hildegard followed as best she could, but lost it at a traffic light. She felt sure it contained Maria.

Next morning, about 11 A.M., out stepped the large white-haired Louise B. Wilson again. Hildegard leapt out of her car and approached her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I wonder if you can tell me, are there any rooms or flats available in this house?”

“I wouldn’t know really,” said the woman. “I’m just the home-help for Mrs. Twickenham. You’d have to ask her.” “Is she in now?”

“Well, if you have any references. Do you have a reference-who sent you, I mean?”

“Yes, of course. I got the name and address from someone in Paris, where I live. I’m only here doing a university course for some months.”

The ground-floor flat had been reserved for Maria’s own use, and Hildegard was asked in to wait while Louise B.Wilson went to make enquiries. In a warm, upholstered sitting room Hildegard thought she saw in the large mirror over the mantelpiece another woman behind her. But on looking back, there was nobody. Of course, my blonde hair, Hildegard remembered. But this fragmentary episode put Hildegard in an ever more guarded and inventive frame of mind, so that when tall Maria came smiling into the room, Hildegard was ready with her plausible tongue.

“I was given your name by an old school friend of yours in Paris.”

This is a tactic in the con business that usually works. The mention of a school friend one doesn’t remember generally gives rise to a slight feeling of guilt rather than suspicion. Instead of a reaction like: “This person is probably a fake. I don’t know or remember any such school friend,” it is more likely to be: “My God, have I become so forgetful? or so grand? or so detached from my youth? Don’t I remember who got married? Well, I don’t really care about their fate.”

Maria said, in fact, “I vaguely remember the name.

What was her maiden name?”

“I think it was Singleton, but maybe not. She got married as you probably know into Carters’ Publications, tall, brown-haired, extremely athletic. After her divorce, of course, she married someone else, I think. She remembered you so well and knows all about you here in London braving it out as you do. I’m sure you can recall . . .”

Hildegard had an address in Paris ready on her tongue, but it wasn’t necessary. “Yes, of course,” said Maria. “Of course I remember her. And you’ll have some coffee, won’t you? I’m about to make some. Let’s go into the kitchen.”

There she told Hildegard, yes, there would be a two room flat on the fourth floor available from the week after next. The tenant was out at his job at the moment, and wouldn’t mind her showing it to Hildegard. “Will you be staying long in London?”

“I have to complete some research. I’m a psychiatrist.”

“How fascinating!” (They always said that.) Like most people, Maria was intrigued by the thought of having a psychiatrist at hand to talk to, without actually taking the plunge of consulting one. There was nothing wrong with Maria, but she herself thought there was; in reality her problem was boredom.

This problem was about to be solved. Maria, although she really had quite a number of friends, had not for many years met anyone quite like Dr. Wolf. Hildegard Wolf was the name on her passport and her fake birth certificate. She had not changed it while hiding in London, so that she would not appear to be hiding, if discovered. And it was much easier to deal with people under a name to which she was accustomed. So she was Dr. Wolf (”call me Hildegard”) to the enchanted landlady, Maria.