Aiding and Abetting (3 page)

“Put it out,” she said.

“I like a cigarette after lunch.”

“But I haven’t had my lunch,” said Hildegard firmly. “I am just about to send down to the brasserie for a sandwich.” She buzzed her secretary. “Have them send up a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a quarter bottle of red wine,” she ordered.

“To get down to the question of your identity . . .”

Walker began. But Hildegard was defiant. “If you have come here for a consultation that is what you’ll get. On the question of sandwiches, sooner or later we all have to stop for a sandwich or grab a sandwich before the theater. I always have a sandwich sent up on days like today when one is expecting a boring patient, very boring. Neither in anticipation, nor retrospect, can one’s digestion cope with a full meal. It is best to faire monter a sandwich. How old are you?”

“Sixty-five next December.”

“You look older.”

“I’ve had a rough time. I’ve been on the run. Let me explain-” “When I’ve had my sandwich.” Hildegard kept silent till the girl had arrived bearing a tray. She started to eat. Between mouthfuls she spoke on, but every time she took a bite he tried to speak, too. It was quite a battle, and Hildegard won it. “Sandwiches,” she said, “like diamonds, are forever. Children love them. They are the most useful, yet often the most despised of foods.” She was carried away by fantasy. “My fondest memories from childhood are connected with sandwiches. At children’s parties-” “The most secure way of keeping my identity private is not to reveal it. But if I do have to make it known that I am Lucan, as in the case of consulting a psychiatrist as you see I have decided to do,” he said, “the only secure way is to know something secret about the psychiatrist equal in criminality to my own case.”

“Murder would be difficult to equal,” she said. “The sandwich was first invented by the fourth Earl of Sandwich in the eighteenth century who was a gambler like yourself, if in fact you are Lord Lucan. He devised this means of nourishment at odd hours without the necessity of leaving the gaming table for his meals, Mr. Walker.” “But you are still wanted for fraud,” said Mr. Walker, “of a particularly disreputable kind. How many poor housemaids did you rob of their savings when you were Beate Pappenheim?”

“Where you come from, of course,” said Hildegard, “the sandwiches are spread with butter. Sandwiches of the British Isles differ greatly from German sandwiches.” She poured herself a glass of wine from the small bottle on the tray. There remained another sandwich which she lifted and slowly contemplated, then carefully took a nibble of. “German sandwiches are much thicker, with some sort of pickles and sausage or cheese inside. Your English sandwiches, on the other hand, are cut thin, thin. They are buttered. They have fillings like chopped egg and tomatoes, sprinkled with cress which hangs in tiny threads, temptingly, out of the sides. They-” “I know, I know,” said Walker. “I remember them at the school sports occasions. What I have come here to discuss is the situation, which is, what are you going to do about it? I refer to the situation I described at our last sitting.”

“Oh, you are growing a beard,” Hildegard said, “and besides,” she said as she sipped and daintily chewed at her leisure, “there are shrimps, there are lobster and salmon, which make ideal sandwich fillings. Strawberry sandwiches are great for picnics.

“There was a time,” she continued before Mr. Walker could interrupt again, “when bakers would sell a sandwich loaf already sliced, either white, brown or wholemeal. Probably there remain some bakers who do this. Now, I’m sure that while you sit there you find yourself eagerly desiring one of these delicious sandwiches. Don’t they fill you with English nostalgia?” She wiped the corners of her mouth delicately with the pink paper napkin provided by the brasserie, and looked at her watch. “Goodness-the time!” she said. “I’m afraid we have to make it an abbreviated session today as I have a most urgent engagement outside the office with a patient too sick to visit me. I must visit her. Please make another appointment at the desk, if you wish to continue. Next Friday?”

“No,” he said.

“Very well,” she said. “Good-bye.”

“You’ll be hearing from me,” said Mr. Walker alias Lord Lucan. “I’ll be in touch, Fraulein Pappenheim.” She had pressed the bell on her desk. The petite receptionist appeared at the door.

“The patient wishes to make another appointment,” said Hildegard. She added in a more confiding tone, “The usual fee.”

From all accounts and police records of the affair of the seventh Earl of Lucan he was an extremely arrogant person. Arrogance is incurable. It usually arises from a deep (sometimes justified) sense of inferiority. Another feature of this Earl of Lucan, which supposedly he maintained, was a peculiar eating habit which lasted apparently the whole of his adult life up to his disappearance. And beyond? He ate nothing but smoked salmon and lamb chops every day; in winter the chops were grilled, in summer they were served en gelée. Dull people found him amusing. Interesting people thought him desperately dull. His wife was not very popular with Lucan’s gambling set. Lady Lucan was unimaginative but honest. She protected her children, and in a bitter court case with Lucan she had won custody of them. Jean-Pierre had studied the huge pile of press cuttings which Hildegard had obtained from London. He said to her, “The two Lucans are in league, you may be sure of that, if one of them is trying in some way to blackmail you. Myself, I think it unlikely that two men should turn up at your studio at the same time, both claiming to be Lucans.”

“I think the second may be the genuine man,” said Hildegard, “the first a friend of his, a helper, making sure I don’t turn the genuine Lucan over to the police.” “I am not sure of that,” he said.

“Nor am I. Perhaps neither man is Lucan.”

“Beate Pappenheim. Was it really your name?”

“Yes.”

“Beate Pappenheim . . . how lovely.”

“Why,” said Jean-Pierre the following evening, “did you not tell me before about your exciting early life as a stigmatic?” “Listen,” she said, “I caused miracles. I really did cure some people. Strangely enough, I did.”

“I believe you,” said Jean-Pierre. He thought: I do believe her. She is magic. And when he thought of his life previous to meeting Hildegard he wondered how he had managed.

“We could put one of your Lucans to the test by asking him to dinner. Give him smoked salmon followed by lamb chops and see if perhaps he eats them eagerly. It says in all the books about him that he ate just that and only that,” Jean-Pierre said.

“If you prepared the meal he would of course eat it eagerly,” she said. Jean-Pierre was indeed a good cook and sometimes made their dinner on the nights-off of their two au pair young men. “Which one should we invite, Lucan I or Lucan II?” said Hildegard.

“Lucan II alias Lucky.”

“That’s what I’ll do. Invite Lucky and give him smoked salmon and lamb chops. That diet of his was a detail reported in all the books and articles about him. It would be of some interest to see how he reacts. I’d like to make him nervous. Perhaps I could ask him a question like ‘Suppose that Death is a male character, what would Death’s wife be like?’ ” “From what I’ve read about him, that’s too imaginative. He could never grasp such a proposition.”

“Perhaps not,” she said. “In fact I am sure you’re right.

Do you know he’s reputed to be very, very dull?” “Yes, I know that. Perhaps I could lace his drink with something-we’ll see. I could get you a harmless loquacious pill,” Jean-Pierre suggested. “Something to last the evening and at the same time make him talk. I know a pharmacist.”

“How clever you are!”

Hildegard thought this over all the next day. The more she thought of it the more she liked the idea of a pill secretly administered to aid the patient to speak out. Unethical, of course. Illegal, no doubt. Neither of the Lords had hitherto bothered Hildegard personally very much, nor did they do so now. She only wondered how she could achieve a good result . . . “I could get you a loquacious pill . . .” She really adored Jean-Pierre; he was so very much of her own caliber. If you can comprehend a morality devoid of ethics or civil law, that was really the guiding principle of both people. And in their dealings with Lord Lucan it was on those particular moral grounds that they determined to deal with him heavily. What shocked Hildegard most in the Lucan story was his, and his set’s, lack of remorse over the dead nanny, a young girl of twenty-nine, full of prettiness, life, humor. When a relative called at the Lucan home by arrangement to collect her belongings, they were handed over at the door by Lady Lucan herself, stuffed into a paper bag, and that was that.

Hildegard and Jean-Pierre read through all the press cuttings together. “What strikes me,” said Jean-Pierre, “is how Lucan succeeded in antagonizing the police and the press without ever meeting them. This was mainly due, I think, to the attitude of his friends.”

“But he was really an awful man,” said Hildegard. “For one thing he was sexually violent. He beat his wife with a cane. Very sick, that.”

“He was sick, yes. All big gamblers are sick, anyway. And if he was also a sexual sadist . . . do you recognize any of that in either of your men?”

“I see it in both. The possibility is in both. The evidence in the lawsuit for his children shattered Lucan. He thought his wife would observe secrecy in the matter of his sexual sadism, but she didn’t. He felt betrayed. But as he was trying to make her out to be mad, obviously she had a moral right to reveal his mental condition. Besides, a bad-tempered man looking after children . . .” “I suppose,” said Jean-Pierre, “you realize that, unlike most of your patients, the authentic Lord Lucan really is mad?”

“You think so?”

“I’m convinced. On the facts revealed in the inquest and the biographical research over the years, he is insane.” “But which one is the real one?”

“Hildegard, I don’t like your being alone with him.

Are you sure you are safe-I mean, physically?”

“I’m sure of nothing.”

“Except that Lucan I, Walker, is trying to threaten you, to obtain your complicity through blackmail. For which,” said Jean-Pierre, “I will somehow smooth him out, I will solve his problem.”

“Darling, he is very large.”

“And I, too. I am also clever.”

Lucky had consumed his smoked salmon, served as it had been with very fine slices of buttered toast. He was now working his way through the three lamb chops on his plate. The wine was from Bordeaux and he absorbed it like blotting paper.

“What was remarkable,” he said, “was that there was so much blood. If I had got my wife as I thought I was doing, there would never have been so much blood, so much. But I will never forget the blood that flowed in such quantity from that girl, Sandra Rivett. There must be something about the lower orders, they bleed so. I cannot forget that blood. It got everywhere. Pools of it.” They had decided to dine in a bistro, to give Jean-Pierre time to focus his full attention on Lucky. All round the walls were signed photographs of old-time actors wearing hats, and actresses greatly be-furred. Hildegard found these reassuring, they predated the memories both of her guest and of herself, and were something solid to be surrounded by in this moment of testing and confessing. “Blood,” she said, “is nothing new to me. As you probably know.”

“I should probably know?”

“Yes, your accomplice, the other Lucan, has no doubt informed you that I was the stigmatic of Munich, Beate Pappenheim.”

“I seem to remember the name,” said Lucky. “But I have no accomplice. Are you crazy? My information comes from the late Reverend Brother Heinrich in whose prayer-hostel I lodged for some months.”

“I was covered with blood, endless blood. And I effected countless cures. I am not crazy. Heinrich was a poor little student. He took my money, plenty of it.” “There was a scandal, though, I seem to think.” “You seem to think right. I am wanted for fraud as you are for murder. Heinrich knew that I changed my name.” “Murder plus attempted murder,” he said. “My wife didn’t bleed so much, you know. It was the nanny. Blood all over the place.”

Hildegard felt almost sympathetic towards him.

“Blood,” she said, “blood.”

“They say it is purifying,” he said.

She thought, immediately, Could he be a religious maniac?

“It is not purifying,” she said, “it is sticky. We are never washed by blood.”

“It is said we are washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” he said, sticking his knife into lamb chop number three. “I sang in the school choir.”

She was exultant in her suspicion. A religious maniac. The possibility consoled her. She had not, after all, found the clear opportunity of slipping Jean-Pierre’s talking pill into his wine but still Lucky was talking, talking. She assumed it was the psychological effect on him of his old menu, salmon and lamb, which in fact he must have been deprived of for most of his clandestinity, lest the police should be on the watch for just that clue.

Generally speaking, Scotswomen who do not dye their hair have a homogeneous island-born look, a well-born look, which does not apply in the south. The man who called himself Lucky Lucan, who was a snob from his deepest gust, sat with his whisky and water in the lounge of the Golf Hotel at a small village outside Aberdeen, and greatly admired the young fair good-boned waitress.

He had picked this spot, as he always picked spots when it was time for him to move on, with a pin on a map open before him. It had always worked well. Nobody was looking for him at a place he had picked out with his eyes shut and a pin in his hand. This time he had, however, picked from a map of North Britain. He had business there. “Christina,” she said when he asked the girl her name. “Do you want a table for lunch?”

“I do. And I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you have smoked salmon or lamb chops on the menu?” “We have both.”

“Good. I like lamb chops.”

He was not really aware of the fact that he was sizing up the girl in a certain way that related to Hildegard Wolf. She was younger than Hildegard. Her hair was light gold. She was decidedly skinnier. Lucky then realized, all of a sudden, that he was really thinking of Hildegard, and had been all through his nine holes of golf. “What is your name?” he said again to the Scottish waitress.