Neither Powerscourt nor Sir Pericles noticed a figure lurking in the shadows a few doors away from the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. The coat was drawn up and the hat was pulled down over the forehead. The figure appeared to have its eyes locked on the Powerscourt’s front door.
Lady Lucy looked closely at her husband after Sir Pericles had left. He was walking up and down the drawing room again and his face looked as though he had travelled in his mind to some far distant place. Something was nagging at him, some connection he couldn’t quite place. Without a doubt it had to do with what Freme had just said, but was it the facts or the gossip that were swirling round his brain? He sat down by the fire and looked at Lady Lucy as if he hardly knew her. Then he came back.
‘Lucy,’ he began, ‘I think there was somebody else in this case who was ambidextrous but I can’t for the life of me remember who it was.’
‘Somebody in Norfolk perhaps, Francis? Some Colville relation? Someone to do with the wine business?’
Powerscourt shook his head. Lucy was close, surely, but she hadn’t quite pulled it off. Suddenly he knew where he had heard it before. It was at Randolph’s funeral and the remark had come from a neighbour who had watched Randolph play tennis some years before without a backhand ever being employed. The thing was impossible, surely. Powerscourt shot down the stairs to his study where he had a file of information about the case. With difficulty he managed to raise Georgina Nash on the telephone. She was another great shouter down the line as if her words had to travel the entire length of the train tracks between Norwich and London. After checking in her wedding notebook she reported that Jean Pierre Drouhin and his wife had indeed been invited to the happy occasion, but had declined. The reply was in a man’s hand. She provided an address in Beaune. Lord Francis Powerscourt, she informed her husband as he tucked into a large helping of oysters later that evening, appeared to be losing his wits.
Mrs Cosmo Colville’s telephone manner was more regular, coming as it did from a much closer place near Lord’s Cricket Ground. Now she came to think of it, she said, she didn’t think she had ever met this Mr Drouhin. He didn’t seem to cross the Channel very often. On the one occasion when she and Cosmo had made an appointment to visit this Jean Pierre when on holiday in France, he had been called away to a sick relative in Montpellier. As she put the receiver down she also reflected that Powerscourt seemed to be chasing at straws.
‘Lucy!’ Powerscourt was back in the drawing room. ‘It may be a wild goose chase. There’s less than one chance in ten that I am right. Never mind. There’s not a moment to lose! We must catch the first boat out of Dover in the morning. There will be a train to take us there tonight if we hurry.’
Lady Lucy knew where they were going. She had been there before. As they walked as fast as they could to pick up a taxi in the King’s Road, the watching figure slipped his moorings and followed them, about ten or twelve paces behind. When they climbed into a taxi to Victoria the figure was less than fifty yards behind. He was close enough in the ticket queue to hear where they were going. The Alchemist swore briefly when he realized that his prey were travelling to the one country he dare not visit. Then he remembered his little brother Marcel in Lyon. He would send him a telegram first thing in the morning. The neighbours in his fashionable street thought he was a successful businessman, the Alchemist’s brother. All his children’s friends knew him as a very generous man, always prepared to pay for charities and treats for his daughters’ classmates. The police of Lyon, however, would have told you a rather different story. In their view Marcel was one of the most violent gangsters in France.
Ten minutes after the Powerscourts’ departure a note was dropped through the door. It came from Charles Augustus Pugh. ‘“Time, like an ever rolling stream,”’ it began, ‘“bears all its sons away.” Or, in this instance, it has borne away the trial due before Cosmo’s. The case has fallen apart. Cosmo’s appearance in court is scheduled for next Thursday, six days from now. God help us all.’
16
Powerscourt had never known a Channel crossing like it. The captain, it transpired later, had serious reservations about setting forth but had been overruled by the managers of the shipping line. Now the boat, apparently so large and so solid on the quayside at Dover, had turned into a matchstick box, rising and falling in the great swells of the angry sea, its metal shrieking and battered in the fury of the waves. The passengers were confined to the great cabin where they clung on to the seats that were fixed to the floor or held on to the railings by the bar. Anybody on deck would have been swept away to certain death in the swirling embrace of the angry waters. Up on his bridge the captain peered ahead, seeking any respite in the storm. There were several small children on board and they huddled sadly into their mothers’ coats, their faces drawn and pale, asking from time to time when it was going to end or were they all going to die and go to heaven.
Lady Lucy had never been seasick on board ship until today. A nauseous mixture of sea water and vomit swirled round the little table where she and her Francis tried to make a shelter from the tempest. She remembered suddenly that Powerscourt’s first wife Caroline and their little son Thomas had been drowned in a terrible storm in the Irish Sea years before. She hoped Francis wasn’t going to meet his first wife again after another maritime disaster. Perhaps, she thought, they have a special section in heaven for people drowned at sea. At least she presumed her husband would be going to heaven. Looking at him now, she saw that his eyes were closed and his lips moving. She wondered if he was praying or reciting some of his favourite poetry. Tennyson’s Ulysses, she remembered, had a pretty rough time on the seas of Greece, taking ten years after the Trojan Wars to reach the craggy island of Ithaca that he called home.
It took over three hours to cross the first ten miles of the English Channel. There was nobody on board now who had not been sick. Many were throwing up for the fifth or sixth time and had little left in their stomachs. The captain sent word that he thought the last stages of the journey might be easier than the first. There was a sort of embryonic hospital in the corner of the great cabin now, populated by people who had broken an arm or a leg sliding across the floor, unable to stop before they crashed into some immovable object.
Just when you could dimly see the French coast, a thin pencil line of land that wasn’t moving or sliding or falling over, it began to rain. It rained, as Lady Lucy said afterwards, as if it were the last downfall ever on earth, as if all the rivers and all the oceans of the world had to give up their water for it to be hurled down on to the English Channel. It lashed down in torrents so dense you could only see a couple of yards in front of your face. Any other shipping close by would have been a grave hazard. Powerscourt looked at his watch from time to time, realizing that all their train connections had, quite literally, been blown apart. He might not have been aware of the latest Pugh deadline, now in Markham Square, but he was sure the start of the trial could not be very far away. And here he was, miles away from London on a mission that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have described as a wild goose chase.
Nearly eight hours after they set out from Dover their ship docked at Calais. The passengers, some still shaking from their ordeal, others wrapped round husbands or wives, small children held very tight in their parents’ arms, descended the gang plank gingerly and wobbled about helplessly on the unmoving dry land. The captain was waiting to greet them at the bottom, rather like a vicar come to shake hands with his congregation after service on Sunday. He proffered his apologies, assuring everybody that he would never have set forth if he had known the conditions were going to be so harsh. The passengers thanked him for bringing them safely from England to France. Powerscourt found a train bound for Paris that was leaving in twenty minutes. The man in the ticket office said they would have to wait until the next day, a Sunday, to reach Beaune.