‘Does she love you?’
‘No. She likes me, and she uses me. I also interest her, vaguely. She hasn’t met anyone like me before. Not in her class, I’m afraid. The one thing she’s really scared of is getting her name linked with mine in the gossip columns.’
Pol shook with laughter. ‘You are lost, my friend! Have you ever tried beating her?’
Packer hesitated. ‘No. I might end up killing her.’
‘Ah, that would be a pity, mon cher —’ he was still laughing — ‘but I fear you are lost. No matter! It is all part of the human comedy. The immediate solution is to make you the rich man, then your problems are over.’
‘Fine. And where does that leave her?’
‘If you are careful, mon cher, it will leave her with a house in the country, and perhaps a farmhouse in Provence.’
Packer leaned forward; he spoke slowly, quietly. ‘Monsieur Pol, do I understand that you intend to involve her in this little charade of yours?’
‘My friend, in French we have a proverb: “There are never indiscreet questions, only indiscreet answers.” I will reply as discreetly as I can. Mademoiselle Sarah is your affair. She appears to be a charming girl, and she might — with a little persuasion, and perhaps the offer of money — prove very useful to our enterprise. But that is entirely a matter for your own judgement. I am offering to employ you to draw up a plan — that is all. Whether I accept your plan, or insist that it be amended, is up to me. For the moment, I am merely your paymaster and parrain.’
They both looked up. Sarah had come in without knocking.
CHAPTER 5
At dinner Sarah was at her most sparkling. The restaurant had an entry in Michelin, and Pol had ordered generously and with imagination. He had chosen, for Sarah and himself, the best wines; and Packer found himself eating almost in silence while the two of them laughed and talked and drank together as freely as though this obscene old Frenchman had known her since she was a child.
She seemed to enjoy him enormously. Her eyes followed his with every word, flashing with mock flirtation; responding to all his jokes, not with her usual contrived gaiety but with genuine high spirits, her head thrown back, her shoulder rubbing up against him, like a cat caressing a vast silken sofa. Packer was all the more disconcerted for, whenever he was alone with her, he usually found her a rather humourless, even sullen character. Above all, he noticed that she appeared entirely to overlook Pol’s habit of talking with his mouth full — a sin which Packer committed only at the risk of arousing her fury and revulsion — while their host continued to eat and talk his way through the meal with impunity, his goatee clotted thick and cherry lips smeared bright with grease.
For beneath his gross exterior, Charles Pol had charm. It was a comic but insidious charm; an alliance of the sybarite and the buffoon, overlaid with the seductive comfort of the magnanimous host; and towards the end of the evening Packer began to consider the outrageous possibility that the day’s events might all be some obscure and elaborate ruse by which Pol intended to ensnare Sarah.
Such things had happened before. What could not be explained, however, was the vast compendium of information that Pol possessed about his and Sarah’s backgrounds. This had been no ordinary pick-up. Its final execution in the tulip field might have been ludicrous, but its planning had been meticulous. The research itself must have taken weeks, even months, depending on Pol’s sources of information — and this brought Packer back to perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the whole affair. Why had the Frenchman waited until the trip to Amsterdam to make contact? Pol had hinted that he was somehow persona non grata with the British authorities. Assuming that the man was genuinely trying to set up a major assassination, Packer was inclined to accept this explanation at its face value. But then how — without intimate access to certain of Packer’s former colleagues in the army, and perhaps a few indiscreet friends — could he know so much?
Sarah’s case was relatively straightforward; half a day’s research in the library of any of the big European newspaper offices would have revealed most of her background. Miss Sarah Pugh Laval-Smith was public property; Captain Owen Packer was not. For Pol to have obtained such information about him — both classified and obscure — would have demanded the resources of at least one major Intelligence organization, friendly or otherwise.
Packer decided that the Frenchman might, after all, be serious.
He sipped his Vichy water and watched the waiter put down the two balloon glasses of Armagnac in front of Pol and Sarah; and again detected, behind those epicene features across the table, a gleam in the Frenchman’s little eyes which Sarah seemed to find entrancing, but which Packer had begun to mistrust.
They were now the last diners in the restaurant. Without consulting Sarah, Pol ordered two more Armagnacs. She often boasted to Packer about how she came from a hard-drinking family; and he had known her to get drunk many times, but always in an impeccably controlled way. Only her bad temper and those ritual ‘bull shots’ at lunch in the Ritz betrayed her. Her delicate features, painstakingly repaired with cosmetics, remained unblemished.
Pol drank a toast: ‘To my two new, dear young
