Aiding and Abetting Read Online Free PDF Page A

.” “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