Caravan to Vaccares by Alistair MacLean Read Free Book Online Page A

green-and-white caravan. From the ache Bowman could still feel in his midriff the answer to that one seemed fairly clear. But why?
    Bowman glanced to his left. A small compartment lay beyond an open doorway in a transverse partition. From Bowman’s angle of sight nothing was visible in the compartment. He moved along to the next window. The curtains on this one were drawn, but the window itself partly open from the top, no doubt for ventilation. Bowman moved the curtains very very gently and applied his eye to the crack he had made. The level of illumination inside was very low, the only light coming from the rear of the caravan. But there was enough light to see, at the very front of the compartment, a three-tiered bunk and here lay three men, apparently asleep. Two of them were lying with their faces turned towards Bowman but it was impossible to distinguish their features: their faces were no more than pale blurs in the gloom. Bowman eased the curtains again and headed for the caravan that really intrigued him – the greenand-white one.
    The rear door at the top of the caravan was open but it was dark inside. By this time Bowman had developed a thing about the unlit vestibules of caravans and gave this one a wide berth. In any event it was the illuminated window half-way down the side of the caravan that held the more interest for him. The window was half-open, the curtains half-drawn. It seemed ideal for some more peeking.
    The caravan’s interior was brightly lit and comfortably furnished. There were four women there, two on a settee and two on chairs by a table. Bowman recognized the titian-haired Countess Marie with, beside her, the grey-haired woman who had been involved in the altercation with Czerda – Marie’s mother and the mother of the missing Alexandre. The two other young women at the table, one auburn-haired and about thirty, the other a slight dark girl with most ungypsy-like cropped hair and scarcely out of her teens, Bowman had not seen before. Although it must have been long past their normal bed-times, they showed no signs of making any preparations for retiring. All four looked sad and forlorn to a degree: the mother and the dark young girl were in tears. The dark girl buried her face in her hands.
    â€˜Oh, God!’ She sobbed so bitterly it was difficult to make the words out. ‘When is it all going to end? Where is it all going to end?’
    â€˜We must hope, Tina,’ Countess Marie said. Her voice was dull and totally devoid of hope. ‘There is nothing else we can do.’
    â€˜There is no hope.’ The dark girl shook her head despairingly. ‘You know there’s no hope. Oh, God, why did Alexandre have to do it?’ She turned to the auburn-haired girl. ‘Oh, Sara, Sara, your husband warned him only today – ’
    â€˜He did, he did.’ This was from the girl called Sara and she sounded no happier than the others.
    She put her arm round Tina. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, my dear, so terribly sorry.’ She paused. ‘But Marie’s right, you know. Where there’s life there’s hope.’
    There was silence in the caravan. Bowman hoped, and fervently, that they would break it and break it soon. He had come for information but had so far come across nothing other than the mildly astonishing fact of four gypsies talking in German and not in Romany. But he wanted to learn it quickly for the prospect of hanging around that brightly illuminated window indefinitely lacked appeal of any kind: there was something in the brooding atmosphere of tragedy inside that caravan and menace outside calculated to instil a degree of something less than confidence in the bystander.
    â€˜There is no hope,’ the grey-haired woman said heavily. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘A mother knows.’
    Marie said: ‘But, Mother – ’
    â€˜There’s no hope because there’s no life,’ her, mother