He tucked down into the darkened interior of the car. The young man, Pasquale, was in front of him, the maresciallo drove.
He leaned forward, he caught the back of the young man's seat. It was a compulsion for him, to share and to talk. There was no one for him to talk with but the ragazzi. He despised himself, but to talk at times was the craving of an addict.
'You know, if I was afraid, if I could not tolerate the fear any longer, I could send a signal. There are routes by which a signal could be sent. Certain people, in the Palace of Poison or in the Questura, even in the barracks of the carabineri, would send a signal, pass a message. I have only to say, in confidence, that a prisoner asked for me. In confidence, I would give that prisoner's name. In confidence, binding such a person to secrecy, I could say that I have rejected the offer of information from that prisoner. It would be a signal that I was now afraid. The message would be passed on, it would be heard. It would be understood that I was no longer a threat. If, in confidence, I sent that signal, then I could again go to a restaurant, go to the cinema, go to the opera at the Politeama, go to the hairdresser . . .'
The young man, Pasquale, sat rigid in front of him.
The magistrate said sadly, 'I have to believe that I can live with the fear.'
'I hear we cocked your posh grub. You won't find me crying, Harry. Wife was out, so mine last night was sausage, oven chips and beans.'
'Didn't do too bad, sir.' Harry chuckled. 'Managed five courses, two gins for aperitif, bottle of white and red, brandy to wash it down . . .'
'Did we screw you?'
The detective superintendent, it was his show, led the detective sergeant out of the senior partner's office and across the hall and out through the front door, down the steps and across to the pavement where the Transit van was parked. Harry stood back to allow his superior to hand over the cardboard packing case first to the constable at the rear doors. They paused, each of them, wrung their hands, pretty damn heavy the boxes were.
'I was beginning to get the taste for it. Quite a good restaurant, actually, for a hotel.'
'Till we horned in. Come on, next load.'
They went back into the building on Regent Street, looking straight ahead and ignoring the white-faced junior partners and the secretaries who had little handkerchiefs clasped in their hands as if to safeguard them from the Domesday collapse of their world. It was inevitable, what had happened the previous evening, because of the shortage of manpower in S06 and the constant juggling of priorities. Listening to Giles Blake's assessment of the immediate future of the gilts market, toying with the cod to make it last because they were slow on their food at the next table and hearing the announcement break into the canned nothing music. 'Would Mr Harry Compton please come to reception to take a telephone call? Mr Harry Compton to reception, please.'
Getting a judge out of his club and back to chambers, phoning the wife and pleading excuses, going through the evidence dossier with the judge and asking for a Schedule 1
Production Order under the Police Criminal Evidence Act (1984). Getting the judge's signature on the order, asking him to put nib to paper a second time for the search warrant, and seeing his reluctance because it was a solicitor that they were going to jump when the office opened in the morning. Maybe that had been worth it, the study of distaste on the good old judge's face, because it was a solicitor, same clan and same tribe. Harry Compton had done the donkey's load of the investigation into the bent bastard whose hands were into clients' savings, the greedy bastard who was excavating trustee funds, the solicitor who had broken trust, but it was the detective superintendent's show and he'd made the call that had hauled the junior man off his expenses dinner. The panic reason was that the senior partner, information received, was going abroad and hadn't given his colleagues a coming-home date. Under a Schedule 1 Production Order and a search warrant the papers and archives were being packed away in cardboard boxes, down to the last sheet and the last file, loaded up and would be d riven for close analysis to the S06 office behind Holborn police station.
Harry Compton was dog-tired, out on his feet. He had finished with the judge at midnight, had the briefing with the team at thirty minutes after midnight, been home and slept three hours, been up and driven to the senior partner's home in Essex for a dawn knock and the clicking of handcuffs. He trudged up the stairs again for the next load of papers.
'Where did we get to?' The detective superintendent stopped on I he landing and breathed hard.
'Last night? Sort of nowhere and somewhere. Chummy meets a guy, they have dinner, they talk financials through the evening. It was pretty unexceptional stuff.
Anyway, the NCIS material on chummy was kind of vague, not much more than a single report of a medium cash deposit in a bank, £28,000, along with sharp-moving accounts with plenty of action in drops and withdrawals and not a lot to point to where the money comes from and where it's going, but not showing up as obvious illegal. That was the "nowhere".'
They were back in the senior partner's office. A small mountain of cardboard boxes remained to be shifted. And there was more to move in the secretary's office, and more from the junior partners' rooms, and then there was the whole of the bloody archive in the basement.
'Get a hernia from this. You're a cussed sod, Harry, always keep the best to last. What was the "somewhere"?'
The detective sergeant grinned, welcomed the compliment. 'Smooth as new paintwork. The guest, wearing his money on his back, Italian, very tasty . . . and he'd flown in from Palermo.'
Each of them heaved up a box and headed for the door.
'You wouldn't be telling me, would you, Harry, that every businessman from Palermo is bloody mafia?'
Harry Compton winked. "Course they are - if it was a grannie aged eighty from Palermo, a kid aged five from Palermo, I'd have 'em locked up for "organized crime".
It has a sort of ring, doesn't it, Palermo?'
'We can run the name through.'
'Don't have the name, had a phone call before I'd even got stuck into the sweets trolley.
I'll get the name.'
'But you'll work this bloody lot first, too right.'
There were forty-seven boxes of papers from the offices, and there would be twenty-nine plastic bin sacks from the archives, and they'd need going through before he could get back to a hotel in Portman Square for a guest's name. It would all be a matter of priorities.
She passed him the letter, but the American made no move to take it. He turned to face her.
'Who else has read this letter?'
She bridled. 'Nobody has.'
'You are telling me, certain, nobody else has touched this letter.'
'Of course they haven't.'
She watched. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it, then took the letter from her. The handkerchief protected the letter from the touch of his fingertips.
To Charley, holding the letter in a handkerchief seemed ridiculous. 'Why?'
He said bleakly, 'So that it doesn't look as if it's been shown round, so that my prints aren't on it.'
'Would it be looked at that closely?'
'We do it my way, let's understand that from now.'
He was impassive. He talked as if to an annoying child. He swung round, away from her, to read the letter held in the handkerchief. Bugger him. Charley had thought it clever to give him a meeting point on the cliffs. The dusk had been falling when she had ridden her scooter to the car park, empty but for his hire-car, that served the coastal footpath. He had been where she had told him to be. There was a nest of cigarette ends by his feet, enough for him to have been there for hours, from long before she had told him to be there. It was a good place for the big seabirds, and the gulls and shags and guillemots were chorusing and floating in the wind and settling on the rocks below where the sea's charge broke. It was a favourite place, when home just suffocated her, to come to. It was where she came and sat and brooded when the clinging attentions of her mother and father swampe
d her. It was a place of peace and wildness. She had thought it clever to come to the cliffs, to sit on the bench of coarse wood planks. Here she would be in control . . . He passed the letter back to her, then pocketed the handkerchief, then flicked a cigarette from the Lucky Strike packet.
'Aren't you going to ask me why I decided—?'
'Not important to me.'
'Whether it's excitement or duty, whether it's adventure or obligation—?'
'Doesn't matter to me.'
She bit at her lip. She ran her tongue the length of her lip. She had sought control.
The blood was running in her. 'Well, sure as hell, it's not your courtesies. You are the rudest man—'
'If that's what you want to think, you should fax it to them in the morning.'
She crumpled, and the control that she had sought slipped further. 'But . . . but I don't have the fax number.'
He said, as if he were tired, as if it were tedious, 'The fax number was on their letter.'
'But I tore it up, didn't I? I wasn't going, was I? I destroyed the letter, and then I changed my mind.'
He should have asked why she had changed her mind. He didn't. He was reaching inside his windcheater and he took out the folded sheet of paper and opened it. From the photocopy of the letter sent to her he wrote the number and the international code on a note pad, tore off the sheet from the pad and handed it to her. There was a growl in his voice. She thought him so bloody cold. 'Write it in your own hand on the back of the letter.'
She did what she was told. He took the paper from his notebook back and tore it into small pieces. He threw the pieces into the air and they flaked away below them, carried on the wind gusts, down towards the big birds as they settled for the night.
Away beyond Bolt Head, off Start Point, she saw the first flash of the lighthouse, the raking beam.
'Is it necessary to be like that, so careful?'
'Yes.'
'That's what I have to learn?'
'It's best that you learn, fast, to be careful.'
She shivered, the cold caught her. His windcheater had none of the quilted thickness of hers, but the cold did not catch him and he did not shiver. She felt dominated and small. Said with acid deliberateness. 'Yes, Mr Moen. Right, Mr Moen. Three bloody bags full, Mr Moen. I'll send the fax in the morning.'
'Tell me about yourself.'
'Excuse me, shouldn't you be doing the talking. Who, what, you are. Where I'm going.
Why.'
He shook his head. 'Who, what, I am doesn't concern you.'
She snorted in fake derision. 'Brilliant.'
'It's about being careful.'
She felt the cold, the wind on her back, night wind hacking at the strength of her anorak. 'Where I'm going and why.'
'In good time. About yourself.'
She took a big breath. He watched her and his face was shadowed, but she did not think that if a flashlight had been shone on his features, or the full beam of the lighthouse on Start Point, she would have seen any damned encouragement. As if she was being manipulated, as if she was one of the marionettes that were stored in the cupboard behind her desk in 2B's classroom . . .
She blurted, 'I'm Charlotte Eunice Parsons, everyone calls me "Charley". I'm pretty ordinary—'
'Don't talk yourself short, and don't look for compliments.'
'Fat chance. I'm an only child. My parents are David and Flora Parsons. Dad was an engineering manager at the naval dockyard at Plymouth, it was his whole life - well, and me - until two years ago, when he was made redundant, the "peace dividend". We lived then in Yelverton, which is up on the edge of the moor, north of Plymouth. He didn't think he could afford to stay there, so they upped and moved. He packed in the bowls club and the tennis club, cinemas and shops, he's paranoid about being hard-up, broke. He bought the bungalow, he took his place in a gossipy and inquisitive little society, mean-minded. God knows why, my mother went along with it. Where they are now, they're boring and sad and empty. Do you think I'm being foul?'
'Doesn't matter what I think.'
She gazed out at the sea, at the darkening mass of the water, at the white foam spurts on the rocks, at the distant light rotating from Start Point. She thought she spoke a truth, and that truth was important to Axel Moen.
'I can't afford to live away from home, all I've got went into that silly little bike. If I had a promotion, a better job, when I've more experience, then I could quit and go and live in my own place. Not yet. Their lives are boring, sad, empty, so they're looking for a star, and I fit the role. It's always been like that, but it's worse now. There's days I could scream - don't think I'm proud of being a right hitch - and there's nights I'm ashamed of myself. The trouble with being a star, you learn as a kid how to milk it, you get to play the little madam. Not before, but there are times now that I disgust myself.
They wanted me to be quality at tennis, but I was ordinary and Dad couldn't see that.
They wanted me top of the form atschool, and when I wasn't, it was the teacher's fault, not because I was just another average kid. They wanted me to go to university, and when I didn't get the grades, Dad said the examiners had made a mistake. What saved me, what sort of opened the window to me, was going to Rome and being with Giuseppe and Angela, they were really lovely, they were wonderful. But you want me to spy on them?'
'I want access, yes.'
She peered ahead. He wouldn't have seen it. She gazed down the depth of the rock face to where a crag hung out as a limp finger. A falcon worried with its killing beak at the feathers under its wing. It was personal to her, the peregrine. Sometimes, when she came to this place, she saw it, sometimes she heard the crying call of the female. If it came, she would see it because she could recognize the fast movements of the bird in flight and its rigid profile when it perched on the finger of rock. The bird was her own, nothing to do with him. It flew. She lost the sight of the bird.
'I came back from Rome and went to training college. I suppose I was a spoiled little cow from home and a patronizing little cow from Rome. I didn't seem to find it necessary to make friends. All right, let's have it straight. I thought most of the other students were pretty trivial, and they thought I was pretty stuck-up, you know what that means? I didn't have a boyfriend, not one of the students, but there were a few sweaty sessions with one of the lecturers, one of those who always apologizes and cries afterwards and moans about his wife, but he used to give me good marks. Are you married?'
'No.'
'Ever been married, Mr Moen?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Just stay with the story, Charley.'
'Please yourself. I've only once ever done anything worthwhile in my life, what I thought was worth doing. You see, when you know how to milk, it's the big temptation to stay on the gravy train - God, that's rotten mixed metaphors. When you can get what you want without trying, you get complacent, you stop trying. Big deal, but I went last summer to Brightlingsea, it's a small dock on the east coast, other side of London.
There was a protest there against the export of calves to Europe. They were shipping the calves across for fattening up and then slaughter. It's the veal trade. It's revolting. I was there for a month, bawling and hollering and trying to stop the lorries. Yes, I thought that was worth while. Are you from a city or from the country?'
'North-west Wisconsin.'
'Is that country?'
'Big country.'
'So you wouldn't care about the animals, you'd say that farmers have to live, people have to eat, animals don't feel fear and pain.'
'It's not important what I think.'
'Christ. What else do you want to know? What colour knickers I wear, when my period is? You're a bloody bundle of fun, Mr Moen.'
'I think I've heard enough.'
She stood. Her hair was jostled on her face. The wind had risen and now that she no longer talked in his ear she had to shout against the roar of waves battering on rocks.
'Could we murde
r something, like a drink?'
He murmured, 'I don't drink, not alcohol.'
'My bloody luck, a bloody temperance nut. Hey, I'll drink, you watch. And while I drink you can tell me whether what I am going to do is worthwhile - or don't you have an opinion on that?'
Charley strode towards the car park. It was her big exit. She pounded up the path from the bench and the cliff face. She was going fast and ahead of him. Her foot, in the black darkness, tripped on a stone. She was falling . . . 'Shit.' She was stumbling and trying to hold her balance . . . 'Bugger.' He caught her, held her up, and she shook his hand off her arm and stormed on.
'Yes, Dr Ruggerio ... Of course, Dr Ruggerio, of course I'll tell C harlotte that you rang, I'll tell her exactly what you said ... It is difficult, Dr Ruggerio, she has a very good position at the moment, hut . . . Yes, Dr Ruggerio, we're very gratified to know that you and your wife regard Charlotte so highly . . . Yes, she's a lovely young woman .. . We are, as you say, very proud of her ... I know she's thinking very hard about your offer.
She's out at the moment, something connected with school work . . . Send a fax or telephone to Palermo, yes, I'll see she does that tomorrow . . . You're very kind, Dr Ruggerio . . . Yes, yes, I'm sure she'd be very happy with you again . . . My wife, yes, I'll pass on your best wishes ... So good to speak to you. Thank you. Goodnight.'
He put down the telephone. David Parsons glanced once, briefly, at the graduation photograph of his Charlotte that hung in the place of honour in the hall. He went into the sitting room. Flora Parsons looked up from her needlework, the cover for a cushion.
'God, you're a coward.'
'That's not called for.'
'Eating out of his hand and he's soft-soaping you. Crawling to him.'
'He sent you his best wishes . . .'
'The letter comes, then the American's here. Half the village wants to know who he is. Where's Charley now? I haven't an idea. Where is she? I'm frightened for her.'
'As soon as she's back, I'll speak to her.'
'You won't, you're a coward.'
It was her bravado, and when she'd finished she had only a few coins left in her purse.
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