Dorothy Eden (20 page)

No wonder this succession of accidents and strange adventures had happened. There had been a continuous attempt to gain possession of the doll, and through her innocent, haphazard behaviour, sometimes carrying it with her, sometimes hiding it, she had unwittingly evaded the thieves.

But the thing had been a farce, anyway, for this time Pepita had not been carrying her hidden fortune, as no doubt she had done several times previously. Francesca must have discovered the hitherto unknown opening in her stomach, and thought it a clever place to hide a treasured but secret letter.

So she had started her journey with a valuable hoard, somewhere on the way she had lost it. And only Francesca knew where.

But this last information she must somehow keep from this woman who obviously cared nothing for a child’s life. Because if she discovered, and Francesca’s whereabouts were known…

Who in all the world was going to bother about a stray Italian child, lost and unclaimed. Who was going to report her disappearance to the police and stir up trouble?

“Yes?” said Rosita impatiently, “if Francesca were carrying the diamonds, what would she have done with them? Nothing, because she knew nothing about them. It was you who cleverly kept the doll. So come. You’ve given us enough trouble. We do not keep our patience forever.”

“I have a loud voice,” Kate told her. “In a moment I’m going to use it to call for help.”

“Call away, call away,” Rosita’s voice was contemptuous. “I’ve told you no one will listen. Your precious Johnnie won’t be back until morning if I know the sort of drinks he’s been having. He’s the party type, you know. He’ll never make a successful detective.”

With a sulking heart, Kate knew she spoke the truth. But this crafty Italian woman was not going to see her giving in.

“Bring in your bodyguard. Let him stand over me with a gun, if he likes. But you can’t make me tell something I don’t know. And I don’t know anything about your filthy diamonds. Nothing. The doll had nothing but a letter written to a child inside it. And I, at least, don’t lie. Now get out of here, and leave that door unlocked. If you have got away with one body in the Tiber, you’re not going to easily get away with two. I’m here to find that poor, mistreated child, and I’m not going home until I find her. If you think you can frighten me, you’re wrong.”

“We’ll see,” murmured Rosita thoughtfully, “we’ll see.” Still keeping between Kate and the door, she suddenly made a swift movement and hastened out. The key was turned in the lock before Kate could spring after her.

The position was as it had been earlier, and there would be no help until Johnnie, stupid, greedy Johnnie, with a bad hangover, arrived in the morning.

Unless the man with the gun came in.

It was interesting, of course, to have so much explained. Now she knew why she had been constantly shadowed, why she had had those clumsy accidents. It had been supposed that either she was carrying the doll with its dangerous hidden hoard innocently, or else that she had carefully disposed of the contents of Pepita’s stomach in a safe place. It had also been supposed that she may have been in league with Francesca’s kidnapper.

For now it was certain the child had been kidnapped by someone perhaps even more unscrupulous than Rosita and her confederates. The awful thing now, if they believed her when she said she knew nothing about the diamonds, was that they would track Francesca down, like bloodhounds.

Somehow she had to find the child first.

Kate walked up and down the room, her footsteps echoing on the bare boards. The moon was sinking, its rays growing more golden and the room becoming darker. Now it was even too dark to see the time. Surely it must be morning soon and Johnnie would come back. Why didn’t he come? How could he behave like this when he had known he was leaving her in a dubious-looking place.

But a knock-out drink would be nothing to the wicked Cesare. He would administer it with the greatest glee, and Johnnie, the gullible fool, would swallow it.

This organization must be powerful, for even in Paris, at that night-club, there had been the search made of her bag. And in London its octopus tentacles stretched.

She felt as if she hadn’t slept for years. Her legs were crumpling beneath her. She was compelled to sit once more on the side of the bed, but she had a rigid determination not to fall asleep. Soon it would be morning. Nothing would seem quite so sinister by daylight…

In spite of her efforts, she did doze, her head falling sideways against the hard iron bed-end. So that she didn’t hear the door open the third time. It must have opened very softly, and her visitor entered like a ghost. For Kate’s eyes flew open to see, in the gloom, a round, squat figure, with a very faint halo of white hair.

“Have a chocolate, Kate, dear,” a cosy voice said.

Kate clapped her hands to her mouth. Now she could not speak at all. Mrs. Dix’s voice! The little, round, too-plump figure with the white hair, the busy fingers fumbling in the chocolate box, the noisy sucking of a sweet.

But if the dead walked they did not eat!

“You won’t have a chocolate? You young things, you worry too much about your figures. Now, Kate, dear, that little mission. You brought back the diamonds, didn’t you? You mislaid the child, but that didn’t matter because you had the diamonds. So where are they? Tell us and we promise you’ll not be harmed.”

“I—don’t—know—”

“Come, dear, try to remember. The Tiber is very cold at this time of year, and muddy. Kittens are drowned in it. Not nice to swallow that water. So try to remember.”

It was then that Kate’s control broke. Anything real she could stand, but this ghost, this caricature, whatever it was, as uncanny as the face that had peered around the door in Mrs. Mossop’s London house, was too much.

She began to scream. “You’re not Mrs. Dix! Mrs. Dix is dead! You’re only trying to frighten me! Go away! Go away, or I’ll call the police!”

“The diamonds, dear? Remember?”

“I don’t know anything about your horrible diamonds,” Kate sobbed. “I wouldn’t touch them if I were starving. I know nothing, I tell you. Nothing!”

Dimly she heard the cluck-clucking sound of remorse, then the cosy chuckle. She didn’t realize she had her eyes tight shut, and only opened them at the sound of the door closing and finding herself once more alone.

Now she was trembling and dizzy. She lay back on the uninviting pillow and the room swam in a sick swirl of stars and darkness. Then it faded away.

She must have become unconscious from fright and sheer exhaustion, for her half-faint melted into sleep, and when she opened her eyes with a dreadful start of nightmare awareness it was bright morning, and there was another tapping on her door.

“Tea, signorina,” called a cheerful young voice, adding, “Please to enter, may I?”

But whoever it was couldn’t enter, because the door was locked. Kate tried to speak, then didn’t need to, for the door opened as if it were not even latched and the plump girl from the previous evening walked in with a tray and a beaming smile.

“
Buon giorno,
signorina.” And then, obviously proud of her English, “Did you sleep well?”

“Sleep!” Kate echoed.

The girl’s eyes flickered in surprise over Kate’s rumpled but full-dressed appearance.

“You were too tired to take off your clothes, signorina?”

Kate sat up and looked at the breakfast tray. The china looked clean, the rolls were brown and appetizing, and the tea, though probably undrinkable, was a charming thought. They did these thoughtful things in Italy, she remembered—at least the Italy she had previously known. Faint energy and even reassurance stirred in her. If she were going to be murdered, at least it was going to be with the condemned criminal’s due, a good breakfast.

“Thank you,” she said, with automatic politeness. “Now there is something I want you to do, please. You understand me?”

“A little, signorina.”

“Then tell the woman called Rosita I must see her at once.”

“Rosita?” The girl frowned perplexedly. “I do not know anyone of that name.”

“Now don’t you go dumb on me, too. Rosita is here, staying in this God-forsaken
albergo
, and I want to see her at once.”

“But I do not know. Honest! There is no woman here but me.” The girl smiled ingenuously, thrusting out her plump bosom.

“Then a little fat woman,” Kate cried desperately. “Not Mrs. Dix, because Mrs. Dix is dead. I know she’s dead. But someone who might have impersonated her.”

“Please, signorina?”

“Someone who eats chocolates.
Cioccolata
.”

“You want
cioccolata,
signorina?”

Kate sighed and gave up.

“Is the signore back?” she asked wearily. “The signore with the car.”

“
Si
, signorina. You did not hear? He made a great noise. But he has the headache. Oh, bad!” She giggled with naughty glee.

“One last thing,” said Kate. “Switch on the light.”

“The light? But it is day.”

“I know it’s day, but last night it wouldn’t work. Or so I thought.”

The girl gave a flip to the switch and the light sprang on, vying with the early morning sunshine. Her puzzled glance went back to Kate, whom by now she must have supposed to be quite crazy.

Perhaps she was crazy. Purely crazy, and not even simply the victim of a nightmare. Perhaps no one at all had come into her room during the night. There was nothing whatever to prove that they had. Only Johnnie’s headache. But Johnnie may not have needed Cesare’s potion to encourage him to linger in some bar where there was talk and laughter and liquor. Johnnie was unreliable. It seemed that it would be scarcely worth while even relating her nightmare, or whatever it had been, to him.

J
OHNNIE WAS WAITING IN
the bar which, by morning light, looked even more frowsty.

No one had watched Kate walk down the stairs. She had boldly opened the doors and looked into all the rooms on the top floor, and seen that they were indeed empty. This fact did not reassure her. Rather, it strengthened her unpleasant suspicion that the night may, after all, have been a long-continuing nightmare, and that if she were becoming a victim of such hallucinations she must be neurotic and it was time she went away for a long rest.

The yellow-faced man could well have been there, since he was her self-appointed shadow. But Rosita and especially Mrs. Dix—who lay in her narrow cold bed in a London suburban cemetery—must surely have been imaginary visitors. Even her screams, which so mysteriously went unheard, must have been the soundless ones of nightmare.

The plump maid was sweeping the passage that led into the kitchen. She smiled at Kate and waved her hand.

“
Arrivederci,
signorina,” she called cheerfully.

Kate opened her bag and took out some of the squalid-looking lire notes. The girl thanked her profusely. She sang to herself as she returned to her sweeping. In a few years she would be fat and slatternly. But at present she was young and fresh and normal. There were no secrets in her merry, brown face. Kate was grateful for that, at least.

But Johnnie was another story. He was unshaven, bleary-eyed and full of apologies.

“I say, Kate, old girl, I really got into trouble last night. That Cesare! He’s quite a lad. Did I get led up the garden path!”

“Is the car all right?” Kate asked briefly.

“Yes, good as gold. It was a faulty plug, the fellow said. Cesare suggested a drink while we waited, and there it was. Fire water!” Johnnie shuddered. “God, I feel loathsome.”

“Let’s pay the bill and go,” Kate suggested.

The stout proprietor behind the bar was watching them, a half smile on his face, his black eyes ironic. But he had looked like that last night. His face was no more secret or knowledgeable than it had been then.

Johnnie got to his feet.

“Quanto debbo?”
he asked, and as the fat man laconically gave a figure he exclaimed, “My God, that for a night in this dump! By the way, Kate, you don’t look any too brisk yourself. Did you get any sleep?”

“A little. When people weren’t walking about. Ask him how many people live here.”

Johnnie, occupied in sorting out crumpled lire notes, translated the question uninterestedly.

“He says only himself and his wife. The girl goes home at night.”

The fat man went on talking, gesticulating and grinning.

“Oh, and a nanny goat and a kid and two or three cats. Business is bad at this time of the year. If you heard people walking about, angel, you must have been listening to ghosts.”

“Yes,” Kate murmured involuntarily. For one of them, at least, had been dead.

Voices and darkness…darkness and voices… But the strange thing was that they had all had the recurring theme of diamonds. Whether it were intuition or reality, she was sure she had hit on the crux of the matter. Diamonds being smuggled into England by a child with a shabby, much-loved doll. That solution explained so much. And if it were so and it was found that the diamonds were no longer in the doll it really did mean Francesca was in danger.

But one would no longer confide in this sorry caricature of the spruce and self-confident Johnnie Lambert. He was not reliable and he couldn’t see beyond his own nose.

“Let’s go,” she said urgently.

“Do we go straight back to Rome and forget the Torlinis?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Wish I had an alka-seltzer. Confounded fool I’ve made of myself. Sorry and all that.”

Kate was not concerned with his apologies. But she was alertly interested when, a little later, sunk in his remorse, Johnnie said defensively, “Actually I did make one discovery last night. That fat fellow at the
Albergo Garibaldi
knows the Torlinis. He said he’d never heard of them having a child. So it must be the wrong branch of the family. There are branches all over the place. He thought it would be the Florence one, but I checked that yesterday. The thing’s a labyrinth. That’s if there is a blasted kid. With all due respect to your evidence as an eye-witness, I strongly believe there isn’t.”

Later, as they became immersed in the stream of traffic pouring into the city, Johnnie turned to her. “What are you going to do now?”