Dorothy Eden (23 page)

Kate made an impatient exclamation. “You can’t apply that theory to moments of tension! They last for ever.”

The telephone rang. Kate jumped nervously.

Lucian spoke into it in Italian. Was it her imagination that his face tightened? He abruptly turned his back to her. The quick, unintelligible words flowed on maddeningly.

Then he put down the receiver and turned.

“What did they say? Where’s William? Hasn’t he come?”

“Yes, he came by the last flight, a couple of hours ago. But he didn’t travel into the terminal by the airways bus. He seemed to meet friends, and they left by car.”

“Friends!” Kate exclaimed. “Who would he know? Unless it was someone he travelled with who gave him a lift. But in that case why isn’t he here by now?”

“They’ve stopped for drinks, perhaps. I wonder what’s happened to those sandwiches. I’ll go down and shake someone up.”

“Lucian, don’t be absurd! William wouldn’t stop two hours for drinks, not when his whole object in coming here was to find me. He is absentminded, I know, but when he’s doing a thing, he goes straight to it. He hasn’t stopped for drinks. What’s happened to him? Oh, God, this awful nightmare again!”

Lucian took her hands and held them a moment, firmly.

“It’ll be all right, Kate. Believe me! He’s probably forgotten the name of the hotel. Now just wait here while I run down and see a friend of mine. And I’ll be back with the sandwiches in a moment.”

It was while he was gone that the telephone rang again. Kate stared at it a moment, hypnotized. Then suddenly she snatched it eagerly, expecting William’s voice.

“Is that Miss Tempest speaking?” came a clipped, English voice.

“Yes, who is that?” English, she thought, in relief. The people who gave William a lift in from the airport.

“It isn’t of importance to you who is speaking, Miss Tempest. But just for the record, it’s Major Dix. We have your friend, Howard, with us. Rather against his wishes, I’m afraid. But as soon as we locate what all of us are looking for we’ll let him go.”

“The diamonds!” Kate gasped.

“Exactly.”

“But you know I haven’t the slightest clue where they are!”

“Oh, come now, you don’t mean to tell me that your friend Cray hasn’t got the child to talk. If he hasn’t he’s a damn fool, and I’m giving you three hours to do so. That’s ample time to do a little telephoning to Somerset. I’ll call you again at six o’clock. After that it will be dark.”

“What do you mean?” Kate whispered.

“More than one foreigner has stumbled drunk into the Tiber.” The clipped, cultured voice became contemptuous. “You amateurs shouldn’t take on these jobs. They always have fatal results.”

“You can’t do this!” Anger and fear made Kate raise her voice vehemently. “William is perfectly innocent.”

“Then let him stick to his pen.”

“We’ll call the police—”

“A search would take a long time. Much longer than the time of the moon’s rising. Let’s be poetic about it, shall we? There’s my proposition. The diamonds for your friend’s life. Fair enough?”

The telephone clicked just as Lucian came back into the room, followed by a waiter with a tray of coffee and sandwiches.

“Kate! What’s happened?”

She had to wait until the waiter had put down the tray and gone out. The disastrous unfairness of this happening to William, who was perfectly innocent, made her forget to be afraid. She was filled with anger and indignation.

She heatedly told Lucian what had happened, and added, “I know where he’ll be. At the
Albergo Garibaldi.
I’m sure that’s their headquarters. We’ve got to go at once. Have you got a car?”

Lucian’s hand was on her shoulder. “Sit down and tell me again calmly what has happened and exactly what this man said. Here! Have a mouthful of this.”

He produced a flask from his pocket and unstoppered it. The neat brandy made Kate gasp, but it steadied her panic.

She related the telephone conversation again, and saw, in a detached way, Lucian’s eyes gleam and his mouth tense with excitement.

“The big fish,” he said softly, “we’ve almost hooked him.”

“Almost hooked him when you don’t even know where he is. And we have this ghastly time limit.”

Lucian picked up the telephone and spoke for a moment.

Then he put a sandwich into Kate’s hand and poured coffee.

“Giovanni’s bringing around the car. He’ll be a few minutes. He’s a fast driver. Are you nervous?”

“Not any longer of simple things like fast cars,” Kate said wryly.

“Yes, it’s all a matter of proportion, isn’t it? Do you want to tidy up before we leave? I’ll wait for you downstairs. I’m not at all sure that this
albergo
, fishy though it sounds, is the place to go. They’ll surely know that you remember it all too well. But I’d like to have a look at it.”

“Not only the
Albergo Garibaldi
, but the Torlinis’ villa farther on. That could be the place.”

When Kate was alone she washed her face and combed her hair, and swallowed some more coffee. She couldn’t eat. Then she looked around the room with a feeling of surprise that it could seem so ordinary and innocent. One had always heard that drama took place in hotel bedrooms, but one had never expected it to happen to oneself. Not even in Rome, with the forgotten centuries hanging in stone over the noisy, hurrying, effervescent people. Later, she told herself, she and William together would throw coins in the Trevi fountain, and wander in the silence and peace of the Colosseum, where autumn had beheaded the wild flowers growing in the stone cracks, and taken the scent from the vanilla trees.

Let Johnnie Lambert be arrested at London Airport for his false passport. (How had Lucian cleverly discovered that he travelled with a false passport?) Let Gianetta be reunited with her silent, stubborn daughter, and Miss Squires go back safely to her cottage and her cat. Let justice be done over the grave of a drowned Englishman.

But she and William would have their snatched hours of happiness in Rome. How utterly blind and foolish of her never to have realized that William would be the perfect travelling companion. Even if he had two black eyes and a multiplicity of bruises. For he would not have been overpowered easily, and he had a violent temper when aroused.

Oh, William, William, please let me be allowed to look after your black eyes…

Giovanni, a slim, smart, flashing-eyed young man, drove extremely well. Although he doubled on his tracks now and again to throw off any pursuer, Lucian explained, he seemed to know the way through the autumn-melancholy countryside to the
Albergo Garibaldi
. When Kate commented on this fact, Lucian said, “Oh, he’s been there before.” And added cryptically, “We were looking after you as well as possible last night. You are too unpredictable to look after with complete certainty.”

Giovanni gave her his flashing smile, the inevitable admiration in his eyes. Kate expected him, too, to ask if she had had a wish at the Trevi fountain, and she wondered absurdly whether he had disguised himself as the goat or the prowling cat last night. Nothing was real to her any more. It was years ago that she had seen a stout little girl in a white starched dress setting out hopefully on a journey.

A deadly little girl who had indirectly robbed Mrs. Dix of her life, Kate of her dearest friend, and Pepita of her stomachful of treasure.

It was siesta time at the
Albergo Garibaldi.
By daylight it looked even more squalid, with the faded paint peeling off the shutters, and a piece of fallen plaster disclosing the bare ribs of the wall within. Giovanni waited in the car. Lucian told Kate to come with him, and together they rang the jangling bell for some time before the stout proprietor, sleepy-eyed and unshaven and reeking of garlic, appeared.

The merest flicker of alarm passed over his face. Then he bowed and leered with repulsive friendliness.

“Ah, so the signorina returns.”

“She finds your place irresistible,” Lucian said ironically.

Kate’s mouth opened in surprise. “You couldn’t speak English last night!” she accused.

The man grinned impertinently. “The signorina did not inquire. What can I do for you? I regret we are closed at this time of day.”

“We just want to have a look over your place.”

“Sorry, signor. We are closed. Later, with pleasure.”

“That’s too late,” Kate cried impetuously. Lucian’s fingers tightened warningly on her arm.

“Oh, too bad, too bad,” said the man in his oily manner. “But the country is more attractive by moonlight.” His black, bold eyes rested significantly on Kate. Their look did not suggest anticipated amours, but the danger that could come by night with the rising of the moon.

Lucian beckoned to Giovanni, who slid out of the car and came over.

“We will look over your place now, signor. My friend has a search warrant. Come along, Kate. Show us the room where you had your visitors last night.” He turned to say sardonically to the startled proprietor, “You should hire a theatre if you enjoy amateur theatricals.”

The leer was replaced by a ferocious frown. The fat man slowly stepped back to let them into the squalid bar.

“Whatever your business,” he said, in a voice suddenly shrill, “you will find nothing here.”

Nor did they. Swiftly, because of time running out, they went over the shabby, bare-floored bedrooms upstairs, and downstairs the large, dark kitchen in which the round-faced maid stared at them speechlessly, shaking her head violently to all Lucian’s brief questions, the backyard, where the goat and kid were tethered and a few scrawny hens pecked in the dust, and the two rooms at the back which were obviously the living quarters of the proprietor and his wife.

The woman, as stout as her husband, garbed in black, and scowling with suspicion, sat in the stuffy living-room, and refused to speak. Her plump hands were folded stubbornly in her capacious lap. Her lips were clamped together. She remained immovable while they took a quick look in the bedroom beyond. She was a frowning Buddha scattering unspoken curses on them.

“Nothing here,” said Lucian. “Let’s go.”

But there was. Kate picked up a half-empty box of chocolates from the sideboard and passed it to the woman.

“Have a chocolate, dear,” she said in a cooing voice.

The woman’s head jerked back. Her eyes widened. Slowly she shook her head. But now it wasn’t that she wouldn’t speak, she couldn’t. Her fear was too obvious.

In the car Lucian slipped his arm along the back of the seat around Kate’s shoulders.

“Well done,” he said. “First clue. I’ll bet that dear, kind soul speaks English without an accent. She looks like a retired variety artist. It’s a pity we haven’t time at present to check. To the Torlinis’, Giovanni, and step on it.”

“What’s the time?” Kate asked nervously.

“Four-fifteen. We’re doing fine.”

“Lucian, do you think Mrs. Dix was murdered?”

“I haven’t a doubt about it. By her loving husband. But for precisely what reason, I’m not sure. Look, there’s the villa. On the hillside among the cypresses. Nice place it looks, as the country residence of a crook.”

It looked like the summer residence of a millionaire. There was an orderly row of cypresses leading up to a wide terrace. Slim white ladies, cast in stone, were grouped around the central fountain and made a pale glimmer in the cypress groves. The house itself was of pink marble.

Kate suddenly felt extraordinarily scruffy and jaded. Lucian gave her a sardonic look as she hastily smoothed her hair.

“Don’t worry about that. You’re not meeting a Prince of the Borghese or even of the Medicis. You’re meeting—I hope—a thief and a murderer.”

Giovanni said something in his own language to Lucian, and Lucian gave a short, ironic laugh.

“Giovanni says why didn’t we discover this place for ourselves, why was it left to you, a girl, to do it.”

“We don’t even know whose place it is.”

“We’ll soon find out,” Lucian said confidently.

This was not so easy, however. A very old servant opened the door. He looked half blind but he had a wrinkled, crafty face which Kate suspected did not miss much. He talked for a little in a high, quavering voice, shrugging his shoulders and waving his hands. Lucian turned to Kate.

“He says the family are all away. They’ve gone to spend the winter in Naples. I think we’ll take a look, all the same. Keep those sharp eyes of yours open, Kate.”

Another inhospitable doorstep, thought Kate. She looked at her watch and her panic grew. Time was running out. Already the daylight was fading. Surely William was not concealed in this large, luxurious house. If he were, he would be making a great noise.

“Make it fast,” Lucian said to Giovanni. “We can pick up less important evidence another time.”

The old man seemed bewildered, but he understood what Giovanni’s badge meant. He hastily stood back, mumbling to himself, as they went in. He did not attempt to follow them, for there seemed nothing to hide. The large reception rooms were dust-sheet shrouded, and upstairs the airy bedrooms, with their fine views of the cypresses and the olive groves, were the same.

At another time Kate would have wanted to linger, looking at the pictures, the statuary and the personal relics of the absent family. As it was, in her despair that this great sleeping house would produce any clue as to William’s whereabouts, she noticed only one significant thing. That was a photograph of a young woman with large, dark, hooded eyes, and a petulant mouth. She was dressed in the style of ten years earlier. It took a second glance for Kate to realize it was Rosita, the woman who had lain languidly on the couch in London and posed as Francesca’s mother.

So Rosita’s natural habitat was not the squalid
Albergo Garibaldi.
It was this expensive villa, with its marble floors and the constant sound of fountains playing.

This information seemed to give both Lucian and Giovanni satisfaction. Their quarry, though absent at present, was being run to earth. But would it be unearthed before the rising of the moon?

“Lucian, William isn’t here. I know he isn’t. The place feels empty. We’re wasting our time.”