Dunster (29 page)

‘How did you manage it?'

‘Well, Jenny was shouting at me from the top of the stairs and asking if I thought that Sir Crispin Bellhanger was more important than her and the children. You know what I said?'

He had started on the complimentary champagne as we crossed the Channel and was now in a confiding mood.

‘No. Tell me.'

‘I said, “At the moment, I'm afraid, yes.'” He was smiling at the memory of his moment of daring. ‘You see, I was careful to put that in, “at the moment”. I mean, this case will soon be over and naturally Jenny and the children are more important to me in the long run. Over the years. She'll understand that, won't she, when she has time to think about it?'

‘Let's hope so.'

‘All the same' – Justin had now got himself worried – ‘I think I'd better ring her this evening. If we can find a phone.' We might have been going into the depths of the jungle where communications were by tom-tom only. ‘How many nights do you think we'll be away?'

‘Didn't we say two?'

‘Oh, I told Jenny three. I thought we might pop along to Florence on the way back.' Then his face cleared and the holiday spirit returned, imagine the pure joy of seeing the Uffizi without having the children in tow!'

We booked in to the Hotel Internazionale in Bologna and met Dr Picchioni, a notary employed by Justin Glover's firm to take any sworn statement the former lance corporal might care to make. We had dinner in a restaurant not far from the Neptune fountain, and Justin Glover telephoned before he left the hotel. During our tortellini he was sunk in gloom.

‘Things all right at home?' I asked.

‘Actually, no.' And then he brightened up and said, ‘I don't suppose we'll be able to ring from Maltraverso, will we?'

Or Picchtoni was small, neat and unexpectedly young, wearing a dark suit and tie despite the stifling Italian summer. He spoke impeccable English and treated us with a sort of amused suspicion, as though he knew exactly what game we were playing. He had already been in touch with Natty Suiting. ‘He is frightened to death,' he said, ‘that he'll be arrested as a deserter.'

I drove the car we hired at the airport out of Bologna and on to the motorway to Florence. The road was built high over great gorges and kept plunging into the blackness of tunnels and emerging into dazzling sunshine. The mountains towered above us, stony slopes which the snow had covered for much of the time that Cris and his men fought their secret battles behind the Gothic Line held by the Germans. I got the bit about the Gothic Line from the guidebook Justin had bought for the occasion. It also told us that the Apennines bred wolves, so that the sheep were guarded, on the lower slopes, by very large and savage dogs. Some wolves, it seems, might still be about, but bears, present in Roman times, were to be found no more, nor were wild goats. Maltraverso is a small town used as a winter resort by those with a taste for mountains. The Hotel Gandolfo, one star, was closed during the month of August. Otherwise the town seemed to be of no special historical or architectural interest. The Bar della Luna received no stars whatever

When we had taken the Maltraverso turn-off and the road was climbing steadily towards the grey peaks, we passed a collection of small signs pointing up a steeper, narrower road and there I saw the word I had learnt to dread Pomeriggio.

‘The scene of the crime,' Justin said, and added, apparently in case I didn't understand English, ‘the
locus in quo
. Do you want to go and take a view?'

I didn't but I said. ‘Do you think we ought to?'

‘Might as well."

So I started to climb towards the sky, along the edge of a precipice which led down to the service stations and the motorway, which were, as we drove up higher, shrouded in a mist which might have been a cloud. The road was lined with dramatic warnings of danger, hairpin bends, steep ascents, uneven surfaces and there were no white lines. We were also warned of rocks falling on us from the cliffs above. ‘CADUTA MASSI' – Justin, still in holiday mood, was laughing at his little joke – ‘wonderful name for an opera-singer!'

What was Pomeriggio? A village or a town? The guidebook, once again, was silent on the subject. It had an old and crumbling wall but inside its arches only a small square, a church, a post office and one steep main street. I here was some sort of municipal building, so perhaps it was the capital of a small area of the rocky and precipitous countryside. Cris's description was forever stuck in my mind and I expected a ghost town, with a street only prowled by uncared-for dogs and cats, doors banging in the wind. Whatever toll the massacre had taken of the small population, life had returned to Pomeriggio. Women were crowding the few shops and men, perhaps not as old as in other towns but old enough to have stopped working, sat on chairs outside the café ordering nothing. Across the street a banner hung advertising a forthcoming Festa di L'Unita; no doubt there would be coloured lights and stalls in the street and young men and girls dancing. I doubted whether anyone in Pomeriggio knew that an English court was about to decide who had blown up their church and murdered their relatives almost half a century before and I wondered how much any of them would care.

We drove round the walls and found the unmade road leading to the place in the photograph I had seen, it seemed years ago, in the office of Streetwise Productions. On a rocky promontory, once the site of the Chiesa Nuova, there was an iron cross over a plaque. Dr Picchioni translated:
In honour of the people of Pomeriggio. murdered by the German Army of occupation in the Church of Saint Magdalena in Tears, 23 October 1944.
They had not been entirely forgotten because there were fresh flowers at the foot of the cross. Justin Glover took a photograph of the inscription ‘for whatever evidential value it might have'. Then we drove away from Pomeriggio and I have never been there since, although the sight of that bleak spot where a church full of people was once blown into eternity is impossible to forget.

‘They can't hold it against me now. Not what happened all those years ago. That wouldn't be fair, would it? Not that the army was fair to me, not always.'

I had heard it said so often that it seemed to have become a sort of theme song, the introductory music instantly recognizable whenever Pomeriggio was mentioned. Jaunty had said it, and Lester Maddocks, and now Signor Andreini – disowning all responsibility for the actions of Lance Corporal Sweeting – was taking up the all too familiar melody.

He had a face like a puzzled sheep, a turned-down nose and bewildered eyes, crowned with a woolly mat of grey hair. He was shapeless and clumsy and he had cut himself shaving. There was blood on his collar, although his white shirt was otherwise carefully laundered and ironed. What surprised me most was his voice; it was a middle-class bleat, rising at times to a high note of complaint, at others inviting us to join him in laughing at his own misfortunes.

We sat round a table near the ‘Toilette' in the shadowy recesses of the Bar della Luna, away from the sunlight and the zinc bar, the hissing coffee-machine and the big glass doors letting in the sunlight. We were shut away behind a white coffin full of ice-cream and a glass cabinet in which the cakes and
paninis
were ranged like geological specimens. On the wall a glossy print ‘Christ, the Light of the World' looked gravely down on us, the Pope smiled in a knowing fashion and the Maltraverso football team looked grimly determined.

‘I was a hopeless sort of a soldier, anyway. My father was terribly disappointed when I didn't get a commission. Dropped my rifle on the parade-ground. I was always doing things like that so I had to go in through the ranks. “Rank outsider”, that's what my father called me. I don't think he was joking. What I'm trying to tell you is this.' Words came pouring out of him; it was as though he had spent years in solitary confinement. ‘I was always hopeless. I never managed to please them, even when we were in the mountains when you wouldn't think they'd have been bothered about all the rules and regulations. And I was always losing things. Or not keeping up when we started to run. You see, I'm sure they were glad to see the back of me. So they wouldn't hold it against me now, that I wandered off, as you might say. I don't think I could stand prison. Not at my age. Prison must be very much like the army. Don't you think it must be like that?'

Natty Suiting was not talking about the deaths of the churchgoers but about the fact that he had abandoned his previous existence in favour of the calm, grey-haired woman who sat watching us, unable to understand a single word we were saying. She must once have been as urgently desirable as their youngest daughter, a girl with long, naked arms, shiny black hair and brown eyes, who was laughing as she served a group of admiring young men. The choice between her and carrying on a terrifying war with Cris and Sergeant Blaker, now dead, and Jaunty Blair must have been a clear one. He was right; it would have been hard to punish this elderly Italian for what he might have done when he was someone else entirely.

‘We haven't come about your desertion,' Justin Glover said. ‘No one wants to see you in prison, Mr Sweeting.'

‘Signor Andreini' He smiled round at us apologetically but insisted on his new identity.

‘I beg your pardon. Mr Andreini,' Justin corrected himself. ‘You have absolutely nothing to fear from us.'

Natty seemed reassured and was silent for a moment. Then he looked at me and I thought I detected, behind the sheep-like innocence, a sort of cunning, which he might have picked up during long years of running the Bar della Luna. ‘Well, then,' he said, ‘what
are
you interested in exactly?'

‘My firm acts for Sir Crispin Bellhanger.' Justin Glover took charge of the meeting, it's been suggested that he was in command when you and Sergeant Blaker and another man called Lester Maddocks blew up the church.'

‘There ought to be a pardon issued. A free pardon. From the Queen or someone like that.'

‘You mean a pardon for blowing up a church?' Justin Glover's voice had acquired a note of professional irritation.

‘I think,' I said, ‘Signor Andreini is still worried about the desertion.'

‘Desertion? You couldn't call it that. I was no good to them. No good at all. I was just' – Natty invited me to join in the joke – ‘just relieving them of my company. I did that one night. I ran then. You can't believe how I ran. I got here and the first person I met was Constanzia.' He looked across at the old woman and stopped smiling. ‘She was outside her house. It was very early in the morning and she was filling a bucket from a tap. I made all sorts of signs to her. I was hungry and tired and she took me in. Her and her family. I couldn't understand it. I'd never had much success with girls in Dorking. That was where we lived. My father was a headmaster. Very keen on the army, my father. I remember he gave me toy soldiers at Christmas and I never played with them. They always got broken though. Now I think Constanzia and her family knew the war was ending and they wanted me to marry her and take her to England. But I couldn't go back, could I, because I'd broken the law? You understand. Constanzia never picked up any English. Other people taught me Italian. I took to it quite easily. Well, I didn't have much choice.

‘My father's dead, of course. But I've got a married sister in Dorking. I'd like to go back. I'd really like to. I'm getting tired of all this Andreini business. I'd like to be myself again. Not pick up where I left off. I could never do that. You mentioned Captain Bellhanger. He could help in my case, if anyone could.'

‘I think he wants you to help in his,' I told him.

‘Let's hope we can help each other. The man who was here before you, he promised he'd look into my case. Let on he'd get questions asked in Parliament. I had high hopes, but he's done nothing whatever about it. Just my luck.'

So Dunster had sat there, in the shadows at the back of the Bar della Luna, by the
paninis
and the ice-cream and ‘Christ, the Light of the World', and offered the one bribe that meant anything to its owner. Knowing Dunster, I didn't believe that he'd offered it deliberately or with intent to deceive, but he was enthusiastic and had promised too much, over-excited by being told the story that, above all others, he wanted to hear.

‘Would Captain Bellhanger help with the free pardon side of things? Would he? He was always kind to me. You know he called me Natty Suiting, because I was so hopeless with the spit and polish.'

‘I don't think we can promise anything.'

‘But?'

‘What?'

‘There's always a “but”, isn't there? You can't promise me but...'

‘I feel we can go so far as to say this –' Justin Glover, who didn't, it seemed, intend to come all this way just for a trip round the Uffizi, offered his sweetener in the most judicial language possible. ‘My firm would represent you in any application you wish to make to the proper authorities. And I've no doubt Sir Crispin would be prepared to give you a good character and speak highly of your war service. That is, until you saw fit to leave the army.'

‘I told you I promised to take Constanzia to England. I've disappointed her and I'm not sure she's ever forgiven me, to be quite honest with you.' Signora Andreini sat with her hands folded in her lap, gazing into the middle distance without expression. ‘That's the trouble with me, I'm afraid I disappoint people. I suppose I disappointed Captain Bellhanger too, that night I ran away. It's very decent of him. He wants to help me, do you say?'

‘Our client Sir Crispin Bellhanger tells us' – the lawyers' phrases sounded more than usually ridiculous in the back of the bar where the proprietor was lost in dreams of Dorking – ‘that on the night the church was blown up he and you and the others were destroying an enemy ammunition shed some miles to the south of Pomeriggio.'