'What time was it?' he said.
'I'm not sure… After lunch. We'd eaten out lunch.'
'Where was your husband, when you telephoned him?'
'In his office. He's always there by two.
Miranda was exhausted as well as tearful. Eagler, who was having to ask his questions over the clumsy barrier of the front seats, made a sketchy stab at patting her hand in a fatherly way. She interpreted the intention behind the gesture and wept the harder, choking over the details of red swimming trunks, no shoes, brown eyes, fair hair, no scars, suntanned skin… they'd been at the seaside for nearly two weeks… they were going home on Saturday.
'She ought to go home to her husband tonight,' I said to Eagler, and although he nodded, Miranda vehemently protested.
'He's so angry with me…' she wailed.
'You couldn't help it,' I said. 'The kidnappers have probably been waiting their chance for a week or more. Once your husband realises…'
But Miranda shook her head and said I didn't understand.
'That dinghy,' Eagler said thoughtfully, 'the one which burnt… had you seen it on the beach on any other day?'
Miranda glanced at him vaguely as if the question were unimportant. 'The last few days have been so windy… we haven't sat on the beach much. Not since the weekend, until today. We've mostly been by the pools but Dominic doesn't like that so much because there's no sand '
'The hotel has a pool?' Eagler asked.
'Yes, but last week we were always on the beach… Everything was so simple, just Dominic and me.' She spoke between sobs, her whole body shaking.
Eagler glanced at me briefly, 'Mr Douglas, here,' he said to Miranda, 'he says you'll get him back safe. We all have to act calmly, Mrs Nerrity. Calm and patience, that's the thing. You've had a terrible shock, I'm not trying to minimise it, but what we have to think of now is the boy. To think calmly for the boy's sake.'
Alessia looked from Eagler to me and back again. 'You're both the same,' she said blankly. 'You've both seen so much suffering… so much distress. You both know how to make it so that people can hold on… It makes the unbearable… possible.'
Eagler gave her a look of mild surprise; and in a totally unconnected thought I concluded that his clothes hung loosely about him because he'd recently lost weight.
'Alessia herself was kidnapped,' I explained to him. 'She knows too much about it,' I outlined briefly what had happened in Italy, and mentioned the coincidence of the horses.
His attention focused in a thoroughly Sherlockian manner.
'Are you saying there's a positive significance?'
I said, 'Before Alessia I worked on another case in Italy in which the family sold their shares in a racecourse to raise the ransom.'
He stared. 'You do, then, see a… a thread?'
'I fear there's one, yes.'
'Why fear?' Alessia asked.
'He means,' Eagler said, 'that the three kidnaps have been organised by the same perpetrator. Someone normally operating within the racing world and consequently knowing which targets to hit. Am I right?'
'On the button,' I agreed, talking chiefly to Alessia. 'The choice of target is often a prime clue to the identity of the kidnappers. I mean… to make the risks worthwhile, most kidnappers make sure in advance that the family or business actually can pay a hefty ransom. Of course every family will pay what they can, but the risks are just as high for a small ransom as a large, so it makes more sense to aim for the large. To know, for instance, that your father is much richer than the father of most other jockeys, girls or not.'
Alessia's gaze seemed glued to my face. 'To know… that the man who owns Ordinand has a son…?' She stopped, the sentence unfinished, the thought trotting on.
'Yes,' I said.
She swallowed. 'It costs just as much to keep a bad horse in training as a good one. I mean, I do clearly understand what you're saying.'
Miranda seemed not to have been listening but the tears had begun to dry up, like a storm passing.
'I don't want to go home tonight,' she said in a small voice. But if I go… Alessia, will you come with me?'
Alessia looked as if it were the last thing she could face and I answered on her behalf, 'No, Mrs Nerrity, it wouldn't be a good idea. Have you a mother, or a sister… someone you like? Someone your husband likes?'
Her mordant look said as much as words about the current state of her marriage, but after a moment or two she said faintly, 'I suppose… my mother.'
That's right,' Eagler said paternally. 'Now would you two ladies just wait a few minutes while I walk a little way with Mr Douglas?'
'We won't be out of sight, I said.
All the same they both looked as insecure as ever as we opened the front doors and climbed out. I looked back as we walked away and waggled a reassuring hand at their two anxious heads showing together from the rear seat.
'Very upsetting,' Eagler observed as we strolled away. 'But she'll get her kid back, with a bit of luck, not like some I've dealt with. Little kids snatched at random by psychos and murdered… sexual, often. Those mothers… Heartbreaking. Rotten. And quite often we know the psychos. Know they'll probably do something violent one day. Kill someone. We can often arrest them within a day of the body being found. But we can't prevent them. We can't keep them locked up for ever, just in case. Nightmare, those people. We've got one round here now. Time bomb waiting to go off. And some poor kid, somewhere, will be cycling along, or walking, at just the wrong time, just the wrong place. Some woman's kid. Something triggers the psycho. You never know what it is. Something small. Tips them over. After, they don't know why they've done it, like as not.'
'Mm,' I said. 'Worse than kidnappers. With them there's always hope.'
During his dissertation he'd given me several sideways glances: reinforcing his impressions, I thought. And I too had been doing the same, getting to know what to expect of him, good or bad. Occasionally someone from Liberty Market came s across a policeman who thought of us as an unnecessary nuisance encroaching on their jealously-guarded preserves, but on the whole they accepted us along the lines of if you want to understand a wreck, consult a diver.
'What can you tell me that you wouldn't want those two girls to hear?' he asked.
I gave him a small smile; got reserved judgement back.
'The man who kidnapped Alessia,' I said, 'recruited local talent. He recruited one, who roped in another five. The carabinieri have arrested those six, but the leader vanished. He called himself Giuseppe, which will do for now. We produced a drawing of him and flooded the province with it, with no results. I'll let you have a copy of it, if you like,' I paused. 'I know it's a long shot. This horse thing may be truly and simply a coincidence.'
Eagler put his head on one side. 'File it under fifty-fifty, then.'
'Right. And there's today's note…'
'Nothing Italian about that, eh?' Eagler looked genial. 'But local talent? Just the right style for local talent, wouldn't you say?'
'Yes, I would.'
'Just right for an Italian leaning over the local talent's shoulder saying in broken English 'tell her to telephone her husband, tell her not to inform the police'.' He smiled fleetingly. 'But that's all conjecture, as they say.'
We turned as of one accord and began to stroll back to the car.
'The girl jockey's a bit jumpy still,' he said. 'It does that to them. Some are jumpy with strangers for ever.'
'Poor girl,' he said, as if he hadn't thought of freedom having problems; victims naturally being vastly less interesting than villains to the strong arm of the law.
I explained about Tony Vine being at that moment with John Nerrity, and said that Nerrity's local force would also by now know about Dominic. Eagler noted the address and said he would 'liaise'.
'I expect Tony Vine will be in charge from our point of view,' I said. 'He's very bright, if you have any dealings with him.'
'All right.'
We arranged that I would send the photostats of Giuseppe and a report on Alessia's kidnapping down to him on the first morning train; and at that point we were back at the car,
'Right then, Mr Douglas.' He shook my hand limply as if sealing a bargain, as different from Pucinelli as a tortoise from a hare; one wily, one sharp, one wrinkled in his carapace, one leanly taut in his uniform, one always on the edge of his nerves, one avuncularly relaxed.
I thought that I would rather be hunted by Pucinelli, any day.
ELEVEN
John Nerrity was a heavily-built man of medium height with greying hair cut neat and short; clipped moustache to match. On good days I could imagine him generating a fair amount of charm, but on that evening I saw only a man accustomed to power who had married a girl less than half his age and looked like regretting it.
They lived in a large detached house on the edge of a golf course near Sutton, south of London, only about three miles distant from where their four-legged wonder had made a fortune on Epsom Downs.
The exterior of the house, in the dusk of our arrival, had revealed itself as thirties-developed Tudor, but on a restrained and successful scale. Inside, the carpets wall-to-wall looked untrodden, the brocade chairs un-sat-on, the silk cushions unwrinkled, the paper and paint unscuffed. Unfaded velvet curtains hung in stiff regular folds from beneath elaborate pelmets, and upon several glass and chromium coffee tables lay large glossy books, unthumbed. There were no photographs and no flowers, and the pictures had been chosen to occupy wall-space, not the mind; the whole thing more like a shop-window than the home of a little boy.
John Nerrity was holding a gin and tonic with ice clinking and lemon slice floating, a statement in itself of his resistance to crisis. I couldn't imagine Paolo Cenci organising ice and lemon six hours after the first ransom demand: it had been almost beyond him to pour without spilling.
With Nerrity were Tony Vine, wearing his most enigmatic expression, and another man, sour of mouth and bitter of eye, who spoke with Tony's accent and looked vaguely, in his flannels and casual sweater, as if he'd been out for a stroll with his dog.
'Detective Superintendent Rightsworth,' Tony said, introducing him deadpan. 'Waiting to talk to Mrs Nerrity.'
Rightsworth gave me barely a nod, and that more of repression than of acknowledgement. One of those, I thought. A civilian-hater. One who thought of the police as 'us' and the public as 'them', the 'them' being naturally inferior. It always surprised me that policemen of that kind got promoted, but Rightsworth was proof enough that they did. The old ridiculous joke of 'Where do the police live? In Letsby Avenue,' crossed my mind; and Popsy would have appreciated my struggle to keep a straight face.
Alessia and Miranda had come into the sitting room close together and a step behind me, as if using me as a riot shield: and it was clear from John Nerrity's face that the first sight of his wife
