'To Rome. To sort things out,' she said. 'We're going to talk to Di Lanna. He's the only one with enough power to do anything. We will have to get his protection, in effect. I only hope he'll give it. But if we give him his wife's murderer he should owe us something. It's just a pity we can't give him any proof.”
'Just a moment,' Argyll said petulantly. 'What about this?' He waved his hand in the direction of the body. 'You can't just leave him there.”
Bottando looked thoughtful. 'No. You'll have to move it.”
'Me? Why should / move it?”
'You can't expect Mary to. She's not strong enough. And you shouldn't sound so annoyed. If it wasn't for Mary you'd be dead.”
'And now,' said Mary Verney, as they watched the lights of Bottando's car disappear down the track as he and Flavia headed for Rome. 'Perhaps you'd be so kind as to remove that corpse from my terrace, Jonathan?”
Argyll, who thought her levity was a little distasteful, scowled at her. 'No,' he said.
He was beginning to resent being the only normal person left in the world.
'Oh, but you must. You heard the general. I can hardly do it myself, and what if the police should come? Or the grocer? What would they say?”
'I don't care. I'm not going to move him until you are honest with me. I know it doesn't come naturally. It will be an effort, but you'll have to try. Otherwise you'll be stuck with Signer Dossoni on your terrace for the next week.”
'Very threatening of you. And quite insulting, too. I always try to be honest. Most of the time. What do you want to know, exactly?”
'The money. Where is it?”
'What money?”
'The three million dollars.”
'Oh. That money.”
'That money.”
She looked at him, hesitated, then let out a deep breath. 'It's in Switzerland. I took it there last Monday. It's in a bank.”
'In your name?”
'Well, yes. Since you ask. It is.”
Here she stopped, so Argyll prompted her. 'And how did you get hold of it?”
'If you must be so nosy,' she said, 'it's simple enough. Taddeo told me what he was going to do, and I was worried. So I tagged along in my little car and saw the whole encounter, from Sabbatini arriving to his driving off in his van with the picture still inside it. And saw Taddeo hopping up and down in the lay-by looking furious. I followed, at a discreet distance, until Sabbatini stopped at a petrol station. Have you ever noticed that when the excitement fades all you are left with is a profound need to go to the toilet?”
Argyll said that his life was blessedly free of excitement, most of the time. Although now she mentioned it ...
He disappeared into the house for a few moments, and then came back. 'You were saying?' he said, as Mary showed no signs of volunteering information without constant prodding.
'Well, that's how it was with Sabbatini. He ran for the toilet as fast as his legs would carry him, and while he was there, I stole his van.”
She smiled. Argyll scowled. 'Just like that,' he said.
'Pretty much. I mean, he'd taken the keys out, but it was an old van and that was no great trouble. So there we are. Simple, really.”
'And then you hoodwinked the general into thinking . . .”
'Good heavens, no.”
Argyll looked at her for a few moments as it all sank in. 'No?' he said. 'You mean that he knew all about this? He decided to take the money? After all this time he's become a criminal?”
Mary Verney looked puzzled. 'Don't be silly,' she said. 'It's a great embarrassment to both of us. Who wants three million dollars? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to manage that amount of dirty money?”
Argyll said he hadn't.
'It's no easy business. I have quite enough, thank you very much, and Taddeo's tastes are terribly modest when he's not in a restaurant. No. We kept the money as we didn't know what else to do. Sabbatini had been killed, the secret services had gone through his apartment. Taddeo knew the murder had to be something to do with the Di Lanna business and simply did not want to get involved.
Can you blame him, considering what's been going on here? If he'd suddenly turned up with the picture, then he would have had to explain how he got it. Much better to convince everyone that the plot was all to do with money by inventing some nonexistent collaborator for Sabbatini and by keeping it all as distant as possible. At least, that seemed the best idea at the time.”
'You could have told Flavia.”
'She would have been obliged to do something. He did his best to keep her out of it and tried to get her to leave well enough alone. If she'd done as she was told and forgotten about it—as the general told her to, the prime minister told her to, Di Lanna told her to and, I imagine, you told her to as well—then all would have been well. As it is, we now have a mess on our hands.”
'You can't blame her for all this.”
'I'm not blaming anyone. All I know is, if Taddeo had just turned up and handed in the picture, people would have asked how he got it.”
'You could have found it in a ditch.”
'Don't be silly. We couldn't get away with that approach twice. Nearly didn't the first time. Now. Will you please clean up this mess?”
'Just a second,' Argyll said sternly. 'I didn't mean last week. I meant now. You could have told her now that you had the money. Why didn't you?' He scrutinized her face very closely. 'You're going to keep it, aren't you,' he said accusingly.
At least she had the grace to look a little embarrassed.
'After forty years of impeccable, legendary honesty, Bottando comes across you again and within weeks he's walking off with three million dollars stuffed down his trouser leg.' He shook his head. 'You really are quite something.”
'We can worry about all that later,' she said, pointing once more to Dossoni.
'Let's worry about it now.”
'Why?”
'Because you have more money than you need, so you say, and, thanks to you two geriatric hooligans, Flavia is out of a job. And because if you didn't have dishonorable notions about hanging on to the stuff, you would have had no trouble telling Flavia all about it. But you didn't. Bottando told her a direct lie and said he'd handed over the money. A lie, which speaks volumes.”
She grimaced in the manner of someone about to explain something very simple to someone even simpler.
'Jonathan, what were we meant to do with the money? It would have been such a waste to give it back. After all, it was the price of getting the picture back and the picture was returned. I recovered it. And I don't work for nothing, you know.”
'And Bottando agreed?”
'After I'd worked on him a bit. It's remarkable the effect being eased out of a job has on even the most upright of people.”
'Well, I'm not going to be the one to tell all this to Flavia.”
'I should hope not. She'd be most upset. She quite possibly wouldn't understand.”
'But silence, as they say, is an expensive commodity. So we might be able to help each other.”
Mary Verney looked closely at him. 'Dear me,' she said. 'So much for the quiet and inoffensive scholar routine.”
'It's the company I keep,' he replied. 'It rubs off on you. Besides, we putative fathers have to go a-hunting and a-gathering, you know.”
