Diamond Solitaire

Dordoni shrugged. At the door, he appeared to decide, after all, that he would volunteer something else. He turned and delivered a couple of sentences.

Now Pia gave a shrug. 'The car was traveling on a perfectly straight stretch of road. It went out of control, but they don't understand why. They can see from the tire marks that it didn't have a blowout It's an extraordinary thing to happen. They are calling it-I think you have the expression in English-an act of God.'

Later in the afternoon there was an opportunity to get Rico Villa's views on the mysterious car crash. He was dismissive, scornful of the suggestion that arsonists had started the fire. 'Why won't they admit mat coincidences happen? Typical of the police, always looking for the first solution that suggests itself. Two serious incidents on one evening and they have to connect them.'

'Only a couple of miles from each other,' commented David, slipping into Dordoni's role.

'A couple of drunks turn their car over. What's so sinister about that?'

'How do you know they were drunk?'

'You're in Lombardy now, my friend. Have you tried the Oltrepo Pavese?

'They did have those empty petrol cans in their trunk.'

'They were probably farmers. If you have farm vehicles to keep on the move, you collect extra petrol to take back with you.'

'But he said the registration plates were missing.'

'Kids. Souvenir hunters. They'll help themselves to anything.' David wasn't overly impressed, and said so.

'Okay,' Rico lobbed one back, 'in a couple of days we can take a roll call. Then we'll know if anyone from Manflex Italia is missing. Want a bet?'

'The guys in the car don't have to be Manflex employees,' David said. 'Like Dordoni said, they could have been sacked. Or they could simply be troublemakers from outside.'

'Let it go, Dave,' Rico advised, putting a hand on his shoulder. 'We have more important things to do right now. The police are going to take months over this. Years, probably. And then it's quite likely they'll file it as unsolved.'

For the first time in their friendship, David Flexner had a stirring of unease about Rico.

CHAPTER NINE

'What exactly do you do in that school?' Stephanie asked one evening as they waited to eat A chicken casserole in the oven was sending out a rich aroma, but the vegetables still required their seven minutes in the microwave.

'A lot of sitting around.'

'Can't you make yourself useful in some way?'

'Occasionally. Today I was doing the job I do best-putting a jigsaw together. An eight-piece jigsaw.' Diamond offered the statement blandly, knowing Stephanie would pounce on it. Sometimes he took a wry pleasure in being the prey to his wife's sharp remarks.

'How many pieces went missing?'

'Unkind! Not a single one. They're the size of your hand.'

'This is for the children's benefit, I take it?'

'Naturally.'

'So you work with them, fitting the pieces together?'

He smiled. 'Some hope! I fit them together and they pull them apart.'

'Does Naomi join in?'

His voice altered, the byplay over. 'Naomi? No.'

'Why not? Jigsaws are pretty basic, when all's said and done. Language isn't involved.'

'She doesn't join in anything. She's completely passive.'

'Maybe she's terrified of the others.'

'She was like this before she was brought to the school.'

'Terrified?'

Diamond nodded. She was almost certainly right.

'But they insist she's autistic?' Stephanie asked.

'The diagnosis isn't carved in stone,' he said. 'Anyway, as far as I can tell it's a convenient label for a pretty broad spectrum of maladjusted kids. Give, for instance, has these tantrums and has to find some corner of the room he considers the safest from invasion. Naomi's not like that She'll sit where she's told. She's silent. Totally switched off. Her behavior is nothing like Clive's, but they're both thought to be autistic. Is that ready?'

He'd been interrupted by five electronic bleeps. The microwave oven was a symbol of more affluent times. He'd bought it on the day he resigned from the police, but it looked older than that, copiously speckled during the redecoration of the kitchen. Some of the marks had been impossible to remove.

'Standing time,' Stephanie reminded him. 'The veggies need their standing time. I don't know if you remember Maxine Beckington, one of the Brownies. She didn't last very long with us, but she was a bright little thing.'

'That was probably why,' said Diamond.

'Why what?'

'Why she didn't last. If she was as bright as you say, she probably objected to dancing around the toadstool on the grounds that it was a phallic symbol.'

She gave him a glare. The Brownie movement wasn't a topic for levity. 'I was about to tell you that Maxine's mother had another child, a boy, and he was the envy of all the other mothers because he was such a contented baby, willing to lie in his pram for as long as they left him. I saw him myself-a beautiful child with gorgeous big blue eyes. He never cried. They never missed a night's sleep. But after a time, this angelic baby started to make them uneasy. They realized he didn't cry even when he was hungry. If they hadn't fed him as a matter of routine, he would have starved, still without complaining. It was uncanny. What started out as a blessing turned out to be deeply worrying, and with good reason. He was eventually found to be autistic. Your Naomi sounds similar.'

Diamond pondered the suggestion. 'Yes, I can imagine her as a baby acting like that, but we shouldn't make these comparisons.'

'Why not?'

'It's unscientific, that's why. One thing I've learned from Julia Musgraye is that autism has to be diagnosed by an expert. You can't pick out a single symptom as typical. Any characteristic you name-the aloofness, the odd movements some of them make, the difficulties with speech-could be the result of some other condition. You recognize autism by a whole range of things. And they vary. Not all autistic babies behave like the kid you just described. Some of them fight and scream from day one and refuse to be comforted.'

'Dreadful for the mothers,' Stephanie concurred. 'And they look like normal children.'

'Prettier, sometimes. You used a word to describe that baby: angelic. Autistic kids tend to have large eyes and remarkably symmetrical features. They really seem to be otherworldly.'

'Is Naomi like that?'

'Well, yes.'

'Does she scream and fight?'

'Never.'

'What if she's provoked?'

Diamond frowned at the idea. 'No one wants to give the kid a hard time. She's had enough shocks already.'

'Don't the other children sometimes bother her?'

'They don't fight each other. They're too enclosed in their own worlds.'

Stephanie picked up the oven gloves and took out the casserole. Together they served up the meal. When they had savored a few mouthfuls, Diamond said, 'I'd like to know how the geniuses at the Police Training College would cope with young Naomi. She'd test their information-gathering techniques all right.'