up the stairs.
The seventh floor lights were fully on. The marksmen had converged on a section where armchairs and settees were displayed. But they weren't in the attitude of gunmen. They were lounging about as if at a wine and cheese party. Two were seated on the arms of chairs. There was no sign of anyone under arrest.
Suddenly cold with his own sweat, Kenton went over with the others. 'But you said you found someone?'
One of them flicked his eyes downwards, towards a sofa.
It was the kind of vast, black corduroy thing that an advertising executive would have in his outer office. At one end was a heap of scatter cushions, brilliant in color. The face looking out from under the cushions was that of a small girl, her hair black and fringed, her eyes Asian in shape. Nothing else of her was visible.
Kenton stared in bewilderment.
'Ah, so,' said the senior policeman.
CHAPTER TWO
'You're sacking me.' Peter Diamond, the guard responsible for section nine on the night the child was found, spoke without rancor. 'I know the score.'
The score was heavily against him. He wasn't young. Forty-eight, according to his file. Married. Living in West Ken. No kids. An ex-policeman. He'd got to the rank of detective superintendent and then resigned from Avon and Somerset over some dispute with the Assistant Chief Constable. A misunderstanding, someone said, someone who knew someone. Diamond had been too proud to ask for his job back. After quitting the police, he'd taken a series of part-time jobs and finally moved to London and joined the Harrods team.
'I shouldn't say this, Peter,' the security director told him, 'but you're blood unlucky. Your record here has been exemplary apart from this. You could have looked forward to a more senior post'
'Rules are rules.'
'Unfortunately, yes. We'll do the best we can in the way of a reference, but, er…'
'… security jobs are out, right?' said Diamond. He was inscrutable. Fat men-and he was fat-often have faces that seem on the point of turning angry or amused. The trick is to guess which.
The director didn't mind exhibiting his own unease. He shook his head and spread his hands in an attitude of helplessness. 'Believe me, Peter, I feel sick to the stomach about this.'
'Spare me that'
'I mean it I'm not confident I would have spotted the kid myself. She was practically invisible under the cushions.'
'I lifted the cushions,' Diamond admitted.
'Oh?'
'She wasn't on that sofa when I did my round. I definitely checked. I always do. It's an obvious place to plant a device. The kid must have been somewhere else and got under them later.'
'How could you have missed her?'
'I reckon I took her for one of the cleaners' kids. They bring them in sometimes. Some of them are Vietnamese.'
'She's Japanese, I think.'
Diamond snapped out of his defeated mood. 'You
'Not yet.'
'Doesn't she know her name?'
'Hasn't spoken a word since she was found. Over at the nick, they spent the whole of today with a string of interpreters trying to coax her to say something. Not a syllable.'
'She isn't dumb, is she?'
'Apparently not, but she says nothing intelligible. There's almost no reaction from the child.'
'Deaf?'
'No. She reacts to sound. It's a mystery.'
'They'll have to go on TV with her. Someone will know her. A kid found in Harrods at night-it's just the sort of story the media pick up on.'
'No doubt.'
'You don't sound convinced.'
'I'm convinced, Peter, all too easily convinced. But there are other considerations, not least our reputation. I don't particularly want it broadcast that a little girl penetrated our security. If the press get on to you, I'd appreciate your not making any statements.'
'About security? I wouldn't.'
'Thank you.'
'But you can't muzzle the police. They have no interest in keeping the story confidential. It's going to break somewhere, and soon.'
A sigh from the director, followed by an uncomfortable silence.
'So when do I clear my locker?' Diamond asked. 'Right away?'
CHAPTER THREE
The priest looked into the widow's trusting eyes and rashly told her, 'It's not as if it's the end of the world.'
The words of comfort were spoken on a fine summer evening in the sitting room of a country villa in Lombardy, between Milan and Cremona. Pastoral care, Father Faustini termed it Ministering to the bereaved, the sacred obligation of a priest. True, the ministering in mis instance had continued longer than was customary, actually into a second year. But Claudia Coppi, cruelly widowed at twenty-eight, was an exceptional case.
Giovanni, the husband, had been killed freakishly, struck by lightning on a football field. 'Why did it have to be my husband when twenty-one other players, the referee and two linesmen were out there?' Claudia demanded of the priest each time he came on a visit. 'Is that the Lord's will? My Giovanni, of all those men?'
Father Faustini always reminded Claudia that the Lord works in mysterious ways. She always gazed at him trustingly with her large, dark, expressive eyes (she had worked as a fashion model) and he always told her that it was a mistake to dwell on the past.
The priest and the young widow were seated on a padded cushion that extended around the perimeter of the sunken floor. As usual, Claudia had hospitably uncorked a Barolo, a plummy vintage from Mascarello, and there were cheese biscuits to nibble. The sun had just about sunk out of sight, but to have switched on electric lights on such an evening would have been churlish. The scent of stocks, heavy on the cooler air, reached them through the open patio doors. The villa had a fine garden, watered by a sprinkler system. Giovanni, not short of money-he'd made it to the top as a fashion photographer-had called in a landscape architect when the place was built. For Father Faustini, the remote location of the villa meant a three-mile trip on his moped, but he never complained. He was forty and in good health. A rugged man with tight, black curls and a thick moustache.
'You're doing so much better, now,' he remarked to the widow Coppi.
'It's window dressing, Father. Inside, I'm still very tense.'
'Really?' He frowned, and only partly out of concern for the tension she was under. It was a good thing the room had become so shadowy that his disquietude wouldn't be obvious to her.
'My usual problem,' she explained. 'Stress. It shows up in the muscles. I feel it in my shoulders, right across the top.'
'As before?'
There was a silence. Father Faustini was experiencing some tension, also.
Claudia said, 'Last week you really succeeded in loosening the muscles.'
