Ellen’s attitude to food had initially been one of the sharpest indicators of her very different background. Brought up to assume that women cooked the regional dishes they had learned from their mothers, Zen had at first been both amazed and appalled by Ellen’s eclecticism. He would no more have expected Maria Grazia to make a Venetian dish, let alone a French or Austrian one, than she would have expected to be asked. But at Ellen’s you had to expect anything and everything. A typical meal might begin with a starter from the Middle East followed by a main course from Mexico and a German pudding. Presumably this was an example of the famous American melting-pot, only far from melting, the contents seemed to have retained all their rugged individuality and to jostle each other in a way Zen had found as disquieting as the discovery that the source of these riches was not family or cultural tradition but a shelf of cookery books which Ellen read like novels. Nevertheless, with time he had come to appreciate the experience. If the menu was bizarre, the food itself was very good, and it all made him feel pleasantly sophisticated and cosmopolitan. What new discoveries would he make tonight?
Ellen was given to dressing casually, but the outfit in which she came to the door seemed fairly extreme even by her standards: a sloppy, shapeless sweater and a pair of jeans with paint stains whose colour dated them back more than two years, when she’d redecorated the bathroom. The flowers he presented her with seemed to make her slightly ill at ease.
‘Oh, how lovely. I’ll put them in water.’
‘There’s no hurry, I expect they’re wet enough.’
She led him into the kitchen.
‘I really meant it about the food being simple, you know.’
She held up a colourful shiny packet. Findus 100% Beef American-style Hamburgers, he read incredulously. Was this one of her strange foreign jokes, the kind you had to be a child or an idiot to find funny?
‘I imagine you ate well in Perugia, didn’t you?’ she continued with restless energy. ‘Tell me all about it. What I don’t understand is how the Cook woman ever thought she could get away with it. Surely it was an insane risk to take.’
He sat down at the kitchen table.
‘It only seems like that because the kidnappers were arrested. Of course once I knew what had happened then I started to notice other things. For example, in the phone call to the Milettis which we recorded on the Tuesday, the gang’s spokesman gave the name of a football team, Verona, as a codeword. Pietro should have responded with the name of the team Verona were playing the following Sunday, but he didn’t understand and simply assumed it was a wrong number. Yet the kidnapper, instead of insisting or hanging up, says that’s fine and goes ahead as if the correct response had been given. Which it had, of course, in the original conversation with Ivy. Also the spokesman refers to “the Milettis’ father”, because he knows that the person he’s speaking to is not a member of the family. If he’d been phoning the Milettis direct he’d have said “your father”.’
Ellen ignited the gas under the grill.
‘Go on!’ she told him as she peeled away the rectangles of plastic which kept the hamburgers separate. She seemed more concerned that he might fall silent than interested in what he had to say.
‘Well, you know most of the rest. The kidnapper I spoke to in Florence told me that they’d phoned the same number as was used to arrange details of the kidnapping. The family had never revealed what this was, and I obviously couldn’t approach them directly. But I knew that the gang had used advertisements in a local newspaper as a way for people to get in touch with them. I went to the library and looked through the paper until I found an advertisement that was supposedly for a two-way radio. Phone 8818 after 7, it said. There are no four-digit telephone numbers in a big city like Perugia. But if you read the instructions literally you get a five-digit one, 78818. That was Ivy Cook’s number.’
There was a crinkling sound as Ellen tore off a sheet of aluminium foil to line the grill-pan.
‘What confused the issue slightly was that the kidnapper told me that the person who answered was a man with an accent like mine. For a moment I thought it might have been Daniele. But Ivy’s voice is deep enough to be mistaken for a man’s, and to a shepherd from Calabria her foreign accent sounded like someone from the North. She recorded the kidnappers’ call on the answering machine attached to her phone, edited the tape to cut out her own voice, then telephoned the Milettis the next morning and played it back to Pietro.’
Ellen laid the patties on the foil and slid the pan under the grill.
‘I’m surprised she and Silvio weren’t more cautious,’ she remarked. ‘Talking freely like that in a police station.’
‘They weren’t in a police station, just an anonymous room in an annexe of the prison. But what really put them at their ease was that it all seemed to have been rigged in their favour. I arranged for one of my inspectors to call Silvio and offer to get him in to see Ivy in return for various unspecified favours. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time to people in Silvio’s position, so he found it completely natural. When he arrived, the inspector got rid of Ivy’s guard and made a big point of the fact that he was leaving the two of them alone together. They both assumed that the Miletti family power was working for them as usual. After that it never occurred to them to watch what they were saying. They felt they were on their home ground, as though they owned the place.’
The patties were sizzling away loudly. Ellen kept busy slicing up buns and laying them on top of the grill to warm.
‘Can I do anything?’ he asked.
‘No, you just take it easy.’
Normally she would have asked him to lay the table, but this evening he was being treated as an honoured guest, except that she’d hardly bothered to cook at all. Zen had once seen a film in which people were taken over by aliens from outer space. They looked the same and sounded the same, but somehow they weren’t the same. What had Ellen been taken over by? No sooner had he posed the question than the answer, the only possible answer, presented itself, and everything made sense. But the sense it made was too painful, and he pushed it aside.
‘All the same, so much scheming just to bring one guilty person to justice!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you always go to this much trouble?’
‘Not usually, no. But I was practically being accused of responsibility for Miletti’s death myself. Besides…’
‘What?’
Zen had been going to say that he had personal reasons for wishing fathers’ deaths to be avenged, but he realized that it might sound as if he was fishing for sympathy.
‘It’s not that I’m criticizing you, Aurelio,’ Ellen went on. ‘I’m just staggered, as always, at the way this country works.’
‘Oh, not that again!’
It was intended as a joke, but it misfired.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a tone that was half contrite and half defiant. ‘I won’t say another word.’
She served the hamburgers wrapped in sheets of kitchen paper and brought a litre bottle of Peroni from the fridge. The hamburgers were an unhappy hybrid of American and European elements. The meat, processed cheese and ketchup tried to be as cheerfully undemanding as a good hamburger should, but were shouted down by the Dijon mustard, the pungent onions and the chewy rolls.
Zen began dismantling his hamburger, eating the more appetizing bits with the fork and discarding the rest. Ellen wolfed hers down as though her life depended on it. After a few minutes she lit another cigarette without asking. He took the opportunity to push his plate away.
‘Don’t you like it?’
She sounded almost pleased.
‘It’s delicious. But I had to eat something with my mother. You know how it is.’
Ellen laughed quietly.
‘I surely do.’
The conversation stalled, as if they were two strangers who had exhausted the few topics they had in common.
‘Anyway, what have you been up to?’ he asked her.
She refilled her glass with beer.
‘Well…’
She broke off to puff at her cigarette. But he already knew what she was going to say. She had met someone
