pensions, fiddling savings.'
'Those pensioners, those savers, they just happen, young man, to pay fucking taxes.
Those taxes are your wages. Don't you get on a high-and-mighty horse and forget where your bread comes from.'
For a moment Harry closed his eyes. He squeezed the lids tight shut. He took a big breath.
'Can I walk in again? Can we start again?'
The coffee dribbled from the sides of the detective superintendent's mouth. 'Please yourself, and keep it short.'
'What I'm saying is this. We have a trace that is just routine on this tosser Giles Blake, bank disclosure on a cash deposit. We run the check on his accounts. Nothing special, no alarms, except that it's not clear where the wealth comes from. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we'd say that's as far as it runs, file it and drop it. But, you authorize an evening's surveillance, and Mr bloody Blake takes an Italian to dinner, and they talk about nothing that is illegal. File it and drop it. But the Italian says he's come from Palermo. But the Italian has given the hotel a false name, a false address. We don't know who he is. But his telephone records indicate that from his room he called a travel agent for his flight back to Milan and the non-existent address, a limousine company for a ride to the airport using the fictional name. But there was one more call from his room. He rang a Devon number. He rang a number listed as belonging to David Parsons. That's where I want to go, to see Mr David Parsons.'
'Why can't the locals-?'
'Christ, don't you understand?'
'Steady, young man.'
'Don't you understand? I repeat myself, what we do is trivia. Trivia are good for the statistics. We lift enough second-rate people on second-rate scams, and you get to make commander, and I get to make inspector, and we get pissed together, and we are achieving damn-all. But, don't worry, it's easy and it gets fast results, and aren't we bloody clever?'
He was on the edge. Over the edge was insubordination, was a bollocking, was a mark on his file. Maybe it was last night's drink, perhaps it was the tiredness, could have been the row with Fliss. It didn't seem to matter to Harry Compton that he was on the edge.
'Then, onto your plate falls something that might just be interesting. Can't quantify it, can't put bloody time and motion to it, can't put a balance sheet on it. Might spend a week or two weeks or a month, and might get nothing. No, it's not for the locals, it's our shout and I want to go to Devon.'
The boss-man hesitated. It was always that way with the boss, because the man was a bully. If the boss's shin were kicked, if he had pain, then he usually crumpled, what Harry had learned. 'I don't know
…'
'If you're trying to send a message, then the message is being heard. Looks to me that you're saying that Fraud Squad can chase greedy little bastards with their fingers in the pensions accounts and the savings accounts, but we're not smart enough for the international scene. I hear you. The big time is too complex for S06, like we're not fit enough to run on dry sand where it gets to hurt. I hear you.'
'For two days, when you've got your in-tray down to half empty, not before,' the detective superintendent said, sour. 'And get the fuck out of here.'
Four days gone, and the excitement had drained. Four days gone in a numbed routine of getting up, getting the kids dressed, getting the kids their breakfast, getting small Mario to school, getting Francesca to kindergarten, getting baby Mauro changed. Charley was four days into the routine and was bored. She sat at the iron-legged table on the patio and she wrote her first postcards.
It was four days since she had gone down to the town and stood by the Saracen tower and pressed the button on her wrist-watch, and looked around and tried so desperately to see him and failed. That had been the last moment of excitement. For God's sake, she hadn't come to Sicily to walk the kids to school and kindergarten, to deal with a baby's stinking backside, to skivvy for Angela Ruggerio. She'd come, spit it out, sunshine, she'd come to gain the access that would lead to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. Who?
What for? Why? A postcard for her mother and father, and another for her uncle, and another for the 2B class. All the week Peppino had been in Palermo, not come to Mondello, and Angela said that her husband had too much work in the city to be able to come back to them in the evenings. Now, that was just plain ridiculous because it was twenty minutes' drive in that big bloody fast car from central Palermo to Mondello.
On the postcards Charley didn't say that she was bored out of her mind. 'Having a wonderful time – weather brilliant – soon be warm enough to swim, Love, Charley.' The same for her parents and for her uncle and for the 2B class.
She had come because she had decided she was trapped at home, netted at work. But nothing bloody well happened here either, except that she fussed round the kids and changed the baby and swept the bloody floors. God. Come on, speak the bloody truth: Charley Parsons had come to Sicily because Axel Moen had told her to. She wrote the addresses on the cards, a fast and clumsy hand. Damn Axel Moen. What did he mean to her? Meant nothing, and she threw the pen down onto the table top. God, and just once he could have said something decent, could have given her something that was praise, something that was bloody compassion.
She had come with the excitement holding her. Like when she had gone to the home of the lecturer at college, the first time, and known his wife was away, and worn the sheer blouse and no bra, and drunk his wine, and stripped for him in front of the open fire, and climbed on him as they did in the films. That had been excitement, till the dull fart had cried. Like when she had walked to the caravan at the edge of the camp site at Brightlingsea where the long-term activists lived who each day tried to break the police cordons and halt the trucks carrying the animals to the continental abattoirs, gone to the caravan where Packy slept, with the cap in her hip pocket, walked to his caravan because the other girls said he'd a prick bigger than a horse's… That had been excitement, till the stupid bugger had spurted before he'd even got over her. Hey, sunshine, excitement's for books. The villa was a mortuary, it was the death of excitement.
It was the third day that piccolo Mario and Francesca had been to school and kindergarten, and Charley thought they were like a pit-prop to their mother. She seemed to weaken when they were gone from her sight. Charley, too damn right, she'd tried. Tried to make conversation, tried to earn some laughter back – a lost bloody cause. Some mornings Angela went into Palermo, some mornings she stayed in her room. Some afternoons Angela walked with the children, some afternoons she went, remote, to a sunbed at the bottom of the garden. Charley tried, Charley failed, to get through to her. Charley giggled, Charley remembered the face of the mistress at school who taught sixth-form history and who'd come to hammer the Civil War into them the morning after the miserable cow's husband had moved out to set up home with a nineteen- year-old boy, same school. God, that was bloody cruel, but it was the face of Angela Ruggerio, struggling to keep the appearance, and tortured… Charley would try, and fail, and try again. As though she were haunted, as though…
The gardener watched her. Whenever Charley was outside the gardener was always close, with the hose for the plants, with the broom for the paths, with the fork for the weeds, always near to her, where he could see her. One day, bloody certain, one day she'd put a towel on the grass and lie on it, and give the 'lechie' something to look at.
One day…
'Charley. Do you know what is the time, Charley?'
She turned. She looked towards the open patio doors.
'It's all right, Angela, I've not forgotten the time, about ten minutes, then I'm off for them.'
Angela Ruggerio stood in the doorway. It made Charley miserable to see her, to see her drawn face, to see her attempt to smile, to see the woman pretend. There was no love, Charley reckoned, and there had been love in Rome. But not her problem.
'I was just doing some postcards, friends and family…'
Angela repeated the word, rolled it. 'Family? You have a family, Charley?'
'Not really, but there's my parents and there's my mother's brother, lives up in the north of England. We hardly see him… I'm afraid we're not like Italians in England, family doesn't matter that much. But-''
The bitterness snapped in Angela's voice, as when a mask slips. 'Find a Sicilian, and you find a family.'
She must never pry, Axel had said, never push. 'I suppose so.'
'When you were with us in Rome, you did not know that Peppino was Sicilian?'
'No.'
