flimsy control. '.. They can't just sacrifice him. This bloody place hasn't had a principle in years, it's not a word in the bloody language. They couldn't even spell it here.'
Carpenter was going to call Head Office in London. They wouldn't take this lying down. She could rely on that. He'd call back within an hour, she should stay by the telephone.
Her voice had risen to its summit, to its highest pitch, and was now the product of crouched and humiliated shoulders.
'Could you come and see me, Mr Carpenter?'
Did she want him to come to the flat?
'Could you come and tell me what's happening? Yes, to the flat.'
Carpenter was sorry, very sorry indeed. But he had an appointment, an urgent appointment. She would understand, but he had a fair amount on his plate, didn't he? But Carpenter would telephone her as soon as he had something to say, and that would be, he thought, within an hour.
The cycle of her changing mood swung on. The screaming past, the whimpering gone. Cold again with the veneer of assurance. 'Don't call again, Mr Carpenter, because I won't be here.
Perhaps I'll be back this evening. Thank you for telling me what's going on. Thank you for telling me what's going to happen to Geoffrey.'
Before he could speak again she had cut Carpenter off the line.
Violet Harrison strode into her bedroom, swept a swimming towel off a bedside chair, and the underclothes that she had discarded the previous evening to the floor. She dropped them into her Via Condotti shopping-bag and headed for the lift and the basement garage.
Forty minutes after the red Flat had moved on to the Raccordo with its centre reservation of pink and white oleanders, Giancarlo gestured to Harrison to turn off to his right. It was the Via Cassia junction and within five miles of his home. Strange to Harrison to be in the midst of tried and trusted surroundings.
But the disorientation won through and he obeyed the instruction without question. The silence, which for both of them was now safe and losing its awkwardness, remained unbroken.
They had made good time. Giancarlo could reflect that the stamina of the driver had been remarkable.
They had given up the speed of the Raccordo for a slow, winding road, heavy with lorries and impatient cars, flanked by the speculative flats that overburdened the facilities. Several times they stopped in the bumper to bumper jams. Harrison sat passively, not knowing where he was being led, declining to ask.
Along the length of the Reggio Calabria to Rome autostrada patrol cars of the Polizia Stradale and carabinieri had begun the pin and haystack game of searching for a red Fiat car of the most popular model in use. Scores of motorists found themselves pitched out of 127s, covered by aimed machine-guns as they were searched, ordered to produce identity papers while their faces were examined against the photostated likenesses of Battestini and Harrison. The road blocks were large and impressive, each utilizing a minimum of a dozen armed men, and were comprehensive enough to warrant coverage by the RAI electronic camera teams.
The concentration of effort and manpower was blessed. From the toll gate at Monte Cassino a Fiat of the right size and colour was remembered. A young man had asked for petrol. A small success and one sufficient to whet the appetite as the police concentration built up in the community of Monte Cassino. The garage owner was quizzed in his office.
Yes, he could tell them who had been manning the pumps at that time. Yes, he could tell them the address of that man's home.
Yes, and also he could tell them that this man had said the previous evening when he came on duty that after he finished the night shift it was his intention to take his grandchildren into the central mountains. No, he did not know where they would go, and he had waved expansively at the big hazed skyline, and shrugged.
The helicopters were ordered from Rome. The military twin-engined troop carriers were loaded with armed men, sweating in the confined spaces on the baked, makeshift landing-pad outside the town. Four-seater spotter machines were dispatched to fly low over the high ranges and valleys, brushing the contours.
Lorryloads of polizia were slowly given the co-ordinates on large scale maps that the whole rugged area might be sealed.
The white walls of the mountain monastery looked down upon the hopeless task, while the shouting and irritation of the flustered staff officers in the commandeered school reflected the feeling that the terrain, rugged and vast, would mock their efforts to find a boy and his captive and his car.
But the element of chance born from the routine moved the chase on, gave it a new impetus, a new urgency. The chance without which the police cannot hope for success in a manhunt and which had forsaken them when the centre of the country was scoured for the ill-fated President of the Democrazia Cristiana.
A young man had gone off duty from his work at a gate on the Roma Sud toll. He had taken the bus home after a six-hour shift, had doused himself under the shower, and dressed and sat down at the kitchen table for cheese and fruit before lying on his bed to rest. His daughter, just a baby, had been crying, and therefore he could not be certain he had heard correctly the description of the two men that had been broadcast on the radio. The detail, rigidly held to, from which he would not deviate, caused the men in uniform and suits to paw at the air in their frustration, but Giuseppe Carboni was master of his own office, was at pains to thank the young man for his gesture in calling his nearest police station. Past eleven in the morning, time hurtling on its way, and Carboni demanded the patience of those around him. The photograph was produced, the picture of Geoffrey Harrison, and the young man nodded and smiled and looked for praise. It was strange, he said to Carboni, that a man who wore an expensive shirt should be unshaven, with grime at his neck and his hair untended.
Carboni's room had disintegrated into movement, leaving the witness to gaze long and hard at the picture.
Telephones, telexes, radios, all into play now to seal the city of Rome. Close it up, was the order, block the routes to L'Aquila to the east, to Firenze in the north. Tighten a net on the autostradas and damn the queues. Pull off the men beginning the search of the Monte Cassino hills, bring them back to the capital.
Carboni set it all in motion, then came back to the young man.
'And there was a boy, just a ragazzo, with this man?'
'I think so..
' It is the older man that you are clear on?'
That was the one that gave me the money. It is difficult to see across the interior of a car from where we sit in the cabins.'
A good witness, would not admit to that which he was not certain of. Carboni replaced the photograph of Harrison with that of Giancarlo Battestini. 'Could it be this boy? Could this be the passenger?'
' I am sorry, Dottore, but really I did not see the passenger's face.'
Carboni persisted. 'Anything at all that you can remember of the passenger?'
'He wore jeans… and they were tight, that I remember. And his legs were thin. He would have been young…' The toll attendant stopped, head low, frowning in concentration. He was tired and his thoughts came slowly. Unseen to him Carboni held up his hand to prevent any interruption from those who were now filtering back into the r o o m. '… He paid, the driver that is, and he paid with a big note and when I gave him the change he passed it to the passenger, but the other's hands were beneath a light coat that was between them, I could see that from my cabin, the driver dropped the change on to the top of the coat. They did not say anything, and then he drove away.'
Pain on Carboni's face. To the general audience he announced,
'That is where the gun was, that is why Harrison drives, because the boy Battestini has the pistol to his body.'
The young man from Roma Sud was sent home.
Fuel for the computer, for the dispersal system of information, and with each piece of typed paper that slipped from his office, Carboni fussed and plotted. 'And tell them to be careful, for God's sake to be careful. Tell them that the boy has killed three times in forty-eight hours and will kill again.'
There was no smirk on the features of Giuseppe Carboni, no expression of euphoria. Geographically they had run their quarry to a ground comprising a trivial number of square kilometres, but the ground, he could consider ruefully, was not favourable. One man and a prisoner to hunt for in a conurbation that housed four million citizens.
Chance had taken the sad, worn-down policeman up a road of promise, and had left him at a great
