been known to drive thirty miles out of my way to avoid going through the tunnels under the Mersey.
“With every minute that passed, that gaping hole in the hillside was getting closer and my heart was pounding faster. Desperately, I rattled through the handful of cassettes I’d grabbed when I’d picked up Bill’s car. Not a soothing one among them. No Enya, no Mary Coughlan, not even Everything But The Girl. Plenty of Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics and REM. I settled for Crowded House turned up loud to keep the eerie boom of the tunnel traffic at bay and tried to concentrate on their harmonies.
Two minutes into the tunnel and the sweat was clammy on my back. Three minutes in and my upper lip was damp. Four minutes in and my forehead was slimy as a sewer wall. Six minutes in and my knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The walls looked as if they were closing in. I tried telling myself it was only imagination, and Crowded House promised they could ease my pain. They were lying. Ten minutes and I could feel a scream bubbling in my throat. I was on the point of tears when a doughnut of light appeared around the cars in front of me.
As soon as I burst out again into daylight, my phone started ringing. “Yeah?” I gasped.
“You okay?” Richard asked. He knows all about me and tunnels.
“I’ll live.” I swallowed hard. “Thanks for asking.”
“You’re a hero, Brannigan,” he said.
“Never mind that,” I said gruffly. “You still with Turner?”
“Tight as Jagger’s jeans. He’s got his foot down. Looks like we’re heading for la bella Italia.”
At least I’d be somewhere I could speak the language, I thought with relief. I’d been worried all the way down Germany and Switzerland that Turner was going to end up in a close encounter that I couldn’t understand a word of. But my Italian was fluent, a hangover from the summer before university, when I’d worked in the kitchens of Oxford’s most select trattoria. It was learn the language or take a vow of silence. I’d prevented it from getting too rusty by holidaying in Italy whenever I could.
I drove cheerfully down the mountain, glad to be out in the open air again, relieved that we were gradually leaving the peaks behind us. We worked our way round Milan just after five, Richard back behind me, and by seven we were skirting Genoa. This was turning into one hell of a drive. My shoulders were locked, my backside numb, my hips stiff in spite of regular squirming. If they ever start making private eyes work with tachographs, I’m going to be as much use to my clients as a cardboard chip pan. I shuddered to think what this overtime was going to look like on Henry’s bill. He’d run out of buckshee hours awhile back.
At Genoa, we turned east again on the A12, another one of those autostradas carved out of the side of a mountain. I kept telling myself the little tunnels were just like driving under big bridges, but it didn’t help a lot, especially since the receiver kept cutting out, giving me panic attacks every time.
Three quarters of an hour past Genoa, the screen told me Turner was moving off to one side. First, he went right, then crossed back left. I nearly missed the exit, I was concentrating so hard on the screen, but I managed to get off with Richard on my tail. We were on the outskirts of some town called Sestri Levante, but according to my screen, Turner was heading away from it. Praying I was going the right way, I swung left and found myself driving along a river valley, the road lined with shops and houses. Sestri Levante shaded into Casarza Ligure, then we were out into open country, wooded hills on either side of the valley. We hit a small village called Bargonasco just as the direction changed on the receiver. A couple of kilometers farther up, there was a turning on the left. It was a narrow asphalt road, with a sign saying Villa San Pietro. The blip on the screen stayed steady. A kilometer away, straight up the Villa San Pietro’s drive.
Journey’s end.
17
“what now, sam spade?” richard asked as we both bent and stretched in vain attempts to restore our bodies to something like their normal configuration.
“You go back to the village and find us somewhere to stay for the night, then you sit outside in the car in case Turner comes back down the valley,” I told him.
“And what are you doing while I’m doing that?” Richard asked.
“I’m going to take a look at the Villa San Pietro,” I told him.
He looked at me as if I’d gone stark staring mad. “You can’t just drive up there like the milkman,” he said.
“Correct. I’m going to walk up, like a tourist. And you’re going to take the receiver with you, just in case the buckle’s going anywhere Turner isn’t.”
“You’re not going up there on your own,” Richard said firmly.
“Of course I am,” I stated even more firmly. “You are waiting down here with a car, a phone and a bug receiver. If we both go and Turner comes driving back down with the buckle while we’re ten minutes away from the cars, he could be outside the range of the receiver in any direction before we get mobile. I’m not trekking all the way across Europe only to lose the guy because you want to play macho man.”
Richard shook his head in exasperation. “I hate it when you find a logical explanation for what you intend to do regardless,” he muttered, throwing himself back into the driver’s seat of the BMW. “See you later.”
I waved him off, then moved the Merc up the road a few hundred yards. I scuffed some dust over my trainers, put on a pair of sunglasses even though dusk was already gathering, hung my camera round my neck and trudged off up the drive.
There was a three-foot ditch on one side of the twisting road, which appeared to have been carved out of the rough scrub and stunted trees of the hillside. Ten minutes brisk climbing brought me to the edge of a clearing. I hung back in the shelter of a couple of gnarled olive trees and took a good look. The ground had been cleared for about a hundred meters up to a wall. Painted pinkish brown, it was a good six feet high and extended for about thirty meters either side of a wrought-iron gate. Above the wall, I could see an extensive roof in the traditional terracotta pantiles. Through the gates, I could just about make out the villa itself, a two-story pink stucco building with shutters over the upper-story windows. It looked like serious money to me.
I would have been tempted to go in for a closer look, except that a closed-circuit video camera was mounted by the gate, doing a continuous 180-degree sweep of the road and the clearing. Not just serious money, but serious paranoia too.
Staying inside the cover of the trees and the scrub, I circled the villa. By the time I got back to the drive, I had more scratches than Richard’s record collection, and the certainty that Nicholas Turner was playing with the big boys. There were video cameras mounted on each corner of the compound, all programmed to carry out regular sweeps. If I’d had enough time and a computer, I could probably have worked out where and when the blind spots would occur, but anyone who’s that serious about their perimeter security probably hasn’t left the back door on the latch. This was one burglary that was well out of my league.
I found Richard sitting on the bonnet of his car on the forecourt of a building with all the grace and charm of a sixties tower block. Green neon script along the front of the three-story rectangle proclaimed Casa Nico. Below that, red neon told us this was a Ristorante-Bar-Pensione. The only other vehicles on the parking area were a couple of battered pickups and a clutch of elderly motor scooters. So much for Italian style.
“This is it?” I asked, my heart sinking.
“This is it,” Richard confirmed gloomily. “Wait till you see the room.”
I gathered my overnight bag, the video camera bag and my camera gear and followed Richard indoors. To get to the rooms, we had to go through the bar. In spite of the floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall, it somehow managed to be dark and gloomy. As soon as we walked through the bead curtain that separated the bar from the forecourt, the rumble of male voices stopped dead. In a silence cut only by the slushy Italian muzak from the jukebox, we crossed the room. I smiled inanely round me at the half-dozen men sprawled round a couple of tables. I got as cheerful a welcome as a Trot at a Tory party conference. Not even the human bear leaning on the Gaggia behind the bar acknowledged our existence. The minute we left by a door in the rear, the conversation started up again. So much for the friendly hospitality of the Italian people. Somehow, I didn’t see myself managing to engage mine host in a bit of friendly gossip about the Villa San Pietro.
The third-floor room was big, with a spectacular view up the wooded river valley. That was all you could say
