I went through the door quickly, jammed the key in the outside lock and turned it. Then I ran, hoping Baldy would be well on his way. I didn’t let up until I reached the launch. I looked back a couple of times but no one was following. I sloshed out across the bog to Severus. Baldy was not with him.
I made him pull out into mid-stream and hang off there waiting for the man to turn up. We waited twenty minutes, listening all the time for the sound of any launch coming downstream, and watching the bank for any sign of the man. In the end we gave him up. I’d got him out of one mess and I didn’t intend to get myself into trouble by searching for him. He was the kind who, given enough start, could look after himself.
Eventually we turned away, going fast down the Treporti channel for Venice, and it was a faint sort of comfort to me that all the time I had fronted Siegfried in the garden the moon had been behind me and my face well in shadow.
*
I was dreaming that I was facing Siegfried, both of us with sabres, and he was smiling all the time as he went for me. Then a telephone bell began to ring somewhere and Siegfried frowned and said, “For God’s sake, why can’t they leave us alone to enjoy ourselves?”
I woke then to see Vérité in a dressing-gown moving around the end of the bed to answer the phone which was ringing in the sitting-room. I sat up, rubbing my neck which was as lumpy as rhino skin with mosquito bumps. I listened to her talking in the next room. My wristwatch showed that it was six o’clock.
I reached for the water carafe and drank from it without benefit of glass. My throat was dry as though I’d had a late night and too many cigarettes.
Vérité came back into the room and sat down beside me. She put her arms around me and kissed me and then, after a few moments, she pulled away but left one hand on my neck.
“You’ve been bitten to death. I’ve got something I can rub on those.”
She started to get up but I held her and said, “Who was the call from?”
“Munich. What time did you come in last night?”
“About three. You were sleeping.”
Severus and I had come back to Venice and taken up station off the Lido shore watching the Komira. At two-thirty the Komira’s launch had turned up from Treporti and Siegfried and the panama-hat man had gone aboard. At three-thirty the Komira had pulled out. I didn’t need a clairvoyant to tell me that the Villa Sabbioni would not be used again. I was due to meet Severus in an hour and go back there to have a look round, not with any great hope of finding anything. They would have cleaned up nicely. Everything destroyed or tidied away. And the tidying would have included Baldy if I hadn’t butted in.
Vérité said, “So, I was sleeping. What had you been doing?”
“I’ll dictate a full report later. I could never concentrate with a secretary in a short nightdress. What did Munich say?”
“It landed at Munich just after eleven last night.”
Munich was about a hundred and ninety miles from Venice as the crow flew, and I suppose there have been a few crows that have done it. The helicopter could do a hundred an hour easily. Three hours to do two hours’ flying. They’d made a leisurely stop somewhere.
She went on, “There was a crew of two, the pilot, Brandt, and another man, Hesseltod. Only this Hesseltod didn’t limp.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. What about the cargo?”
“Exactly as listed on the manifest from here.”
“Neat. I saw the Venice cargo unloaded not three miles from here. They must have had a duplicate cargo waiting at their stopping point before Munich.”
“What happens now?”
I looked at my watch. It was ten past six.
I said, “I’m meeting a man at seven o’clock. I’ll need thirty minutes to shave, shower and dress and get to him. When I come back we’ll probably have to start heading north. Meanwhile we’ve got twenty minutes for you to do something about these mosquito bumps.”
We were at the Villa Sabbioni just after eight. We could have been there fifteen minutes earlier, only we were very circumspect about our approach. We need not have been. There wasn’t a living soul there. Not a door was locked. But before we went into the house we saw where the cargo had been dumped. There was a well-head in the gravel space before the house, and they hadn’t bothered to close the wooden flaps that covered it. Severus shone his torch down. Twenty feet below, we could see the edges of a couple of cases poking above the water. The other one was probably already waterlogged and had sunk.
We went right over the house and there was not a personal item of any kind to be found, except a toothbrush in one bathroom, and some ash in the hall fireplace where a few papers had been burned and crushed to fine flakes. Severus insisted on collecting them in his handkerchief. He had more faith in the marvels of scientific detection than I had. While he was doing this, I went through into the servants’ quarters and the kitchen.
As I could have guessed from Lancing’s remarks about him, the one thing that made Baldy a top professional was his devotion to duty in defiance of any personal discomfort. And last night he had been operating under the ultimate discomfort. But underneath the professional there must have lurked insistently, too, the instinct of, perhaps, his first and most loved métier, the good cook. He had homed on the kitchen like a badger to its holt, a wounded bear to its den. He was sitting at the marble-topped kitchen
