“If he’s a sample of your friends, you might need it.”
“Him.” She laughed and began to tidy her bag away, taking the automatic from me.
“You’ve got a licence?”
“You need one?”
“You know damned well you do. Who was he?”
“Dino. A boy I know. He was outside the hotel after dinner.”
“And you said nothing?”
“This is a fast car. I think we lose him. He is very jealous.”
“With reason?”
She looked hard at me then, and I had the feeling that she was deliberately considering whether to be angry or not. Then she smiled.
“No,” she said. I could have kissed her then and I knew she was waiting for it. But I started up the car and we went down the hill and found a pub in a village called West Firle, and it wasn’t any surprise to me to find that she could drink beer with the best of them.
I dropped her at her lodgings around midnight. It was a small street up near the station and I could hear a radio going in the house as we stood in the doorway and said goodnight.
Lying in bed, I opened up my emergency bottle and had a stiff drink, thinking it over, and wondering which kind of a fool I had been, or was going to be. Dino could have been working off his own bat. But she’d known he was there and had given me no warning. The fact that I might be pulled out of the back of the car when I was hadn’t inhibited a single one of her responses. Either way suited her, either way it was excitement. I was going to meet her in the Ship the next evening.
CHAPTER THREE
ADIEU TO DINO
I drove up to London early the next morning. I parked in Berkeley Square and walked round to Brown’s Hotel and found Hans Stebelson in. There was a big bowl of blue and yellow irises on the table in his sitting-room and a photograph of a small boy in Lederhosen in a pigskin frame on the mantelpiece. He was still in his dressing-gown and there was a strong smell of eau-de-cologne. He ordered coffee, gave me a cigarette, and seemed very pleased to see me.
I said, “Katerina Saxmann lives at 20 Cadman Avenue, Brighton. That’s near the station. She works at a dress shop. La Boutique Barbara in North Street. I had a few expenses. My secretary will list them and send a statement to you.”
He nodded, and made me repeat the details while he wrote them down in a little black leather-bound notebook.
He said, “You saw her?”
I said, “I did. She’s a splendid girl.”
He smiled, but he did it without using his brown plastic eyes so that for a moment I thought he was wincing.
“You spoke to her?”
I nodded. “I took her out to dinner. I didn’t mention your name, of course.”
“And your impression?”
“I’ve told you. She’s a splendid girl. She also carries an Italian Beretta automatic for which she has no licence.”
He nodded and said, “She is an unusual girl. In many ways she does not belong to this era. I am worried for her.”
I didn’t ask why. Either he would tell me or he wouldn’t. I said, “I think she can look after herself.”
He shook his head. “No. Against some things, no. That is why, Mr Carver, I would like you to keep an eye on her. Already you have made her acquaintance. If, say, once a week or a fortnight, maybe, you could see her and let me have a report of what she does, where she goes, or if she moves away. On a business footing, of course.”
“If you wish.”
“Yes, I do. Very much I do. I shall be here, maybe, another month. At the end of that time we could review the situation.”
I stood up, strolled to the little table that held the telephone and stubbed out my cigarette in a tray.
“I’ll keep in touch with you,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said and, as I went to the door, he added, “and if you can persuade her to throw that stupid gun into the sea, please do so.”
I went round the corner and found a call box and fished out a mess of change to make a call. As I had stubbed out my cigarette by the telephone I had seen a Brighton number scribbled on Stebelson’s pad.
I rang it and a woman’s voice at the other end said with so much refinement that it was like a grove of bamboos whining in the wind, “La Boutique Barbara. Can I help you?”
I put the receiver down and stared at a crude drawing of a horse that someone had pencilled on the wall. I decided to make the fee for my extra duties high.
I had a glass of beer and a sandwich in a pub on the road, and I was back in Brighton by four. La Boutique Barbara shut at five o’clock. I stood on the other side of the road and watched the assistants coming out. There were two young girls, and a tall, bonyshouldered older woman. Katerina was not amongst them.
And she was not outside the Ship at half-past six. I waited an hour, and then I went round to 20 Cadman Avenue. The door was opened by a tall young man with wavy fair hair. He was in his shirt-sleeves and held a paperback in one hand.
When I asked him for Katerina, he shook his head.
“She’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Dunno. Ma says she came home lunch-time, packed her bag, and went.”
A woman’s voice shouted from the interior of the house.
He went on, “Ma says she paid up. Extra week for not giving notice.”
“Did she leave a forwarding address?”
Before he could reply, his mother’s face appeared over his shoulder, a worn, plump, pleasant face. Looking me up and down, she said, “No, she didn’t, just went off in a big car, chauffeur-driven.”
“She didn’t leave any message for me, did she? Carver’s the name.”
She shook her head. “No message for anyone. Just
