At the first mention of Freeman’s name he began to pick a few bits of imaginary fluff from the sleeve of his jacket, saw me watching him and stopped. I explained why Mrs Stankowski was worried about her brother, not having heard from him on her birthday, that he had left his job, and also that he had walked off with a valuable bracelet and some money. I didn’t specify the amount. I said nothing of the anonymous phone calls assuring her of his safety, and nothing about Jane Judd and the Robert Duchêne angle.
I finished, ‘Mrs Stankowski is not concerned about the thefts from her. Apparently Freeman had done this before. She is genuinely worried about him. I discovered that he had a cottage in the country and I found there a New Year’s card from you. Since his letter of resignation from the News Service was written from this city it seemed reasonable to come and ask if you knew anything about him. How well did you know him?’
He put his fingertips together and made a steeple, eyed it, and then let it slip into a cat’s cradle. Everything he said to me, I guessed, was going to be carefully considered.
‘I’ve known him for some years, on and off. First in Rome, I think. He has many friends there. If he wrote this letter from Florence, I certainly didn’t know he was here or see him. I’ve been away for a long time and only got back last week.’
‘Can I ask how you came to meet him?’
‘Through my daughter.’ He got up and went to the piano and picked up the silver-framed photograph. ‘She is in the theatrical profession and Freeman did some publicity work for her. Ever since then we have kept in touch loosely.’
He handed me the photograph. She was wearing jodhpurs and a shirt and carried a saddle over one arm. It was the same girl whose photograph in Oriental get-up I had seen in Freeman’s cottage.
‘I see. Where is she now?’
‘I haven’t the least idea. We had a quarrel about six months ago. Not our first. But always when it happens—’ he shrugged his fat shoulders—‘we lose touch.’
‘Could Freeman be with her? Was there any romantic attachment?’ It’s a good phrase when you want to be polite, and I wanted to be polite with this man. I had a feeling that it would be easy to scare him and make him clam up.
‘A little once, I think. But not now that I know about.’ He nodded at the photograph in my hands. ‘When I say that she is my daughter, let me make it clear that I have never been married. Even in that photograph you can see that she has a certain amount of, well, coloured blood.’
I nodded. It seemed an odd thing to tell me, a stranger—unless it was a way of sliding the conversation away from the main point. Dads don’t usually go out of the way to explain to my kind about their bastard, partly coloured daughters. He went even further.
‘Just before the war I had a business in Italian Somaliland. I met her mother there. Beautiful, beautiful. When she died I naturally looked after the child.’
Big of him.
‘How,’ I asked, ‘could I find out where your daughter is? Has she got an agent?’
‘Yes. In Rome. Marrini Fratelli. They’re listed in the book. Her stage name is La Piroletta. But I could probably do more for you. I could ring up a few friends in Rome who might know something of Freeman’s movements recently.’
‘I would be glad if you would. I’m at the Excelsior Hotel, certainly for tonight, and maybe tomorrow night. Could you ring me there?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
He stood up, adjusted his monocle and gave me a little nod of dismissal.
At the door to the stairs, he said, ‘Freeman’s sister—she is paying you well for your work? I understand she is a very rich lady.’
‘She’s giving me the rate for the job.’
He smiled, and it was the first time he’d given me that benefit. Just for a moment, I sensed, he was completely relaxed.
‘It must be a wonderful thing to have much money, too much money. One could do so much with it.’
‘I gather that’s Freeman’s angle too. And, let’s face it, mine. Always the big dreamers and schemers are the chaps who lack capital.’
The smile went. He pursed his fat lips and said, ‘Certo. “Senza speme vivemo in desio.” That’s Dante. My father made me read him. Without hope we live in desire. And that, Mr Carver, is a bad state for any ambitious man.’
He closed the door on me and I had the feeling that, despite himself, he had revealed something of the alter ego struggling for freedom inside him.
*
He hadn’t called me by ten o’clock that night. I telephoned him at ten minutes past ten and there was no answer from the flat. I went up to my room to go to bed.
A man got in the lift just as I was about to press the button for the third floor. He was a big man with shoulders like the back of a truck. He had a large, bland face, and he wore a well-cut grey silk suit with a tiny white line in it, an immaculate white silk shirt and a yellow tussore tie. In one hand he carried a fat briefcase. There was something about him that made me think he was an actor. I’m a great one for instant diagnosis. In Rome I would have bet that he was straight from Cine Citta with his contract renewed for another three years at double the salary plus a slice of the gross.
I raised an eyebrow at the board of floor buttons.
He said, ‘Terza, grazie.’
It was a nice voice, vibrant, manly, guaranteed to send chills of pleasure down the spine of any woman who needed her head examined.
We went up in silence. The lift stopped, the doors went back and I stood aside
