Paulet put on a stiff, disapproving face, and said, ‘One of those.’
There was nothing to be learned from the bathroom or the kitchen. In the big main room Pelegrina had done a thorough tidying-up job. There wasn’t a personal paper or letter in the desk, though there was a pile of thoroughly burnt and stirred-up paper ash in the fireplace. The silver-framed photograph of La Piroletta had gone, and the box of Turkish cigarettes was empty. Missing, too, were the framed photographs of the tramp steamer from over the fireplace and the steam yacht from the wall behind the desk. Both pictures had been hanging some time because the wallpaper was less faded from light where they had hung.
I sat down in a chair by the fire and lit a cigarette.
‘Who lived here?’ Paulet dropped to the divan and the springs creaked.
I told him, gave him a brief outline of my conversation with Pelegrina, and explained about the New Year’s card I had found in the cottage.
I said, ‘I’m sorry I kept that from you. But at the time I didn’t know what a sterling chap you were going to turn out to be.’
It mollified him a bit, but not entirely.
‘Let us,’ he said, ‘have no secrets from one another in future. I wish to help and I wish to be frank with you. No?’
I nodded agreement. Well, that was all right. A nod is not binding. He could have been, for all I knew, putting some unspoken clause to the end of his declaration. If he were a good professional man he had to be, because frankness in our line never paid a dividend that raised the pulse rate through joy.
I said, ‘He takes his daughter’s photograph. Why?’
‘Maybe it was a publicity photograph originally and would have her agent’s name and address on the back.’
‘You think that Marrini Fratelli are an invention?’
‘I would bet on it.’
‘You needn’t. I checked the Rome directory at my hotel this afternoon. They don’t exist. Now—why did he take the photographs? One coastwise steamer, pretty ancient craft by the look of it. Can’t remember the name. And the steam yacht. I never got to have a close look at that.’
‘There must have been a reason. Some day, we know. Clearly he was worried by your presence here and your questions about Freeman. Otherwise, why try to kill you? This Freeman begins to interest me.’
‘That began with me a long time ago. I think you’d better get in touch with your Monsieur Duchêne and see what you can dig out of him. You can tell him about all this. In fact, it might be a good idea if I could talk to him.’
‘I will try to arrange that.’
‘You speak Italian well?’
‘Fluently. In my youth I was a kitchen boy in the Hotel Principi di Piemonte at Turin and later a waiter at many other Italian hotels.’
It all came out pat. I knew he was a good guy, anxious to help me—but since suspicion had often meant the breath of life to me I couldn’t forget the phoney list of coins.
‘Have a poke around here tomorrow morning and see what you can learn about Pelegrina from the other people in the building.’
‘A pleasure.’
As he spoke, an idea struck me. They did from rare time to time, out of the blue, like the first swallow of summer. I got up and went over to the bookshelves and nearly broke my wrist picking up the fat red leather-bound Lloyds Register of Shipping, Volume I.
I was hoping that there would be an index of ship owners. There wasn’t. The whole thing was arranged alphabetically by the names of ships. I didn’t feel like ploughing through the names of nearly four thousand ships and checking the owners to see if I could find a Pelegrina amongst them. I didn’t have to. Sticking out from the top pages of the register was a small piece of marking paper. I opened the register at the marked place.
I ran my finger down the first of the two pages that lay open and found what I wanted at the bottom almost. The ship’s name was Suna, but in 1959 she had been called the Pelox, and before that in 1948 the Nordwell. Under her earlier names she had flown the Liberian flag, port of registry Monrovia. Her present owners—this was a 1962-63 register—were listed as ‘Leon Pelegrina and Others’. Her gross tonnage was 1,366 tons, summer deadweight 662 tons. She’d been built by the Burrard D.D. Co. Ltd of Vancouver, engines by John Inglis Co. Ltd of Toronto, and her classification at Lloyds was marked ‘LC class withdrawn’. A key to symbols at the front of the register said that this indicated that the class had been withdrawn by the Committee for non-compliance with the Society’s regulations. From what I had seen of Leon Pelegrina, and knew of Freeman, if they were connected, that seemed about the right form. Non-compliance with regulations would have made a fine family motto for both of them. At the moment the Suna carried Greek registration.
I explained the details to Paulet.
He said, ‘Pelegrina could still be in shipping. This I find out tomorrow, perhaps.’
I was about to tell him not to bother. I could do it by a phone call the next day to a friend of mine at Lloyds and, what is more, have him check in the Lloyd’s register of yachts whether Pelegrina owned a steam yacht. Normally I wouldn’t have been at all interested in Pelegrina’s shipping connections. It was only the fact that he had troubled to take the framed photographs that made it seem possibly significant so
