Killing Ground (23 page)

Six packs of beer from the off-licence, and three bottles of wine, and a bottle of Scotch which was the detective superintendent's fast track to getting pissed up, and music from a transistor. They didn't come often, the good ones.

Harry was called.

Harry Compton was called out of the party area and into the administration office.

Miss Frobisher, and the place fell apart when she took her five weeks of leave, didn't drink and didn't approve, but she'd stayed put to answer the telephones. She would have read the secure transmission, and she scowled as she handed it to Harry.

TO: Det. Sgt. H. Compton, S06, London.

FROM: Alf Rogers, DLO, Rome.

Harry, Regards. Assuming they could find it, some nasty soul has been pulling your insignificant pecker. No trace in Milan on available records of BRUNO FIORI. The address provided in Via della Liberazione does not exist. That section of the street was pulled down six years ago for the construction of a municipal swimming pool. Details on hotel reg. were totally fictitious. Back to your gin/tonics. We, here, are involved in important work and don't need to be diverted from the necessary with duff info.

Luv, Alf.

Harry took the single sheet of paper to his desk, locked it away, went back to the party. The detective superintendent was into his joke repertoire and had an audience, and Harry didn't think he'd take it kindly if his punchline was interrupted. It would wait till the morning, till they crawled in with their headaches. He had a nose, that was his bloody trouble, and the nose was smelling something rotten, but it would be better talked about in the morning.

'How long?'

'II don't know.'

'If you don't know how long it would take, then, Harry, leave it to the locals.'

Maybe it would have been better the night before, perhaps it would have been better to have crashed the boss when he was in his joke session. Water under the bridge, because Harry Compton had let that moment go.

'I don't want to do that.'

'Did I hear right? "Want"? Don't "want" me, young man.'

The morning after, and the S06 office was a dead ground. Miss Frobisher, of course, had been in early, before seven, and she'd removed all the plastic cups and emptied the ashtrays and wiped the bottle stains off the desks, but the place still stank, and their heads ached. He thought the detective superintendent's head hurt worse than most because the boss-man's mood was foul.

'What I'm trying to say—'

'Rein in, young man. What you are "trying to say" is that you want two days down in the country. Well, we'd all like that, wouldn't we?'

'It should be followed up.'

'The locals can follow it up.'

Harry stood in the detective superintendent's office. The boss was hunched over his desk and he had a second coffee mug in front of him and the heartburn pills that squeezed off a little tinfoil platter. He held in his hand the message received the last evening from Alf Rogers, and the hotel registration sheet, and the printout from the night manager of telephone calls made from the room occupied by Bruno Fiorii, alias for Christ only knew. He was on a short fuse that was getting shorter. His wife, Fliss, had bitched at the time he'd come in. Hadn't he remembered that they were supposed to be going out shopping for the new settee set? Wasn't there a telephone he could have used? He'd an accountancy exam, first part, coming up, and wouldn't he have been better at his books, after late-night shopping, than lurching in smelling foul from drink? Why'd he forgotten to put the cat out? The cat had been shut in the kitchen and crapped on the floor. God.

'The locals down there are useless, they're parking-ticket merchants.'

'You've got nothing, nothing, that warrants me kissing you goodbye for two days.'

'It's worth doing.'

'How many files on your desk?'

'That's the bloody point, isn't it?'

'What's tickling up your arse, Harry?'

'It's trivia, that's what's on my desk. It's nothing stuff. It's corrupt little men, high-street dwarfs, fiddling pensions, fiddling savings.'

'Those pensioners, those savers, they just happen, young man, to pay fucking taxes.

Those taxes are your wages. Don't you get on a high-and-mighty horse and forget where your bread comes from.'

For a moment Harry closed his eyes. He squeezed the lids tight shut. He took a big breath.

'Can I walk in again? Can we start again?'

The coffee dribbled from the sides of the detective superintendent's mouth. 'Please yourself, and keep it short.'

'What I'm saying is this. We have a trace that is just routine on this tosser Giles Blake, bank disclosure on a cash deposit. We run the check on his accounts. Nothing special, no alarms, except that

it's not clear where the wealth comes from. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we'd say that's as far as it runs, file it and drop it. But, you authorize an evening's surveillance, and Mr bloody Blake takes an Italian to dinner, and they talk about nothing that is illegal. File it and drop it. But the Italian says he's come from Palermo. But the Italian has given the hotel a false name, a false address. We don't know who he is. But his telephone records indicate that from his room he called a travel agent for his flight back to Milan and the non-existent address, a limousine company for a ride to the airport using the fictional name. But there was one more call from his room. He rang a Devon number. He rang a number listed as belonging to David Parsons. That's where I want to go, to see Mr David Parsons.'

'Why can't the locals—?'

'Christ, don't you understand?'

'Steady, young man.'

'Don't you understand? I repeat myself, what we do is trivia. Trivia are good for the statistics. We lift enough second-rate people on second-rate scams, and you get to make commander, and I get to make inspector, and we get pissed together, and we are achieving damn-all. But, don't worry, it's easy and it gets fast results, and aren't we bloody clever?'

He was on the edge. Over the edge was insubordination, was a bollocking, was a mark on his file. Maybe it was last night's drink, perhaps it was the tiredness, could have been the row with Fliss. It didn't seem to matter to Harry Compton that he was on the edge.

'Then, onto your plate falls something that might just be interesting. Can't quantify it, can't put bloody time and motion to it, can't put a balance sheet on it. Might spend a week or two weeks or a month, and might get nothing. No, it's not for the locals, it's our shout and I want to go to Devon.'

The boss-man hesitated. It was always that way with the boss, because the man was a bully. If the boss's shin were kicked, if he had pain, then he usually crumpled, what Harry had learned. 'I don't know . . .'

'If you're trying to send a message, then the message is being heard. Looks to me that you're saying that Fraud Squad can chase greedy little bastards with their fingers in the pensions accounts and the savings accounts, but we're not smart enough for the international scene. I hear you. The big time is too complex for S06, like we're not fit enough to run on dry sand where it gets to hurt. I hear you.'

'For two days, when you've got your in-tray down to half empty, not before,' the detective superintendent said, sour. 'And get the fuck out of here.'

Four days gone, and the excitement had drained. Four days gone in a numbed routine of getting up, getting the kids dressed, getting the kids their breakfast, getting small Mario to school, getting Francesca to kindergarten, getting baby Mauro changed. Charley was four days into the routine and was bored. She sat at the iron-legged table on the patio and she wrote her first postcards.

It was four days since she had gone down to the town and stood by the Saracen tower and pressed the button on her wrist-watch, and looked around and tried so desperately to see him and failed. That had been the last moment of excitement. For God's sake, she hadn't come to Sicily to walk the kids to school and kindergarten, to deal with a baby's stinking backside, to skivvy for Angela Ruggerio. She'd come, spit it out, sunshine, she'd come to gain the access that would lead to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. Who?

What for? Why? A postcard for her mother and father, and another for her uncle, and another for the 2B class. All the week Peppino had been in Palermo, not come to Mondello, and Angela said that her husband had too much work in the city to be able to come back to them in the evenings. Now, that was just plain ridiculous because it was twenty minutes' drive in that big bloody fast car from central Palermo to Mondello.

On the postcards Charley didn't say that she was bored out of her mind. 'Having a wonderful time - weather brilliant - soon be warm enough to swim, Love, Charley.' The same for her parents and for her uncle and for the 2B class.

She had come because she had decided she was trapped at home, netted at work. But nothing bloody well happened here either, except that she fussed round the kids and changed the baby and swept the bloody floors. God. Come on, speak the bloody truth: Charley Parsons had come to Sicily because Axel Moen had told her to. She wrote the addresses on the cards, a fast and clumsy hand. Damn Axel Moen. What did he mean to her? Meant nothing, and she threw the pen down onto the table top. God, and just once he could have said something decent, could have given her something that was praise, something that was bloody compassion.

She had come with the excitement holding her. Like when she had gone to the home of the lecturer at college, the first time, and known his wife was away, and worn the sheer blouse and no bra, and drunk his wine, and stripped for him in front of the open fire, and climbed on him as they did in the films. That had been excitement, till the dull fart had cried. Like when she had walked to the caravan at the edge of the camp site at Brightlingsea where the long-term activists lived who each day tried to break the police cordons and halt the trucks carrying the animals to the continental abattoirs, gone to the caravan where Packy slept, with the cap in her hip pocket, walked to his caravan because the other girls said he'd a prick bigger than a horse's . . . That had been excitement, till the stupid bugger had spurted before he'd even got over her. Hey, sunshine, excitement's for books. The villa was a mortuary, it was the death of excitement.

It was the third day that piccolo Mario and Francesca had been to school and kindergarten, and Charley thought they were like a pit-prop to their mother. She seemed to weaken when they were gone from her sight. Charley, too damn right, she'd tried. Tried to make conversation, tried to earn some laughter back - a lost bloody cause. Some mornings Angela went into Palermo, some mornings she stayed in her room. Some afternoons Angela walked with the children, some afternoons she went, remote, to a sunbed at the bottom of the garden. Charley tried, Charley failed, to get through to her. Charley giggled, Charley remembered the face of the mistress at school who taught sixth-form history and who'd come to hammer the Civil War into them the morning after the miserable cow's husband had moved out to set up home with a nineteen- year-old boy, same school. God, that was bloody cruel, but it was the face of Angela Ruggerio, struggling to keep the appearance, and tortured . . . Charley would try, and fail, and try again. As though she were haunted, as though . . .

The gardener watched her. Whenever Charley was outside the gardener was always close, with the hose for the plants, with the broom for the paths, with the fork for the weeds, always near to her, where he could see her. One day, bloody certain, one day she'd put a towel on the grass and lie on it, and give the 'lechie' something to look at.

One day . . .

'Charley. Do you know what is the time, Charley?'

She turned. She looked towards the open patio doors.

'It's all right, Angela, I've not forgotten the time, about ten minutes, then I'm off for them.'

Angela Ruggerio stood in the doorway. It made Charley miserable to see her, to see her drawn face, to see her attempt to smile, to see the woman pretend. There was no love, Charley reckoned, and there had been love in Rome. But not her problem.

'I was just doing some postcards, friends and family . . .'

Angela repeated the word, rolled it. 'Family? You have a family, Charley?'

'Not really, but there's my parents and there's my mother's brother, lives up in the north of England. We hardly see him . . . I'm afraid we're not like Italians in England, family doesn't matter that much. But—''

The bitterness snapped in Angela's voice, as when a mask slips. 'Find a Sicilian, and you find a family.'

She must never pry, Axel had said, never push. 'I suppose so.'

'When you were with us in Rome, you did not know that Peppino was Sicilian?'

'No.'

'With a Sicilian there is always a family, the family is everything . . .'

She was gone. Angela went as quietly as she had come.

Charley finished the addresses on the postcards. She had come into the villa to find Angela, to ask when the post office closed and whether she would have time to buy stamps. She moved, barefoot, across the marble of the living area and the tiles of the hallway at the back. She moved without sound. Angela lay full-length on the bed.

Charley saw her through the open door. Angela lay on her stomach on the bed and her body convulsed in weeping. She knew of the family. The family was Rosario and Agata in Prizzi, and Mario who was hunted, and Salvatore who was in prison, and Carmelo who was simple, and Cristoforo who was dead, and Maria who drank, and Giuseppe who washed the money. She knew of the family because Axel had told her.

Charley watched the woman weep and sob. She felt humbled.

She left the villa, the prison, and walked with the baby in the pram into the town to collect small Mario and Francesca.

'You'd like a coffee?'

'Yes, I'd like that, espresso, thanks.'

'Three coffees, espresso, please.'

The policeman bobbed his head in acknowledgement. He was an old tired man, in a uniform that bulged over his stomach. He looked to be the sort of fixture in the upper corridor of the Palazzo di Giustizia that they had in the same upper corridors at Headquarters. He wore a pistol in a holster that slapped his thigh, but his job was of little more importance than bringing coffee for guests.