Killing Ground (9 page)

'suspicious and large transactions'. Of course, that mid-morning, Mavis Finch reported the deposit of £28,000 in £50 notes because had she not reported it, she would, herself, have been guilty of criminal conduct. She had taken the name, Giles Blake, the address, she had noted what she described in the spidery handwriting of her report as an

'impatience' by the customer . . . Compton watched the target, sipped mineral water, listened.

And so typical, Compton thought, that the buggers at NCIS should have taken from June to March to evaluate the bank's disclosure before passing the detail to Fraud Squad. Bloody typical. To Harry Compton, the National Criminal Intelligence Service should more often get its hands out from under its butt.

He had, because time was precious and allocated fiercely to priorities, around five hours of desk time and an evening to decide whether to hold open a file on Giles Blake or whether to scrawl across the existing seven sheets that 'no further action' was warranted.

The desk time had produced nothing tangible, no evidence of illegality, but Compton had a nose, nostrils, that sensed an in- complete picture. A nice house in Surrey for Mr Blake, a nice wife and children for Mr Blake, bank accounts and stocks and money in building societies for Mr Blake. Too much that was 'nice', and not enough to substantiate it. Compton had gone as a young detective from the Harrow station to Anti-Terrorist Branch, and found the surveillance of Irish 'sleepers' in smoky and beer-stinking pubs to be a decent definition of boredom. He had sought and found stimulation, he had transferred to Fraud Squad. He liked to say, if he met up, increasingly rarely, with guys from Harrow or Anti-Terrorist, that S06 was the steepest learning curve in the Metropolitan Police. He was studying, nights, business management and accountancy, and when he'd those qualifications he'd be going for law. But the old nose still counted.

What had twitched the nose of Harry Compton, stung the nostrils, was the guest that Giles Blake had brought to dinner.

The tables were adjacent. They liked to boast, from top to bottom of S06, that their surveillance procedures were the best, better than Anti-Terrorist, better than Flying Squad. The ethos was 'proximity'. They had to blend, they had to risk burning out. It was not sufficient merely to observe, long range, they needed 'proximity' to listen.

He'd heard once on a course, a hot afternoon, central heating turned too high, head beginning to drop, a lecture line that had hit him. 'The accountants are more dangerous than the killers - the killers are small-time scumbags, the accountants threaten a whole society . . .' He had used up the five hours of his allocated desk time, he had started to burrow into his evening's surveillance time, tracked Giles Blake from his London office to Portman Square, to the hotel, to the reception desk, to the bar, to the restaurant. The guest had come to the restaurant, shaken hands, hugged, sat down.

'A good flight?'

'It's every day, every week, not in your papers here, a strike of the airline workers, just two hours - so we were late away. Nothing changes in Palermo.'

His nose twitched, his nostrils smarted.

The light came on over the porch. Axel flicked the wiper switch and the windscreen was smeared clear. She came out of the door. The windscreen blurred with the rain. She hurried through the small gate and she was hunched small with her arms tight around her body as if that would keep her dry. At the car she rapped her fingers on the passenger window. He did not hurry himself. He tossed the Time magazine copy behind him and onto the back seat and then he pulled out the ashtray and stubbed the cigarette. The rain ran on her hair and her face and she hit the passenger window with her fist. He leaned across and unlocked the door, pushed it open.

She ducked into the car and was wiping the rain off her head and from her face. She turned to him, angry. There was a brightness in her eyes, but her face was wrecked because her mouth was screwed, good anger. It was useful for Axel Moen to see how she handled good anger.

'Thanks, thank you very much.'

'What do you thank me for?'

'Thanks for making me stand out there, get bloody wet, while you read your magazine, smoke your cigarette—'

'Care for one?' He held the packet in front of her, Lucky Strike, out of the carton from duty-free at Fiumicino.

'It's a dirty habit. Thanks for keeping me in the rain while you read and smoke, before you open the door—'

'So you got wet, how's that cause to thank me?'

'Are you stupid?'

'Sometimes, sometimes not.'

'It was sarcasm. In thanking you for getting me wet, I was being sarcastic.'

'I find it best, Charley, always, so there's not misunderstandings, to say what I mean.'

He grinned. Axel grinned because her face had flushed red. He saw the colour spreading across her face by the light above him. It was good anger and getting better.

She had twisted to confront him. He thought she might have put on lipstick at the start of the day hut it had wiped off and not been replaced, and there were no cosmetics round her eyes and they were bloodshot as if it were two nights she hadn't slept well.

Her temper was scratched, a nail in wood that the saw blade hits. It was important for him to read her temper.

forced calm. 'All right, what I mean . . . We don't have it now, we used to have a terrier bitch. When the bitch was in season, on heat, then a big Labrador dog used to come and sit at the side gate. He used to sit there by the hour, big, bloody stupid eyes.

You know what, that dog sitting there, all night, and sort of crying, he got to be just a bore.'

'I'm hearing you, Charley.'

Enjoying herself. 'The town where I went to college, it was an army town, a garrison camp. Soldiers used to sit in their cars, on their bikes, at the gate and watch us, the girls. We called them 'lechies', understand, lechers. They didn't have old raincoats, they kept their Y-fronts on, they didn't flash us. They were pretty harmless, but they got to be boring.'

'Did they?'

'You here in your car, last night, all night. . . today at school. . . here now . . . it's getting to be a bore. It is causing embarrassment. Danny Bent, he says you could have injured his stock. Fanny Carthew says you damn near ran her dog over. Zach Jones wants to know if we've called the police. Daphne Farson wants to know if you're a pervert.'

'Maybe you should go tell them to fuck themselves.'

'That is—'

She laughed. He thought she was trying to be shocked and failing, because she was laughing. It was useful for him to see her laugh. When she laughed she was pretty, quite pretty, not especially pretty. She wiped the laugh.

'Where I was taken last night, emotional blackmail, it was pathetic.'

'Myself, I'd say it was patronizing.'

'Treating me like a juvenile.'

'Patronizing, but I doubt it did you harm.'

'What do you want of me?'

'Same as I told you first time round. There is an opportunity for you to give me access to the home of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio. I need that access.'

She stared hard at him. There were shadows on her face that caught the small lines at her eyes and at her mouth. He thought now that he stressed her. It was important to him to see her stressed. He waited on her. It was not for him to lead her.

She hesitated, then blurted, 'If I refuse, won't go to Palermo ... ?'

Axel gazed at the windscreen, at the running water, at the blur of the beach and the jetty and dark outline of the headland. ''I lose that opportunity for access. I have one opportunity through you. OK, we thought it out, you get the invitation, you write back and say that you're sorry and can't make it, but that you've a friend. We supply the friend. The friend is the Customs and Excise investigation team, a policewoman, whatever. They're too careful over there, wouldn't buy it. You're the one with access, Charley, only you. If you refuse, I don't get the access. Don't think I want someone like you down there, but I haven't another option.'

She turned away from him, twisted her back to him. She jerked the passenger door open. She pushed herself out of the car. She told him that she would think on it one more night, and where she would meet him the next day after school. She asked him if he liked walking. She bent suddenly, peered at him through the door, and il did not seem to matter to her that the rain beat on her head and her shoulders and her spine.

'What would happen to me, if . . . ?'

'It went sour on you? If they were just unhappy about you, they'd fire you, send you home. Charley, I try and say what I mean so I here aren't misunderstandings. It's a shit place and they're shit people. If they'd serious cause to suspect you, then they'd kill you and go home afterwards and eat their dinner. It wouldn't bother them, Charley, to kill you.'

He watched her run towards the light above the porch of the bungalow.

Egregio Dottore e gentile Signora.

She sat in the classroom. She took a mouthful of a sandwich from her lunchbox. She sipped at the can of Pepsi. She had brought in with her, in the rucksack that strapped onto the back of her scooter, the sheet of notepaper headed with the address of Gull View Cottage. In the mid-morning break she had gone to the rubbish containers on the far side of the playground and lifted the lids of two of them and tried, hopelessly, to identify which plastic bag had been in the bin outside her classroom. She had not found the plastic bag. It was a fine day, the cloud was broken, and the crocuses in the pots around the prefabricated classroom were already showing with the daffodils, and she thought that the spring season was a time of hope and optimism, and she wondered how the spring season was in Palermo . . . She tried to remember each phrase, sentence, of the letter written to her by Angela Ruggerio and then intercepted and copied and tracked.

(Sorry, dottore, and sorry, signora, but that is going to be the limit of my Italian - I remember quite a lot of it, but if you'll excuse me the rest will be in English!!)

Thank you very much for your kind invitation. And my warmest congratulations on the birth of Mauro, and of course I was very pleased to hear that Mario and Francesca were well.

It was so clear to her, the Roman summer of 1992. School finished, exams taken. The miserable response of her father, who had expected too much of her grades. Not good enough for university but sufficient to win her a place at a teachers' training college. It had been her mother who had seen the advertisement in the Lady magazine. Her mother had seen the advertisement in the magazine at the hairdresser, copied it and brought it home. An Italian family living in Rome sought a 'nanny/mother's help' for the summer months. She and her mother had written the application and enclosed a photograph, and her father had warned that Italians pinched bottoms and were dirty, not to be trusted and thieves, and she and her mother had ignored him, as they usually did. The four months of the Roman summer of 1992 had been, quite simply, the happiest months of her life.

I was very surprised to get your letter, and you will understand that I have had to think about it very hard. Because of the situation today in England I found when I graduated as a teacher (!) that it was really hard to find work.

I think I was very lucky, Dad certainly says so, to get this job that I now have.

The Roman summer of 1992 had been magic months for Charley. From the time that she had walked down the aircraft's steps, pushed her trolley through Customs and Immigration, seen Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, with Mario holding his father's hand and Angela carrying the baby Francesca, and seen their welcome smiles, she had felt a true liberation for the first time in her life. They had greeted her as if she were a part of them, right from the time that Peppino, as he insisted he should be called, had driven them away from the airport in his sleek BMW, and she had sat in the back withthe small boy beside her and the baby girl on her lap, had treated her as a friend already by the time the car had swept into the basement car park of the apartment on the Collina Fleming. She had thought then that her father was ossified in his attitudes and boring, and she thought that her mother was complacent in her outlook and boring, and to be away from them, first time in her life, was true freedom. Most mornings of that June and July Peppino, with the beautiful suit and smile and lotion scent, was gone early to his office in the bank, something to do with the Vatican. And most mornings of those first weeks Charley had taken Mario down to the piazza for the private bus to the kindergarten of St George's School, high on the Via Cassia. And most mornings of that June and July Angela, with beautiful blouses and skirts and coats, was out in the shops of the Via Corso or at her volunteer job in the Keats Museum at the Piazza Espagna.

Most mornings, while the domestica made the beds and cleaned the bathrooms and put the washing in the machines and did the ironing and tidied the kitchen, Charley had sat on the wide balcony and played with the baby, Francesca, and marvelled at the view above the pot flowers, watered each day by the old portiere, stretching from the dome of the basilica of St Peter's across the heart of the city and away to the distant shadows of the mountains. It had been heaven. And more of heaven in the afternoons, the Italian classes in a room off the cool of a courtyard behind the Parliament building, and then the roaming walks through the centro storico. When she walked the narrow cobbled streets of the centro storico she had never taken a map with her, so that each church and old piazza, each gallery and hidden garden, each tucked-away temple and frieze from antiquity, had seemed a discovery that was personal to her. It had been her freedom.

I have considered very carefully your offer that I should come to Palermo to help look after Mario and Francesca and baby Mauro. I am happy in my present job, I have ambitions to move to a bigger school when I have gained more direct experience. If I resign my position, then I believe it would be quite difficult, at this time, to find another school that would have me in the autumn.

That summer of 1992, for the months of August and September, Charley had gone with Angela Ruggerio and the children to a rented beach villa a kilometre along the coast from Civitavecchia.