LADY FROM ARGENTINA
James Pattinson
© James Pattinson 1994
James Pattinson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1994 by Robert Hale Limited.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One – The Men
Chapter Two – Saved by the Bell
Chapter Three – Break-in
Chapter Four – A Kiss
Chapter Five – Guido
Chapter Six – Not Bad Company
Chapter Seven – Wages of Sin
Chapter Eight – Another Crossroads
Chapter Nine – A Splendid City
Chapter Ten – Sweetener
Chapter Eleven – In Trouble
Chapter Twelve – Nightmare
Chapter Thirteen – Opportunity
Chapter Fourteen – Mystery Tour
Chapter Fifteen – Help
Chapter Sixteen – The Hide
Chapter Seventeen – Luck
Chapter Eighteen – The Best Way
Chapter Nineteen – Home
Chapter One – The Men
It was in Oxford Street that the woman came to the conclusion that she was being followed. There were two of them, men, some distance away. When she stopped to look into a shop window they stopped also, though they avoided looking in her direction. She had noticed them earlier, always much the same distance from her, never closing the gap, stopping when she did and apparently making little effort to disguise their purpose of keeping her in sight. It was as though it were of no concern to them whether she was aware of what they were doing or not.
This apparent unconcern bothered her; it seemed to demonstrate a confidence in themselves, a certainty that they had her just where they wanted her and that there was no need for haste, no need to do anything precipitate, because time was no object and they would make any move they contemplated just whenever it suited them.
It bothered her all the more because she felt that she knew these men. They were not close enough for her to be certain, but there was something about their general appearance that seemed familiar to her; familiar and also menacing. It made her afraid.
For if they were indeed the two she suspected they might be, they were an unwelcome reminder of something which she hoped she had left far behind her; something from which she had thought to have escaped for ever. But now –
The pavement was crowded with people going about their business, brushing past her, even jostling her, completely oblivious to the fear that had taken possession of her. Many of them no doubt had worries of their own; some perhaps had fears as great as hers; but she knew nothing of these and had no wish to know. Her own troubles were sufficient; she had had enough of them in the past, and now it looked as though she were not finished with them yet. Even here in London, where she had sought refuge, it appeared that they had followed her in the shape of two black-haired men, unremarkable in any way, who did not stand out from the cosmopolitan throng and probably were unnoticed by all around them. All except for her; except only for her. She alone noticed them, and was afraid.
Other men glanced at her in passing. She was worth a second look. She was a blonde, slightly above average height and slim. She was wearing a white trenchcoat and she could have been a shade under twenty-five or a shade above; but whichever it was she was a head-turner for sure.
She was well aware of this herself; had been aware of it from an early age. Sometimes she wondered whether it had not been more of a curse than a blessing, this powerful attraction that she had for men. Perhaps it would have been better if she had been without beauty; but what choice did anyone have in such a matter? One had to accept the physical gifts that were handed out at birth and make what one could of them. So maybe she had made the worst of hers. Well, if she had, it was too late to correct things now.
She was not British-born, but she had a British passport that looked genuine, and the name on it was Adelaide Lacoste. She could speak French, German and Spanish, as well as the English which she spoke with an accent that gave to it a certain charm. At this moment she could have wished that the charm had been of the magical variety, which might have been used to cause her to vanish into thin air and thus avoid the men who she felt sure were following her.
Lacking any such supernatural means, however, she was forced to try some other way of ridding herself of their unwelcome attention. She had to shake them off.
She began walking again. A glance over her shoulder revealed the fact that the men were still following. A thought came into her head: suppose she were to complain to a policeman that she was being followed? The idea was banished in a moment; it was altogether too impractical; indeed, it was quite ridiculous. What evidence could she give to support such a charge? And besides, did she want to become involved with the police? Was that not something she most certainly wished to avoid? And would not the men who were tailing her be well aware of this?
Anyway, there was not a policeman in sight, so she could not have appealed to one for help even if she had wanted to do so. She had to rely on her own resources. And that would be nothing new for her; she had been doing no less for years.
She came to a big department store and went inside. She had put some counters between her and the entrance when she saw the men come in and gaze around. There was an escalator leading to the next floor, and she got on it, hoping that the men had not seen her. At the top of the escalator she found herself in the furnishing department, and she made her way past beds and wardrobes and three-piece suites until she came to a door giving access to the women’s toilet. She could see nothing of her pursuers, and without hesitation she pushed open the door and went inside.
It was refuge of a kind, but at best she realised it could only be temporary; however long she hung about in there, the time would come when she would have to venture out again. And the men were bound to be waiting.
She went into one of the cubicles and locked the door. But she felt trapped. Perhaps it would have been wiser not to have entered the toilet at all. Suppose the men had caught a glimpse of her going in and were even now waiting for her to reappear, knowing that they only had to be patient.
For a moment she almost gave way to panic. But then she told herself not to be stupid. For after all, what could they do with so many people around? They could kill her no doubt if they got near enough. A quick knife-thrust in the side, silent but deadly, would do the job. And then they would melt away in the crowd. For men like them it would be easy; they had the experience. That of course was supposing they were indeed the men she feared they might be. But she could not be certain of that; she had still not had a close enough look at them to be entirely convinced of the fact.
Yet they had undoubtedly been following her; of that she was absolutely sure. And so –
And so did this mean that her life was in danger? A cool assessment of the situation could point to only one possible answer: no, it did not. Not immediately, anyway. For the present they most certainly had a different object in view; and that object would not be achieved by killing her. For the present they needed her very much alive.
Not that she could take much solace from this reflection. The very fact that they had found her at all was too disquieting. How had they managed it? She had believed herself to be safe. London had appeared to her to be a sanctuary where she could start a new life and hope to put the past behind her. But now it seemed that that past had all too rapidly caught up with her.
She stayed in the toilet for almost half an hour before venturing out again. She had little hope that the men would have gone,
but she could see nothing of them. She walked back through the furnishing department the way she had come, and when she reached the head of the escalator there had still been no sign of them.
Riding down the moving stairway, she was able to scan quite a wide area of the ground floor, but here too her searching gaze fell on no one who looked at all like either of the two men. She stepped off the escalator and hesitated for a moment or two. Could it really be that the men had abandoned the pursuit? She could hardly believe that they would have given up so easily. So once again there came the question: had she been mistaken in the belief that she was being followed? Had the men perhaps never even existed except in her own too vivid imagination? But no; she could not believe that. They had been real enough; no apparitions but solid flesh and blood. Of that she was certain.
But no less certain was the fact that they were no longer to be seen. It took her a while after she had left the store to persuade herself that she was indeed no longer being followed; but eventually she became convinced and began to feel less on edge. She had had a fright, but it had been no more than that.
*
She had lunch in a restaurant, and her fears retreated even further. It was just not possible. She had been entirely misled in thinking that she was being followed. She saw that now. The men had been perfectly harmless, and if they had indeed had any interest in her it had probably been simply of the kind that any male animal might feel when an attractive female of the species came into its line of sight.
As if to lend credence to this theory, a man made a crude advance as she was drinking her coffee. He came up to her table and said:
‘Excuse me, but haven’t we met somewhere?’
She gave him a cool appraising look. He was, she guessed, about forty years old. He had ginger hair and a plump jowly face, a wispy moustache and a waistline that was getting out of control. He appeared to become somewhat uncomfortable under the impact of that chilling gaze. Miss Lacoste’s ice-blue eyes could be extremely frosty when the occasion warranted. And in her opinion this occasion did.
Then she said: ‘Yes, we have. Here. For the first and, I sincerely hope, the last time.’
He was not very quick on the uptake. He had to work that one out, and it took him a while to do so. Then he got the message and his cheeks reddened.
‘You mean –?’
Miss Lacoste answered crisply but without raising her voice: ‘I mean piss off, you fat slob. Get lost, greaseball.’
The man was obviously taken aback. He might have been prepared for a brush-off, but not quite such a brutal one as this.
‘Well, really!’ he said. ‘Really!’
But her words had the desired effect. He pissed off.
Miss Lacoste felt better after that. It lifted her spirits, which had been somewhat depressed by the earlier experience. She remembered other times when she had been forced to subordinate her own desires to those of a man; it had happened too often in the past; she had been maltreated, humiliated, used; but she had survived. And though she might still have her fears and misgivings, at least she could demonstrate that she was no easy touch for any ginger-haired pot-bellied bastard who might fancy his chances. She had had enough of that; now it was she who would make the choices.
This mood of exhilaration stayed with her until she reached home later that afternoon. She had done a bit of shopping in the West End and was carrying a couple of polythene bags with names on them that had a certain cachet and gave the purchaser a feeling of superiority over the generality who picked up their clothes from stores of a somewhat less exclusive character.
For much of her life Adelaide Lacoste had been without a home that she could really call her own. She had been something of a bird of passage, not always from choice but rather from force of circumstances. She had lived in other people’s houses and sometimes in no house at all; but now she had a place she could really call hers, for the moment at least, and it pleased her.
Admittedly it was nothing to boast about: a small furnished house in the Southwark area which she had rented; one of a row of similar unpretentious dwellings.
She did not regard it as a permanent home, but she might remain there for a time while she considered plans for her future. After her arrival in London, which had been quite recent, she had stayed for a few days in a hotel, but she had been attracted to the idea of having a place of her own and had chosen the house more or less at random from those on an agency’s books.
There was something about this quiet residential district that appealed to her. Perhaps it was the contrast to all that she had experienced in the past. She was aware that the novelty might soon wear off; that she might become bored by the dullness of it all; but for the present she was content. She went for walks, encountered people exercising their dogs, young mothers with prams, children, enjoying the feeling of independence, of being able to do whatever she wished, to come and go just as she pleased. Above all she revelled in the sense of security these surroundings gave her. Here she felt safe, unthreatened, free.
At least she had done so until that morning when she had caught sight of the two men in Oxford Street. Now she was not quite so happy; though, if the men had indeed been following her, it seemed that she had successfully eluded them. She told herself that there was no need to worry; nothing could happen to her here; in these quiet streets it was unthinkable. Nevertheless, at the back of her mind there was that niggling worry still.
There was a tiny garden in front of the house, enclosed by a low brick wall and a wrought-iron gate. The garden was nothing more than a patch of unkempt grass on one side of the paved path leading up to the front door, and there was one shrub, a spotted laurel, growing inside the wall.
The gate squealed on its unoiled hinges as Miss Lacoste pushed it open. She rummaged in her shoulder-bag for the key to the door, found it and let herself into the house. There was an entrance hall that was just a narrow passage with a hatstand and a mirror, and then the stairs and beyond them the kitchen which opened on to a yard at the back.
She discarded her trenchcoat, stowed away the purchases she had made and brewed herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. She carried the cup into the sitting-room, which was on the right of the hall, and relaxed in an armchair. She drank the tea, put the empty cup on a side-table, lay back and closed her eyes. She felt tired and must have dozed off for a time; it might have been half an hour or even an hour; she could not tell.
But she knew what it was that awakened her: it was the ringing of the doorbell. It brought her back to consciousness with a start, and the immediate thought flashed into her mind that it was the two men she had seen in Oxford Street who had followed her home and were now outside the house demanding to be let in.
She dismissed the idea almost immediately as utter nonsense. It was quite impossible that they should have followed her. She would have seen them. And besides, if they had, why would they not have come to the door at once? Why wait? She glanced at her watch. It was nearly an hour since she had come home.
Nevertheless, she did not immediately go to the door. Indeed, she hesitated so long that there came another ring from the doorbell. It had a peremptory sound; or so it seemed to her. But she could not ignore it; that would have been too ridiculous. And there was nothing to fear; nothing at all.
She went into the hall, opened the front door and saw the two men standing outside.
Chapter Two – Saved by the Bell
They grinned at her. She had an impulse to slam the door in their faces, but that would have been useless; they would not have gone away.
She recognised them of course, now that they were so much closer to her; and she knew that her instinct had not been at fault in Oxford Street when it had warned her that she was being followed. For these were undoubtedly the same two men, though she failed to understand how they had managed to trace her after losing touch in the department store. Had some kind of sixth sense led them to her? Had they followed the scent of her like bloodhounds on the trail?
Not that it made any difference; the salient fact was that they were here. They had found her and there was no more security for her in Southwark than there had been five thousand miles away in Buenos Aires on the other side of the Equator.
‘You!’ she said.
The taller of the two, whose name was Luis Gomez, gave a laugh. ‘It surprises you? I think you saw us earlier. No?’
‘Yes, I saw you. But I could not be sure.’
‘But now you are,’ the other one said.
He was Fernando Villa; a hard man, as they both were; pockmarked, with hooded eyes; ugly. In comparison Gomez might almost have been called handsome, though there was a certain wolfishness about him, and the mouth under the thin black moustache had a cruel twist to it.
Both had spoken in Spanish, but she knew that they could speak English if they wished. They had spent some time in the United States and had learnt the language there. She had heard it said – and it was probably the truth – that they had been thrown into a jail in Texas for some criminal activity, and on the completion of their sentences had been deported back to Argentina.
With their peculiar talents it had not been difficult to find in Buenos Aires an employer who could make use of men such as they; men who were not over-scrupulous in the choice of what they did as long as they were paid well enough for doing it. In Ricardo Marquez they had found just such an employer. For him they had been for years his bodyguards and his bully boys. For him they had tortured and killed. And now they were here.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
It was a question which required no answer, for she knew the reason only too well. Yet she felt compelled to ask.
They brushed the question aside, ignored it, laughed as if she had made a joke. They knew that she knew exactly why they were there. It was too obvious to need spelling out.
‘Let us go inside,’ Gomez said. ‘This is no place to talk, here on the doorstep. And we have much to talk about.’
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