Yet she was here, no more crippled than the rest of that lot with their obvious arthritis, obesity and corns, he thought contemptuously, watching the mixed tourist crowd, waiting for Gwen.
When she came at last, saw him, went to look at a picture near him, waited until his voice at her ear, as in the catacombs said quietly, “Go back to the entrance. I’ll join you outside,” he moved away at last and Mrs. Lawler, who had seen Gwen arrive, guessed the whole of the subsequent action, though she did not stay to watch it.
The three friends enjoyed the frescoes in the second church, returned to buy postcards in the entrance of the first and then set off into the little town to look at the many shops full of Assisi embroidery worked upon cloths of many sizes and upon clothes for women and children. The patterns were charming, they decided, but the linen upon which they were embroidered was mostly rather poor and the threads uneven in the warp and weft so that the embroidery was not based, as it should be, on squares of counted threads but must have been worked upon a printed outline, quite another thing altogether.
Flo declared she did not mind how they were done they were so pretty and bought a dress for a small niece. But Myra, who had made table mats for herself in the correct manner upon Irish linen, refused to buy, while Mrs. Lawler, whose legs were beginning to ache again, left her friends to walk slowly back to the coach, taking photographs on the way.
When Gwen joined Owen at the door of the church he led her at once up a narrow street that came out behind the top end of the large car park. Here, almost hidden from every direction was the long black car she recognised. He unlocked it and motioned her inside. She recoiled from the oven heat of the interior.
“Get in,” he insisted. “I want to talk to you.”
She was repelled by this rough order.
“You can’t take that tone with me!” she cried. “And I’m not going to be roasted to suit your convenience, so you can get that straight.”
He realised he had gone too far, too fast. This bird gave an impression of weakness but he really knew already that it was false.
Without speaking he wound down all the windows. The car may have been in the sun when he parked, but it was now in the shade and though the air of the early afternoon had not cooled at all, where the car stood was at the top of the hill and a breeze did blow through it to replace the over-heated air.
“How about that?” he said gently, looking at her with far from gentle eyes.
Gwen accepted the meaning of the look and climbed in, though she shot up from the seat at once, crying out that the leather had burned her. With silent patience Owen pulled forward a cushion from the back seat for her to sit on, then got in himself on the other side. His intention was as firm as ever, but he understood that he had no easy job before him.
Gwen was flattered by his persistence. Her natural vanity had always been a danger to her, and for some months now it had not been fed to anything like the extent she required. Or so she often told herself.
So Owen’s cautious approach was unexpectedly successful, he found. Before long he was able to slide an arm behind her shoulders and allowed to leave it there until he dared to move it where the effect could be greater.
“I had to see you again,” he murmured, truthfully. “You aren’t angry with me?”
“No,” she whispered, accepting this familiar approach. “But how did you know we’d be here? Who was that funny little man in Rome?”
“My messenger? Rollo? A journalist who does me a favour now and then.”
“Journalist!”
He felt her pull away, so held her more closely.
“Do you mind that? Why should you? Scared of the Press? He’s only free-lance and not often employed, I should think.”
Allowing his curiosity a too free rein he added, laughing a little in his almost soundless fashion, “I guarantee he never leaves the Imperial City. He is never in Geneva, for instance.”
This time she did not pull away; she froze. He cursed himself for his impatience, but he must discover soon what had taken her to that bank, for the expenses were mounting up and if it wasn’t going to be worth it he ought to pull out rather than plan ahead to Florence, where he no longer had reliable contacts since …
“You asked me that time you walked out on me …”
“I never …”
“You asked me what was I doing in Geneva myself that time I saw you taking a heavy suitcase into a certain bank and coming out of the bank again to throw the case into a taxi as if it weighed nothing at all.”
This time Gwen drew herself right away from him and he had the good sense to let her go. Besides, she had not lost her head and he wanted very much to discover how she would deal with these cards on the table now between them. Quite a girl this, quite a gir!
Gwen, fully back on her dignity, sought some reason for this apparently reckless disclosure. She remembered the tale she had told before. Mistress of her selfish boss for eleven years, fed up with short trips abroad as his wife and no promise of any real status. Ran out on him with any money she could pick up. That was it. The firm’s money and quite a lot of it … in cash. Mostly one pound notes and you needed a lot of those to make it worth while. But to think he had spotted her and watched her go in and come out again with the empty case. So what was his game? Pretty obvious, surely? A blackmailer? Or just a con man? Ready to demand the ransom or ready with some scheme to enlarge it for her, for them both, with him working at her side?
A most unwelcome complication, anyway. She picked up her handbag from the floor of the car where it had fallen and felt for the door handle.
“You were there in Geneva and you were watching me, you say,” she began. “I can guess why. To latch on to anyone leaving a bank who might be easy meat for your sort. Well, I’m not, see. So you may as well pack it in. I don’t want to see you in Florence or anywhere else. And it’s time I got back to the coach, see. So goodbye and thank you for nothing.”
He sat watching her, not speaking, a little pale. His hands shook on the wheel, so he took them off and held them together in his lap until she had gone. She had made him lose his temper again, but he had been able to confirm one point. She had indeed taken money into that bank, to make a deposit account or add to one already there. Was it her late firm’s money or was that tale as phoney as so much of what she said? But the point had been made and accepted. Gwen Chilton had a deposit account at a Swiss bank. It was up to him to make her disgorge it in his favour.
He watched her turn to look about her when she shut the door of the car. He watched her go up into the courtyard before the church and start down again towards the car park where the tourist coaches were standing. Then he turned his car and drove through the car park himself and away down the road to join the autostrada in the plain.
He wore his dark glasses as he drove and a floppy sun hat that covered his thinning hair and creased forehead. He did not look up at all at the narrow road twisting down from the old town where Mrs. Lawler leaned on the parapet to get her breath and to take a distant view of the white church of St. Francis.
But she saw the long black car and took a quick snap of it, almost head on, right in the foreground of her view. The number will be out of focus, she thought, as she put the camera away. Not that it has any importance to me. But to Gwen? What a silly girl, to encourage the man!
Chapter Six
The tour stayed that night in Perugia. Gwen Chilton spent a considerable time making her usual telephone call, but this time to Paris, not London. She felt much happier when she had finished, so her table companions found her unusually talkative at dinner. Apart from these three no one was paying much attention to Mrs. Chilton, except indirectly, though Rose Lawler was not the only one who had noticed her leaving the church at Assisi with a man.
“It was the one who directed us at Siena right at the start, wasn’t it?” Mr. Woodruff said, with certainty.
“I couldn’t swear to it myself,” Mr. Blundell said, with slight contempt
. “I didn’t take all that notice.”
“Well, I did,” his wife announced in her pleasant country voice. “He was in Rome, too. Quite a romance, by the look of it.”
“Not a very nice one, I wouldn’t think,” Mrs. Woodruff added. “Where’s her husband? Dead, divorced, or neither?”
This brought the subject to a stop. Either the man or the woman would have enjoyed pursuing it further without the other sex, but neither couple cared to go into more intimate speculation in company. Besides, another piece of gossip was engaging the majority of ‘Roseanna’s’ party.
Two carabinieri had been seen at the hotel reception desk with Mr. Banks. He had left the building with them but had come back in time for dinner. Mrs. Banks had joined him in the lounge, but not Penny. None of the family appeared for the meal. Rumour, added to previous speculation, was now confirming a suspicion that the girl was indeed smoking cannabis quite freely and frequently and it had got round to the authorities.
The highly respectable majority of ‘Roseanna’s’ tourists were shocked. They discussed the matter in much the same way they were accustomed to talk about juvenile courts at home. An area of public concern and action that was really foreign to them, but also mildly exciting as long as it did not include anyone they knew. When it did, as now, and if anything was to happen to this hippy-like girl, they would state they neither knew nor had seen anything they recognised as criminal.
“Children like to follow the fashion,” at least six of the stouter matrons said mildly.
“You’d think the parents did too,” said another. “No control these days. I thank my stars mine are all grown-up and settled in good positions.”
“Lucky you! We wouldn’t have been able to come away if it wasn’t for the school cruise to Madeira.”
“Mixed?”
“You mean the schools? Well, yes. But then my three are all at the same comprehensive. Ever so good. We’re delighted with it, aren’t we, Arnold?”
“It’s all right. So far. The Head can’t possibly know them all — more than a thousand.”
“Do they have this drug problem? What we’re talking about.”
“Are we? How should I know?”
It was noticeable, after dinner, that the coach party split into two main groups; those who really wanted to talk about Assisi, its buildings and pictures, and those who were concerned with Gwen and her new friend or old acquaintance or whatever he was, or else with the Banks’ problem. Of these there was the largest, speculative group, throwing out unsupported theory and melodrama and the smaller malicious, strict sectarian, puritan caucus that had been shocked straightaway at Genoa by Penny Banks’ appearance and had plotted ever since to get rid of her.
And had now, perhaps, succeeded. They discussed all the disgraceful, sordid symptoms, finding them exhibited by this slatternly girl; they speculated over supplies, pushers, the smuggling trade with the Near and Middle East. By the end of the evening they were resigned to seeing an announcement before long in all the newspapers of the world telling of Penny Banks’ arrest.
Before Gwen left her table companions after taking coffee with them in the bar lounge she said, “I was in the hall when the ambulance came for Penny Banks. I don’t suppose you were down then. It was just after we got the keys for our rooms.”
“No,” Rose said. “I wondered a little when she wasn’t at dinner. But she often misses meals, doesn’t she? An ambulance? Is she really ill, then?”
“Billie said not to spread it. She’s going round the others later, she said, in their rooms.”
Rose looked at her friends: they all exchanged glances and nodded.
“I’ve been done for everything,” Myra said. “What is it, Gwen? Typhoid?”
Mrs. Chilton, who had been immunised, much against her will, for everything including diphtheria and yellow fever, the year before, stared at them in some horror.
“You’re a cool lot, I must say,” she said at last.
“No,” Rose told her. “We were all advised to be done before we went abroad the first time, years and years ago. Never drink tap water on the continent. Beware of salads et cetera. You still haven’t told us what Penny’s trouble is.”
“Billie asked me if I’d been inoculated. I said yes, was it one of those the Banks girl had got. She said it might be. They’d had an Italian doctor to her and he’d ordered her away.”
“Poor girl!” said Flo. “Would that account for the carabinieri with Mr. Banks?”
“That or the pot,” Gwen said carelessly. Then, seeing the others’ faces she added, “Don’t tell me you didn’t realise she was hooked? Everyone on the coach seems to know.”
“Or think they do,” Rose said.
“Well, I’d say I knew,” Gwen answered stubbornly. “We’ve got another of these bloody early starts, haven’t we? Florence for lunch, Billie said.”
She walked away from them, irritated by their mixture of strange innocence and superior sophistication. This really wasn’t the right tour for them. What would be, though? She turned aside on her way to the lifts, obeying a signal from a South London suburban couple she had chatted with in one of the Assisi shops. They had noticed the ambulance, too, and wanted to ask if she knew whether it related to their own party or some other.
Gwen stalled. She felt she did not know them well enough to declare her knowledge. Let them get the shock from Billie. If they did not leave the tour at once she would have another chat with them the next day.
Dragging herself out of bed the next morning Gwen was not surprised to find ‘Roseanna’s’ complement diminished, not only by the Banks family and four other couples, who had been placed in quarantine as contacts, but by three other faint-hearted travellers, who had been immunised but did not trust the foreign advice, still less the foreign hospitals if the advice was proved wrong.
It was a subdued group that proceeded on its way to Florence. There was a short stop on the shores of the beautiful Lake Tragimento. Here Rose and her friends walked out along a short pier to take photographs of pale grey islands emerging from the morning mist. But none of this restored those universal fallen spirits. Nor, as the sun conquered the mist at last and they ordered coffee at little tables on the lake shore in the shade of trees could they drag their thoughts and fears from the late-night bombshell.
Until Billie, who had been making a succession of telephone calls, came hurrying round her flock with a beaming face and fresh, relieving news.
“The tests on Miss Banks and all the others are negative,” she repeated over and over again. “She is much better. She will be leaving hospital in a day or two.”
“And joining us in Florence?” asked Myra, when Billie reached the table where she and her friends were eating ices.
Billie looked uncomfortable. It was a change from the face of gloom she had worn at breakfast and on the drive to the lake, but the question seemed to have ended her temporary euphoria.
They did not press her, nor did Gwen ask any difficult questions.
As for the rest, by the time ‘Roseanna’ reached Florence the Banks family and the other defectors might never have existed.
The new hotel was one of a series of recent buildings lining a new road along the bank of the Arno river and about a mile out from the centre of the city. Buses just round the corner of the hotel ran frequently, Billie told them. But this afternoon, for those who preferred to leave the tourist crush and heat of the city centre, there was a trip to Fiesole, the little hill town with its church, old houses and ancient Roman theatre, baths and museum.
Gwen was the first to see Owen Strong again. She had joined her table companions at Fiesole for want of something better to do. Their main objective in going there was to see the Roman remains, combined as they were with glorious views of the Apennines, since the excavations lay on the slopes behind the church.
Owen was in the museum peering at a collection of Etruscan pottery in a tall case. He could see the coach party in the glass of the case as they walk
ed into the building, so he did not turn but waited to see what they would do. Particularly Gwen. He hoped his entirely open approach this time would shake her. And fox the three old witches, as he now called them to himself.
He was only partially successful. For one thing he had not reckoned on Gwen’s temper, though by now he should have done so. She was furious at seeing him there, in open pursuit of herself. She said loudly to her friends as they all drew near, “Why, isn’t that Mr. Strong? Looking at those red and black vases? I’m almost sure of it.”
They were just behind him now; he could not pretend he was not aware of them. So he turned slowly, allowing a surprised smile to twist his face into that of an amiable clown. The sight, though by now familiar enough, had its full effect upon Mrs. Lawler. Oh damn, she thought miserably. Memory, never yet more than half submerged, carried her back to the ruined faces of those pilots of the Second War who had survived their martyrdom. Her own love one of the worst, rescued, fought for, but dying at last in final defeat. Even now she could be made to remember that struggle and that end, to feel the guilt and pity and terror of that air war as she had known it.
“Well, fancy seeing you here!” Gwen was saying, glaring at Owen in fully hostile greeting.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Strong,” Rose said and turning to her companions went on, “I don’t think you’ve met before. Mrs. Donald, Miss Jeans. Mr. Strong came to our assistance in Siena over finding the duomo.”
“And crops up like a bad penny all along the line,” said Gwen cheerfully.
There was no easy answer to this, nor did he attempt to find one. Strangled giggles got them nowhere, so he turned to Gwen, as if continuing a conversation only just at that moment interrupted.
“Don’t let me forget to give you …” he began, taking her by the elbow and beginning to guide her towards the door of the museum.
A Pigeon Among the Cats Page 6
