“We’ll check them.” Not that there was much point. She knew they’d stand up.
“Can I go?”
“No.”
“What more do you want from me?”
“Answers.”
“I’ve answered everything you’ve asked so far.”
“I have a problem.”
“I’ll happily listen if it will help.”
“Perhaps it will. You see, I know that you are a thief. What’s more, I know that you are one of the most accomplished thieves I’ve ever come across. What was it? Thirty or so major thefts, and never a hint of suspicion.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. Now, all of a sudden, you turn up in Rome. We get phone calls saying where the theft will take place. We notice you and question you. It worries me. From your past track record, you’ve been meticulous about planning. Never put a foot wrong. If you were involved in the theft of that icon I would have expected it to vanish without trace and without warning. And without violence. And I would have also expected that, when something went wrong, you would abandon everything and go home. Instead we were alerted in advance, there’s blood everywhere and you are still here. As I say, it makes me think.”
“The obvious conclusion, surely, is that I am telling the truth, and that none of this has anything to do with me at all.”
Flavia snorted. “I don’t think so.”
“But you can’t come up with anything better.”
“We’ll see.”
“You’re going to have to let me go, then.”
“Oh, yes. We never thought of holding on to you. This was just a friendly chat. The first, I suspect, of many.”
Mary Verney stood up, waves of relief passing through her, drenched with sweat and her heart still pounding. Appalling performance, she thought. Gave too much away to that damnable policewoman. She was getting too close for comfort. Besides, she was right; this was a disaster from beginning to end.
Flavia even opened the door for her, marvelling at the woman’s utter calm and insouciance as she walked out. Didn’t budge an inch. Leaving her as much in the dark as she was at the start.
Progress, however, was being made at the duller and more routine end of the enquiry; Peter Burckhardt was seen leaving his hotel on the morning of his death with a man in his late thirties and getting into a car. Flavia’s heart had a little skip when she heard this; because Burckhardt, bless him, had been staying in a hotel in the via Caetani. An ordinary street, a bit noisy from too much traffic, but less busy than the large, polluted thoroughfares all around it. It was a no-parking zone, and there was no obvious reason why anyone should pay any more attention to such trivialities in that quarter than they did anywhere else in the city.
Except for historical circumstance, of which Flavia fervently hoped the murderer of Burckhardt was unaware. Because just around one corner of the street was the via delle Botteghe Oscure, containing the headquarters of what had once been the Christian Democrat Party, and close to that was the place where terrorists dumped the body of Aldo Moro. It was all many years ago now; the Christian Democrats had fallen on hard times and the only memento of the former prime minister was the occasional ragged bunch of flowers left at the site where he was found.
But the police still kept close watch, fearful lest those dark days should suddenly come again. Perhaps they were more concerned now that angry voters would come to take revenge on the politicians who had deceived them for so many years, or perhaps it was simply because standing orders, once given, tend to get forgotten. All over Europe, perhaps, policemen stand and guard things for no reason except that their predecessors, and their predecessors’ predecessors, stood and guarded in exactly the same place. It was no doubt apocryphal, but a colleague in Paris had once told him of a building in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the residence of a minor ambassador, which had received round-the-clock surveillance for years after the embassy moved to other accommodation and the building was turned into a brothel.
So policemen patrolled regularly, and the camera, once installed, was perhaps too expensive to take down again. It was Alberto who pointed this out to her, and suggested she came round immediately for a video show.
She got there in fifteen minutes, and was treated to the most encouraging sight she had seen for days. A terrible picture, taken at long range, and certainly not good enough for use in a court, should it ever come to that. But enough to give them an idea, to identify the type of car used, and three letters of a registration number.
“Let’s see it again,” Flavia said, and they sat and watched as once more Peter Burckhardt and a man several inches taller than him came down the street from the direction of the hotel and got into a Lancia.
“Doesn’t look under great duress. No gun pointed at him. Nothing like that.”
“No.”
“Got the car?”
“Still checking. It should be here any moment. Have you made any progress?”
“Not really. That is, I have someone I’m desperately interested in, but I can’t find any way in to her.”
“Her?”
“An Englishwoman. Who is more interested in art than she should be. The trouble is, I’m fairly certain she didn’t steal the picture.”
“I thought we’d established Burckhardt did.”
“Have we? I’m not so sure. He didn’t break into the place, after all. Someone opened that door from the inside for him. What’s more, I’m not sure he hit Father Xavier, either.”
Flavia didn’t want to go into any more details, and didn’t have to, as she was interrupted by the arrival of a computer print-out. “Bingo,” Alberto said. “A run of luck for once.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a rented car. Picked up at the airport last Friday by one M. K. Charanis. Greek passport, staying at the Hassler.”
“Better go and get him then. Can you rustle up some manpower?”
Flavia got home at ten, more tired than she could believe, starving to death and with a blinding headache. Argyll took one look at her, suppressed a desire to mutter about how late it was, and instead ran a bath and fetched some food. She was so exhausted she could barely eat but, after he had given her a broadside of tender loving care, she began to lose the feeling that her neck muscles were tied in knots. The bath helped too.
“We were close,” she said after telling Argyll about the hunt for Charanis, waving a sponge in the air for emphasis. “if we’d only had a little bit of luck …”
It had been gruelling. The result would have been the same whatever they’d done but, while spotting this man showed the carabinieri at their best, trying to arrest him brought out all their worst characteristics. Too many anti-terrorist training courses, that was the problem. Rather than Flavia and Alberto, with a couple of supporters, going round and knocking on the door of his hotel room, someone, somewhere—and Flavia suspected Alberto’s immediate superior, who was a man with a flair for the unnecessarily melodramatic—decided now was the time to give their Los Angeles-style rapid response unit a whirl.
The result had been total chaos which—quite apart from enraging the management of one of the most expensive hotels in the country and creating a very bad impression among a large number of its guests—probably served only to warn Charanis that he had been noticed, assuming he watched the news on the television station which sent along a crew to film an entertaining display of official muscle. At least Flavia persuaded Alberto to put out some vague story about drug smugglers to try and keep them away, although she doubted it would do much good.
As for the rest of it, she had watched appalled as truck after truck of heavily armed idiots ran around waving guns, shouting into radios, getting into position so that they could interdict, negativize or otherwise arrest and render harmless a man who had, in fact, checked out of the hotel the previous evening and was nowhere to be seen.