‘We know each other,’ Patrick agreed. ‘We’ve been on trips together before.’
‘I see.’
Gabriella came down towards us, wearing a supple brown suede coat over her black working dress. She had flat black round-toed patent leather shoes and swung a handbag with the same shine. A neat, composed, self-reliant, nearly beautiful girl who took work for granted and a lover for fun.
I stood up as she came near, trying to stifle a ridiculous feeling of pride, and introduced her to Yardman. He smiled politely and spoke to her in slow Italian, which surprised me a little, and Patrick translated for me into one ear.
‘He’s telling her he was in Italy during the war. Rather tactless of him, considering her grandfather was killed fighting off the invasion of Sicily.’
‘Before she was born,’ I protested.
‘True.’ He grinned. ‘She’s pro-British enough now, anyway.’
‘Miss Barzini tells me you are taking her to lunch in Milan,’ Yardman said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘If that’s all right with you? I’ll be back by two-thirty when the return mares come.’
‘I can’t see any objection,’ he said mildly. ‘Where do you have in mind?’
‘Trattoria Romana,’ I said promptly. It was where Gabriella, Patrick and I had eaten on our first evening together.
Gabriella put her hand in mine. ‘Good. I’m very hungry.’ She shook hands with Yardman and waggled her fingers at Patrick. ‘Arrivederci.’
We walked away up the hall, the voltage tingling gently through our joined palms. I looked back once, briefly, and saw Yardman and Patrick watching us go. They were both smiling.
Chapter Eleven
Neither of us had much appetite, when it came to the point. We ate half our lasagne and drank coffee, and needed nothing else but proximity. We didn’t talk a great deal, but at one point, clairvoyantly reading my disreputable thoughts, she said out of the blue that we couldn’t go to her sister’s flat as her sister would be in, complete with two or three kids.
‘I was afraid of that,’ I said wryly.
‘It will have to be next time.’
‘Yes.’ We both sighed deeply in unison, and laughed.
A little later, sipping her hot coffee, she said, ‘How many pills were there in the bottle you sent with Simon Searle?’
‘I don’t know. Dozens. I didn’t count them. The bottle was over three-quarters full.’
‘I thought so.’ She sighed. ‘The baker’s wife rang up last night to ask me whether I could let her have some more. She said the bottom of the bottle was all filled up with paper, but if you ask me she’s given half of them away to a friend, or something, and now regrets it.’
‘There wasn’t any paper in the bottle. Only cotton wool on top.’
‘I thought so.’ She frowned, wrinkling her nose in sorrow. ‘I wish she’d told me the truth.’
I stood up abruptly. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Leave the coffee.’
‘Why?’ She began to put on her coat.
‘I want to see that bottle.’
She was puzzled. ‘She’ll have thrown it away.’
‘I hope to God she hasn’t,’ I said urgently, paying the bill. ‘If there’s paper in the bottle, Simon put it there.’
‘You mean... it could matter?’
‘He thought I was giving the pills to you. He didn’t know they’d go to someone else. And I forgot to tell him you didn’t speak English. Perhaps he thought when you’d finished the pills you’d read the paper and tell me what it said. Heaven knows. Anyway, we must find it. It’s the first and only trace of him we’ve had.’
We hurried out of the restaurant, caught a taxi, and sped to the bakery. The baker’s wife was fat and motherly and looked fifty, though she was probably only thirty-five. Her warm smile for Gabriella slowly turned anxious as she listened, and she shook her head and spread her hands wide.
‘It’s in the dustbin,’ Gabriella said ‘She threw it away this morning.’
‘We’ll have to look. Ask her if I can look for it.’
The two women consulted.
‘She says you’ll dirty your fine suit.’
‘Gabriella...’
‘She says the English are mad, but you can look.’
There were three dustbins in the backyard, two luckily empty and one full. We turned this one out and I raked through the stinking contents with a broom handle. The little brown bottle was there, camouflaged by wet coffee grounds and half a dozen noodles. Gabriella took it and wiped it clean on a piece of newspaper while I shovelled the muck back into the dustbin and swept the yard.
‘The paper won’t come out,’ she said. She had the cap off and was poking down the neck of the bottle with her finger. ‘It’s quite right. There is some in there.’ She held it out to me.
I looked and nodded, wrapped the bottle in newspaper, put it on the ground, and smashed it with the shovel. She squatted beside me as I unfolded the paper and watched me pick out from the winking fragments of brown glass the things which had been inside.
I stood up slowly, holding them. A strip torn off the top of a piece of Yardman’s stationery. A bank note of a currency I did not recognise, and some pieces of hay. The scrap of writing paper and the money were pinned together, and the hay had been folded up inside them.
‘They are nonsense,’ said Gabriella slowly.
‘Do you have any idea where this comes from?’ I touched the note. She flicked it over to see both sides.
‘Yugoslavia. One hundred dinars.’
‘Is that a lot?’
‘About five thousand one hundred lire.’
Three pounds. Wisps of hay. A strip of paper. In a bottle.
Gabriella took the money and paper out of my hands and removed the pin which joined them.
‘What do they mean?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
A message in a bottle.
‘There are some holes in the paper.’
‘Where he put the pin.’
‘No. More holes than that. Look.’ She held it up to the sky. ‘You can see the light through.’
The printed heading said in thick red letters ‘Yardman Transport Ltd., Carriers.’ The strip of paper was about six inches across and two inches deep from the top smooth edge to the jagged one where it had been torn off the page. I held it up to the light.
Simon had pinpricked four letters. S.M.E.N. I felt the first distant tremor of cold apprehension.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What does it say?’
‘Yardman Transport.’ I showed her. ‘See where he has added to it. If you read it with the pin hole letters tacked on, it says. “Yardman Transports MEN”.’
She looked frightened by the bleakness in my voice, as if she could feel the inner coldness growing. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means he didn’t have a pencil,’ I said grimly, evading the final implication. ‘Only pins in his coat.’
A message in a bottle, washed ashore.
‘I’ve got to think it out,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to remember.’
We perched on a pile of empty boxes stacked in one corner of the baker’s yard, and I stared sightlessly at the whitewashed wall opposite and at the single bush in a tub standing in one corner.
‘Tell me,’ Gabriella said. ‘Tell me. You look so... so terrible.’
‘Billy,’ I said. ‘Billy put up a smoke screen, after all.’
‘Who is Billy?’
‘A groom. At least, he works as one. Men... Every time Billy has been on a trip, there has been a man who didn’t come back.’
‘Simon?’ she said incredulously.
‘No, I don’t mean Simon, though he went with Billy... No. Someone who went as a groom, but wasn’t a groom at all. And didn’t come back. I can’t remember any of their faces, not to be sure, because I never talked to any of them much. Billy saw to that.’