‘Because you what?’
I smiled slightly. ‘Because I belong to a sort of people he thinks should be exterminated.’
‘Henry!’ Her mouth lost its severity. ‘What sort of people?’
‘Well... you have counts and countesses still in Italy...’
‘But you’re not... you’re not, are you... a count?’
‘Sort of. Yes.’
She looked at me doubtfully, halfway to laughing, not sure that I was not teasing her.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘The reason I wasn’t astonished at Billy knocking me about was that I knew he hated my guts for having a title.’
‘That makes sense, I suppose.’ She managed to frown and smile at the same time, which looked adorable. ‘But if you have a title, Henry, why are you working in a horse transport?’
‘You tell me why,’ I said.
She looked at me searchingly for a moment, then she put her arms round my neck and her cheek on mine, with her mouth against my ear.
‘It isn’t enough for you to have a title,’ she said. ‘It isn’t enough for anyone. It is necessary to show also that you are...’ She fished around in her French vocabulary, and came up with a word: ‘...véritable. Real.’
I took a deep breath of relief and overspilling love, and kissed her neck where the dark hair swung below her ear.
‘My wife will be a countess,’ I said. ‘Would you mind that?’
‘I could perhaps bear it.’
‘And me? Could you bear me? For always?’
‘I love you,’ she said in my ear. ‘Yes. For always. Only, Henry...’
‘Only what?’
‘You won’t stop being real?’
‘No,’ I said sadly.
She pulled away from me, shaking her head.
‘I’m stupid. I’m sorry. But if even I can doubt you... and so quickly... you must always be having to prove...’
‘Always,’ I agreed.
‘Still, you don’t have to go quite so far.’
My heart sank.
‘It’s not everyone,’ she said, ‘who gets proposed to in a baker’s backyard surrounded by dustbins.’ Her mouth trembled and melted into the heart-wrenching smile.
‘You wretch, my love.’
‘Henry,’ she said, ‘I’m so happy I could burst.’
I kissed her and felt the same, and lived another half minute of oblivion before I thought again of Simon.
‘What is it?’ she said, feeling me straighten.
‘The time...’
‘Oh.’
‘And Simon...’
‘I fear for him,’ she said, half under her breath.
‘I too.’
She took the piece of paper out of my hand and looked at it again.
‘We’ve been trying to avoid realising what this means.’
‘Yes,’ I said softly.
‘Say it, then.’
‘This was the only message he had a chance of sending. The only way he could send it.’ I paused, looking into her serious dark eyes. After ten silent seconds I finished it. ‘He is dead.’
She said in distress, ‘Perhaps he is a prisoner.’
I shook my head. ‘He’s the third man who’s disappeared. There was a man called Ballard who used to arrange trips from this end, and the man who used to have my own job, a man called Peters. They both vanished, Ballard over a year ago, and no one’s heard of them since.’
‘This Billy...’ she said slowly, her eyes anxious.
‘This Billy,’ I said, ‘is young and heartless, and carries a loaded revolver under his left arm.’
‘Please... don’t go back with him.’
‘It will be quite safe as long as I keep quiet about this.’ I took the hurried, desperate, pinpricked message back, folded it up with the banknote and the hay, and put them all in my wallet. ‘When I get back to England, I’ll find out who I have to tell.’
‘The police,’ she said, nodding.
‘I’m not sure...’ I thought about the Yugoslav currency and remembered Gabriella saying on our first evening ‘Communists begin at Trieste.’ I felt like someone who had trodden through a surface into a mole run underneath, and had suddenly realised that it was part of a whole dark invisible network. I thought it very unlikely that the men I’d flown with were ordinary crooks. They were couriers, agents... heaven knew what. It seemed fantastic to me to have brushed so closely with people I had known must exist but never expected to see; but I supposed the suburban people who had lived next door to Peter and Helen Kroger in Cranley Drive, Ruislip, had been pretty astonished too.
‘Billy must have unloaded whatever he brought over in the haynet today,’ I said. ‘But going back...’.
‘No,’ Gabriella said vehemently. ‘Don’t look. That’s what Simon must have done. Found the money. And Billy saw him.’
It might have been like that. And there had been two extra grooms on that trip, men I’d never seen before. Somehow, on the way, Simon had come across something I’d been blind to: perhaps because there was one more man than he’d arranged for; perhaps because Billy couldn’t distract his attention by the methods he’d used on me; perhaps because of other happenings in the past which I didn’t know about. In any case, Simon had found Billy out, and had let Billy know it. I thought drearily of Simon suddenly realising towards the end of that flight that Ballard and Peters had never come back, and that he wouldn’t get a chance to put Billy in gaol. Billy the young thug, with his ready gun. A few minutes in the lavatory, that was all the time he’d had. No pencil. Only his pins, and the little bottle I’d given him in the privacy of the airline office; the bottle Billy didn’t know existed, with Gabriella’s name on it. Pills into loo. Banknote and paper with its inadequate message into bottle. Simon into eternity.
‘Please don’t search the haynets,’ Gabriella said again.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Someone official had better do it, next time Billy goes on a trip.’
She relaxed with relief. ‘I’d hate you to disappear.’
I smiled. ‘I won’t do that. I’ll go back most of the way up front with the crew, with Patrick and the man who bought the doll. And when I get to England I’ll telephone you to let you know I arrived safely. How’s that?’
‘It would be wonderful. I could stop worrying.’
‘Don’t start,’ I said confidently. ‘Nothing will go wrong.’
How the local gods must have laughed their Roman heads off.
Chapter Twelve
We went through the baker’s shop and out into the street. I looked somewhat anxiously at my watch and calculated a dead heat with the brood mares.
‘We need a taxi,’ I said.
Gabriella shook her head. ‘Very unlikely to find one in this quarter. We’d better catch a tram back to the centre, and take one on from there.’
‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘Tram or taxi, whichever comes first.’
The trams ran along the busy street at the end of the quiet empty road where the baker lived, and we began to walk towards them with some dispatch.
‘I didn’t realise how late it is,’ Gabriella said, catching sight of a clock with the hands together pointing north-east.
‘And that one’s slow. It’s a quarter past.’
‘Oh dear.’
One of the long green and cream single decker trams rolled across the end of the road, not far ahead.
‘Run,’ Gabriella said. ‘The stop’s just round the corner. We must catch it.’
We ran, holding hands. It couldn’t have been more than ten strides to the corner. Not more.
Gabriella cried out suddenly and stumbled, whirling against me as I pulled her hand. There was a sharp searing stab in my side and we fell down on the pavement, Gabriella’s weight pulling me over as I tried to save her from hurting herself.
Two or three passers by stopped to help her up, but she didn’t move. She was lying face down, crumpled. Without belief, I stared at the small round hole near the centre of the back of her coat. Numbly, kneeling beside her, I put my left hand inside my jacket against my scorching right side, and when I brought it out it was covered in blood.