And impaled his hand upon one of the spear heads.
He gasped at the pain, feeling the metal drive into his flesh. He pulled away, conscious of the skin ripping and managed to crook his almost numbed fingers around a spoke. His body hung suspended at the furthest point of the half-web and directly over the drop. He could feel the blood running back along his arm. He twitched his feet in tiny sideways movements to get a foothold. With his left foot he managed to lever himself up, sticking both arms through the bars and then curving them, so one hand was free to discover how badly hurt he was. The point had driven through the gloves, almost at the centre of the palm, like one of the sacrificial wounds in the church models of Jesus that his mother had made him pray before when he went to confession. He clamped his mouth shut against the moan. Dear God, it hurt; it hurt more than anything he’d ever known before. He was bleeding heavily and the fingers were stiffening. There was hardly any grip in his right hand, so he had to press his body tight against the sharpened tips. They scraped his face and he felt the cotton of his windcheater split. He made the turn and stopped again, his arms holding him. He couldn’t manage it much longer: the numbness was spreading from his hand, into his wrist. He crabbed towards the cliff but pushed his body first this time. He got as far as his waist when his foot slipped and his legs slipped away from the metalwork, dangling over the edge. Fantani snatched out with his uninjured hand, locking his fingers into a bracken outcrop. He heaved up and, wedging his elbows beneath his body, dragged the rest of his body to safety.
He rolled away from the rim and lay on his back. He was crying at the effort, tears mixing with the sweat and itching his face. He let the emotion flood out, needing the release. He got up at last, pulling awkwardly with his left hand at the jacket zip and slotting his right arm into it, to create a makeshift sling. Reluctantly he went to the edge, paced in five steps and stopped, putting his good hand over the wet grass. He quickly located the jewellery and wedged it beneath his left arm.
The lightness of dawn was already showing to the east as he took the car along the Ostia road and then turned inland towards Rome. The feeling had practically gone from his hand and the lightheadedness he knew from marijuana and cocaine made him giggle aloud, careless at the closeness of hysteria. He’d done it!
The night-duty man contacted Harkness at home and the deputy decided the importance justified the use of an insecure line, telephoning the director in Hampshire. Wilson answered on the second ring.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Harkness said.
‘What is it?’
‘I asked for a deep investigation, beyond what we already had,’ said the deputy. ‘We’ve just had a response from Australia. It seems for a brief period Jill Walsingham was a member of the Communist party there.’
There was a short silence. Then Wilson demanded, ‘Why’s it taken so long to find out?’
‘It was brief, like I said. Just three months, during her last year at university. Then she resigned.’
‘Which is the first thing she would have been told to do, if she was going underground,’ said Wilson. ‘Did she know Walsingham then?’
‘Not for another two years. They met when he was attached to Canberra.’
‘So she could have sought him out, under instructions?’
‘Yes.’
‘So now the Walsinghams are more likely candidates than Semingford,’ said the director.
During the night, he’d turned away from her. Charlie eased himself around to avoid disturbing her. If she awoke she would want to make love and Charlie still had the ache of the previous night. The light was pale, hardly enough at first to create more than a silhouette. Clarissa slept on her back, with her mouth slightly parted. She was snoring, faint bubbly snores, and as he watched her face twitched, first into a frown and moments later into a smile. He wanted to reach out and touch her but held back.
What was he going to do about her?
There’d been affairs before, when Edith was alive, and she’d always been the excuse to end them, the person he’d gratefully returned home to. But now Edith was dead, so he didn’t have his excuse. And he didn’t know if he wanted one anyway.
Clarissa wore floppy hats to the Royal Enclosures at Ascot and crewed yachts during Cowes Week and ate from Fortnum and Mason hampers from the back of Rolls Royces at Glyndebourne. And he was Charlie Muffin, who had never got closer to Ascot than the betting shop in Dean Street, thought ocean racer was the name of a greyhound and had never known the difference between an aria and an intermezzo. No matter what she said to romanticize her adventure, it was a novelty – fun. It would be wrong to let his loneliness make it into anything more.
The telephone interrupted his thoughts. Charlie jumped, fumbling it from the rest to avoid awakening Clarissa. There was the echoing delay of an overseas connection and then the sound of Rupert Willoughby’s voice.
Charlie hunched forward at the edge of the bed, his entire concentration upon what he was being told and its implications. He turned to see Clarissa blinking at him.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘There’s been a robbery at the Billington villa,’ said Charlie flatly. ‘Everything’s gone.’
She jerked up, so the bedclothes fell away from her. ‘But that’s
…’
‘… just too much of a coincidence,’ completed Charlie.
‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘Not yet.’
In London Rupert Willoughby stared down at the telephone and at the preliminary report of the inquiry agent which was alongside. He felt disgusted. At Clarissa. At Charlie. And at himself.
14
Early in his intelligence career Charlie Muffin developed an instinct, a personal antenna for danger. It had been instinct that turned him from the East Berlin border to hand the keys of the marked Volkswagen to a student to drive into a hail of machine-gun fire instead of an escape to the West. And it was the same instinct that gripped him now, as he went towards the villa at Ostia. He wasn’t a clerk any more, making ticks against a piece of paper. He was Charlie Muffin, a renegade operative who had spent seven years hiding from any sort of authority, being forced to confront God knows how many police and a security system of a British embassy. And he was being forced. His initial thought in the Rome hotel room had been to run. But if he ran, less than twenty-four hours after completing an insurance survey during which he’d learned the security and opened the safe, he’d be the obvious suspect. And get no further than the first check at any airport he attempted to escape from. So there was only one thing he could do. Continue under the guise of insurance assessor and try to recover every scrap of the expertise he’d once had to avoid detection. It would be like trying to cross a fraying tightrope without a safety net; he never had liked circuses.
There was a police roadblock a mile from the villa, officialdom showing its stable-door mentality, but Charlie had taken the precaution of telephoning ahead, and after a radio check he was waved through. From the vantage point of the approaching hill the villa looked as if it were under siege by blue-uniformed carabinieri. They encircled the outside wall, apparently prodding through undergrowth for clues, and Charlie saw more moving in similar head-bent fashion throughout the stepped gardens. There were police everywhere. Rooflights flickered red, and from other cars came a distorted crackle of radios.