He thanked the negotiator and the psychiatrists from there, and jerked his head to me to come out and follow him. I did: across the road, in through the door of the flats and up the stone staircase beyond.
'The big man,' Pucinelli said, 'was up there,' he pointed, 'right at the top, sixth floor, where the stairs lead to the roof.
It took me some time to find him. But we had barricaded that doors of course. He couldn't get out.'
'Was he violent?' I asked.
Pucinelli laughed. 'He was sitting on the stairs with the little girl on his knee, telling her a story.'
'What?'
'When I went up the stairs with my pistol ready he said to put it away, the show was over, he knew it. I told him to go down into the street. He said he wanted to stay where he was for a while. He said lie had a child of his own of that age and he'd never be able to hold her on his knee again.'
Sob stuff, I thought. 'What did you do?' I asked.
'Told him to go down at once.'
The 'at once' however had taken quite a long time. Pucinelli like ail Italians liked children, and even carabinieri, I supposed, could be sentimental.
'That poor deprived father,' I said, 'abducted someone else's daughter and shot someone else's son.'
'Your head,' Pucinelli said, 'is like ice.'
He led the way into the flat that had been besieged for four and a half days, and the heat and stink of it were indescribable. Squalor took on a new meaning. Apart from the stench of sweat and the decomposing remains of meals there were unmentionable heaps of cloth and rags and newspaper in two of the three small rooms: the baby, incontinent at both ends, had done more than cry.
'How did they stand it?' I wondered. 'Why didn't they wash anything?'
The mother wanted to. I heard her asking. They wouldn't Set her.'
We searched our way through the mess, finding the ransom suitcase almost immediately under a bed. As far as I could tell, the contents were untouched: good news for Cenci. Pucinelli gave the packets of notes a sour look and poked around for the radio.
The owners of the flat had one themselves, standing openly on top of a television set, but Pucinelli shook his head over it, saying it was too elementary. He started a methodical search, coming across it eventually inside a box of Buttoni in a kitchen cupboard.
'Here we are,' he said, brushing off pasta shells. 'Complete with earplug for private listening.' A smallish but elaborate walkie-talkie, aerial retracted.
'Don't disturb the frequency,' I said.
'I wasn't born yesterday. And nor was the man giving the instructions, I shouldn't think.'
'He might not have thought of everything.'
'Maybe not. All criminals are fools sometimes, otherwise we'd never catch them.' He wound the cord with its earpiece carefully around the radio and put it by the door.
'What range do you think that has?' I asked.
'Not more than a few miles. I'll find out. But too far, I would think, to help us.'
There remained the pistols, and these were easy: Pucinelli found them on a windowsill when he let up one of the blinds to give us more light.
We both looked down from the window. The ambulance and the barriers were still there, though the drama had gone. I thought that the earlier host of official cars and of highly armed men crouching behind them must have been a fearsome sight. What with that threat ever present and the heat, the baby, the searchlights and the stench, their nerves must have been near exploding point the whole time.
'He could have shot you any time,' I said, 'when you walked out across the street.'
'I reckoned he wouldn't.' He spoke unemotionally. 'But when I was creeping up the stairs…'he smiled fractionally, '… I did begin to wonder.'
He gave me a cool and comradely nod and departed, saying he would arrange transit for the ransom and send his men to collect and label the pistols and radio.
'You'll stay here?' he asked.
I pinched my nose. 'On the stairs outside.'
He smiled and went away, and in due course people arrived.
I accompanied the ransom to the bank of Pucinelli's choosing, followed it to the vaults and accepted bank and carabinieri receipts. Then, on my way back to collect the Cenci runabout, I made a routine collect call to my firm in London. Reports from advisors-in-the-field were expected regularly, with wisdom from the collective office mind flowing helpfully back.
The girl's home," I said. The siege is over, the first ransom's safe, and how are my snaps doing on the second?'
'Lists with you tomorrow morning.'
'Right.'
They wanted to know how soon I'd be back.
Two or three days,' I said. 'Depends on the girl.'
FIVE
Alessia woke in the evening, feeling sick. Cenci rushed upstairs to embrace her, came down damp-eyed, said she was still sleepy and couldn't believe she was home.
I didn't see her. Ilaria slept all night on an extra bed in Alessia's room at her aunt Luisa's suggestion, and did seem genuinely pleased at her sister's return. In the morning she came down with composure to breakfast and said that Alessia felt ill and wouldn't get out of the bath.
'Why not?' Cenci said, bewildered.
'She says she's filthy. She's washed her hair twice. She says she smells.'
'But she doesn't,' he protested.
'No. I've told her that. It makes no difference.'
Take her some brandy and a bottle of scent,' I said.
Cenci looked at me blankly but Ilaria said, 'Well, why not?' and went off on the errand. She had talked more easily that morning than at any breakfast before, almost as if her sister's release had been also her own.
Pucinelli arrived mid-morning with a note-taking aide, and Alessia came downstairs to meet him. Standing there beside him in the hall I watched the tentative figure on the stairs and could clearly read her strong desire to retreat. She stopped four steps from the bottom and looked behind her, but Ilaria, who had gone up to fetch her, was nowhere to be seen.
Cenci went forward and put his arm round her shoulders, explaining briefly who I was, and saying Pucinelli wanted to know everything that happened to her, hoping for clues to lead him to arrests.
She nodded slightly, looking pale.
I'd seen victims return with hectic jollity, with hysteria, with apathy; all with shock. Alessia's state looked fairly par for the circumstances: a mixture of shyness, strangeness, weakness, relief and fear.
Her hair was still damp. She wore a T-shirt, jeans and no lipstick. She looked a defenceless sixteen, recently ill; the girl I'd seen undressed. What she did not look was the glossy darling of the European racetracks.
Cenci led her to the library, and we scattered around on chairs.
'Tell us,' Pucinelli said. 'Please tell us what happened, from the beginning.'
'I… it seems so long ago.' She spoke mostly to her father, looking seldom at Pucinelli and not at all at me; and she used Italian throughout, though as she spoke slowly with many pauses, I could follow her with ease. Indeed it occurred to me fleetingly that I'd soaked in a good deal more of the language than I'd arrived with, and more than I'd noticed until then.
'I'd been racing here on our local track… but you know that.'
Her father nodded.
'I won the six o'clock race, and there was an objection…'
More nods, both from Cenci and Pucinelli. The note-taking aide, eyes down to the task, kept his shorthand busily flowing.
'I drove home. I was thinking of England. Of riding Brunelleschi in the Derby…' She broke off. 'Did he win?'
Her father looked blank. At the time, shortly after her disappearance, he'd have been unlikely to notice an invasion of Martians in the back yard.