Fault Line - Retail (35 page)

Then I was suddenly aware that one of them had stopped. I looked round and met the stern, quizzical gaze of Commissioner Gandolfi.

‘
Buon giorno
, Signor Kellaway,’ he said.

‘
Buon … giorno
.’ I could hardly force the words out. I knew my shock and dismay must have been obvious. The casual smile I tried to manufacture can’t have fooled him for an instant. ‘What … are you doing here?’

‘I’m going home.’ He returned my smile, but his was altogether more convincing. ‘My investigation delayed me yesterday evening. I missed the last ferry.
Allora
, here I am. You are travelling to Naples?’

‘No. I …’ What was I doing on the jetty if I wasn’t travelling to Naples? I felt unable even to begin to imagine a plausible answer. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Signora Hudson, then? Is she aboard?’

‘No,’ I replied. A sullen negative was all I was capable of.

‘You enjoy watching the boats, perhaps. Is that it? I understand. There is always something to watch in a port, isn’t there? The arrivals. The departures. The meetings. Like ours, this morning.’

It was hard not to read an extra layer of meaning into his words. Had he seen me give the briefcase to Bartolomeo? Had he guessed what the case contained? ‘I don’t want to hold you up,’ I said numbly.

‘You are right. I must not miss another ferry. I will hear from Signor Lashley very soon, I hope.’

‘I’m sure you will.’

‘
Bene. Arrivederci
, Signor Kellaway.’ He nodded to me, then headed for the gangway.

A few minutes later, the ferry sailed. I watched it chug slowly away from the jetty, then turn towards the mouth of the harbour. Neither Gandolfi nor Bartolomeo was sitting on deck. They were both in the cabin. Bartolomeo was presumably unaware that a police officer was on board. But the same mightn’t be true of the Camorrista Lashley had been told would observe the delivery of the case from a safe distance. Was Gandolfi known to them? I could only hope not.

As soon as the ferry had left the harbour, I started back along the jetty. There might be an innocent explanation for Gandolfi’s arrival on the scene, but I couldn’t persuade myself to believe it. Lashley had to be told. As soon as possible.

The phone was busy in the first bar I tried. I bought some
gettoni
and hurried on to another, but the phone there was out of order. Valuable minutes were spilling through my fingers as I ran back the way I’d come.

This time the phone was free. I rang the Excelsior and asked for Greville Lashley. There was a brief delay, then I was put through.

But it was Adam Lashley, not Greville, who answered. ‘Kellaway? You’re not supposed to be calling. What’s gone wrong?’

‘Where’s your father?’

‘They phoned him like they said they would. He’s just left. He’s going down to the Borgo Marinaro.’

The Excelsior stood on the seafront in Naples, as I knew, facing a small fishing harbour – the Borgo Marinaro – sheltered by the ancient walls and turrets of the Castel dell’Ovo. The harbour would be quiet on a Sunday morning and might have been chosen by Muriel’s kidnappers as a convenient place to drop her off by boat. It was certainly easy for Lashley to walk there from the hotel.

‘Have you screwed up, Kellaway?’ Adam’s voice had already risen in pitch. ‘I knew we shouldn’t have relied on you.’

‘There’s been no screw-up. I’ve handed the case over. The man who took it’s on the ferry.’

‘Why are you calling, then?’

‘Listen to me, Adam. I—’

‘We’ve listened to you too fucking much.’

‘
Listen to me
.’ I had the attention of the nearest espresso-sipping bar-propper even if I didn’t have Adam’s. I was thinking fast, though not necessarily as carefully as I needed to. Everything might still be all right.
Might
. But I couldn’t ignore Gandolfi’s presence on the ferry. I had to do something. Or, rather, since Adam was in Naples and I wasn’t,
he
had to do something. I lowered my voice. ‘Get yourself over to the ferry terminal. You need to be there when the ferry docks. That’ll be in about forty minutes, so you’ve got plenty of time. The man with the case is wearing a dark suit and a straw hat. We need to be sure he isn’t being followed.’

‘How am I supposed to know?’

‘Watch out for a middle-aged bloke in a pale-blue suit, grey-haired, good-looking. He got on the ferry after our man. I don’t think he’s tailing him, but if he is …’

‘Yeah? If he is?’

‘Then we might have a problem.’

‘What d’you expect me to do about it if we have?’

‘Nothing.’ It was beginning to sound like a bad idea even as I outlined it. I couldn’t be sure Adam wouldn’t draw attention to himself somehow, which might only make matters worse. ‘Don’t intervene, Adam. Just watch what happens.’

‘Watch some bastard walk away with my money, you mean?’

‘I’m sure your father’s explained that—’

‘Yeah, Dad’s explained.
You’ve
explained. Everyone’s fucking explained. OK, Kellaway. Leave this to me.’

‘It’s not—’ But he’d hung up. And I knew calling again was pointless. I put the phone back on the hook and hurried out of the bar.

All was picture-postcard peaceful on the Marina Grande harbourfront. The ferry was still visible, ploughing a white furrow through the deep-blue sea as it headed for Naples. The sun was warm in my face. The air was fresh. It seemed inconceivable that Muriel Lashley’s life hung in the balance this summer morning. But it did. And there was nothing –
absolutely nothing
– I could do about it.

I went back to the villa and told Jacqueline what had happened. She wasn’t sure it had been wise to send Adam to the ferry terminal and neither was I. But the die was cast. There were still good reasons to think everything would proceed smoothly. The money had been paid. Now, surely, Muriel would be released. I imagined her being helped out of a small motorboat on to a pontoon at the Borgo Marinaro and left to find her way to where Lashley was waiting for her. It wasn’t so hard to believe.

Time passed, slowly but inexorably. Then, at last, the telephone rang.

It was Lashley. And the tone of his voice told me at once that all my believing had been for nothing.

THIRTY-ONE

THE BAD NEWS
in Lashley’s first phone call was followed by worse in his second and worse still, in its own way, in his third. Jacqueline and I sat in the Villa Orchis struggling to come to terms with all that occurred as the morning elapsed, waiting helplessly for the consequences to reveal themselves. All we knew for certain was that those consequences would be bleak and bitter.

The sequence of events, once it was clear, told its own terrible story. It began with Lashley standing for half an hour outside Piovra, one of the bars in the Borgo Marinaro. He’d been told Muriel would be brought to him there and he assumed she’d be delivered by boat. But nothing happened. Time dragged by. Piovra opened for business. Still nothing happened.

Then the Piovra barman came out, saying there was someone on the phone wanting to talk to him. Lashley went into the bar and picked up the phone. He recognized the caller’s voice at once. It was the negotiator he’d been dealing with. But he was no longer negotiating.

‘You broke your word, Signor Lashley. The police are on us. You should not have gone to them. The deal is off.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘You will not see your wife today.’

The call ended there, leaving Lashley bewildered and distraught. He wondered if he should phone the police at once, but instead he hurried back to the hotel.

More or less simultaneously, about a kilometre north of the Borgo Marinaro, the ferry from Capri was docking at the Molo Beverello. Adam was watching from the corner of the ticket office as the passengers disembarked. He spotted Bartolomeo at once. And the man in the pale-blue suit – Gandolfi – was close behind. He stayed that way as Bartolomeo headed away from the ferry in the direction of the car park.

A flash of sunlight from a windscreen drew Adam’s attention to a car moving slowly round the curve of the exit road, waiting, perhaps, for Bartolomeo. Gandolfi may have had the same thought. He quickened his pace, overtook Bartolomeo and stepped into his path.

There was an exchange of words, inaudible to Adam. Gandolfi flourished some identification and pointed to the briefcase. More words came, tenser and faster. And more pointing. Bartolomeo shrugged and set the briefcase down. Gandolfi looked at it and said something. Perhaps he was expecting the case to be opened. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Bartolomeo pulled out a gun and shot Gandolfi in the chest.

A woman screamed. Bystanders scattered. Adam took cover behind the ticket office. Gandolfi fell to the ground. Bartolomeo grabbed the briefcase and ran to the car, which took off with a squeal of tyres, pulled straight on to the main road and sped away.

The shocked bystanders recovered themselves slowly. Gandolfi lay where he’d fallen, bleeding heavily and groaning. Someone ran to call an ambulance. Adam walked away fast, heading for the Excelsior.

By the time he arrived, Lashley had already spoken to me, so he realized at once, when Adam told him what had happened, that the man Bartolomeo had shot was Commissioner Gandolfi. The game was up. He phoned the police.

Adam protested that this wrecked Muriel’s chances of being freed. He couldn’t seem to understand that the shooting of a senior officer meant the police would soon be coming to us even if we didn’t go to them. It was better to tell them everything. Well, maybe
he
didn’t want to understand. And Lashley didn’t have the heart to point out that with the money in their hands and a full-scale police investigation sure to follow, the Camorra had no reason now to let Muriel go. He tried to squeeze something hopeful from the negotiator’s parting remark – ‘You will not see your wife today’ – but that was largely for Adam’s benefit. He entertained little hope himself, as he admitted to me later.

‘Whether Gandolfi followed you from the villa or just showed up to catch that ferry by chance we may never know, but the result couldn’t have been worse. The police will want to make someone suffer for the murder of one of their own. They’ll do everything they can to catch the people behind it. That makes Muriel a potential witness against them as well as their hostage. To imagine they’ll release her in such circumstances is’ – he sighed – ‘simply unrealistic.’

By then, Lashley knew, because the police had told him, that Gandolfi was dead. Once they’d realized a previously unreported kidnapping had cost their colleague his life, their initial sympathy had given way to hostility, exacerbated by Adam’s finger-jabbing demands that they ‘fucking do something’. What they’d done, after his finger-jabbing had escalated to shoulder-shoving, was arrest him.

‘I should have stopped Adam before he went so far,’ Lashley admitted. ‘But I was so appalled by how badly wrong things had gone so damn quickly that I couldn’t seem to concentrate. The police will probably just detain him overnight. Theoretically, they could charge us all with obstruction of justice. So this fellow the Consulate’s sent to see me says, anyway. But he doubts it’ll come to that and so do I. Don’t reproach yourself for anything you did or didn’t do. We all acted in good faith and for the best as we saw it. The fact that the outcome’s been disastrous doesn’t alter that.’

It was a brave assertion by Lashley, but I wasn’t sure he really believed it. He’d booked himself in for a second night at the Excelsior, so as to be on hand when Adam was released. It had been made clear that Jacqueline and I would be required to report with Lashley to Police Headquarters in Naples later on Monday to
make
full statements. The man from the British Consulate had supplied the name of a lawyer we’d do well to consult. The mechanism of an official reaction to the murder of Commissioner Gandolfi and the kidnapping of Muriel Lashley was cranking into motion.

The blowing of the lid on the kidnap plot meant those close to Muriel who’d hitherto been told nothing about it now had to be informed. There was no way round it. Secrecy had got us nowhere. The awful truth had to be confessed. I knew Lashley would tell Harriet and Vivien without further delay. And I knew that would bring Vivien to Capri, probably by Tuesday at the latest. I could remember a time when I’d have been elated that I was going to see her again. Now the prospect was simply one more layer of dread. As Lashley had put it, things had gone wrong
so damn quickly
.

I had no doubt who was primarily to blame for that. I left Jacqueline to explain to Patrizia and Elena what was going on, a task I didn’t envy her, and headed for the Gabbiano. The police didn’t yet know who’d made the anonymous call that had prompted Gandolfi to visit Capri. I fully intended to tell them. But not before I demanded an explanation from him myself.

It was mid-afternoon when I reached the Gabbiano. The atmosphere was quiet and somnolent. A man emerged sleepily from a cubbyhole and gave me Thompson’s room number. There were no phones in the rooms, which was fine by me. The less warning Thompson had of my arrival the better.

His guttural, belated response to my thumps on his door suggested he’d been asleep himself. He was still asking who I was and what I wanted when I tried the handle and found the door wasn’t locked.

‘Kellaway?’ He was sitting on the edge of the bed when I entered the small, shutter-darkened room. He was dressed only in socks, trousers and a vest. He glared at me blearily. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘You promised you’d say nothing.’

I moved to the window and pushed the shutters open. The
sunlight
that flooded in dazzled him and fell on a dog-eared pink wallet-file lying on the bedside table. The flap was open. Thompson flicked it over, concealing the contents, while shielding his eyes with the other hand.

‘Why did you call the police?’ I demanded, standing directly in front of him.

‘I … didn’t.’

‘No one else knew, Thompson. It has to have been you.’

‘I made no call.’

‘Didn’t you hear what I just said?
No one else knew
.’