A Pigeon Among the Cats (14 page)

“Which didn't stop a lot of you making up stories about Penny. You needn't think we didn't hear them, in a roundabout way, of course.”

“Stories, yes,” said Rose. “To be perfectly honest, we three did discuss what could have happened, but we never passed on anything or discussed it with anyone else, I do assure you. So I meant it when I said we were glad to see Penny looking well and strong in Venice this morning.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Banks, relapsing into her familiar soft, vague manner. “Penny had a sudden acute appendix, they thought at the hospital, not typhoid as the local doctor thought. We asked Billie to announce it to the tour, only I don't believe she did it properly. She went to hospital in an ambulance from the hotel. Oh, I know there were rumours of a police ambulance and drugs and I don't know what all.”

She paused, staring at Rose, who stared back, making no answer.

“She left hospital and we arranged for her to go to my sister in Wimbledon to convalesce. We asked Billie to announce this also and again die did it too vaguely. So of course the rumours started that she had been moved to prison on a charge of having drugs in her possession. All false.”

Again Mrs. Banks paused and again Mrs. Lawler waited.

“But Penny, being so independent and — and willful …” Mrs. Banks' voice wavered, but she continued to knit vigorously.

“Came back from Wimbledon?” asked Rose gently.

“Yes. With Gary. That's her boy-friend. Her latest boy-friend. Of course we cancelled her booking when she left the tour, but they hadn't filled it, they couldn't, could they, halfway through? She's at liberty to use the booked room here and the two other separate one night stops on the way back to Genoa.”

“Will she? I mean what about the boy-friend?”

“I don't know if she will. They joined us for coffee in the Square, as you noticed. But they didn't come over with us to the Lido.”

“Or turn up for lunch, either. I don't think the rest of tine tour know she's back. Only Billie, I suppose.”

“I've left all that to my husband,” Mrs. Banks said with a glance seawards, where the stout figure was threshing about between the long waves, with Myra and Flo jumping and splashing beside him.

“I think I'd better go and join them,” Rose said. “I'm sorry we have all been so lacking in … understanding and — and just commonsense. Too much melodrama in the newspapers and on the goggle-box, I'm afraid.”

Mrs. Banks graciously inclined her head. Poor woman, Rose thought, marching away across the sand; ivory from the neck up. As for Penny, if that vicious little piece was not smoking reefers in the coach why was all that mixed bag of noses so certain of the smell wafted back to them?

The sea, three lazily foaming waves of it above a bed of sand, welcomed her with cool pleasure as she dropped into it. No horrid icy shock, no dragging undertow, no decision to make about possible off-shore, on-shore, across-shore currents. Perhaps too shallow for continued pleasure, she decided, when she found her feet, even her knees, meeting the bottom as she tried to swim. She stood up to wade out to the others and when she caught up with them found all three only a little more than waist deep, watching her.

“Isn't it lovely?” they called.

“Gorgeous,” she shouted, turning to lie on her back and splash before rolling over and trying to swim down under the water to Flo's legs. The action failed for want of depth.

“Is there no more water further out?” she appealed to Mr. Banks, who was also watching her.

“According to the notice, plenty,” he said. “For strong swimmers only. Beware, beware!”

“Like that, is it? I see.”

She lay on her back again, turning her head away from the direct eye of the sun. The hard line of the horizon blurred beyond the edge of the beach, while the sky there showed a row of little white clouds, faint, fluffy, merging with the sea.

Land again, she told herself. Yugoslavia, of course. Some day when she had saved up again, she would come back to Venice and take ship down that far coast to Dubrovnik and on and on to Corfu …

“I'm going in now,” Myra called.

“I'm staying,” she called back, too contented to say more. When she stood up again she found she was alone, so she started to swim seawards until she found she had passed the last warning notice. At this she turned back, not wishing to bring life-savers from their lair, wherever that might be.

Gwen Chilton appeared at dinner that evening. She was early, in fact already drinking her usual pink aperitif in the bar when Rose and the others joined her.

Mrs. Lawler decided there was no point in pretending not to have seen hen She no longer showed white-faced fear. On the contrary she looked both happy and relaxed, her smooth skin the faintly pink bronze the older women so much admired.

“I saw you in the Square this morning,” Rose said, going up to the girl. “With new friends, or are they old ones?”

Gwen only smiled, so Mrs. Lawler went on. “I had just come out of the cathedral. With Owen Strong, actually. I came across him inside. He was waiting for you, I suspect.”

She said this with some degree of archness, for which she cursed herself for an old fool. She expected a laugh in reply, together with a denial, a blush perhaps.

She got none of these. Gwen, who had half risen at the sound of Owen's name, was now sunk back in her chair, chalk-faced again, eyes closed, a little shuddering moan escaping from her slack mouth.

These manifestations, genuine though they were this time, aroused no alarm still less any sympathy, in her companions. Instead, at a silent signal from Mrs. Lawler, they all three crept away to Myra's room to discuss Gwen's latest display of temperament in private.

So when the girl opened her eyes, instead of the usual ring of embarrassed faces she found that she was alone. Not even a single member of the tour, those she generally had a few words with, those who merely exchanged a “good night” or “good morning”, those who avoided doing so; not even Billie or Mario, the driver, both of whom usually dined with the tour group and often had local friends in each place of call; not even these symbols of protection were within sight.

Gwen sat and shivered inwardly. She might have known what would happen from Jake's response to her last two telephone calls. But she did not expect to see him so soon. It had been a complete surprise, a horrifying surprise, to see his tall figure, his dark face, black hair, black eyes, blue chin except for that nasty little pointed black beard he now wore, surging towards her from the entrance to the Doge's Palace as she was making a cautious approach to St. Mark's where she had promised to meet Owen.

Jake had swept her away into the middle of the Square under the scorching sun, where his friends, his bodyguard, had greeted her with carefully veiled, sneering smiles, sending more waves of alarm through her as they closed in, one just behind Jake, the other just behind herself.

“I thought …” she had stammered. “I didn't expect …”

“You thought because you'd had no trouble with the Law here and none from home or from …”

“I tried to explain when I called you,” she interrupted desperately. “The tour is still O.K. The cover couldn't be better, really. This Mrs. Lawler …”

“Never mind her,” Jake had broken in roughly. “She's negligible. Who's this feller you say keeps following …”

Again she interrupted, because she could not bear to have him drag out the truth about Owen. Which he could do, would do for certain, if he set his wicked mind to it, his mean, evil, trouble-seeking, cunning, grasping …

“Oh Jake!” she gasped, clutching his arm. She looked about her for a way of escape and found it. “Oh Jake, look behind me. A tall, thin old limey woman, staring at us. She's always like that; Mrs. Lawler. I told you. I told you. Following me like a hawk, Nuts, I shouldn't wonder. Never remarks on it, never asks questions …”

“Never mind her,” Jake had repeated. “You give me what I want. This other pest. What's he like? What's he want, for God's sake, beside the usual, which you've probably given, so what else? Come on — spill!”

In despair, in bitter fear, she had denied unfaithfulness, denied betrayal, denied blackmail. How could the stranger try that on when he didn't even know she had any secrets worth disclosing. She denied everything of relevance in fact about Owen, so that in the end Jake had said, “It's no good, honey, trying to put across it's your fascination on its own that's sending this guy. When I first made you, could be so. You were sure thing a raving beauty. But that's eleven, twelve year back. Never now. Never no more.”

It had been a good opportunity to end the bullying with outraged tears and to get away back to the hotel. But in the siesta time, when she had avoided the expedition to the beach and had gone out to find a cool shade among the luxuriant bushes in the hotel garden, her peace, that was no true peace but a desperate search for a means of escape from her dual predicament, was broken suddenly and her mind thrown into fresh confusion by the appearance of Owen himself.

Dressed in a worn, but clean beige-coloured linen suit, he dropped into a chair beside her and said calmly, but with a steely look in his grey eyes, “That was Jake, I suppose?”

“Yes,” she answered sullenly, to gain time.

“You sent for him?”

“No one
sends
for Jake.”

“Asked then?”

“No.”

It was no good trying to hold him off, she knew. In his way he was every bit as bad as Jake. If not worse. When Jake really blew his top she could expect a blow at least, a bullet at worst. Violence, anyway, strong enough to hurt, meant to hurt. But over quickly, whichever it was. With Owen it never showed, except by this everlasting persistence and behind it a threat, never yet spoken, but always to be feared.

So now she turned her head to look him straight in the eyes, hoping to impress him that he was getting the real truth at last. She saw no other way.

“You may as well have it straight,” she said. “It's been Jake all along, of course. And he isn't — wasn't — my husband. We've been together for years and I haven't been the only one by a long chalk. He isn't the English business man I told you. I haven't run off with his business takings. He hasn't got a business at all, not the sort of business I pretended he had. I met him in the States and started — well, working for him there. I don't even know his real nationality. He has a lot of passports, that I do know.”

“And speaks a lot of languages?”

“How did you guess?”

Owen ignored this. He was wondering how much of the latest story he could believe. Gwen was incapable of speaking the plain truth about anything. But on the whole there did not seem much point in discounting the facts. She was a less than willing tool, it seemed, of the brutal, ruthless American crook. She had been sent to Switzerland with a load of lolly to deposit, then to England to pick up this two-week tour in Italy. The plan must have been for her to remain with the tour until she got back to Gatwick. Then Jake would join her, they would fly out to Geneva, she as his Swiss wife, visit the bank, retrieve the spoil and Bob's your uncle.

But why that heavy suitcase? Why not a much less ostentatious method of stashing away stolen gains? Was it indeed money? Why not jewels, bullion, pictures, carefully packed ceramics, priceless old coins?

He tried to remember the recent disappearances of precious objects but could remember nothing suitable.

“How did you guess?” Gwen repeated.

Again he ignored the question. Instead he reached for her hand and began to stroke it and then the arm to which it belonged, brown, rounded, bare to the shoulder. She pulled her hand away but the eyes that continued to search his were now troubled.

“You've got to give up, Owen,” she began. “You can't take on Jake. You daren't. I daren't let you. I've stalled so far, but he'll have it out of me in the end. I know him. I think he's part Italian.”

“Mafia, eh?” said Owen, smiling for the first time since he had found her in the garden.

“I wouldn't know. All I do know is you've got to get out. Now. Today. Before he finds out you've — we've …”

She shuddered, hugging herself as if a cold wind had just blown over her.

Owen made up his mind.

“I'll go,” he said firmly. “Now don't get excited. Wait for it. I'll go, but on condition you go with me. And that we go straight to Geneva and pick up whatever it was you deposited there and then we'll disappear without trace.”

“You must be mad!” She was half out of her seat before Owen checked her. But she felt as she had once before done, that his grip, though not as violent as Jake's would have been, was many times stronger. And Owen was not even angry. His quiet voice was continuing.

“It would not be madness,” he was saying. “On the contrary the only sensible thing in the circumstances. You are the one who put the lolly in safe deposit. Yes? So it is you who must get it out. You have a Swiss name and a Swiss passport in that name. We withdraw what we can use from that safe deposit and — as I said before — disappear till the heat is off.”

“It would be on from Jake and he never lets up, I can tell you.”

He saw that she was wishing inwardly he might be right; that she might escape from her servitude. Poor little camp dolly; it would be quite a change to have her all to himself for a bit. Not for good. Compulsive liars were too dangerous. But money for jam …

“You're scared,” he taunted.

“Bloody scared! So would you be if you knew Jake as I do.”

Gwen was getting upset. Between these two men, these two crooks, she was being tossed about till she didn't know if she was on her head or her heels. And no one, repeat no one, to advise her. The three old girls who had seemed so willing to support her in the early days of the trip would be horrified to learn the whole truth. Besides, they'd advise her to go to the police, carabinieri! No, thank you. Besides, whatever it was in that Swiss bank, she'd taken the risk in putting it in, as usual, and she'd like to see a bit of it for herself, really for herself, not just in the shape of what Jake called “a ball”, night clubs, clothes and that.