A Pigeon Among the Cats (9 page)

“Don't let me forget to give you …” he began, taking her by the elbow and beginning to guide her towards the door of the museum.

She was too surprised to resist him, but moved where he led until outside in the glare of the sunlight, he dropped her arm to put on his dark glasses. They went down a long flight of steps, moved past a succession of low stone walls, clambered up a steep bank and sank to the brown turf under a clump of wizened bushes.

“You've got a nerve, I must say!” Gwen panted, trying to mop her face with a very small handkerchief, then throwing the wet ball from her an disgust.

“I've been thinking,” Owen said. “I'd have tried to contact you earlier, only you had that scare night before last.”

“The Banks girl, you mean? So you heard about that? Another of these phoney journalists?”

Owen laughed delightedly.

“No. Actually I have friends in Perugia.”

“You always have friends. Never mind. It wasn't typhoid after all.”

“It never was typhoid. But it wasn't heroin, after all, either. Just a silly kid, smoking pot. Overdid it. Your driver made a statement.”

“I'm not surprised. She socked him one the time she hurt her foot trying to kick Mrs. Lawler and getting the coach steps instead because the old girl was too quick for her.”

He frowned, hearing that name. But he only said, “So that was why your Mario turned her in? Ities don't like being attacked by women.” He moved closer to her and said, “Forget all that dreary lot. Let me drive you back into Florence.”

Cooled and rested Gwen let him stroke her arm. His hand was cold and dry; when presently he began to kiss the arm and then her neck and finally her mouth, his lips too were dry and cool, less than eager, but surprisingly compelling. She felt too lazy and far too comfortable to resist these advances; which surely could go no further in this place where people moved to and fro below and above the shrubs where they were sitting. But she still wondered at his appearance in Fiesole, so openly, even advertising his arrival.

“Obvious,” he answered her question. “Rome was a washout. Mrs. Lawler suspects me of having designs on you. I bet you've encouraged her.”

“I had to.”

“Granted So the best thing is for me to play the open-handed, open-hearted bum, out bird-catching. At your age the old hags will decide you can, must, or ought to look after yourself, so —”

“Thanks very much,” Gwen said, roused from apathy by this picture of the proceedings. “I suppose the next move is to find Billie and tell her I'm off now, but will be back at the hotel for dinner.”

“Exactly.”

He got up in one easy movement, lifted her to her feet in another and brushed her down first before giving her a final and much warmer kiss.

“You go ahead and I'll have the car outside the church in five minutes, flat.”

Billie took Gwen's nonchalant message in the matter-of-fact spirit in which it was given. If Mrs. Chilton and her ageing admirer were making progress in this girl and boy fashion, it was not for her to laugh at the poor old things, only make sure they did not shock the respectable clientele, already a bit shaken by the false typhoid scare. She decided she would not spread the news of Gwen's action. Time enough, when the coach party assembled and voices began to report Mrs. Chilton's disappearance, to announce that she had gone ahead with friends.

“Mr. Strong, obviously,” Mrs. Lawler said. “Well, if she chooses to behave like a silly child, who are we to try to stop her?”

Myra and Flo agreed.

Owen drove to a garage on the outskirts of Florence, where he parked his car and suggested they might walk to his hotel.

“Is it near?” Gwen asked, looking up at the sky. The change there had been dramatic. She had seen the black patch on the horizon from the steps of the church where Owen was waiting. No more than a patch it had been, and he had laughed when she pointed it out and told her it might hit the coach but they would be ahead of it all the way down and it would probably miss Florence altogether.

“Is what near?” Owen asked a little irritably.

“This hotel of yours?”

“Reasonably. I thought you meant the storm.”

He was looking up himself now and then down to where a few black wet patches, the size of saucers, had appeared on the wide pavement.

“Ow!” Gwen cried as a similar giant drop fell on her upturned face and spread out on every side.

“Run!” Owen said, taking her arm and starting off himself.

There was no time for protest, no point in argument. The sky had opened, the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled, the people ran and jumped and scurried, scarves and jackets and newspapers clamped over their heads. They dashed across streets where the wash from cars and vans splashed them to their knees; they stepped down from pavements into ankle deep ponds; they waded through shallow fast-flowing streams. Gwen had no idea where they were going but Owen continued to hold her arm and urge her on with cries of “Run, darling! Keep it up! Run!”

When at last he stopped in the shelter of the dark little porch of a tall building in a tree-lined street, she panted, “I can't go on! I'm soaking! I can't breathe! I must rest!”

He released her arm to pat her shoulder.

“So you shall, love. We've arrived. We're here. Shall we go inside?”

She looked about her. There were glass doors at the back of the porch and lights behind them. Water was running from her hair down her face and down the back of her neck. Her thin sleeveless dress was clinging to her, drips from it running down her bare muddy legs to her filthy, squelching sandals.

“I can't!” she protested. “I'm a sight! I'm not fit to be seen!”

She found she was shivering and began to cry.

“Come on,” Owen said roughly. “I'm as bad as you. We've got to dry off and warm up. They'll fix us inside.”

“I want a taxi,” Gwen insisted. “I want to go back to my own hotel.”

“Taxi! You've got a hope! Don't be daft! Come inside.”

She knew he was right. She might have known when she left Fiesole that it would all fall out like this. She had let him take control then and the thunderstorm had merely helped him. In any case it would explain her delay in reaching the hotel on the Arno.

Owen proved to be a grand fixer. His room was reasonably good like the one in Rome. Her clothes disappeared to be cleaned and dried and she didn't need them. The shower was warm and Owen, afterwards, completely restored her circulation. Her response encouraged him.

He began to talk about the strange chance that had brought them together.

“Chance?” Gwen laughed indulgently, stroking his bare shoulder. “You know you followed me.”

“I didn't know you'd turn up at Genoa. I swear I didn't.”

He waited, but she did not answer so he said softly, “Why did you come on this tour, my darling? Why not stay in Switzerland? Why not move the lolly right away, once it was safely stowed? Why not play it cool and fast?”

She drew away from him.

“Why are you asking all this?”

He pulled her back and began to kiss her again, talking between caresses.

“Because I think you need help. You're in a mess. You've nicked your firm's petty cash, or so you told me in Rome, to revenge yourself on your boss who won't marry you. And you don't know how to go on from that. But you know you can't go back to England. Are they watching for you there? Has he put the Law on you? He must know the safe's empty. He must have taken
some
action.”

“No!” Gwen cried, sitting up and covering her ears to shut out all these questions. “You've got it all wrong! From start to finish! I was only the messenger!”

“
What
!”

Owen was up now, staring down at her.

“You were …! Then boss — lover-boy — or not the real boss … That's the one that filled the heavy suitcase and had you carry the can to Geneva? Was that it?”

Gwen nodded miserably. Anything to stop him asking questions she could never really answer. Anything … anything …

Gwen had, as usual, a plausible story for her long delay in getting back to the hotel on the Arno. Owen's car had been slowed down by the traffic when the storm broke. They had crawled into the town at last, but at a big junction of roads, where water from blocked drains had formed a lake, their engine had been drowned as Owen tried to slip past near the kerb. They had to run for his hotel, getting soaked in the process. But the management had been most helpful. While she was put into a room to wait for her dress and things to be dried quickly, Owen had gone off to rescue his car with the help of his garage.

“He was lucky,” Rose said. “We saw a lot of breakdowns on our own way back.”

Gwen smiled.

“He speaks the language and seems to have plenty of money.”

“That would help certainly. So he was able to bring you back here?”

“Oh no!” Gwen opened wide, innocent eyes. “The car was towed to the garage to be dried out I came home in a taxi.”

“Another piece of luck,” said Flo. “But of course you speak the language, too.”

“And with Mr. Strong to help …” Rose left it at that while the meal lasted. But afterwards, sipping their usual coffee, she said in a low voice to Gwen, “My dear, are you feeling better about this Mr. Strong? I mean, you were so worried in Rome. And he does seem to be following you. In Assisi …”

“How d'you know he was in Assisi?”

The girl's voice was sharp, quite unnecessarily so, Rose thought but she answered the question calmly.

“Because I saw his car leaving. Actually, it came into my viewfinder when I was taking a last photograph on my way down to the car park.”

“You took a photo of his car … with him in it?”

Gwen was excited, but suppressed any show beyond mild interest.

“Yes. I've been taking pictures all along the line, you know. For the first few days not deliberately of our lot. But I'm sure you'll figure in several of them. You shall have a look later on when they're developed. They're colour slides, so the prints are not terribly good. But you're very photogenic, my dear, as you must know by now.”

She regretted adding “by now” for Gwen might take offence, even at such a mild reference to her age.

Mrs. Lawler sighed, thinking about the silly rules concerning age that seemed to govern all the conversation on the tour. Age and sex. A dreary convention of un-funny jokes and sniggers.

She pulled herself up. Her own censorious attitude was equally tiresome. Who was she to prefer the sort of indecent wit that made her laugh. Who indeed!

Gwen, regarding her friend now with terrified awe, entirely missed the reference to her age. But she soon calmed herself, for she found she could not remember any single occasion when Mrs. Lawler's camera could possibly have compromised her. Her memory did not go back to the little square in San Gimignano and the bank where she had used her Swiss passport.

On further consideration she began to see some profit in Rose's collection of pictures, providing she could secure the sole use of them for herself. Or at least of those of Owen and his car. How to do this was difficult but she decided to think about it.

Her thoughts were given an added incentive the next morning. She had gone out early to buy a newspaper, an Italian one, because English papers always appeared at least a day later than their printing and so two days later than the events set down in them.

On the second page of her Italian news sheet there was a blurred picture, small, but familiar. Owen's car. Or rather, not Owen's car, but that of an irate owner, whose car had been taken from a park in Nice, just ten days ago. The number was different the make was a common one, English with a right-hand drive. But somehow Gwen felt it was Owen's car, in a snapshot taken with its real owner, wearing its real number plate, not the substitute he had put on it.

So what about those photographs that Rose Lawler had taken? If she could lay her hands on them she had a definite good new hold over Owen. She could stop him badgering her, trying to con her into sharing that valuable asset so safely stashed away in the Swiss bank.

She frightened herself with several nasty guesses of what he might do to her when she disclosed her new power. But she would play it as cool as she knew how. She need not tell him what her evidence was that would bring the police of several nations upon him. She would just make it clear that she could do that if she had to. But in the meantime they could go on with an association that was so very pleasant that it could well begin to weaken her resolution if she continued it too ardently.

Gwen checked her thoughts. That wouldn't do, to fall for Owen in a big way. Look how it had turned out with Jake.

That sobered her, the thought of Jake. She looked up at Mrs. Lawler, knowing she had been silent for far too long.

“Oh well,” she said. “He is rather attractive and I don't think mere's really any harm in him. Not real harm. Do you?”

Mrs. Lawler found this speech so palpably false and the implied “harm” so vulgar, so twisted, that she could not help laughing in an unmirthful way that Gwen did not, understand, but took to be reassuring.

The programme of sight-seeing for the next day was a formidable one. As Rose said to her friends at breakfast, “We're in for the whole Renaissance today. Together with the other thousands of tourists. I'm terrified, frankly.”

“What of?” Myra was curious; this was not like Rose.

“Of being disappointed — disillusioned. Of being forced to say to myself, ‘Yes, I know this picture. I've been seeing reproductions of it for fifty years and the original barely come up to them, or doesn't even come up to them …'”

“Blasphemy!” exclaimed Flo. “I should be angry if I thought you meant it, but of course you don't. What time do we start?”