Orchestrated Death (31 page)

‘You’ve changed me,’ he said, stroking her shoulder. ‘And you aren’t white at all. More butter-coloured.’

‘Salted or unsalted?’

‘Pure Jersey.’

‘It’s only the fire light,’ she said, turning her head to kiss his hand, and he smiled and shook his head. All his senses
seemed sharpened, all sensations heightened. The taste of the food and wine, the blissful heat from the fire on his skin,
the shapes of light made by the flames, the small bright sounds of the fire and the ticking clock and the tap of cutlery on
plate -everything seemed intensified, more itself, as if he had been transported into a world of paradigms. As perhaps he
had, being in love.

They talked of nothing in particular, and gradually Slider fell silent, leaving the chatter to Joanna. She touched on a few
subjects, and when they got to the cheese stage she asked him how the case was coming along.

‘We’re waiting for reports to come in on the shop and Vincey’s. But I don’t suppose they’ll tell us much. If Anne-Marie was
mixed up with a big, powerful organisation, it isn’t likely we’ll be able to pin her murder on them. They’ll have covered
their tracks.’

‘Is that what bothers you?’

‘What bothers me most is that if I’m right, my superiors will regard her as an unimportant side issue. People seem to have
come to mean a great deal less than money nowadays.’

‘Oh Bill!’ She smiled, leaning forward to touch his knee. ‘That’s nothing new. Really, it’s just the opposite – that only
nowadays have people begun to feel that it’s wrong for money to mean more than people. Think of the Victorian times. Think
of Roman times. Think of any time in the past.’

He did not look convinced, so she changed the subject and told him about her day and the terrible conductor they were suffering
from. She related a few musical anecdotes to him, and saw him trying to be amused and failing, and fell silent. Then, seeing
he had allowed her to fail him, he felt guilty, and tried to make it up to both of them by making love to her again.

For the first time in his life he couldn’t do it. Long after she had accepted the inevitable he went on trying, until at last
she said gently, ‘It’s no use bullying yourself. If it won’t, it won’t.’

He rolled over onto one elbow and stared at her. This, then, was the other side of that heightening of awareness –that everything
hurt too much.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said helplessly.

‘You shouldn’t have tried. It’s only made you sad.’

‘I didn’t want – I wanted us not to be separate.’

‘Your feeling like that separates us. For heaven’s sake, if you want to be sad in my company, go ahead and feel sad. You don’t
have to amuse me. You don’t have to be on your best behaviour.’

He put out a hand and pulled a lock of her muddled hair. ‘I know.’

‘No. I don’t think you do. Coming here to me is like – oh, I don’t know – like going out to tea when you were a child. Best
suit, party manners, a break from real life and bread and-jam.
I’m not real to you at all.’

He was surprised. ‘You are! You’re the most real thing in my life.’

‘Then you should feel that you can be natural with me. Be gloomy, if that’s how you feel.’

‘But that wouldn’t be fair on you.’

She jerked away from him and sat up. ‘Oh, fair on me! What’s fair on me? What do you think you’re doing? When you happen to
be here, and you’re in a good mood, is that what you think is fair?’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said helplessly.

‘I can see that. It’s because you don’t put yourself to the trouble of thinking. Where will you be sleeping tonight, just
answer me that?’

‘At home, of course,’ he said unhappily.

‘Of course!’

‘But you know that. What else can I do?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. Forget it. Just don’t talk about fairness.’ She stood up with an abrupt movement of exasperation or hurt,
he wasn’t sure which, and stood with her back to him leaning on her folded arms on the mantelpiece.

‘Joanna, I don’t understand. I though you wanted me to be here. I don’t want to hurt you. If it hurts you, me being here,
I won’t come,’ he tried.

‘Oh, for God’s sake! Thank you for the extensive choice.’

He didn’t know what else to say, and after a moment she said, ‘I think you’d better go. We’re only picking at each other.’

But not like this, he thought. He couldn’t bear to leave her like this. He hesitated for a long time, and then went and put
his hands on her shoulders and turned her. Her eyes were dry and bright and she looked at him searchingly, perhaps to see
how much he understood, which was very little.

‘When I was a child,’ she said suddenly, ‘My mother always wound the clock in the sitting-room on a Sunday afternoon, about
five o’clock. It was a very evocative sound. And there was a drain in the kitchen under the sink that smelled of very old
green soap. And the bricks the house was made of, when the sun warmed them, they smelled like caramel. But no-one will ever
say that sort of thing about any
house of mine. I build my nest, you see, but nothing grows in it.’

Still he didn’t understand, but wisely avoiding words, he kissed her on the forehead and the eyes and the lips, and after
a while she responded, and they lay down on the hearth rug again and made love, this time without any trouble.

‘You think this will make everything all right again,’ she muttered at one point, and he did understand, dimly.

‘I love you,’ he responded. ‘I love you.’ He said it again and again, and never used her name because she was not separate
from him then, she was part of his substance. Afterwards he lay heavy, like something waterlogged, in her arms, unable to
make the terrible effort of moving.

‘I’d better go,’ he said at last.

‘Hardly worth it. You might as well stay here. Move in, and save yourself the journey.’

‘I can’t,’ he said automatically. Did she mean it or was she joking? He dreaded a revival of the argument.

But she only said, ‘I know.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘What do you want, a written guarantee?’ she said, but without rancour. ‘Go on, you dope. Get thee to thy clonery.’

‘Here’s the report on that company, Olio d’Italia.’ Dickson said, gesturing Slider to a seat. The fragrance of whisky hung
on the air all around him like aftershave. ‘There was a certain amount of reluctance on the part of our Italian friends to
press the enquiry, which in itself tended to confirm what you thought, Bill. There’s mud at the bottom of every pool, and
some of it’s best left unstirred. Still, for what it’s worth, they’ve sent us this profile, and it’s pretty much what you’d
expect.’

‘Oh,’ said Slider. Sometimes it wasn’t nice to be proved right.

‘Olio d’Italia, head office in Calle le Paradiso, however you pronounce that. Run by one Gino Manetti –’

‘Cousin Mario,’ Slider said. Dickson looked a question and didn’t wait for the answer.

‘The company itself is a subsidiary of Prodiutto Italiano
imaginative names these people choose – which is a massive international concern dealing with all sorts of Italian produce
– oil, pasta, tomatoes, olives, cheeses, grapes, dried fruit -you name it. The big boy at the head of the parent company is
also, surprise surprise, called Manetti – Arturo Manetti. He lives in an enormous villa up in the hills above Florence. Fantastic
place, so I’m told, servants, guard dogs, electric fence, armed bodyguards, the lot. Arturo is Gino’s uncle, and others of
his relations run other subsidiaries. Of course, the reason the Italian security didn’t want to run the enquiries too hard
is that Arturo is the local Capo.’

‘I see.’ This business of being proved right got worse and worse.

‘Anyway, they’ve gone into the business, and it’s all legit –except that it isn’t, of course. They don’t sell the oil in Italy
at all, as we would have expected. The output of that particular subsidiary is all export, and the two biggest international
customers are – want to guess?’

‘England and America.’

‘Britain and the States – got it in two. Their turnover is pretty big. In this country alone they do two hundred million.
That’s an awful lot of oil’

‘An awful lot of people like Italian food.’

Dickson looked at him sharply. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘No sir.’

‘I’ve got a list of their outlets. Some of them are wholesalers, so I doubt if the list is complete as far as retailers go.
Obviously they must all sell oil in some form, but I doubt whether more than one or two are actually bent – it wouldn’t pay
them to run the outfit that way. Your place in Tutman Street is on the list, and everything is backed up by the right paperwork.
On paper everything is rose-scented, and that’s the way it has to be, of course. No funny business. Nobody with a previous.
They’ll have people out all the time, agents, looking for likely recruits.

‘Who recruited Anne-Marie, I wonder?’ Slider said.

Dickson cocked his head. ‘From what I gather, she was a cold-blooded unemotional, ambitious little cow. So she was ideal material,
wasn’t she? I mean, it was either that or the
Foreign Office.’ He leaned back and the chair creaked protestingly. ‘The other end, the Vincey end, is even more difficult
to finger.’ He swivelled the chair and knocked a file off the desk with his elbow. Confining him in an office was like keeping
a buffalo in the bathroom. ‘Vincey’s has been in existence as a business for over a hundred years on that same premises in
Bond Street. Irreproachable address, first-class clientele and all that. The shop and the goodwill were purchased eleven years
ago by an agent acting for an international antiques trading consortium, who had some very big American money behind them.
The money traces back to a New York holding company with a Park Avenue address.’

‘Swanky.’

‘As you say. It’s called AM Holdings, and the President of the company is called Walter Fontodi.’

‘All impeccably above board?’

Dickson gave a savage smile. ‘Squeaky bloody clean. If they could nail this AM Holdings they’d be happy folk over there. But
they haven’t yet found a way of touching it.’

‘So the Vincey end is not a new exercise?’

‘That’s the way they work. That’s the beauty of a family business, isn’t it? You can take your time over things. If you don’t
benefit yourself, your son will, or your grandson. It’s all in the bloody Family. That’s a joke.’

Slider quirked his lips obediently.

Dickson rocked the chair back and let it fall forward with a thump that shook the floorboards. ‘They buy up a place with a
first-class record, and run it straight.’ And I mean really straight – rates, taxes, VAT, the lot. They do that for a number
of years before they ever start using it for their purposes. They want respectable, and they can afford to pay for it. Buying
Vincey’s and running it at a loss for a couple of years must have cost them a couple of million, but what’s that to them?
They’re handling telephone numbers every year. Probably set it off as a tax loss.’

‘And Vincey’s really is respectable.’

‘Yes, of course. They’re simply buying and selling antiques, and if some of their customers are marked cards, so what? They
never touch stolen goods. In fact, they’re probably more honest than your average dealer. I’m told
Saloman has an excellent relationship with the local police.’

‘And who is Saloman?’

‘Ah, that’s an interesting detail. When they bought the business, it was on the market because the previous owner had died
– that was the real, original Saloman. He was in his sixties, and he’d been running Vincey’s since 1935. Apparently he was
a fantastic old boy, a real expert, knew everything about stringed instruments, and a whale on bows. He’d been a concert violinist
in his youth – apparently quite a good one – but for some reason gave it up and went into dealing, and specialised in antiquities.’

Slider raised his brows. ‘You mean they took over his name and his reputation? The young man at Sotheby’s sent Atherton to
Saloman because he was an expert on violin bows.’

‘Nice, isn’t it? I suppose anyone who was around when the changeover took place would know the old boy had died, but the general
public wouldn’t, and by now I don’t suppose anyone remembers.’

‘So who is our Saloman?’

‘His name isn’t Saloman, of course. He isn’t even Jewish, though he wears the hat. He’s an Italian, name of Joe Novanto. Came
over during the war as a refugee, after the Nazi occupation of Italy. He changed his name to Joseph Neves and got himself
a job with Hill’s of Hanwell, making violin bows, which apparently was his trade back home. When the war ended he stayed on
in this country, and got a job at Vincey’s.’

‘So he really could do it?’

‘Oh yes – that part was genuine all right. He was taken on to repair and renovate bows and instruments they were handling,
and he studied the ancient instrument trade under the real Saloman, so he was learning from an expert. And when Saloman died
and the business was sold, he took over the name, the reputation, even the character. Of course, the fact that he’d been working
there so long would help to confuse the issue – people would recognise him, and in time his identity got fudged over. I don’t
suppose many people go to a shop like that more than once in their lives.’

‘And of course he really did know Saloman’s stuff.’

‘He’s been doing it for twenty-five years.’

‘But then, at what stage was he recruited? If it was the organisation that bought Vincey’s when the old man died, was Neves
already one of them?’

‘God knows. I don’t suppose we ever shall. But if you want my personal opinion I’d say yes. It’s carrying the business of
sleepers a hell of a long way, but these people work on a grand scale. You can afford to make plans that take fifty years
to mature if it’s your own flesh-and-blood that’ll benefit. I’d say that Neves, or Novanto, was their man from the beginning,
before he ever left Italy, and he was just slipped in when the opportunity came in case he was ever needed. But of course,
there’s nothing we can pin on him. He not only looks legit, he is, except for using Saloman’s name, and that’s not a crime.’