Carlo looked down the line of trees, which dwarfed a memorial to the fallen soldiers of an Italian war he knew nothing about. ‘Could be fifty years, could be a hundred. They look healthy – probably see us out.’
They reached a compromise, which neither was used to. They would go at dawn. Now they would make time for Fred to buy swimming trunks and a beach towel, and, by way of exchange, they would walk up to the Castello Aragonese, gaze at the great twin towers, and bemoan the lack of activity in restoring the rest, which had toppled in the earthquake. The Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi crossed their route. When Fred went into a shop for his swimming kit, Carlo waited outside. A girl approached him – quite pretty. She wore the usual uniform of jeans and trainers but her T-shirt bore the logo of Reggio Libera, and she thrust a leaflet into his hands. She seemed to challenge him as he glanced at it. He said, in Italian, with a grin, ‘I congratulate you, signorina, for taking on the challenge of a Sisyphean labour, fighting organised crime in its best backyard. From my experience, you’re pushing a rock up a steep hill. As soon as you get it to the top it’ll roll back down again. Good luck.’
‘What would you know?’
He chuckled. ‘Not much. Only that it’s hard to change the world.’
‘Somebody has to try. With the restrictions of non-violence, it’s difficult, but must be attempted.’ She spoke without enthusiasm or sincerity.
‘Accepted – but it’s a road of hard knocks, cuts and bruises.’
‘And you’re a policeman?’
‘Is it that obvious?’
Fred had come to his side with a plastic shopping bag.
‘And my friend is from Berlin, hoping to swim in the warm sea and—’
‘You are English and travel with a colleague who is from Berlin, yes?’
There was something droll in her eyes: a hint of the magic moment when all the boxes were ticked. A half-smile played at her mouth. Not a girl he would have followed to the gates of Hell and beyond, but he would have gone pretty close to the entrance. Too many women had flitted into and out of Carlo’s life, and most had led him a dance. Few had been as attractive as this one. But he was too bloody old for her now. She had turned away from them to give out another of her leaflets. A woman looked at it and dropped it. Carlo was paid to have a nose, to make deductions. Seemed pretty bloody obvious to him.
He crouched, picked it up for the girl and said quietly in her ear, ‘We wondered how he got there, who guided him. Did you twist his mind? He’s an innocent. He shouldn’t be there, and anyone with influence over him should get him out. It’s a bad place at a bad time. Anything you’d like to tell me?’
She gazed into his eyes, seemed to regard him as a lesser species, and ran down the street into an ice-cream parlour. A hundred metres back a young man was wearing the same T-shirt. Carlo was at his side, and asked his name – Massimo. Then he asked for his colleague’s name, and a phone number for their principled campaign. She was Consolata. He could have made a call, given a name, a location and a contact, and she’d have been in the cells within a half-hour.
Carlo said to Fred, ‘Tilting at windmills, or slaying dragons? I’m no good at it.’
‘My ambition is to hold the line. When I quit, I want to be able to say that things were no worse under my watch. That’s about all. You going to turn her in?’
Carlo said softly, ‘I’m going to look at the castle, and then we’re going to have a beer. Not because we don’t care.’
‘Maybe we care too much.’
Birds were gathering in the trees above him.
Jago had no idea why they had selected those trees, oaks and high birches. The crows had come first, then pigeons. The food had filled his stomach but had had little effect on his thinking, which was still rambling, confused. He had scrambled to collect the wrappings before they blew away and had wedged them under the boulder at his right hip. He was waiting for darkness.
The wolf on the rock slab was just visible if he screwed his eyes tight and blinked hard – it was a darker shade on an indistinct ledge. The crows disputed perches on the upper branches, and scores had come.
He had learned a new lesson: that darkness was a friend. There’d have been kids out that night, in the back alleys off Freemasons Road and behind Silvertown Way, who’d have treasured the safety of darkness. He watched the sun, fiercely red, dropping below the trees. His target was the cable.