‘There is no rhinoceros here. I can say it with complete certainty. I am with Mr Russell and your German is a fantasist.’
From inside the vehicle she would have seen and remembered them. The clothing loaned her was too big, which seemed unimportant. Now she peered at them – they were in front of the headlights. It was an intense stare, but she asked nothing. She would have had a list of questions: who was he? Why was he there? Who was controlling him? Neither Fred nor Carlo could have answered because as yet they had no idea of what motivated Jago Browne.
‘You will not, Carlo, have heard of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a great thinker, a German. He argued with your Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher and a man of high intelligence. Was there a rhinoceros in the room? Russell said there was no rhinoceros in the room, but Wittgenstein would not admit to its absence. Russell searched the room, looked under the table, moved the chairs, but the German refused to accept the absence of the rhinoceros. It could be there, but not seen. Two fine men, blessed with huge reservoirs of intelligence, and that was the area of their dispute. I side with Wittgenstein.’
While she had dressed, Carlo had murmured to him that she’d have been more useful to her protest cronies if she’d had herself murdered, or at least maimed. ‘Walking down the road stark naked is hardly the stuff of martyrs.’ He had not disagreed.
‘Where is the rhinoceros?’
‘Behind the sheets. Would your mother have left out washing for that long, allowed it to dry until it’s as stiff as a board?’
She had been driven away. He doubted, poor kid, that her ordeal would be kept secret for long. He hadn’t seen a flash, but one of the men ahead would have a camera phone – any picture taken would go viral. He thought her brave, endowed with a rare nobility. The other girl, the one coming out of the hospital with stitches in her cheek, had had that stubborn defiance – and she’d have thought them two old men who’d lost the taste of the fight. She might have been right.
‘My mother would not. She filled the backyard with sheets at dawn and shifted them at dusk. If it rained they were dried in front of the fire.’
‘The rhinoceros is behind the sheets.’
‘I’m not arguing.’
‘It’s staring us in the face.’
The moon was not yet up. The house would have been more than three hundred metres from them. He went to the maresciallo and asked to borrow his binoculars. He focused and peered, his eyes aching from the effort. He thought he could see the sheets. They masked a hideaway – he would have bet his shirt on it. He did not gamble – against his morals and his religion.
He turned to Carlo. ‘Do we go with this?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re not looking for medals.’
‘No medals, no citations, just a glass of beer.’
Fred went to the maresciallo and gave back the binoculars. It would be the young Italian’s call. He explained briefly, handed over evidence and intuition. His face was studied hard, a search mounted for certainty. Fred had total confidence. It had been there in front of them, had beckoned them and been ignored. It was the elephant, the rhinoceros or the giraffe in the room. Big decision for the young man. He could fall on his arse or end up with the smell of roses in his armpits.
The maresciallo used his phone, had the secure link.
Women walked past them, all in black. Their fingers had pulled off the girl’s clothing. Now they made no contact. They were going back to the village – Carlo, Fred and the uniforms might not have been there. They went on into the gathering night, with the shuffle of flat shoes on the track and little trills of laughter.
Carlo whispered, ‘Watch this space, ladies.’
He was Bentley Horrocks, a man of status.
The vehicle was parked, and the driver – a fucking peasant – reached across him to unfasten the door and pushed it open. He gave that dumb smile. Bent stepped out, straightened his back and stretched. There wasn’t much to see. They were off the metalled road, and had come up a track, passing a field with two rusted tractors and a collapsed cart. The air was cooler than it had been on the coast and a wind riffled his hair. Then the smell was in his nostrils.
A farmhouse stood in front of them. He assumed it was a farmhouse – a bungalow, built with cement blocks, no rendering or paint to finish the job. His home, the country one, a farmhouse in rural Kent, had half a dozen bedrooms, a tennis court, a swimming-pool and a few acres. It would fetch three or four million. And no one was there to meet him. He’d expected a big car and another for the goons to be waiting, and the main man to be there to welcome him. The smell was vile – it wouldn’t have been tolerated in the part of Kent where his place was.