They were late. She drove recklessly. The car was not built to negotiate mountain switchback roads and twice she had lost control. The tyres had slid and they’d skidded close to the edge. Both times, there had been a thirty-metre drop. He did not seem to react. Most would have been clinging to the top of the glove box for dear life, white-knuckled. She supposed it was ‘the calm before a storm’.
She thought they had met through luck, coincidence and chance. She said to herself silently, ‘When was life different?’ She thought of the people she knew, who reckoned they had control over their lives. They were fools and failures. He seemed remarkable to her. She swerved to give more room to a tractor pulling a trailer of cattle fodder for the winter and drove a scooter off the road. She was on the wrong side of the road on a bend and had to heave the wheel to miss a Fiat City-Van driven by an old man, with a boy beside him, and . . . The light was coming.
Too much time on the beach at Scilla? If accused of it, she would have answered robustly: he had lost his inhibitions there; with inhibitions, where he was going, he was the walking dead – no use to man, beast or her. Consolata started to talk about covert surveillance in the mountains, relaying all she had been told by the guy in the ROS who did stake-outs. She told Jago about the basics of survival – but he would be without a firearm, a colleague, a radio, and back-up poised for fast intervention. She talked about stiffness, the cold and damp. The guy, Francesco, had not enjoyed being quizzed about intelligence gathering, but they’d had fun in the hills, playing concealment games. She’d hide, and he’d find her, or she’d hide and he’d look for but not locate her. Or he’d be on a hillside and have to move, and she’d be at an observation point and yell when she saw him. When he lost he was pissed off. She remembered everything he’d taught her, and now passed it to the Englishman: he would be going close to the house, near extreme danger, where she would not go. She helped him and he would hurt them. Then she would rejoice . . . and he was nice-looking.
If they found him close to the house then he would have to have shed every inhibition drilled into him at home and work, since he was a child. Any inhibition, failure to fight, and he was dead.
Consolata had been with him for about twelve hours but already she cared. He had not touched her in the sea or on the beach. She had never cared for a man so quickly before.
She told him everything she knew, hammered into him the detail she had learned when she was with that guy. She remembered her parents’ shock when the shop and the business were taken from them, their humiliation. They’d had no one to turn to in Archi. No wonder she hated the families.
She drove him to a place that the map on her phone indicated could be a drop-off point. The light rose.
She was a manager.
Wilhelmina, as an employee with status, working for a prestigious bank, could demand attention – and did.
She was put on hold, but only briefly. A middle-ranking official at police headquarters on the Platz der Luftbrücke, where memories of the Berlin airlift were celebrated, had contacted the station on Bismarckstrasse, talked with the KrimPol unit there, ascertained the complaint that Jago Browne had made, concerning assault and extortion, determined who had fielded the complaint and what action had been taken. They had to consider the importance of the known facts when set against the – out of character – disappearance of the individual, and his apparent journey to Calabria. The official pleaded for a few more moments of her time.
‘I can refer this to one of my bank’s vice presidents, who would expect to speak to an officer of higher rank than yours. Your name would feature in any such conversation.’
That was not necessary, she was assured. It was always a pleasure to co-operate with the banking industry. Her aggression was fuelled by nerves. She knew of the crime networks based in the extreme south of Italy, the corruption, the danger of extreme violence. She did not know what had been downloaded, what confidentiality was compromised. Her fingers drummed on her desk.
An answer. Seitz, an investigator in the KrimPol unit at Bismarckstrasse, had been recalled from his weekend vacation and would visit her by midday. The official hoped that was satisfactory. He was pleased to have been of service. She accepted what she was told. She had set a train in motion, did not know where the journey would end but felt confident that her back was covered.
His empty seat intrigued her. Magda had mentioned how little the apartment had told of its tenant. Wilhelmina had left her children with her neighbour because her husband was abroad. She wasn’t thinking of the kids, or the chaos at home after the birthday party, or the state of her marriage, but was gazing at Jago Browne’s seat. Where was he? And why was he there? She gripped a pencil between her fingers, bank issue, twisted – and broke it.
A phone call. Confidences.
Magda said, ‘It’s a police matter now. He’s fucked.’
Elke said, ‘Finished, so I’ll never know.’
‘You didn’t go out with him?’
‘Not for want of trying.’
‘Nor me. I put a Post-it on his screen. Nothing happened.’