Ciccio didn’t know what he had seen. Fabio had seen nothing.
‘If we’ve shown, and they’re flushing us out, we’d have a problem. But I reckon we’d see signs of it at the house. At least, that’s what I’d like to think.’
The hide was one of the best, in that cleft, that Ciccio and Fabio had found. As good as any they had used before. The guy coming past? Might have been a hitman from another family, but he’d had no rifle or rucksack of explosives. Perhaps he was with the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna. If so, he might be working alongside the ’Ndrangheta families or against them. But his approach down the slope had not been that of a trained man or of a covert source.
‘Call in and it’s panic.’
‘Their health and our safety. They wouldn’t take a chance, just bring us out.’
‘We wouldn’t be coming back.’
‘Don’t know what we’d hit on the way out.’
‘But we wouldn’t be back.’
Ciccio said, ‘I couldn’t face our prosecutor, poor bastard. I’d swim the Strait to avoid him questioning me.’
Fabio said, ‘We’ve given our prosecutor precious little. We’ve not found what he wants. We’ll stay as long as we can – but it’ll be a bitter pill for him to swallow when we pull out.
Ciccio, bemused: ‘Who could it have been, coming past us – and why?’
They were motionless, breathing suppressed to basic need, coughs and sneezes stifled. There was a wonderful moment – they knew it well – when their information nailed a prized target to the boards, and a bleak period after a mission had failed.
Ciccio said, ‘He didn’t get as far down as the house, but I’d swear he’s in front of us. He’s hidden. Why?’
‘He’s too close because of the dogs.’
He soaked up information.
The cold was in his bones and his skin itched. It was almost a first for Jago Browne. There had been a long-ago camping trip down to the West Country, a few nights under canvas on Dartmoor – a Duke of Edinburgh Award venture – his only previous experience of roughing it – but he had never had to lie still like this, not coughing or fidgeting.
He wasn’t close enough to watch the daily life of the house. At school it had been thought that the trip to the great outdoors was ‘character building’. He’d loathed it: the chill, the damp, the barely cooked sausages, the communality of the tent where others were close to him, could tease, ignore or hurt, and his aloneness was challenged. The men at the banks who had given him the chance to shine had been impressed by his enhanced description of the experience. For that they would have thought of him as a good team player, a man unlikely to hide behind a curtain of comfort. He had not disabused them. But he could cope – he had to.
He had eaten only half of the chocolate. At any other time, in any other place, if he had bought chocolate he would have ripped off the wrapper and wolfed the contents. He had created a regime of rationing. There had been nowhere en route to buy food. He would survive, though, he didn’t doubt it.
He saw the old woman. He had a fine memory, as his employers recognised. When a query was thrown up at a meeting, he seldom needed to go to his screen and hunt for an answer: if he had read it once, it was stored in his head. On the file, she was Bernardo’s wife, and he could have listed the names of her three children. Jago understood the scale of the family’s wealth. He was on the periphery of the team that handled the accounts of clients who were valued in excess of ten million euros. One young woman was handled exclusively by the FrauBoss. She was an heiress of divorced parents, living on the lake of Geneva, and came to Berlin four times a year to meet her asset handlers, accountants and lawyers. She was worth close to fifty million euros. He had met her. She had not shaken his hand but had acknowledged him. He had carried Wilhelmina’s laptop bag and a file, had sat at the side and not spoken. He thought that the people whose accounts he had monitored in London and Berlin were almost paupers in comparison to the family whose home he watched, if he could believe what Consolata had told him, and he had no reason not to.
The old woman moved awkwardly, as if her hips hurt. The day was nudging on but she was hanging sheets and towels on a line. Jago studied her. She had plastic clothes pegs between her teeth, and more in a bag that hung from her shoulder. No servant did that job – she did it. When she had finished she stood to admire it. He thought she took great care over hanging several double sheets and large towels.