Chapter Eleven

Neither of us had much appetite, when it came to the point. We ate half our lasagne and drank coffee, and needed nothing else but proximity. We didn’t talk a great deal, but at one point, clairvoyantly reading my disreputable thoughts, she said out of the blue that we couldn’t go to her sister’s flat as her sister would be in, complete with two or three kids.

‘I was afraid of that,’ I said wryly.

‘It will have to be next time.’

‘Yes.’ We both sighed deeply in unision, and laughed.

A little later, sipping her hot coffee, she said, ‘How many pills were there in the bottle you sent with Simon Searle?’

‘I don’t know. Dozens. I didn’t count them. The bottle was over three-quarters full.’

‘I thought so.’ She sighed. ‘The baker’s wife rang up last night to ask me whether I could let her have some more. She said the bottom of the bottle was all filled up with paper, but if you ask me she’s given half of them away to a friend, or something, and now regrets it.’

‘There wasn’t any paper in the bottle. Only cotton wool on top.’

‘I thought so.’ She frowned, wrinkling her nose in sorrow. ‘I wish she’d told me the truth.’

I stood up abruptly. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Leave the coffee.’

‘Why?’ She began to put on her coat.

‘I want to see that bottle.’

She was puzzled. ‘She’ll have thrown it away.’

‘I hope to God she hasn’t,’ I said urgently, paying the bill. ‘If there’s paper in the bottle, Simon put it there.’

‘You mean… it could matter?’

‘He thought I was giving the pills to you. He didn’t know they’d go to someone else. And I forgot to tell him you didn’t speak English. Perhaps he thought when you’d finished the pills you’d read the paper and tell me what it said. Heaven knows. Anyway, we must find it… it’s the first and only trace of him we’ve had.’

We hurried out of the restaurant, caught a taxi, and sped to the bakery. The baker’s wife was fat and motherly and looked fift y, though she was probably only thirty-five. Her warm smile for Gabriella slowly turned anxious as she listened, and she shook her head and spread her hands wide.

‘It’s in the dustbin,’ Gabriella said, ‘she threw it away this morning.’

‘We’ll have to look. Ask her if I can look for it.’

The two women consulted.

‘She says you’ll dirty your fine suit.’

‘Gabriella…’

‘She says the English are mad, but you can look.’

There were three dustbins in the backyard, two luckily empty and one full. We turned this one out and I raked through the stinking contents with a broom handle. The little brown bottle was there, camouflaged by wet coffee grounds and half a dozen noodles. Gabriella took it and wiped it clean on a piece of newspaper while I shovelled the muck back into the dustbin and swept the yard.

‘The paper won’t come out,’ she said. She had the cap off and was poking down the neck of the bottle with her finger. ‘It’s quite right. There is some in there.’ She held it out to me.

I looked and nodded, wrapped the bottle in newspaper, put it on the ground, and smashed it with the shovel. She squatted beside me as I unfolded the paper and watched me pick out from the winking fragments of brown glass the things which had been inside.

I stood up slowly, holding them. A strip torn off the top of a piece of Yardman’s stationery. A bank-note of a currency I did not recognise, and some pieces of hay. The scrap of writing paper and the money were pinned together, and the hay had been folded up inside them.

‘They are nonsense,’ said Gabriella slowly.

‘Do you have any idea where this comes from?’ I touched the note.

She flicked it over to see both sides. ‘Yugoslavia. One hundred dinars.’

‘Is that a lot?’

‘About five thousand one hundred lire.’

Three pounds. Wisps of hay. A strip of paper. In a bottle.

Gabriella took the money and paper out of my hands and removed the pin which joined them.

‘What do they mean?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

A message in a bottle.

‘There are some holes in the paper.’

‘Where he put the pin.’

‘No. More holes than that. Look.’ She held it up to the sky. ‘You can see the light through.’

The printed heading said in thick red letters ‘Yardman Transport Ltd., Carriers.’ The strip of paper was about six inches across and two inches deep from the top smooth edge to the jagged one where it had been torn off the page. I held it up to the light.

Simon had pinpricked four letters. S.M.E.N. I felt the first distant tremor of cold apprehension.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What does it say?’

‘Yardman Transport.’ I showed her. ‘See where he has added to it. If you read it with the pin hole letters tacked on, it says. “Yardman Transports MEN”.’

She looked frightened by the bleakness in my voice, as if she could feel the inner coldness growing. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means he didn’t have a pencil,’ I said grimly, evading the final implication. ‘Only pins in his coat’.

A message in a bottle, washed ashore.

‘I’ve got to think it out,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to remember.’

We perched on a pile of empty boxes stacked in one corner of the baker’s yard, and I stared sightlessly at the whitewashed wall opposite and at the single bush in a tub standing in one corner.

‘Tell me,’ Gabriella said. ‘Tell me. You look so… so terrible.’

‘Billy’, I said. ‘Billy put up a smoke screen, after all’.

‘Who is Billy?’

‘A groom. At least, he works as one. Men… Every time Billy has been on a trip, there has been a man who didn’t come back.’

‘Simon?’ she said incredulously.

‘No, I don’t mean Simon, though he went with Billy… No. Someone who went as a groom, but wasn’t a groom at all. And didn’t come back. I can’t remember any of their faces, not to be sure, because I never talked to any of them much. Billy saw to that.’

‘How?’

‘Oh, by insults and…’ I stopped, concentrating back. ‘The first time I went with Billy, there was a very fat man called John. At least, that was what I was told he was called. He was absolutely useless. Didn’t know how to handle horses at all. We did two trips to France that day, and I think he wanted to vanish after the first. I saw him arguing furiously with Billy just before we came back the first time. But Billy made him do the double journey. and when he told me John had gone to Paris instead of coming back with us, he poured beer over my foot, so that I’d think about that, and not about John. And he made sure of it by picking a fight on the plane coming back.’

‘But who was this John?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘And were there others?’

‘Yes… we went to New York next, he and I. There was a groom travelling with a half-bred Norwegian horse. He hardly talked at all, said he didn’t speak English much. I understood he was staying in the States for a fortnight; but who knows if he came back? And on that trip Billy smashed a bar across my fingers so that they hurt all the way across, and I thought about them, not the Norwegian groom.’

‘Are you sure?’ She was frowning.

‘Oh yes, I’m sure. I thought once before that Billy had done it for a purpose. I just got the purpose wrong.’ I pondered. ‘There was a day we took a man with a large bushy moustache to France, and a fortnight later we brought a man with a large bushy moustache back again. I never looked beyond the moustache. I think it could have been two different men.’

‘What did Billy do, those times?’

‘On the way over he poured syrupy coffee on my head, and I spent nearly all the time in the washroom getting it out. And on the way back he hit me with a chain, and I went up into the galley all the way with the engineer to avoid any more.’

She looked at me very gravely. ‘Is that… is that the lot?’

I shook my head. ‘We went to New York last week. I told Yardman if Billy didn’t leave me alone I’d quit. The journey out went quite all right, but coming back… there was a man who was plainly not a horseman. He wasn’t even comfortable in the riding clothes he had on. I thought at the time he was the owner’s nephew or something, cadging a free ride, but again I didn’t talk to him much. I slept all the way back. All ten hours… I don’t usually get tired like that, but I thought it was only because it was my fourth Atlantic crossing in six days.’

‘A sleeping pill?’ she said slowly.

‘It might have been. Alf brought some coffee back for me soon after we left. There was a restive colt in the aft box and I was trying to soothe him. It could have been in that.’

‘Alf?’

‘An old deaf man, who always goes with Billy.’

‘Do you think it was a sleeping pill?’

‘It could. I was still tired long after I got home. I even went to sleep in the bath.’

‘It’s serious,’ she said.

‘Today,’ I said. ‘There’s a stranger with us today. His name is John too. I’ve never met him before, but there’s something about him. I was looking at him on the plane and wondering what it was, and Billy kicked me on the ankle. I kicked him back, but I went away, and stopped thinking about that man.’

‘Can you think now?’

‘Well… his hands are wrong for one thing. Stablemen’s hands are rough and chafed from being wet so often in cold weather, with washing tack and so on, but his are smooth, with well shaped nails.’

She picked up one of my hands and looked at it, running the tips of her fingers over the roughnesses which had developed since I left my desk job. ‘They are not like yours, then.’

‘Not like mine. But it’s his expression really. I watched him wake up. It was what came into his face with consciousness.’ I could remember that moment vividly, in spite of Billy’s kick. I knew that expression very well… so what was it? ‘Oh,’ I exclaimed in enlightenment, half laughing at my own stupidity, ‘I know what it is… he went to the same school as I did.’

‘You do know him then, I mean, you’ve seen him before, if you were at school together.’

‘Not together. He’s older. He must have left about five years before I went. No, I’ve never seen him before, but the look he has is typical of some of the boys there. Not the nicest ones. only the ones who think they are God’s gift to mankind and everyone else is a bit inferior. He’s one of those. Definitely not a groom. He looked as if wearing the grubby riding clothes he’s got on was a kick in the dignity.’

‘But you don’t wear riding clothes,’ she pointed out. ‘It isn’t necessary for him if he doesn’t like them.’

‘It is though. Alf wears jodhpurs, Billy wears jeans. The two grooms who travel turn about with these two, Timmie and Conker, they both wear breeches to work in. It’s a sort of badge of office. No one would think twice about a man arriving on a horse transport dressed in breeches or jodhpurs.’

‘No, I see that.’

‘No one bothers much about our passports,’ I said. ‘Look how simply I came out into Milan today, through the airport staff door. Hardly any airports, especially the very small ones, take much notice of you, if you work on aeroplanes. It’s dead easy just to walk off most airfields round at the loading bays without ever being challenged. The Americans are strictest, but even they are used to our comings and goings.’

‘But people do look at your passports sometimes, surely,’ she protested.

I produced mine, battered and dog-eared in the last three months after several years of dark blue stiffness. ‘Look at it. It gets like that from always being in my pocket, but it doesn’t get stamped much.’ I turned through the pages. ‘American visa, certainly. But look, the only stamp from Milan is the time I came on a scheduled flight and went through immigration with the other passengers. Hardly a mark for France, and I’ve been over there several times… of course it gets looked at, but never very thoroughly. It must be easy to fake one in this condition, and even travelling without one wouldn’t be impossible. A pilot told me he’d done it for three weeks once, all over the world.’

‘People who work on aircraft would go mad if everyone started checking their passports thoroughly every time they walked in or out.’

‘Well… normally there’s no need for it. It isn’t all that easy to get on a single one-way flight as a worker. Impossible, if you haven’t a strong pull somewhere or other. Just any odd person who fancies a quiet trip to foreign parts wouldn’t have a hope of getting himself into a horse transport. But if the transport agency itself, or someone working for it, is ready to export people illegally along with the horses, then it’s easy.’

‘But… what people?’

‘What indeed! Billy can hardly advertise his service in the daily press. But he has no shortage of customers.’

‘Crooks, do you think?’ Gabriella asked frowning.

I fingered the bank-note and twisted the small pieces of hay.

‘Hay,’ I said. ‘Why hay?’

Gabriella shrugged. ‘Perhaps he found the money in some hay.’

‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re dead right. Haynets. Carried openly on and off the planes and never searched by customs officers. Perhaps they’re transporting currency as well as men.’ I told her about Billy refilling the net for me on the trip over, and how astonished I had been.

‘But Henry darling, what I really do not understand is why you were not astonished all along at the unpleasant things Billy has been doing to you. I would have thought it utterly extraordinary, and I would have made a very big fuss about it.’ She looked solemn and doubtful.

‘Oh, I thought it was simply because!’ I stopped.

‘Because you what?’

I smiled slightly. ‘Because I belong to a sort of people he thinks should be exterminated.’

‘Henry!’ Her mouth lost its severity. ‘What sort of people?’

‘Well… you have counts and countesses still in Italy.’

‘But you’re not you’re not… are you… a count?’

‘Sort of. Yes.’

She looked at me doubtfully, halfway to laughing, not sure that I was not teasing her. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘The reason I wasn’t astonished at Billy knocking me about was that I knew he hated my guts for having a title.’

‘That makes sense, I suppose.’ She managed to frown and smile at the same time, which looked adorable. ‘But if you have a title, Henry, why are you working in a horse transport?’

‘You tell me why ’, I said.

She looked at me searchingly for a moment, then she put her arms round my neck and her cheek on mine, with her mouth against my ear.

‘It isn’t enough for you to have a title,’ she said. ‘It isn’t enough for anyone. It is necessary to show also that you are…’ She fished around in her French vocabulary, and came up with a word: ‘veritable. Real.’

I took a deep breath of relief and overspilling love, and kissed her neck where the dark hair swung below her ear.

‘My wife will be a countess,’ I said. ‘Would you mind that?’

‘I could perhaps bear it.’

‘And me? Could you bear me? For always?’

‘I love you,’ she said in my ear. ‘Yes. For always. Only, Henry…’

‘Only what?’

‘You won’t stop being real?’

‘No,’ I said sadly.

She pulled away from me, shaking her head.

‘I’m stupid. I’m sorry. But if even I can doubt you… and so quickly… you must always be having to prove.’

‘Always,’ I agreed.

‘Still, you don’t have to go quite so far.’

My heart sank.

‘It’s not everyone,’ she said, ‘who gets proposed to in a baker’s backyard surrounded by dustbins.’ Her mouth trembled and melted into the heart-wrenching smile.

‘You wretch, my love.’

‘Henry,’ she said, ‘I’m so happy I could burst.’

I kissed her and felt the same, and lived another half minute of oblivion before I thought again of Simon.

‘What is it?’ she said, feeling me straighten.

‘The time…’

‘Oh.’

‘And Simon.’

‘I fear for him’, she said, half under her breath.

‘I too.’

She took the piece of paper out of my hand and looked at it again. ‘We’ve been trying to avoid realising what this means.’

‘Yes,’ I said softly.

‘Say it, then.’

‘This was the only message he had a chance of sending. The only way he could send it.’ I paused, looking into her serious dark eyes. After ten silent seconds I finished it. ‘He is dead.’

She said in distress, ‘Perhaps he is a prisoner.’

I shook my head. ‘He’s the third man who’s disappeared. There was a man called Ballard who used to arrange trips from this end, and the man who used to have my own job, a man called Peters. They both vanished, Ballard over a year ago, and no one’s heard of them since.’

‘This Billy…’ she said slowly, her eyes anxious.

‘This Billy,’ I said, ‘is young and heartless, and carries a loaded revolver under his left arm.’

‘Please. don’t go back with him.’

‘It will be quite safe as long as I keep quiet about this.’ I took the hurried, desperate, pinpricked message back, folded it up with the bank-note and the hay, and put them all in my wallet. ‘When I get back to England, I’ll find out who I have to tell.’

‘The police,’ she said, nodding.

‘I’m not sure…’ I thought about the Yugoslav currency and remembered Gabriella saying on our first evening ‘Communists begin at Trieste.’ I felt like someone who had trodden through a surface into a mole run underneath, and had suddenly realised that it was part of a whole dark invisible network. I thought it very unlikely that the men I’d flown with were ordinary crooks. They were couriers, agents… heaven knew what. It seemed fantastic to me to have brushed so closely with people I had known must exist but never expected to see; but I supposed the suburban people who had lived next door to Peter and Helen Kroger in Cranley Drive, Ruislip, had been pretty astonished too.

‘Billy must have unloaded whatever he brought over in the haynet today,’ I said. ‘But going back…’

‘No,’ Gabriella said vehemently. ‘Don’t look. That’s what Simon must have done. Found the money. And Billy saw him.’

It might have been like that. And there had been two extra grooms on that trip, men I’d never seen before. Somehow, on the way, Simon had come across something I’d been blind to: perhaps because there was one more man than he’d arranged for; perhaps because Billy couldn’t distract his attention by the methods he’d used on me; perhaps because of other happenings in the past which I didn’t know about. In any case, Simon had found Billy out, and had let Billy know it. I thought drearily of Simon suddenly realising towards the end of that flight that Ballard and Peters had never come back, and that he wouldn’t get a chance to put Billy in gaol. Billy the young thug, with his ready gun. A few minutes in the lavatory, that was all the time he’d had. No pencil. Only his pins, and the little bottle I’d given him in the privacy of the airline office; the bottle Billy didn’t know existed, with Gabriella’s name on it. Pills into loo. Bank-note and paper with its inadequate message into bottle. Simon into eternity.

‘Please don’t search the haynets,’ Gabriella said again.

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Someone official had better do it, next time Billy goes on a trip.’

She relaxed with relief. ‘I’d hate you to disappear.’

I smiled. ‘I won’t do that. I’ll go back most of the way up front with the crew, with Patrick and the man who bought the doll. And when I get to England I’ll telephone you to let you know I arrived safely. How’s that?’

‘It would be wonderful. I could stop worrying.’

‘Don’t start,’ I said confidently. ‘Nothing will go wrong.’

How the local gods must have laughed their Roman heads off.