Iain Pears - The Last Judgement

‘Wimp,’ she said, feeling more than a little betrayed by this correct but irritating opinion.

‘So why don’t we go home? A job well done.’

‘Because of Ellman.’

‘Carabinieri. Your friend Fabriano. Let him sort it out.’

‘And we don’t know why it was stolen.’

‘So? I don’t care. People steal all sorts of things. Do you have to draw up a psychological profile every time something goes missing? The world is full of lunatics.’

She sat on the bed and made a face. ‘I’m not happy,’ she pronounced. ‘I don’t feel as though I’ve got to the bottom of this. Do you really want to go home?’

‘Yes. I’ve had enough of this.’

‘Off you go, then.’

‘What?’

‘Off you go. Go back home and sell pictures.’

‘What about you?’

‘I shall carry on with my work. With or without the help of you. Or Janet.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Tough. That’s the way it is. You want to go, you go. And I will do my job, filling up any spare hours thinking of you anew as a rotten, treacherous, cowardly toad who’d abandoned his fiancée in dangerous circumstances.’

Argyll thought about that. ‘Did you say fiancée?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes, you did.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘You did. I heard you.’

‘It slipped out by accident.’

‘Oh. What I meant was, anyway, that we should both go back to Rome. But, if you’re staying, I shall stay too. I wouldn’t dream of leaving my fiancée in such a pickle when I’m needed.’

‘I’m not your fiancée. You’ve never asked me. And I’m not in a pickle.’

‘Have it your own way. I’m not going. But on one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you ever do consent to go back home, we go and look at a new apartment.’

‘You drive a hard bargain.’

He nodded.

‘Oh, very well, then.’

‘Wonderful. What a nice fiancée you are.’

‘I’m not your fiancée.’

‘Have it your own way.’

And, both of them feeling they had struck an acceptable, if expensive, deal, they went to sleep.

‘I think,’ she said in the morning, ‘we’d better think of changing hotels.’

‘Why?’

‘Because someone is looking for us and I don’t think I’d like him much. It takes time to track people down in hotels, but when I go back to Rome I want to go with my intestines in working order, not scattered around the landscape like a plate of spaghetti.’

‘I’m eating my breakfast. Do you mind?’

‘Sorry. But you get the point. We change hotels, we find one a little bit more down-market that doesn’t get you to fill out little forms, and we use a different name. OK?’

‘How exciting.’

‘Good. Let’s go.’

Flavia’s notion of somewhere a bit less obvious was an entirely disreputable establishment in a dingy alley off the Boulevard Rochechouart. It probably hadn’t been painted since it was built and, when they checked in, the man on the desk leered at Argyll through his three-day stubble and demanded cash in advance. But at least Flavia was correct in thinking that he wasn’t going to waste precious time getting them to fill in registration forms for the police. It was not that sort of hotel. They signed in under the name of Smith. Argyll had always wanted to sign into a hotel under the name of Smith.

The room was even worse than the lobby. The wallpaper was a horrible shade of pink with little flowers on it, stained with damp and peeling off in several places. The furniture consisted of a bed, a hard chair and a metal table with a plastic top. There was an air of damp and misery about it that gave both of them the shivers.

‘I can’t imagine anybody would want to stay long here,’ Argyll commented as he looked around their new and, he hoped, very temporary home.

‘I think that most customers are in and out of here so fast they don’t notice the wallpaper. Besides, they’ve probably got other things on their mind. I must say, I never thought of you as a person who went to hotels for loose women.’

‘I never realized you were one. Come on, the sooner we’re out of here the better. Didn’t you say something about ringing Bottando?’

So she had. She’d rather hoped he’d forgotten about that. With great reluctance, she went to a telephone booth in the nearest post office and dialled.

‘I was wondering when you’d turn up,’ the General said when he picked up the phone. ‘Where are you?’

She explained. ‘Jonathan reckons that everything is all sorted out and we should come home. I want to keep on plugging.’

‘Obviously, if you want to curtail your holiday, that’s fine by me. It may well be that you’re wasting your time there.’

‘How’s Fabriano?’

‘Him? Oh, getting nowhere, I gather. Vast piles of information which add up to nothing. Although he has established that the same gun killed Muller and Ellman. And that it belonged to Ellman. Which, I must admit, doesn’t surprise me. He has eliminated dozens of people from his enquiries, which I suppose is negative progress. How are you doing?’

Flavia summarized, and Bottando drew in his breath.

‘Look, my dear, I know what you’re like, but you must be more careful. What on earth are you doing approaching these people on your own? You could have got very badly hurt. Why don’t you just get Janet to pull Besson in? Be simple and straightforward for once.’

‘Because.’

‘Because what?’

‘Because Janet is playing silly buggers, that’s why.’

‘Do you want me to talk to him?’

‘No. I don’t want him to know what I think. You can fight with him later, if you want. He wants me to go home. So does Jonathan. In fact, I’m the only one who really wants to give this a bit more time.’

Bottando thought. ‘I don’t know that I can advise you. The Carabinieri need help, even though Fabriano refuses to acknowledge it, and this is a double murder. But whether or not you are wasting your time I can’t tell you. All I can say is that if you decide to come home you can; then we can tell Fabriano that we’ve done our bit and he’s on his own. Or do you want to show him you’re better at this than he is?’

‘That’s a very unfair question.’

‘It just crossed my mind.’

‘I want to get to the bottom of this.’

‘In that case you’d better hang on. Anything I can do?’

‘One thing,’ she said, looking at the meter ticking away. ‘A phone call to Ellman. It didn’t come from Paris, apparently. I asked Janet to contact the Swiss, but could you put a bit of pressure on them as well?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘Well?’ asked Argyll as she emerged.

Flavia thought carefully. ‘He’s absolutely adamant that I should carry on. Very keen to continue the investigation,’ she said. ‘Absolutely essential, he reckons.’

‘Oh,’ he replied, a bit disappointed. There was an auction sale just outside Naples the next day he’d been hoping to get to. ‘So I suppose we do, then.’

‘Yes. No choice. Sorry.’

‘We are running awfully short of money, you know.’

‘I know. We’ll just have to improvise.’

‘How do you improvise about money?’

‘I’ll think about it. Meantime, I want to go to this documentation centre. You coming?’

So they walked south, back into the proper, tourist, Guide Michelin part of the city, away from the run-down streets, the hordes of lost and sad-looking inhabitants, across and through the sweat-shop district of overworked women from Asia on whose shoulders rests the city’s reputation for haute couture , and then again east into the ever more elegant Marais, long since shorn of the down-at-heel occupants who once gave the area its charm.