Gerald Seymour - Red Fox

The tears would come later, back in the flat, back at their home, when she thought again of Geoffrey.

She stood up on her weakened legs, said aloud: 'God help me that he should ever know.'

What if this were the time that he was preparing to die, what if this was the moment that he clutched at an image of Violet?

What if it were now that he looked for her as she was walking on a path in strange woods, her clothes devastated, her modesty wrecked and laughed over and splintered?

'Never let him find out, please God. Never.*

She had not even spoken to him when he left the house that morning. She had lain in the bed, her nightdress tight around her, aware of his movements in the flat, but she had not called him, because she never did, because they had only banalities to speak of.

'Forgive me, Geoffrey. Please, please.*

Only if Geoffrey died would he never know. Only then would she be safe in her secret. And he must live, because she had betrayed him and was not fit for the weeds of the widow, for the hypocrisy of condolence. She must will him to live. A terminal patient of catastrophic internal illness sometimes comes back; always there is hope, always there is chance. And then he will know, if the miracle is enacted he will know.

Violet Harrison ran on the pine needle rug. The pain of the wounds was subsidiary to the greater hurt of shame and humiliation. She skirted the trattoria, darkened and shuttered, and sprinted for the car park. Her hand plunged in her bag, wrenched at the cosmetics in the search for the car keys. When she sat in the driving seat and the ignition fired, she trembled with the tears that had been stifled.

'Come home, Geoffrey. Even if no one is there. Come home, my brave darling, come home.'

'Goodbye, 'Arrison.'

Giancarlo could barely see his prisoner against the dirt black of the earth pit.

'Goodbye, Giancarlo.' A faint voice, devoid of hope.

' I will be back soon.' As if Harrison needed to be reassured, as if all his ordeal was a fear of being alone with darkness. A slight stirring of warmth and the nudge of communication. Was the confidence of the boy failing, was the certainty sliding?

Giancarlo slipped away along the path, feeling with his arms outstretched in front of him for the low branches. There was plenty of time.

He had come so far, and yet where was the measure of his achievement? A bramble stem caught with its spikes at the material of his trousers. He tore himself clear. Had he advanced his claim to Franca's freedom? His ankle turned under a pro-truding root. The P38 dug at the skin of his waist, the acknowledgement that this was his sole power of persuasion, his only right to be heard and known in the great city basking in its summer evening to the south.

The breath of darkness had eddied into the great courtyard of the Questura. The headlights and roof lamps of the convoy from the Rebibbia gleamed out their urgency as they swung through the archway from the outside street into the parking area. More shouting, more running men, more guns as the van was backed towards an opened door that led directly to the cell corridor.

Among those who worked late in the city's police headquarters there were many who hurried down the internal staircases and craned from the upper windows that they might catch a brief glimpse of 'La Tantardini'. They were rewarded sparsely, a flash of the colour of her blouse as she was manhandled the few feet from the van steps to the entrance of the building, and disappearance.

Carboni did not follow her, but stood in the centre of the courtyard among the reversing, straightening cars that jockeyed for the last parking places. Archie Carpenter stood a few feet from him, sensing that the policeman preferred his own thoughts for company.

She had been long gone from their sight when Carboni threw off the spell, turned to look for Carpenter. 'You would not have understood what passed between us.'

'Not a word, I'm sorry.'

' I have to be brief…' Carboni began to walk towards the principal entrance to the building, ignoring the many who watched him as a related secondary object of interest now that the woman was gone. T h e boy will telephone at eight. I have to trace that call. I must know the location from where he telephones. To trace the call I must have time. Only when he talks to Tantardini will he gabble on. He will talk to her.' Carboni's face was etched with anxiety. 'I have told her also that if Harrison is harmed, then we will kill Battestini wherever we find him, but that if she co-operates then clemency will be shown her in the courts.'

'Which you have no power to guarantee.*

'Right, Carpenter, no power at all. But now they have plenty to talk of, and they will use quickly the time that the engineers need. I have no other option but reliance on the trace procedure.'

Carpenter spoke quietly, 'You have one other option. To free Tantardini for Harrison's life.'

'Don't joke with me, Carpenter, not now. Later when it is finished.'

They stopped at the outer door of Carboni's office. The retort was rising in Carpenter's throat, and he suppressed it and thought for the first time how ludicrous to these people was the proposition that seemed straight and clear and commonsense.

' I wish you luck, Mister Carboni.'

'Only luck… you are mean with your favours, Englishman.'

They entered the office, and Carpenter was quick to appraise the mood, sensitive to the atmosphere of downed heads, flattened feet, gloom and frustration. This was Carboni's own team and if they were not believing in success, then who was he to imagine in his mind the incredible. Carpenter watched as Carboni moved among the impromptu desks and tables and the teleprinters in the outer room, speaking softly to his men. He saw the queue of shaken heads, the mournful mutters of the negative.

Like he's going round a cancer ward, and nobody's carrying the good news, nobody's lost his pains, nobody thinks he's coming through. Poor bastard, thought Carpenter.

Carboni expended a long, powered sigh, and slumped to the chair behind his desk. With the sense of theatre, of tragedy, he slapped a hand on to the cream telephone receiver in front of him.

'Call Vellosi. Get him to come here. Not the same room as this.. . but ask him to be close.' He rubbed at the weariness in his eyes. 'Bring her up now, bring Tantardini.'

The child fled from the raw, opened hand of his mother.

Neat and nimble on his feet, he dodged the swinging blow, scattered the posy of hedge flowers on to the stone slabs of the kitchen floor, and scampered for the corridor that led to his bedroom.

'All afternoon I've been calling you from the h o u s e…'

' I was only in the wood, Mama.' He called shrilly in his fright from the sanctuary of his room.

' I even went and bothered your father in the field… he called too… he wasted his time when he was busy… '

She did not follow him, he had achieved safety.

'Mama, in the wood, I saw…'

His mother's voice boomed back, surging to him, as in falsetto she mimicked his small voice. 'I saw a fox… I saw a r a b b i t…

I followed the flight of a hawk. You'll have no supper tonight.

Into your night clothes… sick with worry you had me.'

He waited, trying to gauge the scale of her anger, the enormity of his fault, then wheedled in justification. 'Mama, in the wood I saw. .. '

She snapped her interruption back at him.

'Silence your chatter, silence it and get yourself to bed. And you'll not sit with your father after his supper. Not another sound from you, or I'll be in and after you.'

'But Mama… '

' I'll be in and after you.'

'Good night, Mama, may the Virgin watch over you and Papa tonight.'

The voice was small, the fluency broken by the first tears on the child's smooth-downed cheeks. His mother bit her lower lip.