Gerald Seymour - Killing Ground

'Myself, I'd say it was patronizing.'

'Treating me like a juvenile.'

'Patronizing, but I doubt it did you harm.'

'What do you want of me?'

'Same as I told you first time round. There is an opportunity for you to give me access to the home of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio. I need that access.'

She stared hard at him. There were shadows on her face that caught the small lines at her eyes and at her mouth. He thought now that he stressed her. It was important to him to see her stressed. He waited on her. It was not for him to lead her.

She hesitated, then blurted, 'If I refuse, won't go to Palermo… ?'

Axel gazed at the windscreen, at the running water, at the blur of the beach and the jetty and dark outline of the headland. ''I lose that opportunity for access. I have one opportunity through you. OK, we thought it out, you get the invitation, you write back and say that you're sorry and can't make it, but that you've a friend. We supply the friend. The friend is the Customs and Excise investigation team, a policewoman, whatever. They're too careful over there, wouldn't buy it. You're the one with access, Charley, only you. If you refuse, I don't get the access. Don't think I want someone like you down there, but I haven't another option.'

She turned away from him, twisted her back to him. She jerked the passenger door open. She pushed herself out of the car. She told him that she would think on it one more night, and where she would meet him the next day after school. She asked him if he liked walking. She bent suddenly, peered at him through the door, and il did not seem to matter to her that the rain beat on her head and her shoulders and her spine.

'What would happen to me, if…?'

'It went sour on you? If they were just unhappy about you, they'd fire you, send you home. Charley, I try and say what I mean so I here aren't misunderstandings. It's a shit place and they're shit people. If they'd serious cause to suspect you, then they'd kill you and go home afterwards and eat their dinner. It wouldn't bother them, Charley, to kill you.'

He watched her run towards the light above the porch of the bungalow.

Egregio Dottore e gentile Signora.

She sat in the classroom. She took a mouthful of a sandwich from her lunchbox. She sipped at the can of Pepsi. She had brought in with her, in the rucksack that strapped onto the back of her scooter, the sheet of notepaper headed with the address of Gull View Cottage. In the mid-morning break she had gone to the rubbish containers on the far side of the playground and lifted the lids of two of them and tried, hopelessly, to identify which plastic bag had been in the bin outside her classroom. She had not found the plastic bag. It was a fine day, the cloud was broken, and the crocuses in the pots around the prefabricated classroom were already showing with the daffodils, and she thought that the spring season was a time of hope and optimism, and she wondered how the spring season was in Palermo… She tried to remember each phrase, sentence, of the letter written to her by Angela Ruggerio and then intercepted and copied and tracked.

(Sorry, dottore, and sorry, signora, but that is going to be the limit of my Italian – I remember quite a lot of it, but if you'll excuse me the rest will be in English!!)

Thank you very much for your kind invitation. And my warmest congratulations on the birth of Mauro, and of course I was very pleased to hear that Mario and Francesca were well.

It was so clear to her, the Roman summer of 1992. School finished, exams taken. The miserable response of her father, who had expected too much of her grades. Not good enough for university but sufficient to win her a place at a teachers' training college. It had been her mother who had seen the advertisement in the Lady magazine. Her mother had seen the advertisement in the magazine at the hairdresser, copied it and brought it home. An Italian family living in Rome sought a 'nanny/mother's help' for the summer months. She and her mother had written the application and enclosed a photograph, and her father had warned that Italians pinched bottoms and were dirty, not to be trusted and thieves, and she and her mother had ignored him, as they usually did. The four months of the Roman summer of 1992 had been, quite simply, the happiest months of her life.

I was very surprised to get your letter, and you will understand that I have had to think about it very hard. Because of the situation today in England I found when I graduated as a teacher (!) that it was really hard to find work.

I think I was very lucky, Dad certainly says so, to get this job that I now have.

The Roman summer of 1992 had been magic months for Charley. From the time that she had walked down the aircraft's steps, pushed her trolley through Customs and Immigration, seen Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, with Mario holding his father's hand and Angela carrying the baby Francesca, and seen their welcome smiles, she had felt a true liberation for the first time in her life. They had greeted her as if she were a part of them, right from the time that Peppino, as he insisted he should be called, had driven them away from the airport in his sleek BMW, and she had sat in the back withthe small boy beside her and the baby girl on her lap, had treated her as a friend already by the time the car had swept into the basement car park of the apartment on the Collina Fleming. She had thought then that her father was ossified in his attitudes and boring, and she thought that her mother was complacent in her outlook and boring, and to be away from them, first time in her life, was true freedom. Most mornings of that June and July Peppino, with the beautiful suit and smile and lotion scent, was gone early to his office in the bank, something to do with the Vatican. And most mornings of those first weeks Charley had taken Mario down to the piazza for the private bus to the kindergarten of St George's School, high on the Via Cassia. And most mornings of that June and July Angela, with beautiful blouses and skirts and coats, was out in the shops of the Via Corso or at her volunteer job in the Keats Museum at the Piazza Espagna.

Most mornings, while the domestica made the beds and cleaned the bathrooms and put the washing in the machines and did the ironing and tidied the kitchen, Charley had sat on the wide balcony and played with the baby, Francesca, and marvelled at the view above the pot flowers, watered each day by the old portiere, stretching from the dome of the basilica of St Peter's across the heart of the city and away to the distant shadows of the mountains. It had been heaven. And more of heaven in the afternoons, the Italian classes in a room off the cool of a courtyard behind the Parliament building, and then the roaming walks through the centro storico. When she walked the narrow cobbled streets of the centro storico she had never taken a map with her, so that each church and old piazza, each gallery and hidden garden, each tucked-away temple and frieze from antiquity, had seemed a discovery that was personal to her. It had been her freedom.

I have considered very carefully your offer that I should come to Palermo to help look after Mario and Francesca and baby Mauro. I am happy in my present job, I have ambitions to move to a bigger school when I have gained more direct experience. If I resign my position, then I believe it would be quite difficult, at this time, to find another school that would have me in the autumn.

That summer of 1992, for the months of August and September, Charley had gone with Angela Ruggerio and the children to a rented beach villa a kilometre along the coast from Civitavecchia.

If he were not away on the bank's business, Peppino came to the villa at weekends.

Seven weeks of sun, oil and sand and ice-creams and lazy evening meals and a growing love of Angela and her children. The good clothes from the Via Corso boutiques were left behind. The time for T-shirts and jeans and bikinis, and the fourth day on the beach Charley had taken courage and unhooked the bikini top and felt a desperate blushing shyness at the whiteness and lain on her stomach on the towel while Angela had lain on her back beside her, and never worn the top again and known her own parents would have called her a slut. She had talked of poetry with Angela and known her own mother had never read Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth. She had talked of social sciences, Angela's degree course at the University of Rome that had specialized in local administration, and known that her own father had believed the world began and ended with the study of marine engineering. It was the time of her liberation. And it had ended