Dick Francis - The Danger

'Giuseppe,' I said. 'On the tapes.'

'Yes,' he agreed gloomily. 'None of them knew him before. He recruited one as a stranger in a bar, and that one recruited the other five. We will convict the six, there's no doubt, but it's hollow without Giuseppe.'

'Mm.' I hesitated. 'Enrico, isn't it true that some of the students who joined the Red Brigades in their hot-headed youth grew out of it and became ordinary blameless citizens?'

'I've heard so, but of course they keep the past secret.'

'Well… it just struck me a day or two ago that Giuseppe might have learned the techniques of kidnapping from the Red Brigades, when he was a student, perhaps, or even as a member.'

Pucinelli said doubtfully, 'Your Identikit pictures don't match anyone with a criminal record."

'I just wondered if it might be worthwhile to show those pictures to ex-students of about the same age, say twenty-five to forty, at perhaps some sort of students' reunion? It's a faint chance, anyway.'

'I'll try,' he said. 'But the Red Brigades, as I'm sure you know, are organised in small cells. People in one cell can't identify people in other cells because they never meet them.'

'I know it's a long shot and involves a lot of probably fruitless work,' I agreed.

'I'll think about it.'

'OK.'

'All the universities are closed for summer vacations.'

'So they are,' I said. 'But in the autumn…'

'I will think about it,' he said again. 'Goodnight, friend. Sleep well.'

Alessia heard from her father about the recovery of some of the ransom and from me of the capture of six of the kidnappers. 'Oh,' she said blankly.

'Your man with the microphone isn't among them.' 'Oh.' She looked at me guiltily, hearing, as I did, the faint relief in her voice. We were sitting in Popsy's minute tree-shaded garden where four lounging chairs squeezed onto a square of grass and low stone surrounding wails failed to obscure views of stableyard on three sides. We were drinking iced coffee in the heat wave which had followed the storms, clinking the cubes and being watched politely by equine heads peering in rows over half-doors.

I had invited myself down on my day off, a move neither Alessia nor Popsy had objected to, and I'd found Popsy alone when I arrived, as usual out in her yard.

'Hello,' she said, as I drew up. 'Sony about the wet." She was standing is green gumboots, hose In hand, watering the lower hind kg of a large chestnut horse. Bob held its head. Its eyes blinked at me as if bored. The water ran in a stream across the yard to a drain. 'It's got a leg,' Popsy said, as if that explained things.

I stifled a desire to say that as far as I could see it had four.

'Alessia walked along to the shops,' she said 'She won't be long.' She squelched away and turned off a tap, flinging the hose in loose coils beside it. 'That'll do for now, Bob,' she said. 'Get Jamie to roll up chat hose.' She dried her hands on the seat of her trousers and gave me a bright blaze from the green eyes.

'She rides, you know,' she said as Bob led the watered horse off to an empty box, 'but only up on the Downs. She goes up and down with me in the Land Rover. We don't discuss it. It's routine.

'How is she otherwise?'

'Much happier, I'd say.' She grinned hugely and clapped me lightly on the shoulder. 'Don't know how anyone so cold can bring someone else to life.'

'I'm not cold,' I protested.

'No?' She considered me quizzically. 'There's a feeling of iron about you. Like a rod. You don't smile much. You're not intimidating… but I'm sure you could be, if you tried.'

I shook my head.

'Do you ever get drunk?' she said.

'Not often.'

'Never, more like.' She waved a hand towards the kitchen. 'Like a drink? It's so bloody hot.'

We went into a cool interior with her shaking off her gumboots on the doorstep, and she brought white wine from the refrigerator in the kitchen in fawn socks.

'I'll bet for instance,' she said, pouring, 'that you never get helpless giggles or sing vulgar songs or generally make an ass of yourself.'

'Often.'

She gave me an 'oh yeah' look and settled her large self comfortably onto a kitchen chair, putting her heels up on the table.

'Well, sometimes,' I said.

She drank some wine cheerfully. 'What makes you giggle, then?' she asked.

'Oh… one time I was with an Italian family during a kidnap and they all behaved like a comic soap opera at the top of their voices, and it was painful. I had to go upstairs sometimes to stop myself laughing… awful giggles over and over, when really the whole thing was deadly dangerous. I had terrible trouble. My face was aching with the effort of keeping it straight.'

'Like wanting to explode in church,' Popsy said, nodding.

'Just like that.'

We sipped the cold wine and regarded each other with friendliness, and in a moment or two Alessia appeared with a bag of groceries and a welcoming smile. There was colour in her cheeks at last, and a sort of rebirth taking place of the girl she must have been before. I could see a great difference in even the carriage of her head; self respect returning to straighten the spine.

I got up at the sight of her and kissed her cheek in greeting and she put the groceries on the table and gave me a positive hug.

'Hi,' she said. 'Please note, I've been shopping. That's the third time. We are now back in business… no nerves, not to speak of.'

'Terrific.'

She poured herself some wine and the three of us amicably ate lunch, and it was afterwards, when Popsy had gone off to her office to do paperwork, that I told Alessia in the garden about the new arrests.

'Do you think they'll catch him… the man with the microphone?' she asked.

'He called himself Giuseppe,' I said, 'though that's almost certainly not his name. The six kidnappers knew him just as Giuseppe, and none of them knows anything else. I think he's cool and intelligent, and I'm afraid Pucinelli won't find him, or the bulk of your ransom.'

She was quiet for a while and then said, 'Poor Papa. Poor all of us. I love the house on Mikonos… so full of brilliant light, right by the sapphire sea… Papa says the money so far recovered won't be enough to save it. He says he keeps postponing putting it up for sale, just hoping… but it's not just its value, there's the upkeep, and the fares there two or three times a year. It was always a luxury, even before.' She paused. 'Part of my childhood. Part of my life.'

'Giuseppe took it,' I said.

She stirred slightly and finally nodded. 'Yes, you are right.'

We drank the iced coffee. Time passed tranquilly.

'I thought of going to the races next week,' she said. 'To Brighton. Mike Noland runs a lot of horses there, because he used to train in Sussex, and many of his owners still live there. I may as well go and talk to them… show them I'm still alive.'

"If I went,' I said, 'would I be in your way?'

She smiled at the still-watching horses. 'No, you wouldn't.'

'Which day?'

'Wednesday.'

I thought of switchboard schedules. I'll fix it,' I said.

Gerry Clayton having agreed with a thoroughly false martyred expression to sit in for me from four to midnight, I drove early to Lambourn to collect Alessia, pausing only for coffee and encouragement from Popsy before setting off on the three-hour trek to Brighton.

'I could have got a lift,' Alessia said. 'You didn't have to come all this huge way round.'

'Sure,' I said.

She sighed, but not apparently with regret. 'Half a dozen trainers or jockeys will be driving from here to Brighton.'

'Bully for them.'

'So I could always get a lift back.'

I looked at her sideways. 'I'll drive you unless you definitely prefer not.'

She didn't answer; just smiled. We drove to Brighton and talked of many things for which there had never been peace enough before; of likes and dislikes, places, books, people; cabbages and kings.