Dick Francis - The Danger

I could circle round the tree.

I did that. The surrounding greenery was similar from all angles.

The branches of the tree spread from just above my head, narrow hard arms ending in smaller offshoots and twigs. A good many tan-coloured leaves still clung there. I tried shaking them off, but my efforts hardly wobbled them and they stubbornly remained.

I sat down again and thought a good many further unwelcome thoughts, chief among them being that in the Liberty Market office I would never live this day down… if ever I lived to tell.

Getting myself kidnapped… bloody stupid.

Embarrassing to a degree.

I thought back. If Pucinelli had been easier to reach I would have learned about the Goldoni family sooner, and I would have been long gone by the time the International Rug Co. Inc… arrived at the Sherryatt with their rug.

If I hadn't gone back upstairs to fetch my things…

If, if, if.

I thought of the face of Giuseppe-Peter-Pietro Goldoni coining through my bedroom door: intent, determined, a soldier in action, reminding me in his speed and neatness of Tony Vine. He had himself taken Dominic from the beach, and in a mask had been there personally to seize Alessia. It was possible to imagine that it had been he who had announced himself as the chauffeur to collect Morgan Freemantle; and if so the actual act of successful abduction could be almost as potent a satisfaction to him as the money it brought.

If I understood him, I wondered, would I be better equipped? I'd never negotiated face to face with a kidnapper before: always through proxies. The art of coercive bargaining, Liberty Market training manual, chapter six. Hard to be coercive while at the present disadvantage.

Time passed. Aeroplanes flew at intervals overhead and a couple of birds came crossly to inspect the stranger in their territory. I sat, not uncomfortably, trying to shape my mind to the possibility of remaining where I was for some time.

It began to rain.

The tree gave little shelter, but I didn't particularly mind. The drops spattered through the dying leaves in a soft shower, fresh and interesting on my skin. I'd never been out in the rain before with no clothes on, that I could remember. I lifted my face up, and opened my mouth, and drank what came my way.

After a while the rain stopped, and it grew dark. All night, I thought coldly.

Well. All night, then. Face it. Accept it. It's not so hard.

I was strong and healthy and possessed of a natural inborn stamina which had rarely been tested anywhere near its limits. The restriction to my arms was loose and not unbearable. I could sit there for a long time without suffering. I guessed, in fact, that I would have to.

The greatest discomfort was cold, to which I tried to shut my mind, joined, as the night advanced, by a desire for a nice hot dinner.

I tried on and off to rub the handcuffs vigorously against the treetrunk to see if the friction would do anything spectacularly useful like sawing the wood right through. The result of such labours was a slight roughening of the tree's surface and a more considerable roughening of the skin inside my arms. Small the treetrunk might be, but densely, forbiddingly solid.

I slept, on and off, dozing quite deeply and toppling sideways once, waking later with my nose on the dead leaves and my shoulders stretched and aching. I tried to find a more comfortable way of lying, but everything was compromise: sitting was the best.

Waiting, shivering, for dawn, I began to wonder seriously for the first time whether he intended simply to leave me to the elements until I died.

He hadn't killed me in the hotel. The injection in my thigh which had put me unconscious could just as easily have been fatal, if death had been what he intended. A body in a rag could have been carried out of a hotel as boldly dead as unconscious, If he'd simply wanted me out of his life, why was I still in it?

If he'd wanted revenge… that was something else.

I'd told Kent Wagner confidently that Giuseppe-Peter wouldn't kill by inches… and perhaps I'd been wrong.

Well, I told myself astringently, you'll just have to wait and see.

Daylight came. A grey day, the clouds lower, scurrying, full of unhappy promise.

Where's the Verdi?, I thought. I wouldn't mind an orchestral earful. Verdi… Giuseppe Verdi.

Oh well. Giuseppe… It made sense.

Peter was his own name - Pietro - in English.

Coffee wouldn't be bad, I thought. Ring room service to bring it.

The first twenty-four hours were the worst for a kidnap victim: chapter one, Liberty Market training manual. From my own intimate viewpoint. I now doubted it.

At what would have been full daylight except for the clouds, he came to see me.

I didn't hear him approach, but he was suddenly there, half behind me, stepping round one of the laurels; Giuseppe-Peter-Pietro Goldoni, dressed in his brown leather jacket with the gold buckles at the cuffs.

I felt as if I had known him forever, yet he was totally alien. There was some quality of implacability in his approach, a sort of mute violence in the way he walked, a subtle arrogance in his carriage. His satisfaction at having brought me to this pass was plain to see, and the hairs rose involuntarily all up my spine.

He stopped in front of me and looked down.

'Your name is Andrew Douglas,' he said in English. His accent was pronounced, and like all Italians he had difficulty with the unfamiliar Scots syllables, but his meaning was clear.

I looked back at him flatly and didn't reply.

Without excitement but with concentration he returned me look for look, and I began to sense in him the same feeling about me as I had about him. Professional curiosity, on both sides.

'You will make a tape recording for me,' he said finally.

'All right.'

The ready agreement lifted his eyebrows: not what he'd expected.

'You do not ask… who I am?'

I said, 'You're the man who abducted me from the hotel.'

'What is my name?' he asked.

'I don't know,' I said.

'It is Peter.' A very positive assertion.

'Peter.' Inclined my head, acknowledging the introduction. 'Why am I here?'

'To make a tape recording.'

He looked at me sombrely and went away, his head round and dark against the sky, all his features long familiar because of the picture. I'd nearly got him right, I thought. Maybe in the line of the eyebrows I'd been wrong: his were straighter at the outer edge.

He was gone for a period I would have guessed at as an hour, and he returned with a brown travelling bag slung from one shoulder. The bag looked like fine leather, with gold buckles. All of a piece.

From his jacket he produced a large sheet of paper which he unfolded and held for me to read.

This is what you will say,' he said.

I read the message, which had been written in laborious block capitals by an American, not by Giuseppe-Peter himself. It said:

I AM ANDREW DOUGLAS, UNDERCOVER COP. YOU IN THE FUCKING JOCKEY CLUB, LISTEN GOOD, YOU'VE GOT TO SEND THE TEN MILLION ENGLISH POUNDS, LIKE WE SAID. THE CERTIFIED CHECK'S GOT TO BE READY TUESDAY. SEND IT TO ACCOUNT NUMBER ZL327/42806, CREDIT HELVETIA, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND. WHEN THE CHECK IS CLEARED, YOU GET FREEMANTLE BACK. NO FINGERS MISSING. THEN SIT TIGHT. IF ANY COPS COME IN, I WON'T BE MAKING IT. IF EVERYTHING IS ON THE LEVEL AND THE BREAD IS SATISFACTORY, YOU'LL BE TOLD WHERE TO FIND ME. IF ANYONE TRIES TO BLOCK THE DEAL AFTER FREEMANTLE GOES LOOSE, I'LL BE KILLED.

He tucked the paper inside the front of his jacket and began to pull a tape recorder from the leather bag.

'I'm not reading that,' I said neutrally.

He stopped in mid-movement. 'You have no choice. If you don't read it, I will kill you.'

I said nothing, simply looked at him without challenge; trying to show no worry.