In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

ELEVEN

AS THE GREYNESS spread among the trees, we crouched in a circle and had something to eat. Burke seemed fine when sitting down and his breathing was normal again. But Legrande looked his age and more, the lines on his face etched knife deep. He was getting old, that was the trouble; too old for this sort of caper.

Even Piet looked tired and cold crouched there with the mist curling from the damp ground. The heavy brigade, that’s what we’d always called Legrande and him. There had been occasions when the sight of those two arriving shoulder to shoulder, smashing their way through with the force of a runaway train, had been enough to make you stand up and cheer, but not any more. Times changed and people changed with them – that was life and the pattern of things.

I shivered slightly. I did not like this kind of grey dawning. It reminded me of too many similar ones and a lot of good men gone. I lit a cigarette which tasted foul, but I persisted and Burke moved over and unfolded his copy of the map.

“We can’t be more than five hundred feet above this shepherd’s hut where he’s supposed to be hanging out. It might be an idea if you made a quick reconnaissance. We’ll wait here. I’ll give you three-quarters of an hour.” He added in a low voice, “I think Legrande could do with the rest. He looks shot to me.”

I got to my feet. “I think you’ve got a point there. I’ll see you later.”

I moved down through the trees. On the rockier slopes they were cork-oak and holly-oak, but then I entered a belt of beech and pine and the going became a lot easier.

A fox broke cover, giving me so much of a fright that I almost ended his days for him which would have been fatal for all of us, but there was plenty of wildlife on the mountain besides Serafino and his boys. Wildcats and martens and the odd wolf, although they all tended to run the opposite way at the first smell of a man.

I made good progress now and broke into a trot, my rifle at the trail, sliding down the occasional slope on my backside, and within fifteen minutes of leaving the others, I had descended a good three hundred feet.

There was a freshwater stream over on my right. I worked my way across, lay on my belly and splashed water on my face. It seemed as good a route down as any and it was more than likely that any shepherd building a hut would place it as close to water as possible, especially when you considered what it was like in this country during the summer.

It was the voice I heard first, a kind of smothered gasp that was cut off sharply. I paused, dropping to one knee. There was silence, then a vigorous splashing and another sharp cry.

I had seen the Honourable Joanna Truscott twice in my life, both times on photos which Hoffer had shown us. In one she had been dressed for skiing, in the other for a garden party at Buckingham Palace. It was difficult to accept that the girl I watched now from the bushes, floundering naked in a hollow among the trees where the stream had formed a small pool, was the same.

Her hair was tied back into a kind of eighteenth-century queue and her face, neck and arms were gypsy-brown from the sun. The rest of her was milk white and boyish, the breasts almost nonexistent, although the hips could only have belonged to a woman.

She scrambled out and rubbed herself down with an old blanket. I didn’t bother looking away. For one thing she didn’t know I was there and for another, there was something rather sexless about her. Strange how some women can set one aflame with all the fury of a petrol-soaked bonfire in an instant and others have no effect whatsoever.

She pulled on a pair of old trousers that had definitely seen better days, a man’s shirt, green woolen sweater with holes in the elbows and bound a red scarf around her head, knotting it under her chin.

As she sat down to pull on a pair of Spanish fell boots, I stepped out of the trees and said cheerfully, “Good morning.”

She was a tough one all right. “And good morning to you,” she replied calmly and started to get up.

“No need to be alarmed,” I said rather unnecessarily. “My name is Wyatt – Stacey Wyatt. I’m from your stepfather, Karl Hoffer. I’ve three friends waiting for me now up the mountains. We’ve come to get you out.”

God, what a fool I was. She was on her own and unguarded, obviously free to roam at will. Why on earth that didn’t strike me at once, I’ll never know. It had been a strenuous night – perhaps I was tired.

“What am I expected to do – stand up and cheer?” she said coolly in that beautifully clipped, upper-crust English voice. “How did he tell you to dispose of me? Gun, knife or blunt instrument?”

I stared at her in astonishment and at the same time, some kind of light started to dawn. She had turned away from me slightly. When I got the front view again, she was holding an old Beretta automatic pistol in her right hand and looked as if she knew exactly what to do with it.

“Would you mind going into rather more detail,” I told her. “I’m afraid I’m not with you.”

“Why don’t you pull the other one,” she suggested crisply.

I was still holding the A.K. at the trail. I dropped it at my feet and put the Uzi beside it. “Look, no hands.”

She wasn’t impressed. “What about the thing in the holster?”

I removed the Smith and Wesson, laid it down, then walked back three paces, squatted against a holly-oak and took out my cigarettes.

“Like one?”

She shook her head. “I want to live to a ripe old age.”

“If you think it’s worth it.” I lit one myself. “Now I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen and then you can shoot me – if you still want to.”

“We’ll see,” she said calmly. “Only make it quick. I haven’t had any breakfast.”

So I told her in a few brief sentences and when I was finished, her expression hadn’t altered in the slightest. “Let me get this straight. My stepfather told you I was abducted by Serafino Lentini and held to ransom. That he paid up, but that Serafino decided to have his own wicked way with me after all and kept the money into the bargain?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“A lie, Mr. Wyatt, from beginning to end.”

“I thought so.”

She showed her surprise. “I don’t understand.”

“I happen to know that because of injuries sustained under police interrogation some years ago, Serafino Lentini isn’t physically capable of taking that kind of interest in any woman.”

“But if you knew that, if you realised there was something phoney about my stepfather’s story from the beginning, why did you come?”

“I’ve always been insatiably curious.” I grinned. “The money was good and he made you sound rather interesting. Tell me, did you really sleep with the chauffeur when you were fourteen?”

I certainly cracked that iron composure of hers with that one. Her eyes widened, she gasped and what I can only describe as a virginal flush tinged her cheeks.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s obvious now that he has an unusually inventive streak.”

“You want the facts? I’ll give them to you.” She wasn’t pointing the Beretta at me any longer and she looked mad. “As they say about life insurance, I’m worth more dead than alive. My mother left me everything in trust with my stepfather as executor. Something of a mistake on her part. I’m twenty-one in another three weeks and get personal control of the whole thing. If I die before then Hoffer gets the lot. Two and a half million sterling.”

It certainly made what he was paying us sound very marginal indeed.

“The only true thing he appears to have told you,” she went on, “is the fact that he gave Serafino Lentini twenty-five thousand dollars, but for a different reason. I was to be ambushed when driving alone to visit friends at Villabla one evening, robbed and shot dead beside my car where I would be easily found and identified, apparently just another victim of a bandit outrage.”

“But Serafino wouldn’t play?”

“He intended to at first. Standing there beside my car that evening after he and his men had stopped me I thought my last hour had come. I don’t think I’ll ever be as close to death again.”

“What made him change his mind?”

“He’s told me since that he liked the look of me. That I reminded him of his younger sister who died in childbirth a year ago. I think the real truth is that he doesn’t like my stepfather. It seems they had dealings before although he’s never told me much about that.”

“Then why did he do business with Hoffer at all?”

“He wanted money – big money. He’s enthusiastic about only one thing – the idea of emigrating to South America and leaving this life behind. I think I’m alive because it suddenly struck him that it would be rather amusing to take Hoffer’s money and not carry out his side of the bargain.”

“So he whisked you off to the mountains?”

“I’ve been with him ever since.”

“Doesn’t it ever worry you that he might change his mind on another whim?”

She shook her head. “Not in the slightest. Since I explained the real facts of the situation he and his men are only too well aware which side their bread is buttered on.”

“But of course,” I said softly. “All they’ve got to do is keep you alive long enough and you’ll have all the money in the world.”

“Exactly. Once things are settled satisfactorily, I’ve promised to get them out to South America with a hundred thousand pounds to split between the four of them.”

So now all was revealed. Or was it? A great deal that had puzzled me was now explained, but there were several things which still didn’t make any kind of sense.

She voiced one of them for me. “One thing I can’t understand. What were you supposed to do once you got your hands on me?”

“Take you to Hoffer. He’s meeting us himself on the Bellona road.”

“Didn’t he expect me to say anything to you? Weren’t you supposed to notice when you got here that I wasn’t the slave of Serafino’s passion that he made out?”

Which had been worrying me for some time and yet I could think of no possible explanation except for the one she offered me herself a moment later.

“Which takes us back to square one,” she said. “The only logical explanation. That you dropped in to finish me off along with Serafino and his men. Then my stepfather goes to the police, wringing his hands, giving them some story about how he’s been afraid for my life and didn’t dare seek official help before, but now he can’t go on. The police make an official search and find what’s left of us.”

“Wouldn’t they want to know who was responsible?”

“There are several groups in the mountains just like Serafino and his men, and there’s no love lost.” She shrugged. “It would be reasonable to suppose that one of them was responsible. All very sad, but nice and tidy for my stepfather. When you think of it, it is the only explanation that makes any kind of sense.”

Her hand started to bring up the Beretta again. It was her eyes that warned me and the sudden, pinched look about the mouth, not that I was particularly alarmed.

I came up in an unnecessarily spectacular spring, got my shoulder to her knees and had her on her back in a moment. Once on top, the war was over, although a certain amount of wriggling continued until I clamped a knee across each of her arms.

I held up the Beretta and slipped the safety catch. “It just won’t fire until you do that. Try again.”

I dropped it on her chest, got up and turned my back on her. I lit another cigarette, an ostentatious bit of theatricality and when I turned again she was standing staring at me in bewilderment, the Beretta swinging loosely from one hand and pointing directly into the ground.

“But it still doesn’t make sense,” she said.

She was right – it didn’t. The only thing which filled her true circumstances was that we had been sent to kill her and we had not.

Or had we…?

It was suddenly cold and my throat went dry. No, it wasn’t possible and I tried to push the thought away from me. Burke would never have stood still for a thing like that.

In any case, I wasn’t allowed to take it any further. Someone jumped on my back, an arm clamped around my throat and down I went.

Someone once said that God made some men big and some small and left it to Colonel Colt to even things up. As a philosophy where violence is concerned, it’s always appealed to me and like most relatively small men, I’ve never been much good at the hand-to-hand stuff.

The arm about my throat was doing a nice, efficient job of cutting off the air supply. I was choking, there was a roaring in my ears. Somewhere the girl was shouting and then he made the mistake of moving position and I managed an elbow strike to his privates.

It was only half a target and there wasn’t much zip behind it, but it was enough. I was released with a curse, rolled over twice and fetched up against a holly-oak tree.

Not that it did me much good. My head went back with a crack and the muzzle of a rifle was shoved into the side of my neck.