The Immaculate Deception - Iain Pears

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She had put it on for the first few days, the vastly obese woman explained, more angrily than was warranted in the circumstances, but the tape kept running out. What was she supposed to do? Didn’t people realize how tiring and stressful it was, answering phone calls all day and every day, without having to worry about changing tapes as well? It wasn’t as if she was paid very much, after all. How often, she asked rhetorically, how often had she told her supervisor that they needed at least two people a day on the switchboard? But did anyone ever listen to her …

      Flavia found she wasn’t listening either, and she smiled politely at the indignant, quivering mass of blubber in front of her, and went back to Macchioli’s office.

      ‘No tape?’ he asked.

      ‘No.’

      He smiled apologetically. Flavia resisted the temptation to throw something at him. ‘You’ve remembered nothing else?’

      ‘No. Except that we found the frame.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘In the conservator’s office. What with all the excitement, we quite forgot we’d taken it out of the frame to give it a dust.’

      ‘I see. I suppose I’d better tell the prime minister about the ransom demand.’

      ‘Oh, I’ve already done that.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘When the call came in.’

      ‘And that was?’

      Macchioli looked at his watch. ‘My, how time flies,’ he said. ‘A couple of hours ago.’

      There was no point in mentioning that Flavia took it as a personal insult that she came so far down everybody’s list of priorities. Macchioli would, no doubt, have inquired what difference it made. And, of course, it didn’t make any difference at all.

      ‘Splendid,’ she said. ‘Splendid. Now, this parcel. Where is it?’

      Macchioli pointed to a large, brown-paper-wrapped box in the corner. Flavia eyed it suspiciously. No one had ever sent her a bomb before, but there was always a first time. And, she supposed, a last time as well. On the other hand, why on earth would anyone send it here? She picked it up – it was surprisingly heavy, like a box of books – gave it a tentative shake, then shrugged and borrowed Macchioli’s scissors.

      Inside was money. A lot of money. A huge amount of money. A gigantic amount of money. She shut the lid rapidly. How much? It wasn’t exactly hard to guess that there would be, in mixed denominations, precisely three million dollars. Nor that it had materialized as a result of Macchioli’s call to the prime minister’s office.

      ‘Good heavens,’ the director said, as he came across and peered over her shoulder. ‘What’s that?’ He specialized in redundant questions.

      ‘Well,’ Flavia explained, ‘it was my birthday a few days ago.’ She stood up and picked up the box. ‘Do you think you could have my car come into the courtyard at the back? I would hate to lose this. By the way, what’s the story of Cephalis and Procris?’

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘The Claude. The subject?’

      ‘Ah. It’s Ovid, I think, although it was mainly known in the seventeenth century from the play by Nicolo da Correggio. Terribly complicated. The gods making mischief, as usual. Diana gives Cephalus a magic spear which never misses its mark; he aims at what he thinks is a deer in the forest and kills Procris by mistake. Then Diana brings her back to life again and everything ends happily. Why do you ask?’

      ‘Curiosity. I’ve never heard of it.’

      ‘Really?’ said Macchioli in surprise. ‘Now, when I was young, it used to be part of the school curriculum.’

      ‘What was?’

      ‘Mythology. Everybody had it dinned into them. Mussolini was terribly keen on it, I believe.’

      ‘I suppose it all changed in the sixties.’

      ‘I suppose,’ Macchioli said, clearly not thinking it was a change for the better. ‘Shows your age, though. I imagine everyone over forty knows it quite well.’

      ‘In that case,’ said Flavia, ‘I’ll stop looking for young thieves. Except that I don’t imagine the subject mattered to him much.’

       6

      The Rome to Florence bit was easy enough; simply a matter of going to the station, getting on the train and staring at the countryside getting ever more beautiful as the hours rolled by. An empty train as well, but not what it was. Argyll was getting old enough to feel nostalgic on the slightest pretext, and the replacement of the ancient, green wagons, which had once lumbered along stuffed with redundant conscripts, with shiny, new, fast and expensive super-trains offering the dubious delights of airline comfort made him sigh for a simpler age.

      On the other hand, it was a much faster way of getting there; he hardly had time to read the newspaper before the train slowed down and pulled into Florence. Then the simpler age came back with a vengeance. Whatever innovations modernity has brought in its wake, they have, as yet, had little impact on the Florentine bus system which, though frighteningly thorough, is also incomprehensible to all except long-term residents.

      So Argyll spent the next forty-five minutes shuttling between the dozens of stops outside the station in the hope that one driver would eventually admit to going in the right direction. Even when this hurdle was surmounted, all was not yet complete: the bus dropped him deep in the countryside at the junction of one small road and another even smaller, with no signposts and no one to ask. Just the freshness of the country in spring, before the terrible Tuscan summer has parched the landscape.

      Simply being out of Rome was a remarkable tonic; he loved the place dearly, but there was no denying that it could be a touch smelly on occasion. And you only noticed the noise when it wasn’t there any longer, when all there was to hear was the lightest of breezes in the tall cypress trees and the sound of those few birds that had not yet been shot and eaten.

      Very agreeable; but he couldn’t stand breathing in the fresh country air all day. He had a choice of two routes: to walk on along the road the bus had travelled, or to go down the little road to the right. Instinct told him to take the little path, so as was his wont he chose the other, on the grounds that his instincts in these matters were invariably wrong. Then, bag in hand and beginning to overheat, he trudged along for half a mile with not a house or a person in sight, until he paused to get his breath back. Only spring but it was already warm, and he was English. Anything more than tepid and he began to melt.

      Silly to go back, daft to go forward. No phone. He cast around for inspiration, but there was none within reach, so he trudged round a corner and instead found salvation in the unlikely form of a man in a full three-piece pinstripe suit staring quizzically at an old Volkswagen with the front bonnet up.

      ‘Excuse me …’ said Argyll, in Italian.

      ‘Damnable thing,’ said this man in English, paying him no attention at all.

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘Damn car. Damn people. D’ye see? Someone’s stolen the engine. Stop for a minute, come back, and it’s gone. No wonder it doesn’t go.’

      Argyll looked in. True enough. No engine. ‘Isn’t it in the back?’ he asked.

      ‘What?’

      ‘The back. That’s where they usually are.’

      The man, tall and ramrod-straight with grey wispy hair and a look of astonishment on his face, gave up staring into the empty luggage compartment and turned to Argyll properly. ‘You a mechanic?’

      ‘No. But if you don’t believe me, have a look.’

      Now

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