LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘It’s all right, Ursi,’ I said pleasantly, as if we were playing bad cop, good cop. ‘Mr Kosinski was supposed to meet us here,’ I improvised. ‘So of course we are a little surprised to hear he’s gone away.’

      ‘I want to know everyone who’s visited him here during the last four weeks,’ said Dicky. ‘A complete list. Understand?’

      The girl looked at me and said: ‘No one visits him. Only you. He is so lonely. I told my mother and we pray for him.’ She confessed this softly, as if such prayers would humiliate George if he ever learned of them.

      ‘We haven’t got time for all this claptrap,’ Dicky told her. ‘I’m getting cold out here. I’ll take a quick look round inside the house, and I want you to tell me the exact time you left him at the airport.’

      ‘Twelve noon,’ she said promptly. ‘I remember it. I looked at the clock there to know the time. I arranged to visit my neighbour for her to fix my hair in the afternoon. Three o’clock. I didn’t want to be late.’

      While Dicky was writing about this in his notebook, she started to pick up the big plastic basket, still half-filled with damp laundry that she had not put on the line. I took it from her: ‘Maybe you could leave the laundry for a moment and make us some coffee, Ursi,’ I said. ‘Have you got that big espresso machine working?’

      ‘Yes, Mr Samson.’ She gave a big smile.

      ‘I’ll look round the house and find a recent photo of him. And I’ll take the car,’ Dicky told me. ‘I haven’t got time to sit round guzzling coffee. I’m going to grill all those airport security people. Someone must have seen him go through the security checks. I need the car; you get a taxi. I’ll see you back at the hotel for dinner. Or I’ll leave a message.’

      ‘Whatever you say, master.’

      Dicky smiled dutifully and marched off across the lawn and disappeared inside the house through the back door Ursi had used.

      I was glad to get rid of Dicky, if only for the afternoon. Being away from home seemed to generate in him a restless disquiet, and his displays of nervous energy sometimes brought me close to screaming. Also his departure gave me a chance to talk to the girl in Schweitzerdeutsch. I spoke it only marginally better than she spoke English, but she was more responsive in her own language.

      ‘There’s a beauty shop in town that Mrs Kosinski used to say did the best facials in the whole world,’ I told her. ‘You help me look round the house and we’ll still have time for me to take you there, fix an appointment for you, and pay for it. I’ll charge it to Mr Cruyer.’

      She looked at me, smiled artfully, and said: ‘Thank you, Mr Samson.’

      After looking out of the window to be quite certain Dicky had departed, I went through the house methodically. She showed me into the master bedroom. There was a photograph of Tessa in a silver frame at his bedside and another photo of her on the chest of drawers. I went into an adjacent room which seemed to have started as a dressing-room but which now had become an office and den. It revealed a secret side of George. Here, in a glass case, there was an exquisite model of a Spanish galleon in full sail. A brightly coloured lithograph of the Virgin Mary stared down from the wall.

      ‘What are those hooks on the wall for?’ I asked Ursi while I continued my search: riffling through the closets to discover packets of socks, shirts and underclothes still in their original wrappings, and a drawer in which a dozen valuable watches and some gold pens and pencils were carelessly scattered among the silk handkerchiefs.

      ‘He has taken the rosary with him,’ she said, looking at the hooks on the wall. ‘It was his mother’s. He always took it to church.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. I noticed that he’d left Nice Guys Finish Dead beside his bed with a marker in the last chapter. It looked like he planned to return. On the large dressing-room table there were half a dozen leather-bound photograph albums. I flipped through them to see various pictures of George and Tessa. I’d not before realized that George was an obsessional, if often inexpert, photographer who’d kept a record of their travels and all sorts of events, such as Tessa blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, and countless flashlight pictures of their party guests. Many of the photos had been captioned in George’s neat handwriting, and there were empty spaces on some pages showing where photos had been removed.

      I opened the door of a big closet beside his cedar-lined wardrobe, and half a dozen expensive items of luggage tumbled out. ‘These cases. Do they all belong to Mr Kosinski?’

      ‘No. His cases are not there,’ she said, determined to practise her English. ‘But he took no baggage with him to the airport. I know this for sure. I always pack for him when he goes tripping.’

      ‘These are not his?’ I looked at the collection of expensive baggage. Many of the bags were matching ones embroidered with flower patterns, but there was nothing there to fit with George’s taste.

      ‘No. I think those all belong to Mrs Kosinski. Mr Kosinski always uses big metal cases and a brown leather shoulder-bag.’

      ‘Have you ever met Mrs Kosinski?’ I held up a photo of Tessa just in case George had brought some woman here and pretended she was his wife.

      ‘I have only worked here eight weeks. No, I have not met her.’ She watched me as I looked at the large framed photo hanging over George’s dressing-table. It was a formal group taken at his wedding. ‘Is that you?’ She pointed a finger. It was no use denying that the tall man with glasses looming over the bridegroom’s shoulder, and looking absurd in his rented morning suit and top-hat, was me. ‘And that is your wife?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘She is beautiful,’ said Ursi in an awed voice.

      ‘Yes,’ I said. Fiona was at her most lovely that day when her sister was married in the little country church and the sun shone and even my father-in-law was on his best behaviour. It seemed a long time ago. In the frame with the colour photo, a horseshoe decoration from the wedding cake had been preserved, and so had a carefully arranged handful of confetti.

      George was a Roman Catholic. No matter that Tessa was the most unfaithful of wives, he would never divorce or marry again. He had told me that more than once. ‘For better or worse,’ he’d repeated a dozen times since, and I was never quite sure whether it was to confirm his own vows or remind me of mine. But George was a man of contradictions: of impoverished parents but from a noble family, honest by nature but Jesuitical in method. He drove around a lake in a motor boat while dreaming of Spanish galleons, he prayed to God but supplicated to Mammon; carried his rosary to church, while adorning his house with lucky horseshoes. George was a man ready to risk everything on the movements of the market, but hanging inside his wardrobe there were as many belts as there were braces.

      Downstairs again, sitting with Ursi on the imitation zebra-skin sofas in George’s drawing-room, with bands of sunlight across the floor, I was reminded of my previous visit. This large room had modern furniture and rugs that suited the architecture. Its huge glass window today gave a view of the grey water of the lake and of George’s boat swaying with the wake of a passing ferry.

      The room reminded me that, despite my protestations to Dicky, George had been in a highly excited state when I was last in this room with him. He’d threatened all kinds of revenge upon the unknown people who might have killed his wife, and even admitted to engaging someone to go into communist East Germany to ferret out the truth about that night when Tessa was shot.

      ‘We’ll take a taxi,’ I promised Ursi. ‘And we’ll visit every place you went on the afternoon you took him to the airport. Perhaps when we’re driving you’ll remember something else, something that might help us find him.’

      ‘He’s in danger, isn’t he?’

      ‘It’s too early to say. Tell me about the bank. Did he get foreign currency? German marks? French francs?’

      ‘No. I heard him phoning the bank. He asked them to prepare

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