Nigel was conscious of a shocking pain in his head, the only reality in a world muffled in dark blankets.
Other sensations gradually forced themselves on him.
His wrists hurt. His arms were pulled painfully backwards.
His forehead felt wet.
A voice came from a great distance: ‘Where’s the girl?’
Nigel moaned and opened his eyes. He seemed to be sitting down, his back to a tree. His wrists were tied together behind the tree. His legs were untidily stretched out in front of him. He felt a flicker of childish annoyance to see how torn and dirty his trousers were. Expensive trousers. Probably no use to him at all, ever again.
His brain was clearing.
‘Where’s the girl?’
A big dark man stood over him. Beside him was a man with a depressed, respectable face, who wore a woolly muffler much like the one Miss Winstanley had lent Nigel.
Nigel recognised the woolly-muffler man. He had seen him in a pub off Berkeley Square. He had seen him hail a cab and then hurry off into the fog.
‘Where’s the girl?’
Did Woolly-muffler recognise Nigel? He showed no sign of doing so. He stared at the stiff black trees with a look of distaste.
‘Where’s the girl?’
Big dark man. Tamara had been examined by a big dark man. Nicola had been examined (prodded and defiled) by this big dark man.
Nigel was very frightened.
Nothing in his padded middle-class background prepared him for anything like this. For the use of violence and terror as a casual, a normal business technique. People of Jenny’s background were brought up to a kind of savagery. They shot birds with guns and stags with rifles; they cheered as foxes were torn to pieces by hounds. There was blood on their hands from birth. There was no blood on Nigel’s hands. He was a creature of well-lit streets and warm rooms and bright offices.
Nigel felt sick with fright, but his wits had fully returned.
‘I shall get impatient soon, Sunny Jim.’
‘In the house. In the school,’ said Nigel.
His mouth tasted dry and dark brown. His words rattled painfully in his throat.
‘Why?’
‘She . . . I don’t know. She likes it there.’
‘Try harder.’
Nigel thought furiously. These people must be aware by now that Jenny knew about Caroline.
‘She had some idea about a girl who disappeared.’
‘What idea?’
‘I don’t know. I just drove her here. I don’t know what this is all about. She smashed up her own car, she wanted a lift.’
Woolly-muffler murmured to the big man. The big man grunted at him angrily. He turned back to Nigel.
‘Keep trying, Sunny Jim. Where’s your car?’
‘In a garage in Shaftesbury. The handbrake seized. We came here in a taxi. We came up through the woods. I was bicycling back to get the car.’
‘The girl. How long is she planning to stay?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Guess.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Okay, we’ll come back to that. Seen any good slippers lately?’
‘Slippers?’
‘Don’t make me cross. I want to know what happened to the slipper you found. I want to know who’s been told about it. I want to know very soon.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nigel wildly. ‘I don’t know anything about any slippers.’
‘Maybe,’ said Woolly-muffler glumly, ‘it wasn’t him. We never properly saw the bloke.’
‘And in the pub?’
‘I didn’t properly look. I couldn’t say.’
‘Let’s find out.’
Woolly-muffler nodded. He seemed to know what finding out involved. Nigel had a sick feeling that something horrible was just about to happen to him.
Woolly-muffler lit a cigarette. The big man took it with a look of distaste. He took hold of the waistband of Nigel’s trousers and with a sudden heave of great violence he pulled them down to Nigel’s knees. Nigel’s underpants and white thighs looked pathetic and vulnerable.
They were vulnerable. The big man burnt Nigel in the thigh with the cigarette, at the same time covering his mouth with an enormous hand. Nigel screamed with pain, screamed uselessly against the big hard hand over his mouth. The unbearable jab of agony made him forget his head and wrists. He nearly fainted again. The pain seemed the more shocking because it was so close to his unprotected masculinity.
The big man let go of his face and he whimpered. He knew that he was not being brave.
‘Let’s talk about slippers.’
Nigel drew a shuddering breath. ‘I’d tell you if I knew. Don’t do that again. I don’t know anything.’
‘We’ll see. Keep trying. How long is the girl staying in that school?’
‘She said – she said as long as she had to. Until she got a message to come away.’
‘Message who from?’
‘I don’t know. The police.’
The big man handed the cigarette back to Woolly-muffler. ‘Filthy habit. I may want it again.’
Woolly-muffler puffed at it morosely. He seemed to enjoy it neither more nor less after the use to which it had been put.
The rhododendrons pressed round them, dark and impenetrable. In spite of the horrible pain of his burnt thigh Nigel was aware of his head and of his wrists, and of the discomfort of the hard uneven ground.
‘Till she gets a message. Do you think if we sent her one of your balls in an envelope she might come out quicker?’
‘I don’t know,’ muttered Nigel.
The shiny-faced Sergeant now pushed through the thick bushes, with an attempt at stealth.
He glanced down incuriously at Nigel. Then he said to the big man: ‘Another lot coming out. Three old bags and a few girls.’
‘Okay. Stay here and look after Beautiful.’
The big man tied a scarf (Miss Winstanley’s scarf) suffocatingly tight round Nigel’s mouth, then walked quickly away. Woolly-muffler followed him. Shiny-face grinned at Nigel without humour and began to whistle softly and tunelessly.
Nigel tried to vomit. The gag stopped him. He panted and heaved.
Visions of knives and of axes, of cut-throat razors and of garden shears jumped giddily into his mind.
Shiny-face put his hands in his pockets and looked at the treetops.
Two long, white bare legs flickered between leaves. There was a small crunch of leaves or twigs. Shiny-face half-turned, but by then he had been coshed. His knees buckled and he fell in a tidy tweedy pile.
‘Poor love,’ murmured Jenny. ‘Keep still.’
His gag was off.
‘Get away,’ he whispered harshly. ‘It’s you they want.’
‘Keep still.’
There was a scraping noise. His hands were free.
‘Upsidaisy,’ said Jenny. ‘No time to waste.’
Nigel struggled to his feet, with Jenny’s help. His head swam and pounded. His trousers fell to his ankles.
‘I haven’t any either,’ said Jenny, still in schoolgirl bloomers. She looked extraordinarily sexy. ‘Pick them up and off we go.’
Nigel held his split and ruined trousers up to his waist with his right hand; his left arm was round Jenny’s shoulders. They shambled, like incompetents in a three-legged race, into the woods and away.
‘I waited for what seemed like a year,’ said Jenny, who was driving. ‘And I just didn’t dare take on two of them. Poor leg.’
‘You saw that?’
‘Quite put me off smoking.’
‘I was a coward.’
‘No, love. Very far from it. Nobody could have done better. Unlike me. My awful unforgivable error was assuming there were only the four in the Jaguar. How rude Sandro will be when I tell him.’
‘Will you tell him?’
‘Yes. Hum-hum. I wonder, will they think I’m still inside the school, after you’ve left your teeny tree-stump? Or think we had somebody with us? What will they think we’ll do?’
‘What will we do?’
‘Whatever Sandro says. I’ll stop and ring him up in a minute. We both need a drink.’
‘Dressed like this?’
‘Oh dear.’
Sandro solved things with great speed.
He brought (in a car of which there was no other example in Great Britain and only three in its native Italy) some clothes for Nigel, ludicrously too large, clothes for Jenny, which were needless, and her air ticket. Her passport she had. He had managed to put her on an immediate flight, and arranged for her to be met at Turin. He also brought dressings for Nigel’s broken head and the burn on his thigh.
‘I will ring you up at Montebianco when I have decided what is to be done,’ said Sandro.
‘Actually, darling, I think I’ve already decided.’
‘Yes?’
‘So obvious.’
‘I know. It may be the only way. But I will try and think of something . . . less exciting.’
‘Do, pet. See you soon.’
She kissed Sandro and Nigel on the right cheek of each, and disappeared swinging her suitcase. She looked like a nice but silly girl of seventeen going on a holiday to play lots of tennis and read Mazo de la Roche.
‘Not one word of any of this must be said to anyone at all,’ Sandro said to Nigel in the bar at London Airport.
‘How do you know what Jenny is planning?’
‘As she said. It is obvious. It is, perhaps, the only idea. It will take some preparation. I hope we shall not all soon die. I understand you are in love with the mad girl whom they kept the other night?’
‘Not mad,’ said Nigel hotly.
‘I see it is so. Love,’ sighed Sandro, ‘what energy it wastes. You will wish to help, then. Also the grotesque Miss Winstanley.’
‘Can she help?’
‘She is basic to the plan which I am hoping to replace.’
‘Did Jenny take her gun to Italy?’ asked Nigel.
‘No,’ said Sandro seriously. ‘A cosh only. If she needs guns there are many. Do you want a gun?’
‘Do I need one?’ asked Nigel, feeling that things had got beyond his control.
‘Not yet, I think.’
Jenny was met by Sandro’s chauffeur and whisked in the Iso Griffo to the foothills of the Alps.
They got to Montebianco at ten.
She had eaten on the aircraft, but Memo the butler and Consolata the housekeeper insisted she must be hungry. She sat alone, at ten-thirty, under a chandelier of Venitian glass the size of a grand piano, at one end of a table at which she had seen thirty-six people sit. Memo, in white gloves and livery, stood behind her chair. She ate prosciutto, trout, and fruit, but could not be induced to tackle lasagne or scallopina di vitello. Memo was displeased by this abstinence. He put it down to illness.
She slept in one of the principal spare bedrooms on the second floor. The bed was enormous and ornate. The contents of a well-stocked bar and a delicatessen were arranged on a bedside table: Sandro’s own grappa, Scotch whisky, brandy, mineral water, biscuits, salami, a bowl of fruit. The pictures made Jenny shudder: a St Sebastian whose plump, greyish-white tummy was bristling with arrows like a pincushion; another saint on a griddle, being barbecued by pagans in fifteenth-century hats; a crucifixion by an Umbrian primitive with a diseased imagination.
The morning was soft and misty, with a feeling of hidden but imminent growth. Jenny greeted the rest of the indoor servants, then the mechanics, the gardeners, the secretaries. She killed an hour with the English magazines stacked in Sandro’s study – a room of wood and leather, a parody of a St James’s Street club. On the wall were photographs of big game and racehorses, and two small Guardis. There were shelves of poetry, of Rowland Ward’s big game records, of sailing books, and of books about guns and drugs and crime.
At eleven Jenny had a Campari and soda and went for a walk in steep woods behind the castello.
The world was dripping and mysterious. It was very quiet.
It was the lull before the storm.