‘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 un-usually 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 every-thing in trust with my stepfather as executor. Some-thing 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 iden-tified, apparently just another victim of a bandit out-rage.’
‘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 child-birth 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 ex-plained the real facts of the situation he and his men are only too well aware which side their bread is but-tered 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.’