A boy of eighteen or nineteen, presumably the Joe Ricco Cerda had mentioned, crouched over a small fire, feeding the flames beneath a cooking pot with sticks. Except for his youth and red Norman hair, he was depressingly similar in appearance to the rest of them. The same cloth cap, patched suit and leather leg-gings, the same sullen, brutalised features. He got up, staring at me curiously, and the Vivaldi brothers joined him, crouching to help themselves with a dirty and chipped enamel mug to what vaguely smelled like coffee.
Serafino and Joanna Truscott sat on a log by the stream and he produced from somewhere another piece of cigar and lit it. He looked up into the grey morning. ‘Still it doesn’t make sense.’ He shook his head. ‘I’d give a lot to know what Hoffer is playing at.’
‘Perhaps the whole thing is simpler than we think,’ Joanna said. ‘Maybe he assumed you would do any-thing for money.’
‘He could be right there,’ I agreed ‘but somehow it didn’t sound too funny because it sent me off on another train of thought, one I wanted to avoid, but Serafino wouldn’t let it alone.
‘These friends of yours, you can trust them? They’re not making a monkey out of you?’
I thought about it hard and tried to sound confident. ‘Anything is possible in this life, but I don’t think so. There’s one way to find out, of course.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I’ll go and see them.’
He nodded, biting on his cigar, a frown on his face. Joanna Truscott said, ‘You could make them an offer on my behalf if you like. It would be nice to turn the tables on my stepfather for once.’ She picked up a stick, snapped it between her hands. ‘He married my mother for money, did you know that? When she wouldn’t give him any more, he got rid of her.’
‘Are you certain of that?’
She nodded. ‘Not that I could prove it. He thought he’d get everything because he knew she loved him- loved him to distraction-but he made a mistake. She left me everything, and now he’s in trouble-bad trouble.’
‘What kind?’
‘He needs money-a great deal of money. He’s frightened, too.’
So Mafia was in this after all?
‘All right, wait for me here.’ I looked at my watch, saw that it was an hour since I had left Burke and the others which meant they would already be on their way down. ‘I’ll be about half an hour.’
I thought they might stop me from going, but nobody moved. When I looked back from the edge of the trees, Joanna Truscott had taken off her red scarf and the blonde hair gleamed as the first rays of the early morning sun broke through the clouds.
I ploughed up the steep slope, pushing through the undergrowth and the going was so hard that I had little time to concentrate on anything else except making progress. But I wasn’t happy. The trouble was that, in my heart, I’d never believed Hoffer’s story for a mo-ment. Certain aspects of it were always manifestly im-possible and if I’d seen the flaws, why hadn’t Burke?
But then I couldn’t believe the second possibility. He’d done many things in his time-aided and abetted
by me on occasion. Killed ruthlessly and often without compassion, but as a soldier. It was inconceivable that he would have agreed to murder a young girl for money. In any case, it would not have been possible with the rest of us there.
So deep in thought was I that it was with a sense of surprise that I found myself at the spot by the stream where I had met the Honourable Joanna earlier. I paused to catch my breath and a stick cracked behind me.
‘Hold it right there.’ Piet Jaeger stepped from behind a tree, his assault rifle levelled at my belt.
‘Stacey, what happened. We were getting worried.’
Burke moved out of the trees with Legrande and Piet Jaeger went to stand point at the edge of the little clearing automatically. He was a good soldier, always had been, I’ll say that for him.
‘Well, what happened?’ Burke said again. ‘Did you have any luck?’ He frowned suddenly. ‘Where’s your rifle?’