Giotto's Hand

“But I’m not under arrest? You don’t suspect me of anything?”

“Oh, no. But we might want to talk to you again, and it would be much easier for us if you were close to hand.”

He was very polite about it, but quite firm. Argyll, scowling and a little alarmed, handed the document over. He’d never realized it could be confiscated like that. Now it was gone, he rather missed it.

After he’d been told that a further statement would be required in due course, he was left at his leisure, although how he was to fill it in a village like Weller he was not entirely sure. As he walked past the bus stop in the only real street the place possessed, he realized that he was in a bit of a pickle: the last bus to Norwich had gone and there was not much chance of getting a train back to London. He would have to throw himself on the mercy of the constabulary and beg for a lift somewhere. Unless, that is, he could find a place to stay.

He was also out of cigarettes, so went to stock up and make enquiries.

“Five packets of Rothmans,” he said to the surly, pasty-faced woman on the other side of the counter in the tiny village shop-cum-post office, and grabbed one of the packets that were put down in front of him. He glanced around for emergency rations so that he could maintain a small supply of provisions. Alas, everything was in tins, had been deep-frozen for aeons, or was covered in a thin layer of dust. He decided to leave them be, and settled for some biscuits. One thing about Italy, it doesn’t know much about good biscuits. Not with chocolate on top.

“Tell me,” he went on to the woman, who struck him as a fine example of the dangers of in-breeding and bad diet, “is there a hotel around here somewhere? Where I can get a room for the night?”

“You in the police?”

“No.”

“Twelve pound fifty.”

“What?”

“For the cigarettes. Twelve pound fifty.”

“Good God,” he said, reluctantly handing over much of his cash. “What about a hotel?”

“No hotel.”

There is a pub though,” said a cheerful and familiar-sounding voice from behind. He turned round and saw Frederick the labrador standing in the open doorway of the shop. “But the rooms are a bit dicey.”

“Rats,” he said in disappointment.

“That’s right,” agreed Mary Verney evenly, following the dog in. “But you might survive a night or two. You have to stay around because of Geoffrey, do you?”

Not the discreet type. Argyll could see, out of the comer of his eye, the large pale cigarette server moving slightly downwind so she could hear better. He in turn edged towards the door, and Mrs. Verney accompanied him.

“What’s your name?” she asked as they emerged into the fresh air again.

She talked in a pleasing, well-modulated voice that was, nonetheless, strangely lacking in accent. Argyll decided this was merely because she talked normally: none of the thick rusticity of the locals, nor the tonsil-strangling accents normally associated with the English aristocracy.

Argyll introduced himself, then turned his attention more directly to his fellow customer. A pleasant, very English-looking lady, lots of tweed and Labrador hair. Good bones, as they say, and the sort of skin that retains its freshness through decades of being lashed by fresh, cold rain while out in pursuit of furry animals.

“D’you want some tea, by the way? I’m just about to make some. It’s just so I can pump you dry about Geoffrey and what’s been going on there. Be warned. The police are being damnably uncommunicative, and I’m dying to know.”

Argyll considered, then accepted. It would make a pleasant change. Besides, while he was providing her with information, she might do the same for him.

So he walked by her side back through the main street of the village, then down a broad avenue that branched off to the left, with his new companion chattering away about the family of jays nesting in the oak tree, the depredations of Dutch Elm disease which had quite transformed the area. Her remarks were punctuated by whistles and shouts at Frederick the dog who lolloped alongside, snuffling his nose joyously into every patch of summer mud that presented itself for inspection.

On the whole, it was not a bad village, he decided, located as it was in one of those small sections of East Anglia which are not flat as a pancake and windswept by icy gales coming straight from the North Pole. Clearly, though, it had come down in the world in the past few centuries. It probably had less than a thousand inhabitants, most of whom lived in minuscule cottages along the diminutive main street and in outlying farmhouses and labourers’ cottages. The church, on the other hand, would have done a fair-sized city proud. It was vast, with enough space to sit every villager and still have room to spare. The square, grim tower dominated the entire landscape and the lack of any other building of comparable grandeur nearby only emphasized that the village had not yet fully recovered from the Black Death.