The Third Shadow

Fourteen

"You English," Nuzzo began, chomping now into the cone of his ice cream. "You like making a bet, si? The horses. The dogs. What colour dress the Queen Elisabetta will wear tomorrow."

Though not true personally, as a generalisation it was a valid one perhaps.

"So let's make a bet. You tell me where he is. Lee Bracewell."

I smiled: the million dollar question.

"Somewhere in England I should think," I answered.

It was unlikely that any of the handful of foreign suppliers and business acquaintances included in the contacts list which the Nottinghamshire investigators had drawn up would be prepared to risk prison time harbouring a suspected murderer. There was an old school friend who'd emigrated to Australia a couple of years earlier, but with only three or four hundred euros in Bracewell's pocket a flight to the antipodes was out of the question.

It was enough to get him home though perhaps. Buses, trains, a foot passenger ticket on a ferry. There were so many ports of entry, the south and east coasts. Sailings from France, Holland, even Scandinavia. Either that or a Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel. Tight, yes - he would have needed to manage his meagre finances carefully. But possible, distinctly so.

Beside me, Nuzzo was nodding. "Inghilterra, si. Why else did he come back for the passport?"

Unlike the Schengen area of mainland Europe, a traveller still required a valid photo ID to cross the UK border of course. Bracewell's passport was due to be renewed the following year - an older type therefore, before the Passport Agency had introduced electronic chips. Thanks in part to his wife's subterfuge, for the first forty-eight hours nobody was looking for him, his face not yet flagged up on border guards' computer screens.

*Home*, yes. Almost without question, he'd returned home.

"He'll be holed up somewhere," I commented. "Right there in his hometown of Nottingham maybe." It was difficult to imagine what sort of life awaited him - the constant looking over his shoulders, that dreadful, haunting image each time he closed his eyes.

I licked at my ice-cream; more of it was on my hands by this point than left in the cone. Glanced then across at the comandante. "The circles he mixes in, it shouldn't be too difficult to get hold of fake passport eventually. Move on, somewhere the other side of the world."

"The type of people who buy the guns,' Nuzzo murmured, the tip of his cone disappearing into mouth. He reached into pocket, pulled out a packet of paper tissues.

"Quite an arsenal," I reflected, gratefully accepting one.

Though changing little in regard to the fundamentals of the case, the discovery of the pile of firearms in Bracewell's lock up had helped explain his bloated bank balance at least. Not the mid-level drug pusher Diane and I had suspected, but instead the main hardware supplier to Nottingham's army of trigger-happy gangsters.

And there was something else too: perhaps it also explained his moment of tragic, white-hot violence that night. What if Sean had found out somehow, the alcohol emboldening him, loosening his tongue. A confrontation, a threat to inform. Or maybe Lee had discovered that Sean knew at some point earlier during that tragic weekend, this accounting for the distant frown in the photograph, the distractedness reported both by Sarah and the waitress in the Vecchia Napoli pizzeria. In the car on the way to the cigarette machine, things had come to a head perhaps, Lee too himself under the grip of the booze. There in his hand had been the bottle of Glenfiddich...

"Pronto. Sono Nuzzo."

The commander's mobile had rung, his head nodding as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. I took the opportunity to gulp down the rest of my ice-cream, wipe the worst of the stickiness from my hands.