EPILOGUE
The remainder of September was an eventful period.
In response to daily phone calls, the Sudbury newsagent had confirmed a second embossed letter awaited Mr McFee. Disguised as the ginger-whiskered Scot, Trumpy had gone up by train to collect it. The envelope contained a cheque from the House of Darcy for £265,000.
Using some beautifully crafted e-documents from Suzie, he opened an account with Barclays Bank in St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands, one of Britain’s last no-tax havens. When the cheque was cleared and credited he went over for the day by air and opened another account in the name of Trumpington Gore with the Royal Bank of Canada, just down the street. Then he went to Barclays and transferred the lot from Mr Hamish McFee to Mr Gore down the road. The deputy manager at Barclays was surprised at the speed of the opening and closing of the Scotsman’s account, but made no demur.
From the Canadians, who did not give a damn about British mainland tax laws, Trumpy extracted two banker cheques.
One, for £13,250, went to Colley Burnside, who could contemplate a twilight to his life floating contentedly on a sea of vintage claret.
Trumpy withdrew £1,750 in cash for himself as ‘getting-by money’. The second cheque was for Benny Evans and Suzie Day jointly, in the sum of £150,000. With the balance of £100,000 the helpful Canadians were happy to create a long-term high-yield annuity fund capable of paying Trumpington Gore about £1,000 a month for the rest of his days.
Benny and Suzie married and returned to Benny’s native Lancashire, where he opened a small art gallery and she became a freelance computer programmer. Within a year she had grown out the peroxide, removed the facial metal and had twin boys.
Trumpy got home from the Channel Islands to find a letter from Eon Productions. It told him that Pierce Brosnan, with whom he had had a tiny role in Goldeneye, wished that he have a much larger part in the next Bond movie.
Someone tipped off Charlie Dawson, who, with the amused help of Professor Carpenter, secured the art-scandal scoop of the decade.
The police continue to search for Hamish McFee and Mr Yamamoto, but at Scotland Yard hopes are not high.
Marina sold her memoirs to the News of the World. Lady Eleanor Slade promptly had a lengthy conference with Fiona Shackleton, doyenne of London’s divorce lawyers. A settlement was agreed in which the Hon. Peregrine was allowed to keep his cuff-links.
He left London and was last heard of running a louche bar in Antigua. The Duke of Gateshead still has to buy his own drinks at White’s.
THE MIRACLE
SIENA, 1975
The sun was a hammer in the sky. It beat down on the clustered roofs of the walled Tuscan city and the medieval tiles, some pink but mostly long baked to umber or ashen grey, shimmered in the heat.
Shadows dark as night were cast along upper windows by the overhanging gutters; but where the sun could touch, the rendered walls and ancient bricks gleamed pale, and wooden sills cracked and peeled. In the deep and narrow cobbled alleys of the oldest quarter there were restful pools of further shade and here the occasional sleepy cat sought refuge. But of local humans there was no sign, for this was the day of the Palio.
Down one such alley, lost in a maze of tiny cobbled ways, hardly wider than his own shoulders, the American tourist hurried, red as beef. Sweat trickled down to soak his short-sleeved cotton shirt, the tropical-weight jacket felt like a blanket dangling from his shoulder. Behind him his wife tottered painfully on unsuitable platform sandals.
They had tried to book far too late for a hotel inside the city, in this of all seasons, and had finally settled for a room in Casole d’Elsa. The rented car had overheated on the road, they had eventually found a parking slot beyond the city walls and now scurried from the Porta Ovile towards their goal.
They were soon lost in the labyrinth of alleys dating back 500 years, stumbling on the hot cobbles, feet on fire. From time to time the Kansas cattleman cocked an ear towards the roar of the crowd and tried to head in that direction. His well-upholstered wife sought only to catch up and fan herself with a guidebook at the same time.
‘Wait for me,’ she called as they hurried down yet another defile of brick between town houses that had seen Cosimo of Medici ride by, and been old even then.
‘Try to hurry, honey,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We’re going to miss the parade.’
He was right. A quarter-mile away the massed crowds in and around the Piazza del Campo were straining to catch the first glimpse of the Comparse, the parade in medieval costume of the seventeen great guilds of Siena who once ruled and administered the town. According to tradition, ten of the seventeen Contrade would race their horses that day for the honour of carrying away to their guildhall the painted banner, the Palio itself. But first, the parade.
The American had read aloud from the guidebook to his wife in their hotel bedroom the previous evening.
‘The Contrade or Districts of Siena were created between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century,’ he read.
‘That was before Columbus,’ she objected, as if nothing had happened before the great Cristobal sailed from Palos, on the River
Tinto to head west into oblivion or glory.
‘Right. That was in 1492. This was three centuries before Columbus. It says here they started with forty-two Contrade, reduced three hundred years later to twenty-three, then in 1675 to the seventeen we will see marching tomorrow.’
Out of sight, the first ranks of the hundreds of brightly caparisoned drummers, musicians and standard-bearers of the Comparse pageant were emerging into the Campo itself. Its sixteen palaces were hung with banners and ensigns, crammed with the privileged at every window and balcony, as 40,000 of the populace roared inside the race-ring.
‘Hurry, honey,’ he called behind him as the tumult ahead rose in volume. ‘We’ve come a long way for this. I can see that darn tower at last.’