Free A Pigeon Among the Cats by Josephine Bell

why. To latch on to anyone leaving a bank who might be easy meat for your sort. Well, I’m not, see. So you may as well pack it in. I don’t want to see you in Florence or anywhere else. And it’s time I got back to the coach, see. So goodbye and thank you for nothing.”
    He sat watching her, not speaking, a little pale. His hands shook on the wheel, so he took them off and held them together in his lap until she had gone. She had made him lose his temper again, but he had been able to confirm one point. She had indeed taken money into that bank, to make a deposit account or add to one already there. Was it her late firm’s money or was that tale as phoney as so much of what she said? But the point had been made and accepted. Gwen Chilton had a deposit account at a Swiss bank. It was up to him to make her disgorge it in his favour.
    He watched her turn to look about her when she shut the door of the car. He watched her go up into the courtyard before the church and start down again towards the car park where the tourist coaches were standing. Then he turned his car and drove through the car park himself and away down the road to join the autostrada in the plain.
    He wore his dark glasses as he drove and a floppy sun hat that covered his thinning hair and creased forehead. He did not look up at all at the narrow road twisting down from the old town where Mrs. Lawler leaned on the parapet to get her breath and to take a distant view of the white church of St. Francis.
    But she saw the long black car and took a quick snap of it, almost head on, right in the foreground of her view. The number will be out of focus, she thought, as she put the camera away. Not that it has any importance to me. But to Gwen? What a silly girl, to encourage the man!

Chapter Six
    The tour stayed that night in Perugia. Gwen Chilton spent a considerable time making her usual telephone call, but this time to Paris, not London. She felt much happier when she had finished, so her table companions found her unusually talkative at dinner. Apart from these three no one was paying much attention to Mrs. Chilton, except indirectly, though Rose Lawler was not the only one who had noticed her leaving the church at Assisi with a man.
    â€œIt was the one who directed us at Siena right at the start, wasn’t it?” Mr. Woodruff said, with certainty.
    â€œI couldn’t swear to it myself,” Mr. Blundell said, with slight contempt. “I didn’t take all that notice.”
    â€œWell, I did,” his wife announced in her pleasant country voice. “He was in Rome, too. Quite a romance, by the look of it.”
    â€œNot a very nice one, I wouldn’t think,” Mrs. Woodruff added. “Where’s her husband? Dead, divorced, or neither?”
    This brought the subject to a stop. Either the man or the woman would have enjoyed pursuing it further without the other sex, but neither couple cared to go into more intimate speculation in company. Besides, another piece of gossip was engaging the majority of ‘Roseanna’s’ party.
    Two carabinieri had been seen at the hotel reception desk with Mr. Banks. He had left the building with them but had come back in time for dinner. Mrs. Banks had joined him in the lounge, but not Penny. None of the family appeared for the meal. Rumour, added to previous speculation, was now confirming a suspicion that the girl was indeed smoking cannabis quite freely and frequently and it had got round to the authorities.
    The highly respectable majority of ‘Roseanna’s’ tourists were shocked. They discussed the matter in much the same way they were accustomed to talk about juvenile courts at home. An area of public concern and action that was really foreign to them, but also mildly exciting as long as it did not include anyone they knew. When it did, as now, and if anything was to happen to this hippy-like girl, they would state they neither knew nor had seen anything