‘No.’ I felt obstinate. Maxwell could probably have persuaded me. But not Reece. There was a personal barrier. I finished my drink and got to my feet.
Reece got up also and came round the table. He didn’t make any further attempt to play on my friendship with Tucek. He didn’t even try to tell me it was my duty as an Englishman to help him. He just said, ‘All right. I was afraid you might feel like that so I brought someone with me. I think you’ll find it more difficult to say No to her.’
For an awful moment I thought he’d got Alice with him. But he must have realised what was in my mind, for he said quickly, ‘It’s someone you’ve never met before. Let’s go through into the lounge.’ He had hold of my arm then and I had no option but to go with him.
She was sitting in the far corner — a small, red-haired girl with her head bent over a newspaper. As we approached she looked up, and I knew her at once. She was Jan Tucek’s daughter. Reece introduced us. ‘I have heard of you from my father,’ she said. The grip of her hand was firm. The set of the chin was as determined as her father’s, and her eyes, set rather wide on either side of the small upturned nose, looked straight at me. ‘He often used to speak of his friends in the R.A.F.’ She glanced down at my leg and then pulled up a chair for me. ‘Mr. Reece said you might be able to help us.’ Her voice was rather husky and she spoke English with a queer mixture of accents.
I sat down, comparing the girl in front of me with the memory of the photograph in Tucek’s office. Some trick of the light caused her hair to gleam just the way it had gleamed in the photograph. It was beautiful hair — a reddish gold, the real Venetian Titian. And she had freckles just as Tucek had said. They mottled the pale golden skin of her face in a way that gave it a gamin quality. But the face wasn’t quite the same as the face in the photograph — it was older, more set, as though she had had to come to grips with life since the photograph had been taken. I remembered how I’d last seen that photograph, smiling up at me from the floor of Tucek’s ransacked office. She wasn’t smiling now and there was no laughter in her eyes. Her face looked small and pinched and there were dark rings under her eyes. And yet, as I met the level gaze of her eyes, I was conscious again of that sense of something personal in her face. It suddenly became important to me that she should smile again as she’d been smiling in the photograph. ‘I’ll do anything I can,’ I murmured.
‘Thank you.’ She turned to Reece. ‘Is there any news please?’
He shook his head. ‘Not much I’m afraid. Farrell saw your father only once.’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘Does the name Sismondi mean anything to you, Hilda?’
She shook her head.
‘Your father never hinted that he might be forming a business partnership with Sismondi?’
‘No.’