O WOMAN IS A HEROINE TO HER DENTIST. ALONG WITH MY phobia about tunnels goes my paralyzing fear of needles and drills. As a result, I knew I wasn't going to have to rely on any­thing as crude as physical strength to beat the bodyguard. If Richard hadn't pissed me off so much, I'd have explained it to him. But Watsons who scream at their Holmeses don't get the inside track on methodology.

Picking up the bodyguard was a doddle. Any man who spends as much time as he obviously did on keeping his body in peak condition has to have a streak of vanity a mile wide. He fully expected that if an attractive foreign woman walked into a bar where he was drinking, he'd be the one she'd in­evitably be drawn to. And in a country where the native women are so sexually constrained by religion, it's equally inevitable that foreign women who walk into bars alone and with bare shoulders must be whores. My target thought it was his lucky night as soon as I settled on the bar stool next to him and smiled as I ordered a Peroni.

On the short walk to the bar, I'd come up with the cover story that I was a professional photographer, in Italy to take pictures for a coffee-table book of Italian church bell towers.

Gianni the bodyguard and his drinking companions fell for it hook, line and sinker, with much nudging in the ribs about women who liked big ones. I suppose they thought my Italian wasn't up to mucky innuendo. By the time I'd finished my first beer, they were competing over who was going to buy the next one. By the time I'd finished my second, his heavy, muscular arm was draped over my naked shoulders and his equally heavy cologne had invaded my nostrils. The hardest part of the whole production number was hiding my revulsion. If there's one thing I hate it's hairy men, and this guy was covered like a shag pile carpet. Just the thought of his shoulders was enough to make me feel queasy.

I was on my fourth beer when I casually let slip that I was staying at Casa Nico and that I'd left my car down there while I walked up the valley. Immediately, Gianni volunteered to drive me back down. Then, of course, he suddenly remembered how terrible the cooking was at Casa Nico. Cue for nods of agreement from his buddies, coupled with nudges and winks acknowledging the cleverness of Gianni's moves. Why, he asked innocently, didn't I come back to the villa with him for some genuine Italian home cooking. His boss was away, and he was a dab hand with the spaghetti sauce. We could eat on the terrace like the rich folks do, and then, later, he could run me back down to the pensione.

I looked up adoringly at him and said how delightful it was to meet such hospitable people. We left a couple of minutes later, accompanied by whoops and grunts from his cronies. In the car, he put a proprietary paw on my knee between gear changes. I fought the urge to lean over and grip his balls so tight his eyes would pop from their sockets like shelled peas. He was the driver, after all, and I didn't want to end up in the riverbed looking like spaghetti sauce.

As we approached the villa, he pulled a little black electronic box out of his tight jeans and punched a button. The gates swung open, the Alfa shot through and I got my first full frontal view of the Villa San Pietro. It was magnificent. A modern villa in the style of the traditional houses that front every fashionable resort in Italy. Immaculate pink stucco, green louvered shutters. And a satellite dish the size of a kid's paddling pool. "Molto elegante," I said softly.

"Good, huh?" Gianni said proudly, as if it were all his. The drive swung round the side of the house, past a tennis court and swimming pool and over to a separate, single-story build­ing. As we drew near, Gianni hit the button on the box again and an up-and-over garage door opened before us. Inside the garage was the stretch limo, Turner's Merc and a small green Fiat van. At the sight of Turner's car, I started to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Gianni had said we'd have the place to ourselves. But Turner had come back to the villa with him in the afternoon, and his car was still here as proof posi­tive that he hadn't left. Maybe he'd nipped into Sestri for the evening in a taxi. Somehow, I didn't think so. For the first time since I'd started this crazy expedition, I allowed a trickle of fear to creep in. Maybe I should have listened to Richard after all.

We got out of the car and Gianni folded me into a bear hug, his tongue thrusting between my teeth. It felt like my tonsils were being raped. "What happened to dinner?" I asked as soon as I could get my mouth clear. "I don't know about you, but I can't think about having fun when I'm hungry."

Gianni chuckled. "Okay, okay. First the food, then the fun." He leered and gestured with his thumb toward a door at the side of the garage. "That's my apartment over there. But we'll go over to the house to eat. My boss has better food and drink than me."

We walked over to the house, his arm heavy across my shoul­ders. We crossed a marble patio, complete with built-in barbe­cue and pizza oven, and entered the kitchen through tall french windows. It was like a temple to the culinary arts. There was a freestanding butcher's block in the middle of the floor, complete with a set of Sabatier knives in their slots. Above it hung a batterie de cuisine. On the blond wooden work­tops, there was every conceivable kitchen machine from ice­cream maker to a full-sized Gaggia. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the walls, while pots of fresh basil, coriander and parsley lined a deep windowsill to the side. "He likes to cook," Gianni said. "He likes me to cook too, when we have guests."

"Nice one," I said. "Where's the drink?"

He nodded toward a door. "Through there. There's a wet bar in the dining room. It's got everything. There's white wine in the fridge, and red wine in the cupboard here. Why don't you help yourself?" He moved toward me again and clutched me close, his huge hands cupping my buttocks. "Mmm, gor­geous," he growled.

I reached round and let my fingers stray up and down his back. That way I stopped myself thrusting my thumbs into his eyeballs. "Tell you what," I whispered. "I'll fix us some cock­tails. I might not be much good in the kitchen, but I'm terrific with a cocktail shaker."

He released me and leered again. "I can't wait to experience your wrist action."

I giggled. "You won't be disappointed, I promise you."

I left him staring into a big larder fridge. He hadn't lied about the wet bar. It did have everything. The first thing I did was dredge my phial of Valium out of the bottom of my bag. I'm pretty hostile to pharmaceuticals in general, but if I didn't have the Valium, I'd have blackened stumps where my teeth should be. I tipped the tablets out. There were six. I hoped that would be enough on an empty stomach to knock Gianni out be­fore I had to test whether I really did have the skills to stop a man in his tracks. I spotted a sharp knife by a basket of lemons and oranges, and quickly crushed the tablets with the blade. Then I took a quick inventory of the bar. What I needed was a cocktail that was strong and bittersweet.

I found the measure and the shaker sitting on a shelf behind me. A small fridge contained a variety of fruit juices and a cou­ple of bags of ice. I settled on a Florida. Into a cocktail shaker I put three measures of gin, six measures of grapefruit juice, three measures of Galliano and one and a half measures of Campari. I tossed in a couple of ice cubes, closed the shaker and did a quick salsa round the bar with the shaker providing the beat. "Sounds good," Gianni shouted from the kitchen.

"Wait till you taste it," I called back. I chose a couple of tall glasses and scraped the Valium powder into one. I topped it up with about two-thirds of the cocktail mixture and stirred it vig­orously with a glass rod. I poured the rest into the other glass and topped it up with grapefruit juice and a dash of grenadine syrup to make the colors match. I swallowed hard, picked up both glasses and walked through to the kitchen. Gianni was chopping red onions with a wide-bladed chef's knife. "A very Italian cocktail," I announced, handing the drugged glass to him.

He took it from me and swigged a generous mouthful. He savored it, swilling it round his mouth before swallowing it. "You're right. Bitter and sweet. Like love, huh?" The leer was back.

"Not too bitter, I hope," I giggled, moving behind him and hugging him from behind.

"Not with me, baby. With me, it'll be sweeter than sugar" he said arrogantly.

"I can hardly wait," I murmured. I wasn't exactly lying. I moved away and perched on a high stool, watching him cook. The onions went into a deep pan with olive oil and garlic. Next, he chopped a fennel bulb into thin slices and added them to the stewing onions. He took a basket of wild mushrooms from the fridge, washed them under running water, patted them dry lovingly with paper towels and chopped them coarsely. Into the pan they went along with a torn handful of coriander leaves.

"It smells wonderful," I said.

"Wait till you taste it," he said. "There's only one thing tastes better." Time for another leer. The temperature was ris­ing in more ways than one. The only good thing about that was the speed at which he was drinking his cocktail.

"No contest," I said, watching him measure out round grains of risotto rice. He tipped the rice into the pan, stirred it into the mixture for a couple of minutes, then took a carton out of the freezer.

"Chicken stock," he said, tossing the solid lump into the pan amidst much hissing and clouds of steam. He kept stirring till the stock had defrosted and the pan was bubbling gently. Then he put a lid on, set the timer for twelve minutes and drained his glass.

"How about a salad to go with it?" I asked hastily as he started to move toward me. "And I'll mix you another drink, okay?"

His eyes seemed to lose focus momentarily and he shook his head like a bull bothered by flies. He rubbed his hands over his face and mumbled, "Okay." I'd reckoned about twenty min­utes for the drugs to take effect, but maybe the amount he'd had to drink on an empty stomach was accelerating things.

I'd barely got the cap off the gin bottle when there was a sound like a tree falling in the kitchen. I tiptoed back to the doorway to see Gianni spread-eagled on the marble floor. For one terrible moment, I thought I'd killed him. Then he started to snore like a sawmill on overtime. I ran across to the butcher's block and picked up the knife. It took seconds to saw off the electric cable from a couple of the kitchen appliances. Tying him up took quite a bit longer, but the snoring didn't even change in note while I was doing it. I took the black box out of his pocket and tucked it my bag.

I found the cellar door on the second try. A wide flight of stairs led down into the depths. One thing about marble floors is that they make shifting heavy loads a lot easier. I got down on my knees behind Gianni and shoved with all my strength. Foot by foot, we slid across the gleaming tiles to the doorway.

One last push sent him skidding over the first step, feet first. He bounced down the stairs like a sack of potatoes, still snor­ing. I staggered to my feet. For the first time, I was grateful that Gianni's boss was security conscious. The cellar door had bolts top and bottom as well as a lock on the door. I slid the bolts home and leaned against the door to get my breath back.

When the timer went off, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Automatically, I turned off the gas under the pan. Now the adrenaline surge was slipping away, I realized that I was in fact ravenous. I shrugged. The food was there, I might as well eat. I didn't think Gianni was going to be knocking at the door demanding his share in a hurry.

He might have been the world's worst lecher, but he was a fabulous cook. I shoveled the risotto down, savouring every de­licious mouthful. Now I needed coffee. It was going to be a long night. I wished I hadn't chopped the lead off the Gaggia. A search of the cupboards eventually turned up a jar of instant and a Thermos jug. I brewed up and, armed with jug, mug and shoulder bag, I set off to explore.

Whatever Gianni's boss was, he wasn't short of a bob. The public rooms on the ground floor were all marble floored, with expensive Oriental rugs scattered around. The furniture was expensive repro, all polished to a mirror finish. There was nothing in the dining room, drawing room, morning room or the TV lounge to indicate that this was anything other than the home of a successful businessman. Even the videos lined up in the cabinet by the oversized TV were completely innocuous.

Cautiously, I made my way up the stairs. It was always pos­sible that Turner was a prisoner somewhere inside the villa rather than the victim of my worst imaginings. Six doors opened off the long landing. The first two were lavish guest bedrooms, complete with en suite bathrooms. If Gianni's boss ever set up in competition with Casa Nico, the pensione down the valley would go out of business within hours. The third door opened on what was clearly the master bedroom. The wardrobes were filled with designer suits and shirts, the draw­ers with silk underwear and the kind of leisure wear that has the labels on the outside. No trace of a woman in residence. No trace of any papers, either.

The fourth door opened on to a library. It was obviously a reader's library rather than one where the books had been bought by the yard. Modern hardbacks lined the shelves. I no­ticed a sizeable chunk of crime fiction, but most of the books were by authors I'd never heard of. There was also a whole sec­tion of legal textbooks, mostly covering commercial and inter­national law. But again, there were no papers anywhere, unless some of the books were dummies. If they were, they'd be hanging on to their secrets. There was no way I had time to go through that lot book by book.

The fifth door was locked. I left it for a moment and tried the sixth. Another guest bedroom. That told me that either Turner was behind the locked door, or something significant was. Unfortunately, I didn't have my set of picklocks with me. I don't carry them routinely, and when I'd set off on my pursuit of Turner, I hadn't expected to be doing any burglar­ies. I could of course simply smash the lock with one of the dozens of marble statuettes that hung around in niches all over the place. But I didn't want the villa's owner to know the extent to which he'd been turned over unless I could possibly help it.

I looked up at the door lintel. Gianni's boss was not much bigger than me, so the chances were that the key wasn't sitting up there. I went back to the master bedroom and began a proper search. I got lucky in the bathroom. I'd taken the con­tents of the bathroom cupboard off the shelves one by one, just to make sure there was nothing behind them. There were two aerosol cans of Polo shaving foam, and one was a lot lighter than the other. I looked more closely at the heavier of the two. Gripping it tightly, I twisted the bottom of the can. It unscrewed smoothly, revealing a compartment lined with bubble wrap. Inside was what looked like a handkerchief. I pulled it out and a bunch of keys tumbled to the floor. "Gotcha!" I murmured.

The longest of the keys opened the locked door. Bingo! In­side was a starkly functional office, a sharp contrast to the luxurious appointments of the rest of the villa. I switched the light on, closed the shutters and took a good look round. A ba­sic desk stood against one wall with a computer, a modem and a fax machine on it. To one side there was a photocopier and a laser printer. Automatically, I switched them on. I noticed a shredder under the desk as I sat down and hit the computer's power button. The machine booted up and I called up the di­rectories. Ten minutes later, my jubilation had given way to depression. Every single data file I'd tried to access was pass­word protected. I couldn't get in to read them. All it would let me do was print out a list of all files, which I duly did.

Muttering dark imprecations, I returned to the main direc­tory. Time for some lateral thinking. In the years since I first started working at Mortensen and Brannigan and discovered the wonderful world of electronic mail, the Internet had grown from the home of academics and a handful of computer loonies like me to the world's bulletin board. The communications software that was running on this machine was a standard business package that I'd used dozens of times before. Even if the files were password protected, I reckoned that the commu­nications program would still be able to transmit them intact to somewhere I could retrieve them later and pass them on to someone who could crack the passwording. All I needed was a local number for the Internet. If I was lucky, there would be one already loaded in the comms program. I started it running and called up the telephone directory screen.

It was my lucky night. Right at the top of the list was the number for the local Internet node-the E-mail equivalent of a postal sorting office. The way the Net works is simple. It's analogous to sending a letter rather than making a phone call. The network is connected by phone lines, and works on what they call a parcel switching system. What happens is you dial a local number and send your data to it. The computer there reads the address and shunts your data down the network, sec­tion by section, till it arrives at its destination. But unlike a letter, which takes days if you're lucky, this takes less time than it takes to describe the process.

I used the edit mode to discover Gianni's boss's login and password, then I instructed the computer to connect me to the Internet. Less than a minute later, we were in. I typed in the electronic mail address of the office, then I started send­ing the files one by one. An hour and a mug of coffee later, I'd sent a copy of every data file in the machine back to Man­chester.

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I switched off the machine. Now it was time for the desk drawers. I unlocked each drawer with the remaining keys on the bunch. The first drawer held stationery. The second held junk-rubber bands, spare com­puter disks, a couple of computer cables, a half-eaten choco­late bar and a box of Post-it notes. The bottom drawer looked more promising, with its collection of suspension files. No such luck. All the files held was the paperwork for the house: utility bills, receipts for furniture, building work, landscaping, pool maintenance. The only interesting thing was that everything was in the name of a company-Gruppo Leopardi. There was no clue as to who was behind Gruppo Leopardi. And I didn't have the time for the kind of thorough search that might re­veal that. I'd already been there too long, and I was getting too tired to concentrate. It was time to make tracks.

I went back over to the window, to open the shutters again. I wanted to leave everything exactly as I'd found it. As I turned back, clumsy with exhaustion, I caught the Thermos jug with my elbow. It sailed off the desk and bounced off the paneled wall under the window. It landed on its side on the floor, apparently undamaged. Not so the wall. The wood pan­eling where the jug had hit had slowly swung away from the wall, revealing a safe. Eat your heart out, Enid Blyton. If pre­posterous coincidence is good enough for the Secret Seven, it's good enough for me.