‘Maybe,’ she said, ’he wanted to leave his wife for the old one from New York, Mrs Angry? Or the little crazy one with her mess and her pots?’
‘Well,’ said Cate reluctantly, ‘it could have been Beth, I suppose? The intern. Could be why she left.’
There was a silence while everyone considered that thought, and dismissed it; Beth, more timid than a small brown rabbit, and the big, taciturn Scandinavian.
‘Beth was gay,’ said Nicki, from the corner, and everyone stared.
‘What?’ said Ginevra and Anna-Maria in unison.
‘She’s gay,’ said Nicki, folding her arms defensively across her bony chest. For the first time Cate noticed a little tattoo of a daisy at her wrist.
‘How do you know?’ said Ginevra, outraged.
Nicky said nothing; she rolled her eyes. ‘Come
on
,’ she said; ’don’t tell me you didn’t know?’
In the corner Mauro made a sound like a growl in the back of his throat. Ginevra’s mouth was set in a line.
Cate laughed abruptly, and they all turned to look at her with uniform hostility. She looked down at her feet.
Nicki, apparently liberated from a year or more of mute obedience, didn’t seem to be able to stop talking now.
‘I think she liked it,’ she said. ‘The
Dottoressa
. Lo-nee. The more gay girls the better.’ There were red spots of colour in the girl’s cheeks. ‘I think she vetted everyone who came through this place according to what she could get out of them, whether they would fancy her or whether they might be tempted to fancy anyone else. She had to just be the queen bee, didn’t she? Didn’t want anything in the way of competition.’ She turned to look at Cate. ‘I’m surprised you slipped through the net, though. Not old, not ugly, not married, not gay.’
Cate stared at her, speechless.
‘That’s enough,’ said Ginevra sharply. Mauro yanked the door open and disappeared.
Looking around the room at the other women, at each pair of watchful, unfriendly eyes, even Nicki’s, it took Cate no more than three seconds to make the decision to follow him.
Outside the sun was all but gone; there was a bitter wind and the sky was a white blanket. There was a tang in the air, borne on the breeze.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Mauro, ‘someone’s lit a fire.’ He was staring down the slope in the direction of the
villino
. The women turned to look and there it was, a thick column of smoke between the black cypresses, eddying in the wind.
‘Is it the house?’ said Mauro, and his face was murderous, white with emotion. ‘The
villino?
’ He let out a string of expletives. Belatedly
Cate remembered that the
villino
was the house Mauro had grown up in; in his eyes she saw the rage of one bitterly insulted. ‘Jesus, fucking idiot foreigners,’ he said, talking to himself now, striding stiff-legged for the tractor. ‘What in God’s name are they doing lighting a bonfire?’
Cate ran after him as the tractor jolted between the cypress trees down towards the smoke. And as they approached, choking and coughing through the acrid cloud, the tractor swung out of the way and the two women came into view standing on either side of an oil drum from which the thick plume of smoke billowed and climbed. Tina and Michelle, and their faces were defiant.
Cate saw Michelle, in her leggings and an ugly, oversized cardigan, move around next to Tina, a restraining hand on the slighter woman’s arm. Behind them, framed by the last yellow leaves of a pomegranate tree, the door to the downstairs studio stood open; she could see old newspapers on the floor, and a trestle covered with bits of pottery and tools.
‘
Che cazzo state facendo, sceme?
’ shouted Mauro. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you idiots?’ They looked at him in mulish incomprehension and the rage still raw in his voice stopped Cate in her tracks. Mauro, of all of them, would be the one she could imagine doing violence: Mauro, for whom every imbecility of these foreigners was a reminder of betrayal. He turned away, muttering.
Cate peered into the oil drum; there was all sorts in there. She saw the curled ash of paper, orange wool, a ball of crumpled fabric, its Indian pattern of orange and green blackening and smouldering. The unmistakable smell of burning hair.
‘What were you doing?’ said Cate quietly to the women. She saw Tina give Michelle a pleading look, and the older woman answer.
‘Listen,’ she said, her harsh voice muted for once. ‘The cleaner said she wouldn’t do anything today. Told Tina she’d been told not to touch anything. What were we supposed to do?’ She seemed weary. ‘Art generates a lot of crap, sometimes. You need to get a clean sweep, if you want to move forward.’
The woman was usually so direct that on this occasion there was something about Michelle’s dark, averted eyes that made Cate persist.
‘Really?’ she said drily. ‘But actually, I think there was a reason Anna-Maria was told not to clean. The police – ’ And she fell silent, spreading her hands. Not saying more because actually she did not know why Luca had said what he’d said.
Tina made a convulsive movement. ‘The police?’ she said, wide-eyed, and at the almost forgotten sound of her soft, frightened voice Cate realized the girl had hardly said a word since Luca had first gathered them together in the library, to tell them Loni Meadows was dead. She was trembling: it was cold, though. Cate was beginning to feel cold herself, under the dark cypresses, the bleached sky full of snow.
Mauro appeared beside Cate with a bucket of water, grunted something and doused the smouldering detritus in the oil drum. It hissed and stank.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Cate, forcing herself to remember that she was here to look after these women. ‘The police – it’ll be no more than a formality.’ But Mauro and Ginevra had said the police weren’t coming back: it had been an accident. So who would be coming to check through their rubbish then? Why were the rooms not to be touched?
‘This will all be over soon,’ she said meaninglessly. She could feel herself begin to shiver.
‘You hear that?’ said Michelle, looking down, surprisingly gentle, her arm around Tina’s shoulders. ‘Don’t worry.’ She looked up at Cate, and the expression in her angry black eyes seemed almost grateful. ‘Over soon.’ She hesitated. ‘She feels guilty,’ she said.
‘Guilty?’
‘You’d better tell them,’ Mauro butted in threateningly, ‘that if anything like this happens again, I’ll kick them out myself.’
Cate stared at him. ‘That’s enough, Mauro,’ she said, trying to keep her voice firm. ‘I’ll speak with them.’ He glared a long moment, then turned on his heel, still ramrod-straight with rage.
Tina and Michelle watched him go; Michelle appeared to relax, although Tina still had her arms wrapped tight around herself. Michelle saw Cate looking at the younger woman.
‘She had to clean the stuff,’ she said abruptly, one eye still on Mauro’s back. ‘I wasn’t going to tell that goddamn Neanderthal bastard. She’s
got this thing. OCD.’ And in response to Cate’s blank look. ‘Obsessive compulsive.’
Slowly Cate nodded; she thought she knew what that was. But somehow it didn’t explain everything. She resisted taking another look inside the oil drum. There’d been something unpleasant about the way the bundle of fabric and sticks had looked. And she’d seen that Indian patterned stuff before.
‘Has anyone told Beth?’ said Tina out of the blue, in that small, otherworldly, fine-china voice.
Michelle made an ugly little face. ‘Why would anyone call her?’ she said.
Cate looked at her, curious at her reaction. ‘She was fond of Loni,’ she said. ‘They – ’ and she tried to find a way to describe the unequal relationship between the two. ‘They – talked.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Michelle. ‘What would those two find to talk about? Beth was a fool.’
‘Did – did something happen between them?’ asked Cate. ‘Is that why she left?’ Michelle shrugged, and said nothing.
Cate looked at her set, obstinate face a long moment, then turned to Tina. ‘What were you burning?’ she said. ‘Why did you feel guilty? That stuff – that Indian-patterned fabric, that was Loni’s, wasn’t it?’
Tina looked at Michelle beseechingly.
Michelle looked from Cate to Tina, and back again. ‘Ah, shit,’ she said. ‘What harm can it do?’
‘Harm?’ said Cate.
‘Let’s get inside,’ said Michelle, nodding towards the studio’s open door. ‘And we’ll tell you.’ Tina stood stiffly, not responding to Michelle’s hand on her arm.
‘We’ll tell her, baby,’ Michelle said soothingly, as if talking to a child. ‘I mean, it’s not like you really killed her, is it?’
T
HERE WAS SNOW FORECAST
As Sandro drove out through the southern suburbs in Saturday traffic and on to the forest-shadowed Siena
superstrada
, the only clear patch of blue sky was dwindling behind him. He hadn’t needed to turn on the TV, as he had done in the gloom of their flat in Santa Croce at midday, to know that the weather was going to turn nasty.
If it had been a Saturday afternoon any time after April, the Siena
superstrada
would have been slow and packed, but no one wanted to go down to the Maremma in winter; the beaches would be deserted, those barren hills in hibernation. Checking his mirror, with apprehension Sandro saw the red-tiled rooftops of the city recede behind him, the pale fortifications of the Certosa high against the skyline. His city. Already he was surprised by how much he missed the narrow, bustling streets, the crowded bars and Saturday-shopping housewives.
He was abandoning the quiet of the Piazza Santa Croce in winter, the pigeons fluttering up from the flagstones, the terraced gardens of the Villa Bardini, the
pietra serena
and arched windows that soothed the eye, and for what? On either side of him the unkempt forest of Chianti crowded in on the narrow, potholed road, and ahead of him clouds pressed down on the distant hills of the Maremma.
His back ached. He hadn’t driven this far in a while, and he shifted painfully in his seat as he tried to ease the knotting between his shoulder blades. Mascarello and his wife: that relationship was one of the things tightening the muscles of his neck. As a policeman, of course, he’d been present at any number of domestics, screaming and yelling and tears and sweat, stab wounds and brandings and broken cheekbones. He knew the words that couldn’t be taken back. Perhaps that was why, when it came to it, he would go to any lengths to avoid the first step in his own marriage: the first accusation.
He’d once been called to a handsome apartment block in the suburbs by an anonymous call, a man’s voice saying someone was going to die. Sandro had seen a good-looking blonde, not even thirty, skip out of the glass doors, climb into her little Mercedes runaround with a secret smile on her face and he had just had time to think,
off to meet her lover
, before she turned the key in the ignition and the car went up. Why had the husband wanted a policeman there? A fellow male, a witness to that secret smile, an accomplice? He’d never forgotten the fraction of a second before the terrible sound of the explosion, a kind of vacuum, an intake of breath in which he knew – and the husband, stepping out from behind a truck, knew – that it was too late. Sandro had managed not to look at the bloody mess inside the car as he ran to find something to take a pulse from, but that moment of the world holding its breath and willing the terrible thing not to happen, after all – that had never left him.
He might have stopped it, if he had got there faster, if his reactions had been sharper, if he had been more intelligent. Or, as Luisa would have interjected, if you could fly or read minds. And it hadn’t been him who’d planted the bomb, a surprisingly effective home-made device, had it?
The husband had been off his head afterwards, laughing in the street, blood on his trouser legs and a deep cut on his forehead from the flying metal. He’d cut his wrists in the police holding cell with a shard of biro casing. Ingenious. The human capacity for inflicting injury.
Mascarello and his wife, though, had had what some would call a happy marriage. He had tolerated whatever it was she got up to: they had an understanding. At the wheel Sandro found himself shaking
his head violently at the thought and his neck stiffened even further. But Mascarello was not the one who had killed her: he had been in a hospital bed. He might, Sandro supposed, have paid someone else to do it. He had the contacts and the resources. But he was the one demanding an inquiry into her death. And he could have reined Loni Meadows in, if he’d wanted to. And how might that have felt, if you’d been her lover?
Now Sandro’s eyes were aching. The light was uncertain, the trees here overhung the carriageway. Gallo had offered him a lift; Sandro had gazed at him in incomprehension. The thought of not having independent means of transport down there was inconceivable to him, but he was beginning to understand that Gallo operated on different principles to your average jaded, city-dwelling ex-policeman. He had ideals – of green living, of artistic freedom, that kind of thing.
‘I’ll drive myself,’ Sandro had said shortly. He had turned down Gallo’s offer to guide him down there in convoy, Sandro dutifully following on behind. ‘I’ll find the place all right,’ he’d said. ‘You go on ahead.’
And he needed time too, without Gallo breathing down his neck. Time to look over the police report, the photographs and the folderful of brochures and CVs Gallo had given him. Time to call the police station in Pozzo Basso, to sit down in front of Giuli in the office and brief her on what to do in his absence.
And, of course, time to talk to Luisa. A proper talk, to clear the air, to say sorry for all that hysterical nonsense about having affairs, to tell her, really, how he’s feeling. Time to go quietly along to Frollini and get her out of there for ten minutes to sit down side by side in the Caffè La Posta under the arcades in the Piazza della Repubblica, and talk it through, before he goes, before she goes. That broad pale face, her dark eyes smiling back at him over her tall glass of
latte macchiato
.
Loni Meadows had died in a car accident – something hard to set up without expertise, these days, given that most cars, if not Sandro’s twenty-year-old Fiat, were complex, computer-controlled machines with liquid crystal displays and microchips. If you want to kill someone with certainty, there were other ways.
Luisa wouldn’t want to see the preliminary photographs of the accident scene. The deep gouging in the frozen ground, the blood and hair on the car’s door pillar, the skull dented like an eggshell. Nor would she demand to look at the initial police report on the determining factors – weather conditions, injuries, skid marks – all of which told Sandro no more than that the police were probably right: it had been an accident.
No, Luisa would ask him, what was she like, then? She’d want to see the photograph of the live woman first off, and only then would she spread all those pieces of paper in front of him, examining each photograph, each CV, each personal statement given by the Trust’s guests.
This was what Sandro would have needed the time for, before heading off on his own down the pot-holed Siena highway. Time to set himself up with Luisa’s angle on the case and time to tell her, after all that, I’m an idiot, darling. Forgive me. Have a wonderful time in New York, you deserve it.
Only that wasn’t quite how it went.
Giuli hadn’t let up. Patiently Sandro had stood in the office at their cheap little printer, copying the folderful of documents while she paced the floor and ranted at him.
‘What do you mean, she was busy?’
‘It’s Saturday, Giuli,’ he’d said quietly, slotting the papers into another file, handing it to her. She’d taken it, but hadn’t even looked to see what it was. ‘The shop was packed.’
‘But this is important,’ she’d pleaded.
‘Giuli,’ he’d said, with a calm he hadn’t felt, ‘you’re getting hysterical. We’ve been married thirty years, and a week apart is not going to finish us off.’ Even as he’d said it he’d felt sick.
And they
had
been busy, in Frollini; Saturday, and in sales season. He
had
gone in, he’d spoken to Giusy, the intermittently friendly, lip-lined till-girl (no longer a girl, as a matter of fact, but younger than him). He had asked her if Luisa was around. If she was available. She’d smiled and said,
Sure
,
I’ll buzz upstairs
.
She’s um
,
actually I think she’s with Frollini
.
‘So you just – what?’ Giuli had said.
‘I’ve written her a note,’ Sandro had replied. ‘Left it at home,’ and at that Giuli had only shaken her head. Sat down, looked at the folder and sighed. ‘And this?’
He’d shrugged. ‘For the files.’
Giuli had dropped it on the desk bad-temperedly. Poor kid. Just when she thought she was part of the deal, a comrade in arms, he was off. The remote possibility of another evening’s surveillance of a girl smoking a bit of dope obviously hadn’t seemed quite the new start Giuli had hoped for. He’d remembered something, scribbled CHECK LONI MEADOWS BLOG: LONESTAR on a luminous pink Post-it note, pasted it on the desk beside the computer. LOOK FOR NAMES.
She was pulling open the drawer where they kept the new laptop. Her mouth set in a line, resignedly she’d pushed it across the desk to him. ‘All the cables are in there, and the wireless card, and the battery’s got good charge.’
She’d shut up after that, and Sandro had been able to call the front desk at the police station in Pozzo Basso, in the province of Grosseto, and arrange an appointment with Commissario Grasso, whose case this routine incident had been. The desk officer had seemed entirely indifferent to Sandro’s inquiry: Sandro could picture him, fat, complacent, with
brioche
crumbs on his uniform.
Sandro checked his watch, the pot-holes jolting his hands on the wheel. He’d hit the
superstrada
by two and should be in Pozzo Basso by 3.30, an hour or so at the police station then, with luck, find his way to the castle before dark.
He could have got going an hour earlier, if he hadn’t spent at least that sitting at the kitchen table in the midday gloom of the apartment, trying to think what to write in the note he was leaving for Luisa.
Something’s come up; off on a job for a while. See you when you get back
.
Love
.
Curt, peevish, petulant, childish. He could see her screw the paper up in a ball and throw it at the kitchen wall, thinking all those things. But every time he’d written
darling,
even though that was the word
he’d wanted to use and actually not bother with the rest, he’d just felt this resentment boil up inside him. Why should I be the one? The one to beg and compromise? He’d given her little packed suitcase if not a kick then a shove with the side of his foot as he left, then felt ashamed of himself.
Enough, he thought, and with an effort transferred his mind to the job, and the darkening horizon to the south.
By the time he saw the sign for Pozzo Basso, the sky was iron-grey with snow not yet crystallized, just waiting for that small shift in atmospheric conditions to begin to fall, softly, and the light was already failing. Within five minutes of leaving the
superstrada
Sandro was on the town’s dismal outskirts: Gallo had been right about it being an ordinary little place. Curiously pancake-flat, considering the hills that rose up almost immediately beyond it; the flyblown station building and the open crossing over the railway line, the rows of aluminium
capannoni
housing light industry, the ugly ersatz shopping-centre built up around a cheap supermarket chain. A one-horse town, with no aspirations to bettering itself.
Things improved slightly as he drove on; an avenue of dusty acacias led to what was left of a mediaeval centre, complete with fortifications. He’d been told to look for Pozzo Basso’s only hotel, which turned out to be one of the town’s few attractive buildings: the Hotel Liberty, with a dignified art deco frontage and a particularly elegant acacia shading its balconies, set back from the town gates. Follow the signs to Grosseto, second left after the hotel, the desk sergeant had told him in an unenthusiastic monotone.
Although Sandro had mentioned that he had the full authorization of the deceased’s husband, Avvocato Mascarello, for his investigations into Loni Meadows’s death, his guess was that the desk officer was too dumb to register the name’s significance, because the man’s phone manner had remained unchanged.
Skirting the old wall, turning between high gates with the insignia of the Polizia di Stato so familiar to Sandro – the crest, the motto, ‘Freedom under the Law’ – he reflected that he was not, in fact, prejudiced against the provincial outposts of the service that had once
been his own employer. Genuinely he was not: there were plenty of intelligent officers outside the big cities, and some of the regional centres had challenges significantly tougher than those Sandro had faced in Florence: immigration, people-smuggling, Mafia, terrorism. Poverty; there were some awful dead little towns down south, and poverty did terrible things. Pozzo Basso, though, was better off than that; Sandro had already put in a call to Pietro about the place even before he met with Luca Gallo. He’d been able to hear the bustle of the police office behind his old partner as he talked; had he also heard weariness, caution, pity? Poor old Sandro, out in the cold. No. His imagination: Pietro would be on Sandro’s side. Always.
He pulled up in a space designated for a named officer; there were no others. A silver Audi was parked in another officer’s space, so he wasn’t the only civilian breaking the carefully calibrated rules of the car park.
No, the biggest challenge Pozzo Basso faced on the whole would be teenagers smoking pot and pickpockets in the holiday season, when the little towns filled up with seaside trippers, even this far back from the coast. Pietro had snorted. ‘It’s a dump,’ he’d said. ‘And they’re all country in-breds. Wouldn’t trust them to find their own backsides with both hands.’ But his old partner hadn’t heard of Commissario Grasso, so as he locked the car Sandro was none the wiser.