Cate found herself wondering whose idea it had been to light the fire, to destroy the stuff? Tina’s? She doubted it.
‘And then?’ she prompted gently. And Tina raised her blotchy,
unhappy face to hers. ‘So I did it,’ she said.
‘Did what?’ Tina’s head went down again and she mumbled.
‘I made her. Made a – made a Loni doll.’ And lifting her head to Cate’s mystified face, she said, ‘You know what obeah is? Vudou? I made a poppet. A voodoo doll.’
‘Voodoo,’ repeated Cate, and her eyes went to the row of pots ranked above her, with their malignant little misplaced features. On the Caribbean cruises, the kindly, overweight American women came back with those rag-dolls, of sticks and cloth, and fake scrolls. Disney witchcraft.
‘I didn’t think it would work,’ said Tina tonelessly.
‘It didn’t work,’ said Michelle roughly, interrupting her. ‘Just stop it, kid. Now.’
Cate’s mother believed in exorcism, and evil spirits, and faith healing; Cate had always groaned and held her head at the mention of this or that creepy priest, and now it seemed downright dangerous lunacy.
‘She’s right,’ she said, taking hold of Tina’s arms at the elbow and looking into her face. ‘You mustn’t talk about this. Are you crazy?’ No one should know about this: they’d lock the girl up.
It was this place. If Cate was anywhere else, down in Pozzo, hanging out with Vincenzo, at home with her mother or eating ice-cream in her home town with the girls she’d grown up with – this would just be laughable. Stupid. Kids’ stuff; a girl with a grudge makes a voodoo doll of a mean teacher. In this place, with the high grey walls of the castle always at her back, the cold, dark corridors, the wide, empty, frozen countryside that stretched for miles, with only taciturn farmers between her and civilization – here, Cate was frightened. And Cate was not easily frightened.
She took a deep breath. ‘You did something stupid, but you didn’t kill her.’ She turned to Michelle. ‘What did she put on that – thing? The doll?’
‘I made it out of clay,’ said Tina. ‘I – got hold of some of her hair.’ She looked to Michelle, as if asking permission, but Michelle’s face was just set grimly. ‘From out of her hairbrush. And that cloth – it was a headscarf of hers.’
Cate looked from one of them to the other, barely able to believe the madness of it.
‘The scarf got mixed up in my laundry,’ said Michelle defiantly. ‘It’s what gave Tina the idea.’
The pots stared down at her, Tina and Michelle’s faces each distinctly and separately crazy, in the open door the smell of burnt hair and cloth still hung, and all at once Cate found she couldn’t stay in there any more.
Outside the sky seemed lower than ever, and darker; the wind had whipped up and it felt bitterly cold, and damp with impending snow. Far off in the woods came the crack of hunters’ guns, followed by the dogs’ baying.
Cate looked inside the oil drum: the blackened and incinerated mess looked disgusting. Tina and Michelle came up behind her. Cate leaned in, extended an arm, hesitated.
‘What should we do with it?’ said Tina.
From above them, where the cypresses ended and the grey bulk of the castle rose dark in the feeble afternoon light, came a shout. Cate turned at the sound: it was Tiziano, muffled up in his wheelchair. He raised a hand, and Cate waved back. He shouldn’t try to come down; the gravel path was tricky. Unwillingly she looked back into the drum, and saw a longish piece of crumbling, blackened clay that might have been a bone.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, averting her eyes.
She looked back up; Nicki was up there now, a hamper in her arms, walking awkwardly down towards them on the uneven path, tottering as she turned back to wave to Tiziano. Ridiculously, Cate didn’t want Nicki to look inside the drum; Nicki was just a kid.
‘I’ll get rid of it for you,’ she said quickly. ‘Just put it round the back.’ Tina smiled, with timid gratitude.
And Cate almost ran, up over the stones, towards Tiziano, in time to see his wide smile turn wary. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked with concern as she reached him. Kneeling next to him, getting her breath back, Cate managed a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. Over Tiziano’s shoulder she saw someone else emerge from around the side of the castle, walking fast under the trees.
‘I thought you might take me for a walk,’ said Tiziano, and Cate smiled more broadly, because Tiziano didn’t need someone to push his chair. She stopped herself, not wanting him to think she was laughing at him.
She sat back on her haunches. ‘Sure,’ she said, her eyes on the thin, tense figure skirting the walls in a long overcoat. It was Alec Fairhead. Seeing them, he came to a halt. Getting to her feet, Cate waved, then looked back down at Tiziano. He caught her hand. ‘So you will?’
‘Yes,
caro
.’ Cate frowned. ‘Did you get something to eat? Things are a bit – chaotic at the moment. In the kitchen; I don’t know if I’m supposed to be in there, or out here, or what.’
‘Nicky brought me something earlier,’ he said. ‘I’m well taken care of. And I’m sure it would count as part of your duties, helping the disabled.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said sharply, then immediately regretted it. She was no good at this; was she these people’s equal or not? Was she Tiziano’s friend, or his servant? The odd thing was, before Loni Meadows’s death and her own abrupt promotion, Cate would have said, friend, one hundred per cent.
‘I’ll just get a coat,’ she said. Tiziano had several layers on as well as a woollen hat and gloves, whereas she’d come out in no more than a sweater. It was freezing now, the wind whipping round her legs; a stupid idea to go for a walk in this weather, and with snow on the way, but anyway. Alec Fairhead was coming over.
Cate waved at the Englishman again as she set off to her room; Tiziano would explain. But what she heard as she hurried across the stones was the Englishman’s soft, hurried inquiry, ‘Mind if I tag along? Could do with some fresh air,’ and Tiziano, in whose voice she thought she detected resignation although it might have been wishful thinking on her part, answering, ‘Sure, yeah. The more the merrier.’
Damn, she thought, damn.
S
TATIONED AT THE BIG old computer in the office in the Via del Leone, Giuli was wondering what she was doing there on a Saturday afternoon, when no doubt Sandro wouldn’t be paying her, not that she was doing it for the money, God knew. But then the phone rang and startled Giuli out of her bad temper. And it was a good job too, because it turned out she was answering the phone to her own first client, thanks to Sandro, and sounding like a truculent school kid wouldn’t have been a good move. Fabrizio Bellagamba even asked for her by name.
The man was in a state because his daughter wanted to go out on a Saturday night. Giuli had to bite her tongue so as not to say, just chill out. That wouldn’t be appreciated.
‘You did the right thing, calling us,’ she said. ‘Absolutely. Getting into a fight with her will not improve matters; she needs to feel that you trust her.’ Even though you don’t; even though you can only trust her if you’ve got a private detective tracking her, but clearly it wasn’t Giuli’s place to question that.
‘I’ll look after her,’ Giuli said. ‘Don’t worry.’
The words escaped her before she could think; it wasn’t something Sandro would have said to the man. Now she corrected herself. ‘I’ll stay
close to her. I’ll be out there by 5.30?’
And there was a brief pause before Fabrizio Bellagamba said, ‘Thank you.’
Texting Sandro practically the minute she’d put the phone down Giuli was full of her triumph, then after the message had been sent, full of nerves.
Come on, call me back, she thought. Tell me I’ve done great, then tell me what I do next. She got up, paced the room, checked her phone had charge and that her clothes would do, not too noticeable, not too shabby. She’d do fine: her best dark jeans, white shirt, fake cashmere sweater, the warm padded jacket Luisa had given her for Christmas.
That stopped her short: Luisa, who would be still at work, wearing herself out all day on foreigners, and wouldn’t know until she got home that Sandro had done a bunk.
Was that what he’d done? No, of course not: he was on a job, it was the truth. But Giuli hoped he’d written a proper note, straightening things out. Fat chance. And then she started pacing the room again; she couldn’t actually be thinking about Luisa now. Come on, she said to her mobile.
As it turned out, he didn’t call her back for a good hour, and when he did, he didn’t say anything she expected.
‘You’re a popular lady, today,’ the morgue assistant had said, pulling out the drawer and addressing the comment to the dead body it contained. He was a fat, inappropriately jovial man, with a habit of muttering to himself; Sandro wondered what Niccolò Orfeo would have made of him. He knew it was Orfeo because as he waited for the man to be done, eyeballed stonily all the while by the girl with the pierced lip, he had gone back to the brochure Gallo had given him and looked him up. Niccolò Orfeo, father of Carlotta’s hero Alberto, whose surname he had never asked.
Niccolò Orfeo, sixty-nine years old and looking good on it, photographed in the castle’s old library standing at the grand piano, then photographed in patriarchal mode with his wife and son at their
villa in Florence, on a wide terrace with expensive garden furniture and a striped canopy and the Duomo floating serene in the background. The house was up behind the Porta Romana somewhere, judging from the view: Poggio Imperiale or Arcetri, both in Zone E. Open house, the janitor at the Liceo Classico Marzocco had said, when he’s off with one of his women.
The wife looked like a bolter, too thin, with a deep tan of the sort acquired in the southern hemisphere, a distracted smile on her face as she stood between son and husband, and no wonder. To Sandro’s experienced eye Niccolò Orfeo didn’t look much of a man for the marriage vows. Too aristocratic, perhaps. And other evidence, too, was accumulating.
And then he was coming through the swing doors and Sandro stepped back, hoping to make himself as close to invisible as could be managed in the space. A gust of carbolic mixed incongruously with the man’s aftershave and his face pale, his eyes staring fixedly ahead, Niccolò Orfeo marched straight past and out of the morgue.
A popular lady: so Orfeo had come to look at her too. Sandro knew very well that not just anyone could walk in off the street and be shown the recently deceased, on state premises, but Orfeo was a name in these parts. The question was, what was he doing here?
As to that, Sandro was beginning to formulate his own reasons. Either he’d been fond of her, or he wanted to make sure she was dead. Or both.
As the morgue orderly, a good ten centimetres shorter than Sandro and a broad, questioning smile on his round, shiny face, stood holding the handle of the long steel drawer that contained Loni Meadows, Sandro found himself wanting to tell the man, no, he’d changed his mind. He’d asked to see the dead body to be sure that Orfeo had been here for the same reason he was, and now he knew that, it was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead he inclined his head, took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes.’
Niccolò Orfeo would be climbing into that big silver Audi now, slipping on to the ringroad of the dirty little town, his polished, powerful car a superior beast amid the shabby provincial traffic. But
Sandro couldn’t use that as an excuse to run out of the morgue and after him, because he had a pretty fair idea where he’d be going. And Luca Gallo had given Sandro a good set of directions to the Castello Orfeo from Pozzo.
The drawer slid out with ease; Loni Meadows had not been a big woman, and under the crisp white sheet she hardly took up any space at all now. The orderly folded the sheet down to reveal her face and neck, and Sandro nodded briskly, holding up a hand to stop him there. The eyes were closed, of course. The light blue, sky blue eyes, and without them she was almost ordinary. Almost; there was nothing ordinary about the dead. Her skin, had she been alive, would have been remarkable for a woman of her age, hardly a wrinkle or a blemish, although it was dull as mud now, and one cheekbone had been smashed. The consequent bruising and swelling had made her face lopsided, brutalized.
Her lips were bluish grey; Sandro couldn’t see more than a wisp or two of the hair, because like the injury that killed her, it was hidden under the white linen folded into a sort of cap to protect the viewer from the pathologist’s incisions. He could ask the man to expose the injury, to fold back the cap, but he didn’t. Even from what Sandro could see, from the extent of the collapse in the skull at the eggshell-thin temple, a dent the extent of perhaps a large grapefruit, she could not have survived this one injury. It was an injury common in car crashes, where the head met the door pillar, and commonly fatal, and there would have been others. Sandro leaned down closer; there were photographs in his briefcase, he knew he did not have to do this, but now he was in so far – he stopped short, his downturned face over hers, like a lover’s; he did not want to breathe. He wanted to close his eyes, but he kept them open.
From this close he could see a diagonal mark on her neck, a small, reddish abrasion like a rope burn, which might possibly have been the mark of a seatbelt as it tried to brake her body against the force of the crash. Grasso, though, had said she had not been wearing one, and for a moment Sandro pondered the inconsistency. It might, or might not, prove significant; at this stage, he simply couldn’t know.
Sandro breathed in, against his will, and smelled it, the smell of the morgue, of the body that has been through all the invasive processes that follow death, filled with the alien fluids and coagulants of the laboratory. What would Loni Meadows have smelled of, in life? Of soap, face cream, one of those heavy, expensive scents, the musk of her own skin. He jerked his head back.
As he stared into the orderly’s pasty, knowing face, Sandro wished silently for Luisa, for the soft white neck in which he could press his face and inhale until she was all he could smell.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’ll do.’
The swing doors, the front desk, the pale, pierced face and black hair of the receptionist, all passed in a blur as he retraced his steps through the ugly little building and its equally ugly surroundings until he was back at his car, opening the unlocked door and inside. Taking deep breaths.
Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. You’ve seen dead bodies before. Not for a long time, though. Five years, even. With his last two big cases, one as a policeman, one as a private investigator, he’d expected a dead body but had managed to get there first. A matter of dogged persistence and luck, he’d told himself. But you couldn’t rely on luck. With Loni Meadows, though, he’d been too late, although it couldn’t be said to be Sandro’s fault.
Or could it? Of course not. But what if he’d summoned up enough curiosity to ask why the Orfeo Trust wanted to check the references of such a woman? And what if he had managed to extract from Luca Gallo, then no more than a personable, likeable voice on the end of a phone asking him to carry out a perfectly routine control, the information that a nasty anonymous email had been sent about her? Would that email have told him that its sender was dangerous and might, in time, have tracked Loni Meadows down and brought about her death?
He – if it was a he – certainly would have known where to find her.
One, two: he breathed in the friendly, musty smell of his car’s interior: fake leather, old carpet, stale something or other he’d snatched for breakfast a week ago and was still in the glove compartment.
Around Sandro, things normalized; beyond his car window the world carried on, traffic moved on the ring road. He got out his phone, and thinking once again with longing of the city – the light, quiet office in San Frediano, the wide green river, the sound of
motorini
audible inside the familiar, gloomy flat that smelled of Luisa’s scent – he called Giuli.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, well done. Good girl. Now listen.’
When he’d given her his instructions, Sandro folded the phone and put it in his pocket, sitting for a long moment as he considered what he had to do next. Then he started the car and drove away.
If they’d wanted fresh air they could have walked down behind the castle, past the
villino
and the laundry and the studio and the plain new house where Mauro lived to where there was a small hill and a ruined tower; that was the little constitutional guests sometimes took to walk off a heavy lunch. They could have walked into the winter fields, although they’d been warned of the hazards presented by trigger-happy hunters; they could have taken the path that led off the back entrance, down to a pretty little stream. They did none of these things.
As Cate came back out of the door to the stable block wearing hat, scarf, gloves and a long padded coat buttoned up to her ears against the bitter wind, she saw the car. The little black car with the hire logo, parked up against the office entrance; looking up, she saw light behind the shuttered windows. So Luca was back; she should go and bring him up to date, Cate knew that. But the light was going, and Tiziano and Fairhead were waiting for her – and it was all too complicated. Wives were not allowed – and most particularly, she suspected, noisy, emotional, betrayed wives – and it was quite possible Luca would take the position that she, Cate, should have sent Yolanda Hansen packing. She didn’t want to see that disappointed look in his eyes, and so she hurried past.
By the time she reached them Alec Fairhead had pushed Tiziano’s wheelchair across the rougher ground behind the castle and round to
the front, to the smooth tarmac of the road that led down between the grand avenue of old cypresses, where they were waiting for her. The two-hundred-year-old trees between which Yolanda Hansen had approached the Castello Orfeo at speed, as if she wanted to ram the great gate; the avenue by which Loni Meadows liked to come and go, seeing herself as the castle’s mistress. Not for her the tradesman’s entrance.
With Cate alongside they set off without a word, only Alec Fairhead giving her a shy, apologetic smile. She smiled back, forgiving him; feeling exhilarated at the thought of leaving the bounds of the castle keep for the first time in what seemed like weeks, not just twenty-four hours. And given the pace at which they set off, Tiziano in the lead and turning his wheels with furious energy, she wasn’t the only one.
No one spoke for a while. They knew where they were going.
The wide winter landscape stretched in front of them, the sun no more than a feeble glare not far above the western horizon, behind a sky low and heavy with layers of snow cloud. When they reached the end of the old cypress avenue Tiziano stopped, and they turned and looked back.
The great squat bulk of the castle sat there, more forbidding than ever and entirely uninterested in them. All of it, sky, trees and stone, in shades of grey, except the flash of red that was the car Yolanda Hansen had arrived in, no longer on the grass, now parked askew on the drive.
‘Poor old Per,’ said Alec Fairhead abruptly. ‘What a mess.’ Tiziano barked a laugh, rubbing his hands in leather gloves in his lap. Cate looked down at the pianist’s hands and found herself instead gazing at his legs, lifeless and thin in padded trousers, his booted, useless feet on their foot-rest.
‘You can say that again,’ he said. ‘A mess.’