T
HE THREE FIGURES ON the brow of the next hill and perhaps eight hundred metres away from Sandro didn’t move; they were watching him. A tall man, coatless; a woman with long black hair that blew about in the wind and whom, even at this distance, as he climbed out of the car, Sandro could tell was beautiful; and a man in a wheelchair. Broad-shouldered; strong. Three people not necessarily friends, but allies.
It was a professional habit; in the police or out of it, the ability to evaluate people and the dynamic between them from a distance was useful. To know whether they would coagulate, group and turn on you, or scatter. In either case you would have to know which of them would move the fastest; Sandro thought the guy in the wheelchair might have the edge, disabled or not.
Standing a moment, leaning on the roof of the car, Sandro watched them. They had to be from the castle; in fact from his examination of the guests’ CVs, the one in the wheelchair would be Tiziano Scarpa. Pianist? Composer and pianist. Sandro had imagined him a twisted, angry figure; no joke, paralysed from the waist down since the age of twenty-two, in a Red Brigade bomb blast that had killed his father. He didn’t look stunted from this angle.
The three figures watched him back, and they didn’t move, and it came to Sandro that they had been coming here too. Relaxed, Sandro held his ground; let them come back tomorrow. In half an hour, forty-five minutes at most, it would be dark, and they had a walk ahead of them. And as if they had read his mind the man in the wheelchair turned his head so Sandro could see a profile, tilted it up to speak to the girl, whose head then turned to the skinny man, he nodded, and they were gone.
Forty-five minutes was not long, for Sandro’s purposes. He got started straight away, walking up the slope opposite him almost as far as where the three had stood and watched him. Then back down. The ice had melted somewhat, although it could hardly have got above zero today, and most of it was still visible. Black, glassy, fanning across the tarmac from halfway down the hill. He looked along the verges, in the pale winter grasses on either side, carefully criss-crossing the site. He wasn’t used to traffic accident investigation beyond the city, and anyway, although there were country lanes enough close in to Florence, ice was never much of a factor. The city held the temperature a degree or two too high for the most part. He couldn’t see where this ice came from; in the fading light, he gave up.
At the skid marks Sandro paused, kneeling in his old quilted jacket, nothing like warm enough. He looked down the steep gradient of the hill. She had braked, hard, then had come across the patch of ice on to drier tarmac, but even that would have been frosted and it hadn’t given her enough purchase, the tyres had lost grip again. The big car would have thumped and teetered on to one side, still moving too fast – you could see from the skid marks. That alone might have been enough to knock her out, side of the head on the door frame as the car tilted.
Those blue eyes, wide in the darkness. Is this happening, she’d have asked herself, in the split second before she hit her head, as her feet pumped uselessly on the pedals. Sandro thought that he should have gone to the pound to have a look at the car, after all. Though he had the photographs: blood and hair on the front pillar, some on the car door, a smear on the window.
In car accidents, people always had that look of disbelief as they stepped out of the wreckage, stunned not just by the impact but by
the realization that they were mortal, that their fate could slip out of their own hands so easily. The moment at which they lost control of the situation – until then as comfortable as their own living room – still mirrored in their startled, dilated pupils; the realization that the car wasn’t simply the benign and obedient carriage they were used to, warm and padded and computerized and safe. It was a cage and a weapon; a blowtorch and a blunt instrument.
At the foot of the hill, on the bend, Sandro straightened, looking at the churned and frozen earth. It was bitterly cold, and the sun hadn’t even gone down. Some of it was wind chill – in the city, one was largely protected from the wind too, but out here there seemed to be nothing between Sandro and Russia. It was hard to believe that in the summer people flooded down here from the city, to swim in the rivers, lie on the beaches, bask in swimming pools on these baked and barren slopes. Far off, he heard some dogs begin to bay, and the sound echoed mournfully around the hills.
The bend was indeed very sharp; in the dark, if you didn’t know the road, it could be lethal. Although Loni Meadows
had
known the road; she would have known the curve was coming. There’d been a sign too, a kilometre back, warning of bends – not of ice, however, whatever Grasso might have said. The accident scene – or whatever it was – had been contaminated considerably. The tow-truck had churned up the verge, although because the earth had been so hard-frozen there were no footprints at all. Sandro returned to the car and took out the envelope of photographs and looked through them with fingers stiffening with the cold until he found the one he wanted. His back to the road, he held it up in what light was left, comparing the image with the reality.
There in front of him was the crushed long grass, frosted over again in the shape of Loni Meadows’s outstretched body. He looked at the photograph: one stockinged foot turned inwards, one shoe off, her head down the bank and in the water. Her skirt – heavy dark silk by the look of it – had ridden up, and the stocking top was visible. She would have staggered in the dark, the car’s headlights shining pointlessly into the river. The car door open behind her.
In some of the photographs they’d used the flash; it had still been very early. There was a lot of disturbance to the grass where the body lay. She might have wandered about, dazed, before the bleeding in her brain sent her irreversibly into a coma. He would have assumed she would have fallen to her knees, then forwards, although in the photograph it looked more as though she’d fallen headlong.
The car hadn’t been that badly damaged; still driveable, according to the report. If it hadn’t been nose down in the riverbank. Sandro studied the photographs again, then the turned earth in front of him. She’d tried, hadn’t she? Perhaps bleeding, perhaps concussed, she’d revved the engine, assuming she was still in control, the rear wheels turning uselessly in the air, the front pair churning themselves deeper into the frozen mud of the riverbank. Stuck.
That didn’t help.
Or did it? At least, it ruled one or two things out; if there’d been someone else in the car, someone who’d wished her harm, would that person, having somehow caused the accident, allow her to assume control again and try to get the car out of the mud? It seemed unlikely. But that scenario had a number of flaws, in any case; anyone planning to cause an accident while in the car themselves would risk death or injury too. It might only feasibly have happened on impulse, a row, an attempt to grab the wheel. But where would that putative passenger be now, supposing no one had seen him, or her, get into the car with Loni Meadows? Bloodied, injured, traumatized, frozen, in shock? Certainly such a person might not expect to escape notice. Then again, anyone who had somehow managed to disguise all these after-effects was unlikely to be the impulsive sort.
It didn’t make any sense. She would have been alone, revving the engine, in the dark, swearing to herself. Yes.
Carefully Sandro slid the photographs back into their envelope and replaced them in the car’s crowded glove compartment.
Stockinged leg. She dressed the part; she didn’t think she was going out into the dark, the cold, she wasn’t dressed for a winter expedition, she wasn’t prepared for this. She was going to meet her lover, in a warm hotel room. Sandro picked up the little plastic pouch containing Loni
Meadows’s personal effects, and studied them. Not prepared, careless, focused only on her destination; a bit like Sandro, who was now reproaching himself for not taking a closer look at the bag’s contents earlier in the day. And if he was going to find for certain what was missing from the pouch, he had to get on with it.
It was possible that the police had missed it, yes. Sandro began at the river, working back, fingertip-searching, checking possible trajectories. When after twenty-five minutes it was simply too dark to go on, and he still hadn’t found anything, Sandro began to persuade himself out of it, another wild goose chase. It could be in her car, it could be in her room at the Castello Orfeo; odds were, surely, that even Grasso and his boneheads would have found it, if it was there to be found.
Surely.
He crossed the road, walked back a hundred metres, then a little way forwards up the hill from whose crest the threesome had watched him, then back down. A sheep track led off to the left, circumventing the hill the way to wherever the three had come from – as if he didn’t know – a track that might also have been a shortcut, only they would not have taken it with a wheelchair.
The light had almost completely leached from the lonely valley, the ridge of distant hills was black against a rapidly darkening sky, and now, whether he wanted to or not, Sandro had to go and meet the residents of the Castello Orfeo.
The little digital clock in the corner of the old computer told Giuli that it was 17.10 as she carefully attached the document to an email addressed to Sandro, pressed send, then closed the computer down. The document contained the dates and places and times she’d managed to glean from the internet and the sheaf of papers Sandro had filed, under Orfeo/Meadows, in the old filing cabinet. Giuli had tried to set up a kind of grid, cross-referencing the current guests at the Castello Orfeo as painstakingly as the time available and the limitations of her English would allow. The classes Giuli was taking were only for holidaying and conversation purposes, and weren’t much help in deciphering the
migrations and stop-overs of artists. Visiting Fellowship in Installation Art in Uppsala, Sweden? Poet in Residence at a prison in Holland? The lives of the residents of the Castello Orfeo didn’t seem entirely enviable to Giuli, who had secret dreams of settling down in a more modest version of the Bellagamba villa in Galluzzo.
Teaching English at the Sorbonne in Paris sounded all right. But didn’t any of this lot want to settle down? Perhaps they didn’t have the choice.
Sandro’s instructions had been very clear. ‘I want you to find out which of them has crossed paths with Loni Meadows in the past, say over the last fifteen years. I know they will have, Mascarello and Gallo already intimated as much, it’s a small world, if you’re a struggling artistic type. Obviously I don’t expect you to find out everything. But the public stuff: festivals, lectures, exhibitions, sabbaticals, book tours. As much as you can.’
Giuli had only had a couple of hours, and she didn’t think she’d made a comprehensive job of it. It had been uphill work; she wasn’t sure what a sabbatical was in Italian, let alone the English word for it, but she used her initiative, and an online dictionary. She was fairly satisfied; it meant nothing much to her, but it would mean something to Sandro.
She hadn’t asked him if he’d called Luisa, yet. There came a point, when you just had to take a back seat, she could see that. And surely they were rock solid; nothing could derail Sandro and Luisa, certainly not a little misunderstanding like this. Giuli remembered when Luisa had told her about the cancer, and how she’d had to swallow hard and pretend not to be scared out of her wits; this was a bit like that. But no one was dying, here. She had to remind herself of that.
As if as an afterthought, before he hung up Sandro had said, ‘Carlotta Bellagamba will be going to Alberto’s house tonight, I’d bet on it. I have a feeling Alberto’s father’s out of town, and it’s going to be party time.’
‘How d’you know that?’ she’d asked curiously.
‘Because I’ve just seen his father coming out of the police station in Pozzo Basso; because his father’s Niccolò Orfeo and I’m betting
Alberto’s having a party tonight because he’s told Alberto he’s not coming home. He’s staying over, at the family castle, and who knows, I might even be having dinner with him myself.’
And before Giuli had even begun to digest this new information, he’d continued, ‘D’you know what would be really useful, Giuli, would be, if you could get in there? Into the party; into the house. Get talking to those kids. Think of it as part of the surveillance of Carlotta, if you like. But what I want to know is, when the old guy usually plays away. Dates, if possible; in particular, if he was playing away, the night Loni Meadows died.’ There’d been a pause. ‘Oh, and if he did cocaine.’
After a stunned silence Giuli had said, ‘All right.’
‘You can do it, kid,’ Sandro had said, and she’d softened. What the hell. She could try.
And if she wanted to get to Galluzzo by 5.30, she was going to have to get going.
On the way Giuli picked up about fifty grammes of dope from the dealer on the corner of the Piazza Santo Spirito, sitting on the wide stone bench that was spattered with pigeonshit, holding court looking like some Native American wise man. She’d known him since she was thirteen; he looked at her without surprise as he handed over the little foil package, even though she’d been clean for three years now.
‘It’s all right,’ said Giuli uncomfortably. ‘It’s not for me.’
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘whatever.’