Not even going back to her room to take off her coat, once she was inside the castle’s bounds Cate went straight to the office.
Tiziano and Alec Fairhead had gone their separate ways without much more than a muttered farewell; the three of them had hurried back under the darkening sky, an element of shame, of anxiety in their shared silence. Had it been the sight of the man climbing out of his car? A ghoul, like them, a sightseer? Cate wasn’t so sure about that; the slow, considered way he looked up at them made her think the bareheaded man in his shabby coat had an agenda that was more serious.
As Fairhead raised his hand to say goodbye under the great arch Cate suddenly felt rather anxious for him; he actually looked ill. And frightened. But he caught her eye and hurried away, before she could ask him if he was all right.
Outside the office door Cate hesitated at the sound of voices. Luca’s, and another, deeper – lower, angrier – voice she recognized as Niccolò Orfeo’s. ‘Impossible,’ he was saying. ‘Out of the question.’
She knocked. There was an abrupt silence, then Luca said warily, ‘Who is it?’
He sounded tired, and when she tentatively pushed the door in response to his reluctant, ‘Quickly, then,’ she saw that he looked it too. He was at his desk, shirtsleeves pushed up, jacket crumpled over the back of his chair. He seemed to have grown a week’s stubble since this morning. Niccolò Orfeo was standing by the window, his broad shoulders blocking what remained of the light; he looked at Cate over his shoulder, eyeing her up and down, then looked back outside. There was a strong smell of cigar smoke, in defiance of every rule of the castle.
Cate remained standing, in her coat, as she hadn’t been invited to sit.
‘Count Orfeo – will be staying,’ said Sandro wearily. ‘For dinner, at least.’
‘I see,’ said Cate, waiting for further instruction, but none came. Orfeo would be keeping them all dangling, she saw; it was his house, and if he decided a bed needed making up at two minutes’ notice, in whichever room he chose, then they’d have to jump.
‘I wondered if you’d called Beth yet,’ she said hurriedly.
‘Beth?’ Luca looked blank for a moment. ‘Oh, Beth. Right, yes. I mean, no. No, I haven’t called her.’
‘Well, she should know,’ said Cate. ‘Before she reads it in a newspaper. Don’t you think? I mean, they were close.’ From the window Orfeo looked back at her a moment down his aristocratic nose, but this time it wasn’t with quite the same casual lecherousness.
‘Yes, yes, I suppose so,’ said Luca distractedly.
Cate looked at her watch. ‘If it isn’t done tonight,’ she said, ‘the time difference and everything – it won’t be for another whole day.’
‘What is your suggestion?’ said Luca impatiently. She saw him glance back over at Orfeo; did the man have power over Luca’s job? Cate had always assumed that the Trust was a quite separate entity, but she supposed the castle was still his. She thought about what Ginevra had said about Loni Meadows causing trouble for everyone who worked under her: Mauro, Nicki, Luca.
‘I’ll call her,’ said Cate. ‘You give me the number and I’ll explain it to her. Gently, you know.’
‘All right,’ said Luca, sounding uncharacteristically uncertain. He began poking through the chaos on his desk in search of something, then stopped, seemed to forget what he was looking for. Was it the presence of Niccolò Orfeo that was throwing him, or was he playing for time? Why would he be worried about Beth?
‘The number?’ she prompted. He resumed his poking, found his mobile, scrolled down a list of numbers, read the number out to her. Beth lived on the East Coast: Westport, Connecticut. It would be late morning there. Cate looked up from entering the number in her own
telefonino
and found them both looking at her, their meaning quite plain.
‘I’ll call her, then. I’ll do that now.’ And she left hurriedly, her coat still on, not having relaxed for one second of the exchange.
Outside the door Cate hesitated a full minute, listening, but she heard nothing. Perhaps they were listening, too, for the sound of her departing footsteps, before they resumed their conversation. She went.
Stopping off in the kitchen, Cate meant to promise Ginevra she’d be there in a moment, once she’d made that call to Beth, only another row was brewing. Of course it was: it was Ginevra’s night off, she remembered belatedly, the cook was supposed to go home at five on Saturdays. Cate had simply lost track of time, of her usual routines. And there was no escaping the row.
‘What does he think I am?’ Ginevra was fulminating. Mauro was standing in a corner, a coffee cup in his hand and an unpleasant gleam in his eye. He never drank coffee without a little something in it; Cate found herself wanting to ask him, what happens if you come off that tractor, break your neck?
The kitchen’s surfaces were already spread with the dishes for the evening’s buffet, each covered with its separate clean ironed cloth. ‘He thinks I’m housekeeper, maid, cleaner? He sends Anna-Maria home, he takes you off kitchen duties – ’ at which the full force of her glare turned on Cate ‘– then he decides we need beds making up, and I’m supposed to send Nicki off to clean the intern’s bathroom.’
‘Intern?’
‘The little bedroom,’ said Ginevra impatiently. She tugged off her apron. ‘Well, you can do it. Nicki’s done enough. You can do it, and you can help her clear after their dinners, too. Saturday night and Sunday morning, my time off. I hope someone remembers that.’
‘The intern’s room needs making up? I thought – ’ and Cate broke off, confused.
‘Two extras for dinner,’ Ginevra grumbled on. ‘And no warning. Well, they’ll have to make do with rice.’
‘Two? Who’s the other one?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ snapped Ginevra.
‘A snooper,’ said Mauro, speaking for the first time from the corner. ‘Someone coming to ask us questions.’ His voice was dangerously ragged; he was properly drunk, Cate realized. ‘That husband of hers is behind it, if you ask me.’ His laugh was phlegmy and slurred. ‘And then there’s Orfeo too, that’s a bit of a turn-up. Overcome with grief, no doubt.’
Cate wanted to get out of there; she didn’t like this.
‘Where’s Nicki?’
‘She’ll be up on the
piano nobile
,’ Ginevra said, relenting. ‘Doing the intern’s room.’ Then she scowled. ‘You’ll have to walk her back to the farm, you know.’
‘I’ll sort things with her,’ said Cate. ‘You get off home.’
Ginevra stared at her, then pulled off her apron without a word. Passed her hand over the gas taps on the stove, straightened a tea towel on the rail. ‘You coming?’ she said to Mauro brusquely. He shrugged, his eyes red-rimmed. He was definitely worse, Cate thought, since the
Dottoressa
had died: drunker, angrier; perhaps that was why Ginevra was protecting him. Protecting him from himself.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Watch a bit of television.’
‘And a bite to eat.’ Ginevra had her coat on, and wearily she steered Mauro ahead of her out of the door. An icy wind swirled in out of the darkness. ‘Bite to eat,’ he repeated, as if unsure what the words meant, as the door closed behind them. Cate hoped Ginevra was driving.
At the kitchen door she paused and listened; heard the dogs begin to bay on the other side of the hill as the cook’s Punto hove into view. Ginevra knew something was wrong, that was why she was keeping Mauro on a tight rein. Cate looked down the hill the other way, towards the
villino
. There was a light at one of the squat building’s upper windows, and as she stood there more light blazed out, closer, off to the right from beyond the laundry. The modern apartment with its glass wall: Michelle must be turning on every light in the place. Soon the guests would be turning up one by one like kept beasts sniffing around for the next meal, no matter what.
As she crossed the courtyard towards the stone steps and the great door, two things happened more or less at once. Snowflakes started gusting down from the black sky and inside the castle someone – it could only be one person – began to play the piano. Though that seemed too tame a description for the sound that reached Cate, stopping her where she stood. Like liquid, the music flowed out through every crack in the shutters, between door and doorframe, climbing and spilling, soft and melancholy, into the courtyard, filling the space enclosed by the grey walls and the black sky overhead as if Cate was in her own private concert hall. For just a moment, as she stood there and forgot what was fretting at her or where she was going, she understood the point of it all. The big, forbidding castle with its metre-thick walls, the closeted rooms, the seclusion, the feeding and watering of the unhappy guests, the torment. For this.
She saw him as she tiptoed past in the hall, like a minotaur, his big head between those great shoulders bent over the gleaming black piano, oblivious, and climbing the wide curve of the stone stairs she held her breath.
Nicki was in the doorway of the intern’s little room, leaning against the cut stone of its corner, damp cloth in one hand. She was transfixed,
listening. Cate put a finger to her lips, and Nicki nodded. Her eyes were round; they’d heard Tiziano play before, but he had never sounded like this. The music swelled and rolled, now flooding every corner of the ancient building; her eye caught by a movement higher on the stairs, Cate looked up and saw Alec Fairhead on the upper landing, his eyes glittering in the light from below. It seemed to her that the music was calling them all out of their hiding places – a celebration and a warning and a funeral march, all rolled into one.
Fairhead’s focus shifted and he looked at her and then, quite unexpectedly, she saw an expression she’d never seen before, a smile of pure happiness and release spread across his face, as if he had been taken by surprise by something that delighted him. Cate bobbed her head back down and at that moment she felt Nicki take her hand and hold it tight.
Turning, she smiled into the girl’s face. ‘It’s OK,’ she mouthed, because Nicki’s look of dazzlement had turned into consternation as the notes thundered, and she smiled reassuringly. As if Tiziano realized, below them, that the music was passing beyond his control, it changed, or he tamed it, and beside Cate, Nicki let out a long breath. Feeling the tension ebb, Cate looked over her shoulder into the small, neat room that had been Beth’s: one long, shuttered window, a narrow bed with faded, soft red velvet cover, a corner turned back in the circle of light shed by the bedside lamp. A desk had been set out, with paper and a telephone. Seeing her questioning look, Nicki just shrugged.
‘It’s you and me,’ Cate whispered. ‘I’ve sent Ginevra home.’ Nicki nodded obediently.
Still looking into the room Cate saw no trace of Beth’s occupancy, not a discarded paperback on the shelves, not a mark on the walls. ‘Do you miss her?’ she said softly, and Nicki moved her head, see-sawing, ambivalent. Then nodded.
‘She didn’t like it here,’ she whispered. ‘She told me, it scared her. Something scared her.’ Cate examined her expression a moment. Remembered that Nicki believed in ghosts too; gently took the damp cloth from her hand and pulled the door of the intern’s room to behind them.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘They’ll all be turning up soon, and there’s no booze out.’ The music seemed to bear them down the stairs, measuring their steps as though they couldn’t help but walk in time to it, as though they were dancing. When Cate reached the bottom, she stopped.
On the doorstep stood a middle-aged man with a broad, tired face, in his hand a small holdall, his head tilted as he listened. He wore a hat, with a light dusting of snow just melting on its brim. As if on cue, the music lifted to a perfect point, and came to rest.
‘Sandro Cellini,’ said the man in the new silence, and he held out his hand.
T
HE TWO GIRLS – WOMEN, he should say, he knew – stared back at him, one small and mousy and sharp-nosed, one tall and strong-shouldered and black-haired and clever. He’d seen the tall girl already, with the two men on the rise looking down at him, and he hadn’t been wrong to think her beautiful. She had the full, downturned mouth of a Piero della Francesca: the face of the Queen of Sheba and the strong shoulders of a girl soldier. Sandro could imagine her striding into battle without a second thought.
‘Caterina Giottone,’ she said, and held out a hand. ‘I’m the manager’s assistant. Luca’s assistant.’
She had an accent close to the Sienese, so not from around here. Her grip was warm and firm; her black hair parted in the middle, and she looked at him with curiosity, not unfriendly, as though she had a feeling about him. As though he might be bringing good news, but she wasn’t quite sure yet; as though she trusted him. It made Sandro feel creaking and ancient to remember it, but she looked like every girl he had ever wished he might ask out, had he not been too shy and lonely, since the age of thirteen. She looked like Luisa.
The piano playing had stopped. It had been quite remarkable: Sandro didn’t think of himself as having an ear, nor of being susceptible
to atmospheres, or superstition, but while the music had been playing he had felt as though none of this was quite real. Not the slit windows of the big, dark, unforgiving building that had loomed over him in the dusk, not the tall, silent cypresses enclosing him on the approach, not the snow whirling in the empty courtyard. The only real thing had been left behind him on that sharp bend: the rutted mud and the flash of police tape clinging to a willow.
‘You’re the – um – investigator,’ said the thin girl with the sharp nose and the scarecrow hair, and reality returned. Something about her reminded him of Giuli. ‘I’ve just made up your bed. Next door to the
Dottoressa’
s rooms.’ She gave him a beady-eyed look. Next door; Sandro wondered who would have occupied such a room under normal circumstances.
‘Shall I show you up?’ said Caterina Giottone. She hadn’t known he was coming, but the other girl had. Caterina was an outsider here, like him, and she was thinking on her feet. Good. ‘Or do you need to see Luca first?’
‘I’ll just leave these – things,’ Sandro said, lifting his little case.
The room was small, but that was fine in a big draughty place like this; it seemed warm and well lit. There was a table he could use as a desk, and a long window. ‘You’re very kind.’
‘I’ll tell Luca you’re here, shall I?’ said Caterina Giottone. Behind her on the landing the other girl shifted from foot to foot, eavesdropping.
‘That would be great,’ said Sandro. ‘Thank you, Miss Giottone. You’ve been very helpful.’
‘Caterina,’ she said, inclining her head. ‘It’s a pleasure.’ She frowned. ‘There’ll be – dinner, or sort of, a little later. We’re a bit – upside down. And Saturday is Ginevra’s night off; she’s the cook. There’ll be something laid out, in the dining room, from eight. But I’m sure Luca – Mr Gallo – will show you.’
As Sandro gently closed the door he heard them on the stairs, Caterina Giottone’s low voice and the other one’s excitable chattering. He didn’t know what Gallo had told them; the minimum was what he imagined, but it didn’t take people long to work things out. He didn’t
need to worry about that.
The computer took forever to start up. Sandro knew that computers saved any amount of time; all the same, the effect they had on him was only to increase his impatience. The blue screen asking for his password, the icons appearing, one by one, the whirs and clicks. The screensaver came up: it was of the view from a little house they’d rented on the Ligurian coast a long time ago, he and Luisa; Giuli had downloaded it for him. A strip of scalloped, green and white awning and the sun going down in the sea, a couple of moored boats black on the silver water.
To the left of the computer on the desk, Sandro set out the green card folder containing the information he had on the castle’s guests. He decided, thinking about Caterina and the mousy girl, the absent cook, whoever drove the tractor and the pick-up he’d seen parked up at the back of the castle, that it wouldn’t do any harm to have a note or two on the place’s staff too.
Would a cook or a gardener or a girl with long black hair and the soft accent of the Valdichiana send an anonymous email through a proxy server about a woman they were very unlikely ever to have met? No, they wouldn’t. But Sandro didn’t believe in putting all his eggs in one basket; closing off his options this early on in an investigation would be rash. And now he was here in these bleak and empty hills, now he breathed the air of the castle keep, heard its creaks and whispers and felt its thick walls close around him, the puzzle of Loni Meadows’s death had turned into something different, something subject to change, something still living, its consequences yet to unravel. All of a sudden the darkness of this castle and its grounds were teeming with possibilities.
It would come. It always did.
Almost never easily, but it came; you had to stand at the still centre of a place like this, and listen, and watch. This was a closed circle, like many murders; you just had to map the edges, then look at those gathered inside. Like the Roma site Sandro and Pietro had once been called to because the body of a young man lay just beyond the light cast by the trailers and abandoned container lorries, stabbed more than twenty times and left to bleed out in the dust on a sweet-smelling April
evening.
Some of the travellers had stayed in their trailers, others had gathered on the edge of the policemen’s vision as they shone their lights on the body, then inspected it minutely with their gloved hands. One or two had come to offer information, of a sort, not to be trusted. The young man – not much more than a boy – had been one of theirs, and they knew they would be suspected.
It had taken time, that was for sure. There had been physical evidence to be retrieved, pollen and dust analysed, the shape and pecularities of the murder weapon identified – but for the most part it had been a question of waiting. Waiting to be trusted, for the suspicion to abate, for people to begin talking – not even to Sandro and Pietro, but between themselves. And then at last a small and angry Roma boy ran to Sandro, his face streaked with dirt and crying, who told him his big brother had been in love with a girl from outside.
The seal breaks, and the world rushes in. Sandro still remembered the feel of that small boy’s head against his ribcage, hot and damp, the feel of unwashed hair under his palm.
He stood and went to the window.
There were internal shutters, first, then the window; he opened it to push back the outside louvres. The cold took his breath away, but he stood there a moment at the open window, looking. The snow was still falling, but softly now, quietly; the wind had dropped, and he could sense the change that came over a landscape as snow covered and muffled it, could smell the clean coldness of it in the air. Below him the drive and lawns were uplit but even the dark, distant hills gleamed white as they reflected some mysterious source of light: the moon, perhaps, shining briefly through a break in the canopy of snow cloud. Had there been a moon, two nights ago? Sandro tried to remember; it had been the night, hadn’t it, that Luisa had told him she was going away.
He’d got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. As he always did, his age and all that. Sandro closed his eyes, trying to think back, and for a moment all he could remember was the despair that had come over him in the chilly bathroom, its frosted window
unshuttered. Not that he would be alone for a few days, but that he was being left behind, somehow. He opened his eyes again. It had been dark, or almost; no more than a sliver of crescent moon visible overhead.
For some reason the thought depressed him; would it have been better if a full moon had shone that night, when Loni Meadows died? Because he wouldn’t like to die in the dark, himself. And for other reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on now, but which would come to him.
Sandro closed the shutters carefully, and returned to the desk.
Find the lover. Find the sender of the email.
He stopped there, frowning. Would those two be the same? It was possible, yes. He could imagine a scenario in which a man might send hate mail then become the victim’s lover. But it was a stretch. With a woman like Loni Meadows, sharp, pushy, inquisitive? A stretch. He stood very still, thinking.
It occurred to Sandro that he couldn’t even be sure if the sender of the email would have also been her murderer. If it had been murder. Speculation made his head hurt: he needed to start looking at facts.
If you wanted to send someone off to crash their car, alone, how would you do it? Sandro could think of at least one way, but of none that would be guaranteed to succeed. She might, after all, have been badly injured, crippled or paralysed rather than killed. So your handiwork would need to be invisible, in case she came back to tell the tale. Although perhaps injury would have been enough; perhaps someone had only wanted to bring Loni Meadows face to face with a reality she could not charm away – with the fact that she, like everyone else, was mortal.
He set his mobile phone on top of the green folder, and it blinked patiently back at him, indicating that it had a strong signal. There must be a transmitter somewhere around here, though he couldn’t remember seeing it. He should have checked for a signal in the valley, shouldn’t he? Would she have been able to call for help? If she had a phone with her. Would she have been able to get a signal?
Everyone always had a phone, these days; if Sandro could remember
to keep his on him and charged, then anyone could.
Moving his finger tentatively across the laptop’s touch pad, Sandro logged on to the Castello Orfeo’s broadband network, which was unsecured. No one for miles around to freeload off it, so why bother?
The clock in the corner of the screen said 18.45. Giuli would be watching Carlotta Bellagamba, and waiting for her moment. She’d manage it, Sandro was certain. For a second he felt a twinge of guilt; this wasn’t really about the girl and her drug-taking boyfriend, was it? He was using her – using them. But Giuli was another matter. Giuli had her own agenda; she saw Carlotta as her case now. On screen Sandro opened the mailbox, pressed send and receive, astonished at how quickly these things had become second nature to him.
Messages pinged into his mailbox, a flurry of rubbish, spam that Giuli had programmed the thing to delete, then one from Giuli.
Downstairs the music began again, softer this time, quiet and pretty. Chopin? Sandro liked Chopin, even if he couldn’t claim to know much about music; Luisa enjoyed a concert now and again at the Teatro Communale or the Goldoni, a bit of Verdi, a bit of Mozart, and Sandro would go along if he wasn’t working, happily ignorant. This music calmed him now, rills of notes like water, as if it had been expressly composed to ease troubled thoughts. What thoughts could have troubled Chopin’s patrons though? Rich men and women, in castles and palaces.
Leaning back in his chair, Sandro breathed in the scent of old money, of stone and wood and polish, thinking. He opened the email from Giuli: a list, then a kind of table setting out dates and times and ages. Per Hansen, born Trondheim, Norway, 1953; Alexander Fairhead, born London, 1954; Tiziano Scarpa, born Mestre, 1966; Michelle Connor, born Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1956; Tina Kreutz, born Orlando, Florida, 1977. Sandro tilted his head, trying to make sense of the graph. Did these people have no homes to go to? London, Paris, Caracas, Yarra; they hardly seemed to settle. No: one of them did, the Norwegian, the one whose home country sounded the least hospitable had spent the most time there: a visiting fellowship in creative writing to Barcelona in 1985, then Oslo ever since. The
family man. Difficult to see how he, at least, would have come across Loni Meadows before coming to Orfeo, unless she’d visited Oslo. Which he couldn’t picture.
Alec Fairhead and Loni Meadows had both been in London between 1981 and 1982.
Then he heard something. Over the seductive variations of the music, Sandro heard someone on the stairs outside his room, not loud but unmistakable. Out of instinct he closed the screen of the computer and got to his feet, quickly, quietly, holding the chair back to stop it scraping. There was a knock.
On the threshold, careful not to enter, Luca Gallo looked anxiously apologetic. Did apologize, in fact, several times over, for the fact that Sandro had had to be admitted and welcomed to the Castello Orfeo by someone other than himself.
‘But she was very personable,’ said Sandro, feeling the need to defend Caterina Giottone. ‘I couldn’t have been treated more – ah, correctly.’
‘Yes,’ said Gallo, taken aback, ‘yes, well – of course. Caterina has only recently – she has had to step into the breach, if you understand me. But she’s doing a good job, yes, an excellent job.’
And again Sandro had the feeling that he and Caterina were in some way in the same boat: outsiders, and not much expected of them.
Then Luca Gallo was fretting over arrangements. There would be supper, of a kind, laid in the dining room, and Gallo would show Sandro, if he would like, where to find it, close to where he’d parked the car in fact, an informal arrangement, people could come and go as they wished on Saturdays, but today was slightly unusual.