Gallo grimaced a little. ‘Niccolò Orfeo – Count Orfeo, although he doesn’t really use the title, you understand – he’s dining with us tonight. So if you’d like to join us?’
‘Of course,’ said Sandro. ‘If I could have, perhaps, half an hour?’
Gallo was looking into the room, and the things laid out on the desk. ‘Of course,’ he said absently, ‘yes, you’ll have things to do, first. I – ah – I’ve, um, mentioned your presence here to the guests. A – condensed version.’ He moved inside the room, half closing the door behind him; the little space seemed suddenly smaller.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘I can imagine.’
‘I gave them the impression it was – a kind of formality. Mascarello, in his grief – you know.’
‘And the staff? Some of them seem to have a good idea of why I am here. Not all.’
‘Ah,’ said Gallo distractedly. ‘Yes. I only said – well. I mentioned you in passing, to Ginevra. News seems to travel, somehow.’
‘And Orfeo?’ He spoke casually, watching Gallo out of the corner of his eye.
‘Orfeo? What about him?’ There was something there. Gallo knew something.
‘Does he know?’ Sandro smiled encouragingly. ‘Why I’m here?’
‘Ah, yes. Although clearly – well. He lives in Florence, even if this is his family seat. You won’t need to talk to him?’ Bluff, and panic.
The man Sandro had seen cut an imperious swathe through Pozzo’s dismal little police station would have shouted at Luca Gallo without a second thought, Sandro could see that; as though he was a mediaeval peasant. And the mere suggestion that the Count might co-operate with a private investigator’s inquiries on any subject would certainly have been perceived as an offence to his dignity.
‘But he knew Loni Meadows?’
Luca Gallo shrugged, his nonchalance not convincing. ‘Of course.’
‘And when – ah – when was he last here? On the night of the accident?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Gallo quickly. ‘He didn’t usually come in the evenings, not often, it’s a long drive, you understand. No, I think he was last here on – let me think – on Sunday. There’s really no need – no need at all. To talk to him.’
‘Well, perhaps just a word or two,’ said Sandro mildly.
Gallo shot him a glance. Sandro saw that the man’s nails were bitten down to the quick. He leaned past Luca Gallo and pushed the door to, then sat down on the corner of the bed.
‘Mr Gallo,’ said Sandro, looking up at him. ‘Luca.’ Alarm flickered in Luca Gallo’s soft, monkey-brown eyes. Could he really suspect this
man, this twitching bundle of anxieties? A walking breakdown.
‘Luca, is there – ’ he hesitated, gently probing. ‘Is there anything else I should know? About – you and Dottoressa Meadows, for example? Any – animosity? Any upset? Because if there is, it will come out, you know. These things always do.’
‘I’ve told you,’ said Gallo, his face pale under the stubble. ‘We were a good team.’
Sandro said nothing, just looked at him.
‘We were not friends,’ said Luca with resignation. ‘All right? But we worked together.’
‘Fine,’ Sandro said quietly, getting to his feet, sidestepping Gallo, who stood as though rooted to the spot, and opening the door again. ‘So, I’ll find my own way down.’ He gestured with a hand, and Gallo preceded him out of the door on to the wide landing.
‘And I’m happy to make my own introductions.’ Gallo nodded, eyeing him warily, as though he knew he’d been let off the hook, for now. Sandro went on cheerfully. ‘In the meantime do you think I might – ah – make a quick examination of Dottoressa Meadows’s apartments?’ He used the word as if she’d been a princess. This place was getting to him.
‘Of course.’ Fishing in the sagging pockets of his jacket Gallo looked anxious all over again, nervously overeager. He pulled out a bunch of keys, detached one. ‘They’re right next door; she was the first of our Directors to occupy those rooms.’ There was something sharper in his tone when he said this.
Sandro eyed the key, still in Gallo’s hand. ‘When the police – when they came to notify you of her accident, did they ask to see the rooms?’ he asked casually.
Gallo shrugged. ‘They looked in. That was it. I – I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, as far as they knew, she died in a car accident.’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, and their eyes met. ‘I suppose so.’ Grasso certainly had seemed arrogant enough to consider it a waste of his time, or perhaps they had a little too much respect for Orfeo’s property.
‘Would you like me to show you?’ Gallo’s hand closed around the key; it occurred to Sandro that he would not have been exactly
encouraging to policemen tramping through his precious castle.
‘I can probably find my own way around,’ said Sandro again, easily. ‘And the dining room too, close to where I parked the car, you said? I’ll follow my nose, shall I?’ Gallo didn’t move. ‘Thank you,’ said Sandro, ‘I’ll be fine.’ And held out his hand.
With reluctance Gallo dropped the key into it. ‘Oh,’ said Sandro, looking at it thoughtfully. ‘Just one more thing. Do you have her number? The
Dottoressa’
s mobile number?’
Gallo blinked back at him, alarmed. ‘Her number?’ As though he’d asked if he had the dead woman’s underwear.
‘Her mobile number,’ said Sandro patiently.
Fishing in his pocket again, Gallo got out a small, battered phone and prodded at it until the tiny glowing screen yielded up what he was looking for.
Sandro offered no explanation beyond a smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said. Gallo went on standing there until eventually Sandro put a hand to the door and took a step forwards, and only then did the man finally turn to leave.
As he turned the key in the heavy panelled double doors, Sandro thought about Niccolò Orfeo. Too arrogant, would be his first thought, to bother with murder. Too stupid, his second.
The apartments were dark, a warm, velvety, scented darkness: even without turning on the lights Sandro would have known a woman inhabited them. Would have known, perhaps, what kind of woman too. A woman who liked to make her presence felt, who liked to trail her distinctive fragrance through other people’s lives; a woman who liked her comforts, and her pleasures. He reached around the door for a light switch; he expected a blaze of overhead brilliance from some great monstrosity of a chandelier but the switch turned on a series of lamps, peach and gold, casting a soft glow through the large, untidy room. He closed the door behind him.
The room wasn’t just large, it was palatial. Opposite a panelled wall it had three long windows to match the one in Sandro’s little room, and was dominated by a huge bed, with an ornately carved wooden headboard, a dark velvet cover, and scattered with at least half a dozen
items of discarded clothing, some laid out as if to suggest entire outfits. She’d taken some time choosing what to wear. On the floor an emerald green shirt of some fine material lay crumpled; it had clearly been worn. A pair of trousers; silk underwear. Also worn. Sandro stepped over them, wondering what Luisa would have said. Getting the picture.
A door in one corner stood ajar: the bathroom. Leaning in, Sandro flicked on another light; this one was lit like a star’s dressing room, soft light glowing round an antique mirror. A big marble bath like a Roman emperor’s, soft mottled green tiles that looked very subtly expensive. It seemed only recently fitted out and decorated, and Sandro remembered what Gallo had said, that previous Directors had not occupied these rooms. So she had appropriated the most beautiful rooms, and had them done out in her colours. Sparing no expense.
Set into the tiles in one discreet corner, Sandro eventually discerned what he was looking for: a bathroom cabinet. It yielded nothing that interested him very much: some painkillers with codeine, heavy-duty, but only one had been taken. A woman who didn’t fuss about with herbal remedies but went for the nuclear option, only sparingly. Had he been looking for contraceptive pills? Well, he found some. Fifty-five, but not yet menopausal then. And something he thought was HRT medication, so belt and braces, this was a woman still powered on her own hormones, but she wasn’t taking any chances. The last thing this woman wanted was a baby.
Stacks of expensive creams and lotions. What would she have done when the signs of getting older couldn’t be ignored or moisturized away any more? Plastic surgery, probably. Sandro compelled himself not to judge. Why shouldn’t she want to hang on to her looks? Feeling the woman’s presence around him like a warm, suffocating fog, he closed the cabinet door thoughtfully, and returned to the big bedroom. The dressing table held cosmetics and a small leather case of jewellery; it looked like the real deal, or most of it. Some pearls with a diamond clasp, a star-shaped diamond brooch, a ring with big sapphires, opals, garnets. A dark red lipstick lay unsheathed, worn down to a nub; her favourite shade. Luisa would enjoy this, wouldn’t she? Or perhaps it would upset her; perhaps one then the other. Sandro got out his mobile,
and dialled the number Luca Gallo had given him.
There had been no mobile phone in the plastic bag the orderly had handed him at the morgue. He had not found it at the river, on his hands and knees in the frosted grass as the light ebbed. Was it here, buried under the discarded clothes, in a drawer or a purse?
Would it still have charge, two days on? Plenty of phones would, these days. He raised it to his ear. It was ringing, somewhere. He lowered it again, covered it with his hand, and listened. Ringing somewhere, but not here.
If it was locked, overlooked, in a drawer at police headquarters in Pozzo Basso, would it be heard? Probably. Would they have turned it off? Probably; and yet this phone had not been turned off. Just as Sandro raised his own mobile to his ear again, the answerphone message came on, and he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck and the sound of that voice, speaking softly to him out of the past, completed the picture he had of the dead woman to perfection. He knew her scent, the precise colour of her eyes, even the shape of her neat body imprinted on those clothes left lying on the floor and the big gilded bed, and now her voice. No mechanical default message for Loni Meadows, no: she had to record her own, in two languages, breathy and sweet, her English perky, direct and intimate, the Italian lazily, seductively American. She would never have bothered to get it right, Loni Meadows would never have felt the need to camouflage herself among the locals.
She couldn’t get to the phone right now. As if she was talking to him, and only to him.
You’re falling in love with her, Sandro jeered at himself, in love with a dead woman, and not a nice one. Perhaps it was because the thought of Luisa smiling into another man’s eyes had not been out of his thoughts for forty-eight hours, but he had a sudden and startling image of one of those rooms full of old coats and broken crockery and dusty pictures that the unloved dead leave behind them, his hoard of forgotten and embarrassing emotions, among them, hopeless infatuation. He quickly clicked his mobile shut, terminating the call.
The bedside tables, matching walnut cabinets with delicate legs and each with a tiny drawer. Which side did she sleep on? Both, by
the look of it. Capricious, prone to self-love, sprawling across the bed. A book on one side, its spine cracked, a half-full water glass on the other. Sandro went to the cabinet with the water glass and pulled open the drawer and took out the silver blister pack of triangular pills he saw there, had expected to see there. Not always blue but all colours, these days, although these happened to be a light grey-blue, four gone, one of which he had glimpsed through the plastic of the evidence bag containing Loni Meadows’s possessions. Viagra.
There was a desk in a corner, and on it a small white machine he barely recognized as a laptop computer, so small and slender was it. Of course, she’d have a computer. It was open. Sandro stood there, contemplating it. Would she have left it open? He pressed the on button with a fingernail: the screen turned blue-green; he waited. Nothing, just the silent, blind glow. No request for a password. The feeling grew in Sandro that someone had tampered with this machine. If he had been in the force, with a whole department devoted to extracting information from computers – well, he wasn’t. Did this compact little assembly of plastic and circuits and silicon hold all her secrets? Probably not: machines had their limitations. Sandro knew he could put it in his bag and take it back to Florence for one of Mascarello’s technical contacts to take apart – but for the moment Sandro would have to go on without it. It was only a machine, after all, a modern shortcut to someone’s private life. There were other routes.
Footsteps were coming downstairs, from above him. Turning towards the sound Sandro saw that he had not quite closed the door behind him, which was stupid. Swiftly he crossed the room and gently eased it shut, hearing the person pass on down without pausing. He took one last look around the room, for now.
She had changed in a hurry. She had taken Viagra with her, and her mobile, because it wasn’t here. She had been going to meet her older lover.
In his own cramped maid’s quarters, Sandro checked his mail one last time, but there was nothing.
19.45; Luisa would have left work, surely? If they’d sent her home early, as they should have done after a long Saturday with a busy few days ahead of her, she might be turning her key in the apartment’s
lock right now. She might have been there for half an hour, sitting at the kitchen table, even supposing she didn’t see the note straight away – Sandro found himself grinding his teeth. Forget it. Below him the music was rising steadily, building to a point of no return.