Luisa didn’t do email; he didn’t know why he’d felt that surge of mingled hope and dread as he’d pressed send and receive. Downstairs the last notes thundered out, there was a brief silence then a spattering of applause.
Time to meet the locals, thought Sandro.
‘Private investigator? Into the
Dottoressa’
s – accident? You knew that?’ Nicki wouldn’t show Cate her face, letting her hair hang down, but she nodded almost imperceptibly.
They were in the kitchen, hurriedly polishing glasses and cutlery and setting them on trays, because everything was behind schedule now.
Even as she said it, though, Cate realized that somehow it wasn’t as much of a surprise as it should have been. Even when they’d first seen him, from the brow of that hill, climbing out of his modest little car, there’d been something about Sandro Cellini. Something careful and meticulous. Tiziano and Alec Fairhead had seen it too, she’d known that by the way they fell silent in the dusk beside her.
‘Who told you?’
Nicki shrugged, looking truculent.
‘Ginevra?’
‘Actually, Mauro. Luca Gallo told him an investigator was coming, to put the wind up him, maybe.’
Cate took a step back and eyed Nicki more closely. ‘Because?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Nicki dully. ‘Mauro says Gallo wants to get him sacked, just like the
Dottoressa
did. Thinks it’s a big conspiracy, the whole thing.’
‘Really?’ She didn’t believe it.
‘Maybe he’s being paranoid about Luca,’ Nicki said, fiddling. She looked listless and uncomfortable, her skin even blotchier than usual
in the heat of the kitchen.
‘Nicki,’ said Cate, ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but you need to get out of this place. I don’t mean just move to Pozzo, I mean, far away. Living down there, your mum, Ginevra, Mauro – ’
‘You think so?’ said Nicki, frowning, as if the possibility hadn’t occurred to her. She eyed Cate. ‘Well,’ she said, in a burst of confidentiality, looking around as if she might be overheard, ‘the
Dottoressa
certainly didn’t like Mauro, even before – that morning. She gave him a written warning. She said if she caught him drunk again he’d be out; she even said she was going to get some kind of breathalyser.’
Cate recalled her recent trip into Pozzo to collect her things, Mauro sloping back from the bar with a flush and brandy on his breath. ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘she had a point, didn’t she?’
‘It’s his home,’ said Nicki simply. She came and stood beside Cate at the door. ‘This place is his life.’
Dangerous to turn a man out of his home. They stared at each other, both sensing that this was serious; the presence of Sandro Cellini in the castle confirmed that. Had she always wondered whether it had been an accident? Cate realized that she had; also that she, for one, was actually glad Cellini was here.
‘It’s snowing again,’ said Nicki, looking past her. Cate pulled the door open a little more and together they looked out. The snow was falling steadily under the arc of the wall light, thick and soft and silent. The bumpy surface of the back road was already carpeted with white, and the night seemed muffled.
‘Snowed in, are we?’ said Cate. ‘Does that ever happen?’
Nicki gave her a scornful look. ‘Once or twice a year. Mauro should be out there clearing the drive.’ Cate nodded, thinking. ‘He works hard,’ said Nicki, and she looked troubled.
‘I know,’ said Cate, and sighed.
They both took a step out; the air was clean and sharp and Cate felt the flakes falling soft as down on her upturned face, then cold and wet. She shook her head, feeling it in her hair, seeing it beginning to settle on the trees, on the hire car parked under them, the saddle of her own
motorino
. In the wider, deeper dark beyond the castle Cate even
thought she could see the glimmer of white on the hills around them. It suddenly seemed extraordinarily quiet.
‘The music’s stopped,’ said Nicki, but as they listened to the silence a distant shout went up from the other side of the castle, a kind of football cheer. ‘Are they coming for food?’ said Nicki, alarmed.
‘Quick,’ said Cate. ‘Come on.’ It must be eight, at least; how could she have lost track of time? The kitchen clock said half past.
But when they hurried in, loaded with dishes, the dining room was empty. Cate took off the cloths:
zucchini
filled with minced meat, cold rolled stuffed veal in slices, grilled aubergines with parsley and slippery red and yellow stewed peppers. The
crostini
she’d helped prepare herself, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
‘Where is everyone?’ said Nicki, but Cate could hear them in the corridor, coming across from the library down the awkward passageways. She met Tiziano in the doorway.
‘
Boicotta
,’ he said, triumphantly.
Behind him stood Per, his wife Yolanda clinging fiercely to his arm. Per looked determined, like a man whose only hope was to get as drunk as he could. Alec Fairhead brought up the rear; his face behind Yolanda’s shoulder was pinker, healthier, and he still had that look she’d seen on the stairs, of being surprised by happiness. Freed; or perhaps he was just drunk too.
Cate set her hands on her hips. ‘What do you mean, boycott?’ There was a gleam in Tiziano’s eye she didn’t recognize; of malice, of wildness, or rebellion. ‘What would you be boycotting?’
‘This place,’ said Tiziano.
She knelt, and still in Italian, so the others wouldn’t understand, she said, ‘You know, don’t you? About the detective.’
Tiziano nodded. ‘Luca told us,’ he said warily. ‘We were in the music room, before I played. Captive audience.’ She thought of the music that had poured out, after.
‘What – how did they take it?’
Tiziano put his head on one side. ‘Are you asking me to snitch?’ he said softly, using the word they’d have used in school. She smiled.
Tiziano pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Well, Per just said, what?
What? Like he’d lost his marbles. Tina looked petrified. Michelle started shouting at him that it was an outrage.’ He shot a glance over his shoulder at Alec Fairhead. ‘The Englishman – well. I thought he was going to burst into tears at first but then he seemed – you know. All English. Stoical: resigned, like he was facing a firing squad.’ They both looked now at Per Hansen and Alec Fairhead behind them, the former beginning to frown.
‘
Tuttavia
,’ said Tiziano loudly, and again, in English. ‘Anyway. We’ve come to tell you, we’re not eating. Or at least, not in here.’ He reached out for a tray of stuffed
zucchini
and set it on his knee.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alec Fairhead, his voice slurring. ‘We’re sorry, Miss Giottone, Cate. We don’t mean it personally.’ He was still being polite, but his hair was untidy, and Cate could see the tie he always wore stuffed into his jacket pocket. ‘The girls are having a party.’
‘Girls?’ Cate couldn’t imagine who he meant.
‘Michelle and Tina,’ said Tiziano. ‘Michelle’s place.’
‘Is there any booze left in the library?’ Cate asked crossly. ‘Have you drunk it all?’
‘The music did it,’ said Per, his face comically solemn as he gazed down at Tiziano. ‘All his fault, the fault of the musical genius. A Bacchanal, I think it is called. A breakout from prison.’
Tiziano set his muscled forearms on the wheelchair’s armrests; he looked like a warrior; he was certainly the ringleader and perhaps the only one sober. ‘We don’t like this private investigator business,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it was part of the deal. Not conducive to artistry.’
‘No,’ said Fairhead, his face wilder. ‘Not in the contract, being suspected of murder.’
‘We do not co-operate,’ added Per. At his side Yolanda looked up at him, her eyes shining.
It was funny, thought Cate, looking at them, that having spent six weeks avoiding each other like nervous cats, these artists were now united. By Loni’s death. She took a step back, hands up. ‘Look, that’s nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘I’m just the kitchen slave.’
‘We know,’ said Tiziano impatiently, and Cate bit her lip. He gave her a sharp look and for a moment she thought he was going to say something to soften it, but instead he put his broad hands down and
spun the wheels, turning away in a tight circle.
Obediently the others followed, Alec Fairhead only pausing, hovering a moment on the way back out into the corridor. ‘Sorry, Caterina,’ he murmured again, and she heard the slight slurring in his voice. ‘You see how it is.’ He frowned, seemed to brighten. ‘You could come too, you know. We’d like you to – at least – ’ Cate was aware of Nicki listening avidly at her shoulder. ‘At least, I would.’ Only then he clamped his mouth shut as if regretting what he’d said, and hurried off after the others.
‘I’m going to call Beth now,’ Cate heard herself say to Nicki. And perhaps they heard that too, only she closed the dining room door on them.
G
IULIETTA SARTO HAD NEVER been in a house like this. She had to make herself move coolly through the wide white corridors, from one big pale, glass-walled room to another, making herself invisible as she passed among them, as if she’d been doing this all her life, but inside she was rooted to the spot, eyes on stalks.
It had been easy. Or if not exactly easy, then a hell of a lot less of a nightmare than she’d expected. In fact Giuli was resentful, almost angry, that it had been so easy, and found herself wondering why she’d spent her life expecting to be refused entrance to almost anywhere. She knew it was only the dope that had made the boy she attached herself to turn and give her a smile as he preceded her through the gate and inside the Orfeo villa’s magic circle. They were all stoned on one thing or another, and full of the milk of human kindness; she hadn’t even needed to hand her own stash around. The little fraternity of dope heads; dope the great leveller – well, up to a point. Giuli wasn’t the only older person present – she spotted a guy with long white hair and earrings who ran a club in a
fondo
behind Santo Spirito, holding court on a big leather sofa – but she wasn’t under any illusions that if she didn’t watch herself, she’d be out on her ear. Because after brotherly love came paranoia, in the big warm wonderful world of drugs.
Carlotta had left the house at seven. At a discreet distance Giuli had followed, knowing roughly from Sandro where Carlotta would be headed. It didn’t occur to her to doubt Sandro, and of course he’d been right.
High on the southern hills of Arcetri overlooking the glittering city, on a silent, narrow street whose long, clean-plastered walls indicated a garden bigger than most parks, the high flank of a villa built on a grand scale had loomed, and up ahead of Giuli, Carlotta had slowed. Giuli had promptly killed the engine of her own
motorino
, then placed the machine carefully against the wall and lit a cigarette. There was a bend in the road here, and if she leaned forward a fraction she could see what was going on, keeping herself in the shadow of a big evergreen overhanging the wall. It was very very cold, and still, the pavement glinting with frost; snow, she’d have said, only it never snowed in the city.
Carlotta had stopped by a gate further along the wall and had soon wheeled her little pink Vespa through it, leaving Giuli on the outside, with the night sky and the sparkling carpet of the city spread out below them.
Every ten minutes or so for the hour Giuli had stood there, feeling her toes turn numb, more visitors had turned up, singly, now and again, but more often in groups of five or more, chattering, laughing, oblivious to Giuli leaning in the drive opposite, on her third cigarette. Biding her time, watching what happened when Alberto Orfeo’s dad was away. She’d found herself thinking of Sandro, down there in the Maremma in that big ugly castle in the dark. Leafing through the pages he’d given her, it had seemed to her a funny sort of set-up for the ‘guests’. No TV, no boyfriends, no one you knew, stuck in the middle of nowhere without a car; sounded an awful lot like rehab to Giuli.
At least Sandro would have a car.
Giuli’s phone had rung; glancing around, grateful that for the moment she was alone in the street, she’d wrestled it out of her buttoned pocket: it would be Sandro. ‘Yes?’ she’d hissed, not bothering to look at the caller’s identity.
‘Giuli?’
It hadn’t been Sandro. Giuli’s heart had lurched; shit. Why had she felt guilty? Like being back in school, called out as the dunce.
‘Luisa,’ she’d said, faltering, straightening instinctively out of the half-crouch she’d adopted. ‘How are you?’ Stupidly formal; she’d given the game away already.
‘So you know about this – idiotic game, do you?’ As usual, Luisa had cut straight to the chase.
‘Game? What game?’
‘Giuli,’ Luisa had said, warning her. ‘Don’t bother. You know where Sandro’s gone, don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And why are you whispering?’
‘I’m working,’ Giuli had said, raising her whisper to a mutter. ‘Following the girl. Carlotta Bellagamba.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Luisa had said, her voice steely with scorn. ‘That girl he was getting all fatherly over. And where’s he? In some hotel somewhere while you do the legwork, trying to teach me some kind of lesson? Staying with Pietro?’
‘What? No, no,’ Giuli had replied urgently, forgetting herself, looking round to see if anyone would have heard. The street was empty for the moment. ‘He’s gone down to the Maremma, on a new job. Really.’ She’d paused, listening to the silence. ‘Luisa?’
‘All right,’ Luisa had said wearily, and Giuli had felt a prickle of anxiety at the defeat in her voice when she’d continued. ‘So you’re not going to tell me.’
‘OK,’ Giuli had said, ‘I’ve told you the truth, he’s down in the Maremma.’ No response from Luisa. ‘Look, he said, he was – upset, yes. About you going away, not telling him till it was too late. He’s worried he’s going to lose you.’ Should she even mention Frollini, the old lizard? She’d decided not to.
‘He’s an idiot. Lose me? I should think he
is
worried, behaving like this.’
Her voice had been ragged with anger; Giuli had tried to work out what it meant. Even though she’d steered clear of men since rehab, she knew well enough what it was like when a relationship ended. Things
you might have accepted for years suddenly you couldn’t tolerate any more, and there was no going back. You let yourself hate someone, and it’s finished.
She’d taken a step into the street, looking out over the frosted city, the black skeletons of trees in the villa’s garden motionless in the icy, windless night. Luisa was down there, alone in the cold flat with her suitcases and her plane ticket.
‘When do you leave?’ she’d asked, cautiously. ‘Monday morning, is it?’
‘He’s told you all about it, has he? It’s a business trip; someone dropped out. It’s a big opportunity.’
Had there been a splinter of defensiveness there?
‘I’ll come over tomorrow,’ Giuli had said. Silence again. ‘Please?’
‘I’ll be busy. Packing.’
‘I’ll help.’ And this time she had to take Luisa’s silence as agreement. ‘I’ll come at eleven. I’ll bring
pasticcini
.’
Pasticcini
, the little cakes you brought when you visited your loved ones on a Sunday. Giuli had spent a few months in a halfway house after she’d been let out of psychiatric hospital. And every Sunday morning she’d call in on Luisa and Sandro – this odd couple who were better parents to her than her real ones had ever been – but only after stopping at the
pasticceria
in the Viale Europa.
It had been a shameless, sentimental appeal on Giuli’s part, but it might have won her a chance to talk over this stupid business. Luisa’s response had been to let out a sound of exasperation, one Giuli had had no choice but to take as assent.
‘Luisa?’ But she’d hung up.
Now, after close to an hour inside, Giuli still hadn’t spotted Carlotta, and she was starving. There was a dining room with a long table laid out with stacks of takeaway pizza boxes, and she pulled herself off a couple of slices. There were two crates of beer and some half-full bottles of champagne warming on the table; a couple was lying under it, kissing. She moved back into the room with the leather sofas where the man who ran the nightclub now had a girl thirty years younger than him nestling under his arm. Who cleared all this stuff up, in time for the old man’s return?
When a burst of laughter followed her as she passed a little group sitting cross-legged and rolling joints behind a sofa, Giuli decided it was time to lower her profile. She went outside, into the garden.
Behind her someone put some music on, loud R&B, and the lights went out; for a paranoid moment Giuli wondered if they’d been waiting for her to leave. She moved away from the noise to the end of one wing of the big house and stood there and let her eyes adjust. It was dark, but the garden was not quite empty – she could hear murmured voices, some way off. There was a sloping lawn, with flowerbeds and a big, closely trimmed hedge beyond it. Giuli listened. Got out the dope, some papers, broke up one of her cheap state cigarettes into dry tobacco and began to roll a joint. Not for her; this was camouflage, or perhaps a lure. It felt strange, though, going through the motions after all this time. Not good.
Someone appeared beside her, and she handed the joint to him; it was the boy who’d let her in.
‘Do I know you?’ he said with mild interest as he lit up. She weighed him up in the dark.
‘No,’ she said kindly.
‘Didn’t think so,’ he said, dragging deeply, and despite herself Giuli sighed. ‘What?’ the boy asked sleepily.
‘You ever tell yourself you’re going to give it up?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’ He straightened up, uncertain as to whether she was going to call his parents, or something. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t mind me.’ He’d think he dreamt her, in the morning. She hesitated. ‘You seen Alberto or Carlotta anywhere?’ By the glow of the cigarette’s tip, she saw his lazy eyes examining her without curiosity, nose wrinkling at the taste of the cheap tobacco; perhaps he wasn’t one of her kind, after all. He nodded across the sloping lawn, then turned away, back towards the music.
For a while, Giuli didn’t move, then she walked calmly in a diagonal across the grass, between flowerbeds, to an arched gap in the hedge. There was a light source somewhere, discreet, bluish, low down among the greenery; she heard people talking somewhere off
to her left, in murmured voices. She edged closer. ‘Berto,’ she heard a voice whisper. Was that Carlotta? When the boy spoke she thought it was him, for sure.
‘Come here,’ he said hoarsely.
The conversation wasn’t exactly a conversation. Pet names, laughter, mumbled kissing. Then the girl said petulantly, ‘What about next week?’
Then they were making an arrangement to meet. ‘Not this week, don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It’s too much. Look at this lot; no chance of being alone.’ He sounded sulky, eager, tender. Perhaps he was serious about her, after all. ‘And besides, the old man – I don’t know what his plans are now. Something’s happened down there, that’s why he’s away tonight. He said there’d been an accident.’
‘An accident?’ She sounded querulous, haughty. ‘What kind of accident?’
Her voice wasn’t right, thought Giuli as Alberto mumbled a response, ‘Dunno,
cara
. Nothing to do with him, anyway,’ and then they moved and the girl was in view, and it wasn’t Carlotta. Alberto had his face in her neck and she was pulling away, looking down her long nose between wings of straight blonde hair.
An accident.
Giuli took a step back, trying to think, suddenly not wanting to be a witness, looking back through the arch towards the bright windows of the villa and thinking, Carlotta mustn’t see this. Then there was Carlotta, walking towards her. Towards them.
Giuli’s first impulse was to deflect the girl, moving towards her with hands outstretched and a smile fixed on her face, although what she thought she was going to say she didn’t know. Then she took in Carlotta’s stiff-legged walk, her clenched fists, and, as she came closer and Giuli saw the gleam of tears as the other girl brushed past without even registering her, she thought,
Well
,
she knows.
Too late. Giuli stood aside, and behind her all hell broke loose.
Didn’t she have to find out at some point that Alberto wasn’t her sort? Wasn’t it better this way? But Giuli knew it never felt better at the time, and she could hear the tears in Carlotta’s voice as she raged. She backed into the shadows, turned and ran inside. As she did so,
someone flung open a window at all the noise – they really were like cats squalling – and hooted derisively.
It wasn’t heaven in the house, after all. As Giuli slipped unnoticed past the leather sofas and the champagne and the handsome young people watching themselves in every reflective surface, she could only see the pieces of congealing pizza stuck to their boxes and a cigarette burn in the cream carpet. She picked her way back through the rooms, out of the side door to the gate where she’d got in, and waited.
It took forty minutes, but Carlotta came, in the end, hair flying, eyes streaked, jacket ripped, banging the gate behind her. She looked as if she’d given as good as she got.
Giuli set off after the pink Vespa at a discreet distance, although perhaps not discreet enough; waiting at a light apparently stuck at red on the Via Senese, Carlotta turned and looked at Giuli over her shoulder, as if in acknowledgement, and something like recognition dawned in her eyes. For a long moment they held each other’s gaze. They were level with a shabby all-night bar Giuli knew, its original, silvered sign from the thirties still in place. Old men were standing at the counter, talking sociably, and the glow from the place suddenly looked welcoming.
The light stayed red. Carlotta’s head turned to follow Giuli’s gaze. Giuli set down her feet and pulled off her helmet.
‘Who are you?’ asked Carlotta.