Dad has girlfriend somewhere down that way. Carlotta says party tonight because he was called away suddenly tonight accident, better call later maybe. All fine Carlotta fine, home safe.
OK. Sandro looked up and saw the wariness in Orfeo’s face, returned it with a broad smile.
‘Look, I’m so sorry,’ he said with elaborately false courtesy, ‘but I have a message to call the
Avvocato
. And as he is my employer, to me at least he is powerful.’
Orfeo frowned down at the mobile Sandro held up, as though it reminded him now of something faintly disturbing. Sandro put it away. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘if you will excuse me?’
As though galvanized by the lawyer’s name, Luca was suddenly at Orfeo’s side. ‘Yes, that would be fine,’ he said, and Sandro heard the relief in his voice. ‘We’ll – ah – ’, he looked at the door through which the guests had disappeared, then went on nervously, ‘we’ll just let the guests – we’ll let them – ’, he took a breath, ’ – In a moment or so we shall make our way to the dining room.’ And to Sandro, with a look that pleaded for understanding, ‘In your own time, then?’
In the music room Sandro paused, reached again for his mobile, checking for a signal, then looked back over his shoulder into the dim cold cavernous library.
‘Another
aperitivo?
’ Gallo was saying, as Orfeo pulled his arm rudely away to look back over his shoulder at Sandro, standing there by the piano with his phone poised in his hand.
‘And that’s another thing,’ he heard Orfeo mutter, ‘the blasted phone. Didn’t I tell you? You were supposed to – ’ and turned abruptly back, so that whatever else he said was swallowed up.
Sandro stood a moment, thinking; staring at the blinking mobile screen that told him no signal. Thinking about what Orfeo had just said.
He took the stairs three at a bound. Closed the door behind him and crossed to the long window, knitting his brow as he stared at his own phone, still thinking. He heard a tiny sound from outside and looked up from the phone and out of the still unshuttered window to where a figure below him paced up and down on the half-circle of drive.
Here there was a signal. He dialled Mascarello’s number; it rang. And rang. Damn, he thought, nearly nine. Giuliano Mascarello, he guessed, had a thing about time-keeping. Just as he was about to give up, a woman’s voice answered brusquely, ‘Yes?’
He asked for Mascarello. In the background he thought he could hear something, a mechanical hissing, hushed voices. ‘Avvocato Mascarello is undergoing his dialysis treatment,’ said the woman’s voice coldly.
‘Ah – he called me,’ said Sandro humbly. ‘Sandro Cellini.’
Muffled voices, and when she came back on the line the woman’s tone was fractionally less chilly. ‘Call again at ten,’ she said, and hung up.
All right, thought Sandro, looking down at the lit semicircle of snowy gravel below him. Get things straight. There’s the sender of the email, and there’s Orfeo. Orfeo her lover, whom she was going to meet. Only he was in Florence.
The figure below stopped, tilted her face and he saw her profile. It was Caterina, shoulders hunched in the cold as she traced and retraced her steps across the ground, and for some reason the sight of her made him feel better. Putting his face to the glass Sandro could hear the crunch of her feet in the snow and the sound of her voice, speaking urgently into her own
telefonino
. And then she looked up, and Sandro stepped away from the window.
Orfeo. Is he guilty of something? Yes.
He took a moment, before going down again.
T
HE PHONE HAD RUNG long and hollow on the other side of the world, Westport, Connecticut. Cate, leaning against the stove in the hot kitchen with Nicki eyeing her nervously from the door into the dining room, imagined a great white clapboard house like the ones on TV, with a lawn, gleaming boards in a spacious hall, but the longer it rang the more she quailed at the thought of breaking the news to Beth, and when the voice answered, breezy and confident, for a moment she thought with relief, wrong number. Because it sounded nothing like querulous, unhappy Beth who had moped around the corridors and had a constant migraine.
But it was her. ‘Speaking,’ Beth sang, when Cate asked for her by name, apologetically, ready to hang up.
‘It’s Caterina? From the Castello Orfeo? From the Trust.’ The snow had eased, only a few dusty flakes whirling down now, but the cold almost took her breath away, and the beautiful, silent whiteness of it all. The trees seemed closer, denser, layered with snow and motionless. Over her head the white was beginning to settle in the crevices of the massive façade.
‘Oh.’ Bemused, and a little flat now, Beth was wary. ‘Caterina. Hey. How’re you guys doing?’
‘Beth, um, OK – listen.’ And now Cate found she didn’t know quite how to say it; thought of how she would sound over there, in the bright American day, in the great white house she imagined, with its green sloping lawn. ‘There’s um – there’s some bad news.’
As she went on, Cate heard Beth swallow, then heard a ragged, incoherent sob and she imagined all that American bright peace fractured. ‘Loni. Who – how did – ’ Beth stopped, seemed to collect herself. ‘You said it was an accident?’ Now she sounded disbelieving. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes,’ said Cate slowly. ‘In her car. Why do you ask that? Beth?’
‘She always drove too fast,’ said Beth uncertainly, and Cate blinked, hearing the words she’d repeated to herself when Luca had told them, hearing the tears in the girl’s voice.
‘She did, you’re right. That’s just what I said.’ But even as she spoke Cate thought with dull fear that she didn’t believe it.
And as if to confirm her thought Beth said, ‘They’re sure, are they?’ Sounding just like the timid, nervous Beth the castle had made of her.
Cate spoke carefully. ‘Listen to me, Beth. Do you think anyone might have wanted to – hurt her?’
‘Hurt her?’ And Beth let out a small, sad, bitter little laugh. ‘She wasn’t afraid of making people angry, was she? Even the ones who loved her. Especially them.’
Cate was silent a moment. ‘The ones that loved her. Like – um – like who?’
‘I know what you’re trying to get at,’ Beth burst out. ‘Like who? OK, like me. She knew I was – she knew I was gay. She messed me around. That’s why I left, OK? That’s why. She let me fall in love with her. She had me up in her room, on her bed, sitting in her bed, gossiping while she got dressed, telling me stuff. Intimate stuff. Letting me think – ’
‘No, Beth,’ said Cate urgently, ‘I didn’t want to – to pry, that’s not what I meant. I know this is nothing to do with you.’
There was a hoarse sob and then silence, and Cate heard the mother’s voice, whispering, anxious. Cate heard Beth collect herself. ‘Five minutes, Mom, OK?’
Cate waited a full minute before beginning again.
‘There’s a private investigator here,’ she said, trying to sound reasonable and logical and comforting this time. ‘Seems like a good guy.’ It was her turn to hesitate, then she spoke slowly. ‘Loni’s husband doesn’t want to believe it was an accident.’
She didn’t die immediately, you know.
For a perverse moment Cate wanted to share this awful fact with Beth, to tell her how bitter the cold had been that night, tell her about the green silk blouse on the floor of Loni’s bedroom, but she stopped herself.
Instead she asked again, calmly, gently, ‘Is there anything – or anyone – you know about that might help him? In the investigation?’
‘Anyone,’ repeated Beth, sounding traumatized.
‘Beth,’ said Cate, ‘Per had written to his wife telling her he wanted a divorce, because he’d fallen in love with another woman. What other woman could it be? You? Me? Tina Kreutz?’
‘Per?’ Beth was blankly incredulous. ‘No way. I mean, she did her thing with him. Flirted – ’ She broke off, and when she spoke again it was with dull understanding. ‘Well, I guess she might have done the same job on him as she did on me. Kind of – led him on.’
‘Only Per wouldn’t take no for an answer?’
A sharp intake of breath. ‘You think he – you seriously think Per would hurt her?’
‘No,’ said Cate without stopping to think. ‘Yes. Well, in the heat of the moment, maybe. But this wasn’t – ’
Unless he was in the car with her? Cate didn’t believe that. Even if Fairhead hadn’t heard him come up to bed, if Per had left the castle with her, if he’d struck her, wrestled with her, driven them into a tree – the whole scenario unspooled itself, horribly vivid. But he wouldn’t have left her to die there, in the dark. He would have wept, tried to resuscitate her. Called an ambulance, given himself up to the police. He wouldn’t have let her die.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he would.’ There was a silence. ‘So he wasn’t actually her lover, as far as you know?’ Another silence. ‘Those nights when she left the castle late at night, that wasn’t with Per? When she took the car and went into Pozzo?’
‘Oh.’ Beth spoke warily now. ‘So you knew about that.’
‘Everyone knew,’ said Cate apologetically. ‘Even Mauro knew. Though, I don’t think he knew who she was going to.’
Beth spoke. ‘She told me I was the only one. I mustn’t tell a soul.’ A pause, then thoughtfully. ‘She told me about all her lovers. Bet Mauro didn’t know about the English guy, either, did he?’
Cate stopped stock still. ‘English guy? Alec Fairhead?’
‘Loni said when he turned up with Mauro at the beginning of the retreat, last to arrive, she could see it all over his face. That he hadn’t forgotten her, whatever he might say.’
‘Forgotten her?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ said Beth. ‘Years. She was – triumphant about it. He wrote that book about her, so she said, his only book was about her. About them. And when he turned up she said he hadn’t seen her in years, but he still wanted her.’
Did he? Had he? Cate tried to process this, tried to stop herself actually hating Loni Meadows. ‘He did say he’d known her, way back,’ she said slowly. ‘When – when we got the news. When we heard she was dead.’
Alec Fairhead’s haunted face, in the library. Cate took an involuntary step back from the great stone wall of the castle and paced across to the trees, arms wrapped tight around herself against the cold, to the beginning of the rough road that sloped past the laundry to Michelle’s. ‘Yeah,’ said Beth, ‘well, at least he admitted it.’
‘Yes.’ Cate realized that she didn’t want Alec Fairhead to be a bad guy. ‘You don’t think she – started it up again?’
Through the trees she could see the light shed from Michelle’s apartment through the big wall of glass, an elongated rectangle of dazzling white cast across the snow; she could feel the icy wet seep up from the hem of her jeans. Felt the impulse to go down there and spy on them, only poor Nicki trembling in the kitchen stopped her. She turned around and walked without thinking back towards the castle, skirting the grass to the front, where she stopped.
Over there, in the dark. She looked down the straight avenue of cypresses, swallowed up in the night, weighted with snow, behind her the great looming bulk of the castle’s front elevation.
‘Start something up with Fairhead? No way.’ Beth was speaking. She sounded pretty sure; almost cheerful. ‘She thought he was a loser. No way. She even said it. Like a dog returning to its own vomit.’
‘Right.’ What a horrible expression, thought Cate. And for some reason Vincenzo came into her head. What, she asked herself in a brief moment of distracted clarity, am I doing with him? Poor Vincenz.
It came to her that these were delaying tactics. ‘So you’re not going to tell me?’ A light came on in the façade, and for a wild moment Cate thought it was in Loni’s room and that she had come back to stop her secrets being spilled. The stocky outline of a man stood in the window, looking down: Sandro Cellini. Not in Loni’s room but in Beth’s, the room next door.
‘I don’t know.’ Beth sounded frightened. ‘She was so – obsessive, about people not knowing. She liked it that no one could ever guess, from how they were with each other. It was a – kind of a game, for her. Her secret life. That’s why they met somewhere else, out of the castle. Sure, he was old, that didn’t seem to bother her, though. She wasn’t in it for love. And she got such a kick out of it. He’d come up for lunches, give his spiel and she’d wave him off back to Florence.’
‘Back to Florence?’
Him?
‘Hey, listen,’ Cate said with alarm, knowing that the man was right there, lording it in the music room, that she’d be serving him his dinner the minute this call was over. The growing realization that Beth was right; of course it would be him. Loni Meadows had simply gone to the top. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Totally I’m sure.’ Now it was Beth’s turn to be patient. ‘It was him, the lord and master. Niccolò Orfeo, of course. She wanted to be queen of the castle, didn’t she?’
Queen of the castle. And Cate stared up at the window where Sandro Cellini had stood, until eventually Beth’s voice came back at her.
Caterina? Are you still there?
The dining room in which they sat, like a parody of an old titled family, was nothing like as grand as the library: housed in some kind of extension, low-ceilinged, ill-lit, with dull, institutional furnishings.
Sandro caught Orfeo looking around himself with disdain, as if disowning the modern addition and all it represented; Sandro supposed it had been part of the deal to accommodate the guests. Health and hygiene regulations, perhaps, and Orfeo didn’t like to be reminded that this was no longer entirely his home.
Sandro bided his time for a bit; they ate in silence. He could see Luca Gallo eyeing him nervously from the far side of the oval table. They were waited upon by the sallow, shy girl; Nicki, Gallo said, introducing them. He’d hoped for Caterina but she spent most of the time in the kitchen, only appearing at the door with clean dishes for Nicki, darting him a glance. At one point he heard her phone ring in there, heard her talk in muttered tones. He supposed that wouldn’t usually have been allowed, but there was altogether something ersatz about the formality of the set-up, the table hastily laid at Orfeo’s imperious insistence even though it was the cook’s night off. Eventually, aware that he had to call Mascarello back at ten, Sandro addressed Orfeo.
‘You were in Florence?’ he said. ‘That night?’ And the old man looked at him from under heavy brows, his tanned face threatening outrage.
It seemed as good a way as any to broach the subject. Of course, he knew Orfeo had been in Florence on Thursday night because he had seen him drop his son off at school at eight o’clock that morning. Or did he? Under two hours to the castle, in a fast car. But it was the flaw, the thing that held Sandro back from making an outright accusation; it was the thing that didn’t make sense.
She died on her way to meet her lover. Orfeo was her lover, ergo he must have set out to meet her. But he had been in Florence at around eight the morning after she died and fresh as a daisy. Sandro didn’t know how they made their arrangements to meet, but he assumed it would be by phone. And where was her phone?
‘What do you mean?’ said Orfeo menacingly, knife and fork poised. Luca Gallo made a sound of protest, but no one looked at him.
Take it slowly, Sandro told himself: make sure you’re sure. ‘Just asking,’ he said blithely, taking a bite of the rolled veal. Cold, but
good. He pushed away the thought of Luisa, and her dishes in the freezer. ‘The weather was bitter, wasn’t it? Not a night to be on the road.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Gallo, ‘Count Orfeo never comes up at night; anyway, certainly not during the winter.’ He looked across at the man hopefully, trying to please. Orfeo eyed him narrowly but only grunted.
‘Road’s terrible,’ he said dismissively. ‘I suppose she was driving too fast.’ He forked a mouthful of stuffed
zucchini
into his mouth and chewed.
Unable to detect even a trace of regret in the man’s voice, Sandro felt himself seethe with frustration and dislike. How had it worked? Had they merely made use of each other? Was there not even affection? Or was this all in his mind?
Something sprang into Sandro’s head. ‘I – ah – encountered your son, the other week,’ he said, on impulse, holding a smile as he willed Orfeo to look up from his plate. Not a nice impulse; a desire to upset. ‘I’m based in Florence, you see.’
‘Really?’ Orfeo’s voice was scornful, but he looked up sharply. Barked a laugh. ‘Can’t imagine that.’ He turned to Luca Gallo and said, ‘What about cheese?’
‘A job,’ said Sandro, knowing this was thin ice, where client confidentiality was concerned. ‘Following a girl whose parents were worried she’d got in with the wrong crowd.’ He’d phone Giuli, he decided. After Mascarello.