And just as though she’d read Cate’s mind, Nicki said hurriedly, craning her neck to try and see where Sandro was, ‘Look, what we said – I don’t think Mauro – did anything to her, though. To the
Dottoressa?
Do you? I mean – I know he’s got the pick-up, and he knows the road, and all that. And he was out that day.’ She’d been thinking about this, Cate could tell. ‘But I don’t think he’s clever enough. Even sober.’
‘No,’ said Cate slowly, marvelling at how daft Nicki could sometimes seem, and then say something like that. But she had to say it, unwillingly. ‘But we don’t know – it might not have required anyone to be clever.’ She kept her voice low.
He might have just – run her off the road, was what she didn’t say. Chased her in his pick-up. Per couldn’t have watched her die – but Mauro? She could see Nicki shivering, arms folded tight across her body. Cate put out her own hands and rubbed the girl’s shoulders vigorously. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Now get inside, you’ll die of cold out here.’
Nicki didn’t move. ‘Not Mauro,’ she said, sounding like a stubborn child, knowing she was wrong but refusing to admit it. She took Cate by the sleeve, her thin fingers pinching through the fabric. ‘You be careful,’ she muttered, pulling her down and closer. Sounding frightened. ‘You just be careful.’
Then she ducked away abruptly, the door banged sharply behind her and Cate turned to see Sandro Cellini standing in the moonlight no more than a metre away.
‘Ready when you are,’ he said in the gruffly apologetic tone Cate was getting used to. She climbed in.
‘Now,’ he said, engaging the gear and leaning to look back over his shoulder as he reversed carefully out of the farmyard. ‘Was there something you wanted to tell me?’
Sandro watched Caterina go, as composed and calm when she got out of the car as when she got in. It had been a slow crawl back up the hill, the tyres grinding and crunching as the chains gripped, but an interesting one.
The twenty minutes the journey had taken had not in fact been enough; they’d sat side by side in the car after he’d turned off the engine and gone on talking.
Outside the snow had been beginning to drift down again; he had seen it settle on the roof of the stable block that housed the kitchen. A light on above it; Luca Gallo’s office, she’d said, and his room and bathroom; her own little apartment was accommodated further round in the same block. Servants’ quarters.
He’d listened to what she’d had to say, slotting it in alongside the information he already had.
Orfeo was what she’d wanted to tell him about first. That he had been Loni Meadows’s lover; ever circumspect, Sandro didn’t tell her he already knew, because there might be more. And there was. ‘She used to go and meet him. At the Hotel Liberty.’ Even in the dark he’d seen her blush. ‘My boyfriend knows someone who works there.’
‘So you’d have assumed that was where she was going?’ Wide-eyed, she’d shrugged.
‘Now? I guess. I didn’t know before. I think the others did.’
‘Guests, or staff?’
‘Both,’ she’d murmured. ‘Except – not Per.’
And that was a new piece of information. Per Hansen, whom Loni Meadows had charmed and flirted with until he fell in love with her and wanted to leave his wife.
‘And this man – was the last man to see her alive?’ His meaning had been unmistakable. The man he’d seen clinging to his wife like a lifebuoy.
She’d stared at him. Nodded slowly. ‘She got a message, Alec said. Just as they were leaving the table, and then she didn’t have any time for either of them. Alec went to bed. But – ’
‘But what?’
‘He couldn’t have – Per couldn’t have – ’and she’d stopped. She was clever enough to know there were things she didn’t know. ‘He’s a good man.’
‘Do you think he knew her,’ he’d asked gently. ‘Before he came here? Per?’
She’d shaken her head, bemused. ‘No. Why?’
‘And what about the others?’ he’d prompted. ‘The women? Did they – show any sign of having known her?’ Saving Fairhead until last.
‘I don’t know if they knew her, exactly,’ she’d said slowly. ‘I don’t think so. Michelle couldn’t stand her from the word go, though. Nor Tina. Tina, just because she was horrible about her work in her blog, some time last year.’
He’d interrupted. ‘When was that, exactly?’
She doesn’t create, she destroys, the email had said. Might an artist have written that? But Cate had scotched that one. ‘Last summer some
time? Not long ago.’
‘And the other one.’ Sandro had pursed his lips, remembering her: the most vivid and fierce of them, to him, with her wild hair, her aura of rage.
‘Michelle,’ Cate had said. ‘I don’t know why she hated Loni. Because they were so different, perhaps. Because she was a widow and Loni had all the men she wanted.’ She’d frowned. ‘It seemed more than that. She was protective of Tina too.’ She’d opened her mouth, then closed it again, as if she’d been going to say something else.
‘And Mr Fairhead?’ Almost casually.
‘Oh, yes,’ she’d said, as if this was what she’d been waiting to say. ‘Oh yes, he did.’
And another piece of the puzzle slotted into place. He wrote a book about her, said Caterina Giottone, with wonder. His book.
And then he had waited, letting her thoughts settle, before he asked, ‘Now tell me. Now tell me what happened, that last day.’
Of course, he had told her nothing himself; that wasn’t his job. Rather like being a shrink, if the TV dramas were to be believed; they talked, you listened. Although by the time she’d climbed out of the car and walked down the hill towards the bright square of light and the loud music, it had occurred to Sandro that he might take Caterina into his confidence, before too long. Too early, though, to tell her what Mascarello had said; he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant himself.
Mascarello had not wasted any words. Standing in the dark lee of the great building, wondering if Luca Gallo was still in earshot and frustrated by the realization that he had no idea which direction would lead him back around to the kitchen entrance, Sandro had the sense to remain silent while the man spoke; he’d made an effort to focus on what he said. At his back the rough wall had held a deep chill that seemed to transmit itself into his bones through his faithful old coat, designed only for the city’s mild chills.
‘I hope you’re busy,’ the lawyer had said drily. ‘I hope you’ve got down to work already, and that’s why you didn’t have time to call me back. I don’t suppose I have to tell you how much my time is worth?’
Grudgingly Sandro had found himself almost smiling. Even when hooked up to a dialysis machine, or whatever it was that he could hear humming like a butcher’s flytrap in the background, the man was unshakeably convinced of his own power to command. There were characters out there – and fleetingly, painfully Sandro thought that Luisa was one of them – immune to fear of their own mortality. And then there were the rest, like Sandro, pushing the fear like a stone uphill.
‘Yes,’ Sandro had said, as humbly as he could manage. ‘I was busy.’ There was a whistling exhalation and for a moment Sandro had thought it was the machine, before he’d understood that it was the air being expelled from Mascarello’s lungs.
‘All right,’ Mascarello had said hoarsely. ‘It’s unfortunate, but it has to be me – I don’t like delegating this matter. It’s enough that you should know; I don’t want the secretaries chewing it over, I don’t want this turned into gossip.’ And Mascarello probably knew more than most about how easily what one left on an answering machine or wrote in an email might be intercepted.
How did their marriage work, wondered Sandro, as he tried and failed to picture them side by side in the same bed, reading before turning out the light. But Mascarello had really loved her; he didn’t want her sullied.
‘No,’ he’d said.
‘Gallo’s safe enough,’ Mascarello had said, with a trace of contempt that extinguished the spark of fellow feeling Sandro had just begun to experience. ‘He won’t talk. A good servant, only promoted beyond his competence, as Loni would say. I expect he’s at his wits’ end.’ There’d been a pause. ‘And how are things, down there? That little nest of vipers, all squirming and wriggling, are they, with you in their midst?’
Sandro had wondered if the man was merely lonely and wanted to talk, improbable as it might seem. He could hardly ask him to get to the point.
‘Well,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve only been here a couple of hours. But everyone does seem a bit on edge.’
‘It’s an ugly old place, isn’t it?’ Mascarello had commented with rusty satisfaction. ‘Orfeo might style himself the great nobleman, but it’s hardly the Villa Borghese, is it?’
He knows
, Sandro had thought with awe as he registered the contempt in the old lawyer’s voice.
He’s known all along
. ‘You’ve been down here?’ he’d said.
‘Well, not since Loni took up residence, clearly. She likes – ’and he’d stopped, cleared his throat. ‘She liked. To spread her wings.’
‘He’s here,’ Sandro had said carefully. ‘The Count, I mean. Arrived just before me.’
‘Yes, I thought he might be.’ There’d been a pause. ‘There’s no need to spare my feelings, man. I can hear in your voice that you’ve managed to work it out. That that puffed up old fool Orfeo was her – her second string.’ He’d cleared his throat wetly. ‘Well done.’
‘Was that why you were calling?’ Sandro had asked. And Mascarello had let out a wheezing laugh that turned into another cough. Over the machine’s monotone Sandro had heard someone say something to the old lawyer, remonstrating.
‘I like your directness, Cellini,’ he’d said when the coughing eased. ‘Luca Gallo wasn’t sure about you himself, when he brought you to me; I wondered about that. But it doesn’t matter what he thought; what matters is that I’m sure.’ A pause, heavy with meaning. ‘Don’t disappoint me, though, will you?’
Sandro had said nothing; foolishly he had not considered what it would mean, working for a man like Giuliano Mascarello. If it went badly, well, he’d be pretty much finished. But even success wouldn’t be uncomplicated. Mascarello had a great deal of influence, if he lived long enough to exercise it, but Sandro wasn’t sure he wanted Mascarello as his patron. And almost as if Mascarello had read Sandro’s thoughts about his employer, he’d decided to get to the point.
‘All right,’ he’d said flatly. ‘Two pieces of information for you; that’s what you were waiting for?’
Looking around him in the inky dark, listening to the faint rustlings and creakings from the woods, ghostly under snow, Sandro had murmured assent.
‘The first, my team of technicians came up with. They got through the proxy server used to send the email and came up with an internet café in northern Paris, since closed down for failure adequately to monitor their clients.’ He sighed. ‘The anti-terrorism laws, you see. These days, anonymity is harder to come by.’
Sandro knew this; he had no doubt, however, that Paris, like Florence, had any number of unregulated backstreet internet shops. He’d spoken without any expectation. ‘So they don’t have a – a log, of any kind? CCTV? A record of customers?’
‘No. My technicians have the precise time, though, some cookedup email address, invented on the spot.’ A pause. ‘Sent 4.15am, 23 April, the week after the announcement of Loni’s appointment. The email address was [email protected].’
‘Just a moment,’ Sandro had said desperately, and heard Mascarello sigh. He’d scrabbled in his pocket for his notebook and pencil. Moved away from the wall and hurried towards some light further around the great mass of the castle; saw two figures downlit by a lantern light, in the porch of what must be the kitchen entrance. Laboriously he’d written it down.
Eduardog82. Sandro had been on a course long ago about internet crime and bank fraud and remembered being told how those trying to disguise themselves almost never succeeded; passwords and addresses and ciphers always contained something, some clue. What it came down to quite often was, people wanted to be identified; wanted their stamp on things. Particularly the mentally unstable.
‘Ready?’ Mascarello had asked, impatience creeping into his voice. Time was the one thing Mascarello couldn’t buy.
When he’d spoken again Mascarello’s voice was changed. Evasive, bluff. ‘And the other thing. Tiziano Scarpa.’
‘Right,’ Sandro had said warily, and the man had come into his mind with no effort at all, the bulky, energetic figure in his wheelchair, the bright, fierce eyes, the muscular shoulders. Ringleader of the artists’ mutiny. Pianist from whose strong fingers the music had flowed out and up and filled the vast ugly castle. ‘Scarpa. Yes. I’ve met him. In a wheelchair.’
‘Paraplegic,’ Mascarello had said brusquely. ‘Spinal-cord injury in the bombing of a station in Mestre in the late eighties, later attributed – wrongly – to the Red Brigade.’
‘Right,’ Sandro had replied, and the case sprang into his mind as fresh as it had been back then, when in Florence they’d all still been reeling from a bombing behind the Uffizi that had killed two
carabinieri
. He’d remembered how many deaths in Mestre – nine killed. The injured – well. There was less publicity surrounding the injured.