‘Her phone?’ And for a moment Sandro didn’t understand what he saw in Orfeo’s bloodshot eyes, heard in his strained voice.
‘That phone could have evidence on it,’ Sandro said. ‘It would reveal who texted her that night. She might – she might,’ and he cast about for what she might have done. Climbing out of the car, dazed. ‘She might have tried to phone the emergency services. Stumbled about, looking for a signal.’
Orfeo’s eyes widened. ‘No,’ he said blankly. ‘No.’ Did Orfeo really not know what he was talking about? ‘I don’t have her phone. I didn’t come looking for her phone – I simply – ’ He stopped, and started again. ‘I needed to know what had happened. I didn’t understand – I know the
Soprintendente
, I simply asked – as a friend – ’He took a breath. ‘It placed me in a difficult situation.’
At least he wasn’t trying to fake emotion, to pretend he wanted to see her, one final time.
Sandro made a last-ditch attempt. ‘You said to Luca Gallo. The phone, you said.’
Orfeo drew himself up, looked down his patrician nose, beaked like a Roman senator’s. ‘Not her phone,’ he said with a hint of the old impatience. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. No. Not hers. My
telefonino
. My phone.’
Sandro stared at him; he felt Orfeo gather strength from his silence.
‘I left it behind here, in the library, or somewhere – I don’t know.’ The man spoke with disdain. ‘The last time I was in the house, Sunday? I – I – this is my house. I assumed I would pick it up on my return. I have another phone, in any case, I only used it for – to – ’
He was lying; he had to be. A cover-up, an absurd, desperate attempt to escape the truth. The only problem was, Orfeo was telling the truth; Sandro could hear it, see it.
He only used the phone to contact Loni Meadows, and she was only his mistress, good in bed, a younger woman, his social inferior, whose clothes he had shoved into the bottom of the wardrobe now she was dead. What did it matter? Orfeo had some vague idea now that it might involve him in – unpleasantness, that was all he cared about.
Everything about the look he turned on Sandro said to him, you will never understand our sort. We have different desires, we have different requirements, we live in a bigger, bolder world. Damn him, thought Sandro, damn him and Frollini, because the two of them were one and the same; damn them for taking what they wanted and escaping the consequences.
He didn’t kill her: he was too stupid, too lazy, too self-absorbed; he had too many options. She might have grown troublesome, demanding, although Sandro couldn’t see it; she might have wanted to become his
Contessa
. But Orfeo would merely have brushed her off, as he had to Sandro and Luca. And he had not been here on the Thursday night; he had been in Florence with his spoiled brat of a son.
Damn it. Sandro’s head ached with the implications.
‘You have no morals,’ he said calmly. ‘You have no conscience. The woman is dead.’
And Orfeo said nothing. Just slowly opened the door and waited until, eventually, Sandro couldn’t stand the sight of him any longer, and went.
Sandro was not in the habit of taking his blood pressure, nor his pulse, but it took at least half an hour in the small room next door to Niccolò Orfeo’s palatial apartments, painstakingly noting everything he knew and thought and had been told by Caterina Giottone and Luca Gallo into a new document, before he felt his body return to normal.
Might this be what killed him, one day? This unreasonable sensitivity to every slight, since he had left the force, his keen ear for an insult, his frustration. Had it always been there, this anger, boiling under the surface? Or had it built up, as the country filled up with fastfood restaurants and toxic garbage dumps, as its children were found overdosed on veterinary tranquillizers and its politicians slept with underage prostitutes? The rage that had come out of nowhere, just at the thought of Luisa sitting in a restaurant with another man. At this rate one day he might simply burst like a geyser, and no sooner had Sandro had that thought than it was followed by another, that he did not want to die without Luisa. That he simply would not be able to live without her.
He might not be able to live without Luisa, but he could not call her. Too late, he told himself. She’ll be asleep, we’ll have another row, it’ll make things worse.
In his shirtsleeves, unshaven, Sandro sat at the desk prepared for him by Caterina. He put his notes beside the computer, pressed the button on the machine and booted it into life. He set a hand flat on either side as he contemplated the lists Giuli had made for him, the where and when, which eventually, if he looked hard enough, would tell him why. He made a note. Then another.
About forty minutes later he reopened the email programme and started a message to Giuli, thinking he’d just jot down a few things, paste in the document he’d already begun, only forty minutes later Sandro was still at it. Rambling now, he said to himself, signed off hurriedly and pressed send.
He took the slender book of Alec Fairhead’s from his pocket, and began to read.
In the flat she’d shared with Sandro for more than thirty years with barely a night apart – but for one notable exception, even if it was three in the morning and he smelled of the morgue, cigarette smoke and disinfectant, he’d still come home and slide into that bed beside her – Luisa sat on her big bed and listened to the sounds of the city.
The Via dei Macci was never going to be peaceful; it lay on the most direct route between the crowds of Piazza Santa Croce and the hawkers and haggling women of the Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio. They’d talked about it when they’d first taken up the lease, as newlyweds, how it might be too noisy, but just around the corner was the market, the statue of Dante grim as death, the perpetually lovely church and its chapels. And over the years they’d absorbed the changes for the worse, the crowds of teenage drunks from other countries, the scrape and smash and stand-up rows of a street too narrow for motor traffic, the constant high-pitched mosquito sound of
motorini
. She heard one go whining past even as she remembered it, their first night here, half-unpacked, sitting on a second-hand bed in the moonlight, holding hands.
In the corner sat Luisa’s little suitcase, packed, zipped, locked and labelled. It had been newly bought for the occasion; Sandro had not remarked on that, which was just as well. What would she have said? That she couldn’t embarrass Frollini with the battered nylon overnight bag that had served her perfectly well for a decade or more. That she didn’t want to look like an old lady from a Third World country as she stepped down that gangway, into that arrivals hall, all nervous and frightened coming into the New World, her possessions bulging out of a tatty holdall?
In her padded dressing-gown, slippers and warmest nightdress, ready for bed but wide awake, Luisa went to the window. She could feel the cold through the glass, but she pressed her cheek against it, looking down the street. There was snow, she’d heard, in the Casentino, the Mugello, on Monte Aperto in the Appennines and Monte Amiata down south; even, it was said, in the inland portion of the Maremma. That was where Sandro was, if Giuli was to be believed, the guest of a castle and a count.
It rarely snowed in Florence. What would Sandro be thinking, wherever he was? Would he be marvelling at it, the hills covered with snow? He would, for a bit, then he’d start to grumble because he didn’t like the countryside and he wouldn’t have the right clothes, the right shoes.
There was a pair of snow boots they’d bought during a snowfall close to a decade ago, but they were sitting in the hall cupboard; Luisa knew because she’d seen them there when she got home and looked. Wanting to make sure that he’d taken a coat, at least, wanting to see, too, if he’d taken a bag. Wondering how long he was planning to be away.
It had gone beyond Luisa being angry with him. With such childish behaviour, storming off like that, in such a hurry – because he hadn’t taken anything much with him at all, as far as Luisa could see. Leaving a note.
A note
, she’d said to Giuli, expecting an echo of her outrage, and she’d heard the unease in the girl’s voice as she tried to excuse him. Giuli was close to being Daddy’s little girl where Sandro was concerned, far too ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But her anger had always been tempered with something else, anyway. Something so unfamiliar to Luisa that she wasn’t sure if she recognized it; something like guilt.
Would it have been different if they’d had children of their own? It would, there was no point denying that. Even leaving aside the painful thing, the love they might have given a child between them and received back. Whatever people might say nowadays a baby brought you together, it didn’t split you up. And would it have been different if Luisa hadn’t had a breast removed and three months of chemo? But Luisa’s mother had told her thirty years ago that there was no point in imagining how things might have been different. You had to take what you were given, and make the best of it. It was advice Luisa had followed unquestioningly for almost all her life. Until now.
I am not having an affair with Enrico Frollini.
Was that what she should have said? Her mother would certainly have said yes. What would she have had to lose from saying it? From telling him the plain, unvarnished truth?
Well
, she imagined herself saying to her long-dead mother’s sceptical old face,
why should I even bother to answer such a stupid question? And besides
,
he wasn’t in a mood to believe me
.
She could imagine what her mother would have said to that. What Giuli wanted to say, but didn’t quite dare.
Are you sure it’s the truth?
Luisa looked at the neat, handsome little suitcase. She was an excellent packer; there was nothing she enjoyed more. A new suit was in there, grey cashmere and silk mix with a fine pinstripe, layered in tissue paper. Three shirts, a plain smart black dress, the two-string pearl necklace Sandro had bought her for her fiftieth; a pair of flat shoes, a pair of heels and a pair of evening shoes. The flight was at nine o’clock on Monday morning from the city airport; Frollini had said he’d collect her at six from the Via dei Macci. She could imagine the look on his face, comic horror, at the scruffy façades, the bulging dumpsters, the smell of cat in the ugly little street before dawn.
She could call Sandro, she knew that, she could email him, for heaven’s sake; the phone was there by the bed, the big computer on the desk – everyone had them, said Sandro, when she’d complained about how ugly it was. She could talk to him, but she wouldn’t.
It was not even late, but Luisa closed the shutters, climbed into the cold, clean sheets and turned off the light. And as she lay and stared at the ceiling, for the first time Luisa understood with dull certainty that she could get used to this, if she had to. A night apart turned into a week, separation turned into divorce, people grew apart. Was that what was happening to them? All Luisa knew was, she had changed, and Sandro had not.
Sleep, she commanded herself, and eventually she did.
T
HERE WAS A STRANGE new quality to the light that dazzled through the shutters as Cate surfaced in the room that itself was not yet familiar, and she lay there half-asleep for a while, eyes still closed, with the blue-white glare trying to pry them open.
Snow, she thought as she came awake, bit by bit; the snow was what had changed the light from yellow to blue-white. Lying still, Cate could detect no sound from the kitchen. Was it early? It was very quiet, but even with the snow it was too bright to be early. Reluctantly Cate squeezed open an eye, turned her head a painful fraction and looked at her battered old radio-alarm. 8.20. She groaned.
Pushing back the duvet, Cate swung her legs out and sat up, and the nagging pain behind her eyes worsened abruptly. Five hours’ sleep, give or take. And quite a lot of wine. She scrabbled in the bedside table for some
tachipirina
, swallowed them with water straight from the bottle, and made for the bathroom.
The shower was not hot enough, but Cate stood under it anyway, letting the water run over her, flushing away the night before.
She shouldn’t have gone, most definitely she should not have gone. But Sandro Cellini had wanted her to.
‘Go,’ he’d said. ‘Go and have your party. See what you remember;
see what they say.’
I won’t be a spy, Cate had thought stubbornly, leaning a moment on a sharp stone corner of the building. But he’d started something going in her head.
Then the music from inside had changed and someone had yelled out something, drunken and jubilant: they were letting off steam, all right. But as the cheering was taken up by another voice, for a wild moment, she had thought what if they all did it between them, what if they’ve planned it all, some elaborate scheme to lure Loni Meadows out on the coldest night of the year and with hard frost forecast? And she’d remembered all over again that the
Dottoressa
had not died straight away; could they have stood around as she climbed out of the car and watched her stagger, dazed and dying? Cate had tightened her grip on her arms in the cold and told herself stoutly, no. Don’t be ridiculous.
‘She
was
a dangerous driver,’ she’d said unwillingly to Sandro Cellini as they sat in the car. ‘She threw that car around. Worse than Mauro. Never wore a seatbelt.’
At Michelle’s studio someone had stepped out of the shadows.
Him; no more than a metre away from her. Cate had felt as though she suddenly knew everything about the man: the whole picture. From the moment he arrived at the castle to complete the group, stepping out of the car beside Mauro, to his haunted face on the gallery of the library, the morning the police came to tell them she was dead. She should have finished that sad, dangerous little book he’d written about her.
‘You came,’ Alec Fairhead had said, his eyes happy and unfocused, looking ten, twenty years younger. Looking like the boy he must have been when he had his affair with Loni Meadows. He’d taken her hands in his; he was very drunk, Cate had seen. It wouldn’t have been fair to ask him anything, in this state.
‘You’re a lovely girl,’ he’d said earnestly. ‘Don’t know what you’re doing stuck in this place. Come back to London with me, Cate, come to Paris.’ She’d laughed, and he’d looked at her, crestfallen.
‘Thank you,’ she’d said seriously. ‘I’ll get my passport straight away.’
He’d looked at her again with sadness. ‘Come inside,’ he’d said, rubbing her hands clumsily between his, ‘you’re freezing.’ Reluctantly she’d followed him through the wide glass door.
They’d all been there, in the big room. Sandro Cellini had asked her, what are they like? Could any of them have hated her enough? To hurt her.
No one had noticed their entrance for a moment or two; the lights had been dimmed and the music was playing loudly, a cheesy hit from last summer. Michelle was pouring water into a glass on the edge of the kitchen corner’s draining board, wearing a red dress; Cate had never seen her in a dress before. Rage, Tiziano had said, rage drives Michelle. But where did it come from?
There’d been a faint but distinct smell of dope in the air and in the centre of the room Tina was dancing, with complete abandon, an ecstatic expression on her face and arms swaying over her head. The space had seemed too big for one person to inhabit; Michelle’s possessions seemed hardly to have made an impact. A handful of books sat lonely on a long shelf, a wheeled hanging rail for clothes held only Michelle’s parka and a solitary pair of jeans, carefully folded over a hanger. It wouldn’t take her long to pack up, when it was time to move on. Although when they’d had that conversation around the dining table about who was going where after their tenure at Orfeo was done, what would be the next gig, Cate remembered now that Michelle had been the one who’d said nothing. Her husband was dead.
The long table she worked at was pushed back against one wall. Tiziano was in his wheelchair at one end of it next to a computer on which graphics were moving with the music. One hand had rested on the computer touchpad and with the other he was quietly smoking. He leaned back in his wheelchair in an attitude of ease she hadn’t seen him in before, not ever, the broad shoulders relaxed, his clever, watchful face calm. As Cate had studied him, feeling a sudden sadness she couldn’t explain, Tiziano had leaned forward and tapped the touchpad, and another song came on.
Brown
-
eyed girl
, the voice sang; she’d known this one.
In the far corner a kitchenette was heaped with dishes. Per and his wife were standing over there, pressed into the quietest corner and
entwined against a work surface. His wife was leaning back, a hand up and touching his cheek, and Cate had seen his face, pale and stunned and grateful, like a man climbing out of the ruins of his house after an earthquake.
Per and Alec had been for a walk together in the early afternoon. It had come to Cate, just like that; he’d said she would remember, and she had. She’d wished Sandro Cellini had told her why he wanted to know.
‘Look who I’ve found,’ Alec Fairhead had said in the end, lifting her hand in his. She’d wanted to ask him about Loni; if it was true what Loni had said to Beth, that he hadn’t forgotten her. But now wasn’t the moment.
They had all looked at her, Per nodding while wrapping his arms tighter around his wife, Tiziano smiling faintly through a blue spiral of smoke, Tina twisting her slight body on the space they had cleared for a dancefloor and lowering a hand to wave limply. Michelle, still filling a glass of water from a bottle, watched her. Cate had seen that she had make-up on too; the hostess. Quickly Cate had crossed the room to stand beside her, feeling Alec Fairhead’s eyes on her as she went.
‘Is this all right?’ she’d said to Michelle quickly.
Michelle had taken a long drink of the water, eyeing her over the glass. They must all have known where she’d been, Alec Fairhead would have told them. Seen climbing out of the enemy’s car: she had to explain to them that whoever the enemy was, it wasn’t Sandro Cellini.
‘All right with me, baby,’ she’d said drily. Not drunk, thought Cate; interesting. The rest of them get wasted by way of celebration, but Michelle sobers up. Her face under the make-up – not much of it, red on her lips, her eyes outlined – was transformed; not younger so much, her skin still weathered, fine lines around the eyes, but more alert, defined, cared for. There was something faintly challenging about the look she’d given Cate, bright as a bird’s, defying her to ask her questions. She’d poured a tumbler full of wine and handed it to Cate, who wondered where it had all come from, all this booze. Bottles of wine and vodka on the long table, at Tiziano’s feet; pinched from the castle’s cellars? She hadn’t recognized the label.
‘Our little act of subversion,’ Michelle had said, seeing where she was looking. ‘Those market trips? Turns out we were all stashing a private supply. It’s not always nice, to be dependent, like a little kid. To have to ask for everything. And it turned out kind of useful, huh?’
Saying nothing – because to agree out loud would have been to betray the Trust – Cate had just raised the glass and taken a drink. Nice enough.
Michelle had shifted slightly and looked away, across at Tina on the dancefloor.
‘Poor kid,’ she’d said after a while. Then abruptly, ‘That was kind of you. To tell her it wasn’t her, with all that voodoo shit. She needed someone to tell her, and she didn’t believe it when I said it.’
‘No, well, maybe she wouldn’t,’ Cate had said. ‘You’re so close.’
‘You think?’ Michelle had taken Cate’s wrist in her rough dry hand, holding it tight. ‘She wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know that? I mean, really.’ Looking into Cate’s eyes.
Cate had looked across at Tina twirling and singing to herself; seen Alec Fairhead look at her too. Realized Michelle wanted to know what she’d said to Sandro Cellini. ‘I know,’ she’d said. ‘But he’s a good guy, you know. Sandro Cellini; he’s not one to misjudge her.’ And she’d realized that she believed it. ‘You don’t need to worry.’
Michelle had looked at Cate a moment longer, then let go of her wrist abruptly. The music stopped and Tina let her arms drop, looking across at them.
‘You never had kids,’ Cate had said, without thinking, the wine making her careless. There was no answer and then she’d realized, and said, ‘Oh, God. I’m sorry. I – Tiziano told me. You lost your husband.’
‘Lost him?’ Michelle had said wonderingly. ‘Huh.’ There was a long pause, in which Cate had wished she could be swallowed up. Then, with bitterness. ‘Lost him. It didn’t feel quite like that. It felt like – he was stolen. Hijacked, run over, thrown off a cliff, dismembered by gangsters. Murdered.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, I lost him. He’s gone.’
‘Murdered?’ The word had seemed hard to ignore.
Michelle had looked at her a moment, weighing something up. When she spoke again her voice was level. ‘I found him. Early in the
morning on our bathroom floor in Queens, last August. It was so hot. He’d taken an overdose, after I went to bed; I slept through it, then I got up to go to the bathroom at around five and I found him.’ She’d taken a breath, then let it out. ‘He was on the floor, and his eyes were open.’
Cate had nodded, staring at her. ‘Why did he – did you – ’
Michelle had shaken her head violently, as if to stop Cate talking. ‘Dying’s a violent thing, always, however. That’s all I meant.’ She had folded her arms tight across herself, pulling the red dress around her, her face pale and her made-up eyes smudged dark.
Cate had nodded, saying nothing. How could you go on living in a place where someone had died? It was no wonder Michelle didn’t want to talk about the next gig; maybe she was wondering if she’d ever go home again. Even in this place, which was no one’s home, Loni’s death was everywhere.
Tina had sidled up, nudging in next to Michelle. Wearily Michelle had dropped an arm on her shoulders, and setting her cheek on the older woman’s forearm Tina gave Cate a timid look from under her colourless fringe, out of her faded eyes.
Cate had smiled at her, wanting to reassure her, feeling Michelle’s watchful gaze on her.
And remembered that Michelle had gone for a run, as the light began to go, on the day Loni Meadows died. Mid-afternoon, perhaps two o’clock.
That was what had started it, the row over the minibus and the museum trip being cancelled; Michelle didn’t want to go, she said, because she needed a run, really needed one. Then Tina said she wouldn’t go, then there’d been no point hiring the minibus and Loni had gone all thin-lipped, in her coat with the fur trim. Per had been hovering around saying awkwardly that he’d like to go, though, and maybe Loni and he could go in the Monster, then Luca had made the mistake of arriving and Loni had grabbed him by the arm and stalked off with him. Frogmarched him up to his office.
Tiziano had appeared, and together they’d tried not to listen to Loni shouting at Luca. They’d seen Michelle emerge from the studio
in her running kit, jogging up across the stones and looking around almost as if she wished Loni was still there to see her. All the gear: trainers, shorts, water pouch on her back.
Now Michelle was watching Cate. ‘Have another drink,’ she’d said, and Cate had let her fill the tumbler again. Across in the kitchenette Per was looking down into his wife’s face, one hand on her shoulder, the other stroking her hair, while she spoke intently up at him.
Had Cellini believed her, when she’d said Per couldn’t have done it? He’d reserved judgement; she supposed he had to do that. She knew, though. And she wasn’t as green as Cellini thought.
Something had nudged against Cate’s hip, and setting down the glass of wine she looked down and saw Tiziano.
‘Dance?’ he’d said, and as he said it she’d heard the music, an old plaintive Neapolitan song that everyone knew, that brought tears to the eyes of every old man in every village the length of the country, thinking of his first kiss.
Reaching up in a swift movement Tiziano had caught her arm and pulled her down so quickly she’d gasped, landing on his lap in the chair. He’d smelled of dope smoke; he’d whirled the chair away and Tina had clapped wildly. Cate’s head had spun, with the wine and the movement and the dope smoke and the proximity of Tiziano’s face to hers; she’d scrabbled for the wheelchair’s arms. ‘Stop,’ she’d said, and he’d stopped. In the background the old ballad was still playing.