Fairhead had jerked back in his chair. ‘What?’ he had said, breathless. Then incredulously, ‘What?’
Sandro had sat as still as he could and looked. Had examined Fairhead for any hint that might betray his reaction as anything less than total, unfeigned shock, and found nothing. ‘Did you?’ he had asked softly. ‘Did you kill her, Mr Fairhead?’
Fairhead had stared straight back at Sandro, not even shaking his head. ‘Kill her? Kill
her?
No!’ Still staring. ‘No, no, no, never. I didn’t even want to kill her when – not ever.’
Sandro had wondered if he was losing his touch. The man had seemed to him to be telling the truth. He had felt the cramped proportions of the little room around him, Alec Fairhead sitting up here at his computer day after day, struggling with his unhappiness.
Then he had seen that that was all it was. Not violence, not madness. The same kind of banal daily unhappiness that Sandro and Luisa had dealt with themselves, their own small tragedies.
‘After I’d written the email,’ Alec Fairhead had said slowly, as if in confirmation of what Sandro was thinking, ‘it was as though the sting had gone out of it. It was – less. Everything was greyer, but it was better. Funny thing was, I almost liked her, being back here. She’s – good value; a kind of old-fashioned spectacle. If you’re not in love with her.’ So she’d been wrong, Sandro had thought, Loni Meadows had reckoned she still had him in her hand. Fairhead hadn’t killed her: the certainty had settled in Sandro’s mind. But he had had to be sure.
‘I need to know something,’ he had said. ‘Did you go out, that day, that afternoon? Before she died. Did you walk down to – the place? Did you go anywhere near the river? To where she – came off the road?’
Fairhead had looked at him as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘So you really think she was – murdered?’ He had swallowed. ‘But how?’
Sandro had shaken his head briefly. ‘That doesn’t matter just now,’ he had said. He would hold his theory in his head just a while longer; he needed to unpack it in front of someone he trusted; he wished for Luisa. ‘Did you go down there?’
The answer had come slowly. ‘We went for a walk – ’ Fairhead had said. ‘I don’t even know if we got that far. We walked that way, yes. After lunch: about two.’
‘We?’ An alibi, Sandro had reminded himself, was not everything. But it was unignorable. He had waited.
‘Per and I,’ Fairhead had said. ‘We often walked together.’ He had smiled unhappily. ‘Perhaps it’s a northern European trait. But we both like – to be with someone, but someone we don’t have to talk to.’ He had sounded confused, resigned.
‘And that night?’
‘I went to bed. I passed her on the stairs.’ Fairhead had said precisely what he had told Caterina and she had recounted carefully to Sandro the previous night: Alec Fairhead had gone to bed after seeing Loni Meadows go into her apartment. Per had come up soon after; neither of them had left their rooms.
‘You’re sure? About Mr Hansen?’
Fairhead had nodded. ‘He put on some Grieg, quite loudly; he does that every night. He took a long time to go to sleep, which is also normal for Per. And for me.’ He had frowned a little. ‘Even through the wall, I knew it was him. You get to know people’s – sounds, their habits, I suppose like a blind person does. Surprisingly quickly.’
Sandro had nodded. The man’s lonely, he had thought. Just lonely.
‘It’s all right,’ he had said, and Fairhead had looked up at him. ‘You do believe me?’ he had asked.
Sandro had looked at Alec Fairhead a long moment and realized that, for good or ill, he did. Hadn’t been sure if it was wise to do so, but he had inclined his head, just a fraction. ‘I’ll talk to Mr Hansen,’ he had said. Hesitated. ‘Yes, I believe you.’ He had hesitated again. ‘But there’s just one more thing. Niccolò Orfeo. Left his phone here, last Sunday.’
And now Fairhead had looked almost desperate with confusion, hands at either side of his head. ‘Did he?’
‘You haven’t seen it?’ Fairhead hadn’t even shaken his head, but his expression was enough: complete lack of recognition. ‘No one’s mentioned finding it? Asked you about it?’
‘Well, I – God.’ He had frowned. ‘Did Luca say something about a phone? Perhaps he did. I don’t know if I gave it a thought. Perhaps he did.’
‘It’s all right,’ Sandro had said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He had got to his feet. ‘Let me give you some advice,’ he had said. ‘You need to put the life first, now. Before the art. Before it’s too late.’
Alec Fairhead had looked at him wonderingly. ‘That’s what Per said.’
‘Ah,’ Sandro had said. ‘Per.’
In the snow, in the dip that kept him out of the sun, the cold was really beginning to bite now. Sandro squatted down on his haunches. He could hear the river, gurgling and whispering as it slid over the stones, not deep, here, after a winter drought. When the thaw came it would
be different; the snow would have changed everything, melting into the water table, washing things down and away.
In the dark, Loni Meadows would have been able to hear the water, staggering out of the car, falling. Lying in the dark. It was an accident; he rehearsed the words to himself. Yes, there was a nasty email, but this was a car crash, coincidence, a woman with many enemies can also die, mundanely, in an accident; the statistics proved it. She died as thousands do every year, even those who don’t drive like madwomen.
Go back to Giuliano Mascarello, Sandro told himself, deliver him Alec Fairhead if necessary; the old man wasn’t stupid. He’d know the truth when he heard it. It would be so easy. The temptation was great. The only trouble was, there was something stubborn and resistant in Sandro that would not believe it.
In part it was this place – this great thug of a prison-castle – and the people confined in it; in part it was superstition. An uneasy, half-defined feeling of something unhealthy breeding quietly in the small rooms, in the spindly trees pressed up against the walls, in the run-down farmhouse. And then there were the scraps and tatters of a story, of evidence, that he could not entirely ignore.
It had not been necessary to spend long with Per Hansen to know that the man was completely incapable of dissimulation. Sudden violence, possibly, if pushed to an extreme. Followed by abject remorse.
Sandro had seen signs of neither; in addition he had told the same story as Alec Fairhead. They had walked together in the early afternoon, perhaps as far as the river, he couldn’t remember. He had said good night to Loni Meadows, gone to his room and not emerged until the following morning; he had played Grieg.
‘You were perhaps the last person to see Loni Meadows,’ Sandro had then said abruptly.
The man’s wife had left early on: Yolanda Hansen had opened the door to his knock, wearing a long nightdress and a dressing-gown, sensibly brought from home, no doubt. She’d understood straight away, and hurried downstairs, saying something about bread.
The room could not have been less like Fairhead’s; it had been a tip. There had been signs that the wife had tried to make inroads,
clearing a space for a cup on the table. Hansen himself had looked only bewildered, as if Loni Meadows had happened to someone else, in a different lifetime.
But eventually he had responded. ‘I – yes,’ he had said, and he had begun to flush, darkly. ‘I went to her room. I – she had been very attentive to me.’ He had passed a hand over his forehead. ‘I don’t mean that it was – her entirely. I – ’ and he had cast about, as if looking for his wife. ‘I have always liked women,’ he had said finally. ‘But I’m not experienced with them. Only my wife. I thought this was a great – emotion. A great love; it was like madness. I don’t – I didn’t understand what I was feeling.’
‘I know,’ Sandro had said, and he had sighed.
Hansen had gone on. ‘I didn’t understand anything – until that night. I was standing at her door and she was looking at her telephone, reading something there, and she simply wished I would go away. I suddenly realized that she wanted me to disappear, I was inconvenient.’ He had put his hands to his head. ‘And now it seems that everyone else knew, all along, that she was having this – affair. This other affair, going to hotels.’ He had sounded sick.
‘But you have your wife, now,’ Sandro had said, intending to comfort him. We have our wives.
His head resting against the window, Per Hansen had straightened, looking at him gratefully. ‘You’re an odd sort of detective,’ he had said.
Sandro had laughed abruptly. ‘I suppose I am,’ he had said. Hansen had been looking down out of the high window, and there had been something about the way he was looking that had drawn Sandro to him.
‘You didn’t hear her leave?’ he had said quietly, following his gaze. Down between those cypyresses. Sandro had seen that from this room slightly more was visible to the castle’s right – or left if you were facing it from below, from the river. Down where the women lived, the
villino
and the studio. ‘You didn’t hear – anything?’
‘I was listening to my music,’ Per Hansen had said, stiffening, chastened to the point of anguish by Sandro’s implication. Might the sound of the accident have echoed across the hills, might it have come up this far? ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
And if he had, Sandro had thought as he’d examined the man’s hollow-eyed look, he would have gone to help. And then a shadow had passed across Hansen’s face in the thin morning light. ‘Later,’ he had begun hesitantly, then stopped. ‘Later, though. I did see something. Thought I saw something.’
And so another little shred of evidence had joined the rest; a threadbare little collection, but stubborn. It would not go away.
Sandro straightened, the whisper of the water in his ears, and threw one last pebble, heard it splash, saw it enter the black water between the mounded snow overhanging the banks. There, he thought, following the stone’s trajectory, and as he thought it someone called his name.
When Cate came in, Luca was sitting at his desk reading a letter. Handwritten, on the heavy-gauge paper the castle provided to the guests, a small representation of the castle’s silhouette in one corner. He didn’t look up for a good minute after she entered the room, staring at the page as Cate stood awkwardly wondering if she’d misinterpreted his distracted answer to her tentative knock, wondering if he had not in fact wanted her to come in at all.
It was different, Cate thought as she stood there; the room that had on her last visit seemed full of life and purpose, busy with Luca Gallo’s energy, stuck about with itineraries and Post-it notes, now seemed dusty, chaotic and neglected. The photograph of Luca’s lover, Salvatore, had gone from its place in the corner of the computer screen.
At last he looked up from the piece of paper, and Cate saw that Luca’s face was quite pale under the cheerful beard, and the look he turned on her in that moment was completely desolate.
‘What is it?’ she said, taken aback.
‘Oh,’ he said, blinking back down at the paper. ‘Oh,’ then sighed. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, but Cate just stared back. ‘It’s Orfeo,’ he said briefly, when she said nothing, and let the piece of paper fall to the desk. ‘Sounding off.’
‘Orfeo?’ Cate looked towards the window. ‘But he – he’s – ’
‘He’s gone back to Florence,’ said Luca. ‘First thing this morning, and left this,’ he flipped the piece of paper with a forefinger. ‘We know where to find him, he says, if he is required.’
‘Know where to find him?’ Cate didn’t understand.
‘He means Sandro Cellini,’ said Luca, following her gaze towards the window. ‘Apparently Cellini did something to offend him last night. Spoke to him about the
Dottoressa’
s death. About his – relations with the
Dottoressa
. He’s very angry.’
Cate felt herself grow warm with the knowledge of her own guilt. ‘I – ah – I see,’ she said. Luca looked at her consideringly, but when he spoke it was not on the subject of who might or might not have known about Loni Meadows’s affair; anyone might have told him, pleaded Cate silently, suddenly sure that she had been the last to know.
‘He says he intends to dissolve the Trust,’ said Luca briefly, and Cate stared at him. ‘Take back the castle.’
We’ll all be out of a job, was Cate’s first thought, and it came with something surprisingly like jubilation. But her second was for Luca Gallo, for whom leaving the Castello Orfeo would be the end of the world. ‘Can he do that?’ she said.
Luca took the piece of paper with a sudden movement and crushed it into a ball. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Probably.’ And made an impatient gesture, waving something aside. ‘Lunch,’ he said, and the old Luca seemed to be back, albeit in a faded version. ‘With this snow – I’m worried Ginevra will be running out of provisions. We can’t let the guests go hungry. Care will need to be taken, things may have to be rationed.’
Cate looked at him warily, a number of questions presenting themselves, not least whether Luca knew of the guests’ plans to go their separate ways as soon as Sandro Cellini had talked to them. And certainly when she had come past it on her way to Luca’s office, the kitchen had been dark, no sign of Nicki or Ginevra; one of the questions she had come to pose to him was whether they were snowed in down there. Had Luca simply been holed up here for too long to know what was happening?