‘I – um – ’ she began, but then Luca’s mobile began to vibrate on the desk, jiggling among the papers. He answered it, giving Cate a quick look that told her to stay where she was.
‘Ginevra,’ he said, frowning. Cate heard a gabble, weary, anxious, pleading.
‘He’s what?’ More gabble. ‘All right, all right.’ Luca’s tiredness sounded extreme, as if he had reached breaking point. ‘Look, just leave him where he is. No, leave him. You stay there, I’ll be down, the snow’s melting. I’ll be down.’ He hung up and let a long breath out, his face between his hands.
‘What’s happened?’ said Cate.
‘Mauro,’ said Luca, with resignation. ‘He’s – it looks like he’s pushed it too far this time. Some kind of crisis.’
For God’s sake, thought Cate, as if we didn’t all know. ‘Is he drunk?’
Luca looked at her sharply, then gave up. ‘Not exactly,’ he said wearily. ‘More like – withdrawal. He’s hallucinating, got the shakes, she says. Can’t stand up. She’s worried.’ He looked up at Cate, his brown eyes wondering whether she might conceivably be able to help him out of this. ‘Looks like lunch might have to be late today.’
She should have gone straight to the kitchen to get started, she knew that. But the roads had begun to thaw, Luca had been right, and as she watched his hire car creep down the hill towards the farmhouse, Cate found her gaze shifting across to her little
motorino
, forlorn under the trees, its saddle freighted with snow. Found herself wondering what Sandro Cellini was doing down there, throwing stones in the river. And before she knew it she was back in her room, collecting her helmet.
She left by the front drive, on impulse: the quicker route to the river, swooping down between the cypresses, slowly at first then faster as she reached the main road and more clear tarmac, holding her breath and feeling a ridiculous euphoria to be out of there, under her own steam. Tempted for a second just to keep going, until she wondered, where, though? Home? To Pozzo Basso, and Vincenzo? The thought gave her a queasy feeling, of guilt and aversion. She came to the brow of the hill and stopped. Sandro Cellini was bent over, up to his knees in a snowdrift by the river and looking at something. She called his name.
Looking up briefly, he hardly seemed to register she was there; just a hand over his eyes to shield him from the snow glare, and the slightest of nods. By the time Cate was down there, Sandro was practically in the river itself, one foot on the bank, another on a stone in the shallow flow, hanging on to a branch.
She came down slowly, because it was steep, this last bit; on a
motorino
you had to stick to the middle of the road even when it wasn’t half-covered with snow. Not the first to die down there, was that what Mauro had said? Poor Mauro. Shaking with the DTs in a dark room, in another sunless dip between the hills. Everyone knew it was dangerous; but Loni had thought she’d live forever.
The rear wheel of the Vespa slid a little on the snow, but Cate held steady. What was he doing down there? She came to a stop, breathless, at the foot of the hill and set her feet down on either side just as Sandro’s head jerked up. A dripping arm held over his head in triumph, something small and silver in his hand; the hand bone-white from cold.
‘Got it.’ He spoke to no one in particular, in a fierce mutter. Cate dismounted, pulling off her helmet.
‘Got what?’
He looked at her a moment then held it out, a smoothed silver pebble, a piece of dead technology. Loni Meadows’s phone.
State of the art cameraphone on this model, Cate had heard Loni say that – to whom? To Tina, the artist.
You mustn’t reject the new
, Loni had said.
Embrace the technology
. Aiming the phone around the dining table and pretending to snap them each one in turn. Per looking bashful, Michelle scowling.
‘It’s not art, though,’ Michelle had said. ‘It’s like blogging. Incontinent photography. The world’s full enough of shit as it is.’ Michelle was always back at her, from the moment she’d arrived at the castle. Was she happy, now Loni was dead? That question gave Cate pause.
Sandro Cellini was sticking his hands under his armpits to warm them, grimacing in pain. ‘It’s hers, isn’t it?’ he said, teeth chattering.
Cate turned it over in her gloved hand. ‘You found it,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Will it do you any good, after all that time, under the water?’
Cellini had now folded his arms across his chest and was rocking to keep warm, his weathered face, his kind brown eyes fixed on the strip of dark water between snowy banks.
‘We’ll see,’ he said, and she heard the chatter in his teeth, saw his blue-knuckled hands.
‘Haven’t you got any gloves?’
The detective nodded at the verge and she saw a pair of woollen gloves on the snow; not warm enough to start with, and now soaked into the bargain. And his coat, she noticed, wasn’t thick enough, either. Sandro Cellini looked sheepish, but happier than he’d seemed since he arrived at the castle, as if enjoying her exasperation. Cate stuck the phone in her pocket and pulled off the leather gauntlets she wore on the
motorino
; two sizes too big for her. An old boyfriend’s. The thought depressed her; too many old boyfriends. As she handed the gauntlets to Sandro, Cate realized that she’d already consigned Vincenzo to the same status.
‘How come you found it,’ she said, ‘and the police didn’t?’
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Maybe they don’t think like I think; maybe they don’t look anywhere but the obvious places, maybe they think anything but the obvious things.’ He sighed. ‘Look, I don’t want to badmouth them: and often enough the obvious is the answer. Maybe they’re just lazy, or maybe they turn up at an accident scene, and they see what they want to see. And when the local big man comes along and flatters them a bit, when they know the deal at the Castello Orfeo, they don’t think, let’s have a closer look. They smile like a girl receiving a compliment, and they forget all about what job it is they’re supposed to be doing.’
‘You think it was Orfeo?’ Cate thought of him heading back to Florence in the big car. ‘He’s gone.’
‘I heard him,’ said Sandro. ‘No, it wasn’t him, he was at home in Florence with his delinquent son. He’s too vain and self-centred and stupid, anyway. But I think he wanted to make sure he didn’t get in the papers over it, that’s all.’
Cate took her hands out of her pockets and folded them across her body in the biker jacket, thinking.
Slowly Sandro took off the gloves and handed them back to her, and they both looked to the road, in shadow still, and the crest behind which stood the castle.
‘Are you going to tell me what you think happened now, or not?’ said Cate, pulling the gloves back on. He looked at her for a long moment, then said, ‘Come with me.’
They walked up, Cate pushing her
motorino
; fifty metres. Overhead the thin band of blue had narrowed and the sun was dimming, edging back behind the cloud. The air was cold and damp, and a wet wind had got up. They stood at the top of the short hill and looked together at the castle, black against the snow. The flag, Cate noticed, was still at half-mast. To the left of the castle’s dark, symmetrical bulk, through the spindly trees, she could see the shapes of the outbuildings; the laundry, the
villino
lower down. To the right, Cate noticed, the roof of the farm was just visible, and when her eyes adjusted to the snow glare, a criss-crossing of animal tracks in the soft white contours.
‘You think it wasn’t an accident,’ said Cate.
He nodded. ‘There was nothing wrong with the vehicle,’ he said, as if he knew what she was going to say next. ‘The police report was categorical: no failure, only slight wear on the brake pads. No one tampered with the car.’
Cate felt colder, all of a sudden. ‘So do you think – there was someone in the car with her, after all?’ Someone like Per?
Sandro turned back, looking down the hill to the black ribbon of river winding behind the sharp bend, and the bare clumped willows that had obscured Cate’s view of the car and the tow-truck as she had come into work on that icy morning. All around them the empty landscape stood silent, waiting. Slowly he shook his head. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Barely, though. The passenger side of the car was completely caved in. You’d have had to be in the back, and wearing a seatbelt, to have escaped alive, and even then you would almost certainly have sustained some kind of injury. And I think it happened another way. I think it was worked out in advance.’
‘But you can’t,’ said Cate stubbornly. ‘You can’t cause a crash by – by remote control.’
Sandro turned towards Cate, looking at her thoughtfully. ‘There was a patch of ice,’ he said, ‘running down the side of the road. Down the slope. It’s the patch she hit that sent her off on to the verge.’
‘Yes,’ said Cate, waiting.
‘You all knew she drove dangerously, and that she didn’t wear a seatbelt: all of you. From Luca Gallo down; anyone who’d been in a car with her or even seen her climb into one and drive away. You all knew that this was a tricky bend. Did you all know how cold it was going to be that night?’
Cate eyed him. ‘I guess. When you’re stuck in this place, the weather’s pretty important.’
Sandro nodded, took a deep breath. ‘I saw the ice,’ he said. ‘Yesterday evening. I saw the skid marks. A thick sheet of black ice a metre wide, down the side of the road for maybe four metres. That’s quite a lot of ice; quite a lot of water.’ He kicked at the snow on the side of the road: some ice still showed dark beneath it.
‘Only thing is,’ he said, ‘I can’t work out where that water came from, to turn to ice. There’s no culvert, there’s no spring up here. Because if there had been, it would have made the road so dangerous every time there was a hard frost, it would have had to be diverted long ago.’
Cate stared at the dark patch beneath the snow, glassy and dangerous. ‘You think someone – made the ice?’
‘I’m not a scientist,’ said Sandro. ‘The police have forensics teams for that kind of thing, only in this case it didn’t seem to occur to them.’
Thinking of the policeman, cosy in the kitchen of the castle with Mauro and Ginevra, Cate could see how he might have overlooked all sorts of things.
Sandro was still talking. ‘But even I can see that it could be done. You’d need water, and you’d need to know how cold it was going to get. It would have to be done while it was still light, but starting to chill right down.’
‘Someone came down here,’ she murmured, feeling the hairs on her neck prickle and rise.
‘I think,’ Sandro said softly, at her shoulder, ‘that this was a murder by degrees. At each stage, she might not have died. The crash might not have killed her; if she had been wearing her seatbelt she might even have walked away from it.’
Cate nodded, chilled to the bone.
Overhead the sky had thickened, turned grey as the last shard of sun died. It wasn’t human, to live in a place like this, Cate thought, without neighbours, with no one to hear you if you called. Did someone hear Loni Meadows?
He went on. ‘If she hadn’t answered the call.’ He held up the mobile. ‘It’ll be on here; they’ll find it eventually, they’ll resuscitate it. Even the police at Pozzo Basso.’
‘The call? What call?’
‘The text, saying, at a guess,
Meet me at the Liberty
,
the usual room
. Something like that.’
Cate stared at him blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Only the text wasn’t sent by the person she thought had sent it: Niccolò Orfeo wasn’t waiting for her at the Liberty, no room had been booked there.’ He looked at her and she remembered Vincenzo saying just that. ‘Did you know Niccolò Orfeo had left his phone behind here, last week?’ said Sandro.
She gazed back at him, starting to shake her head, then stopping. Remembering Luca coming to the kitchen door one night, Monday night? ‘Luca – yes. Luca asked if anyone had seen it.’
‘And had anyone? A cleaner?’
‘Anna-Maria? No. No one, as far as I know,’ she said falteringly.
‘But someone did find that phone,’ Sandro said. ‘Someone found that phone; perhaps that someone already had a shrewd idea that she was having an affair, or perhaps they looked – he or she looked at the messages and worked it out from there.’
Cate stared at him. ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Hold on. Wouldn’t he have told Loni he’d lost his phone?’
Cellini looked at her contemplatively. ‘Do you think he would, really? No direct communication, all this secrecy; Orfeo’s not a man who bothers to keep anyone informed about his business, about
these minor irritations. Not even his lover; she could just wait for his next call, as she’d always done. He’d instructed Gallo to find it, and he expected it to be returned to him.’
‘Maybe,’ said Cate; she saw that he was right.
Sandro Cellini pressed on. ‘Perhaps finding that phone was what started it all off: perhaps if Niccolò Orfeo hadn’t been a careless, lazy man who always had other people to clean up after him, to pick up what he left behind – then perhaps Loni Meadows would still be alive.’
There was a silence. ‘It’s getting dark,’ said Cate, feeling the low grey sky pressing down on them. ‘It’s not even midday, and it’s getting dark.’ She swallowed. ‘Alec Fairhead said she got a text, after dinner.’