‘Really,’ pleaded Luca Gallo, sounding frightened, turning to look at the door, the window, as if he might escape through them. ‘What are you saying?’ They ignored him.
‘You found Niccolò Orfeo’s mobile phone,’ said Sandro carefully, and Michelle’s wide eyes told him Caterina had been right. ‘He left
it behind, and you picked it up. Why didn’t you return it to him immediately? Did you know already that they were having an affair? By all accounts, it was fairly obvious. Or did you discover it only from the messages he sent her? I imagine it occurred to you quite quickly that it might be – interesting. At least. To have that telephone. What you might do with it.’
There was a silence, and then at last she spoke.
‘I didn’t care about her damn love life, I’m too old to find that stuff rewarding.’ She closed her eyes and her ashen, weary face, briefly shadowed with shame, might for an instant have been a death mask.
Then she opened her eyes. ‘Yes, I got the phone,’ she said flatly. ‘Yes, we even laughed, looking at his messages. What an old fool he is, and what a whore she was. Yes, for a second or two.’ She twisted her mouth. ‘I shouldn’t even have looked.’
Sandro stared at her, trying to make her out in the dim room. And as he stared it felt smaller; all around him the stacked shelves, the pinboard covered with photographs and brochures, pressed in on him. The bitterness rose in the back of his throat and Sandro felt a sudden reluctance to go on with it. But he had to. He took a breath, wanting to express himself as precisely as he was able.
‘You are an angry woman, Mrs Connor. And you are intelligent, educated at college. You are certainly intelligent enough to devise a way to send Loni Meadows to her death.’ He took a breath, remembering what Cate had told him. ‘You could have gone out running with water in your backpack. You could have observed how that water froze when you poured it across the road. And then, on the coldest night of the year so far, you could have used that phone to send a message from her lover. Perhaps you had found that each day here made you hate her more, not less: perhaps you were so angry you could not stop yourself.’
At his desk Luca Gallo was on his feet and stuttering but it was the look in Michelle Connor’s eye that stopped Sandro.
‘Are you making this up?’ she said slowly, as if something was only just occurring to her. ‘Ice? Do you think I’m crazy? Crazy enough to cook up this – this plan?’
‘You were hospitalized,’ said Sandro in a low voice. Not wanting to say it. ‘In a psychiatric unit.’ But Michelle didn’t even seem to hear.
‘Angry?’ she said. ‘Sure, I was angry. I’m still angry, but with her?’ She made a small explosive sound of contempt. ‘She was not even worth a minute of my time. You want to know who I’m angry with? I’m angry with him. With Joe.’
She leaned down and struck the table. ‘With Joe. For giving in, after all this time, because of some shitty little position here. I told him, I won’t go without you. Told him, jeez, we can go and have fun in Italy if that’s what we want, we don’t need those guys.’ And then her voice cracked, and was gone. ‘But he went and did it, didn’t he? He went and did it, and I found him on the bathroom floor.’
Luca Gallo was still trying to say something, but Sandro was struggling with the sensation of dizziness her words induced in him, the unmistakable sound of truth in the claustrophobic room.
‘But what about the
telefonino?
’ he said, in despair, grappling even for that word, his English suddenly exhausted. ‘His mobile. His cell phone.’
And Michelle took a step towards him, the thin light behind her.
‘The
telefonino?
’ she said, and she swung her arm out to include Luca Gallo at last, something like jubilation in the gesture. She laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t have the
telefonino
. Tell the man, Luca.’ Then, gazing straight at Sandro now, she went on. ‘All right, I will. “Has anyone seen Count Orfeo’s cellphone?” Luca asked us, just the next day. If we found it, we were to give it to him, so that’s what we did. Not straight away, maybe, but he’s had it since that Wednesday, the day before she died.’
And then, finally, they both turned to look at Luca Gallo.
H
ER FACE PRESSED TO the window of Tiziano’s ground-floor apartment, with its hoist and specially adapted bathroom facilities, Cate called his name, then again, then banged on the glass through the security bars. And as she began to lose her breath through panic and fright, Cate thought about the fact that Tiziano never let anyone in there: he came to the door to take his lunches, or they left them on the step. A private person.
A funny noise, Nicki had said. What funny noise? Was he in pain? Was he in trouble? Cate thought about the expression on his face the night before, when he’d swung her into his lap in Michelle’s apartment. Had he had anything to do with Loni Meadows’s death? Had he done something – stupid?
Cate found she couldn’t think about Michelle; she couldn’t get her head around it. The abrupt realization that it actually hadn’t been an accident; those theories Sandro Cellini had been constructing with careful determination suddenly standing up on their own: it was surreal, but it was true. That ice should not have been there; Loni Meadows had been called out to a lovers’ meeting that did not exist.
‘Tiziano,’ she whispered, trying to keep panic from her voice, ‘
Caro
, what are you doing in there?’ Swallowed. ‘Are you all right?’
And then the door opened. He sat there. Not blocking the door as he usually did, beaming but implacable, hands out for his packed lunch, but staying back with his face in the door’s shadow, allowing Cate entry. She came inside, and the door closed behind her.
It was dark, even darker than it had been in the kitchen. ‘Do you have any candles?’ she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she crossed the square dim space like a blind person, bumping then skirting the great veneered bulk of the grand piano that was the sister to the one in the library and which dominated this smaller room. She knew where the candles would be as she was in charge of replenishing their stock for this eventuality: in a drawer in the room’s kitchen corner. She lit one and set it in a saucer: it didn’t give much light, but it was better than nothing. Tiziano shrugged, turning his face towards her and as her eyes adjusted she saw the change in him.
‘Nicki and Ginevra were worried about you,’ she said. ‘You didn’t answer.’
‘I’d forgotten what it was like,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘That’s all. I’d forgotten what leaving was like. Saying goodbye. And we should have had another four weeks together.’
Could that be all? That he would miss them, this strange family of misfits and loners? It couldn’t be all. Cate came back to his wheelchair and squatted beside him on her haunches. She could feel her feet still wet from the snow, her body feverish with tiredness and cold and wondered how long it would be before life returned to normal. If ever.
What if it wasn’t Michelle? What if she’d given that phone to someone else? She and Tiziano had always been close.
‘Tiziano,’ she said, and she couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice. ‘Darling.’ Cate used the endearment as her mother might have used it to her, as she might have used it to the brother she had never had. ‘He told me. Cellini told me, about your accident. About the bomb that killed your father. About Loni’s husband the lawyer, who defended the bomber.’
‘Did he?’ said Tiziano, and his voice came from somewhere buried deep.
‘Why were you – upset?’ She didn’t want to say, crying. ‘Just for leaving this bunch behind?’
‘Does he think I did it?’ asked Tiziano, not answering her question. ‘Does Cellini think I fixed her car, or drugged her, or – or – parked my wheelchair on the bend in the middle of the night to scare her off the road?’
Cate found she couldn’t speak.
Eventually she found some words. ‘I told him no way,’ she said.
‘You don’t think I could do it?’ And Tiziano took her hand quickly and raised it to his mouth and held it tight against his face; against her skin she felt the softness of his mouth and the prick of his stubble and the strength of his hands.
‘Physically?’ she said, and felt something like adrenaline surge through her, as it might have surged through him. ‘I think you could do it. Yes.’ Then bravely, ‘Do you know how to get there, across the fields?’
And he made a sound, in his throat, like a growl of pain. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘I could have done it. There’s nothing I can’t do, in or out of this chair.’ And abruptly he let go of Cate’s hand. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, though they both knew that wasn’t true.
‘Do you know,’ he said in a voice so close to normal it was bizarre, ‘that bomber killed at least three other people because of her husband? Her husband the human rights lawyer: where were their human rights, those dead people? Where were mine? One of them a woman just married and four months’ pregnant.’
With awful inappropriateness, Cate wondered if Tiziano wanted children. And for the first time in what seemed like days Vincenzo came into her mind, V’cenz who’d said cheerfully when she’d turned in the street one time to look into a buggy, ‘You don’t want kids, do you, Cate? No way.’
‘I remember that,’ she said, and she did. A bomb in a station in Mestre.
‘You think I’d kill anyone? Leave anyone crippled, like me? D’you think I’d want that revenge?’
And Cate didn’t know what to say because that was exactly what they had contemplated silently, her and Sandro Cellini. The rich dull
sheen of the piano gleamed in the thin light from the window; on the side the candle flickered. The room was bare, apart from the great instrument and a narrow bed. A monk’s cell; but he’d cried at the thought of leaving.
‘Revenge on a woman simply for being married to that old crook? Kill her to get at him? Who thought that? Did you? Did Cellini?’ His voice was ragged with emotion.
‘He doesn’t know you,’ said Cate. ‘It’s not his fault. And besides – he doesn’t think it was you, not any more.’
‘I could have done it,’ said Tiziano, sitting up straight in the chair beside her, taller than her as she crouched beside him, her hand now on his thin, hard knee, though of course he couldn’t feel it. ‘I could have done it, but I didn’t. She didn’t even figure, with me.’
Then he turned to her as though he’d only just heard what she said. ‘So who?’ he asked. ‘Who does he think did it?’
‘He thinks it was Michelle,’ Cate said, and there was a long silence. She had thought he would defend her, but he did not.
‘Because of her husband,’ he said, and she wondered how he knew. ‘Meadows vetoed him, did you know that? Said she wasn’t having married couples here. And he topped himself. No wonder she was angry.’
‘You’d never do that,’ she said, without being able to stop herself. ‘Would you?’ He took her hands and clasped them in his.
‘
Never say never,’ said Tiziano, as though he was murmuring an endearment.
Mai dire mai
.
‘No.’ Feeling the dark creep closer to them, feeling the cold rise up through the stone floor, the walls, Cate whispered, ‘Don’t say that.’
‘You don’t know, sweetheart,’ Tiziano said softly. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. There are things that regenerate, you see, and there are things that don’t. Spinal cord, that’s one of the things that doesn’t.’
There were words that Cate wanted to say at that moment, about how little it mattered to her that his legs didn’t work, only she didn’t know how you could say that. It mattered to him, that was the thing.
Besides, he was still talking. ‘Look at Alec Fairhead, he’s regenerated all right,’ he said, with bitterness.
‘What d’you mean?’ she said, unsettled.
‘After, what is it, more than twenty years of mourning, no relationships, no decent work to speak of, now Loni’s dead and he’s trying it on with everyone in sight.’
‘Did you know about that? About Alec and Loni?’ She stared at him.
‘He told me. The morning after she died, he told me. She aborted his child, did you know that?’ Cate shook her head slowly. ‘A new man now,’ said Tiziano. ‘Asking you to run away with him last night, haring off after little Tina. He’s down there now, getting her to comfort him.’
‘What?’ she said. She hadn’t known Tiziano had heard that last night. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, though, with Tina,’ she said, feeling alarm rise in her. ‘She’s – she’s vulnerable.’
‘Or d’you want him for yourself?’ She stared at Tiziano in the flickering half-light, startled by the anger in his voice.
He looked away, but not before she saw something burn in his eyes. ‘Did you see that coming, then? Michelle?’ And his voice now contained only casual curiosity, as if he simply didn’t care any more.
Had she? And then Cate thought of Michelle standing by that burning oil drum, saw again the expression in Mauro’s face as he ran up to stop them. He’d thought they were up to no good, hadn’t he? Why had she swallowed Michelle’s story whole?
She should have emptied that stuff all over the grass and picked through it until she knew what was in there. But she’d been afraid.
She should have told Sandro Cellini about it, but she’d wanted to protect them.
And Cate felt abruptly and completely alone, the burden of her failure falling squarely on her own shoulders, and no one else’s. Her mother’s voice rang again in her ears:
When are you going to take responsibility, Caterina?
‘I’m going down there,’ Cate said, hearing her own voice as though from far away. ‘I’m going down to the
villino
.’
‘As you wish,’ said Tiziano stiffly.
And it was only when she was out of the door in the cold and
running in the snow, down into the trees, that she realized he thought that Alec Fairhead was the reason for her going.
Luca Gallo’s face collapsed as they stared at him, and he sat, suddenly limp, in the chair behind his desk. He stared around at his surroundings as though he barely recognized them, and had no idea what was going on.
Sandro stood and watched, and waited; at his side Michelle Connor seemed entirely relaxed, and curious.
Gallo had pushed his chair back and was staring at the drawers. His desk was a total mess, an overflowing inbox, a small photo of a man’s face fallen under the computer screen, loose papers slipping to the floor. Was this the sign of a man who was losing his mind?
‘Is this true?’ Sandro said quietly.
Luca Gallo was shaking his head slowly, from side to side, then eventually he looked up. ‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘Did she give you the phone last Wednesday, the day before Loni Meadows died?’
‘The day before?’ said Luca slowly. ‘I couldn’t be sure of the day.’
‘But before she died?’ Sandro was patient. Luca nodded. ‘Before,’ he said, ‘yes.’
It was like getting blood out of a stone: the man looked traumatized. ‘I’m trying to think,’ he said. ‘Where I put it.’
‘Are you playing for time?’ asked Sandro as gently as he could. ‘Because all you are doing is allowing me the time to realize that if anyone here could have set up Loni Meadows’s car accident, you could have.’ As they returned his gaze, Gallo’s eyes came into focus, slowly: he seemed hypnotized into silence. Sandro went on. ‘You could have sent Mauro down there, couldn’t you? To do the dirty work, to work on the road surface. He’d be good at that; and now rather conveniently he seems to be unavailable for comment. You weren’t at dinner: you could have waited until they’d left the dining room, and sent that message. Only you, in fact, could have sent that message, isn’t that right?’
‘How do you know?’ Luca seemed to be grappling for a rationale. ‘How can you be so sure that the message was from his phone?’
Sandro shrugged. ‘Of course, I can’t.’ He pulled the little silver pebble of a phone that had belonged to Loni Meadows from his pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. ‘Of course, even if Orfeo’s mobile never turns up, this will tell me, in the end.’ He flicked it open, passed a thoughtful thumb across its small, dead screen.
‘It could tell you now,’ interjected Michelle, and Sandro turned to look at her. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, and she gestured to him impatiently. He handed the phone to her and watched, frowning, as she fished her own mobile out of her pocket, flicked off its back with a blunt nail.
Gallo was pulling open drawers now, in a panic. ‘Hold on,’ said Sandro, ‘calm down.’
‘It’s here somewhere,’ said Gallo. The drawers spilled out of the desk; he looked up, wild-eyed.
‘It must have been tough,’ said Sandro, arms folded across his chest. ‘Working for a woman like that. And when she bawled you out in front of everyone – ’ Sandro saw something fierce come into Gallo’s eyes.
‘So,’ said Sandro. ‘Per Hansen said he saw a light, from around the side of the castle, heading cross-country at about midnight.’ He leaned on the desktop with the tips of his fingers, eyeball to eyeball with Gallo. ‘The police will know, you know. They’ll find the shoes, or the trousers, they’ll find her traces on you.’ He paused. ‘What did you do with the phone? Did you destroy it? Hope no one bothered to ask after it? Or were you just going to give it back and rely on Orfeo being too stupid and arrogant to ask any questions?’