Gallo stared down, pale-faced, into the chaos of paper, old telephone directories and files. Then he focused, and pounced. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here, here it is.’ And he brandished an envelope marked ‘Count Orfeo’ in a neat script totally at odds with the disarray in the room.
Sandro stopped.
‘Right,’ he said, and slowly he held out his hand. Gallo hesitated, then dropped the envelope into his palm, and at that moment Michelle
looked up from whatever she was doing, held up her scratched and ancient
telefonino
, its screen illuminated.
‘See,’ she said. ‘Gotcha. Her sim card in my phone. Her phone records, her messages, right here.’
‘And here,’ said Sandro, weighing the envelope in his hand, strangely reluctant to open it. ‘So why didn’t you give it back to him, Luca?’ he asked, all of a sudden not feeling remotely triumphant. ‘He asked you about it, last night.’
‘He did, yes, he did,’ said Luca eagerly. ‘I told him it had been found. He was going to come and get it this morning.’ His face fell. ‘Only he left very early.’
Sandro ripped the envelope and pulled the phone out. Thumb hard down on the on button. Nothing happened.
‘No battery, I suppose,’ said Luca nervously. Sandro grunted, staring down at it, thinking. Pressed the button again, threw the thing down on the desk where it landed in a slew of museum brochures. Michelle came closer to him.
‘Here,’ she said quietly. ‘Look at this.’
Messages. Last message received, from someone Loni Meadows’s address book recognized as Nic.
Seem to find myself free this evening
, it read, in English. Perhaps whoever sent the message thought that made it more aristocratic.
At the Liberty. You know I don’t like to be kept waiting.
‘You were right,’ said Michelle, wonderingly.
Slowly Sandro took the phone from her. Clicked back to get to the call history. The last number she called.
Nic, 00.09 22 February.
Call out, at nine minutes past midnight on the Friday morning.
‘She called,’ said Sandro. ‘She was down there in the dark, concussed, frightened, certainly in shock, probably hypothermic.’ They were both staring at him now. ‘She called her lover,’ he went on. ‘Of course. She thought he’d come to help her.’ Turned to Luca Gallo. ‘More fool her.’
Gallo was staring, shaking his head, but Sandro wouldn’t wait.
‘Did you even answer? Did you listen to her sobbing, or was she incoherent?’ He stared into Gallo’s face, refused to let him look away.
‘You weren’t even content to leave her to die, were you? You had to go down there to make sure. And then you went through her pockets to find her phone and throw it in the river.’
Sandro looked at the shambles of the office and wondered that this man could have the presence of mind to do that. He must have hated her.
‘Did she threaten you, did she write about you on her blog? Did she write to the American office, perhaps? Did she make allegations? Was it you, sabotaged her computer, thinking you might destroy evidence?’
There was a silence, and in the dim, stuffy room Sandro felt something, almost as palpable as a change in temperature, coming from Michelle Connor at his shoulder.
‘Luca?’ she said, with horror. ‘No.’
‘Did you get Mauro to lay down the ice for you?’ Sandro went on. ‘He’d have done it, wouldn’t he, no questions asked? And then later. You came up here, you left the dinner table. You said you were coming up here – but no one saw you, did they? You might have been – anywhere.’
And Gallo said softly, ‘No.’
‘No?’ Damn it, thought Sandro, damn it. Just admit it.
‘I was on the phone to my lover Salvatore, in Sicily,’ said Gallo simply, and all his anxiety, all his fear was gone. ‘He’ll tell you. The phone records will tell you. We talked until very late.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know when exactly. It doesn’t matter. He’ll tell you.’
On the desk between them Niccolò Orfeo’s discarded mobile glowed into life.
NO SIM, it read.
Sandro frowned at it. ‘What does that mean?’ he said impatiently. His own phone might be invaluable to him but he regularly found himself infuriated by its intricacies, its gnomic utterances.
‘It means the sim card isn’t in there,’ said Michelle slowly. She sounded sick.
‘But it was in there when you found it. And when you handed it over – ’
‘I didn’t – it wasn’t – ’and Michelle froze.
‘Hold on – ’ said Sandro because something occurred to him, something that should have sounded an alarm an hour earlier. ‘You said,’ and he spoke carefully, ‘didn’t you say,
we laughed?
You said,
we thought
,
what an old fool
.
What a whore
. We.’
He looked from Gallo to Michelle. ‘It wasn’t Michelle gave you the phone, was it?’ he said to Gallo. And to Michelle, ‘Who were you looking at those messages with? Who did you trust to give it back to Luca?’
But he already knew.
‘Is it really snowing down there?’ said Luisa distractedly, the phone in her hand as she paced the floor. ‘And it’s possible there’s no signal, either.’ She pressed her face against the glass as though a glimpse of the Carmine church might come to her rescue. ‘What if he’s had some kind of accident?’
‘It’s pretty remote,’ said Giuli, hardly listening. She was scrolling through a post on Loni Meadows’s blog from six months previously, covering an exhibition in New York. It was slow work, trying to understand the English. The text wasn’t so much about the art, which was just as well, as when she clicked on the small photographs of the exhibits inset in the text Giuli found them at best incomprehensible, at worst downright disturbing. It seemed to be more of an attack on the artist.
‘Come here,’ she said to Luisa. ‘Your English is better than mine.’ Luisa crossed the room in two strides, impatient as always, and sat beside Giuli on the seat. ‘Shift,’ she said, peering at the screen, and Giuli got another chair.
‘Cheap exhibitionism,’ Luisa translated roughly. ‘No canvas but her own abusive childhood. This is not art, it is indecent exposure. Trailer-trash – ’she didn’t know what that meant ’ – picking the lint out of her navel and sticking it on a pot.’ She peered at the picture, clicking to enlarge it, the slender-necked, elegant shape of an Etruscan amphora. Close up a small, ugly creature had been fashioned on the vase’s smooth bell, a thing horned and toothed and
clotted with clumps of hair and nail, possessed of a horrible energy. Luisa recoiled.
‘Abusive childhood?’ said Giuli. Luisa’s eyes refocused, looking into hers. ‘Yes,’ she said, and reached across the desk for the piece of paper she had plucked from the array they had set out earlier.
‘I said, didn’t I?’ she murmured, looking from the page to the screen. ‘I said, if I had to pick any of them out of a line-up as – what? Mentally unstable? I’d have picked her. And Sandro said,
Look for the weak
,
not the strong
. That’s her.’
And Luisa took up her mobile. ‘I’m going to call him,’ she said. ‘He has to know about this. Because if I was this girl, this abused girl grown up to make monsters of her own life, and if I read this – if I thought millions of people were going to read this about me – ’ And she broke off to dial, her head shaking, back and forth.
‘Her, then,’ said Giuli. ‘Tina Kreutz.’
A
ND CATE RAN, AROUND the back of the castle, past the kitchen, past the stairs to Luca’s office, the door to her own apartment. She couldn’t even have said why she was running or how she knew that she must be quick: she couldn’t have said if she was running towards something or away from it. The snow clung to her soaked trouser legs and clogged on her boots, her feet as heavy and numb as lead. She passed the laundry and slid, landing heavily on her side, something hard and sharp catching her on the hip bone. She blinked with the pain, but it occupied only a part of her brain, she scrabbled and was upright and looking into the wide glass frontage of Michelle’s bungalow.
There was the detritus of the night before, or some of it; there was a black plastic rubbish sack open to reveal crumpled cans and newspaper. As her eyes adjusted she noticed two suitcases, tagged, neatly upright and side by side, and scanning the room she saw that half the shelves had been emptied. It looked abandoned, a place where vagrants might have slept and from which they had moved on. But even as she strained to see behind the glass Cate knew, this wasn’t it. This wasn’t the place, this wasn’t what she’d come to find.
The blue-white glare off the snow was deceptive: the light was failing, and behind the grey lid of the sky the day was closing. Cate realized she had no idea what time it was, only the cramping of her empty belly told her it was later than she thought. She floundered away from the bungalow to find herself up to her knees in a drift, waded on to the path and looked down through the trees.
The
villino
stood, perhaps half a kilometre away; over her left shoulder the bulk of the castle. Somewhere down here Michelle had set off on her run, somewhere down here Per had seen a light moving across the dark landscape. Cate could see fresh footprints in the snow, and she followed them.
Big prints, wide apart, wider than she could stride. Alec Fairhead, going down to see Tina; no prints coming back. Cate stopped a moment. They would be there together, of course. She would be – intruding. Uneasy, she shaded her eyes, trying to see; on the corner of the
villino
the black shape of the oil drum, at hip height and half hidden, was still there, where they had left it. Uncertainly Cate set off again stumbling and slipping on the track: unstable hardcore overlaid with snow. If they were there, she would just have to explain. She pushed away the image of Alec and Tina together – not because she had any interest in Alec Fairhead, she defended herself silently to Tiziano. But because it was somehow – wrong. Vulnerable was the word that she had used. Tina was vulnerable.
And just short of the
villino
, Cate stopped. A couple of metres away, it was as though her legs wouldn’t take her any further. Her cheeks were icy, her fingers frozen, and quite suddenly she was very, very frightened.
Behind the
villino
, the little house where Mauro had been born, the trees clustered dark, ivy smothering their spindly trunks, almost as high as the house. Go on, she urged her legs, but they felt as useless as rubber. One step, then another.
The windows were dark in the rough stone walls, the door closed. Cate leaned against its peeling wood, and rapped, the sound feeble. And again, with as much force as she could muster, feeling no pain as the wood grazed her frozen knuckles. Then she leaned heavily on the
bell push. It sounded inside, shrill and lonely. Cate waded through the snow to the window and, on tiptoe, peered in.
There was the long brick island supporting the work surface in the centre of the studio space, the potter’s wheel and assorted shapeless things barely lit in the grey gloom. The high shelf with its row of watching pots, the faces on them obscure now: Michelle had packed to leave, but Tina had not. Why not? Did she not mean to leave with the rest of them? Something was different, all the same. Something had been moved, or taken, but Cate didn’t know what.
Cate heard herself swallow. Nothing moved, not a flicker, but it was not quite silent. There were the tiny, obscure sounds of the crusted snow as it shifted and settled; there were soft patterings and drippings from gutters and branches, not all close, falling from the eaves, but further off too, down the hill, among the trees. A sense of something breathing that Cate had heard before, as if the wooded hillside had its own system of lungs and veins and its own pulse, the castle its beating heart.
The wind. It would be the wind. Feeling her lungs burn in the cold, her breath short, Cate turned with awful reluctance away from the window. Where were they all? What had she come here for, when she might have just climbed on her
motorino
and escaped, once and for all?
The oil drum: that was what she’d come here for. It was on the far corner of the
villino
, carelessly shoved half out of view, abandoned, but just the sight of its steel edge furred with black gave Cate a sudden sick sensation. Just the memory of those soaked and charred fragments in the blackened interior, a bad smell of burnt leather and hair and things not quite discernible. What might Michelle have disposed of in here?
Cate knew now she should have told Sandro Cellini about it, this nasty little secret of feminine hysteria and illogic, but she had been ashamed, hadn’t she? For Michelle and Tina, or for herself, for halfbelieving in it too? Too superstitious even to begin to describe it; how would you begin? But she should have told him. Cate took a step, then another, cold hands set on either side of its charred and rusted edge, and she was looking inside.
The smell of old ashes and worse, something sodden and organic and stinking fused to other, chemical odours, rose to Cate’s nostrils. Turn it out, she thought with a quick, violent revulsion, and she tipped the drum, heard it scrape harshly on the stone underfoot but not before she had heard another sound, down below the house and deep in the trees, a variation of that breathing again but this time more of a quick gasp or even a choking. And the drum was on its side only Cate was not looking at what had spilled out of it but listening, it seemed, harder than she had ever listened in her life.
‘Who – who is it?’ She tried to call and it came out as a whisper. But there was only that silence that was not quite silence but a hundred thousand tiny sounds and all of them mocking her. Her back against the stone of the house, she knelt, the knees of her trousers soaking instantly, and made herself look at the blackened rubbish now dirtying the snow in front of her.
The brittle remains of a burnt plastic bag. A strip of disintegrating printed fabric that had once been Loni’s. Out of the corner of her eye the doll was discernible, a crudely stuffed limb flung out and something like hair, but Cate didn’t want to look at it directly. Michelle had had nothing to do with this, she knew quite suddenly: this was horror-story schlock. But there was other stuff here: this was more than a doll and a few scraps of cloth.
With trembling hands, unable to look up for fear of the sounds from the trees, nor to the side, Cate forced herself to reach into the sodden heap of ash. And immediately she felt something solid, rubbery. Grateful for the numbness in her fingers, she flipped it out of the pile. It was – a shoe. A half-burnt little flat oriental cloth shoe, not much more than child-size. She stared: what else? Feeling her chest burn, Cate pulled at a dark piece of cloth that turned into a trouser leg, charred from the bottom, loose cotton trousers. And as she raised and opened them and saw whose hollow-bellied, thinshanked shape they would have fitted, a scatter of smaller fragments fell. She didn’t see the stamp-sized sim card or follow its trajectory into the snow because she was looking at something else. The grotesque melted remains of what might have been a condom but
was in fact, as Cate saw when she forced herself to go on looking, one latex glove, of the kind a doctor might use, or an artisan working with glazes or chemicals or –
She thought of Tina, sitting, leaning forward in the little library, watching the old TV set. Watching the weather report, the night before Loni died. Rocking, just slightly, hugging herself and rocking as she stared at the screen.
And then into the quiet she heard the gasp again only this time there was a finality to it, a sigh as if of love satisfied or sleep attained, and although all Cate wanted to do was run the other way and never turn around, she was up and stumbling through the trees towards the sound.
In her mind’s eye Cate had thought the tree trunks stood there in ranks like soldiers that she might easily dodge, but she had not bargained for the brambles and the ivy that clogged and snared the space, ripping at her trousers, strangling the branches. Or for the cobwebs and nameless trailing things that touched her face so that she had to fight not to scream and bat at it all, to fight just to run. Or even for the horrible idea that each tree, those on the periphery of her vision as well as those blocking her path, might not be an inanimate thing but someone. Someone come to seize her from behind and pin her arms and bring her down and press her face into the dead things on the forest floor.
And then she saw it, white among the dark trunks, and she had to stop and lean against something and feel the bark against her cheek and listen to her heart pounding desperately and know that there was nothing she could do any more. Someone was coming, she could hear them, but there was nothing she could do.
Pale-faced, Michelle was at the door and pleading: Sandro didn’t know at first if she was urging him to hurry or trying to block his path. She had either hand on the frame, cruciform in the doorway.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said, over and over again, ‘Jesus Christ, I didn’t know.’
‘Michelle,’ said Luca Gallo gently, suddenly at her side with a firm hand on her shoulder; he seemed to Sandro quite transformed. She looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’s not your responsibility. Tina is not your responsibility.’ Michelle held his gaze questioningly, the faintest colour returning to her cheeks, and Gallo turned to Sandro.
‘The girl fetching water from the river,’ he said slowly. Sandro looked at him, uncomprehending. ‘Mauro said it,’ Gallo went on. ‘This morning; I thought he was hallucinating, or thinking about another time, maybe. He said he was out on the tractor, and he saw the girl from his house, he said, fetching water.’
‘The
villino
was his house,’ said Michelle. ‘Once upon a time.’
In his pocket Sandro felt the throb of his mobile, an urgent summons, and before he realized that she didn’t even know his number, for some reason his thoughts turned to Caterina. Was this like parenthood, he wondered for an instant, this constant grappling with where they were, were they safe? He pulled out the phone, its screen blinking at him. Jesus God, he thought, as the pulse of elation combined with the need to get out through that door and find Tina Kreutz, why now? Why does she call me now? But he had to answer.
‘Darling,’ he said with impatient longing, and he saw both of them, Luca and Michelle, turn towards him at the sound of his voice. Luisa, though, didn’t seem to hear what they heard; she was talking urgently about something he couldn’t understand, something about the weak and the strong, as bossy and insistent and constant as she had always been. She the strong and he the weak.
‘You told me once,’ she was saying on the crackling line, ‘it’s not the strong who murder, it’s the powerless,’ and although he didn’t know what exactly she was talking about, Sandro marvelled at it, as though she was inside his head. ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Abusive childhood, it said on the blog.’
‘Darling,’ he said again, whispering with tenderness, ‘I can’t talk now,’ and he hung up.
‘I didn’t know,’ Michelle was saying still.
‘But you know now?’ Sandro asked her quietly. She turned her head and stared back at him and then, finally, she nodded.
‘I knew she hated Loni,’ she said. ‘I always knew she hated her enough, deep down I guess I knew that.’ She looked at her hand on the doorframe as if it held some kind of answer. ‘I gave her the phone to give back. I guess – I even thought, when I saw her burning her stuff, I guess deep down I knew there was something wrong with it.’
Then she looked at Luca. ‘It’s the work, with her, you see. That’s all she ever had, after the family she got, goddamned Lutheran bastard dad.’ And she turned to look at Sandro. ‘You know what it’s like when someone takes something you feel like you spent your life creating, and laughs at it?’
Sandro glanced into her honest, angry eyes, and slowly he nodded. She went on. ‘Holds your baby up in public and says, what d’you call this? Says, is this all you have? Is this all you are? You imagine that. You got nothing but your work, then things get out of proportion. Love didn’t interest her, see. Love, sex, no way.’
Eyes far away, Michelle took a hand from the doorframe and passed it over her forehead and Sandro knew she was thinking about her husband.
Quietly, not wanting to interrupt her thoughts but knowing he had to, he asked, ‘Where is she now?’
‘She?’ Michelle said, then something dawned and a hand came up to her mouth. ‘He went down to her. Didn’t he? We saw him go down to her, Alec went down. Oh, shit.’
The light was going, outside, and Sandro felt a rise of panicked unpreparedness as they emerged at the foot of the staircase, one after the other like rabbits from a tunnel, out into an uncertain gloom. He barely registered Tiziano Scarpa in his wheelchair heading towards them, hardly heard him call, ‘Where is she? Have you seen Cate?’ Not until he was halfway down the path, trying to keep up.