‘No thanks,’ Giuli said, still smiling. ‘It’s not good for you, that stuff.’
Carlotta shrugged, and slid off the washbasin. ‘Feels good, though,’ she said, taking a deep drag. The carelessly rolled paper glowed bright; the girl didn’t even know how to roll a joint properly. But Giuli wasn’t going to point that out to her.
‘Maybe,’ said Giuli, then shut up. Wondered what Sandro was going to say to the parents tomorrow; whether he was going to take the money and wash his hands of the girl.
‘That your boyfriend?’ she said eventually, nodding upstairs. Carlotta flushed. ‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t he?’ Giuli shrugged.
From behind the door came the cascade of a faulty flush, and one of the English girls emerged with a blush of scarlet on her cheeks, like a doll. She brushed past them without washing her hands.
Giuli nodded towards the cubicle but Carlotta Bellagamba shook her head, holding up the joint. Giuli had no choice but to go in, locking the door behind her; after two, three giant Cokes, it was just as well. But when she came out, Carlotta wasn’t there any more.
At the gold-tiled basin Giuli washed her hands with deliberate care, eyeing herself in the mirror. She didn’t want just to rush back out there and blow what cover she had.
The lower room was empty when she emerged and in the entrance the Indian doorman was sitting absorbed in his cash box, counting notes into a cloth bag. It was nearly two; if Giuli went back up the spiral staircase and found Carlotta and the boys gone, she’d have wasted valuable time. She grabbed her jacket, her helmet, and slung her bag over her shoulder and edged outside.
It was bitterly cold; the bare trees of the little piazza were silvery with frost. Where were they?
‘They haven’t come out,’ said the voice at her shoulder. It was Sandro, leaning against the wall.
‘You’re not warm enough,’ he added, holding out a hand for her helmet, so she could get her jacket on properly. She didn’t know whether to hug him for being there or give him grief for treating her like a kid.
There was movement behind them, voices in the doorway, and Sandro took her by the elbow, moving them both aside.
‘Good move,’ he said in a low voice, ‘leaving before them. Clever girl.’
Behind her Giuli heard the guttural accent of the man in the grey leather jacket. ‘
Alla prossima
,’ he was saying. ‘Any time, baby.’ Slurring, insistent.
‘How long have you been out here?’ hissed Giuli. ‘You did go home, didn’t you? You talked things over with Luisa?’
‘I did,’ said Sandro shortly. ‘Look, I just came back to make sure you were all right. And the girl, of course.’
‘I was going to follow her home,’ said Giuli, keeping her voice down. ‘On the
motorino
.’
‘You’d die of exposure,’ muttered Sandro. ‘And you’re worn out, look at you.’ Giuli grimaced, remembering the shadows under her eyes in the cloakroom mirror. ‘I’ll follow her back in the car. Only – ’ he stopped.
‘Only what?’ Giuli had her shoulders hunched against the cold and even in the lovely padded jacket Luisa had given her she couldn’t stop shivering.
‘Only I might want you to take this over a bit from tomorrow. I promised him – Bellagamba – promised him we’d come by and update him.’
So he was going to stick with it – or she was. She said nothing; Sandro mistook her silence for reluctance. ‘I know tomorrow’s Saturday, ’ he said apologetically. ‘I’ll make it up to you. I just want Bellagamba to know you’re part of the deal.’
Giuli felt her face break into a smile. She could do it, she wanted to say, she could. She restrained herself, as Sandro had taught her to do. ‘Why?’
‘Well, for a start you’ve done most of the legwork,’ he said, hesitating. ‘And something’s come up. Another job. At least, I think it has.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ said Sandro. ‘I’ve got a garbled message from Luca Gallo on my mobile.’ He was looking over her shoulder, distant. ‘Says it’s urgent. Says he needs to see me tomorrow.’
His gaze shifted over her shoulder, and turning her head a little Giuli saw the three boys and Carlotta on the street. From behind them came the sound of a bolt being shot across the door. ‘Chucking-out time,’ said Sandro. It was after two.
‘You get on your bike,’ Sandro said, ‘I’ll follow the girl home.’
They walked together as far as Giuli’s
motorino
; he handed her the helmet. ‘Go home and get some sleep now.’ And before turning towards the little car he and Luisa had used to come and visit her in rehab together, he put a hand to her cheek. Then he hunched his shoulders and went.
As she swung around the corner, heading for home, Giuli looked back and saw his silhouette as he sat solitary and motionless at the
wheel, watching the kids on the pavement.
You’ll be OK
, she promised silently.
Everything’s going to be OK
.
The frost that glittered on the city pavements also dusted the trees and gates and fences out through the suburbs and up into the dark hills. Down in the Maremma, the icy tributaries of the rivers that crisscrossed the land were beginning to freeze at the edges, and high up where Orfeo sat under a waxing moon the clear night sky had lowered the temperature to eight degrees below zero, and hardened the rutted fields to stone.
Down in the steep-sided valley, on the sharp left-hand bend where Loni Meadows had come off the road, the deep ruts the heavy vehicle’s careering descent had carved in the earth had set like rock. It had gone almost all the way down, into the river; it had taken the crew of the tow-truck hours to haul it out of there and now the chaos of crushed vegetation and churned mud was the only obvious evidence of Loni Meadows’s headlong passage, in the dark, to her death.
In Orfeo itself all illumination save the security lights that twinkled deceptively softly at even intervals around the castle’s massive fortified walls had been extinguished, but in her new bed, in her small, bare room, Cate could not sleep. As she half-dozed, snatches of the day’s events – faces, expressions, things said and left unsaid – replayed themselves in her head, in and out of order.
At one point she started up, halfway through the fragment of a nightmare, and shouted ‘No!’ before lying back down. She drifted, half-awake, half-dreaming, in and out of time, seeing a rumpled bed, a green silk blouse, the big ugly car outside a hotel and finally only Dottoressa Meadows’s bright, wicked face, hearing her sharp, light, mocking voice before she fell, at last, into sleep.
‘S
O WHAT ABOUT the husband?’
It occurred to Cate that Ginevra, speaking these words in a gruff undertone to Mauro, might have forgotten she was there. She was standing at the work surface in the little cold pantry off the kitchen, keeping her head down and following orders. Which in this case were to make the paste for the evening’s
crostini toscani
. She’d been doing it for forty minutes or so, since coming down not long after 7.30 and taking Ginevra by surprise. ‘Oh my God,’ the old cook had said, clasping a hand to her flushed chest at the sight of Cate in the doorway. ‘You gave me a start. What are you doing here so early?’
Saturday evening was Ginevra’s evening off, and the dinner was a buffet prepared in advance: Cate had thought, more fool her, that what with all the goings on her offer to help would be welcome. Last night, sitting at the silent dinner table, hopping up and down clearing the table as well as trying to make some kind of conversation with the guests, Cate had felt sorry for Ginevra and Nicki, knowing how much extra work there would be behind the kitchen door. And to be frank, it had been torture trying to play the host, under the circumstances.
The bed had been comfortable, the room warm, but Cate had woken early after her troubled night. She had felt a sense of doom, of bad news
awaiting. One of her dreams had featured the barking of the dogs from Ginevra’s farm, and now wide awake, she could still hear them baying in the pre-dawn light. All she had wanted was a bit of human company, to make the world normal again.
To get to the kitchen Cate had to come down the quiet, dark back staircase, found herself tiptoeing in fact, so as not to wake anyone, past the closed and silent door to Luca’s office and apartments, out into the castle’s courtyard, grey and silent in the early light, and round the back to the kitchen door.
And it had looked like she wasn’t welcome. It had seemed to Cate then that her new status – and she wished she had a clearer idea of just what that status was – wasn’t the only thing annoying Ginevra; the cook was also unhappy about having Cate breathing down her neck. She’d wondered what time Ginevra got up herself; she was in here by seven every morning, and never mind the ten-minute walk from the farmhouse where she lived.
And it had been a cold one, this morning. Off to the north-west, Cate had noticed, looking out over the frosted fields in the blue-grey dawn, there was a bank of heavy cloud waiting on the horizon. Snow moving down from the Alps, her radio had told her.
Nicki didn’t get in until 8.30; Ginevra had set Cate to making the paste as an alternative to sending her back to bed; a slow, time-consuming job requiring plenty of fine chopping. Onion, carrot, celery, oregano, chicken livers, oil and wine.
When Mauro had come in she’d known it was him before he spoke from the boots being stamped on the mat, the heavy tread, the cold whiff of fields that came in with him. Cate had known without having to look that he was crossing the kitchen to the big two-litre bottle of wine that stood beside the stove; she’d heard the glug of the tumbler being filled.
They’d stood in silence for a bit, a few muttered complaints about the cold, then they’d started.
‘I suppose we’ll have to clear her stuff,’ Ginevra had grumbled first. ‘I suppose someone’ll have to take it away.’
He’d grunted. Ginevra had gone on. ‘What did the
Commissario
say about that? Anything?’
At the mention of the policeman Cate had paused in her careful chopping, and listened.
‘Nope,’ the gardener had said with satisfaction. ‘I think they’re done with the whole business, don’t you? Foreigners are always driving into trees and killing themselves, it’s a pain in the backside for them, our poor lads having to clear up the mess.’
And it was then that Ginevra said, with something malicious in her voice, ‘What about the husband?’
For some reason the question came as more of a shock to Cate than anything she’d heard since the news of Loni Meadows’s death. Husband? There was a husband. Well.
There was another grunt from Mauro. ‘What about him?’ he said with contempt.
‘Well,’ Ginevra said cautiously. ‘I suppose he’ll come out and collect her stuff, will he?’
‘I don’t suppose he’s in any hurry,’ said Mauro. ‘I mean – it wasn’t what we’d call a marriage, was it?’ He laughed sourly, and for a moment Ginevra joined him.
‘Do you think he knew?’ said Ginevra after a bit. ‘About her?’
‘Probably,’ said Mauro with bitterness. ‘Different rules for their sort.’
They were sitting at the table now; Cate could hear the scrape of chairs, and Mauro’s tumbler being set down on the wood. Refilled. Ginevra herself would be drinking peach nectar, her sickly secret vice. She ordered the stuff by the case, on the Trust’s bill, but no one ever drank it but her. The glasses chinked.
‘He said she didn’t die straight away,’ said Mauro, and Cate put a hand to her mouth in the chilly pantry.
‘The
Commissario
. Said it. Said it’d have been the cold, finished her off.’
Ginevra made a grudging sound. ‘
Brutto,
’ she said. ‘Nasty.’
‘She had it coming,’ said Mauro, his voice slowed up, almost thoughtful-sounding under the influence of the wine.
‘Oh yes,’ said Ginevra. ‘She did.’
As the silence persisted, the chicken livers still between her fingers, Cate realized that sooner or later Mauro and Ginevra would work out
she was there, and she had no idea what she would do then. And as if on cue her stomach, empty for close to twelve hours, rumbled loudly.
Suddenly Ginevra was in the doorway to the pantry glaring down at her. Cate got to her feet smiling, as though she’d heard nothing, and presented Ginevra with the wooden board loaded with its cargo of fresh, neat piles; glossy livers, carrot, celery, parsley.
‘
Mamma mia
,’ she said brightly, ‘I’m starving.’
Behind Ginevra the door banged and in came Nicki, with Anna-Maria hard on her heels, overcoated and grumbling.
But Ginevra didn’t turn at the sound; instead she leaned down to Cate’s ear. ‘Now you listen, my girl,’ she said in a low, fierce voice; ‘we both know what you heard. And if you breathe a word – ’
Cate shook her head, mesmerized. Ginevra went on, muttering fiercely. ‘She did have it coming, there’s no one would disagree with that. There’s not one of us – and I mean none – she hasn’t accused of stealing or lying or drinking on the job, except you, and she’d have got around to it, believe me. Mauro, Gallo, Nicki – accused Nicki of stealing an earring!’ Her eyes bulged with outrage. ‘A single earring! And it had got caught in the bedspread all along.’
Cate’s words fell over each other in an attempt to placate Ginevra. ‘No – I – I wouldn’t – ’ Then something crept into her mind, and wouldn’t leave. ‘I didn’t think – well, it’s just – he did have a row with her, didn’t he? That very day.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Ginevra, hands on hips, then something dawned. ‘Don’t be silly. Like I said, not a day passed she didn’t row with someone.’
‘And then he was out all day,’ said Cate, half to herself. ‘Hauling cows out of a stream, he said.’
Ginevra’s eyes were black as currants. ‘Oh, you stupid girl, of course he was. Besides, she was alive and kicking the whole day, wasn’t she? He doesn’t need an alibi, he wouldn’t – ’ She looked momentarily bewildered, and when she spoke again her voice had lost some of its certainty. ‘It was an accident. Well, even if he did need an alibi, yes, he was off with the cows, then he came back in time for the bitch to bawl him out all over again, for helping a friend in need, as if she’d have
understood. But one thing’s for certain, when she drove into the river and killed herself, he was tucked up in bed beside me, snoring his head off.’ Looking her age, Ginevra took a breath.
‘Look,’ she hissed, ‘he thinks there’s something funny about it. We all do. Something not right. But it’s nothing to do with us.’ And her small black eyes glittered.
‘Did he tell that to the
Commissario
, then?’ asked Cate. Ginevra turned her back by way of answer.
At the stove Anna-Maria and Nicki were still grumbling between themselves, but looking over the old cook’s shoulder Cate saw they were beginning to take notice, and Ginevra turned to glare at them.
‘And what are you looking at?’ she snapped.
‘He’s said I’m not to clean the rooms,’ said Anna-Maria. ‘Some story about not wanting anything thrown away by mistake? Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. No one’s complained about me, have they?’
There was a story, Cate had always thought it a myth, that Anna-Maria had incinerated a piece of artwork in progress that one of the guests had left out on their kitchen table; something made out of sprouting green potatoes and bleached chicken bones. Or was it congealed blood? The story varied.
Anna-Maria was still complaining. ‘Well, I don’t know, they’ll be pigsties by the time I get back in. The girl from Florida’s freaking out already. The Englishman doesn’t know how to keep anything clean – but then, they never do, the English. Don’t know a dishcloth when one’s laid out for them.’ Cate shushed her; if she was caught badmouthing the guests so loudly she’d be out on her ear. ‘And that northerner – Swedish, is he?’
‘Norwegian,’ said Cate.
‘Well, whatever he is, he hasn’t let me inside his door in a week anyway, just glared at me the first few days, then wouldn’t answer when I knocked.’ She plonked herself at the table, puffed with outrage.
Nicki was hanging up her coat. ‘Mr Gallo said you can start on the library,’ she soothed. ‘He didn’t say he was going to dock your pay, either, so come on. No harm done. Oooh,’ she moved on, without a pause, eyeing the slice of
pandoro
that Cate had cut herself, ‘can I have some of that?’
Nicki was greedy, for a skinny little thing. Cate cut another piece of the sweet yellow yeast-cake and pushed the plate across the table to the girl, who parked herself at a chair and began to wolf it. And what with Mauro looking like thunder at the sink, Nicki stuffing her face and babbling and Anna-Maria still padded in her layers of coats and taking up as much room as a water-buffalo at the table, the kitchen suddenly seemed very crowded. Cate stood up.
‘I’ll check on the dining room before I go, shall I?’ she said.
‘You’d better,’ said Ginevra, giving her a beady look. ‘I’m sure we didn’t have a proper chance to clear yesterday. And before you go where?’
‘Well, to check in with Lu – with Mr Gallo,’ said Cate cautiously. ‘If he’s up and about. Anna-Maria?’
‘Well, I don’t know about up and about,’ said the cleaner huffily. ‘He just leaned out the window to shout at me, and if you ask me he was still wearing what he’d slept in.’ She sniffed.
Poor Luca, thought Cate. What was Anna-Maria’s problem? His alternative lifestyle, maybe; poor Luca, fighting this lot’s prejudices all these years. He must be made of strong stuff. Cate swallowed the halfcup of lukewarm coffee Ginevra had grudgingly poured her, and left.
By the light of day the dining room looked sad; Ginevra was right, they had all wanted to get out of there in a bit too much of a hurry, last night. The table was smeared and there were crumbs on the floor, so Cate got the cleaning materials from the cupboard in the kitchen and set to.
It might look sad this morning, but last night had been something else. Once out of the library, with its dark, echoing corners, where voices seemed muffled and whispering acceptable, and into the modern wood-and-glass dining room, the guests had simply stopped talking.
Whether it was the cheerful lighting, the effort of looking – or not looking – each other in the eye around the great oval table, or the fact that Loni Meadows’s absence was most unavoidable here, her place literally empty, Cate couldn’t have said. The memory of the night before – the
Dottoressa
in green silk telling a dirty story about Fellini;
I knew him, you know
, she’d said, sweeping the table with her flirtatious gaze, so you couldn’t tell who her look was meant for.
She had her favourites; who’d said that? Probably Tiziano. Per, Tina; they were her favourites.
Last night they hadn’t even complained about the
baccalà
, traditionally the most disliked meal of the week, Friday’s fish supper, salt cod stewed in sauce. They hadn’t got noisily drunk and bickered or pontificated or embarked on impromptu poetry readings, although Per had worked his way steadily and without obvious effect through two bottles of red wine and Michelle had been woozy on prosecco even before she sat down. Tina had drunk glass after glass of water, as if purging something from her system, and pushed the food around her plate.
‘Did they say – did she suffer?’ Cate had heard Tina say at one point, in her high, light voice, looking around with spaced eyes. The question had seemed deeply shocking; certainly no one had answered.
Anna-Maria thought there was something wrong with Tina. Her room smelled bad, said Anna-Maria; it smelled sour. Maybe she was ill. Maybe she was just unhappy.
In fact, no one had eaten much at all; when Cate had risen to help Nicki clear she had noted that most of the plates had hardly been touched. Tiziano, bless him, had cleared his, but even he had been far from his usual boisterous self. Each one of them had seemed determined to keep their thoughts to themselves. Why? The thought popped into Cate’s head that they were afraid to say the wrong thing. Afraid to incriminate themselves.