Authors: Christobel Kent
Magda Scardino regarded him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sniffing around is about right. He asked me if Giancarlo was off the scene. I told him he wasn’t my type. He is good-looking, isn’t he?’
Was, thought Sandro. And asking about Giancarlo.
She leaned in. ‘Do you think he might know something, you know, for your
investigation
?’
And she had looked over his shoulder. ‘Darling,’ she said smoothly to her husband, who had arrived beside them, and taking him firmly by the elbow she steered them both away without another word.
Ahead of him now on the ringroad, lights blinked, moved, the blockage easing. A figure was moving through the traffic, selling something. Nifty, these rush-hour vendors, one eye on
the lights changing, the other scanning the cars for movement. He wondered what the death and injury rate was: half of them looked maimed already.
Negotiating a path through the crowd of guests – a raft of younger people had turned up, no doubt friends of the happy couple – Sandro had had to track Alessandra Cornell down before he left. She might be abandoning ship, but he’d be damned if he’d ask Bottai if it was all right if he went home. Cornell’s fiancé was holding court on the terrace, but the bride-to-be was nowhere to be seen. Remembering his laptop, Sandro had headed to his office, in through the courtyard, a quick sidestep at the wide staircase, past the lifts. To his relief he found that he had locked it after all, and even managed to locate the bunch of keys in his briefcase.
It had been coming back that he’d found Alessandra Cornell, frowning down at her mobile at the top of the stairs that led to the cellars.
Sandro was all too aware that he still hadn’t said a word to her about what he’d seen at the morgue that morning. Fortunately for him she seemed to have forgotten his errand: the suitcase that might have belonged to someone at the Palazzo. Other things on her mind. That cat would be amongst the pigeons soon enough, and in the meantime it was simply easier to say nothing.
Of course, she might have just stepped out of the lift, or come down from the upper floors, but what Sandro said to her, before he could stop himself was, ‘Been paying a last visit to the torture chamber?’
Her head snapped up instantly, eyes wide. Trying to make a joke of it, Sandro said, ‘That’ll be good practice for marriage.’
‘You’d better not let Gastone hear you talking like that,’ Alessandra Cornell said.
‘Once you’re gone he’ll get rid of me, won’t he?’ said Sandro. She smiled wearily, but said nothing. ‘Because he’s got something to hide?’
She snorted. ‘Gastone?’ She shook her head. ‘He hasn’t the brains.’ She put the mobile away. ‘A message,’ she said. ‘The Carabinieri want to talk to me.’ She sighed. ‘You wouldn’t know what about?’
Sandro shrugged. ‘Search me.’ Not exactly a lie. He hesitated. ‘I could call them, if you like? I was about to ask if I could leave, but . . .’
Alessandra looked at him a long moment: tired like that, you could almost imagine her a mother. ‘I’ll call them back in the morning,’ she said. ‘If I feel like it.’
‘He’s a lucky man,’ said Sandro, sincere. ‘You’re doing the right thing.’
‘Running away?’ She shivered. ‘I thought I – you and I – I thought we could bring it under control. I thought it was just coincidence. Or – or mischief.’
‘But it’s not, is it?’ said Sandro.
‘It’s evil,’ she said, and although he didn’t like the word, he didn’t correct her. ‘Athene,’ she said, and he saw the distress on her face. ‘An old woman. In the ambulance she was trying to tell me something and she couldn’t make me understand. Her eyes—’ She broke off.
‘I know,’ said Sandro. ‘I saw.’
She straightened her collar, rubbed her eyes. ‘I just have this – this feeling.’ She glanced over her shoulder, down the
stairs, then quickly back at him. ‘That there’s worse to come.’
Something occurred to him. ‘Who was it,’ he said, ‘who found Marjorie Cameron in the steam room? Who let her out?’
The colour was returning to her cheeks, she seemed unburdened. ‘Who? Oh, I see.’ She frowned at him. ‘I believe it was Mrs Scardino, as a matter of fact. Magda.’
The vendor was beside his car now and through the window Sandro handed him a coin and took the paper. He thought with longing of the restaurant table, and his wife sitting there in the soft light waiting for him.
His phone went:
Giuli
, it said. He juggled the phone and the paper; the traffic was stationary and he set the paper down.
Gay Slaying: Man Sought
, it said.
He answered the phone. ‘Giuli,’ he said, and sighed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
M
ARESCIALLO
F
ALCO HAD BEEN
raging behind the door of his office. ‘Where the Jesus fucking Christ did this come from?’ his secretary Carlotta Franchi heard, through the flimsy partitioning. Followed by, ‘Well I sure as hell didn’t say anything.’ Then, ‘Christ. I suppose I’m going to have to talk to Cellini, if Cornell’s not answering.’
He’d asked her to put him through to Gastone Bottai at the Palazzo San Giorgio. The man had come in to the office that afternoon, and it had been all very civilised then: coffee and a chat, two gentlemen looking pleased with themselves and shaking hands at the door.
Before the clatter of the receiver going down had died away, Falco was storming towards her through the door, his face like thunder. For a minute Carlotta thought he was going to accuse her of feeding the story to the evening newspaper. She didn’t have the balls to ask,
Is it true
? He stopped in his tracks at the sight of her, glaring.
‘Get me the names of the officers first on the scene,’ he said.
‘And the forensic team. Now.’
One look at his face was enough to prevent Carlotta saying, they’ll be at home eating dinner by now, I should have been gone an hour ago myself. As if he’d read her thoughts, he went on, rigid with anger, ‘I don’t care if they’re bathing their newborn children or burying their mothers. Get them in here.’
But five minutes later he was out of his office again, and miraculously calm. All smiles, in fact. ‘Get me Cellini, would you?’ he said.
*
‘Talk to me,’ pleaded Enzo at last, all his resolve gone. Dinner was eaten, the kitchen was dark and he and Giuli were sitting – together but not feeling like it, not at all – in the tiny sitting room, the TV flickering with some idiotic gameshow neither of them was paying any attention to.
She’d come in close to an hour later than he’d expected her, pale, her eyes somewhere else entirely. She’d kissed him, muttered
sorry
into the side of his face, but offered no further explanation. He’d listened, while trying not to look like he was, to one side of the conversation with Luisa.
She loves you
, Luisa had said to him earlier, but he’d heard something in her voice that unsettled him.
She wants this
, Luisa had said. In dull despair, he didn’t believe her.
He’d cooked dinner while Giuli sat at the computer, raising his head from the pan when he heard a hiss of triumph, but only to see her lean down again and tap in another set of characters.
He’d heard the message Giuli had left on the answering
machine of the girl she’d been at school with. Elena: she’d worried him, for a start. The way Giuli had disappeared this afternoon, her failure to answer his calls, now this Elena, this woman from the past, stirring things up.
‘I don’t think you should get too close to Danilo Lludic,’ Giuli had said into the phone, and he’d heard the panic in her voice. ‘I don’t think you should see him again. It’s not safe. Call me, Elena?’
She’d sat staring at the phone for a good ten minutes then, almost catatonic with tension, and she hadn’t looked at him standing over her.
Now she did look up, at last, reluctant, the TV remote loosely in her hands. Slowly she raised it and clicked: the noisy screen died. She looked a long moment into his face and, seeing only desolation, he thought grimly, that’s it.
‘Is it over?’ he said. ‘I mean, you and me?’
And her face flared into infuriated life.
‘What
?’
‘This girl,’ he said helplessly. ‘This woman, this Elena.’ He didn’t know how to explain. ‘The Centre – it’s the past, coming back to clobber us. I always thought I could wipe it out for you, the past.’ He wasn’t making much sense, not even to himself, but Giuli leaned forward, closer, and courage flickered inside him.
‘You can’t wipe it out,’ she said, with an impatient sideways brush of her hand. ‘I don’t care about the Centre any more. I can sort that.’
‘You can?’ He waited for her to explain.
‘As long as you believed me,’ she said, which wasn’t an explanation, but set a pulse of hope up inside him.
‘I believed you,’ he stated flatly. He didn’t need to sell her that, surely.
She nodded, just once. ‘I know.’
‘So what—’ He broke off because she’d bent over, her face in her hands, trying to hold something back. When she took the hands away he saw that it was all right, that she’d tell him now. Her face had softened, crumpled: it was giving way, and he waited.
‘Her boyfriend’s dead,’ she said, tonelessly. ‘Elena’s boyfriend’s dead. Murdered. I was so . . . offhand with her, I thought he’d just done a runner, you know what guys are like.’
‘Not me,’ Enzo said, but she didn’t seem to hear.
‘I thought she’d be fine, because she already had this other man, this sculptor, chasing after her. And I find out the boyfriend’s dead but I’m too chicken to tell her.’
‘Poor woman,’ said Enzo, frowning.
She nodded fiercely. ‘And the other man—’ She broke off, looking right through him, fixed on something worse.
‘What?’ he said, but she didn’t answer, only got to her feet and retrieved her laptop from the kitchen.
He was patient while it started up, watching her face illuminated by the screen. She set it on his lap and he saw a page of newsprint, the
New York Post
. It was in English: he shrugged helplessly, having no more than a handful of words in the language. Giuli edged up next to him and he felt the heat in her body. It could be just the humid evening, the stifling apartment, but it seemed unhealthy.
‘You’re burning up,’ he said.
She didn’t seem to hear. She raised a finger to a paragraph
headed:
Sculptor Lludic: Charges Dropped
. There was a small photograph of a bulky, bear-like man, haggard beneath a beard, being jostled in a small crowd on the steps of some city building.
‘This is the other man,’ she said. ‘I was even ribbing her about him, called him her boyfriend.’ Giuli stopped abruptly, as if she’d run out of breath. ‘He was accused of violent rape.’
Enzo stared at her, and in her closed white face he saw that other world he’d spent three years trying to shut them away from: all the men before him, the men who’d damaged her and stolen from her and used her body. Helpless, useless, wrong – that was how he felt.
‘I think you’d better call Sandro,’ he said.
*
He had phoned from the hospital. ‘They won’t let me see her,’ he said, and she could hear tears in his voice. ‘Can I come over?’
‘All right,’ said Elena, weary. ‘All right.’ And if she was making a mistake, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Q
UITE COMPOSED
,
L
UISA SAT
alone at her table in the restaurant. At the bar the waiter was eyeing her as he waited for a trayful of drinks. She’d been there twenty minutes and he’d brought her an
aperitivo
. ‘I’m waiting for my husband.’
They never came here. It was too expensive: it was the kind of place where Luisa might spot clients, and Sandro would squirm in his seat because his jacket was too shabby.
The information had seemed to cheer the waiter, who was about her age, but now he was worried about her, she could tell. She watched him cross the room, glancing back at her. He appeared at her table with a folded newspaper and a plate of
crostini
. ‘While you wait,’ he said.
Should she have returned the missed call? He might have been running late, he might have been cancelling.
The waiter retreated, and she unfolded the paper. The headline jumped at her, but at the same time the door into the restaurant opened and, primed as she had been to watch
for Sandro, she looked, the image of the newsprint sitting unprocessed on her retina. Because there he was.
Looking worried. ‘What’s up?’ she said. At the back of her mind she tried to fix on her mission, what Maratti had told her. It occurred to her that she should have written it down, or something.
‘Giuli just called me,’ he said, and seemed to deflate into his seat. ‘She’s in a state.’
‘Not Enzo? The wedding?’
He took a breath, shook his head.
Luisa listened, in dread. If anything was going to get to Giuli, it was the thought of putting another woman in the way of that kind of danger. Violent men was something Giuli knew all about.
Sandro passed a hand over his face. ‘And Magda Scardino says she saw Lludic in Athene Morris’s room last night.’
‘Her.’ Luisa made a sound in her throat.
‘Lludic lives next door to Athene Morris, and Magda says she saw him closing her shutters.’ He sighed. ‘I told Giuli. Mistake.’
‘Well, it’s hardly keeping a low profile,’ said Luisa, thinking hard. ‘The worst case scenario, let’s say the sculptor did rape his ex-girlfriend, and got off. He’s been accused of rape once, he’s not going to risk it happening again. Is he?’
Sandro just looked at her: she could see something gnawing. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
She sat and thought. ‘Do you think he’s a psychopath?’ He looked startled. ‘Because he would have to be. Wouldn’t he?’
Sandro frowned. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t think so. But I hardly know him.’
He looked old, and worried. Luisa leaned forward and put a hand on his. ‘You always had that instinct,’ she said. ‘You can still trust it.’ He looked at her, unconvinced. ‘Don’t you want to know how it went?’ she said. ‘I talked to the landlady, you know. Or are you too hung up on Enrico having given me a lift?’