Authors: Christobel Kent
‘Died? Died?’ He heard his voice stupidly repeating the words. He saw the woman’s old, slack face, her pleading single eye. Her little stash of treasures. Men’s cufflinks. Her bracelet, with the initials, still in its evidence bag at the morgue, and who would get it now?
The cat lolloped away from him back under the trees, a tiny rustle beneath its paws, its damage inflicted.
‘Did she say—’ he began, but before he could finish he registered that Luisa sounded more than just tired. It was too much for her, he could hear it. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’m going.’
He sent the message to Giuli as he trudged down the Viale Europa towards another bus stop.
Athene Morris died. I’m sorry
.
*
As she urged the
motorino
up the hill in the cold morning there was a painful feeling in Giuli’s chest, like burning. Guilt. She’d lain all night feeling it, feverish with waiting for a message to come back, with wondering if she should call. Danilo Lludic had been the man in Athene Morris’s room late last night. Sandro didn’t think he’d done it – but he didn’t say why. And what if he was wrong?
Giuli had felt hysteria mounting in her, thinking of the old
woman. Beside her on the sofa she’d sensed Enzo’s distress. ‘She knew something. Why didn’t I stop and talk to her? She knew something about why Vito was fired, if only I’d waited and asked her what she was getting at, there’d have been no need to hurt her.’ She took a breath. ‘To keep her quiet.’
‘And if she’d told you, don’t you think you might be the one in danger?’ Enzo was on the edge of the sofa now. ‘This isn’t all your responsibility,
cara
. There are so many unknowns, it’s not easy to do the right thing. You need to sleep.’
She hadn’t slept.
The second message came in as she removed her helmet. Staring down at it, her hair standing up stiff, she wanted to cry. Old, she told herself. She was old. But still.
Her eyes blurred, it took Giuli a while to find the bell-push for the apartment over the workshop. The wind whipped at her legs in the blue-grey morning. She put her hand to the dusty glass and looked inside: it was in darkness, only where the pale early light fell did it bring into relief this end of the workbench, the shapes of tools dimly hanging. Something sharp lay on the ground on its side, with a worn handle; there were puddles of shadow among the shavings on the workshop floor. Had something happened in there?
No answer. She stepped back off the pavement, feeling the pressure in her chest rise higher to choke her, listening to her heart speed up. Did something move up there? She stepped back, pressed the bell again, back into the road to look. A light came on in the workshop and then Elena was at the door, pale, hair down in a wild tangle, holding her mobile in her hand and frowning down at it.
‘Elena,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t think. It was in the back of my mind, that there were rumours about him—’ She didn’t even know what she was saying.
Under her tight embrace she felt a squirm of resistance that released. The wild hair felt strange and scratchy against her cheek and then she felt Elena’s hand on her back, patting tentatively, as if Giuli were the one who needed comforting. They pulled apart, and Giuli felt her cheeks burn.
‘Sorry,’ she said again. Elena looked up and down the steep grey street: no one. They both looked across at the Palazzo San Giorgio, all shuttered and the great arched doorway firmly closed.
‘Christ, it’s cold,’ said Elena, her face pinched in the wind. ‘Come inside.’
She held a finger to her lips as Giuli stepped into the gloom. Warmer at least, in here, and that smell, that lovely smell of wood and paint. Could anything bad have happened in here? Elena was pointing upstairs, finger still to her lips. Giuli understood something, at least, and nodded. She followed Elena through the workshop and out the back door. There, to her a surprise, was a tiny, neat kitchen, like the kitchen on a boat, filled with a long shaft of the clean white light of a just-risen sun.
Someone had constructed it painstakingly, by hand, measuring and positioning and planning until everything fitted. A unit of old wood with an aluminium cooking ring, the little flap of a folding table built into the wall, a single stool. And a door onto a minuscule courtyard where the bright yellow-green leaves of a climbing plant trembled in the wind. Rubbing her eyes with one hand, Elena reached for a coffee pot.
‘He’s upstairs,’ she said, yawning over her shoulder. ‘He’s asleep.’
‘Did you see my message? About what he did?’ Giuli corrected herself, ‘What they said he did?’
‘Who? I – I didn’t look at my phone,’ she said, and then suddenly awake, ‘Do you mean John? Have you found John?’
Giuli looked into her face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’d better sit down.’
But Elena remained standing. Giuli knew that feeling, and she was back in the janitor’s office at school. Sit down and they’ll get you with it, they’ll tell you the thing you don’t want to hear.
Elena’s small face was set stubborn. ‘Yes, I know. I know what Danilo was accused of. As a matter of fact he spent most of the night crying about it.’
On the stove the little pot bubbled and spat. She set out two small thick china cups, a bag of sugar, poured. There was no sound from upstairs.
Elena studied her hands. ‘He couldn’t do anything . . . last night. He was too frightened.’
‘He
was frightened of
you
?’
Elena shook her head fiercely. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘What happens between two people? No witnesses. He said they had a row, he wasn’t kind to her, in fact, he was horrible to her. But he didn’t lay a finger on her.’ She frowned down fiercely, mouth set. ‘She retracted it in the end. Do women do that, if they’ve really been raped?’ She looked up into Giuli’s face.
‘Yes,’ said Giuli. ‘Sometimes.’
‘And do women sometimes make it up?’
‘Less often,’ said Giuli, uneasily. ‘Much less often. But yes.’
‘He can never get away from it now,’ said Elena, raising the small cup to her lips. ‘It’s a nightmare. He’s being punished. That much is true.’ Her eyes were inward, remembering something. ‘I wouldn’t want to be his lawyer but I don’t think he did anything to her.’
‘They must have already known? At the Palazzo?’
‘They knew,’ said Elena slowly. ‘It’s how they got him, he was desperate to get away from the US, the case had been dismissed. A little bit of notoriety was fine with them.’
Overhead there was movement, heavy-footed. A groan.
In alarm, Giuli pushed herself off the stool she’d been sitting on. The little room, suddenly, seemed like a trap, the comforting smell of coffee and the sunlight the lures.
Elena put a hand to her arm.
‘Tranquilla
,’ she said wearily. ‘It’s okay.’ She stepped into the doorway and stood at the foot of the narrow stairs. ‘Danilo?’ Silence. ‘We’re down here. There’s some coffee.’
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ said Giuli, and Elena’s eyes flashed, then she turned away. She knows, Giuli thought.
The man who appeared in the kitchen doorway behind Elena gave off nothing to raise Giuli’s defence mechanisms.
‘Hey,’ he said, ducking his head sheepishly. His eyes were sore-looking, his beard unruly. He looked at a hand, then held it out to Giuli; it felt tentative as it closed around hers, wary. ‘Danilo Lludic. I saw you the other night.’
‘Giuli works with Sandro Cellini,’ said Elena. She held a cup of coffee out to him. ‘We’re old friends, Giuli and me. Sort of.’
Lludic closed his eyes, leaning against the doorpost, then abruptly opened them. ‘Do I have to go back?’ he asked, of no
one in particular. ‘That place, God almighty. Does your Sandro know what he’s getting into?’
‘Were you in Athene Morris’s room when she got ill?’ Giuli said abruptly.
He frowned. ‘What do you mean? I closed her shutters for her; she gave me some whisky.’ The look he gave Giuli was level. She became aware of Elena beside them, poised to intervene. ‘She was fine when I left her,’ he said. ‘Rearranging her treasures. Plotting something.’
‘Plotting,’ said Giuli, thinking of the look on Athene Morris’s face when she’d last seen her, bewildered, crafty, wounded. Thinking of what it must be like to be old, and losing your powers: what would be left but plotting?
‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Lludic. ‘Are you saying I’d hurt Athene?’
‘Did she know about your . . . past?’ She took a breath. ‘Did Giancarlo Vito?’
‘He went to see her in the hospital yesterday,’ blurted Elena. They both turned to her. ‘
What
?’ she said, in response to Giuli’s warning look. ‘He’s her friend.’
‘Sandro thinks – I think, too – that Athene Morris knew something about why Giancarlo Vito was killed,’ said Giuli. ‘There was something. Plotting, you said, right? Gossip. She was hinting to me, about all sorts of things. I – I was in too much of a hurry. I had things on my mind—’ She stopped. They aren’t interested, she told herself.
‘Sandro thinks,’ she went on slowly, ‘that something happened in Athene Morris’s room that night she died. Someone helped that stroke along.’
Elena looked from one to the other, bewildered. ‘But Danilo . . . he went back to see her,’ she said, pleading for him. ‘In the hospital.’
‘Did he,’ said Giuli.
Lludic gazed at her, pain in his eyes. Don’t ease up now, Giuli told herself, even though she felt Elena at her elbow, ready to cry.
‘They wouldn’t let me see her,’ said Danilo Lludic slowly. ‘In the hospital. You can ask them. They wouldn’t let me see her, they said she was . . . she was sleeping.’
Giuli’s phone blipped in her pocket, and she got it out and looked at it. Something heavy seemed to descend on her shoulders. She looked up.
‘And I wasn’t the last one to see her, anyway,’ Lludic said, his voice higher now and insistent, like a child wrongly accused. Sullen, defiant. ‘After – after. He was in there, that spook, Mr Suave. I could hear him droning on, in that self-satisfied voice of his, sent me right off to sleep.’
‘Spook?’ said Elena.
Giuli stared at her blankly, the word ringing in her ears too. ‘She died,’ she said. ‘In her sleep, early this morning. If she had anything to tell anyone, it’s too late now. Athene Morris is dead.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I
N A LITTLE SQUARE
just off the foot of the Costa San Giorgio there was a bar, and Sandro was in it.
He was well aware that he’d been summoned back to the Palazzo, but he knew just as well that once across that threshold his capacity to think straight would be impaired – if it didn’t evaporate altogether. Besides, it was to the old woman he felt the tug of duty, and Athene Morris was beyond caring if he got to work on time or not.
The bar had loud music and a TV screen dancing in the corner of his eye, but he could think through that. Besides, coffee before work was a human right – or if it wasn’t, it should be. The girl – black hair in a ponytail, kohl-rimmed eyes – brought him his
caffè lungo
, leaning down with a smile. Why did women suddenly all look wondrous to him? Middle age, maybe. He corrected himself, nothing middle about it, at sixty-five. Old age.
Something was forming, more an instinct than a thought, more emotion than logic, but it needed the outside world if it was to develop.
It was a feeling that had on several occasions in his life as a policeman raised the hairs on the back of his neck. A middle-aged woman neatly bisected, the two halves of her body retrieved from a drainage ditch, had been perhaps the first time. As Sandro, thirty-one years old but feeling like a virgin as he vomited over his shoes, had stared at the horrible puzzle of her death, it had been inescapable: somewhere else the consequences of this violence were still unfolding. His job, then as now, to follow the trail, find the end of the fuse, stamp on the embers.
On that occasion the woman, it turned out, had been murdered by her violent younger lover, who’d decided she’d cheated on him. When Sandro caught up with him he was living with another middle-aged divorcee, who’d started missing days at work, turning up with bruises on her arms. Sandro had got there in time. Maybe thirty per cent of cases he – they, he and Pietro – had managed that. Not enough.
Carlsson was dead, killed by Giancarlo Vito. Twenty-four hours later Vito was dead. Athene Morris was dead. Was that the end?
He knew with certainty that it was not.
His old friend appeared in the door. He was in uniform, his cap under his arm: Sandro had caught him on the way to work. He looked tired out. Sandro wondered if Pietro was remembering the woman found in two halves in the drainage ditch. Red hair, she’d had. More likely it was John Carlsson’s murder that had kept him up – and the solution Sandro had presented to him on the phone.
He gestured to the bar girl for another, Pietro pinching finger and thumb to tell her,
ristretto
, not
lungo
. The hard-core single
shot, to jumpstart the brain. Sandro smiled, nostalgic for the old double-act they used to pull before a working day.
Pietro grimaced: the music was deafening. He looked pleadingly at the girl as she set down the coffee and she nodded. He and Pietro must stick out a mile in this place, he thought. The other customers – a few long-hairs, a moony couple who’d obviously just hauled themselves out of bed – were decades younger, but they didn’t seem bothered when the music subsided.
Sandro watched him take a sip. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ve solved your case, how about you solve mine?’
Pietro downed the coffee, and gestured for another. ‘So, tell me again,’ he said.
‘The landlady will identify Carlsson as the man who visited Vito the night he was fired – and the suitcase Carlsson was found in as the one he left with the next day. Vito was an ex-soldier, he worked out.’ He paused. ‘It was bugging me, trying to get my head around which of my old guys in the Palazzo San Giorgio could have hauled that body across town.’
Pietro nodded. ‘There was a – a crusty, a rough sleeper, said he saw a man with broad shoulders coming up the ramp at the station with a big wheeled case, at dusk,’ he said slowly. ‘The witness – and his girlfriend, and his dogs – smelled so strongly of weed, I took what he said with a pinch of salt.’ He sighed. ‘And the envelope? The bracelet?’