Authors: Christobel Kent
‘Stolen from a guest. One of the dirty tricks Giancarlo never quite cleared up,’ said Sandro. ‘The maid said he knew who stole it.’
‘Do you?’ asked Pietro, interrupting his flow.
Sandro sighed. ‘You always ask the hard questions,’ he said. ‘That one’s on the back burner.’ Was that true? The inversion of the initials was bothering him: Athene Morris should be AM, not MA. Marjorie Cameron locked in the steam room was bothering him. Released by Magda Scardino. What had she been doing down there? Marjorie Cameron didn’t seem like the steam room type.
Sandro went on. ‘But I think he wanted that envelope to be found, he wanted the body to be traced back to the Palazzo San Giorgio – maybe he wanted to send a message too, to the person who stole it? To Athene? Did he want to scare somebody, or was he just angry because he’d been fired, and wanted to cause trouble?’
Pietro groaned. ‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to talking to the Carabinieri on this one,’ he said. ‘Call it an intuition.’
‘I can tell you what they’ll say,’ said Sandro. ‘The story’s already out there. Gay sex. Bondage gone wrong, or something, plus spite at his former employers maybe. Things get out of hand with Carlsson then the following night he gets himself killed by a bit of rough trade, maybe reckless out of remorse.’
Pietro was silent. When he spoke he sounded guarded. ‘Ties it up nicely. Shit stops piling up. Everyone’s happy.’ He sucked his cheeks. ‘Except the dead men, obviously.’
‘Only trouble is,’ said Sandro, ‘It isn’t true, is it? Because outside the landlady – and he fed her the story to cover up the fact that he’d just murdered a journalist in his own bathroom – there’s absolutely no evidence Giancarlo Vito was gay: rather the contrary. And John Carlsson wasn’t either.’ He shrugged. ‘Which kind of puts a spoke in it.’
Pietro stood, his face set. He looked old in the bar’s lurid lighting; Sandro had always thought of him as a kid brother, and now they were both old.
‘What happened at Bari, last year?’ Sandro said, almost to himself.
Pietro frowned. ‘Bari?’
Sandro became aware of the bargirl hovering over a table inside the room, watching them. He cleared his throat. ‘The Carabinieri are obviously having to ring-fence information on this,’ he said stiffly, hearing the change in his own voice as the explanation dawned on him. Outlandish? Maybe. ‘For whatever reason.’ Because a clock somewhere could be ticking now, his voice registering on a screen in jumps and dips, in a nondescript house in a dusty suburb, or an unmarked surveillance van parked in a sidestreet. Sandro on the radar. Paranoia?
‘So we keep our noses out, and our mouths shut,’ said Pietro, wearily.
Sandro smiled: they were both old and tired, a quiet life was probably the way to go. He put out a hand, and with the other held his friend’s head a moment against his. ‘I have to go to work, now,’ he said. ‘You do your thing, and I’ll do mine.’
Pietro stepped back. ‘Watch yourself,’ he said.
*
‘You’ll have to set up for us outside,’ the Professor’s wife said, turning her back on him before she’d even finished the sentence.
Mauro liked strong women. He had a fierce mother he
worshipped, bossy sisters he loved, a quietly determined fiancée he would lay down his life for, but there was something about Magda Scardino that made his skin prickle.
‘Outside?’ he echoed in hollow dismay.
Magda Scardino looked back at him over her shoulder with a kind of imperious blankness, her eyes turned dark. The other women clustered behind her in the library like a small flock of sheep. Well, perhaps not all sheep. The small white-haired Englishwoman, Lady Juliet Fleming, might be able to act docile when required, but Mauro knew there was an awful lot more to that sharp clever little face than just following the lead of other people. She wasn’t well, that was the rumour.
‘But it’s turned very cold, Signora Scardino,’ Mauro protested, shooting a glance at Lady Fleming.
‘We didn’t come to Italy to hide inside,’ said the Englishwoman with gentle persistence. ‘It’s May.’
Precisely, thought Mauro, puzzled. It’s only May. Why did they so urgently want to be out on the terrace? The lower terrace, Scardino had specified. He looked around the large, echoing library, his fiefdom. He had to admit he hated it in here himself. Was it claustrophobia? Or the need for privacy?
‘You’ve got those big heaters,’ said Magda Scardino. ‘I know, I’ve seen them. Patio heaters. Just bring one out.’ She turned away briskly at his pained glance and said to her small audience, ‘All this rubbish about them being bad for the environment. It’s a myth, did you know that? Charles says so. A drop in the ocean, he says.’
It took a good ten minutes’ shuffling, with the women standing on the upper terrace watching them, and another five
minutes finding the extension lead. Mauro had looked around for Sandro Cellini, a good man, he felt, in this situation; he might be getting on a bit but he was solid where Lino was frail and more importantly he was a man who understood. But Lino said Cellini wasn’t in yet. Just late, Mauro had thought at the time, but now it stopped him in his tracks. He hoped nothing had happened to Sandro Cellini.
Should he have told him outright what he knew about Giancarlo Vito? Cellini would work it out: he’d given him enough. And it was a dangerous business, besides. Cellini didn’t want to get involved, not if he could help it. What good would it do, after all? The authorities would divide it up between them, the Carabinieri, the army, the Polizia di Stato, a little bit of responsibility each, and no one carries the can.
A friend in the Polizia di Stato had slipped him another little piece of information that morning, about a body in a suitcase. Mauro would wait and see about that one. Dead bodies did tend to attract all sorts of rumours, not all of them reliable.
‘Ladies,’ he said, with a bow, back on the top terrace. ‘Your table is ready for you.’ Magda Scardino was already walking away: Marjorie Cameron shot him an apologetic glance, Therese Van Vleet blushed, Juliet Fleming just gave him that gentle smile.
I know you
, it said.
I know what you know, I know how much you understand
. Mauro looked up at the sky; the few heavy drops had evaporated, but there was no knowing how long it would hold off.
Coming back down with his tray of drinks –
I’ll take them
, he’d said to Alice, who’d been hovering in the library,
I spend enough time stuck in here
, and she’d looked at him, wonderingly
– the sight of the women’s heads all bent towards each other aroused something queasy in Mauro. He leaned down, setting a tall glass of milky coffee in front of Magda Scardino. She didn’t even look up.
‘But surely,’ Marjorie Cameron was saying, with what seemed like alarm, ‘they won’t let us just leave the country?’ Mauro slid her tea – strong, with milk – carefully on to the table, where her thin hands fidgeted with her phone, bare of rings, nails unpainted.
‘You mean me?’ said Magda Scardino with amusement. ‘What do you think they’re going to do to stop me?’ She leaned forwards. ‘You know what’s his name’s been poking around?’ She clicked her tongue in exasperation. ‘Our new Director of Security, the old fool. Cellini. I spoke to his wife yesterday. I told her not to poke her nose in.’
‘Magda.’ It was Juliet Fleming, weary, exasperated. ‘Why did you think that was a good idea?’
Mauro put the Englishwoman’s mint tea on the table. She’d told him she’d got the taste for it in the Middle East; the only thing that settled her stomach, she said. Perhaps that was where her trouble lay, in the stomach. The whites of her eyes, he saw, were yellow.
Looking sidelong he saw Magda Scardino’s expression harden.
‘Well,’ she said, her mouth set in a line, no big full flashing smile wasted on this lot. ‘I didn’t like her . . . manner. Looking at me as though . . . well. She clearly wasn’t listening, anyway. A little bird told me she went out to Vito’s house to poke about, last night.’
‘A little bird?’ It was Marjorie Cameron again, like a bird herself, bobbing anxiously at every word. Behind her, Mauro hung back.
‘Another old fool,’ said Magda, the smile of self-satisfaction returning. ‘Her boss, what’s his name? The man who owns the boutique, Frollini. He telephoned me this morning to ask how it had gone yesterday, our little jaunt. He said he hoped we weren’t all too distressed by it, then let slip he’d taken her to see the landlady. Vito’s. Oh, he got flustered at having said anything, but I got it out of him.’
The sigh Juliet Fleming let out held something of weary calculation, like a mother surveying some mess her child has made behind her back.
‘They’re just being nosy,’ said Magda, in defiance of the sound. ‘She’s a nosy bitch.’ She shrugged. ‘Let them try to stop me leaving. A weekend in Cairo’s just what I need after all this – this stress. And if I don’t come straight back here . . . well. It’s hardly going to come to extradition now, is it?’ Her laugh was hard and ringing. ‘And we’re pretty much all off out of here, aren’t we? Ian’s going to . . . where is it? Dubai? He’d better be careful, hadn’t he, talking of extradition?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ whispered Marjorie Cameron, tears coming to her eyes, pulling at her sleeves. Mauro wondered why she defended him. He’d seen the marks he left. ‘And it’s Bahrain.’
‘Leaving you behind to face the music?’
‘I could go if I wanted,’ Cameron said, turning away under the onslaught. Mauro stood at her elbow, holding his breath. But she just turned to Therese Van Vleet, stubbornly sticking
to her subject. Made of stronger stuff than she seemed. ‘Are you going, too?
‘Just for a week or two,’ said Therese Van Vleet. She turned her heart-shaped face up to Mauro as he gave her her black coffee, and in the grey cold light he saw fine lines around her great blue eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and reluctantly turned back to the others. ‘Brett has some business to sort out. Financial.’ Her lip trembled. ‘He says he wants me along this time; moral support.’
Mauro saw Magda Scardino’s hand come out briskly and settle on Van Vleet’s delicate, china-white forearm. He thought he saw the American flinch.
A bit late for that, he thought. A bit late to get squeamish about who your friends are. Were.
Mauro turned his back on them and walked away up the gravel path towards the Palazzo San Giorgio.
*
He had to leave the car at the foot of the hill. Watching the old woman toil up ahead of him, it wasn’t until she turned off into a gate in the wall below the Palazzo San Giorgio that Sandro realised it was the foreigners’ neighbour. He was almost at the big front door when a familiar figure darted out of the little workshop opposite.
Sandro couldn’t work out what she was doing there. ‘Giuli?’
Pale but determined, Giuli looked back over her shoulder, up at the window over the workshop. Belatedly he spotted her little battered
motorino
at the kerb, unmistakably Giuli’s. ‘I saw
you,’ she said. ‘Elena said it’s where her boyfriend used to stand, watching. I was standing there and I saw you coming.’ She paused. ‘Who are you looking at?’
The old lady was at her door, where the road curved away from them out of sight. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just the neighbour.’ He could see the strain in Giuli’s face. ‘Have you told her yet?’ he said quietly. ‘Do you want me to do it?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s Lludic,’ she said. ‘He spent the night with her. I can’t . . . I need to get her alone.’
‘Is that an excuse?’ Her face was stubborn as she shook her head. ‘He didn’t hurt her, then? The sculptor.’
She looked uncomfortable. ‘If you’d had my life, Sandro,’ she said, ‘you would have freaked too, reading that. Rape?’ She folded her arms tight across her chest and he could see goosepimples coming up on them in the cool breeze: it wasn’t summer yet. ‘Although you didn’t have to read too far into it to see it wasn’t true. He’s just . . . a bit of a dolt. Where women are concerned. I think Elena feels sorry for him.’ Her eyes were dark.
‘What is it?’ said Sandro.
Giuli took a deep breath. ‘The old lady.’ For a moment he frowned, his mind still on the neighbour watering her pots. ‘Athene Morris. Lludic told me someone else was in there, after him. He closed the shutters for her after he’d seen Elena out. But he heard another voice in there, as he was going to sleep.’ On the sloping street Sandro turned a little and saw Lino watching him through the glass of the door. ‘A man.’
‘And you believed him?’ he said quietly.
Giuli shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually.
‘Did he say who it was?’
She nodded.
Lino watched as he came in to the Palazzo.
‘You haven’t seen me,’ said Sandro. And he entered the long, sloping corridor, almost jogging through the empty library, past the stairs and into his office without a word. He closed the door behind him, took his laptop from his briefcase and set it on the desk. He hadn’t looked at his mailbox in twenty-four hours: he opened it and fifty-nine messages came in. He scrolled down, deleting all except those from Giuli’s email address, with their picture attachments. The first one that came up was from the launch. It was of Gastone Bottai and Giancarlo Vito, and another man between them.
Only then, it seemed, did he take a breath.
Chapter Thirty
W
ITH TEN MINUTES BEFORE
she had to be at work, Luisa was drinking coffee in Rivoire and thinking about Giancarlo Vito’s mother. A doter, a spoiler, that had been the landlady’s implication. Luisa imagined old Maratti standing on that gloomy doorstep sticky with whatever her unpruned trees had dropped, waiting jealously for Vito’s mother to come around to collect his belongings so she could talk poison under the guise of condolence. Something about it troubled Luisa: she couldn’t quite believe in that scenario. Why hadn’t the mother already come?
Two old ladies on the next table were looking at her. She nodded at them. Uncertainly they smiled back. One even lifted a shaky hand in greeting and then said, meaningfully, ‘You’re looking well.’
Luisa’s smile stiffened. She was resigned to the fact that everyone knew she’d had a breast removed, but she certainly wasn’t going to go around updating them.
I’m in remission. I’ll be clear next year, God willing. I’ve had the reconstruction.
Sandro
still hadn’t gone near the new breast, not even now the scarring was close to invisible and the swelling all gone. Had he jumped out of bed this morning and shot out of the door just to avoid rolling over in the dark and brushing against it? Abruptly Luisa stood. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Late for work.’