Authors: Christobel Kent
‘I don’t suppose . . .’ said the detective, and Lino shook his head.
‘I didn’t see who she was talking to,’ he said. ‘I was dead beat. I got my things, and I went home.’
Cellini held his gaze, forgiving him. ‘We’re too old for this,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we?’
Chapter Thirty-Two
T
HE MESSAGE CAME IN
at ten-thirteen, and Luisa, who as a rule left her mobile behind the till, out of courtesy – she’d seen too many girls busily clicking away in shops, heads down while customers idled or left – saw it at ten-thirty when Giusy handed it to her in silence.
I’m sorry
She stared at it. Of corScardino was the strongestuse there were mornings when there’d be something for Sandro to apologise for, but this wasn’t one of them. Not even a full stop: a draft sent by mistake, a message interrupted. The lack of full stop upset her. He’d gone while she was still asleep; she tried to recall his tone when she’d told him, some time around eight, that Athene Morris had died. Urgent and distracted. Frightened? Maybe.
She turned away from Giusy’s inquisitive gaze. Her place was behind the till, and it was part of the etiquette that when Luisa’s mobile sounded down below the counter, Giusy wouldn’t look at what it said before handing it to Luisa at the earliest possible opportunity.
Upstairs there were footsteps, and the murmur of male voices. It was menswear, after all, but they weren’t customers. Frollini was up there, talking to Beppe.
He’d come in with a gleam in his eye, all puffed up with assuaged vanity. He had been talking to Magda Scardino at the Palazzo San Giorgio, he announced. Didn’t take you long, thought Luisa. Chew him up and spit him out, that one. ‘They had a lovely time yesterday. She was interested in you,’ he’d said pointedly, to Luisa. ‘Interested in you and Sandro. Married to a private eye. I said you were his right-hand woman.’
She’d stared at him then, expressionless, remembering last night.
You better not have told her anything else.
Enrico Frollini had flushed as though reading her mind, and Luisa had turned her back. That woman: Magda Scardino was a witch.
She pocketed the mobile instead of putting it back behind the till, and walked away from Giusy’s curious look, walked to the window that looked out over the Por Santa Maria. She dialled Sandro’s number.
It rang three times, then went to answerphone. Luisa didn’t know much about technology, but she knew it took six rings for Sandro’s phone to go to messages. He’d cut her off. Stay calm, she thought. He’ll have his reasons. She looked up and a customer was there on the other side of the glass door, looking at her angrily. She stepped back, smiled, put the phone away. Frollini’s face appeared at the top of the stairs and she turned her back on him.
Waiting outside the changing room, Luisa tried to still the unreasoning anger she felt against the customer, and at the same time to diffuse the silly panic that rose in her every time
she thought of that message, without its full stop. In her pocket she pressed redial: it went straight to answerphone this time.
From behind the door of the changing room came sounds of dissatisfaction: an ill-tempered sigh, a tut, an elbow banging against the partition. Women. Luisa felt a wave of tiredness at the thought of women – the fretting, the anxiety, the competition, the sheer labour of it. The answer, it came to her, the answer to Giancarlo Vito’s death lay between the women. And add to them Valeria Maratti, Vito’s landlady.
Somewhere between them, they knew. Why he’d died.
Therese Van Vleet: no. Too young, too unhappy – not guilty. Magda Scardino: she’d slept with Vito, said Sandro. Well, of course she had. Luisa thought of her in the limo heading for the mall, chasing her discount like a dog with a bone; she was a woman who felt it her duty to take what she wanted without hesitation. If someone stood in her way, how far would she go? If Vito threatened, say, to tell her husband? Something ticked in the back of Luisa’s mind, stalling that line of thought. Even if Magda Scardino was the strongest of them, wouldn’t she just walk away? Not her problem.
What nagged at her, an inconsistency half-formed, had to do with Maratti, and that mother she’d invented for her lodger. Because Vito’s CV had had his parents down as deceased.
Did you invent that kind of thing out of thin air? No.
The changing room door thumped open and the woman thrust a handful of garments at Luisa, her face pouchy and unattractive with disappointment. As Luisa looked into her face, she wasn’t quite seeing her customer but the vengeful features of Valeria Maratti, peering through the green gloom of
her backyard, spying, and Giancarlo Vito finding an explanation for something his nosy landlady had seen. Just like he explained away the sounds of his struggle with a man.
She’s my mother.
‘No good then?’ she said automatically to the client. ‘I’m so sorry. Can I show you—’
‘I wouldn’t trust you to show me anything,’ the woman snapped. ‘Are you an idiot? The sizes were all wrong.’ There was movement at the other end of the shop and Luisa looked, and saw Enrico Frollini at the foot of the stairs eyeing her, turning his most treacherous placatory smile on the customer.
An older woman had come to visit Vito. She pictured them together, in the parking lot, in the garden. She thought of Juliet Fleming, watchful when the news was broken of Vito’s death, and remembered the sickness in the woman’s own face when Luisa had told them Athene Morris had been taken ill. An older woman.
Why would Juliet Fleming have gone to Vito’s house? Luisa didn’t know why.
The door closed behind the customer and Frollini was looking at her. Something calculating in his look, something colder. ‘Really, Luisa,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you recognise her? I’m beginning to think—’
But she turned her back on him and she heard an intake of breath. She walked away, to the stairs down to the stock room, retrieved her jacket and her bag and came back up to find him still there, standing at the foot of the stairs. Behind the till, oblivious, Giusy was struck dumb and pale with startlement.
‘I’m finished,’ said Luisa quietly. Did he actually look relieved? ‘I mean, Enrico,’ she amplified, ‘that I resign.’
After thirty-five years. He couldn’t even complete a response. ‘Well, Luisa, if you think . . .’ He cleared his throat and fell silent.
The soft sound of the door as it closed behind her, her bag clasped against her newly awkward chest, seemed to Luisa like a little rush of wind, as though she had stepped off a ledge and the air was all that would hold her up. The brightness of the street and the passers-by whirled about her for a moment, and then the world steadied, and she was out.
She turned to walk towards the river.
*
Carlotta could see them clamping the little car from where she stood on the Carabinieri station’s terrace: leaning out you could see right down into the Via Romana. The sound of the truck’s beeping reverse alarm had brought her out; her own very smart and shiny new Vespa was parked legally, as far as she remembered, but when the
comune
was running out of cash they’d have the
vigili
out clamping anything a centimetre over the line. From what Carlotta could see of a bird-spattered brown roof just visible through the canopy of leaves, the car they were fixing the clamp to probably wasn’t worth much more than the removal charge.
It was cold, and raindrops still stood on the long-bladed leaves of the iris beds from the morning’s shower. Turning to go back in, Carlotta heard voices. Falco had opened his window.
The man had been in there five minutes. Carlotta didn’t know him to look at – an unprepossessing, stocky man in a shabby
coat, but with a weary sort of authority that had stopped her from fobbing him right off when he’d appeared in the doorway. Sandro Cellini.
‘He’ll see me,’ said Sandro Cellini, and he’d sat, without asking, lifting the old raincoat aside as he lowered himself, in a gesture that made Carlotta think of her father, a bus driver all his life. She didn’t think this man drove a bus.
He’d taken out a mobile phone and looked at it, holding it far away from him in his lap. To Carlotta, hesitating, it seemed as though he wanted to throw the thing away, but perhaps he just didn’t have his glasses on. He smoothed the screen with a thumb, then reluctantly stabbed at it. One word, two. He looked up and she went; when she turned back at the door, the mobile phone had gone.
‘He said you’d see him.’ Falco had looked at Carlotta with eyes narrowed. She knew the name: Sandro Cellini had phoned, yesterday. And knew it from somewhere else too, some old story, some old case.
Falco had sighed. ‘He did, did he?’ And to her surprise said, ‘Show him in.’ He’d closed the door behind them.
Carlotta leaned forward a little and saw the ironwork of Falco’s tiny balcony.
‘This is confidential,’ he was saying. ‘This is a matter of internal security. You’ve been in the service, Cellini, you know we can’t make things public.’ Carlotta was surprised by the pleading edge to Falco’s voice. No wonder he’d wanted the doors closed.
‘You know they’ve fired me?’ said the other voice. ‘What am I going to say to my wife?’
‘So you don’t owe them anything,’ said her boss. ‘Just let it drop.’
‘Owe them nothing?’ The voice was weary. ‘What about public safety, Falco? Two men dead. Both murdered, beyond a doubt. Don’t you want to know what Carlsson discovered? Unless you know already, that is. And of course if you go talking to his girlfriend you’d have to admit he wasn’t gay, wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know anything about girlfriends,’ said Falco. ‘Who is this girl?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Cellini, grimly triumphant. ‘You’re covering this up; how do I know you won’t go after her yourselves? Vito killed Carlsson, that seems beyond a doubt. But Vito wasn’t gay and he wasn’t a psychopath – that murder was sanctioned, officially or unofficially, by the intelligence services. Would she get the same treatment?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Falco stiffly.
Hardly daring to breathe, Carlotta moved closer. She could see the open shutters on Falco’s balcony from here: if he stepped out he would see her.
‘Giancarlo Vito was murdered,’ said Sandro Cellini, and although the words were spoken quietly she could hear perfectly. They must be standing right in the window. ‘What interests me is how. Are we talking trained killer? Just between us. You’ve had access to the autopsy reports by now.’
There was a sigh. ‘It’s a mess,’ muttered Falco. ‘Conspiracy? It’s the usual cock-up.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Cellini’s voice was sharp. ‘Is that an admission?’
‘You won’t believe me,’ said Falco, although Carlotta knew her boss well enough to know he was speaking the truth, for
once. ‘But I don’t know why Vito killed this journalist. By the sound of it, he was a loose cannon, to say the least. Maybe he was angry because he’d been fired, angry he’d been uncovered by some hack. Angry his career was certainly over.’
A pause. In the silence Carlotta could almost hear Cellini working out what he could trust. Holding his fire. Falco went on.
‘And no, that’s not an admission of anything. But everything points to Vito’s killing being an amateur job. He was taken absolutely by surprise, he’d let the killer in, no sign of forced entry. One blow to the head and the killer didn’t wait around to make sure he was dead, just wiped down the handweight he’d used and threw it into the grass.’
‘A lucky strike,’ said Cellini, thoughtfully.
‘But of course I would indeed like to talk to Carlsson’s female friend.’
There was a silence in which the note of sly calculation that had crept into her boss’s voice still sounded in Carlotta’s head. She wondered if Sandro Cellini was right: she knew who she’d trust on a dark night. The tired-looking man who spread his raincoat as he sat.
Falco went on trying to sound superior, but only sounded crafty to Carlotta. How could she work for this creep? ‘Trained killers leave no evidence. You can’t have it both ways, Cellini.’
Another silence, and when Sandro Cellini spoke he sounded weary. ‘I don’t know who it was,’ he said. ‘I just don’t like the way it’s being handled, and I don’t want anyone else hurt, if it’s in my power to prevent that. Although as you will have observed, I have almost no power, these days.’
‘I’ll contact the girlfriend,’ said Falco, urgently. ‘Let me
have the details, I’ll get after her, I’ll have protection for her.’
It occurred to Carlotta that she had better get back inside, and she stepped back, feeling a shower of cold raindrops hit her cheek from a hanging rose. Below her the Via Romana was silent. The clampers had gone. She waited, just one last moment, to hear Cellini’s answer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t trust you.’
*
Behind Lino’s back, at the door, someone cleared their throat, and he turned, expecting the limo driver. It was the spiky-haired girl – young woman. Cellini’s colleague. She smiled, but she looked nervous. ‘I need Sandro,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Lino, realising he would have to explain. At the back of his mind things were shifting. One of this lot, he thought, eyeing the residents gathered in his foyer, waiting for their transport. Fleming, glancing down at his wife, looked like he’d had a late night – at the hospital, Lino’d heard.
‘He’s gone,’ he said in an undertone to Signorina Sarto.
‘Gone?’
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder into the street. ‘Must have been something he said. They fired him.’ She stared.
‘Where’s that car?’ The voice, insistent in Lino’s ear, was Magda Scardino’s. ‘The flight’s in less than two hours.’
‘Just one moment, madam,’ said Lino, with dignity. Turning back to Giuli, ‘I can’t tell you much more than that,’ he said. ‘He left an hour ago. I saw him get into his car, down at the bottom of the hill. He didn’t say where he was going.’
Giulietta Sarto was looking at Magda Scardino, who had her hand on Sir Martin Fleming’s arm in a gesture that would have made Lino nervous if it had been his body she was touching. ‘They’re leaving?’ Sarto muttered, wondering. ‘They’re just allowed to go?’
‘This isn’t a prison,’ said Lino, trying for a laugh. But she was frowning down at her mobile, punching in numbers, turning away from him already, and out of the door.