Authors: Christobel Kent
‘And the rest,’ said Magda Scardino. ‘Getting him fired wasn’t enough, was it? The strange thing was,’ she tapped a long fingernail to her plump lip, ‘Giancarlo never did look at his post. He was actually trying to be helpful for once, taking him the letter. But from then on Cameron had it in for him. Everything about him, he hated.’
Pimp, seducer, player. What’s not to hate, thought Sandro. And yet. He didn’t quite hate Vito.
‘And Vito thought . . .’ She glanced over at her husband, taking the coffee from the barman, turning to walk back. ‘Well,
I was holding out on him – he thought he could kill two birds with one stone. Make me jealous and at the same time sweeten Marjorie up, get her to bring her husband round.’ She leaned her head back, exposing her long throat, and closed her eyes a moment. Nothing accidental about Magda’s gestures.
Sandro stared at her. ‘Jealous? Of . . . he was . . .’
‘You should have seen her,’ said Magda. Perhaps, thought Sandro, this is what pity looks like, in her, this scornful mouth. ‘Oh, God, no fool like an old fool, a virtuous old fool. She’s only ever slept with her husband and Giancarlo turns those eyes on her and touches her. . .’ She put a finger with deliberate sensuality to the inside of her own elbow. ‘I was on the other side of the library and I could see it happening. Do you think her own husband couldn’t see?’
Sandro could feel Charles Scardino’s approach, slow and deliberate – he must have taken his medication for the journey – balancing the coffee. Magda turned and smiled at her husband, out of earshot, and spoke under her breath.
‘Athene said, she came back without him that night. Marjorie and Ian went out for a romantic dinner, the night Vito died. Athene said, Marjorie came back without him.’
Sandro frowned, trying to remember what Lino had said. Something wasn’t quite right.
Then Magda lifted her head towards her husband. ‘Darling,’ she said, calmly. ‘We were talking about Ian Cameron.’ Beyond the single wide VIP window onto the tarmac, the light changed as she spoke, and the glass shuddered in a sudden gust of wind.
Scardino lowered the coffee to the table between them. ‘An excellent engineer, by all accounts,’ he said, his face concealed.
‘Single-minded. That’s what it takes. So what if he took the lowest bid for materials? Sometimes that’s what it takes.’ And raising his head he smiled, perhaps the first time Sandro had seen it, before speaking again. ‘Wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of him, mind you. Did you see the bruises on her? That scratch?’
‘Oh, she probably likes it,’ said Magda, startling Sandro. ‘Drawing attention to herself. Locked in the steam room – I don’t think so. I found the keycard lying on the floor in the corridor. She did it herself. And does a man inflict scratches?’
‘What scratch?’ But before Scardino could say anything they were all distracted by a sudden rattle overhead, like rain only harder, followed by a series of sharp cracks against the window glass. For a wild second it made Sandro think of gunfire, as if they were in some Third World airport under siege, and then he realised it was hail. Beyond the window on the runway a plane was pushing to take off into the wind with what seemed like some difficulty. Watching it, Sandro thought of Juliet Fleming strapped into her seat, facing her end.
But when he turned back, Magda Scardino’s face had faded, frozen, looking towards the door. In a dull beige suit, sand-coloured shirt, attaché case, the new arrival to the VIP lounge was eyeing the greeter in her smart hat with grim distaste. It was Ian Cameron.
*
A fanatic,
Vito had written, and you could almost read disbelief in the word, underlined and in bold.
Borderline sociopath,
controlling in extreme
. And like an alarm bell ringing too late.
Mistake
.
A man called Ian Cameron. Danilo had leaned down and said, ‘Well, of course, he’s the one got Vito fired. Obviously it was a mistake to wind him up.’ Then he’d stepped back.
Sitting so intent at the computer screen, Elena hardly noticed Lludic leaving. Last time she looked he’d been standing at the window as John used to do, gazing down into the street.
Was it wrong to pore over Giancarlo Vito’s last words, searching through the CDs for any more evidence? Looking for what he might have said about John. About her. As if there’d be anything on these CDs that would say what she wanted to hear, that John had felt for her what he’d said he felt, all those weeks ago, reaching to touch her cheek: that he’d loved her. Perhaps she didn’t need to hear the words again. Perhaps once was enough. And when she looked up, the sculptor was gone.
*
A tall, startlingly good-looking woman was standing in the street outside the front door in the Via del Leone, so handsome she almost had a force field, and Giuli found herself stepping off the kerb as she reached the spot.
‘Ah, can I help you?’
The woman was looking up at the building. Giuli had her key in her hand: all she’d planned to do was sit a moment in her safe place, check the messages. Hide. Fight the weakness she felt overcoming her, the desire to cry. Think, instead. Think.
The woman looked down at her, standing in the gutter. ‘I’m
looking for Sandro,’ she said, frowning. ‘I’m Mariaclara. I used to work at the Palazzo San Giorgio.’
‘He’s my boss,’ said Giuli. ‘They fired him.’ She wondered what it must be like, to look like Mariaclara. The power.
‘I know,’ said Mariaclara. ‘I called.’
‘He’s off somewhere,’ said Giuli. ‘I think maybe he went to the airport.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want to come up?’
Once again Mariaclara looked up at the building, her long dark hair falling back from her white throat, then back at Giuli. ‘I liked him,’ she said. ‘Shit. There was something I wanted to tell him.’ And when she shivered suddenly, hunching her shoulders, Giuli saw that the power was a veneer. Just like it was with everyone. ‘He’s well out of there,’ said Mariaclara as an afterthought.
‘What was it you wanted to tell him?’ said Giuli.
‘There’s someone,’ said Mariaclara slowly. ‘I think she could tell him who’s been playing those nasty games. She sees everything that goes on up there. It’s her he needs to talk to.’
*
‘Hello?’ said Luisa. ‘
Permesso?
’ She pushed at the glass and it gave under her hand. ‘Is anybody there?’
Was it the weather? Since turning to walk uphill she hadn’t seen a soul. As the sky darkened and the wind rose, it was as though they’d all scuttled inside, tourists, locals, waiters and all. Something followed her up the street, a hard pattering, and she stepped inside the Palazzo San Giorgio to escape the hail that flung itself against the glass at her back.
The doorman was nowhere to be seen. Through a long window the great canopy of a tree was being buffeted by the wind. Lower down the slope there was a flash of white as a big canvas umbrella inverted itself.
‘Hello?’ There were doors: one of them, Luisa knew, was her husband’s office, but they were all closed. She turned down the only other avenue, a wide grey corridor, a glimpse of books at the end, a library, tables with chairs.
I’ve come to see my husband
, Luisa rehearsed as she came into the big room. But it was empty as well, the long bar polished and clean, flowers at one end, and not a human soul. It was like a dream, or a nightmare: the big house with many rooms, the wind battering at the walls and the absolute silence inside. Or was it silent? Luisa felt something creep and draw tight inside her, closing her throat.
From somewhere a soft sound moved in the cavernous quiet, a padded footfall. She turned in the centre of the big windowless room, trying to find its source, and stopped. Beyond the bar at the far end of the library another door stood open, framed in cut grey stone, light falling across the space beyond it. Luisa held her breath. She heard nothing but as she watched the light a shadow moved in it.
Chapter Thirty-Six
O
N THE LOWER TERRACE
Lino and Mauro sheltered inadequately under the collapsed umbrella. He might be my son, Lino thought. If he weren’t too dark, too short, too Sardinian.
‘I don’t know who was firing who,’ he said, looking sidelong at the barman. A great deal of shouting from Cornell’s office, and then a silence that had grown.
‘It was, you go or I do,’ said Mauro, ducking his head to look out over the city. The purple pall of cloud stretched into the hills to the north.
‘And then she went,’ said Lino gloomily.
‘She was leaving anyway,’ said Mauro. Alessandra Cornell had departed in a whirl of coat and bag and heels, without addressing a word to either of them. ‘And Bottai goes out for an early lunch,’ said Mauro, thoughtful. ‘It won’t last. They’ll make it up.’
They looked down. The old woman who lived below the palace’s garden was standing in the glazed door that opened onto
her terrace, looking anxiously out at her bedraggled plants under the downpour. A plumbago was on its side on the terracotta, its pale blue flowers scattered. As they watched there was the sound of a doorbell and the old woman turned and went inside.
‘And meanwhile we’re holding the baby.’ Lino glimpsed something on the stone and knelt, raising it in triumph. ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘I thought she said further down.’
Mauro looked at him. ‘I thought it was a wild goose chase,’ he said, eyes narrowed. ‘Who knows what goes through that one’s head.’ He reached for the mobile – brand new, top of the range – and Lino handed it to him.
The younger man weighed it, lightly touched the gleaming screen and it lit up. The screensaver was a family group, three grown children, all looking warily back against a wide red landscape. He slid back the cursor to see the icons: a map sprang on to the screen. ‘She doesn’t keep it locked,’ he said. ‘Not a practised deceiver then.’
Lino looked at him sharply. ‘Signora Cameron?’ he said, disbelieving.
Mauro looked back into his face, expressionless, just a little shake of the head, then stared back down at the screen. They both looked.
‘Isn’t that . . . where is that?’ Mauro said, tilting his head to see the map, a red thumbtack highlighting the tight hairpin of a sliproad leading down from the motorway. Mauro moved finger and thumb apart over the screen, looking for street names. Firenze Sud. He raised his head. ‘Ah,’ he said. The hail peppered them. ‘Someone needed to find their way home.’
*
‘
Permesso
.’
The old woman – whose name, according to the plaque on her door, was Bertelli – looked at Giuli expectantly as she hovered on the threshold.
Mariaclara had said,
I wanted to tell him, ask old Bertelli, she sees everything.
The old lady’s building was close to the bottom of the hill, she said, at the foot of the Palazzo’s garden. It was overgrown with something tangled and unkempt.
There’d been four bells and she’d rung all of them, having no idea which had admitted her. She’d just come straight up to the top floor and Signora Bertelli had been standing there, like a grandmother from a fairytale, white hair escaping from a bun. Giuli noticed earth under her fingernails, an apron, red lipstick in the cracks around her old mouth. A smile.
Tentatively Giuli handed over her card. The old lady looked at it with interest.
‘I wonder,’ said Giuli, ‘if I might look at your terrace.’
But even as she stepped into the old lady’s dim, cluttered apartment, felt the cool breeze shifting the long muslin curtains at the window and saw through them the terraces that tumbled below the great façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio, it was already forming in Giuli’s mind. The face over the teacups in Gilli, the figure hovering in the corridor outside old Athene Morris’s room: the reason Marjorie Cameron knew a man had been in Athene Morris’s room her last conscious night on earth, was because she had been waiting in the corridor herself. Waiting for him to leave.
‘Is it about the dog?’ said Signora Bertelli. ‘Poor creature.
She put it in one of the bins, where they keep the paper, the old magazines, all that. I didn’t know who to tell, you see? They’re hardly neighbourly, up there.’
*
She was standing between the glazed doors and some steps leading down, in the light that suddenly flooded in from outside, haloed by that frizz of colourless hair. Marjorie Cameron.
‘Oh, you came,’ she said and her voice was reedy and lost. She put out a hand.
Luisa’s heart was still thumping on alert, but without thinking she put out her own hand in response. The fingers fastened on her wrist. Luisa looked down in surprise, tried to pull away, but the thin hand was strong. The sleeve fell back and there above the wrist was a long, deep scratch, no more than a couple of days old. She looked up at Cameron’s face, indignant, but protest died on her lips.
‘She told you, didn’t she?’ said Cameron, and pulled.
Luisa stumbled forwards at the sudden force and was abruptly only centimetres from the other woman’s face.
‘That woman. His awful old landlady. You were there last night.’
Frollini must have told Magda Scardino, thought Luisa grimly. No fool like an old fool.
Marjorie Cameron was examining her. ‘She must have told you.’
So close, Luisa could see the softness under her chin, the lines around her eyes. She had thin northern skin and not
enough flesh to resist ageing. This close, Marjorie Cameron might have been Maratti’s age, the awful old landlady. Absently she was rubbing at the scratch on her forearm.
‘Told me?’ managed Luisa. Her eyes were drawn to the moving fingers, the dark beaded blood along the scratch: a cat might have done it.
She doesn’t like strangers
, Maratti had said.
Particularly women.
‘About me,’ said Marjorie, and abruptly released her hand. Her face faded, the eyes filled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I went to see him before, you see. I’m married, of course. He was trying to protect me. That’s what he said. No one should know about how he felt about me, it had to be platonic.’
The eyes widened, brimming. ‘I told Ian he was wrong. Ian said he never wanted me, he said, who would want me if they could have
her
. I had to go back and make sure. I never meant—’ And she stopped.