The Killing Room (39 page)

The big pale tear-filled eyes seemed quite blank to Luisa, empty of all understanding. I’m stronger, Luisa thought. She’s asked for my help.
He told the landlady you were his mother.
She felt pity bubbling up in her, dangerous. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, rubbing her wrist. ‘Your husband . . . where is everybody?’

‘They’ve gone,’ said Marjorie Cameron. ‘I wonder if they’ll come back?’ It was not clear if she included her husband. They were right on the edge of the short flight of stairs and Cameron looked down. ‘I need to show you something,’ she said. ‘Is that all right? If I show you maybe you’ll understand.’

Luisa could feel her on the brink of hysteria, and wanted to keep her calm. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Show me.’

Marjorie Cameron took a step away.

‘Down there?’ said Luisa, and looking down to where the stairs narrowed, she felt a sudden ridiculous vertigo. She set a hand to the wall to steady herself, and didn’t move.

Cameron turned to look back, colour in her faded cheek at last, raising her head like a hopeful child. ‘It’s all right. I’ll go first.’

At the foot of the stairs the corridor opened out ahead of them, wide and dark. Luisa knew it was a mistake. Was it some absurd kind of politeness that was keeping her here? ‘What . . . where are we going?’ she said, a hand to the wall.

Cameron glanced back at her again. ‘Don’t you want to see?’ she said, and she was smiling but her eyes were distant, wild. ‘They were in there,’ her head bobbing as if in agreement, ‘Giancarlo and . . . that woman. I went into the steam room, I wasn’t spying on them—’ She broke off, and Luisa heard a hiss, from between clenched teeth. ‘But when I heard them . . .’

Cameron drew a breath; she took hold of Luisa’s arm again, her hand felt hard, like a claw. Luisa looked back at the stairs: she could always run. Just not yet.

‘He used to meet her down here,’ said Marjorie Cameron. ‘He had the key, you see. It . . . he said she liked it. It excited her.’ Her eyes were huge. ‘The killing room. Did you know about it?’ She tilted her head like a bird, searching Luisa’s face. ‘They kept an unfaithful wife down here. Her husband had her chained and tortured till she gave her lover’s name.’ Her fingers insistent on Luisa’s arm, Marjorie Cameron whispered, ‘They used instruments.’

How could she know all this, thought Luisa, hypnotised; then she saw it blooming behind the woman’s pale, mad eyes, a mess of the real and the imagined. The skin on her face seemed stretched,
drawn back over the bones of her skull, as she turned towards Luisa. ‘Don’t you think she might have started making names up, in the end? They left her in her own filth. They left her to starve.’

A mistake, a mistake: it clamoured in Luisa’s head even as she followed Marjorie Cameron down to the dead end of the corridor.

‘Look,’ said Marjorie Cameron, pushing at the wall. ‘Look, someone’s left it open.’

‘There was a magazine in my husband’s briefcase,’ said Luisa, and Marjorie Cameron turned in the black rectangle of the doorway. It was cold, suddenly, a deep chill came from inside the room: she saw something illuminated in there in the dim light of the corridor. It looked like a chair, its seat padded with cloth she had first thought was black, but that was only the light. It was red.

‘I found it in the garbage,’ Cameron said, with satisfaction. ‘The magazine.’ And then she turned, her face close to Luisa’s. ‘But not you. You mustn’t think . . . I just wanted to . . . to show your husband, all men are the same. I didn’t know, when I put the magazine there. About your – your operation.’

She turned and ducked her head under the door’s low lintel. ‘Come on,’ she said.

Mistake.
But Luisa stepped inside, because she had to see. And the door closed behind her.

*

Sandro had had to run: in the doorway to the VIP lounge Ian Cameron had taken in their faces, turned so hard he’d knocked
the greeter sideways with his attaché case, and disappeared. Sandro caught up with him outside the men’s room and blocked him, feeling a burning in his chest. The adrenaline wouldn’t be enough, he realised as he looked into Cameron’s face, if he had to fight this man.

‘Get out of my way,’ Cameron said with level fury. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Sandro shouldered the door open on a gust of disinfectant and lavatory fug. ‘In here,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want this to become a police matter, here and now.’

One man was in there, a North African washing his hands: at one look from Sandro he left. Cameron set his case down, and Sandro could feel the rage coming off him, incandescent. ‘Have you left her behind?’ he said. ‘Your wife?’

‘She never comes with me,’ said Cameron, white-lipped. ‘It’s work.’

Sandro stared at him, feeling with sudden force how much he disliked this man. Since when? And he knew quite instantly: since he’d seen a small, distinct movement of Cameron’s across a crowded room, removing Athene Morris’s hand from his arm with distaste – hatred on his cold, fanatic’s face. She’d stood up to him. She was dead.

‘Giancarlo Vito,’ he said, and he saw Cameron’s Adam’s apple bob and subside. A slight sideways movement of the head. Sandro went on, quietly, almost with respect, considering what he was saying. ‘He seduced your wife. Did he actually sleep with her? Perhaps he thought she would talk you round, when he saw you’d got it in for him.’ Sandro had to speak in English: he couldn’t be sure he’d got it right. ‘You got him fired, but that
wasn’t enough, was it? You went out to dinner with your wife, the night Giancarlo Vito was murdered. What did your wife say to make you feel that firing him wasn’t enough?’

The eyes Cameron turned on him were like pale stones: Sandro almost faltered. He had to go on. ‘Did you make her tell you where he lived?’

‘Marjorie hardly said anything,’ he said, and his smile was thin. ‘She told me she wanted a divorce, of course, she told me she was in love with another man.’ He made a small prissy movement with his shoulders, imitating a woman. ‘She seemed rather pleased with herself, I believe she thought she’d done something courageous. But after that I did most of the talking. I told her, for example, that Vito had slept with that . . . woman, Magda Scardino. She said she already knew, it was just business.’ He laughed, and Sandro imagined him laughing at his wife. ‘I told her he’d arranged prostitutes for the Van Vleets.’

His grey face in the smeared mirror was a picture of disgust: he clenched both fists at once, then looked down and released them. ‘I told her I had no intention of giving her a divorce. I told her if she thought Vito would rather have her than Magda Scardino, she must need her head seeing to. And she walked out of the restaurant.’

There was a flush on his cheek now: Sandro imagined the waiters watching him finish his meal, alone. He wouldn’t have hurried.

‘Athene Morris saw her coming back without you,’ he said, very softly.

Ian Cameron looked down, brushed at his shirt. Sandro remembered the time he’d first seen the engineer and his wife
by candlelight on the terraces of the San Giorgio, Cameron examining something in her eye. Even then Sandro had thought, tenderness, or something else? Something else.

‘Ah yes,’ Ian Cameron said. ‘Did Miss Morris tell you that personally? She didn’t like me. And now she’s dead of course.’ Sandro said nothing. ‘So she can’t tell you that she also saw me, coming back without Marjorie. The problem, for your theory, would be that I returned first, some two hours earlier than Marjorie, at approximately. . .’ He looked down at an imaginary watch. ‘Eleven-thirty. Marjorie returned closer to one, in a taxi. I expect a minimal amount of investigation would trace the taxi – oh, and of course Juliet Fleming saw me come in, the doorman saw me come in – without Marjorie, or didn’t he notice?’ He sneered. ‘Whatever his name is.’ And he swung the attaché case down to his side.

‘I don’t suppose any of this is admissible in a court of law,’ he went on, turning at the door. ‘Not even in Italy. But I may be prepared to take it further. I haven’t spoken to Marjorie yet.’ And he was gone.

The message from Giuli came in as, stunned, Sandro emerged on to the crowded concourse, a family group parting around him as he ground to a halt.
Missed call
– no signal in the men’s room – immediately followed by
Message received
.

Marjorie Cameron, it’s her? And Luisa’s up there, looking for you
.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

A
S THE DOOR CLOSED
behind Luisa, all she could think was, this is a terrible place. It had been built deep into the rock and stretched away into shadows, and there was a smell. Of something ancient and filthy, something that seeped and sat. A single bulb suspended at the centre of its low ceiling illuminated a dark spreading stain on a dusty dirt floor, and heavy stone rings set in a back wall – and the chair.

‘I knew whose magazine it was,’ said Marjorie Cameron. ‘That disgusting man. The American.’

‘Why did you want to hurt
her
, though?’ said Luisa. ‘She never did you any harm. Therese Van Vleet.’

‘Hurt her?’ Marjorie Cameron spoke wonderingly. ‘But why should everyone protect her, because she’s young, and pretty? She’s dirty. I wanted her to know, that someone knew.’

‘You smeared . . . mess.’ Luisa tried not to make her revulsion audible.

‘It made me feel better,’ said Marjorie Cameron simply. She looked at the chair. ‘I married Ian at nineteen,’ she said. ‘I wanted
to kill him, there and then at the table in the restaurant, when he said that to me.’ She sat on the velvet seat, and looked up.

I could run, now, thought Luisa, but she didn’t.

Cameron pushed her sleeves up unconsciously and there was the scratch again. Looking higher up the bare arm Luisa saw bruises.

‘Does he hurt you?’ she said. Was she constructing a case for the defence? But Marjorie Cameron hadn’t killed her husband.

‘Ian?’ Saying his name, Marjorie Cameron’s upturned face was childlike, or perhaps the light was kinder. You could see she would once have been pretty, when the hair had been a child’s silky gold, and the soft mouth had been hopeful. ‘Ian never touches me.’ She looked down at the arms, as if seeing the bruises for the first time, touched them tenderly. ‘He did that. Giancarlo did that. I thought he wanted to – to make love.’ She looked around herself. ‘I thought Ian must have been . . . wrong. But it hurt, I said, that hurts, and Giancarlo laughed and then I – I knew. That it had been true, what Ian said.’

‘Did you understand that you were in danger?’ Again, the case for the defence.

‘Danger? I didn’t care. Was I in danger?’ Her eyes were wild. ‘I just thought, he doesn’t love me. He’s had enough of me. He wants
her
.’ In a white, drawn face.

In the limousine, in the mall, Marjorie Cameron had followed Magda like a dog: what had Juliet Fleming called it? Something about masochism, and unrequited love. With Vito dead, all she had left was Magda. To long for, and to hate. Luisa shifted, a step back, her head turned towards the door Marjorie Cameron had closed behind them. She swallowed down, the tiniest reflex of
fear, but suddenly Marjorie Cameron was on her feet beside her and that hard small hand had fastened again around Luisa’s wrist.

‘He wasn’t dressed. He was ready for bed, he said. His face . . . I tried to explain to him, it wasn’t my fault, if I’d known Ian was going to have him fired I’d have tried to stop him . . .’ She faltered. ‘But he just looked at me as if I was nothing. All those years, alone, mending fences, fixing the pick-up. I always thought there’d be someone to rescue me.’ She looked up. ‘And then he said – Giancarlo said – go away. You’re a stupid ugly old woman. And I saw the – the little thing, the dumbbell, just sitting on the shelf, it was so small but it was so heavy in my hand. It felt like . . . power. When I lifted it.’

Under the swinging bulb Luisa hardly dared breathe, and Marjorie Cameron went on.

‘Do you know what it’s like to be married to a man who only uses you? Do you know what it’s like to have only that for nearly forty years, until he’s sure you’re no good for anyone else, and then suddenly there is someone else?’

Stiff-necked, Luisa shook her head,
no
, knowing there was no answer that would get her out of there.
Sandro
. Still holding her wrist, Marjorie Cameron’s other hand crept up to Luisa’s face, touching it with a thin finger, stroking. Luisa tried to breathe: under the woman’s touch her body felt old and heavy and useless.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt Athene, you know. I didn’t touch her. I tried to ask her not to . . . not to say she’d seen me. But . . . she was laughing at me. She’s another one of those women. With her lovers.’ She stroked. ‘I should have gone and got someone, an ambulance, when she stopped being able to talk. But I just
left her, on the bed.’ A shuddering breath. ‘I locked the door and threw away the key.’

Overhead came muffled sounds, footsteps on the corridor’s soft carpet. Marjorie Cameron looked up, then down. ‘Would you tell?’ Sorrowfully, looking around. ‘He brought me down here, too. It’s where I kissed him.’

Involuntarily Luisa closed her eyes against the sight of the red chair, for shame.

Marjorie Cameron sighed, final. ‘You would, wouldn’t you? You’d tell.’

*

He’s still here then
, thought Lino. Danilo Lludic was standing among the library’s tables like an escaped bull when they came back in, dripping and dishevelled from the terrace, Mauro holding Marjorie Cameron’s mobile phone away from him as if it might be dangerous.

‘I saw her come in,’ said Lludic, looking around, jumpy as hell. ‘I saw her.’

‘Signora Cameron?’ said Lino.

‘Weren’t you on the door?’ said Lludic. ‘No. Not Cameron. The detective’s wife. Black hair. I saw her come over, I watched for her, but she didn’t come back out again.’

The wife, thought widowed Lino, remembering the black hair, and something tightened in his chest. ‘I couldn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I had to help Mauro.’

‘So where did she go?’ said the sculptor, and just as the bewilderment in his face turned to something else, they all heard
a noise. They all turned in search of it, the sound of something crashing over underground, a crump and a splintering, beneath their feet.