by Mark McCrum
‘Journalist,’ Liam said. ‘Has to be. The first harbinger of fecken’ doom. I’ll go and investigate.’
He returned triumphant. The young man was from the Corriere dell’ Umbria newspaper and Liam had spoken to him. ‘Just gave him a mini-briefing. Nothing he didn’t know already. The poor fellow’s travelled all the way out here, he needs something to take back to his editor.’
‘Did you let him take your photo too?’ Mel asked.
‘Perhaps.’
‘You did!’ cried Belle. ‘You are now the face of Murder Villa, do you realize that?’
‘It’s not funny,’ said Diana. ‘Now you’ve given him something, it’s not speculation any more. It’ll be a story. We’ll be besieged. Camera crews, the lot.’
‘They’ll be here anyway. Do you really think he’s going to come all this way and write nothing?’
‘Don’t you think you should have checked with the rest of us, before you released a statement on our behalf?’
Liam’s good humour was fading fast. ‘I didn’t release a statement, Diana. On anyone’s behalf. I just gave your man a short summary, on my personal feckin’ behalf, of what’s been going on here.’
Diana made the kind of face that made you glad you weren’t her partner or child. ‘On your personal behalf,’ she repeated scornfully, pointedly leaving out the Irish expletive. ‘Who knows what you’ve unleashed now. At least it’ll be your ugly mug in the paper.’
Francis retired to the Wi-Fi bench with his laptop. He found Il Corriere dell’ Umbria (circulation 11,212) and its sister paper Il Corriere di Siena, but there was no mention of Villa Giulia yet in the surprisingly comprehensive online coverage. Once again he cursed his lack of Italian. There was a picture of an ambulanza on the front page and details of some tragedia involving someone trovato morto, but it wasn’t either Poppy or Sasha. A scout around some other websites confirmed that the Italian legal process was somewhat different to the British. As well as the whole inquisitorial system, with the procuratore and all that, there seemed to be no formal charging by the police, instead a requirement that a judge confirm the holding of the suspect. There was no bail. Why was that? Francis wondered. Something to do with the mafia? With making sure the polizia could hold on to the big fish when they caught them? But how very inconvenient for the well-heeled lawbreaker. At home, if you were wealthy enough, you were almost always allowed to go home. And Angela was right: Italian jails were notoriously overcrowded, with three to six per cell.
Privately, Francis was worried. The police had made a mistake arresting Duncan. Though he too had had him marked as prime suspect for a while, now that his motive was gone, any suspicion attached to him had gone too. That little outburst at supper last night (‘it’s tantamount to torture’) had only confirmed Francis’s gut feeling: that the ambassador was innocent, and that on his return to Blighty he probably was going to be kicked out of the house and garden he loved. Moretti had had a bee in her bonnet about Duncan right from the start. Francis wouldn’t forget the look on her face when she’d made up her ‘little story’ about the passionless marriage and the beautiful house. It had been like watching a child who thinks they’re being super-clever. Once she had formulated her thesis, she had never quite, he thought, accepted Duncan’s rejection of it.
All this, obviously, was unfortunate for poor Duncan, now presumably being put through the mill at the questura in Perugia, by a group of professionals who didn’t believe him, but it was more unfortunate, if not actively dangerous, for the group left behind at the villa. The killer was still at large.
The only advantage of this situation that Francis could think of was this: perhaps with Duncan taken into custody, the real murderer would relax, would somehow give themselves away, even if it were only by the enthusiasm with which they wept crocodile tears for Duncan. Two things were for sure: 1) he was going to double-lock his bedroom door tonight, and 2) he was going to be watching every last one of them like the proverbial hawk.
If Francis couldn’t go for a walk, he could at least enjoy the pool. He got his trunks and the last tranche of Zoe’s memoir and headed down there. To his surprise, despite the sunny afternoon, he was alone. Perhaps the others were all cowering in their rooms.
Eventually, around four thirty, he heard the click of the little gate in the surrounding fence. He looked up, thinking it might be Liam, or one or both of the Yorkshire ladies. But it was Barbara.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘I’m not disturbing you, I hope.’
‘Not at all.’
She took a lounger two along from him and settled herself down. She had no book or magazine with her. She let out a loud sigh and closed her eyes. Francis continued to read, though the silence between them was heavy with possibility. Should he offer his condolences? Should he ask her how her day had gone? He didn’t want to be intrusive; on the other hand, he didn’t want to be unsympathetic. But it was Barbara who broke the spell.
‘This is more like it,’ she said eventually.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. Then: ‘Difficult day?’
‘Just a bit of one.’
She gave him a cracked smile and was soon off into a quiet rant about the police, the Italian authorities, everything she had to do, just to get her poor daughter released so she could fly her home. ‘They’re insisting on doing this autopsy on her, which I do totally understand. But it’s not at all clear that they’ll release the body even when that’s over. She can’t be registered dead until the body is released. And I can’t book her on to a flight home until she’s registered dead.’
Outside of this frustration, Barbara had a lovely gentle manner, though with her classically neat figure she was of a totally different body shape to Sasha. Francis found himself wondering again about the father and what his story was.
Anyways, she went on, somebody from the American Consulate in Florence was coming over to meet with her tomorrow, so maybe they could get things moving. ‘I just feel at the moment like I’m the one they should be helping out, and they’re not.’
‘Aren’t they at all sympathetic?’ he asked.
‘They are. Of course they are. Condoglianze and all that. But beyond that, they’re not in the business of making it easy. See this person, speak to that person, go to this office, climb these ancient stone stairs to find another locked door, drive out to this police station on the edge of a trading estate, it’s all a … a … fucking nightmare.’
With that she was suddenly in tears. Francis got up and went over to her. He sat down on the lounger next to her and took her hand. She continued to sob.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘Mi dispiace.’ She smiled through her tears. ‘You shouldn’t have been so sympathetic. That’s what set me off. I’m much better when people are just being businesslike and annoying.’
‘That’s OK,’ Francis said. He gave her hand a little squeeze and let it go. ‘Perfectly understandable. Jesus, you’ve lost your daughter.’
‘I know.’ She stared out silently in front of her and for a moment Francis thought he’d gone too far. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she went on. ‘What am I doing in this place, with all these old ladies telling me they’re sorry for my loss. Who are they all? What do they know? Do you know the reason Sasha was even here?’
‘She told me she’d wanted to come to Italy ever since reading A Room With A View.’
‘Was that the book? The main reason was that she’d had an abortion. After a silly one-night stand with some bloke she met on Tinder. ‘“Ethically polyamorous”, apparently. But he ran a mile when he heard about the child. She was very cut up about it all, so when afterwards she suggested a break somewhere, I encouraged her.’
‘Financially?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t know this,’ Francis said. It made the whole situation almost unbearably poignant.
‘Why should you? But the point is, am I really supposed to believe that one of them strangled poor Sasha? Which one was it? None of them look strong en
ough, except perhaps that big scary one.’
‘Diana.’
‘Is that what she’s called? The one who greeted me when I arrived. With the Scottish accent. Who’s always bustling around like some big old hen.’
‘Diana.’
‘Oh, she’s perfectly sweet. They all are. But I just want to be left alone, really. I nearly checked into a hotel in town. But then I thought, no, I want to see them, I want to know what happened. To my poor, wonderful, little girl.’
Francis let there be silence. Then: ‘She was wonderful,’ he said. ‘Truly, Barbara. She had real talent. I’m sure you know that. She wrote beautifully. Better than all of this lot, really. And she had another rare quality …’
‘Intuition,’ said Barbara, quietly.
‘Did you know I was going to say that?’
‘I thought you might.’
‘Astonishing, really. She played this game the other night where she did character analyses of a couple of us. And they were so spot on. And she was so young. I was amazed. We were all amazed.’
‘Twenty-four. She just had her birthday a month ago. Twenty-three years since I found her, rolling around in her cot in her foster mom’s backyard.’
This was a surprise.
‘You adopted her?’
‘Me and my then husband did, yes. We couldn’t have kids of our own.’
‘I see.’ Francis was tempted to tell her his own story, how John and Susan Meadowes had rescued him, too, from a foster carer at the age of fourteen months, but decided against it. This was not, as they say, about him.
‘So bright-eyed, such a clever little thing. And even though she’d been through God knows what before we found her, she always had the sweetest disposition. And such natural talent. She was one of those kids who could turn their hand to anything. Her drawing was wonderful. She quickly picked up the piano and passed all her grades. Then she moved on to the clarinet and was in school orchestras and things. But her writing was always special. She was always inventing stories, even from a very young age. Long, twisty, imaginative stories. About trolls and dragons and fairies and all sorts. We were so proud of her. Had such high hopes for her. She won competitions at high school.’
Francis was longing to ask about her father. But the last thing he wanted to be now was intrusive in the way that people so often said he was, when really he was just curious. So he said nothing. He sat there on his lounger, looking out over poor Barbara’s head at the valley, the criss-crossing ridges of field and forest, the tiny orange dots of villas and villages, the little thread of grey tarmac road that wound through the middle, and in the distance the mighty blue-grey hulk of the Mountains of the Moon.
‘You want to know about her father, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Donald. We’re not together, though we’re still friends. He’s a musician. You know the type. A talented man, but you know, not made for the long-term project of fidelity. So we went our separate ways when Sasha was about nine. In answer to your unspoken question, no, we didn’t adopt any more. She was the only one.’
Francis didn’t know where to look. But Barbara seemed better now. Her storm of emotion had passed.
Five minutes later they were joined by Mel and Belle, down, as they said, for an early-evening splash. ‘Oh, sorry,’ Belle said, as they came through the gate and saw the two-person tableau in front of them. ‘We’re not interrupting anything, are we?’
‘No, no,’ said Barbara. ‘I was just going to get in the water. Have a little swim before dinner.’
‘You know that Erica St John is joining us tonight,’ said Mel.
‘Who the heck is Erica St John?’ Barbara asked.
‘Some local artist,’ Mel said. ‘She was going to come last week and then … and then, well … she was cancelled. Due to events. But I think Stephanie thought we could do with some distraction. And entertainment. She’d be right about that.’
Erica St John was quite something. How old was she? Francis wondered. Late seventies, early eighties? She had clearly been a beauty in her youth, with those well-defined cheekbones. She had not tried to cling on to that, as some did, even some of those around her tonight, with their dyed hair and powdered skin. Erica’s hair was as white as bone, her skin as wrinkled as a prune. She had a line of kohl around her lively dark eyes and the thin, amused strip of her mouth was crimson with lipstick – but that was it.
She arrived in a yellow Mini Cooper, driven by a short, tubby man whose name was Benjy. Benjy was younger and their relationship was not stated. Was he lover, companion, friend, butler, secretary? From the way she treated him he could have been any of those things. He was decidedly boho, with his bushy grey hair, his unkempt eyebrows above heavy black specs. He had a diffident manner, but it was, with his fruity, drawly, well-educated voice, the diffidence of the entitled.
Why had Stephanie invited them? It was a very odd call, particularly as Erica’s new show – in Geneva, opening in two weeks’ time – was called A Preoccupation with Death, and featured real human skulls set in found-object tableaux. There were ‘canvas-sculptures’ too, they learned. Because at one stage of her career Erica had been an abstract painter, like Gerry. Now she tore and broke her paintings or decorated them with broken shards of mirror or bone. Frames were no longer simple boring decorative oblongs that surrounded the image; they too might be smashed. One skull, spattered with blood-like red paint, had a length of fancy gold moulding jammed alarmingly into one of its dark eye sockets.
At least she was a distraction, Francis thought, as they took turns over the pre-prandial Prosecco to admire Erica’s catalogue, where lavishly produced images were interspersed with the usual gobbledegook artspeak. Liam loved it – and her. Diana, you could see, was struggling (Francis imagined that Constable’s The Hay Wain was more up her street). Mel and Belle made polite faces, as well they might, after a week of struggling to paint fruit and flowers and alla prima landscapes. Gerry was gracious, as one artist had to be to another, especially if that other was as successful as Erica was. Was he considering smashing up his moody abstracts too? Maybe that was the shortcut to the Biennale.
Duncan had not returned from Perugia. ‘Sadly,’ Stephanie said, ‘he will not be joining us tonight.’ And that was that. No further mention was made of the fact that he had been arrested, that he might at this very moment be in Capanne jail, in one of those cells that Zoe had talked about, shared with ‘three to six’ others; that two highly suspicious deaths had taken place within these four walls within the past week, that though Erica and Benjy had been allowed in for the evening, none of the rest of them were allowed out.
Fiona, too, was absent. After her long day with her father, she had decided to have soup and a sandwich in her room. But to Francis’s surprise, Barbara was present. Why she wanted to face the four-course set piece again was a puzzle to Francis, even after the conversation they had had earlier. I want to see them, I want to know what happened. Perhaps that was it.
In the dining room, Francis found himself almost opposite Erica, who was between Liam and Gerry. Benjy was sitting next to him, and Stephanie beyond that. He had tried to escape down the other end, where Barbara was now between Mel and Belle, with Diana and Angela opposite her. But Stephanie had insisted, pretty much manhandling him up to be near their distinguished guest. On his other side he had Roz, who was rather naughtily right next to her lover again. What kind of a buzz were the pair of them getting out of that? Would she and Tony be playing footsie during the antipasto? Or were they about to put the cat among the pigeons by coming out as a couple?
For a moment, looking down towards the fire crackling in the wood stove, he caught Barbara’s eye. Without smile or acknowledgment, she looked away. If she, too, was using the sympathy of the kind ladies to play detective, she wasn’t going to mess it up. Perhaps she felt she had already told him too much.
It was a long evening, during which Francis learned quite a bit about the Tuscan/Umbrian expatriate scene. Erica and Benjy were full of gossip, and Ge
rry and Stephanie weren’t holding them back. Dear Jonte was being as preposterous as ever in his castello. Sylvia’s attempts at B&B were comic; the trouble was she was such a snob she couldn’t really bear her guests. After the success of her book about moving to Tuscany, Georgia was trying to write a novel, but by her own admission she had no imagination. Geoffrey and Antoine had split up, Geoffrey had gone back to London and Antoine was bereft and back to his best friend the bottle, poor soul. None of these names meant anything to Francis – or presumably Liam – but in half an hour he got a better idea of Gerry and Stephanie’s social milieu than he had in the whole of the previous week.
Francis wondered how Erica and Benjy would describe this scene to the Jontes and Sylvias and Georgias and Antoines. ‘One of them was the murderer, and we were sitting there eating and chatting as if there was nothing out of the ordinary at all.’ Perhaps, indeed, that’s why they’d agreed to come – to be at the fount of the best local gossip for years.
FOURTEEN
Wednesday 3 October
In the morning, in any case, the story was officially out. Liam had got himself on the front page of the Corriere dell’ Umbria, grinning inappropriately between the tall, ivy-covered gateposts of Villa Giulia. Below was the headline: MORTI MISTERIOSE NELLA VILLA INGLESE.
‘I told you you’d be the face of Murder Villa,’ Belle said, as Tony’s iPad was passed eagerly around the breakfast table.
The breaking news had brought out other journalists too – and not, as Roz had predicted, just local ones. It looked as if the policeman at the top of the drive was holding back a proper press pack behind those wrought-iron gates. Francis didn’t want to risk being photographed, so he hadn’t gone up to have a closer look. Liam, who had sneaked up, thought there were at least twenty, with a couple of TV cameras too. He hadn’t shown his face this time. For the moment all the posse were getting was footage of the agente and the gateposts.
But at nine thirty, the journos did have something to point their cameras at. Barbara White-Moloney leaving the villa in a taxi. As mother of a victim and a new arrival, she was obviously exempt from the rules governing the others. Francis watched the car go with some frustration. He had hoped to talk with her about what she had discovered, if anything, over dinner; what her suspicions were about the guests she had met. She had got up and left the table before the pudding had even been served, so he’d not had the chance last night. And now she was gone, having taken breakfast in her room, and marched out to her car without even a glance in the direction of the guests.