Jasper perked up. “A monk, you say?”
“Yes. He grabbed her and they struggled. She fell in the street and he fell on top of her. He must have killed her then. He got to his feet and looked at her, then fled. Coward.” Luigi spat in the water as he pushed the gondola away from the dock.
“This was on the Ponte della Musica?”
“No. It was in an alley not far from the feast. They must have moved the body later. To erase traces. But the tramp saw it all. He told me and I am now telling you.” Luigi’s elation died away as he asked, “A monk means he wore a costume, right? It was not really a monk. A monk is a man of God, he wouldn’t kill.”
“I know who wore the monk’s robes to the party.” And who injured himself in a fall in the street. Marcheti had claimed to have been with him. “Did the tramp say there were two men?”
“No, just the one. The monk.”
“I see.” So Marcheti had lied. His protégé had come home, hurt and bloodied and he had decide to lie for him to protect him. Because he genuinely cared for the boy he had taken into his home and trained? Or because he was well aware that nothing should threaten Leonardo’s upcoming marriage to a very rich woman?
Time that both the master and his pupil answered some questions.
Chapter Sixteen
Marco Marcheti sat in his study writing a new piece of music for Leonardo. Ever since he had come home with that head wound, he had been downcast and almost lethargic. Only a new melody could excite him, bring life back to him.
“Maestro!” The door flung open wide and a servant stepped in. Marcheti’s pen skidded, making a dirty smudge between the carefully crafted notes. He cursed under his breath and rose. “What is it? Can you not knock?”
“The policeman is back. He pushed past me and went up to Leonardo.”
Marcheti raced out of the room. Who did that man think he was, forcing his way into other people’s homes and questioning patients who needed rest?
He halted on the threshold seeing Jasper stand over Leonardo’s bed. He just heard him say, “You beat her and left her to die. You are despicable.”
“No,” Leonardo cried. “It wasn’t like that. We stumbled and I hit my head. I didn’t hurt her.”
Marcheti swore again. He had pressed upon the boy not to tell the truth to anyone. Now this.
Jasper turned to him and said, “Leave.”
“This is my home. You came inside without my permission. You are threatening Leonardo’s health by your rude behaviour. I will have my servants throw you into the street.”
“Then I will come back with policemen to take him to prison.”
“You cannot. You have no proof.”
“Leave it be, Marco.” Leonardo’s cheeks were red, his eyes feverish. “I want to confess.”
“No, there is nothing to confess. You didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, I did.” Leonardo threw himself back into the pillows. “I was a fool for her, like I was before. I believed she loved me, had loved me all along. Her death in the accident tore me apart inside, like I had abandoned her, betrayed her. For all those years I felt like a traitor, a coward, a useless man who had no right to live. I played music of love and devotion, but I never felt it, not deep inside.”
“Nonsense. How can you play the way you do without feeling it? Of course you felt it. You lived it, moved your audiences to tears.”
“Stop telling me what I feel, how I am. You never knew me. You never wanted to know me. The real me. Not what you made of me. An image, a statue, as perfect and smooth as those statues in your garden. I am not like them. I am damaged, I am raw. I let her down, I killed her.”
Marcheti banged the door frame. “Enough.” He focused on Jasper. “You cannot reason with him when he is like that. He doesn’t mean it. It is just a tantrum.”
Leonardo started to laugh, loud and uncontrolled.
Marcheti walked over to Jasper and said, “He has moods. He thinks he is different from other people. A terrible person. Or a brilliant mind. Whatever it is today.” He sighed wearily. “It is the price he pays for his talent.”
Jasper looked him in the eye. “Are you sure it is just words? That he did not indeed kill her?”
Marcheti was cold inside. This was about everything he had worked for, lived for. He could not let it slip away. “Leonardo is a good man inside. He’s no murderer.”
“I saw him trying to strangle you. If I had not separated you…”
“I would have fought him off. I’m strong. I did not need your interference. I do not need it now.”
“No, but someone did die. I need to know if he did it.” Jasper turned to Leonardo again. His laughter had died down into a periodic gasping. Jasper said softly, “Tell me about three years ago when Lady Bantham had the accident.”
“Her husband forced her to live in the countryside. He said it was for clean air and horse riding, but it was to keep her away from the city, from liveliness, friends, parties. He wanted to own her, control her. He was a cruel man. He is a cruel man. He cannot have her back.”
Leonardo stared up at the ceiling. “When she died, I was at least happy she had escaped him. I could not have her, but he could not have her either. Not any more. He could no longer haunt her with his demands, his endless pressure about an heir. She was free. Still I could not quite convince myself it was so. When I was reminded of her, when I heard music we danced to, or saw someone with her hair, the same shape of her neck, soft chin, bright eyes, I thought of her and wished I had died with her.”
“Stop this melodramatic nonsense,” Marcheti burst out. “You never loved her, no more than the others you played with. You’re nothing but a vain child demanding new toys, playing with them for an hour and throwing them away.”
“I never threw her away. She escaped me.”
“Yes, and that is why you became obsessed with her, idolized her. But she never cared for you, never loved you. She used you like you used her.”
“Is that why you killed her?” Jasper asked. “Because you realized she never loved you? Did you give her the rose and she laughed at you and said she had forgotten all about you?”
“Rose, what rose?” Leonardo asked. His eyes were wild and flickering with a strange fire.
Marcheti wondered if the concussion had caused a fever and the young man was even making any sense. Perhaps his mind had distorted what had happened and he believed he had killed the woman while he had not?
Leonardo said in a toneless voice, “I saw her on the balcony. Her glorious face, her green eyes smiling down on me. Then the petals began to fall like snow. She turned and vanished. Not again. I could not let her go again. I ran after her. I followed her wildly. I caught up with her and grabbed her, shook her. I never meant to hurt her, just talk sense into her. She belonged to me. Her husband had married another. She could now marry me.”
“Her husband’s second marriage was never valid,” Marcheti cried. “She was still married to him. Nothing had changed.”
Leonardo hissed at him. “Everything changed. I saw you for what you were, have always been. You destroyed us, our chance for happiness. You made me betray her, get engaged to someone I don’t love, just for gain. You made me kill her. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.”
He thrashed around in the bed.
Marcheti pushed past Jasper and tried to calm him down, but Leonardo struck at him. “Go away from me. Murderer! Murderer!”
Marcheti shrank back. “He is out of his senses, he doesn’t know what he says.”
Jasper gestured to him to quit the room. Outside in the corridor, Jasper said, looking him over, “When Leonardo came home, with his head injury, did he tell you where he had left Lady Bantham?”
“He told me nothing. He said he had stumbled and hurt himself.”
“But you must have gone out to see her. You must have… Did you move her body? Put it on a bridge, put a rose in her hand suggesting a romantic encounter?”
Marcheti shook h
is head. “I did no such thing. Leonardo lied to me about where he had been, what he had done. You see for yourself that he doesn’t trust me.”
Jasper said, “I have a witness that says he struggled with Lady Bantham and fell on top of her. The witness mentioned grabbing, shaking, an attempt to strangle. But no stabbing. The wound that killed her was delivered to the back and these two were facing each other. What if Leonardo left her unconscious but not dead? Then another came and killed her. Was it you?”
Marcheti laughed softly. The whole situation suddenly struck him as utterly ridiculous. “If I had, would I tell you? You have to figure it all out for yourself, Inspector. If Vernassi will let you. You cannot harm influential people here. I will make sure of that.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that your pupil is so violent? That he may have killed?”
Marcheti shrugged. “You just told me you believe he struggled with her but did not kill her. That another did and moved the body. Then Leonardo is innocent.”
Jasper shook his head. “I can’t believe how you defend him knowing what he is capable of. Knowing how much he hates you. Are you not afraid he will kill you?”
“Leonardo will not bite the hand who feeds him.”
“Not as long as you feed him. But after he marries Giulieta Calvieri, another hand will feed him. He will no longer need you.”
“He will always need me. I write his music for him. He can’t do that himself. He’s a great player but not a composer. I was both. At the height of my career I could ask for gold for my performances. My creations. I was better than he is, too. I flatter him often saying he is better, but I was much better than him.”
“I heard that.” The door had opened behind them, and Leonardo stood on the threshold. “I never believed you truly valued me. You always lied. Everybody lied.” His head rolled back, and he collapsed to the floor.
“Quickly,” Marcheti called. “Get him back into bed. The doctor must come and see to him. He must not exert himself any further.”
* * *
Jasper helped the other man bring his protégé back to bed. A sense of guilt gnawed at him that he had looked for confrontation with a sick man and had possibly worsened his condition. In any case, he had worsened the tension between these two people, master and pupil, pseudo father and reluctant son, caught in a bond that was suffocating them both.
But he had no choice if he wanted to make progress in the case. He now knew Leonardo had indeed confronted her but probably not killed her. Another had come later and done that. On the same spot, then moved the body?
Or had Lady Bantham risen to her feet again after Leonardo had left her for dead and had she, herself, found her way to the Ponte della Musica to wait for the person who would stab her? How had the rose ended up in her hand?
A picture was forming, yes, but it was far from complete. He needed to speak with more people and get answers from England.
Marcheti touched his arm. His face was full of wrinkles, deep shadows forming under his eyes. “Do not accuse anyone lightly, Inspector. It can do enormous harm.”
Jasper wasn’t sure if this was a threat or a genuine warning. In any case he was going to take it seriously. Very seriously indeed.
* * *
Red lay at his feet, satisfied that his master was finally there and now and then fondling his ears and patting his head as he leafed through the notes he had made while on the telephone. The marked discrepancy between Lady Bantham’s two forefingers had been confirmed by two girls she had been to boarding school with. The pawnbroker who had brought back some of the missing jewels had declared that the woman handing them in to him had matched the description of Lady Bantham’s maid Agnes, but he couldn’t be certain it had actually been her as he had never seen her before.
Jasper could just picture the scene: a dim room, a woman in front of the counter with a hat pulled deep over her face. How much had he actually seen of her hair, her build, her face? How interested would he have been in just looking at the stones and bickering over the price?
“It was lazy of me not to check it better at the time,” he told Red, as he fed him a bit of prosciutto. “I should have ensured that girl Agnes was really selling off her mistress’s jewellery but it seemed obvious and… How could I have guessed that her mistress had left early and the maid died in the car…? Yes, the longer I think about it, the more I fear that our poor conscientious Agnes died in that car, Red.”
Red grunted and dropped his head on his paws, closing his eyes.
“Sweet dreams.” Jasper patted his back and returned to his notes. “If she died in the car,” he mused to himself, “how did she get in there? Not of her free will. Drugged? By Lady Bantham who could easily have offered her something when she was in her bedroom with her in the morning, before she left the house. A drink, sweets. The unsuspecting girl would have felt flattered by the attention and accepted without doubt.”
Lady Bantham had been seen leaving the house driving the car so she would have had to pack the unconscious girl in the back. Then she would have had to stage the accident. Put the girl behind the wheel, push the car off the road down the steep bank where it would hit the thick oak.
Could it have been done by her on her own? Didn’t it need more people, more strength and knowledge? They had somehow made sure the car started to burn so the body wouldn’t be too easily recognizable. The files on the accident were on their way over to Venice, and then he could check his assumptions against the facts. For instance, if there was a note about fuel having leaked from the car onto the ground. Or having been poured on the ground and then set alight?
Jasper closed his eyes a moment. At the time he should have been more open to the idea of foul play. But he also realized it was easy to think so in hindsight. The crash had happened on a road where other such accidents had occurred. The road had even been named as dangerous in the local newspapers. That could have been the reason for Lady Bantham to choose a car accident as the way for her disappearance. By reading the accident reports in the papers she could have known what the police looked at and how to make it all seem natural and real. They had actually provided her with the material for her escape.
But not alone. He couldn’t believe that. There had been someone with her to help her. It couldn’t have been Agnes if the maid had really died in the car. Who then?
Biancci came to mind as he had been staying with her. The fact that he was now livid at her didn’t mean he hadn’t been in on it back then. What if they had planned it all together, had executed it together and she had then vanished, leaving him alone? Having used him only to get away from her demanding husband? Involving him in murder, even?
Biancci could not have told anyone, not without admitting to the killing of the victim placed in the car. It would have been perfect seen from her point of view. An accomplice who could never betray her.
But it was less clever to return. Could she not have predicted he would jump at her and shake her? Why risk it? For what important reason could she have destroyed the illusion of her death? It had gone well, nobody had suspicions.
She had not returned to prevent her husband’s new marriage, so Jasper guessed she wasn’t interested in what he did without her. Who had been her target at the party?
If only Agnes was still around. She could have known something vital.
He leaned his head back against the chair. If she had died in the car, she had been pregnant. Whose child had she been carrying? Lord Bantham’s?
He tried to put himself in the position of a man who is at a party, non-suspecting and who sees his dead wife standing on the balcony. Suddenly he understands. Her jealousy over his affair with the maid, how she killed the girl and used the murder to stage her own disappearance. At the time he had believed her to have been pregnant, now as he looks into her triumphant eyes he realizes it was the maid who died, carrying his baby. He loses control of himself and…
But Lord Bantham didn’t pursue her outside. He had stayed with his new wife.
They went home together. They were together all night, they claimed. But Rose O’Neill had said someone had left. A shadow creeping along the houses.
Had Lord Bantham left to go and see the woman who had betrayed and hurt him in the most despicable way possible? How had he known where to find her?
Did that bridge have special meaning for them? Had they been here before? Yes, she had because on that occasion she had met Leonardo.
Ponte della Musica. Had Leonardo taken her there and did Lord Bantham know about that? Had he gone there to see if they would meet and had he then killed her in rage?
He had to find out about that, ask Sir James and others about Lady Bantham’s earlier stays in Venice. He had to build up his image of her. What he suspected her of was terrible, coldhearted and cruel. Uncaring of human life. Could he not understand, a little bit, how Leonardo had hated her and wanted to shake the life out of her?
Yes, but Leonardo wasn’t innocent himself. Perhaps he had fallen in love with her at the time because he had recognized something of his own nature in her: the cruelty beneath the veneer of beauty and accomplishment. The ruthlessness when it came to taking what you wanted, whatever the cost.
Betrayed he might have been by her, but he had himself also betrayed others. Giulieta Calvieri, whom he had courted knowing he cared nothing for her.
Jasper paused a moment, thoughtfully brushing his hand through his hair. Something she had said to him had struck him as if it was somehow essential. But what had it been?
He closed his eyes and tried to go through their entire conversation, bit by bit. He was bone weary with the long day and ached for his bed. Perhaps he should just dive in and hope his unconscious mind would work it out as he slept. That he would wake up and see the answer, as clearly as if it had been written down on the wall opposite his bed.
Voices resounded from below, footfalls rushed and his door was thrown open. Red shot to his feet and started to bark. He moved forward towards the intruder, then backed up as if he sensed that it was unsafe. The man storming into the room waved madly about him and shouted at the top of his lungs. “I’ve got the killer. My wife’s killer. I should have realized sooner. You must arrest her. Now before she gets away.”
Under the Guise of Death Page 13