The Inspector was continuing: ‘The case had everything a scandal needs to run: a beautiful girl accused of being a poisoner; a well-known murder victim; wealthy characters; a sort of love triangle. It was a complicated hot mess of a case, and tempers ran high, both in the Courtroom and in the country among the readers of the news.’
‘Remind me.’
Lovelace’s boyish face lit up at the memory.
‘The crime was nothing to do with London, of course. Not my patch. It was up in the north. Lancashire, I think. Although the case was tried in London, at the Old Bailey, as all good murders are. There were three rich families involved, all of whom had a big monopoly on business up in Lancashire: the Gattlings, who owned a good many hotels all along the Blackpool coast; the Alladices, who owned a chain of famous sweet factories which supplied the whole country; and the Allessandros, who were second-generation Italians, and owned a chain of successful restaurants in that area. The Allessandros started off, as many immigrant Italians did in those days, by running seaside ice cream parlours, but by this time they had moved on, both socially and economically. But that didn’t stop the press from labelling it “The Ice Cream Girl Murder.”’
Posie remembered. ‘The children of these families were part of the same crowd, weren’t they?’
‘Exactly. By the time of this case they were all in their early twenties. Robert Gattling was the only child of the hoteliers, and by all accounts he was a bit of a wild lad; a good-looking young cub with plenty of money to splash around. He was after all the girls, until he’d settled on Alicia Allessandro, that is. She was the only child of the Italian restaurant family. Robert Gattling pursued her fixedly, although apparently they weren’t well-suited: she was a dreamy, gentle girl more interested in painting watercolours and pressing flowers than dancing in nightclubs and staying out until the early hours. But nevertheless, most people at the time were waiting for the engagement notices to be placed in the newspapers.’
Posie exhaled slowly.
Alicia Allessandro.
It all fitted. She remembered those exotic dark eyes, haunting and reproachful, looking out from photographs: a small doll-like face framed by puffy black wings of hair which were so fashionable back then; an enviably slim figure dressed in the height of romantic Edwardian fashion.
So that was who Lucy Christie really was.
Inspector Lovelace carried on. ‘As far as I recall, this lot were all at a Society Spring Ball somewhere, round about May, and they were all eating their fancy dinner when Robert Gattling keeled over and went splat in his soup. Dead as a door-nail, blue in the face. Alicia had been sitting next to him, and it was she who screamed for a doctor, although it was obviously too late. It was pretty clear it was a poisoning, and the police big boys arrested Miss Allessandro the very same night.’
‘But why?’ Posie breathed, enthralled.
‘A vial of poison was found in her evening bag. The drug had been put into Robert’s champagne flute, and it would have been the work of a second to slip it in, given the right opportunity. Apparently Alicia had ample opportunities, when she returned from the toilets, for example, and found the others had gone on ahead of her onto the dance floor. There was a convincing witness who stated that Alicia had been alone near the table at least once.’
‘But that bottle of poison could easily have been placed in her bag!’ hissed Posie in disbelief. ‘And why would she have done it? She was about to get engaged to the man!’
‘That was the trouble. There was some sort of rumour abounding that Alicia wasn’t actually as happy about a possible engagement to Robert Gattling as she might have been, that he was the one doing the running, and that, in fact, she loved another. The rumour went about that she couldn’t stand the fella.’
‘Awkward. But hardly a motive for murder, surely?’
Lovelace shrugged. ‘That’s as maybe. But killing Robert would have got him out of the way. And there were other, even uglier rumours doing the rounds. Mostly hushed up, of course, by the parents, who couldn’t believe them of their blue-eyed boy.’
‘Such as?’
‘That Robert Gattling was a bully, starting to run with another, far racier crowd, down in London. He was violent, and got into scrapes, often with cheap women in nightclubs. And he was frequently not in his right mind.’
‘Drugs, you mean?’
The Inspector nodded grimly. ‘Most likely cocaine. He was spending money like billy-o, at any rate. It was just the sort of juicy detail a young almost-Inspector likes to get his teeth into, but, as I said, all of that drugs and violence stuff was mostly hushed up. What came across clearly at the trial was that Robert Gattling could do no wrong: he was a lad cut off in the prime of his life, about to propose to his intended at a prominent society event. They even found an engagement ring in his jacket pocket later. A blasted great brute of a ruby, ugly as sin, but it must have cost him a packet. Funny the things you remember when you’re supposed to be studying, isn’t it? Anyway, the timing was tragic, it lent pathos to the whole thing.’
Posie frowned. Something felt familiar here. But the thought slipped from her, like sand falling away.
‘I remember the trial vaguely.’ Posie thought of those long-ago, far-off hot summer days. ‘Lucy refused to make any defence for herself, didn’t she? She wouldn’t say a thing, just stared straight ahead or at the floor. A bit like earlier, when the Commissario arrested her because of the connection to that flask. It was dreadful.’
The musicians had stopped tuning up and had launched into a beautiful, soaring melody. A small paper pasted to the glass door by their bench announced that the quartet would be performing Bach’s ‘Ciaccona per Violino e Archi’ later that night. For a second they enjoyed a few bars of the trembling, melancholy music, before shaking themselves and returning to the job in hand.
‘It was dreadful,’ agreed Lovelace. ‘The trial ripped those families apart. Despite hiring the best defence counsel available, the girl wouldn’t answer anyone, and there’s not much even the best lawyer in the world can do if his client won’t speak. Both Alladice boys stood as character witnesses for her, I remember, and they gave statements which cast Lucy in a favourable light, throwing doubt on how she could have poisoned Robert Gattling that night.’
That made sense: Posie remembered Johnny Alladice’s Will, protecting Lucy, and also Dickie’s protestations of her innocence, earlier, at her arrest, and his obvious and continued devotion to her.
‘But she was convicted of murder by the Jury, anyhow?’
‘That’s right, sentenced to death by hanging. It all looked pretty bad for her. The newspapers went to town, you might recall. They made much of her Italian background and her Latin temperament, and her apparently poor roots: practically made out she was a serving girl in one of the Allessandro’s ice cream parlours and that she deserved no better than she got, for having the nerve to have made a play for such an exalted chap as Robert Gattling in the first place.’
Inspector Lovelace was pulling his scarf and his coat collar up around his face, buttoning his coat tighter. Posie followed suit. Someone was lighting candles all around the church now, and incense was being lit, cloying in the air already.
As they left, the cold of the street enveloped them again. They walked slowly.
‘The Allessandro parents were plagued by the press after the trial. Literally hounded day after day. They’d started up a big appeal, of course, but it didn’t look hopeful. While their daughter was awaiting a date for her own execution, and the appeal just beginning, they shot each other in a mutual suicide pact.’
Posie shook her head in horror. They had reached the Accademia Bridge, and pilgrims for the Salute Church were pressing them on all sides.
‘I believe the mother survived,’ Lovelace explained. ‘But she was virtually brain-dead, and completely paralysed. She no longer knew who she was, or anything else for that matter, poor soul. She must have died since, I’m guessing.’
‘No. I don
’t think so, sir.’
Posie remembered the snooping Max had done, and the money orders being sent to a nursing home in the north of England. She told the Inspector, who grimaced. And then she remembered more: the other money orders which Max had found, written out by Lucy every month to Roger Valentine, ever since he had started work for Bella Alladice. Roger must have found out, somehow, about who Lucy really was. Perhaps he had threatened to tell the world where they could find Alicia Allessandro, the villain of ‘The Ice Cream Girl Murder’ case?
Confound the man and all he stood for! But that couldn’t be helped now.
‘Weren’t her family very rich, sir? So why is Lucy sending her small salary home?’
‘I expect not as rich as they seemed, especially with the costs of all those legal fees. The money for Lucy’s appeal lawyer, and the costs of the Court fees would have come out of Mr Allessandro’s estate. Probably there was enough left over for a few years of nursing home care, but not much else.’
‘It was worth it, though, wasn’t it, sir? The appeal? She’s still alive! Alicia, or Lucy, as she now is…’
Lovelace nodded seriously. ‘Yes. It was the damnedest thing, but the appeal went through. That expensive lawyer was worth his salt, and more, even if his client still refused to speak. The girl was released and all murder charges dropped, for lack of evidence.’
They were almost at the Campo San Vio itself. Some priests in birettas and cloaks hurried by in a closely-knit black crowd, anxious to keep a distance from the crush of people surging towards the Salute, and one peeled off in the direction of St George’s Church, reminding Posie to go and check about her own wedding ceremony.
‘Lack of evidence, sir? It sounds a bit wishy-washy, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, that’s how it always goes. Some flimflam about how the placing of the poison in Robert’s champagne couldn’t really be attributed to Lucy, and there were also concerns about the vial of poison in her evening bag: how it really got there. But oh! Oh, golly, yes!’ The Inspector ruffled his hair, thinking deeply.
‘I believe that the main evidence against the girl – a damning testimony about seeing Lucy hovering near the table, alone – was smashed apart at appeal by the defence lawyer. He had a whale of a time, I believe, announcing it in Court. It was news in itself. One of those Alladice brothers came forward; reported that the particular witness concerned wasn’t impartial. He was very convincing.’
‘How so?’
‘Because it concerned his younger sister. She had given a withering report at the trial against Lucy. But it turned out she was jealous. She had been a former paramour of Robert Gattling and she’d been passed over by him, and couldn’t get over it.’
The stony cobbles of Campo San Vio felt like they were spinning, and the world with all its crazy colourful masks and priests and churches and water was reeling.
Posie whispered, as if she didn’t want to admit the truth, even to herself. ‘That was Bella, wasn’t it, sir?’
It was too, too awful. ‘Bella wanted Lucy to hang?’
****
Eighteen
So many things made sense to Posie now, and yet nothing came together.
Bella.
With that dreadful ruby ring like a bloody-red claw on her hand. A dead man’s ring.
It must have been the ruby Inspector Lovelace had just spoken of, found the night of the murder in 1912.
Probably Bella had acquired it somehow after the trial, and hung onto it for posterity, like some ill-fated omen of doom. But what sort of sick love could sustain you to do such a thing? To wear a ring intended for another? What sort of morbid obsession could fester like that? To give evidence sufficient to hang an innocent girl?
If Lucy had been innocent, that is. If it hadn’t just been the work of a clever defence lawyer to get her acquitted of murder back in 1912.
And then in the years afterwards Bella had gone against her dead brother’s wishes and kept Lucy close, but ill-treated. Out of jealousy, or vindictiveness, or for revenge. Because even though Lucy, as she had become, had been dragged through the murder courts, and even though Robert Gattling himself was dead, Lucy had forever got her man. Bella’s man.
Posie remembered Bella’s strange words from only the night before, not understood at the time. The heavy, dreadful menace behind them was now loaded with even more significance: ‘I was in love with a man who was going to marry me. But it didn’t work out. He looked elsewhere. And my heart froze.’
For the tiniest second Posie felt sorry for the dead Countess, so bound up by her misremembered love affair with the Gattling boy, unable to move on, to form normal relationships, or to forgive. But Posie’s mind was unaccountably marching on, faster than she could think, automatically passing on to the next snatch of her conversation with the dead Countess, her reason for hating Lucy:
‘She has a habit of stealing hearts. Hearts which are not hers to take.’
Hearts. So the hearts had been those of Robert Gattling, and then, afterwards, as was obvious from that pathetic little Will, Johnny Alladice. He too had loved Lucy. It had represented a double betrayal in Bella’s twisted mind.
They were now at the heavily-scrolled and emblazoned front door of St George’s Church, with yet more crowds pressing past. A scratchily-bare tree stood to the right of the church door, wispily losing its last leaves.
But Posie could scarcely take in that Inspector Lovelace was now pulling at the old-fashioned iron bell-pull, and that he was leafing through a yellowing, rain-grizzled pamphlet for Sunday services which was tucked into a small metal basket nailed to the wall. The bell rang out, soft and low. Above them a beautiful carved relief of George and the dragon caught the eye, mainly because it was covered in roosting, wet pigeons.
‘Sir,’ she insisted, ‘why on earth has Lucy stayed with Bella all these years? With the woman who tried to get her hanged, but who also cheated her financially?’
‘What was that?’
She quickly described how Lucy had been ‘provided for’ in Johnny’s Will, and how she had received a diamond ring from him, and how Bella had spectacularly abused her position of trust.
Lovelace shrugged, pulling his hat low, and looking around the place unappreciatively.
‘Who knows why she stayed? Maybe for the same reason she changed her identity and grabbed a convenient, inconspicuous name? Perhaps it was just easier, and better the devil you know? If she had remained Alicia Allessandro forever, she would always have been followed by the press. There would have been blackmailers everywhere. Maybe even people threatening her life? People get a bit funny about murderers, you know. Even murderers who get acquitted.’
Posie thought sourly of Roger Valentine. ‘There are still blackmailers everywhere, sir. Even out here in Venice.’
Damp leaves blew past and Lovelace shook them from his polished shoe. ‘I agree the whole thing is confoundedly wretched, but you often hear these sad stories. I must say, things look very bad for the girl, especially in light of what you’ve just told me; years of abuse from this awful Bella creature.’
He suddenly sounded doubtful. ‘Maybe she did just flip out and murder the Countess? And maybe she did kill Robert Gattling, all those years ago? Once a murderer… Do you know, the funny thing is that way back in 1912 I was so convinced of that girl’s innocence I even had an argument with my Molly over it, and we never argue!’
‘Sir, do you happen to remember what poison was used to kill Robert Gattling?’
‘It was prussic acid. Same as now. Not good. Not good at all.’
And Posie recalled with a sharp, horrible jolt the tension in the air in the salon at the guesthouse, and Dickie Alladice’s words, now with a new meaning attached to them: ‘Did you say prussic acid? Good grief! I must be mistaken!’
The Inspector pulled the bell again and turned to Posie. ‘I don’t think anyone is going to answer the bell, somehow. Do you think Lucy killed the Countess?’
Posie wasn’t entirely ce
rtain, but her instincts were usually good, and she had liked Lucy Christie from the start. She waved her left hand with its engagement ring airily. ‘No, I don’t. Why would she be so stupid as to use the same poisoning trick twice? In fact, I’ll make a bet with you: I’ll wager this ring on her innocence.’
The Inspector grinned in amusement. He looked with pretend longing at Posie’s expensive bauble.
‘I don’t know what Alaric will say, eh? But I do know that ring would see my little Phyllis all through school and university and give her a nice white wedding, too.’ He nodded wryly. ‘I’d better wish for Lucy’s guilt, then. Although…’
Suddenly they could hear footsteps approaching from inside the church. Big bolts were being drawn back. The heavy oak door opened inwards and a round-faced, mild-looking man of about Posie’s own age peered out in a friendly manner.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting, I was battling with the Primus stove in the kitchen. All I wanted was a cuppa! We are quite without our normal housekeeper today, and it tells, I’m afraid. What can I do to help? If you’re looking for the Salute Church, all you need to do is follow the crowds! You’ll get there just fine.’
‘No, nothing like that.’ Posie shook her head quickly. Posie, who had grown up among Vicars and church folk, recognised the man immediately for what he was, a Chaplain. He was wearing a shabby hand-knitted English cardigan over his cassock, and he was wielding the troublesome cup of tea.
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