Murder at the Castle

by M. B. Shaw

  Looks like they succeeded, thought Iris, shaking his hand and thanking him for his help. ‘You’ve certainly given me plenty to think about.’

  ‘You’re very welcome. Please keep in touch, Mrs Grey. And please also… be careful.’

  * * *

  Outside San Cassiano, leaning against the wall of a nondescript tabaccaio, a man watched Iris emerge from the church, her string bag drawn across her body and flapping at her side.

  ‘She’s leaving now,’ he whispered into his phone, simultaneously snapping pictures, just as he had when Iris had arrived.

  ‘Is she alone?’ the voice on the other end asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Follow her.’

  Wordlessly, the man hung up.

  Chapter Twenty

  Kathy arrived the next morning in a whirlwind of wedding-dress-related excitement, tossing her Vuitton suitcase onto her four-poster bed and pronouncing herself ‘in love’ with Venice, the apartment and everything.

  ‘How beautiful is this?’ she sighed ecstatically to Iris, throwing her arms and twirling around as if she expected fairy dust to start falling from the ceiling at any moment. ‘I literally feel like I’m in a dream.’

  ‘No, you metaphorically feel like you’re in a dream,’ Iris corrected her patiently. ‘Haven’t we already had this conversation?’

  ‘About a hundred times.’ Kathy grinned. It amused her when Iris picked her up on ‘Americanisms’, as she called them, which, as far as Kathy could tell, just meant ‘talking normally’, and she never took offence at the impromptu grammar lessons.

  ‘So how was Father Antonio?’ she asked, kicking off her shoes. ‘Was he like the hot priest from Fleabag?’

  ‘Actually, he was a bit,’ Iris admitted, hastily whipping out her sketchbook. There was no way she was letting Kathy slip out to Gucci until they’d got in at least an hour-long sitting together. ‘He was much younger than I expected, and quite handsome, if you’re into –’

  ‘Priests?’ Kathy offered, helpfully. ‘And are you?’

  ‘Me? God, no,’ said Iris. ‘Men are complicated enough without throwing God into the mix, don’t you think? If I ever marry again, it’ll be to a sinner.’

  ‘Bravo,’ laughed Kathy. ‘I approve.’

  Over the course of the next hour, Iris filled Kathy in on Beatrice and her mother, and the long, sad story Father Corromeo had told her yesterday. At long last, it seemed, they might have an identity for at least one of the Girls in the Wood. Whichever way you cut it, that was a huge step forward.

  ‘So he loved her, this Beatrice?’ Kathy asked wistfully, once Iris had finished.

  ‘Clearly,’ Iris agreed. ‘He remembered that necklace like it was yesterday.’

  ‘But he had no idea who the other girl might have been?’ Kathy frowned. ‘Or how either of them ended up at our bothy?’

  There it was again, that ‘we’. ‘Our bothy.’ In Kathy’s mind, she and Jock were already married and Pitfeldy castle was already hers. Again, Iris’s mind drifted to Rory, and the anonymous letters, but only for a moment.

  ‘No,’ she told Kathy. ‘He had no clue. Other than the general sense that Beatrice was in trouble, that she was afraid of something.’

  ‘Or someone.’ Kathy looked thoughtfully out of the window and across the red-tiled rooftops.

  ‘Quite,’ said Iris. ‘So that’s the burning question, really, if one set of remains does turn out to have been Beatrice’s: how did a troubled young girl from Venice wind up murdered in Scotland?’

  ‘Well,’ said Kathy, hopping to her feet and stretching out her limbs in one long, languid motion, like a cat. ‘The burning question for me is how do I get from here to the Calle Larga? Murder mysteries are all very well, but Graff are holding a diamond tiara that might be perfect with the MacKinnon family veil, and I promised to be there before three.’

  * * *

  Happy with her work on the portrait, and pleased to have a few hours to herself, Iris ate a simple lunch of salami and cheese up on the roof terrace and then tried again to call Stuart Haley. She’d left him a message last night, as soon as she’d got home from San Cassiano, but he hadn’t yet responded. In fairness, the message had only said ‘call me’, as she’d decided Father Corromeo’s evidence was too complicated to get into on a voicemail, so he may not have realised it was important.

  This time, however, he picked up immediately.

  ‘Well, hello there.’

  Gratifyingly, he couldn’t have sounded happier to hear from her. Unlike Jamie Ingall, who appeared to have forgotten how to use a telephone altogether. Not that his radio silence was any great heartbreak. Iris was filing it firmly under ‘live and learn’, but still…

  ‘How’s Venice?’ asked Stuart Haley cheerfully.

  ‘Indescribably beautiful,’ Iris sighed. ‘Enchanting. Not too crowded. How’s Pitfeldy?’

  ‘Ach, you know… shite,’ said Haley, in between mouthfuls of hot, vinegary chips from the bag he’d bought at the van on the harbour. ‘It’s sleeting just now, as it goes. But you didn’ae call to chat about the weather, so don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me about your mysterious priest.’

  There was a lot to tell. For almost fifteen minutes straight Iris repeated the story she’d just told Kathy, her words tumbling out one after the other as she filled Haley in on her meeting with Father Antonio and the triumphant unearthing of a name: Beatrice Contorini.

  ‘So the question is,’ she paused, finally drawing a long, deep breath, ‘are you able to check Beatrice’s dental records, from Italian missing persons, or whatever, to see if they match our body?’

  ‘Aye, that shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Haley. ‘I’ll make some calls. Give the Italians the name, maybe Interpol too. See what they come up with.’

  ‘Great.’ Iris smiled to herself. She liked talking to Stuart Haley. Painting was her life, but it could be a solitary business. And being divorced didn’t help. It was gratifying, every once in a while, to feel like part of a team.

  ‘If it is Beatrice, what would be the next step?’ she asked, suddenly energised. ‘Father Antonio mentioned these Eastern Europeans she’d fallen in with here a number of times. Evidently they were quite violent.’

  ‘Let’s just see if one of the bodies is this girl first,’ said Haley. ‘Before we go getting our knickers in a twist.’

  He pronounced it ‘twest’ to rhyme with ‘rest’. Hearing his Scottish brogue, Iris imagined him parked in his cramped Ford Fiesta on a dour Pitfeldy side street, sleet pounding his windscreen. It seemed impossible, somehow, that he was there and she was here, basking in the winter sun on her Venice roof terrace. Impossible, not only that those two realities simultaneously coexisted, but that Beatrice Contorini had somehow managed to straddle them. Or rather, she hadn’t managed it at all. Instead, somehow, she’d fallen to her death in the chasm that divided these two opposite worlds, breaking her poor mother’s heart in the process.

  ‘OK,’ she said aloud to Stuart Haley. ‘I’m untwisting my knickers for now. But you will keep me posted?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Haley. ‘And likewise, if you pick up any more titbits over there. Maybe when you’re back, we could have dinner and exchange notes?’

  Iris’s stomach gave a lurch. Was he asking her on a date? Or would this be a ‘team’ dinner? A ‘work’ dinner? Oh God. If it was a date, was that good or bad? At least with Jamie she’d known where she stood. Then again, she’d fancied Jamie. The bastard. Whereas with Stuart…

  ‘Iris? Are you there?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Sorry. I’m here.’

  ‘So we’re on for dinner, then, when you’re back?’

  Say something, you idiot!

  ‘Sure. Dinner. Absolutely. Why not?’

  ‘Good,’ Haley said briskly. ‘And I’ll give you a ring if I hear anything before that. Nice work, by the way.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Iris, and she hung up.

  What on earth had just happened?


  Chapter Twenty-one

  Massimo Giannotti tightened the belt on his bespoke silk dressing gown and wandered out to the terrace. He liked to have breakfast here, beside the vast, azure-blue swimming pool he never swam in, in the shadow of the Palatine Hill. Massimo adored Rome. The eternal city. He owned grander homes all across Italy: a seventeenth-century palazzo on the shores of Lake Maggiore, a sprawling estate in Tuscany and an opulent town house in Milan. But his apartment in Rome, sandwiched between two embassies on one of the city’s most prestigious vias, felt more like home than any of them. Perhaps it was the sense of power that he still felt here, as a member of the aristocracy, the old guard? Rome was a city where status and wealth still mattered, and where the ruling class still ruled. A place where there was one law for the ordinary people, and another for the likes of Massimo and his friends. Some people called it corruption. But to Massimo it was simply tradition, the preservation of a natural and divine order that other, lesser countries seemed to have lost sight of.

  He felt sorry for his friends in Paris and London, men born to great old families like his who had seen their influence and status eroded, along with their crumbling estates. Some had been bankrupted by draconian inheritance taxes, others by divorce laws that gave preposterous sums to discarded wives, something quite unheard of here in Rome. Massimo’s first ex-wife, Julia, had run back to her wealthy father in Capri. His second, Angela, was without connections and had been jettisoned with nothing more than her clothes and jewellery. Out of spite, he had also fought her for custody of their eight-year-old daughter Livia, who now lived with a nanny/housekeeper out in Maggiore and whom Massimo hadn’t laid eyes on in over a year. Last he heard, Angela was living in a cheap apartment in Florence, slowly drinking herself to death, but it wasn’t a subject that exercised his attention.

  Recently, of course, the appalling #MeToo movement had made things even worse, giving a voice and a sense of self-importance to every two-bit whore from New York to Naples. Glancing back over his shoulder, Massimo could just make out the naked, sleeping form of the teenage girl he’d picked up last night at the Moda Models party. No one in Rome cared that, at well over sixty, he was old enough to be her grandfather, or that she may have been trafficked into Italy by some unscrupulous Eastern European pimp, using the model agency as a front. Here, she was a commodity, something that Massimo could enjoy at his leisure, like a glass of fine burgundy or a new Bugatti car.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’ Armando, Massimo’s excellent butler, appeared silently at the outdoor breakfast table bearing a tray with a silver coffee pot, a bone china cup and saucer, this morning’s copy of Il Corriere della Sera and his master’s iPad.

  ‘Grazie.’

  Massimo sipped at his espresso, allowing the hot, bitter liquid to help jolt his senses into life as he scrolled through his inbox. A vain man despite his age, he ate and drank sparingly, anxious to maintain his lean physique. Massimo Giannotti pursued his own pleasure vigorously, but he also knew the value of self-discipline. It was what had kept him rich, powerful and on top, what had made him one of life’s winners.

  The second email he opened, however, soured his good mood like an unwelcome squirt of lemon juice. It was sent from Venice, and consisted of three short lines of text, a link to a UK website and some attached JPEG pictures of a woman by the name of Iris Grey.

  Massimo read the information, his quick mind whirring, and clicked open the pictures. His patrician upper lip curled with disdain. She looked like a nobody, this Grey woman. A little, dark-haired, middle-aged mouse. Only her eyes were notable, wide set and too big for her face. Attractive to some, perhaps, but they reminded Massimo of the eyes of a fly. An irritation to be swatted away.

  Walking back inside, he picked up the phone on his desk.

  ‘Ugo? It’s me.’

  ‘Wha…? Massimo?’ Venezia’s chief of police had clearly just been dragged from his slumbers, but Giannotti didn’t care. He explained the reason for his call matter-of-factly, keeping his eyes fixed on the life-sized, solid-gold statue of a horse that dominated the apartment’s vaulted sitting room, a present from his erstwhile father-in-law.

  ‘OK,’ said the police chief once he’d finished. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘By the end of the week,’ said Massimo. It was an instruction, not a request.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Ugo sounded irritated. ‘I’m on top of it, my friend. Don’t worry.’

  With a short, mirthless laugh, Massimo Giannotti hung up.

  It would take a lot more than an obscure, middle-aged English portrait painter to worry a man like him. On the contrary, it was the snooping busybody Iris Grey who should be worried.

  * * *

  The Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice was close to deserted when Iris arrived at opening time. Stepping off the vaporetto into the little square in front of the museum, there were no more than a handful of tourists perusing the tatty souvenir stand, and only a few students smoking and sipping coffee around the building’s grand front entrance.

  At first, she thought she must have made a mistake. Surely, if Da Vinci’s iconic Vitruvian Man drawing were being displayed to the public this week, the crowds would have been epic? But the girl at the front desk assured her in flawless English that the iconic ink-on-paper sketch was indeed on show upstairs, and that for a modest additional fee Iris could buy a ticket to see it. ‘We don’t get so many tourists this time of year,’ she explained. ‘I think the museum prefers to show the important works when it’s not, you know, a stampede.’

  Incredibly, there were only two other people in line in front of her when Iris approached the roped-off gallery. The room containing Leonardo’s masterpiece was in almost total darkness, with only the glass display case illuminated; the temperature was carefully controlled and it was chilly, presumably the better to preserve the fifteenth-century parchment. Visitors were being asked to walk through in single file, approaching the exhibit one by one. As she waited her turn, Iris’s mind drifted back to the painting in Angus Brae’s cottage back at Pitfeldy, a bold teenage interpretation of the original masterpiece. She wondered whether Angus, too, had had a chance to glimpse the original on his school art trip, or whether he’d simply been inspired by the posters that hung permanently outside the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

  She felt her own excitement build as she was waved forward, and soon found herself staring down at perhaps the most recognised and written-about drawing of all time, representing the ideal human body proportions. To be this close to history, to the actual paper touched by Da Vinci’s own hands, was a humbling feeling. Embarrassingly, it was soon replaced by another feeling when it suddenly struck Iris how very alike Da Vinci’s naked man was to Jamie Ingall in the buff. She was still blushing as she exited the exhibition room and headed for the gallery café. She had just sat down when her mobile rang, flashing up Haley’s number.

  ‘It’s Beatrice,’ he announced breathlessly, before Iris had even said hello.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Our jawbone. The younger girl? She was definitely Beatrice Contorini.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Iris gasped. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’ She could hear Haley’s grin down the line. ‘Italian Missing Persons pulled out her file and matched the dental records. Boom. Nice work, Sherlock Grey.’

  Iris couldn’t hide her delight, jumping to her feet to the surprise of her fellow café customers and punching the air with her fist.

  ‘That’s fantastic!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Haley.

  ‘We have a victim.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘I can’t believe they got back to you so quickly.’

  ‘I know. It’s a big step forward,’ conceded Haley. But something about his subdued tone was beginning to set off alarm bells.

  ‘I’m sensing a “but”?’ said Iris.

  ‘Aye.’ His heavy sigh confirmed it. ‘It’s quite a big one, I’m afraid. Chief Constable Roebuck is shutting us down.’

/>   ‘I don’t understand,’ said Iris. ‘You don’t mean he’s closing the case?’

  ‘I do, unfortunately.’

  ‘But… we have victim,’ she stammered. ‘Does he know about Beatrice?’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Then how…?’

  ‘I know,’ said Haley. ‘Believe me, I’m disappointed too. Especially as I’m as sure as I can be that this is Jock MacKinnon’s doing, putting the hard word on Roebuck. But it is what it is. If the chief constable doesnae want to pursue it, then that’s an end of it. At least here in Scotland.’

  ‘Who cares what the chief constable wants to “pursue”? It’s not a bloody fox,’ Iris retorted angrily. ‘Two women have been murdered, and now we know who one of them was.’

  ‘Look, I agree,’ said Haley wearily. ‘You’re preaching to the converted. But it’s out of my hands.’

  ‘Yes, but what reason has he given?’ Iris refused to let it go. ‘Surely he has to have a reason?’

  ‘Limited resources,’ said Haley.

  ‘Resources…’ muttered Iris disdainfully.

  ‘It’s not all doom and gloom,’ said Haley more brightly, trying to lift Iris’s spirits. ‘Now that we know an Italian national was one of the victims, the Italian police have made noises about opening their own inquiry.’

  ‘What sort of “noises”?’ asked Iris, still fuming.

  ‘Loud enough that I expect they’re going to do it,’ said Stuart. ‘I’ll know by tomorrow, but they’ve asked if Banffshire police would cooperate with an Italian-run effort, which, of course, we would.’

  ‘And you’re OK with that, are you?’ Iris asked Haley indignantly. ‘With just handing the case over to the Italians?’

  It did not improve her mood when Stuart laughed.

  ‘Iris, it makes no difference whether I’m OK with it or not. This is the police force, not a WI meeting. I follow orders. No one’s asking for my opinion.’

  ‘Well, I am,’ said Iris stubbornly. ‘Are you happy to have the Italian police running this?’