by Tim Parks
There he was.
You’ve seen the photos, Carla, so there’s not much point in describing the scene. What I rather have to explain, I suppose, is my response. I would like to tell you that I was totally disorientated, and in a way I was. But there was also a way in which I was terrifyingly orientated: I mean, I knew exactly where I was; it was a scene I was familiar with.
How can I explain?
You must remember that for twenty years I have been collecting paintings showing scenes of murder. This has been my specialisation, the way some philatelists collect stamps showing flowers, others wildlife, others famous public buildings. And of course I had been thinking about these representations of lethal violence much more intensely in recent months as I selected the exhibits for the forthcoming show. Among the biblical murder scenes, one that is rarely depicted but extremely quaint is the murder, or rather political assassination, of the Moabite King Eglon by the Jewish hero, Ehud. There is a nineteenth-century woodcut of the scene by Ford Madox Brown which appears in Dalziel’s illustrated Bible (published in the 1880s), a copy of which I had procured through an Internet auction room only the month before, having decided to lend it to the museum for the show. What makes it relevant is that King Eglon was hugely fat and the Bible speaks of the long knife that Ehud used sinking right into his belly, to the point that the haft disappeared. Madox Brown’s woodcut shows Eglon in his oriental finery sitting on a handsome throne, just before Ehud attacks.
What can I say? I suddenly felt an extraordinary wave of heat welling up, as if my bowels were on fire. It was the throne that most struck me. What had this room been furnished for, with its antique chests and tables, its gilt chaises longues, its plush drapes, its lush and obscene tapestries, its bizarre oriental symbols and strange instruments (I recognised at once the scourge Volpi had shown me in his office and various weapons from the museum’s collection). This must be the place the director had been concerned I might discover, I realised, when he objected to my visiting the storeroom. And there he was on his throne, or a least a huge regency armchair, naked but for the red robe on his shoulders, and with that deep gash in his lower stomach. I took a step towards him and became aware of the smell. The room stank. Because out of his belly had come not just blood but faeces. I made the mistake of taking a step closer, seeing the intestines and just the tip of the haft thrust right into the deep blubber. Immediately I wanted to be sick and indeed I was. I retched on the red carpet already thick with blood (would a murderer do this?). It was as I was trying to wipe my mouth that I realised there was a sticky redness on my hand. From the door. With terrible clarity I knew then I was going to be charged with this murder that I had not committed.
This must be the reason why I delayed informing the police. The moment I told them, I felt sure they would arrest me. It was a mistake, but I wasn’t thinking. I panicked. How had Volpi come to such a brutal end? Who had done this terrible thing? Why did it correspond so closely to an image on a woodcut I had recently bought, and a copy of which I had emailed to both Zolla and Volpi, but also, come to think of it, to the Arab, Tarik who had been invited to write some captions for the show? One can see a million paintings, read thrillers and watch horror films, but the real thing is different, it’s impact incomparably greater. Yet the fact that this real corpse did seem to have come out of one of those paintings, or even in a strange way to be the painting, somehow made things even worse, both real and unreal. Most awful of all was the way Volpi’s small eyes were open, amazed; the head lolled back, with a strange expression of bewildered lust about the slack lips. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The blood must have drained down through his naked body so that the fat feet, on the gold footrest, were a dark bruised blue. The chromatic effect was most curious. On instinct, I took out my mobile and snapped a couple of shots. What was I thinking of? Then somehow the idea of death reminded me of my daughter. I turned, walked out of the room, along the corridor, took the service lift to the back door, and with blood still on my hand walked back to our house in Via Oberdan.
Antonella was lying on the sofa with a perfumed silk scarf over her face. Having washed my hands and drunk some water to clean the taste of vomit from my mouth I drew up a chair and sat beside her in respectful silence.
‘Poor Don Lorenzo,’ she murmured. She reached out and took my hand and we sat, or I sat and she lay, in silence.
‘It seems he went out late to visit a dying patient. He was too old for such duties. When he came back he fainted and struck his head. Who knows if he will ever wake up? I hope he flies straight to Paradise. I know Purgatory terrified him. Oh poor Lorenzo.’
I couldn’t help feeling this was rather an overreaction to the plight of a man who was surely old enough and pious enough to be ready to meet his Maker. All the same I felt the same difficulty my son had had in announcing Massimina’s disappearance. I squeezed my wife’s hand and went looking for my son, but he was nowhere to be found. Then I remembered it was Sunday afternoon. He must have gone to report at the police station as he is obliged to whenever there is a home match. After which, no doubt, he would go straight to the stadium to catch the second half of the game.
I went into the kitchen and found a saucepan with a mix of lentils, ginger and vegetables on the cooker. I heated up a few mouthfuls, washed down my meagre lunch with a glass of Cabernet and retired to The Art Room. Here I sat for an hour and more contemplating my paintings and reflecting on what I had seen at Castelvecchio. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. All too soon of course the police were banging on the door. In less than an hour I was in a cell.
That’s it, Carla. I’m exhausted. I have written into the early hours. Every ten minutes the guard peers in to check that I am not trying to commit suicide. They do well. During the day I sketched a Madonna. I’ve been praying to her that Massimina may be found. So now a last plea to the Almighty, then sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
THE DEAD BECAME YOUR allies, they really did. It was not unlike those games of tag where, once touched and caught, the victim joins your team and helps you chase the others. Over the years it had become a regular occurrence for Morris to appeal for their help. Massimina most often of course; her ghostly, sweet-smelling presence was always beside him. Then Paola; Morris’s first and wilder wife had provided no end of useful tips when he was trying to seduce young interns, and her experience proved even more invaluable when the time came to wind up these affairs. Genital Giacomo, the lascivious photographer bludgeoned to death with his telephoto lens in a two-star Rimini hotel, had been generous with his know-how on many occasions when Morris was photographing artwork in the disobliging gloom of a medieval nave or transept, the man’s grating Veronese dialect croaking aperture settings in his murderer’s receptive ear. Antonella’s dear dead husband, the once ferociously hostile Bobo Posenato, had softened up considerably after his interment and thence fed Morris all kinds of avant-garde strategies for maximising company profits, and indeed for getting a bit more mileage out of the wife Morris had taken over from him. Years later, when the inevitable showdown was looming with Forbes, the Nigerian Kwame had helpfully come back to brief his one-time employer on the full extent of Forbes’s paedophilia, something that allowed Morris to feel assured he was only dispensing justice in seeing the man off. Even Forbes, after a few years in the attic at Santi Apostoli del Soccorso, had put unpleasantness behind him and would occasionally let Morris know which paintings would and wouldn’t copy well, which priests could be trusted when he bought works that weren’t strictly supposed to be on sale. All in all, Morris reflected, bent over a notepad in his prison cell, it was quite a team he had put together for his riper years. There was so much talent and experience there. ‘If you lot can’t get me out of gaol,’ he muttered, ‘I want to know who can.’
Morris was drawing now. They had let him have a notepad with plain paper. At first he sketched to fill the time, but soon it became a form of invocation: carefully, deftly, he called the dead into being with hi
s pencil. Pausing a moment from this effort and recalling his previous imprisonment of twenty and more years ago, Morris marvelled at the feverish mental crisis he had gone through in those weeks and months, the tortured religious images he had conjured up. This time, on the contrary, he was absolutely calm. He plied the long penitentiary hours as a steady, well-laden ship plies the empty ocean, unhurried, unimpressed by waves and weather, absolutely confident he would bring his cargo safely to port. Perhaps it had to do with his being innocent, he thought. That must count for something. Even the occasional interrogazione hardly unsettled him. They had put a woman magistrate on the case, Ilde Grimaldi. Not an unpleasant lady, Morris had thought when he first found himself sitting across the table from her, though he couldn’t help noticing a drab tweedy skirt on square hips. Cool as the occasion would allow, he decided not to insist on having his lawyer present; hopefully this would indicate he had nothing to fear.
What the police were most concerned about were his movements on the night before the murder. Or of the murder perhaps. Presumably they had now established the time of death. Morris explained that he had spent the Saturday evening at home, for the most part in his Art Room. His wife went to bed early and barely noticed when he joined her.
‘I know it’s not the perfect alibi,’ he confessed, ‘though I do fear this is all too common a state of affairs in most marriages.’
‘I’m not here to collect your pearls of wisdom, Signor Duckworth,’ the older woman coughed drily, turning over typed pages on the table before her. ‘You were not, then,’ she eventually went on without looking up, ‘the middle-aged man seen walking down Via Roma, from Castelvecchio in the direction of Piazza Bra, at approximately 2.30 a.m. Eh?’
Morris was not going to rise to bait like this. ‘Hardly,’ he remarked, and after a pause, ‘middle-aged man would not seem an entirely conclusive description.’
Avvocata Grimaldi studied the page in front of her. ‘Balding . . . blond, wearing a tweed jacket.’ She looked up. ‘Eh, Signor Duckworth?’
Morris had always disliked people with the lazy habit of tossing out inarticulate question tags. He didn’t trouble himself to repeat his denial. The magistrate sighed:
‘Walking unsteadily,’ she read from her witness report, ‘perhaps drunk or stunned in some way. Occasionally leaning a hand on the walls for support.’ She looked up. ‘Eh?’
Morris gave her his most friendly smile: ‘Scars?’ he enquired. ‘Birthmarks? Cornflower blue eyes? Carnation in the lapel?’ He waited a moment and just as the lawyer opened her mouth to speak, added ‘Eh?’ She frowned but did not appear to have caught on.
‘I hold my drink pretty well,’ Morris concluded. ‘Ask anyone who knows me.’
The questioning dragged on for three hours and more, the focus shifting to the suspect’s relationship with Volpi. Grimaldi refused to believe that Morris had told her all there was to know. Morris noticed she had poor teeth and was evidently a smoker.
‘Do you imagine,’ he said at one point, ‘that I am the kind of person who would have wanted to get naked with the good Dottor Volpi, as the murderer presumably did?’
Pouncing at once, Grimaldi asked how Morris knew that the body hadn’t been stripped and arranged like that after being killed? ‘Eh?’
Morris reflected: ‘I would have thought murdering people would be hard enough without removing their underwear. Why would anyone want to do that?’
‘Are you a Freemason, Signor Duckworth?’
Morris frowned. ‘I believe the Freemasons observe a vow of secrecy. You will hardly trust me if I tell you no.’
‘Not these days,’ the magistrate told him.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘They are not so obsessed with secrecy these days,’ Grimaldi repeated.
‘Evidently you know more about these folk than I do,’ Morris told her sweetly, and added, ‘But going back to the body, if it was stripped after death, I presume such a thing would have required at least two people, two Masons that is.’
The taller of the two policemen standing at the door smiled.
Abruptly, the magistrate again asked why Morris hadn’t contacted the police immediately on discovering the body. Again Morris explained that ever since he had been accused of murder many years ago he had felt insecure and vulnerable as far as police and judiciary were concerned. He was simply scared of having anything to do with them.
‘When I first saw Volpi I couldn’t believe my eyes, Dottoressa.’ Morris was at his most sincere and straightforward now. ‘And the moment I walked out of the room I couldn’t really believe I had seen it. That was why I hurried back in and took two photos, to prove to myself that the corpse was there. To see that it registered in the technology. Even then I wanted it not to be true. I suppose I feared I would be held responsible somehow. That’s what I’m like, Dottoressa, sorry Avvocata. Crime annals are full of slightly unhinged people who feel guilty for crimes they didn’t commit. Just logically though, if I had done it the evening before and walked, er, what was it, unsteadily home at two or three o’clock, I would have had to be stark raving mad to go and fetch a painting, bring it to the museum and then go tramping bloody footprints all over the place only ten hours later, getting myself seen by tourists and guards to boot. Eh?’
The grim Grimaldi countered that if Morris claimed the right to have behaved irrationally in not reporting the crime, then she hardly needed to prove that his visit the following morning was rational. Did she? ‘Eh?’
Morris smiled. ‘Fair point,’ he acknowledged.
‘You could have returned to remove important evidence from the scene of the crime,’ Grimaldi went on. ‘You could have brought the painting to provide an excuse for your fingerprints being down in the storeroom, eh?’
The two watched each other over the plain tabletop.
‘Signor Duckworth,’ Grimaldi said, ‘I have to inform you that your fingerprints have been found on a knife in the cupboard of the museum storeroom, a knife in every way similar to the knife in the victim’s belly.’
Morris sat tight. Eventually, he said, ‘Avvocata Grimaldi, I was waiting for you to frame a proper question for me, but apparently life is too short for such luxuries. So, you found my fingerprints on any number of knives down in the storeroom because I sorted through them a few weeks before. Indeed it was my visit to the storeroom that led to the misunderstanding with Volpi who, I now realise, far from fearing I might steal something down there was actually concerned that I would come across this strangely decorated room where doubtless he and his cronies got up to all kinds of disgraceful stuff with their whips and scourges. Freemasons all, if not worse. They are not the only secret organisation after all. Italy is full of them.’
‘All the staff at Castelvecchio knew about this room, Signor Duckworth.’ Grimaldi paused, turned a paper and read: ‘The underground location . . . signalled on the building plan as interrato 7b . . . erm . . . houses an exhibit used in a show . . . in 1993 . . . a mock-up of the decor in the court of Cangrande della Scala, Signore of Verona, in the early fourteenth century. Why are you pretending you didn’t know this, Signor Duckworth?’ She stopped and looked up. ‘Eh?’
Calmly Morris pointed out that he was not a member of the Castelvecchio staff. ‘And honestly, Avvocata, medieval statuary has never been of the slightest interest to me. It’s just not the kind of show I would ever bother with.’ He paused. ‘However, even if everyone knew about the place that hardly explains why Dottor Volpi would have been down there in such fancy undress, does it?’ He opened his mouth to say eh, but then chose not to.
Ilde Grimaldi lifted her papers and started lining up their untidy edges with quick sharp stabs on the tabletop.
‘Signor Duckworth, we believe you carried out this disgraceful murder, together with your mistress Samira Al Zuwaid. We believe you used a knife from the museum store. We believe the motivation had to do with disagreements about the prospected show, Painting Death, or perhaps an attempt on your part t
o blackmail Volpi over his homosexual relationship with the art historian Angelo Zolla.’
Morris sighed deeply. ‘Avvocata,’ he said, ‘if you insist on this silly story of my having a mistress less than half my age, I shall get ideas into my head. Am I to take it that the young lady is in gaol?’
But the lawyer was on her feet, where Morris was pleased to note that she was even shorter and tubbier than he had supposed. Without so much as looking at the suspect she turned and left the room. Morris shook his head, and shook it again an hour later as he sketched out Massimina’s face on the rather poor quality paper they had given him. ‘Gesture of supreme rudeness,’ he muttered. ‘Especially when one is supposedly innocent before proven guilty.’
‘No one is as well mannered as you,’ the dear girl assured him; her whisper felt like a caress.
‘It takes so little effort,’ Morris mused. He was propped up on one elbow on his bed. It was strange this dreamy calm he felt, with so much precious time passing. Almost three weeks now. Three weeks of solitary confinement. Perhaps it was a question of age, he thought, of the cerebral temperature falling, the pulse easing off. He turned the pages of the sketchbook, working first on this little portrait, then on that, comparing them, studying them. Without actually deciding to, he had embarked on a plan of conjuring up all their beloved faces at exactly that moment of knowledge, of mutual recognition, the last breath before the killer blow, when each victim had become part of his life, forever. He was looking at them again as they had been in that instant, the most intense of their lives, about to die. And they were looking at him: Giacomo and his gawky English girlfriend Sandra, Massimina, Bobo, Paola, Kwame, Forbes, in sketch after sketch. They knew they had become part of the Duckworth team, the Duckworth Foundation, no less. They rejoiced in their common destiny, smiling from the cheap paper and the blunt pencil point. They were happy together. Astonishing, Morris marvelled, how clearly he saw them.