“Roberto!” Marguerite shouted, moving towards the man, who seemed now to sense that he was no longer alone in the room. A flick of the hand and the mechanical noise died away; a murmuring radio in the background filled the void. Roberto twisted his torso around. Tom glimpsed a gladiator reimagined in a filter mask and powder armour, and his hands went unthinkingly to shield Miranda’s eyes, feeling as he completed the act silly and prudish.
“Roberto,” Marguerite began again, in an exasperated tone, “put something on, would you? You have guests.”
Obediently, Roberto placed the sander on a nearby bench and peeled back the filter mask and goggles, handing them to Marguerite. The head covering he tugged off, revealed as a pair of old white rugby shorts, which he stepped into, snapping the band against his slim waist. Roberto regarded them with faint hostility, as if he had been pulled from a sound sleep. He offered no apology for his dishabille, but Tom realised, as Miranda pushed away his hands, that it was they who had intruded upon his realm. He sensed a new tension in the atmosphere.
“I thought I would show Tom and his daughter the stable conversion.” Marguerite dropped the mask on a nearby table and fetched what looked like a strip of linen. “You met last evening.”
“Yes. I remember.” Roberto flicked him a disinterested glance and took the cloth from Marguerite, wiping the perspiration first from his forehead and around his eyes, then in long, firm strokes across his torso, pushing the layer of fine white powder to the dusty brick. Tom noted the powerful sinews of his forearms rippling beneath the skin and tautness of the pectorals—the benefit of labouring over a lump of stone with a cold chisel—but he noted, too, bruising and cuts, fresh-looking ones, in the same areas—the result, he presumed, of labouring over stone with no protective clothing, though the sanding looked harmless to bare skin.
“What are you working on?” Jane asked with forced cheer, stepping into the penumbra of light.
“The commission for Delix Fennis I mentioned last evening.” Roberto’s eyes ranged over his work, his mouth turned down with a hint of critical dissatisfaction.
Joining them, Tom’s eyes were at first dazzled by the ethereal, luminous quality of the marble, as if the moon shone from within its compressed form. Two figures emerged from the stone, limbs entwined, as if struggling for release, he thought for a second, before realising the figures were male and female locked together in an embrace, their naked forms writhing and twisting. His eyes darted to the faces, to their frozen features modelling passion—or perhaps pain—as if it were suddenly imperative to find in the finely wrought details the living models. Absurdly—he was conscious he was driven by pure guilt—he looked for his own face and for Lucinda’s, as if Roberto had been witness to their tryst and had rushed to replicate it in marble. He could feel himself blush with relief that it was not. The faces of the man and woman, unlike the face of Mary in the Labyrinth, were idealised, as beautiful as the statues of the gods of antiquity. A little troubled at the mature theme of the sculpture, he glanced at the children. Max’s face wore the studied frown of an art connoisseur at a gallery. Disturbingly, Miranda’s attention fell to the artist, not the art. She seemed to be studying him in a way that pierced a father’s heart. He followed her gaze. The sculptor himself would offer a worthy subject: the high forehead, the deeply set eyes, the sensitive mouth, a Cupid’s bow, but Tom didn’t give a damn. He shuffled forward to block Miranda’s view, saying the first banal thing that came to his head:
“Remarkable.”
“Yes,” Jane and Marguerite murmured as one as if mesmerised by the artwork’s erotic power, but not daring voice it.
“Dionysus I’m guessing from the vines and grape clusters.” Jane gestured to the renderings ornamenting the male figure. “But who is the female?”
“Ariadne.” Roberto dropped the cloth on the bench.
Jane frowned.
“One of Dionysus’s consorts,” Marguerite responded.
“I would hope so!” Jane laughed. “But she’s not familiar to me. I associate Dionysus with Aphrodite.”
“Ariadne helped Theseus slay her monstrous half brother—” Roberto began.
“The Minotaur,” Tom interrupted, uncomfortably reminded of the slaying of a half brother at Eggescombe this very morning. “Theseus and Ariadne were to wed after, but Theseus abandoned her, I think.”
“Yes.” Roberto regarded him with some annoyance. “But Dionysus came to the rescue.”
“And they all lived happily ever after,” Marguerite summed up with a throaty laugh. She caught Tom’s eye, then returned to scrutinising the artwork. “You’ve made great progress.”
“I’ve been at it all night.”
“Not all night, surely.” Her gaze seemed to command his assent.
He blinked. “No. Not all night.”
Tom frowned as he watched Roberto turn to switch off the floodlights. The words of their exchange were commonplace, but the tone was oddly freighted. He glanced over to a far wall, to a cot in half shadow, rumpled with bed linen. It looked slept in, but—on the other hand—nothing about Roberto suggested the boarding-school diligence of making up a bed every morning. The cot might have been rumpled for days or weeks. Where did Roberto sleep? Were he and Lady Fairhaven really cohabiting?
And did it matter?
The rest of the studio fallen now to a kind of chiaroscuro seemed a maze of things: Drawings, diagrams, and photographs partially covered the exposed-brick walls; much the same covered worktables, themselves arrayed in no particular order. Several large pieces in various stages of creation sat on wheelie tables here and there along with rolls of plastic sheeting, ladders, various manual and electrical tools, and industrial lighting snaking with cords. Small completed works lined one shelf while casts and studies in clay sat beside strips of linen piled on a table by a basin of water near a slop sink. It was towards these that Max and Miranda moved, intrigued perhaps by their potential for play. The cat followed.
“Mind the water on the floor by the sink!” Roberto called. “That drain’s still not working properly.” He glanced at Marguerite. “And don’t touch the sculptures!” he snapped as Max turned a linen strip into a neck scarf.
“Maxie, darling,” Marguerite said, “why don’t you show Miranda the horses.”
“Yes, let’s!” Miranda enthused, leading the way towards the bar of buttery sunshine at the door. “Come, puss.” She turned with a coaxing gesture. “What’s its name?”
Roberto shrugged. The cat didn’t obey.
“Let’s call him Fred Astaire,” Max said, following Miranda. “Come, Mr. Astaire.”
When the children had gone, Roberto cast them a dark look. “I’ve heard some news.” He gestured to the radio, an old brown Bakelite model, resting on a shelf near the sink. “But of course you would know already.”
“You left Radio Devon on in the kitchen.” Marguerite seemed to watch him carefully. “Jane and Tom told me earlier.”
“Hector might have said on the phone.”
“Would it have mattered?” Marguerite asked.
“No.” Roberto’s nostrils flared. “Although knowing a few hours earlier that someone had topped that shit might have gladdened my heart more.”
“Perhaps not a wise thing to say, Roberto, darling. Not at this time.”
“I’m not going to make some polite display, Marguerite—”
“That’s not what I meant.” She murmured as the cat leapt onto the table nearest them, deftly missing knocking over a small clay sculpture. “How did you know Oliver had been … as you say, ‘topped’?”
“The newsreader said his death is being treated as suspicious. What else could it be?”
“Of course.” A little cloud seemed to lift from Marguerite’s face. “Yes, that’s right, she did.”
“Obviously,” Roberto carried on heedless, his voice bitter, “I’m not the only person in the world who wanted to see him got rid of.”
“Then why”—Tom found the words flyin
g from his mouth before he had time to think—“did you?”
“Because, mate,” Roberto threw the crusty gloves against the table with force, sending the cat flying to the tiles. “He killed my sister. He did, Marguerite,” he added darkly, as if expecting her to contradict him.
“Roberto, there’s no—”
“Of course there isn’t. Why would there be? Some crap island police force, corruptible, corrupted—or just plain bloody stupid—kowtowing to an English lord?”
Tom looked to Jane, to a new alertness in her eyes.
“Alessandra Sica was your sister?” she said in a wondering voice. “Sica, of course. I knew it sounded familiar. I should have made the—”
“Yes. Was. Was my sister,” Roberto interrupted. He intoned, as if he had stated the facts a hundred times: “My sister drowned off a boat on Baissé—it’s one of the Grenadines—six years ago. She was twenty-two. There were bruises on her neck and a cocktail of drugs in her blood—at least we got that information out of the filth that accounts for the police on Baissé—and my father got the boat captain to admit Alessa and his bloody lordship had quarreled—but nothing! Nothing! An accident! Bah!”
Tom felt the full force of the man’s anger wash over him like a powerful tide. He looked to the two silent and shocked women and struggled for a response. “I know injustice is difficult to bear—” he began.
“Yeah? And how would you know that, posh vicar?”
“Because”—he took a sharp breath, labouring for an even tone—“I see it daily and I bear my own.”
Something in Tom’s fixed look quelled the man, for Roberto flinched and shifted his attention to the cat winding around his legs. Like a storm waning, his body slackened. He reached down for the cat—an albino, surely, the thought passed through Tom’s mind as he noted the cold pink glittering eyes—and tucked it into the crook of his arm. But he wasn’t done. It was as if he had to trump Tom.
“And … and she was carrying a child—that man’s child. Morborne’s.”
The tone was one of disgust choked back; the look on Roberto’s face barely disguised hatred. Such an oppressive, distorting emotion, Tom knew, giving a passing thought to his own feelings in the wake of his wife’s death, though he then had—and still had—no individual, man or woman, to attach them to. He glanced away, to take in the kinder vision of the plump purring cat content as a baby in a mother’s arms, but as he did a terrible thought suddenly possessed him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I never made the connection before.”
“What connection is that, my love?” Jamie Allan glanced up absently. He had been browsing the newspapers and magazines on the library table.
“You remember that awful incident six years ago or so when Oliver was winding up his father’s affairs on Baissé? There was a woman Oliver took with him who drowned.”
“I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen a chink in Olly’s armour.”
Jane looked at Tom, then at her husband. “Really? I thought it was the only time I’ve ever seen Oliver in love.”
“What? You never said at the time.”
“Didn’t I? I’m sure I did. You just don’t remember.”
“Oliver fforde-Beckett in love—what a mad idea.”
“He must be in love with Serena, Jamie. Or must have been,” Jane amended.
“Oh, do you think? Another of Olly’s dollies, I would have said.”
“Yes, Jamie, but he was prepared to marry this one.”
“True. Well, Serena’s suitable. Frank Knowlton had investments in television and film, I think. A good alliance from Olly’s point of view. Fair bit of money there, too.” He lifted a copy of The Sunday Telegraph, pulling out the flyer and assorted rubbish from between the folds. “What’s this to do with that girl? Worked in a sandwich shop or something, didn’t she? Did we meet her?”
“No. Her picture was in the papers, though. Afterwards, of course, with all the press coverage. Very beautiful.” Jane tapped her fingers along the cover of the book she was holding. “Anyway, her father owned a string of sandwich shops in London. She happened to be working in one, in Wigmore Street, near Oliver’s offices, when Oliver popped in—well, for a sandwich, I presume. I think he was between personal assistants at the time. Anyway, she was involved in music somehow herself, but more practically—studying music therapy, I think. Olly lured her away. She was very young and I suppose what Olly does—did—made him attractive. She became his PA. Well, I guess that’s the polite term.”
Jamie gave an unhappy grunt and settled into a chair opposite his wife. “What makes you think Olly was in love with her?”
“Something he said to me later, when it had all blown over. Do you remember? My mother was visiting. We’d taken her to see some play in the West End. I can’t remember the play, but I remember we were having our drinks in the street at intermission and Olly was doing the same at the theatre across the lane. On Shaftsbury. Do you recall?”
“Vaguely.”
“Some protégé of his was in some musical.” Jane frowned in recollection. “Anyway, I think you’d gone to the loo and my mother had wandered off. Olly and I had a few moments alone together and I told him I didn’t think he looked well, though he was very tanned from being on Baissé. He said he was having trouble coming to terms with Alessa’s death. Alessa—that was the PA’s name. He said he’d never again find someone like her.”
“As a PA, he meant, presumably.”
“No, Jamie, as a woman. I’m right! Don’t frown at me like that. It was the look in his eyes—and they misted up!”
“I can hardly imagine it.”
“Probably not something he would reveal to you men.”
“No. I expect not.” Jamie’s eyes fell to the newspaper on his lap. “Still, you mentioned a connection. What connection?”
“She was Roberto’s sister. Roberto Sica? The girl was Alessandra Sica—Alessa.”
Jamie looked up. “Small world.” He glanced from Jane to Tom with suspicion. “What is it, you two? It was an accident on Baissé, wasn’t it? Misadventure, whatever you call it.”
“Mr. Sica doesn’t think so,” Tom said, glancing around the Eggescombe library, hundreds of feet of mellow morocco bindings and richly shining shelves. He had had half a hope the “magical electronic board,” as Marguerite had called it, that had mixed the filming of the Leaping Lords, might be in evidence, but it wasn’t.
“He’s really very angry,” Jane added. “Thinks the police were inept or corrupted or something.”
“Do you mean to say he thinks Olly … killed this girl, this Alessa?”
“In so many words.”
“Deliberately? Malice aforethought? In cold blood. Et cetera.”
“I’m not sure about that.” Jane looked to Tom for confirmation.
“He thinks your cousin had a hand in it—and I’m not being funny,” he said.
“Apparently there was considerable bruising around Alessa’s neck,” Jane continued. “I remembered some of the details from the press reports at the time. Unexplained bruising. And there was no one else on the boat but the captain.”
“But that’s outrageous. Olly’s many things—and not all of them good, I’m sure—but he’s not the sort to, you know … how do you know all this?”
“From the horse’s mouth,” Jane replied. “We paid a call on Roberto at his studio in the stables this morning. Marve filled us in on a few more details when we walked back for lunch.”
Jamie scowled. “Are you suggesting that Roberto has somehow contrived to be at Eggescombe intending to—”
“No,” Jane interrupted. “Well, I don’t think so. According to Marve, he had no idea that Georgie was Olly’s sister. And really, if he were set on a plan of revenge all these years …” She looked to Tom.
“It would make more sense to do so in London, where your cousin lived and worked,” Tom supplied.
“Olly never spends any time here, Jamie,” Jane pointed out. “Georg
ie is rarely here, so there’s no reason for Olly to come down. When Hector comes on business, he arrives alone and usually stays with Marve, at hers. No Olly, no opportunity, you see.”
“There has been these last few days, since Olly arrived,” Jamie countered.
“Well, I’ll grant you that.”
“Seems a bit of a fluke, each being at Eggescombe at the same time.”
“Flukes happen, Jamie. But I don’t think Oliver had run into Roberto, until last evening when he and Marve arrived together. We hadn’t seen hide nor hare of Roberto, either. He’s in his studio all the time.”
“Where did he come from? Mr. Sica, I mean.”
“Marve told me she met him at some arts do at Falmouth. She’s a trustee of University College. She’s had this scheme to turn the stable block into artists’ studios, found his artwork to her liking, and invited him to be the first artist in residence.”
Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) Page 14