Peril at the Pellicano Hotel

by Adriana Licio

  “And did you see anybody else that night?”

  Paolo and Strazio kept questioning the man until they were convinced they knew the exact sequence of movements in the hotel the night Margherita had died. When they had finished, they let him go.

  “I’m sorry, Brigadiere,” said Strazio contritely. “I should have done better when we spoke to him the first time round.”

  “Indeed,” Paolo growled. “But never use leading questions during an interview. Remember, it’s the basic rule.”

  Strazio nodded, but his mind was pondering what a reading question was. He’d google it as soon as he had a chance; no good would come from asking the brigadiere right now.

  “I need to speak to them all again. But this time, we will leave them no room for lies.”

  “You don’t want to speak to Giovanna Brando?”

  “No, let’s start with Valentina.”

  Strazio nodded and left the room. “Ms Valentina Valsecchi,” he called into the bar a few moments later. “The brigadiere wants to speak to you.”

  Valentina went pale. In unison, Alberto and Vittoria asked, “Again?”

  “We have new evidence,” Strazio said, feeling like a TV cop. But then he smiled softly; he could never play the tough guy, and these people all looked too good to be guilty. Unless they’d done it all together, like the murderers on the Orient Express.

  Giò didn’t even look up at Guido and shrugged him away when he tried to approach her. She’d sat as far from him as she could on purpose, she was so mad at him. He was forcing her to make a choice, disrupting her life. Why, of all places, did he have to land up in Maratea?

  She was dragged from her thoughts by the sight of Valentina leaving the interview room. The woman went directly to the lifts, while Strazio came to the bar where the rest of the writers were gathered.

  “Ms Vittoria Valsecchi, it’s your turn. The rest of you, please don’t speak to Valentina until we have completed this round of interviews.”

  “Are you going to interview all of us again?” Erminia asked furiously. “As if once wasn’t enough!”

  “Indeed we are.” Strazio, as he’d been instructed by the brigadiere, didn’t offer an explanation, which suited him just fine. Mrs Spilimbergo scared him quite a bit.

  Despite the order, as soon as Strazio and Vittoria had disappeared, Alberto rushed over to Valentina, who was still waiting for the lift.

  “What’s going on? Are you OK?”

  “It’s too late, Alberto, too late. Forget about me,” she replied, repeatedly pressing the button to call the lift. Alberto walked away with a desolate look on his face and returned to the bar, sitting at a table on his own, obviously determined not to speak to anyone. And, in fact, no one seemed to want to speak, apart from Erminia who kept trying to talk to her son.

  “Mum, please be quiet,” said Francesco eventually. “Things have taken a turn for the worse. They must suspect one of us.”

  “Suspect one of us of what?”

  “Of a double murder.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!” and she let out a loud false chuckle, but no one joined in.

  Annika beckoned to Giò to accompany her outside. Giò was relieved; she was getting fed up with having to ignore Guido’s looks and attempts to speak to her. Getting away, even for a few minutes, would do her good.

  “You know what?” said Giò as they left the hotel terrace and moved on to the walkway taking them over the rocks below the restaurant windows towards Anginarra Beach. “I can’t help but wonder why Margherita decided to join your group in the first place. She was so critical of you all, and she already had a powerful network of people. I can’t understand why she wanted to join if she felt you were so far beneath her.”

  “Can’t you see?” Annika said, gazing over the white rocks towards the sea and the deep blue line of the horizon beyond. Giò shook her head. She didn’t have a clue.

  “There’s a lot of talent in our group. You know about Guido, and there’s Simone too, despite him feeling like he’s anything but a successful author. Valentina will do great, and even the mother and son duo has put out a few bestsellers. I think Margherita wanted to get her hands on all that talent.”

  “But it seems to me she did her best to alienate the writers, not encourage them!” Giò protested.

  “Her technique was more wicked than you could imagine. She’d do her best to destroy an author’s confidence so she could get her hands on their work and dominate their career. As soon as I recognised the scheme for what it was, I spoke to other authors and friends in the publishing industry, and a pattern soon emerged. She’d done it before, and that’s when I decided to expel her from my group.”

  “I see,” Giò said as they continued their walk along the beach.

  “Oh Giò, what’s happening? This is all too much for me.”

  “It looks bad. I suspect this second death has cast everyone under suspicion. I really thought Margherita’s death was an unfortunate accident, but it’s too much of a coincidence that Mrs Galli would die of natural causes too, in the same hotel so soon after the first death.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Annika, sitting down on the deserted beach not far from the sea. “Nonetheless, it could have happened. A terrible coincidence, I know, but possible.”

  “The carabinieri have to do their job,” said Giò, sitting beside her. “They are the only ones who can find out the truth.”

  “I’m so worried.”

  Something in Annika’s tone made Giò prick up her ears.

  “Why? I mean, I know as the retreat organiser, you feel the weight of responsibility and blah, blah, blah. But is there something more to it than that?”

  “I’m afraid I told the carabinieri a lie…”

  “About Mrs Galli?”

  “Nope, about the night Margherita died.”

  “And what was it?”

  “After we’d had our chat in the hall, I went to see how Simone was doing. I knew he was shocked at having to face Margherita again. During our first retreat, the woman had been dreadful to him, and as you know, he is full of self-doubt. Margherita enjoyed playing cat and mouse with him. She was awfully mean to him, criticising all his published work.”

  “But as you said, he’s a successful author…”

  “To some people, that doesn’t mean anything. I mean, they’re happy to have their readers, but they often wonder whether they really deserve their fame or not.”

  “Impostor syndrome?”

  “Very much so.”

  “And you suspect he might have hurt Margherita?”

  “Oh no, not at all.” But again, Annika’s voice lacked its usual determination. “When I visited him in his room, he was devastated. He had worked so hard to build a little confidence in the months that followed the first retreat, but hadn’t written a single word since. All the same, he had arrived in Maratea full of hope that he’d get back to work… and then Margherita showed up and started ridiculing him again.”

  “I still can’t understand why you’re so worried.” Giò looked intently at her friend. “I think everyone had their own reasons to be mad with Margherita. Simone is no exception.”

  “There’s more to it, Giò. I tried to calm him down, we talked late into the night, and then I left. But half an hour later, I messaged him and got no reply. I thought it was weird – he’d been so upset, there was no way that he’d already have been fast asleep, so I returned to his room. When I got no answer, I went downstairs looking for him. I used the stairs as I didn’t want to be seen by the concierge, but I hadn’t even got to the ground floor before I bumped into him.”

  “The concierge?”

  “No, Simone. He was shaking violently, was flustered and confused. He told me to leave him alone, so I…”

  “So you what?”

  “I went straight into the restaurant to confront that dreadful woman. I couldn’t see Margherita at first, but when I walked across the room, I finally saw her. And Giò, she was dead.�
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  23

  Life Proceeds Through Progressive Complications

  “I thought you didn’t want to see me,” said Giò, peering into the interview room.

  “I was saving the best for last,” Paolo said dryly.

  “You look annoyed…”

  “I am.”

  Giò looked at him, puzzled. Unlike the maresciallo, the brigadiere usually had an even temper.

  “Isn’t Strazio here?” she asked to break the silence.

  “This isn’t an official interview, although we might have to have one later for paperwork’s sake.”

  “I take it I’m not a suspect.”

  “Amazingly, you aren’t,” he finally smiled, “but the situation is rather complicated.”

  “You’ve decided you can trust me, even though I got things so very wrong last night?”

  His face became even more serious, if that was possible. “I’ve always trusted you, Giò. But let’s get out of here; this room is stuffy, and I need some fresh air.”

  “How about the garden near the swimming pool?” Giò asked. “They’ve put the chairs out, the sun is shining and we can find an isolated table to sit at.”

  Paolo nodded, and out they went. Despite the storm of the weekend, the garden was looking neat and tidy. It was too early in the year for the colourful explosion of flowers that characterised the place, but lilies at the foot of olive and palm trees were brazenly showing off their flowers, creating lively spots of white, yellow or red. The backdrop was the rocky mountains of Acquafredda and, beyond the vegetation and the beach, the Mediterranean, still streaked in a multitude of different blues and greens due to the water currents following the storm.

  Giò and Paolo paused beside one of the large terracotta vases and stood there to let the sun warm their faces and bodies.

  “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  “The colours after a storm are more intense than ever, the view so clear,” said Giò, waving a hand towards Mount Bulgheria enclosing the Policastro Gulf in the North. “It almost seems you can touch it. And look – I can see the houses of Scario from here.”

  “Please, take a seat.” Paolo indicated a chair at a little table on the far side of the pool. From there, they could check any movements in the garden or on the beach. As she sat down, his hazel eyes searched hers, then he got started.

  “We’ve been looking back over Margherita Durante’s death.”

  Giò sighed. She realised this meant the carabinieri thought the two deaths were connected.

  “So what did you find out?” she asked.

  “We have a reconstruction of the night she passed away, based on what we’ve found out so far, but we need to take each person’s statement with a grain of salt. Every one of your companions has been deliberately holding information back, if not lying the whole time.”

  Giò gulped, thinking of Annika and… well, Guido too. Was his situation desperate?

  Paolo took out his notebook and opened it on a list of bullet points.

  “Let’s start from the first dinner you had at the Pellicano Hotel. You’d all left the restaurant by ten past ten, except for Gagliardi who stayed in there with Mrs Durante. In his first statement, he declared they’d just chatted generally, but in his second statement today, he admitted they talked about meeting Mr Pecoriello the next day, discussing the proposal they were going to put to him.”

  Giò shot him a look straight in the eyes.

  “They discussed their business, and then at 10.30, Gagliardi left. At that time, according to him, Margherita was completely fine.”

  “What does Dr Siringa say about her death?”

  “It might have been anaphylactic shock, but it could also have been cardiac arrest. The problem with the first hypothesis is that we don’t know what triggered the reaction. No traces of contaminated food were found in her body, nor did anything used in the kitchen to prepare her food contain allergens, as we had believed before forensics gave us the results of their analysis.”

  “You mean,” asked Giò, “it’s more likely it was a sudden cardiac arrest, which would explain why she didn’t try to reach for her EpiPen?”

  “It’s a possibility,” but from his tone, it was easy to tell he didn’t believe it.

  “On the other hand, if it was an allergic reaction,” she continued doggedly, “how long after contact with the substance would she show signs of suffering?”

  “There’s no hard and fast rule. It can be almost instantaneous, or it can be delayed, but it’s rarely longer than an hour. Although there are exceptions.”

  “And what was the time of her death, according to Dr Siringa?”

  “Between 10.30pm and midnight. But we digress. After Gagliardi had left the restaurant, he lingered for a while in the hall as he had asked the concierge to prepare him a thermos of coffee. He saw Valentina coming down the stairs and going into the restaurant. A few minutes later, it was the concierge who saw Valentina going back upstairs in the lift, a worried, angry look on her face.”

  “So Guido wasn’t the last one to see Margherita alive. Why didn’t he tell us this before?” Giò cried in surprise.

  “He said he didn’t want the finger of suspicion to point at Valentina until she was ready to tell us herself. I think he’s the type who doesn’t trust the carabinieri and won’t tell us more than he has to. People like that make our jobs more difficult than they need to be.”

  “He’s lived in countries where democracy doesn’t exist,” Giò wondered why she was trying to defend Guido, “or it’s in its infancy. I guess he might have developed a certain mistrust for authorities there.”

  “Well he should know he’s safe in Europe and learn to act accordingly.”

  “Don’t preach! I hate it when you do that.” Giò jumped down Paolo’s throat, despite her best intentions to be calm and collected. He waved his hand as if to dismiss her and pointed his pen at the second item on his bullet list.

  “Valentina went to speak to Margherita. According to her, she found her alive and left her alive.”

  Guido’s safe! He’s got an alibi, Giò thought with relief.

  “That is if we can trust what anybody says about that night,” Paolo added wistfully.

  “Did she say why she went to see Margherita? What did they have to discuss?”

  “Yes, she told us an interesting story. Apparently Margherita, amongst other things, was working on a memoir in which she’d mentioned Valentina and Vittoria’s father, making it public that he’d become a renowned author using our very own Mrs Margherita Durante as a ghost writer.”

  “Really?”

  “Valentina says that on the contrary, Margherita had stolen one of her father’s manuscripts, pretending she’d shown it to some publishers and saying they’d all criticised it harshly and refused it. Her father dropped the whole project, but years after his death, Valentina and Vittoria came upon the book by chance, published under another author’s name. They never found a copy of the manuscript in their father’s archives to claim it as his work, but eventually discovered the name of the author was one of Margherita’s pen names…”

  “But that’s awful! What a wicked woman she was.”

  “Are you trusting enough to believe everything Valentina says? There’s no proof to back it up.”

  “Yes, I’m inclined to believe her. From all the bad things I’ve heard about Margherita, I think this accusation matches her profile.”

  “That’s interesting, because if you trust Valentina’s story, then you must also see it gives her a rather solid motive to kill.”

  Giò gulped.

  “But that’s not all. Valentina told us she threatened to kill the woman if she mentioned her father in her new book, but Margherita just laughed at her. She showed Valentina the manuscript she was working on and said she intended to tell the whole truth. But as I said, according to Valentina, Margherita was still alive when she left.”

  “And we don’t know if we should trust her or not,” sa
id Giò, wondering if Valentina’s story would mitigate Annika’s suspicions about Simone.

  “Wait – there’s so much more. It was clearly destined to be an interesting night. After Valentina left, seen by the concierge, she bumped into Francesco about to go down.”

  “Francesco?”

  “Yes, apparently Margherita enjoyed ridiculing him, saying the real author in the famous mother-son duo was Mummy and he was nothing more than a fraud.”

  “I witnessed Margherita laughing at him,” Giò confirmed.

  “He was in a real fury, determined to speak his mind to the woman. They had a heated discussion, but were interrupted by Erminia, who swears blind… guess what?”

  “That Margherita was alive when they left.”

  “Exactly. But the concierge claims that Erminia never went into the restaurant. Instead, she only met up with Francesco when he was shutting the restaurant door behind him.”

  “So Erminia doesn’t know if Margherita was alive or not?”

  “Correct.”

  “But in any case, that means Valentina is innocent.”

  “Unless Francesco is covering for her.”

  “Why should he?”

  “Maybe he’s fallen for Valentina…”

  “I don’t think so,” said Giò, shaking her head.

  “His mother seems to believe the two have feelings for each other, and she would definitely approve of a relationship between them.”

  “Erminia might approve, but I don’t think she understands how things are. But that would explain why she’d cover up for both Francesco and Valentina. So is it Francesco who’s top of your list of suspects?”

  “No, it’s just one hypothesis of many,” said Paolo, cocking his head sarcastically. “Difficult to establish what’s true when you’re dealing with such a bunch of liars!”

  “Come on! It’s just a bit of solidarity within the group. May I remind you that the first time you questioned us, we all thought Margherita’s death was an accident – death by anaphylactic shock, as might still be the case.”