Peril at the Pellicano Hotel

by Adriana Licio

  And she went into all the details.

  “But we’ll need the doctor,” Paolo replied.

  “You can always speak to Dr Siringa. Won’t he sort things out?”

  A few minutes later, Paolo sent her a text.

  “Siringa suffers from seasickness, so he asked Gimondi to come along.”

  “Fine,” was her laconic answer.

  29

  On The Sailing Boat

  The two-masted gulet with its rubber dinghy picked them up from the hotel beach. To start with, as they boarded, they were still slightly embarrassed, as they’d been for the past two days, as if they didn’t know whether they should still laugh and make jokes after what had happened, now the carabinieri had found out that most of them hadn’t told the whole truth.

  As planned, Dr Gimondi joined them. On the surface of things, he had happened to visit the hotel that morning, and Giò had invited him to come along. As it was his day off, he had been glad to accept the invitation. Did the rest of the party find his presence rather melancholy? True, he was not the pathologist, but he had still been there when the victims had been found, a constant reminder of what had occurred.

  For his part, Enzo, the skipper, was determined that his guests would have a good time on his boat. He started by entertaining them with a few anecdotes and legends as they left Anginarra Beach and headed north towards Punta Infreschi. The day was gorgeous and the rocky coast, seen in all its glory from the water, sent a frisson of excitement through the party. The tension slowly gave way to enjoyment and they started laughing at Enzo’s jokes.

  They explored grottos and little bays, and finally anchored for lunch in Baia degli Infreschi, a large rocky bay surrounded by Mediterranean bush, famous for its exotic, clear waters and white stretches of beach. It could only be reached by long hikes or boat. This time of year, unsurprisingly, the gulet passengers were the only people on the bay.

  The boat docked at the jetty. When Alberto turned round in search of Valentina, she’d already gone up the hiking trail with Dr Gimondi to get a view from the top over the entire bay. Erminia and Vittoria were stretching out on the beach, ready for sunbathing, while Annika and Simone followed Giò to a little promontory she knew. Sighing, Alberto accompanied Francesco to explore the grottos, while Guido was busy flying his drone and shooting film.

  Giò had barely spoken to him since their difficult conversation the previous day. It was stupid, pretending to ignore each other, but on the other hand, it was difficult to carry on as if nothing had happened. Guido hadn’t even tried to catch her eye, but she couldn’t help glancing at him, wondering what images he was capturing, what he had in mind, what stunning videos he would have created by the end of the day.

  The horn blew, announcing to the explorers that it was time for lunch and they could get back on board.

  “Enzo, the smell is simply divine!” cried Annika.

  “Spaghetti with pachino tomatoes, capers, anchovies and garlic.”

  The writers tucked in, the only sounds for a while their murmurs of approval.

  “My goodness, is there any more?” Simone asked at last, showing Enzo his empty dish.

  “Of course,” Enzo replied, smiling. “I made plenty, knowing too well that life at sea makes you hungry.”

  “But don’t give it all to him,” Francesco said. “There are more hungry folks here.”

  “There’s enough for all of you,” Enzo replied, scooping second helpings into the dishes that were being held out to him, begging for more.

  When lunch was over, Enzo suggested they enjoy their coffee on the sea.

  “Any chance to do some sailing?” asked Guido.

  “There’s almost no wind, but it may be better a little further from the coast. We’ll try putting the sails up on our way back.”

  As the gulet left the beach, Alberto offered to prepare coffee, and Dr Gimondi helped him serve it. The Moka pot gurgled and the aroma of coffee mixed with the smell of the salty water.

  “The first cup to your group leader,” said Dr Gimondi, serving Annika. “And then to Mrs Spilimbergo.” They had all invited him to refer to them by their first names, but it seemed he felt more at ease with formality.

  “Don’t forget our skipper!” Giò cried.

  “Of course not,” Alberto replied from the kitchen. “A double for him, he needs to take us back.”

  “Ms Valsecchi, this is for you,” Dr Gimondi said, handing Valentina one of two cups. As her hand stretched towards the wrong one, he promptly corrected her. “No, the large one is for the captain.”

  Valentina grinned, took the smaller one and stirred some sugar in with a loud tinkling of her spoon. She was about to lift the cup to her lips, when…

  “Don’t drink that coffee!” cried Giò.

  Dr Gimondi snatched the cup from Valentina and, quick as lightning, threw it and all its contents into the sea.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Guido, puzzled.

  “I thought it was dangerous.” The doctor turned towards Giò. “You said it was.”

  “I only told her not to drink it.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought there must be something wrong with it,” he said, looking mortified.

  “We could have analysed it,” Giò continued, “and found out for sure.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think…”

  “Don’t you worry,” Giò consoled him, walking towards the boat’s galley. “We substituted the cup you were going to serve to Valentina with another.”

  And from the tall cupboard, Brigadiere Paolo Rossi stepped out, holding a coffee cup and wiping some of the sweat from his forehead. The first part of his trip, hidden in one of the cabins, had been fine, but when he had moved to the cupboard… well, it wasn’t the most comfortable of places.

  “Yes,” Paolo said. “This is the original cup, but to make sure there was no margin for error, we also taped everything on a nice video.” He pointed to a camera above his head.

  “That’s a very sharp HD camera.” Guido smiled. “No blurring, all details crystal clear. We’ll be able to read the name of whatever he’s used, even if he has now dumped the packet in the sea.”

  “Who, me? I prepared the cups,” Alberto said, confused.

  “No, not you. Him. When Dr Gimondi put Valentina’s cup on the tray,” Paolo explained, “he added something to it. You’d turned your back to rinse the Moka pot out to make more coffee, so he felt safe. Was Valentina going to be your third victim, Doctor?”

  Dr Gimondi’s face became red with fury.

  “She killed my mother! She destroyed our lives! We’d have been so happy together.”

  The others looked blank. Giò enlightened them.

  “You’re speaking of Margherita Durante, aren’t you?”

  “That spiteful woman!”

  “Did you already know her?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But that Friday night at the Pellicano Restaurant, when you heard Margherita Durante saying she had lived in Villa degli Incanti, you put two and two together. Just by chance, you had met the woman who’d stolen your father from your mother. The woman responsible for Angela’s suicide.”

  “Exactly! I hadn’t gone looking for her, but there she was. I took it as a sign. The wretched woman said her days in Maratea were the best of her life, while my mother was so heartbroken, she killed herself. I was left all alone, and she never bothered to find out what had happened to us. How dare she refer to those as fine days?”

  He sat down, his face twisted by rage.

  “Unluckily, that night, Margherita mentioned she had a severe allergy to fish,” Giò continued at a nod from Paolo. “Severe enough to oblige her to carry her EpiPens with her, always. And just a few steps away from you, there was an aquarium containing a lobster – one of the most common and powerful allergens in the fish world.”

  “Exactly!” said Dr Gimondi again. “I saw my opportunity to bring my mother’s killer to justice at once. When the woman said she want
ed to stay in the restaurant to do some work, I made sure the outside door stayed unlocked when I left with Dr Siringa. But I only pretended to leave, returning soon after saying goodbye to my colleague.”

  “It was a busy night,” added Giò. “After Guido Gagliardi had left, a steady stream of people came and went.”

  “But I was already hiding in the kitchen at that point. I would have waited for hours if necessary, but it didn’t take that long. After he left,” he pointed to Francesco, “I walked in, got the lobster out of the aquarium and hit Mrs Durante on the face with it. She was shocked, then she panicked as I held her bag away from her and told her who I was. She said she’d never known I existed, that she’d make up for it, if only I’d give her the EpiPen. But the attack was even faster than I’d thought it would be. I laughed in her face as her throat swelled and she started suffocating, but it was her heart that couldn’t bear it any longer.”

  The man was standing up on the deck, laughing. He was quite clearly insane.

  “And once she was dead, you wiped her face with a napkin from the table, broke a glass of red wine and made sure it was underneath her head. If during the post-mortem the pathologist saw any ecchymosis, he would have attributed it to the broken glass and wouldn’t have investigated further, especially as he’d be concentrating on the contaminated food in her stomach. It was important that either the kitchen staff got the blame or it was passed off as an unexplained death. Nobody would have linked the murder to you, a chance guest in the company of the local pathologist.”

  “But he didn’t stop there, did he?” Annika asked. “Was it he who killed Mrs Galli? And he was ready to strike again, poisoning Valentina?”

  “The stupid woman tried to blackmail me.” Dr Gimondi was standing on the bow of the boat, his arms and legs bent as if ready to spring. Paolo signalled to Giò to keep talking.

  “Yes, I was there when you met Augusta Galli for the first time,” Giò said. “She mentioned the aquarium, how soothing it was for her. But it was not a throwaway remark, as it seemed to be. No, it was a coded message for you. Possibly she had noticed something amiss with the lobster, perhaps its claw was broken, or maybe she had seen a mystery man leaving across the terrace from her window as Erminia did – the man in the black jacket – and recognised him as you.”

  Dr Gimondi nodded, as if explaining everything would convince them he’d had to act the way he did. “She phoned me a few days later and told me to meet her at 11pm, when the group of authors would all be asleep. She’d leave the back door of the hotel open, as I’d told her I wouldn’t bring my mobile with me.”

  “That was a stroke of genius,” Giò said admiringly. “If we were to check your movements via the GPS on your mobile, you’d appear to have been in Capitello until the next morning.”

  “Yes, I had to build my alibi quickly. I received a call from Mrs Galli at 6pm, which was true, and only lied about the content of the call, saying Mrs Galli had asked me to visit her the next morning. At 11pm, she let me into her room, I gave her the money she’d demanded, and while she was counting it, I knocked her out cold with chloroform. It didn’t take much time nor effort, she was old and weak. In five minutes, she was sedated and I could inject a good dose of insulin into her. I had thought of an embolism, but once I saw her diabetes medication, I realised I could again pass the sudden death off as an accident. The whisky she’d been drinking would help too.”

  “So you stayed there…”

  “For an hour or so. I left two empty vials next to her bed, but I gave her more to make sure it was enough to kill her.”

  Giò and Guido’s eyes locked. Dr Gimondi had left around midnight, just when Guido had said he had spotted a waiter in the corridor. But they knew better than to interrupt the man.

  “I knew it would be difficult to track the exact amount of insulin in the following analyses, so I took the rest of the empty vials with me. She was sweating; she was in hypoglycaemia for long enough for me to know that if, by any chance, she survived, the brain damage would be irreparable. She’d never recover enough to be a danger to me, so I left knowing the night would do the rest. At 7.30, I was back at the hotel, this time officially, and there she was, dead.”

  “But why would you want to kill Valentina?” Alberto cried furiously.

  “That was not his… er… fault,” Giò explained. “Dr Siringa phoned Dr Gimondi yesterday and told him he’d been requested to join the writers’ group this morning on the sailing boat. The carabinieri were setting a trap for Valentina Valsecchi and required medical assistance on board should anything go wrong, and Dr Siringa told him how much he loathes anything moving on the water. The idea of being on so much as a canoe makes him sick, so would Dr Gimondi take his place?”

  “And I imagine he was quite happy to do that?” Alberto asked.

  “Even more so when Dr Siringa explained to him the carabinieri suspected Valentina had killed Margherita to protect her father’s character from defamation through her memoir. Finally, Siringa told him the manuscript hadn’t been destroyed, but it was still in Valentina’s hands.”

  “And I confirmed it was in my possession during our walk in the Baia,” Valentina’s jet black eyes were shining, “as Giò had instructed me.”

  At that moment, a desperate Gimondi jumped from the boat into the water. But miraculously, his body slipped by the propeller unharmed.

  “Oh my goodness, I don’t think he can swim,” Giò cried, watching the doctor thrash about in a panic. Before she knew what was happening, she heard a splash from the other side of the boat.

  Paolo had to swim fast to reach the man, who was flailing his arms in a desperate attempt to keep water out of his lungs. When Paolo approached him, Gimondi grabbed hold of him so violently that Paolo had to push him away and get hold of him from behind instead.

  “Just stop it! I’ll keep you afloat,” the brigadiere cried out after a few coughs to empty his own lungs. Dr Gimondi finally calmed down as Paolo kept his head above water while the boat slowly turned back to save them. Minutes later, the two men were inside the boat’s galley, drinking something hot and enveloped in warm blankets – the April sea after the storm was still far too cold for bathing. But Gimondi had now shut himself in absolute silence, refusing to answer any questions that required more than a nod or shake of the head.

  “Why did you rescue him?” Guido asked Paolo that evening in the hotel.

  “I’m a cop.”

  “Well, if he’d died, justice would have followed its natural course.”

  “I’m not an executioner, I need only to bring criminals to justice. Administering justice itself isn’t my field,” replied Paolo.

  “Why was Gimondi so concerned about Margherita’s manuscript? Did he think it might give him away?” Vittoria asked.

  “He dreaded that. By reading it, the carabinieri would likely have been alerted to the fact that the adopted child in question wasn’t Valentina at all. At the same time, he hoped Valentina’s death would look like suicide and the investigations would stop there and then. We would have thought that she had poisoned herself, fearing she’d been found out, and that would buy him time. He would then try to retrieve the manuscript later. If it represented a threat to him, he would destroy it; if it would reinforce the carabinieri’s opinion that Valentina had a motive to kill, he’d leave it where it was. The only important thing now was to kill her.”

  Valentina looked shocked, but Giò caught the lively sparkle in her eyes that had disappeared the moment Margherita had come into her life again.

  “I’m alive,” she whispered.

  “Yes, my love,” Alberto said, hugging her. “You’re alive and you should never fear anything nor anybody again.”

  She looked at him. “Because you’ll be taking care of me?” she asked with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Not at all. It’s because you’ve learned that fearing things, being afraid, is not the way forward. And if you want, we could remind each other of that lesson
in the future.”

  She smiled at him. This was the answer she had been hoping for – not a guide, but someone to share life’s lessons with.

  “And you will not run away from me again?” This time, her voice had a teasing note and she wore the expression of a jubilant kitten ready to play.

  “I only feared I might be too boring a man for you. I tried to forget you, but when I saw you again, I felt… I was ready to take all the risks. And should you get fed up with my seriousness, you can always look around for someone better than me.”

  She smiled again, and before he could put more of his silly ideas into words, she kissed him, despite the others watching on. But as they were such good friends, they pretended to be busy chatting with one another, or reading the menu, trying to make up their minds whether or not they should indulge in dessert.

  30

  Departures

  Annika and Giò were alone on the Pellicano terrace. Alberto had already left, and Francesco was just manoeuvring his way out of the parking space.

  “Put it in reverse and pull back a couple of metres,” they heard Erminia command. “Correct it, don’t turn too much to the right! Watch out for that stupid tree.”

  “Poor Francesco, Erminia will never change,” said Annika, smiling.

  “So isn’t it funny that he has started a relationship with Vittoria?” Giò said. “She doesn’t hold back either – out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

  “Oh no, he needs to be bossed around,” said Annika, sitting down at a table facing the sea and breathing deeply, relaxing for the first time in days. “He could only leave his mother for someone just as strong willed.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall when the two women get together,” Giò blurted out.

  “He’ll not take sides, and who can blame him?”