A Murder in Tuscany

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Yes, caro.’ Cate frowned. ‘Did you get something to eat? Things are a bit – chaotic at the moment. In the kitchen; I don’t know if I’m supposed to be in there, or out here, or what.’

  ‘Nicky brought me something earlier,’ he said. ‘I’m well taken care of. And I’m sure it would count as part of your duties, helping the disabled.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said sharply, then immediately regretted it. She was no good at this; was she these people’s equal or not? Was she Tiziano’s friend, or his servant? The odd thing was, before Loni Meadows’s death and her own abrupt promotion, Cate would have said, friend, one hundred per cent.

  ‘I’ll just get a coat,’ she said. Tiziano had several layers on as well as a woollen hat and gloves, whereas she’d come out in no more than a sweater. It was freezing now, the wind whipping round her legs; a stupid idea to go for a walk in this weather, and with snow on the way, but anyway. Alec Fairhead was coming over.

  Cate waved at the Englishman again as she set off to her room; Tiziano would explain. But what she heard as she hurried across the stones was the Englishman’s soft, hurried inquiry, ‘Mind if I tag along? Could do with some fresh air,’ and Tiziano, in whose voice she thought she detected resignation although it might have been wishful thinking on her part, answering, ‘Sure, yeah. The more the merrier.’

  Damn, she thought, damn.

  Chapter Thirteen

  STATIONED AT THE BIG old computer in the office in the Via del Leone, Giuli was wondering what she was doing there on a Saturday afternoon, when no doubt Sandro wouldn’t be paying her, not that she was doing it for the money, God knew. But then the phone rang and startled Giuli out of her bad temper. And it was a good job too, because it turned out she was answering the phone to her own first client, thanks to Sandro, and sounding like a truculent school kid wouldn’t have been a good move. Fabrizio Bellagamba even asked for her by name.

  The man was in a state because his daughter wanted to go out on a Saturday night. Giuli had to bite her tongue so as not to say, just chill out. That wouldn’t be appreciated.

  ‘You did the right thing, calling us,’ she said. ‘Absolutely. Getting into a fight with her will not improve matters; she needs to feel that you trust her.’ Even though you don’t; even though you can only trust her if you’ve got a private detective tracking her, but clearly it wasn’t Giuli’s place to question that.

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ Giuli said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  The words escaped her before she could think; it wasn’t something Sandro would have said to the man. Now she corrected herself. ‘I’ll stay close to her. I’ll be out there by 5.30?’

  And there was a brief pause before Fabrizio Bellagamba said, ‘Thank you.’

  Texting Sandro practically the minute she’d put the phone down Giuli was full of her triumph, then after the message had been sent, full of nerves.

  Come on, call me back, she thought. Tell me I’ve done great, then tell me what I do next. She got up, paced the room, checked her phone had charge and that her clothes would do, not too noticeable, not too shabby. She’d do fine: her best dark jeans, white shirt, fake cashmere sweater, the warm padded jacket Luisa had given her for Christmas.

  That stopped her short: Luisa, who would be still at work, wearing herself out all day on foreigners, and wouldn’t know until she got home that Sandro had done a bunk.

  Was that what he’d done? No, of course not: he was on a job, it was the truth. But Giuli hoped he’d written a proper note, straightening things out. Fat chance. And then she started pacing the room again; she couldn’t actually be thinking about Luisa now. Come on, she said to her mobile.

  As it turned out, he didn’t call her back for a good hour, and when he did, he didn’t say anything she expected.

  ‘You’re a popular lady, today,’ the morgue assistant had said, pulling out the drawer and addressing the comment to the dead body it contained. He was a fat, inappropriately jovial man, with a habit of muttering to himself; Sandro wondered what Niccolò Orfeo would have made of him. He knew it was Orfeo because as he waited for the man to be done, eyeballed stonily all the while by the girl with the pierced lip, he had gone back to the brochure Gallo had given him and looked him up. Niccolò Orfeo, father of Carlotta’s hero Alberto, whose surname he had never asked.

  Niccolò Orfeo, sixty-nine years old and looking good on it, photographed in the castle’s old library standing at the grand piano, then photographed in patriarchal mode with his wife and son at their villa in Florence, on a wide terrace with expensive garden furniture and a striped canopy and the Duomo floating serene in the background. The house was up behind the Porta Romana somewhere, judging from the view: Poggio Imperiale or Arcetri, both in Zone E. Open house, the janitor at the Liceo Classico Marzocco had said, when he’s off with one of his women.

  The wife looked like a bolter, too thin, with a deep tan of the sort acquired in the southern hemisphere, a distracted smile on her face as she stood between son and husband, and no wonder. To Sandro’s experienced eye Niccolò Orfeo didn’t look much of a man for the marriage vows. Too aristocratic, perhaps. And other evidence, too, was accumulating.

  And then he was coming through the swing doors and Sandro stepped back, hoping to make himself as close to invisible as could be managed in the space. A gust of carbolic mixed incongruously with the man’s aftershave and his face pale, his eyes staring fixedly ahead, Niccolò Orfeo marched straight past and out of the morgue.

  A popular lady: so Orfeo had come to look at her too. Sandro knew very well that not just anyone could walk in off the street and be shown the recently deceased, on state premises, but Orfeo was a name in these parts. The question was, what was he doing here?

  As to that, Sandro was beginning to formulate his own reasons. Either he’d been fond of her, or he wanted to make sure she was dead. Or both.

  As the morgue orderly, a good ten centimetres shorter than Sandro and a broad, questioning smile on his round, shiny face, stood holding the handle of the long steel drawer that contained Loni Meadows, Sandro found himself wanting to tell the man, no, he’d changed his mind. He’d asked to see the dead body to be sure that Orfeo had been here for the same reason he was, and now he knew that, it was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead he inclined his head, took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes.’

  Niccolò Orfeo would be climbing into that big silver Audi now, slipping on to the ringroad of the dirty little town, his polished, powerful car a superior beast amid the shabby provincial traffic. But Sandro couldn’t use that as an excuse to run out of the morgue and after him, because he had a pretty fair idea where he’d be going. And Luca Gallo had given Sandro a good set of directions to the Castello Orfeo from Pozzo.

  The drawer slid out with ease; Loni Meadows had not been a big woman, and under the crisp white sheet she hardly took up any space at all now. The orderly folded the sheet down to reveal her face and neck, and Sandro nodded briskly, holding up a hand to stop him there. The eyes were closed, of course. The light blue, sky blue eyes, and without them she was almost ordinary. Almost; there was nothing ordinary about the dead. Her skin, had she been alive, would have been remarkable for a woman of her age, hardly a wrinkle or a blemish, although it was dull as mud now, and one cheekbone had been smashed. The consequent bruising and swelling had made her face lopsided, brutalized.

  Her lips were bluish grey; Sandro couldn’t see more than a wisp or two of the hair, because like the injury that killed her, it was hidden under the white linen folded into a sort of cap to protect the viewer from the pathologist’s incisions. He could ask the man to expose the injury, to fold back the cap, but he didn’t. Even from what Sandro could see, from the extent of the collapse in the skull at the eggshell-thin temple, a dent the extent of perhaps a large grapefruit, she could not have survived this one injury. It was an injury common in car crashes, where the head met the door pillar, and commonly fatal, and there would have been others. Sandro leaned down closer
; there were photographs in his briefcase, he knew he did not have to do this, but now he was in so far – he stopped short, his downturned face over hers, like a lover’s; he did not want to breathe. He wanted to close his eyes, but he kept them open.

  From this close he could see a diagonal mark on her neck, a small, reddish abrasion like a rope burn, which might possibly have been the mark of a seatbelt as it tried to brake her body against the force of the crash. Grasso, though, had said she had not been wearing one, and for a moment Sandro pondered the inconsistency. It might, or might not, prove significant; at this stage, he simply couldn’t know.

  Sandro breathed in, against his will, and smelled it, the smell of the morgue, of the body that has been through all the invasive processes that follow death, filled with the alien fluids and coagulants of the laboratory. What would Loni Meadows have smelled of, in life? Of soap, face cream, one of those heavy, expensive scents, the musk of her own skin. He jerked his head back.

  As he stared into the orderly’s pasty, knowing face, Sandro wished silently for Luisa, for the soft white neck in which he could press his face and inhale until she was all he could smell.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’ll do.’

  The swing doors, the front desk, the pale, pierced face and black hair of the receptionist, all passed in a blur as he retraced his steps through the ugly little building and its equally ugly surroundings until he was back at his car, opening the unlocked door and inside. Taking deep breaths.

  Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. You’ve seen dead bodies before. Not for a long time, though. Five years, even. With his last two big cases, one as a policeman, one as a private investigator, he’d expected a dead body but had managed to get there first. A matter of dogged persistence and luck, he’d told himself. But you couldn’t rely on luck. With Loni Meadows, though, he’d been too late, although it couldn’t be said to be Sandro’s fault.

  Or could it? Of course not. But what if he’d summoned up enough curiosity to ask why the Orfeo Trust wanted to check the references of such a woman? And what if he had managed to extract from Luca Gallo, then no more than a personable, likeable voice on the end of a phone asking him to carry out a perfectly routine control, the information that a nasty anonymous email had been sent about her? Would that email have told him that its sender was dangerous and might, in time, have tracked Loni Meadows down and brought about her death?

  He – if it was a he – certainly would have known where to find her.

  One, two: he breathed in the friendly, musty smell of his car’s interior: fake leather, old carpet, stale something or other he’d snatched for breakfast a week ago and was still in the glove compartment.

  Around Sandro, things normalized; beyond his car window the world carried on, traffic moved on the ring road. He got out his phone, and thinking once again with longing of the city – the light, quiet office in San Frediano, the wide green river, the sound of motorini audible inside the familiar, gloomy flat that smelled of Luisa’s scent – he called Giuli.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, well done. Good girl. Now listen.’

  When he’d given her his instructions, Sandro folded the phone and put it in his pocket, sitting for a long moment as he considered what he had to do next. Then he started the car and drove away.

  If they’d wanted fresh air they could have walked down behind the castle, past the villino and the laundry and the studio and the plain new house where Mauro lived to where there was a small hill and a ruined tower; that was the little constitutional guests sometimes took to walk off a heavy lunch. They could have walked into the winter fields, although they’d been warned of the hazards presented by trigger-happy hunters; they could have taken the path that led off the back entrance, down to a pretty little stream. They did none of these things.

  As Cate came back out of the door to the stable block wearing hat, scarf, gloves and a long padded coat buttoned up to her ears against the bitter wind, she saw the car. The little black car with the hire logo, parked up against the office entrance; looking up, she saw light behind the shuttered windows. So Luca was back; she should go and bring him up to date, Cate knew that. But the light was going, and Tiziano and Fairhead were waiting for her – and it was all too complicated. Wives were not allowed – and most particularly, she suspected, noisy, emotional, betrayed wives – and it was quite possible Luca would take the position that she, Cate, should have sent Yolanda Hansen packing. She didn’t want to see that disappointed look in his eyes, and so she hurried past.

  By the time she reached them Alec Fairhead had pushed Tiziano’s wheelchair across the rougher ground behind the castle and round to the front, to the smooth tarmac of the road that led down between the grand avenue of old cypresses, where they were waiting for her. The two-hundred-year-old trees between which Yolanda Hansen had approached the Castello Orfeo at speed, as if she wanted to ram the great gate; the avenue by which Loni Meadows liked to come and go, seeing herself as the castle’s mistress. Not for her the tradesman’s entrance.

  With Cate alongside they set off without a word, only Alec Fairhead giving her a shy, apologetic smile. She smiled back, forgiving him; feeling exhilarated at the thought of leaving the bounds of the castle keep for the first time in what seemed like weeks, not just twenty-four hours. And given the pace at which they set off, Tiziano in the lead and turning his wheels with furious energy, she wasn’t the only one.

  No one spoke for a while. They knew where they were going.

  The wide winter landscape stretched in front of them, the sun no more than a feeble glare not far above the western horizon, behind a sky low and heavy with layers of snow cloud. When they reached the end of the old cypress avenue Tiziano stopped, and they turned and looked back.

  The great squat bulk of the castle sat there, more forbidding than ever and entirely uninterested in them. All of it, sky, trees and stone, in shades of grey, except the flash of red that was the car Yolanda Hansen had arrived in, no longer on the grass, now parked askew on the drive.

  ‘Poor old Per,’ said Alec Fairhead abruptly. ‘What a mess.’ Tiziano barked a laugh, rubbing his hands in leather gloves in his lap. Cate looked down at the pianist’s hands and found herself instead gazing at his legs, lifeless and thin in padded trousers, his booted, useless feet on their foot-rest.

  ‘You can say that again,’ he said. ‘A mess.’

  ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ said Cate, looking at Fairhead. They were neighbours, after all, the Norwegian and the Englishman. She thought of him typing away there this morning; thought of all those other mornings when he would have done nothing but stare down to where they stood now, down between the tall, dark trees to the distant hills and the silver strip of river winding between their spurs. Surely if Per talked to anyone, it would be to him?

  ‘He’s got himself into a mess,’ Fairhead repeated. ‘That’s what’s happened.’ There was something resigned about the way he said it, as though it was a situation he knew all about, had seen before.

  ‘His wife said he’d written to her asking for a divorce,’ said Cate tentatively. This was gossip. It made her uncomfortable. ‘Said he’d fallen in love with another woman, and he wanted a divorce.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. I always thought –

  ‘Thought he was a nice family man?’ said Tiziano, twisting his wheels and turning back downhill. ‘Me too. Someone certainly turned his head.’

  Cate had to hurry to catch up, but Fairhead’s long stride enabled him to keep pace easily with the two of them.

  ‘Do you know who?’ she asked. Tiziano shrugged; she turned to Fairhead.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t think – I think he’ll tell you himself, if – when – it becomes appropriate.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Tiziano, echoing Ginevra with savage cheerfulness, his face red in the wind as he looked curiously at Alec Fairhead. ‘Who else could it be? The only other good-looking woman in th
e place was Cate, and I think she would have said, don’t you? If she and Per were planning to ride off into the sunset together?’

  Cate blushed furiously; Tiziano kept going regardless. ‘Do you think he bumped her off, as well? How would you go about it, though? Cut the brakes? Surely it can’t be that easy, these days, and if she’d had no brakes, she’d never have made it to the end of the drive.’

  As Cate stared at Tiziano in disbelief, Alec Fairhead spoke. He was quite white. ‘I don’t think – I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,’ he said, sounding very English.

  ‘So it was Dottoressa Meadows? He was leaving his wife for Dottoressa Meadows?’ asked Cate.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fairhead, so quietly she could hardly hear him. ‘Yes. That was what he thought.’

  They had come out of the small cluster of low trees that marked the end of the drive, and they were on the road, a D-road, curved, narrow and, if it had been busier, far too dangerous to go walking on at the approach of a snowstorm in bad light. None of them asked which way they would turn; they all turned downhill together, each of them silently pondering what had just been said. It occurred to Cate that without Tiziano and the wheelchair, there would probably have been an alternative to this road, a path cross-country to their destination. The hills were scored with such paths, rabbit runs and sheep tracks and riding trails; one of the weird aspects to the landscape, considering, was how empty it always seemed. All the time, there must be secret movement, in the scrub, between the willows and juniper and myrtle bushes, skirting the trees.

  ‘So kitchen gossip had it right, then?’ asked Tiziano. ‘Might have known Ginevra would have her finger on the pulse. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice anything, Caterina? You’re a clever girl.’

  ‘Notice anything?’ said Cate, ‘I didn’t notice anything, actually. I don’t look for – ’ She wanted to say, I don’t look for that kind of thing. Was that true? Not on the cruises, no; on the cruises she’d been very good at spotting those romances that sprang up and died down among the elderly passengers.