‘Think we’re above all that?’ said Tiziano, reading her mind, not for the first time. Cate wished Alec Fairhead, a metre ahead of them with his arms wrapped around himself, would say something.
‘Mr Fairhead?’ she asked gently. ‘Alec? What do you think of all this?’ And he turned towards her, and she saw his eyes bleary with the wind.
‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Stop.’
And though that wasn’t what he’d meant, they all literally did stop, in the middle of the road. In the sudden silence Cate could hear, from far away, the sound of a car that came and went, baffled and bounced by the hills. A powerful car.
Alec Fairhead was rubbing a fist in his eye, facing up to the brow of the hill from which they would be able to see down into the next valley, where the road curved sharply, and then Cate remembered how he’d looked that evening when he’d arrived, as though he’d wanted to run away, the moment he saw them all standing there waiting for him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she meant it. ‘You knew her. I’d forgotten that. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s not it,’ said Fairhead, his face drawn and haunted. There was a long pause, then he spoke hesitantly. ‘It’s Per. I just feel sorry for Per, to be honest. He – fell for her. He’s a man who doesn’t do things by halves – he’s a man who can’t pretend, either. He fell for her.’ The distant car was louder now, and closer.
‘You mean, fell in love with her?’ Cate hugged herself, rubbing her arms; in the lee of the hill it was even colder, if that was possible, than it had been at the castle. No sun got down here in these valleys, not between November and March.
‘Fell in love with her, yes,’ said Alec Fairhead, and Cate saw that he was shivering. He was not warmly dressed; a dark corduroy jacket, thin gloves, an insubstantial scarf – but that wasn’t it. ‘I also mean, that he was taken in by her. Deceived.’ He spoke, Cate saw, with grim understanding. ‘She was – a flirt, is the kind word for it.’
‘Never flirted with me,’ said Tiziano, ruddy-faced and healthy in contrast to Fairhead, but his smile was cool.
The sound of the approaching car was suddenly much closer and Cate became aware at once that they were standing in the middle of the road. It had to be coming this way; there was nowhere else. She edged towards the verge. ‘Come on,’ she said, but they weren’t listening to her. She came around behind the wheelchair and leaned to push and at last the two men responded.
‘Would you have wanted her to flirt with you?’ said Alec Fairhead quickly, tensed as he tried to stop the shivering. ‘She was good at that, knowing who it was worth bothering with.’
‘You knew her very well, didn’t you?’ said Tiziano.
It wasn’t really a question, but if Alec Fairhead had wanted to answer no one would have been able to hear him because at that moment the big, powerful silver car leapt the brow of the hill above them, its engine a deafening roar as it passed without a swerve or a touch on the brakes, within centimetres of the little group. The driver didn’t turn his head to acknowledge they were there – it was possible, thought Cate with a sick feeling, that he had not seen them at all – but they all knew who it was. They knew Niccolò Orfeo’s car, and the way he drove it; like Loni Meadows, as though he was immortal, untouchable.
‘Well,’ said Alec Fairhead stiffly. ‘Our lord and patron.’ They turned to watch, but they knew where he was going; up through the cypress avenue behind them, carelessly fast because, of course, unlike poor Yolanda Hansen, if he wanted to ram his own gates, no one could stop him. The car was obscured by a puff of white dust as it hit the dirt road, and they turned away.
‘Is there any sun over there, d’you think?’ said Tiziano, nodding up towards the brow of the hill. Cate made an apologetic gesture. There was no sun anywhere; at the horizon the cloud was blue-grey with unshed snow.
‘Should we go back?’ she suggested hopefully. The men both looked from the castle to Cate and back.
‘No,’ said Tiziano, just as Fairhead shook his head.
But when they set off again it was slowly, reluctantly. What were they going for, anyway? To inspect the scene of the crime? Ghoulishly to look for blood or scraps of clothing, or tyre treads? Or was it just that having escaped the castle they were in no hurry to go back, particularly not now Niccolò Orfeo had arrived?
‘She led him on,’ said Cate.
Fairhead nodded, head bowed as he walked. ‘She told him she would divorce her husband – at least, that’s what he says.’
‘You don’t believe him?’
‘I think he convinced himself; it’s possible she led him to believe she would, but if I know Loni – ’ Fairhead broke off, and Cate could see he was shivering uncontrollably now.
She pulled off her hat and held it out; he took it, puzzling over it a second before pulling it on. He tried to smile his thanks, but his face was grim. ‘If I know Loni, she’d have covered herself. Only a joke, darling, only in the heat of the moment, darling. But of course Per would have taken it seriously, being Per.’ He twisted his mouth. ‘Per can’t conceive of anyone saying such a thing lightly. So he wrote to Yolanda, in Oslo, a week ago. When she got the letter she dropped everything, and came out, only by then – it was all what you might call academic.’
‘He told you this – when?’ said Tiziano. ‘Last week?’
‘No,’ said Fairhead, shaking his head energetically, ‘they were arguing, this afternoon – I couldn’t help overhearing. I even understood some of it. I tried to help. I’d never have let him send the letter, if he’d told me. I’d have told him she’d never leave her husband.’
Tiziano sat very still in the wheelchair, arms rigid by his sides. ‘The husband,’ he said; ‘the famous human rights lawyer.’ He sounded uncharacteristically sharp. ‘You think not? He’s old, though, isn’t he? Old and ugly.’
‘Old and ugly and rich,’ said Fairhead, gazing away from them and towards the grey line of the horizon. ‘But it’s not just that. They’re two of a kind, Loni and Giuliano Mascarello. Were. Ruthless, charming, clever, and the rest.’
So Fairhead didn’t just have a passing acquaintance with Loni Meadows and her husband before he came here. It had been more than that; it had been something that had stopped him writing; something had happened.
And then they heard another car. Far off, slower, quieter than the first, but getting closer. Silently, as if by mutual agreement, they hurried now to get to the brow of the hill, to see and be seen. And then they stopped, and looked down into the narrow valley, the sharp bend at the foot of the steep hill, the spidery willows, the churned earth. The last ragged flicker of the tape, caught on a bramble.
They stood, getting their breath, and then Cate decided. ‘You knew her,’ she began, and before she could ask it, ask Alec Fairhead what Loni Meadows had done to him however long ago it was, he turned on her fiercely.
‘We were the last ones to see her,’ he said, ‘Per and I. I couldn’t see it. I can’t believe I couldn’t see what was going on. We were the last ones to see her before she died.’
‘What happened?’ asked Tiziano quietly.
‘The women left,’ Fairhead said, his voice stilted, formal. ‘Tina left the table early because Loni had said something that upset her. Talking about one of the galleries in New York.’
Cate nodded. ‘It was to do with a show she’d had in New York,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Loni had posted a bad review of Tina’s work at the same gallery, and I suppose just mentioning the name… ’ She tailed off, not wanting to tell Tina’s secret.
‘Michelle and Tiziano went after her.’ Fairhead stared down the slope at the red and white tape.
‘She was running,’ Tiziano said, and sighed. ‘I could hear her crying. I let Michelle follow her; I couldn’t keep up. I went to bed.’ Cate looked down at him, feeling a tiny pulse of adrenaline as things slotted into place. Tina first, yes, then Michelle, then Tiziano.
Fairhead went on in a distant monotone. ‘And we sat there, just the three of us;
she said something about poor Tina, talking to Per. She was saying Tina needed to toughen up if she was going to survive, that art wasn’t just about the studio, that you had to engage with the world. Per was just gazing at her, she might have been saying anything.’ His voice was strained, dull with resignation. ‘Then her phone went. She got a text message on her phone.’
‘No phones at dinner, I thought,’ said Tiziano drily. ‘Isn’t that the rule?’
Alec Fairhead shrugged, the ghost of a smile on his thin face. ‘One rule for Loni Meadows,’ he said, ‘another for the rest of us. You must have learned that by now.’
Tiziano was sitting upright in his wheelchair, and Cate knew he wanted to ask Alec Fairhead outright what she’d done to him to set him off wandering the world like he did. She put a hand on his arm to stop him.
‘Did she read the message?’ she asked gently.
He nodded unhappily. ‘We might as well have not existed. She read it and just gave us a vague sort of smile, pleased with herself, oblivious. Then she got up and went out.’
There was a silence, save for the sound of the second car. It was slower, quieter than Orfeo’s, but it was getting closer.
‘Did Per leave with her?’ Cate asked softly. She found herself thinking of Loni Meadows’s bedroom, still smelling of her, clothes flung around as though she’d just left. The green silk of the blouse she’d worn at dinner, left carelessly on the floor; she’d changed in order to leave again. She wouldn’t have done that with Per in the room? Unless she was a bigger whore than they thought. ‘Did he leave with her in the car that night? Did he have something to do with – the accident?’
‘After she’d gone, Per just sat there a moment, looking – Idon’t know. Like he’d been slapped. I should have understood.’ Fairhead looked haunted. ‘But I had enough trouble myself, getting through those dinners. Then he got up without saying anything and left too; and I went after them.’
‘You mean they were together?’ Tiziano’s voice was probing, insistent. Alec looked at him as if he didn’t recognize him. ‘Together? No. She was going upstairs to her room, holding her phone. She was in a hurry. Of course, our rooms are on the floor above, so we had to pass her – but Per stopped. I went on. When I looked back, she was at the door, talking to him. Impatient. I don’t know if he went in. I went to bed. I heard him come up about five minutes later.’
‘You heard him? You didn’t see him?’
But Alec Fairhead didn’t answer; he was looking away from her, and Cate followed his gaze. His eyes were fixed on the far hill, where another car had appeared, only this one was small and brown, humble as a forest creature by comparison with Orfeo’s great sleek roaring machine, and moving slowly, as though it was looking for something. Looking for them.
Chapter Fourteen
THE THREE FIGURES ON the brow of the next hill and perhaps eight hundred metres away from Sandro didn’t move; they were watching him. A tall man, coatless; a woman with long black hair that blew about in the wind and whom, even at this distance, as he climbed out of the car, Sandro could tell was beautiful; and a man in a wheelchair. Broad-shouldered; strong. Three people not necessarily friends, but allies.
It was a professional habit; in the police or out of it, the ability to evaluate people and the dynamic between them from a distance was useful. To know whether they would coagulate, group and turn on you, or scatter. In either case you would have to know which of them would move the fastest; Sandro thought the guy in the wheelchair might have the edge, disabled or not.
Standing a moment, leaning on the roof of the car, Sandro watched them. They had to be from the castle; in fact from his examination of the guests’ CVs, the one in the wheelchair would be Tiziano Scarpa. Pianist? Composer and pianist. Sandro had imagined him a twisted, angry figure; no joke, paralysed from the waist down since the age of twenty-two, in a Red Brigade bomb blast that had killed his father. He didn’t look stunted from this angle.
The three figures watched him back, and they didn’t move, and it came to Sandro that they had been coming here too. Relaxed, Sandro held his ground; let them come back tomorrow. In half an hour, forty-five minutes at most, it would be dark, and they had a walk ahead of them. And as if they had read his mind the man in the wheelchair turned his head so Sandro could see a profile, tilted it up to speak to the girl, whose head then turned to the skinny man, he nodded, and they were gone.
Forty-five minutes was not long, for Sandro’s purposes. He got started straight away, walking up the slope opposite him almost as far as where the three had stood and watched him. Then back down. The ice had melted somewhat, although it could hardly have got above zero today, and most of it was still visible. Black, glassy, fanning across the tarmac from halfway down the hill. He looked along the verges, in the pale winter grasses on either side, carefully criss-crossing the site. He wasn’t used to traffic accident investigation beyond the city, and anyway, although there were country lanes enough close in to Florence, ice was never much of a factor. The city held the temperature a degree or two too high for the most part. He couldn’t see where this ice came from; in the fading light, he gave up.
At the skid marks Sandro paused, kneeling in his old quilted jacket, nothing like warm enough. He looked down the steep gradient of the hill. She had braked, hard, then had come across the patch of ice on to drier tarmac, but even that would have been frosted and it hadn’t given her enough purchase, the tyres had lost grip again. The big car would have thumped and teetered on to one side, still moving too fast – you could see from the skid marks. That alone might have been enough to knock her out, side of the head on the door frame as the car tilted.
Those blue eyes, wide in the darkness. Is this happening, she’d have asked herself, in the split second before she hit her head, as her feet pumped uselessly on the pedals. Sandro thought that he should have gone to the pound to have a look at the car, after all. Though he had the photographs: blood and hair on the front pillar, some on the car door, a smear on the window.
In car accidents, people always had that look of disbelief as they stepped out of the wreckage, stunned not just by the impact but by the realization that they were mortal, that their fate could slip out of their own hands so easily. The moment at which they lost control of the situation – until then as comfortable as their own living room – still mirrored in their startled, dilated pupils; the realization that the car wasn’t simply the benign and obedient carriage they were used to, warm and padded and computerized and safe. It was a cage and a weapon; a blowtorch and a blunt instrument.
At the foot of the hill, on the bend, Sandro straightened, looking at the churned and frozen earth. It was bitterly cold, and the sun hadn’t even gone down. Some of it was wind chill – in the city, one was largely protected from the wind too, but out here there seemed to be nothing between Sandro and Russia. It was hard to believe that in the summer people flooded down here from the city, to swim in the rivers, lie on the beaches, bask in swimming pools on these baked and barren slopes. Far off, he heard some dogs begin to bay, and the sound echoed mournfully around the hills.
The bend was indeed very sharp; in the dark, if you didn’t know the road, it could be lethal. Although Loni Meadows had known the road; she would have known the curve was coming. There’d been a sign too, a kilometre back, warning of bends – not of ice, however, whatever Grasso might have said. The accident scene – or whatever it was – had been contaminated considerably. The tow-truck had churned up the verge, although because the earth had been so hard-frozen there were no footprints at all. Sandro returned to the car and took out the envelope of photographs and looked through them with fingers stiffening with the cold until he found the one he wanted. His back to the road, he held it up in what light was left, comparing the image with the reality.
There in front of him was the crushed long grass, frosted over again in the shape of Loni Meadows’s outstretched body. He looked at the photograph: one stockinged foot turned inwards, one shoe off, h
er head down the bank and in the water. Her skirt – heavy dark silk by the look of it – had ridden up, and the stocking top was visible. She would have staggered in the dark, the car’s headlights shining pointlessly into the river. The car door open behind her.
In some of the photographs they’d used the flash; it had still been very early. There was a lot of disturbance to the grass where the body lay. She might have wandered about, dazed, before the bleeding in her brain sent her irreversibly into a coma. He would have assumed she would have fallen to her knees, then forwards, although in the photograph it looked more as though she’d fallen headlong.
The car hadn’t been that badly damaged; still driveable, according to the report. If it hadn’t been nose down in the riverbank. Sandro studied the photographs again, then the turned earth in front of him. She’d tried, hadn’t she? Perhaps bleeding, perhaps concussed, she’d revved the engine, assuming she was still in control, the rear wheels turning uselessly in the air, the front pair churning themselves deeper into the frozen mud of the riverbank. Stuck.
That didn’t help.
Or did it? At least, it ruled one or two things out; if there’d been someone else in the car, someone who’d wished her harm, would that person, having somehow caused the accident, allow her to assume control again and try to get the car out of the mud? It seemed unlikely. But that scenario had a number of flaws, in any case; anyone planning to cause an accident while in the car themselves would risk death or injury too. It might only feasibly have happened on impulse, a row, an attempt to grab the wheel. But where would that putative passenger be now, supposing no one had seen him, or her, get into the car with Loni Meadows? Bloodied, injured, traumatized, frozen, in shock? Certainly such a person might not expect to escape notice. Then again, anyone who had somehow managed to disguise all these after-effects was unlikely to be the impulsive sort.
A Murder in Tuscany Page 17