A Murder in Tuscany

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Caterina Giottone,’ she said, and held out a hand. ‘I’m the manager’s assistant. Luca’s assistant.’

  She had an accent close to the Sienese, so not from around here. Her grip was warm and firm; her black hair parted in the middle, and she looked at him with curiosity, not unfriendly, as though she had a feeling about him. As though he might be bringing good news, but she wasn’t quite sure yet; as though she trusted him. It made Sandro feel creaking and ancient to remember it, but she looked like every girl he had ever wished he might ask out, had he not been too shy and lonely, since the age of thirteen. She looked like Luisa.

  The piano playing had stopped. It had been quite remarkable: Sandro didn’t think of himself as having an ear, nor of being susceptible to atmospheres, or superstition, but while the music had been playing he had felt as though none of this was quite real. Not the slit windows of the big, dark, unforgiving building that had loomed over him in the dusk, not the tall, silent cypresses enclosing him on the approach, not the snow whirling in the empty courtyard. The only real thing had been left behind him on that sharp bend: the rutted mud and the flash of police tape clinging to a willow.

  ‘You’re the – um – investigator,’ said the thin girl with the sharp nose and the scarecrow hair, and reality returned. Something about her reminded him of Giuli. ‘I’ve just made up your bed. Next door to the Dottoressa’s rooms.’ She gave him a beady-eyed look. Next door; Sandro wondered who would have occupied such a room under normal circumstances.

  ‘Shall I show you up?’ said Caterina Giottone. She hadn’t known he was coming, but the other girl had. Caterina was an outsider here, like him, and she was thinking on her feet. Good. ‘Or do you need to see Luca first?’

  ‘I’ll just leave these – things,’ Sandro said, lifting his little case.

  The room was small, but that was fine in a big draughty place like this; it seemed warm and well lit. There was a table he could use as a desk, and a long window. ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘I’ll tell Luca you’re here, shall I?’ said Caterina Giottone. Behind her on the landing the other girl shifted from foot to foot, eavesdropping.

  ‘That would be great,’ said Sandro. ‘Thank you, Miss Giottone. You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘Caterina,’ she said, inclining her head. ‘It’s a pleasure.’ She frowned. ‘There’ll be – dinner, or sort of, a little later. We’re a bit – upside down. And Saturday is Ginevra’s night off; she’s the cook. There’ll be something laid out, in the dining room, from eight. But I’m sure Luca – Mr Gallo – will show you.’

  As Sandro gently closed the door he heard them on the stairs, Caterina Giottone’s low voice and the other one’s excitable chattering. He didn’t know what Gallo had told them; the minimum was what he imagined, but it didn’t take people long to work things out. He didn’t need to worry about that.

  The computer took forever to start up. Sandro knew that computers saved any amount of time; all the same, the effect they had on him was only to increase his impatience. The blue screen asking for his password, the icons appearing, one by one, the whirs and clicks. The screensaver came up: it was of the view from a little house they’d rented on the Ligurian coast a long time ago, he and Luisa; Giuli had downloaded it for him. A strip of scalloped, green and white awning and the sun going down in the sea, a couple of moored boats black on the silver water.

  To the left of the computer on the desk, Sandro set out the green card folder containing the information he had on the castle’s guests. He decided, thinking about Caterina and the mousy girl, the absent cook, whoever drove the tractor and the pick-up he’d seen parked up at the back of the castle, that it wouldn’t do any harm to have a note or two on the place’s staff too.

  Would a cook or a gardener or a girl with long black hair and the soft accent of the Valdichiana send an anonymous email through a proxy server about a woman they were very unlikely ever to have met? No, they wouldn’t. But Sandro didn’t believe in putting all his eggs in one basket; closing off his options this early on in an investigation would be rash. And now he was here in these bleak and empty hills, now he breathed the air of the castle keep, heard its creaks and whispers and felt its thick walls close around him, the puzzle of Loni Meadows’s death had turned into something different, something subject to change, something still living, its consequences yet to unravel. All of a sudden the darkness of this castle and its grounds were teeming with possibilities.

  It would come. It always did.

  Almost never easily, but it came; you had to stand at the still centre of a place like this, and listen, and watch. This was a closed circle, like many murders; you just had to map the edges, then look at those gathered inside. Like the Roma site Sandro and Pietro had once been called to because the body of a young man lay just beyond the light cast by the trailers and abandoned container lorries, stabbed more than twenty times and left to bleed out in the dust on a sweet-smelling April evening.

  Some of the travellers had stayed in their trailers, others had gathered on the edge of the policemen’s vision as they shone their lights on the body, then inspected it minutely with their gloved hands. One or two had come to offer information, of a sort, not to be trusted. The young man – not much more than a boy – had been one of theirs, and they knew they would be suspected.

  It had taken time, that was for sure. There had been physical evidence to be retrieved, pollen and dust analysed, the shape and pecularities of the murder weapon identified – but for the most part it had been a question of waiting. Waiting to be trusted, for the suspicion to abate, for people to begin talking – not even to Sandro and Pietro, but between themselves. And then at last a small and angry Roma boy ran to Sandro, his face streaked with dirt and crying, who told him his big brother had been in love with a girl from outside.

  The seal breaks, and the world rushes in. Sandro still remembered the feel of that small boy’s head against his ribcage, hot and damp, the feel of unwashed hair under his palm.

  He stood and went to the window.

  There were internal shutters, first, then the window; he opened it to push back the outside louvres. The cold took his breath away, but he stood there a moment at the open window, looking. The snow was still falling, but softly now, quietly; the wind had dropped, and he could sense the change that came over a landscape as snow covered and muffled it, could smell the clean coldness of it in the air. Below him the drive and lawns were uplit but even the dark, distant hills gleamed white as they reflected some mysterious source of light: the moon, perhaps, shining briefly through a break in the canopy of snow cloud. Had there been a moon, two nights ago? Sandro tried to remember; it had been the night, hadn’t it, that Luisa had told him she was going away.

  He’d got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. As he always did, his age and all that. Sandro closed his eyes, trying to think back, and for a moment all he could remember was the despair that had come over him in the chilly bathroom, its frosted window unshuttered. Not that he would be alone for a few days, but that he was being left behind, somehow. He opened his eyes again. It had been dark, or almost; no more than a sliver of crescent moon visible overhead.

  For some reason the thought depressed him; would it have been better if a full moon had shone that night, when Loni Meadows died? Because he wouldn’t like to die in the dark, himself. And for other reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on now, but which would come to him.

  Sandro closed the shutters carefully, and returned to the desk.

  Find the lover. Find the sender of the email.

  He stopped there, frowning. Would those two be the same? It was possible, yes. He could imagine a scenario in which a man might send hate mail then become the victim’s lover. But it was a stretch. With a woman like Loni Meadows, sharp, pushy, inquisitive? A stretch. He stood very still, thinking.

  It occurred to Sandro that he couldn’t even be sure if the sender of the email would have also been her murderer. If it
had been murder. Speculation made his head hurt: he needed to start looking at facts.

  If you wanted to send someone off to crash their car, alone, how would you do it? Sandro could think of at least one way, but of none that would be guaranteed to succeed. She might, after all, have been badly injured, crippled or paralysed rather than killed. So your handiwork would need to be invisible, in case she came back to tell the tale. Although perhaps injury would have been enough; perhaps someone had only wanted to bring Loni Meadows face to face with a reality she could not charm away – with the fact that she, like everyone else, was mortal.

  He set his mobile phone on top of the green folder, and it blinked patiently back at him, indicating that it had a strong signal. There must be a transmitter somewhere around here, though he couldn’t remember seeing it. He should have checked for a signal in the valley, shouldn’t he? Would she have been able to call for help? If she had a phone with her. Would she have been able to get a signal?

  Everyone always had a phone, these days; if Sandro could remember to keep his on him and charged, then anyone could.

  Moving his finger tentatively across the laptop’s touch pad, Sandro logged on to the Castello Orfeo’s broadband network, which was unsecured. No one for miles around to freeload off it, so why bother?

  The clock in the corner of the screen said 18.45. Giuli would be watching Carlotta Bellagamba, and waiting for her moment. She’d manage it, Sandro was certain. For a second he felt a twinge of guilt; this wasn’t really about the girl and her drug-taking boyfriend, was it? He was using her – using them. But Giuli was another matter. Giuli had her own agenda; she saw Carlotta as her case now. On screen Sandro opened the mailbox, pressed send and receive, astonished at how quickly these things had become second nature to him.

  Messages pinged into his mailbox, a flurry of rubbish, spam that Giuli had programmed the thing to delete, then one from Giuli.

  Downstairs the music began again, softer this time, quiet and pretty. Chopin? Sandro liked Chopin, even if he couldn’t claim to know much about music; Luisa enjoyed a concert now and again at the Teatro Communale or the Goldoni, a bit of Verdi, a bit of Mozart, and Sandro would go along if he wasn’t working, happily ignorant. This music calmed him now, rills of notes like water, as if it had been expressly composed to ease troubled thoughts. What thoughts could have troubled Chopin’s patrons though? Rich men and women, in castles and palaces.

  Leaning back in his chair, Sandro breathed in the scent of old money, of stone and wood and polish, thinking. He opened the email from Giuli: a list, then a kind of table setting out dates and times and ages. Per Hansen, born Trondheim, Norway, 1953; Alexander Fairhead, born London, 1954; Tiziano Scarpa, born Mestre, 1966; Michelle Connor, born Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1956; Tina Kreutz, born Orlando, Florida, 1977. Sandro tilted his head, trying to make sense of the graph. Did these people have no homes to go to? London, Paris, Caracas, Yarra; they hardly seemed to settle. No: one of them did, the Norwegian, the one whose home country sounded the least hospitable had spent the most time there: a visiting fellowship in creative writing to Barcelona in 1985, then Oslo ever since. The family man. Difficult to see how he, at least, would have come across Loni Meadows before coming to Orfeo, unless she’d visited Oslo. Which he couldn’t picture.

  Alec Fairhead and Loni Meadows had both been in London between 1981 and 1982.

  Then he heard something. Over the seductive variations of the music, Sandro heard someone on the stairs outside his room, not loud but unmistakable. Out of instinct he closed the screen of the computer and got to his feet, quickly, quietly, holding the chair back to stop it scraping. There was a knock.

  On the threshold, careful not to enter, Luca Gallo looked anxiously apologetic. Did apologize, in fact, several times over, for the fact that Sandro had had to be admitted and welcomed to the Castello Orfeo by someone other than himself.

  ‘But she was very personable,’ said Sandro, feeling the need to defend Caterina Giottone. ‘I couldn’t have been treated more – ah, correctly.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gallo, taken aback, ‘yes, well – of course. Caterina has only recently – she has had to step into the breach, if you understand me. But she’s doing a good job, yes, an excellent job.’

  And again Sandro had the feeling that he and Caterina were in some way in the same boat: outsiders, and not much expected of them.

  Then Luca Gallo was fretting over arrangements. There would be supper, of a kind, laid in the dining room, and Gallo would show Sandro, if he would like, where to find it, close to where he’d parked the car in fact, an informal arrangement, people could come and go as they wished on Saturdays, but today was slightly unusual.

  Gallo grimaced a little. ‘Niccolò Orfeo – Count Orfeo, although he doesn’t really use the title, you understand – he’s dining with us tonight. So if you’d like to join us?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sandro. ‘If I could have, perhaps, half an hour?’

  Gallo was looking into the room, and the things laid out on the desk. ‘Of course,’ he said absently, ‘yes, you’ll have things to do, first. I – ah – I’ve, um, mentioned your presence here to the guests. A – condensed version.’ He moved inside the room, half closing the door behind him; the little space seemed suddenly smaller.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I gave them the impression it was – a kind of formality. Mascarello, in his grief – you know.’

  ‘And the staff? Some of them seem to have a good idea of why I am here. Not all.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gallo distractedly. ‘Yes. I only said – well. I mentioned you in passing, to Ginevra. News seems to travel, somehow.’

  ‘And Orfeo?’ He spoke casually, watching Gallo out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Orfeo? What about him?’ There was something there. Gallo knew something.

  ‘Does he know?’ Sandro smiled encouragingly. ‘Why I’m here?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Although clearly – well. He lives in Florence, even if this is his family seat. You won’t need to talk to him?’ Bluff, and panic.

  The man Sandro had seen cut an imperious swathe through Pozzo’s dismal little police station would have shouted at Luca Gallo without a second thought, Sandro could see that; as though he was a mediaeval peasant. And the mere suggestion that the Count might co-operate with a private investigator’s inquiries on any subject would certainly have been perceived as an offence to his dignity.

  ‘But he knew Loni Meadows?’

  Luca Gallo shrugged, his nonchalance not convincing. ‘Of course.’

  ‘And when – ah – when was he last here? On the night of the accident?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Gallo quickly. ‘He didn’t usually come in the evenings, not often, it’s a long drive, you understand. No, I think he was last here on – let me think – on Sunday. There’s really no need – no need at all. To talk to him.’

  ‘Well, perhaps just a word or two,’ said Sandro mildly.

  Gallo shot him a glance. Sandro saw that the man’s nails were bitten down to the quick. He leaned past Luca Gallo and pushed the door to, then sat down on the corner of the bed.

  ‘Mr Gallo,’ said Sandro, looking up at him. ‘Luca.’ Alarm flickered in Luca Gallo’s soft, monkey-brown eyes. Could he really suspect this man, this twitching bundle of anxieties? A walking breakdown.

  ‘Luca, is there – ’ he hesitated, gently probing. ‘Is there anything else I should know? About – you and Dottoressa Meadows, for example? Any – animosity? Any upset? Because if there is, it will come out, you know. These things always do.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Gallo, his face pale under the stubble. ‘We were a good team.’

  Sandro said nothing, just looked at him.

  ‘We were not friends,’ said Luca with resignation. ‘All right? But we worked together.’

  ‘Fine,’ Sandro said quietly, getting to his feet, sidestepping Gallo, who stood as though rooted to the spot, and opening the door a
gain. ‘So, I’ll find my own way down.’ He gestured with a hand, and Gallo preceded him out of the door on to the wide landing.

  ‘And I’m happy to make my own introductions.’ Gallo nodded, eyeing him warily, as though he knew he’d been let off the hook, for now. Sandro went on cheerfully. ‘In the meantime do you think I might – ah – make a quick examination of Dottoressa Meadows’s apartments?’ He used the word as if she’d been a princess. This place was getting to him.

  ‘Of course.’ Fishing in the sagging pockets of his jacket Gallo looked anxious all over again, nervously overeager. He pulled out a bunch of keys, detached one. ‘They’re right next door; she was the first of our Directors to occupy those rooms.’ There was something sharper in his tone when he said this.

  Sandro eyed the key, still in Gallo’s hand. ‘When the police – when they came to notify you of her accident, did they ask to see the rooms?’ he asked casually.

  Gallo shrugged. ‘They looked in. That was it. I – I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, as far as they knew, she died in a car accident.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, and their eyes met. ‘I suppose so.’ Grasso certainly had seemed arrogant enough to consider it a waste of his time, or perhaps they had a little too much respect for Orfeo’s property.

  ‘Would you like me to show you?’ Gallo’s hand closed around the key; it occurred to Sandro that he would not have been exactly encouraging to policemen tramping through his precious castle.

  ‘I can probably find my own way around,’ said Sandro again, easily. ‘And the dining room too, close to where I parked the car, you said? I’ll follow my nose, shall I?’ Gallo didn’t move. ‘Thank you,’ said Sandro, ‘I’ll be fine.’ And held out his hand.