A Murder in Tuscany

by Christobel Kent

  Carlotta had left the house at seven. At a discreet distance Giuli had followed, knowing roughly from Sandro where Carlotta would be headed. It didn’t occur to her to doubt Sandro, and of course he’d been right.

  High on the southern hills of Arcetri overlooking the glittering city, on a silent, narrow street whose long, clean-plastered walls indicated a garden bigger than most parks, the high flank of a villa built on a grand scale had loomed, and up ahead of Giuli, Carlotta had slowed. Giuli had promptly killed the engine of her own motorino, then placed the machine carefully against the wall and lit a cigarette. There was a bend in the road here, and if she leaned forward a fraction she could see what was going on, keeping herself in the shadow of a big evergreen overhanging the wall. It was very very cold, and still, the pavement glinting with frost; snow, she’d have said, only it never snowed in the city.

  Carlotta had stopped by a gate further along the wall and had soon wheeled her little pink Vespa through it, leaving Giuli on the outside, with the night sky and the sparkling carpet of the city spread out below them.

  Every ten minutes or so for the hour Giuli had stood there, feeling her toes turn numb, more visitors had turned up, singly, now and again, but more often in groups of five or more, chattering, laughing, oblivious to Giuli leaning in the drive opposite, on her third cigarette. Biding her time, watching what happened when Alberto Orfeo’s dad was away. She’d found herself thinking of Sandro, down there in the Maremma in that big ugly castle in the dark. Leafing through the pages he’d given her, it had seemed to her a funny sort of set-up for the ‘guests’. No TV, no boyfriends, no one you knew, stuck in the middle of nowhere without a car; sounded an awful lot like rehab to Giuli.

  At least Sandro would have a car.

  Giuli’s phone had rung; glancing around, grateful that for the moment she was alone in the street, she’d wrestled it out of her buttoned pocket: it would be Sandro. ‘Yes?’ she’d hissed, not bothering to look at the caller’s identity.

  ‘Giuli?’

  It hadn’t been Sandro. Giuli’s heart had lurched; shit. Why had she felt guilty? Like being back in school, called out as the dunce.

  ‘Luisa,’ she’d said, faltering, straightening instinctively out of the half-crouch she’d adopted. ‘How are you?’ Stupidly formal; she’d given the game away already.

  ‘So you know about this – idiotic game, do you?’ As usual, Luisa had cut straight to the chase.

  ‘Game? What game?’

  ‘Giuli,’ Luisa had said, warning her. ‘Don’t bother. You know where Sandro’s gone, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And why are you whispering?’

  ‘I’m working,’ Giuli had said, raising her whisper to a mutter. ‘Following the girl. Carlotta Bellagamba.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Luisa had said, her voice steely with scorn. ‘That girl he was getting all fatherly over. And where’s he? In some hotel somewhere while you do the legwork, trying to teach me some kind of lesson? Staying with Pietro?’

  ‘What? No, no,’ Giuli had replied urgently, forgetting herself, looking round to see if anyone would have heard. The street was empty for the moment. ‘He’s gone down to the Maremma, on a new job. Really.’ She’d paused, listening to the silence. ‘Luisa?’

  ‘All right,’ Luisa had said wearily, and Giuli had felt a prickle of anxiety at the defeat in her voice when she’d continued. ‘So you’re not going to tell me.’

  ‘OK,’ Giuli had said, ‘I’ve told you the truth, he’s down in the Maremma.’ No response from Luisa. ‘Look, he said, he was – upset, yes. About you going away, not telling him till it was too late. He’s worried he’s going to lose you.’ Should she even mention Frollini, the old lizard? She’d decided not to.

  ‘He’s an idiot. Lose me? I should think he is worried, behaving like this.’

  Her voice had been ragged with anger; Giuli had tried to work out what it meant. Even though she’d steered clear of men since rehab, she knew well enough what it was like when a relationship ended. Things you might have accepted for years suddenly you couldn’t tolerate any more, and there was no going back. You let yourself hate someone, and it’s finished.

  She’d taken a step into the street, looking out over the frosted city, the black skeletons of trees in the villa’s garden motionless in the icy, windless night. Luisa was down there, alone in the cold flat with her suitcases and her plane ticket.

  ‘When do you leave?’ she’d asked, cautiously. ‘Monday morning, is it?’

  ‘He’s told you all about it, has he? It’s a business trip; someone dropped out. It’s a big opportunity.’

  Had there been a splinter of defensiveness there?

  ‘I’ll come over tomorrow,’ Giuli had said. Silence again. ‘Please?’

  ‘I’ll be busy. Packing.’

  ‘I’ll help.’ And this time she had to take Luisa’s silence as agreement. ‘I’ll come at eleven. I’ll bring pasticcini.’

  Pasticcini, the little cakes you brought when you visited your loved ones on a Sunday. Giuli had spent a few months in a halfway house after she’d been let out of psychiatric hospital. And every Sunday morning she’d call in on Luisa and Sandro – this odd couple who were better parents to her than her real ones had ever been – but only after stopping at the pasticceria in the Viale Europa.

  It had been a shameless, sentimental appeal on Giuli’s part, but it might have won her a chance to talk over this stupid business. Luisa’s response had been to let out a sound of exasperation, one Giuli had had no choice but to take as assent.

  ‘Luisa?’ But she’d hung up.

  Now, after close to an hour inside, Giuli still hadn’t spotted Carlotta, and she was starving. There was a dining room with a long table laid out with stacks of takeaway pizza boxes, and she pulled herself off a couple of slices. There were two crates of beer and some half-full bottles of champagne warming on the table; a couple was lying under it, kissing. She moved back into the room with the leather sofas where the man who ran the nightclub now had a girl thirty years younger than him nestling under his arm. Who cleared all this stuff up, in time for the old man’s return?

  When a burst of laughter followed her as she passed a little group sitting cross-legged and rolling joints behind a sofa, Giuli decided it was time to lower her profile. She went outside, into the garden.

  Behind her someone put some music on, loud R&B, and the lights went out; for a paranoid moment Giuli wondered if they’d been waiting for her to leave. She moved away from the noise to the end of one wing of the big house and stood there and let her eyes adjust. It was dark, but the garden was not quite empty – she could hear murmured voices, some way off. There was a sloping lawn, with flowerbeds and a big, closely trimmed hedge beyond it. Giuli listened. Got out the dope, some papers, broke up one of her cheap state cigarettes into dry tobacco and began to roll a joint. Not for her; this was camouflage, or perhaps a lure. It felt strange, though, going through the motions after all this time. Not good.

  Someone appeared beside her, and she handed the joint to him; it was the boy who’d let her in.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he said with mild interest as he lit up. She weighed him up in the dark.

  ‘No,’ she said kindly.

  ‘Didn’t think so,’ he said, dragging deeply, and despite herself Giuli sighed. ‘What?’ the boy asked sleepily.

  ‘You ever tell yourself you’re going to give it up?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’ He straightened up, uncertain as to whether she was going to call his parents, or something. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t mind me.’ He’d think he dreamt her, in the morning. She hesitated. ‘You seen Alberto or Carlotta anywhere?’ By the glow of the cigarette’s tip, she saw his lazy eyes examining her without curiosity, nose wrinkling at the taste of the cheap tobacco; perhaps he wasn’t one of her kind, after all. He nodded across the sloping lawn, then turned away, bac
k towards the music.

  For a while, Giuli didn’t move, then she walked calmly in a diagonal across the grass, between flowerbeds, to an arched gap in the hedge. There was a light source somewhere, discreet, bluish, low down among the greenery; she heard people talking somewhere off to her left, in murmured voices. She edged closer. ‘Berto,’ she heard a voice whisper. Was that Carlotta? When the boy spoke she thought it was him, for sure.

  ‘Come here,’ he said hoarsely.

  The conversation wasn’t exactly a conversation. Pet names, laughter, mumbled kissing. Then the girl said petulantly, ‘What about next week?’

  Then they were making an arrangement to meet. ‘Not this week, don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It’s too much. Look at this lot; no chance of being alone.’ He sounded sulky, eager, tender. Perhaps he was serious about her, after all. ‘And besides, the old man – I don’t know what his plans are now. Something’s happened down there, that’s why he’s away tonight. He said there’d been an accident.’

  ‘An accident?’ She sounded querulous, haughty. ‘What kind of accident?’

  Her voice wasn’t right, thought Giuli as Alberto mumbled a response, ‘Dunno, cara. Nothing to do with him, anyway,’ and then they moved and the girl was in view, and it wasn’t Carlotta. Alberto had his face in her neck and she was pulling away, looking down her long nose between wings of straight blonde hair.

  An accident.

  Giuli took a step back, trying to think, suddenly not wanting to be a witness, looking back through the arch towards the bright windows of the villa and thinking, Carlotta mustn’t see this. Then there was Carlotta, walking towards her. Towards them.

  Giuli’s first impulse was to deflect the girl, moving towards her with hands outstretched and a smile fixed on her face, although what she thought she was going to say she didn’t know. Then she took in Carlotta’s stiff-legged walk, her clenched fists, and, as she came closer and Giuli saw the gleam of tears as the other girl brushed past without even registering her, she thought, Well, she knows. Too late. Giuli stood aside, and behind her all hell broke loose.

  Didn’t she have to find out at some point that Alberto wasn’t her sort? Wasn’t it better this way? But Giuli knew it never felt better at the time, and she could hear the tears in Carlotta’s voice as she raged. She backed into the shadows, turned and ran inside. As she did so, someone flung open a window at all the noise – they really were like cats squalling – and hooted derisively.

  It wasn’t heaven in the house, after all. As Giuli slipped unnoticed past the leather sofas and the champagne and the handsome young people watching themselves in every reflective surface, she could only see the pieces of congealing pizza stuck to their boxes and a cigarette burn in the cream carpet. She picked her way back through the rooms, out of the side door to the gate where she’d got in, and waited.

  It took forty minutes, but Carlotta came, in the end, hair flying, eyes streaked, jacket ripped, banging the gate behind her. She looked as if she’d given as good as she got.

  Giuli set off after the pink Vespa at a discreet distance, although perhaps not discreet enough; waiting at a light apparently stuck at red on the Via Senese, Carlotta turned and looked at Giuli over her shoulder, as if in acknowledgement, and something like recognition dawned in her eyes. For a long moment they held each other’s gaze. They were level with a shabby all-night bar Giuli knew, its original, silvered sign from the thirties still in place. Old men were standing at the counter, talking sociably, and the glow from the place suddenly looked welcoming.

  The light stayed red. Carlotta’s head turned to follow Giuli’s gaze. Giuli set down her feet and pulled off her helmet.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Carlotta.

  ‘Fancy a coffee?’ asked Giuli.

  They sat drinking warm milk, Carlotta fiddling with a damp tissue and blurting out her misery. Giuli set her mission aside to start with, patting the girl gingerly on the shoulder, telling her she was better off out of it, which was true. Carlotta was happy enough to tell her what she knew about Alberto’s father, although she did give Giuli a faintly puzzled glance when she got out a notebook.

  ‘You investigating him, or something?’ She sniffed, blew her nose, looked better. Looked curious.

  ‘Something,’ said Giuli. And they both smiled.

  By the time they got back to Galluzzo and Giuli saw the girl safely inside, a few flakes of snow were beginning to fall, almost invisibly. Giuli sat a while outside the house texting Sandro, rubbing her fingers inside her leather gauntlets as they stiffened and turned numb. She saw a light go on inside the house and another, then the sound of voices. You’ll survive, she thought.

  If he’d known how little time he’d have to size up his suspects at their first meeting, Sandro might have taken notes. But things didn’t always go to plan, notes could be misleading, and sometimes that initial glimpse was all you needed. That, at least, was what he told himself.

  Sandro’s phone had chirruped at him as he stepped off the broad stone staircase and into the great cavernous hall. There had been a murmur of voices through the archway where the piano had been played, congratulations being offered; Sandro thought he could distinguish Luca Gallo’s voice among them, strained and hearty.

  He stopped, thinking how cold it was in this great monster of a building. Opposite the wide-arched entrance to the music room, the vast studded door was closed tight; at the far end of the hall was another, smaller door, and it annoyed him that he didn’t know where it led, yet.

  Already Sandro hated this place; it was a labyrinth, uncomfortably huge, with its secret doors and mysterious, icy currents of air, and lightless as a dungeon, full of ghosts. But it wasn’t just the building – it was everything. He was uncomfortable, out of place; too far from home. From the wide green river, the basin of the city filled with red roofs and narrow streets full of people and suspended above it all the big marble and terracotta ship of the Duomo. Dome-sickness, the Florentines called it, or someone had called it anyway. Ghirlandaio? He’d been right, whoever he was; nowhere else was civilized, least of all the barren hills and once-malarial swamps and brutish castles of the Maremma.

  Loni Meadows had tried to fit out her boudoir up there, with silk and cushions, but it was a great stone prison still, and it had got her in the end.

  Staring down at his phone Sandro had felt as grumpy as a teenager. New message, read now? But as he clicked to open it he heard the sounds of group movement and looked up. Hastily he put the phone away.

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Luca Gallo was saying, his hands held up. His back was to Sandro, standing in the wide doorway to the music room as if attempting to block it. Over his shoulder Sandro could see faces. A stocky woman had her mouth open ready to talk back; her blonde hair was loose and greying, and her big, ravaged features might once have been handsome. Michelle Connor: he ticked her off mentally. Standing some way off on the far side of the room, one hand on the piano, with a haughty look of discomfort on his face, was Niccolò Orfeo. Distancing himself from the mob.

  They did indeed seem a bit like a mob; the only question was, who was to be strung up?

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Michelle Connor sarcastically, and even though she was talking to Luca, she was looking straight at Sandro; ‘but we don’t buy this, no way.’

  Gallo moved his head a fraction in Sandro’s direction, pleading out of a corner of his eye, and Sandro took his cue, stepping forward.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, shoulder to shoulder with Luca Gallo in the doorway; he heard Luca breathe out quietly. ‘I’m Sandro Cellini.’ He held out a hand to the woman, who ignored it.

  ‘We know what you are,’ she said disdainfully.

  ‘You do?’ He spoke mildly, head on one side, and felt an uneasy shifting among the others. He reminded himself that these northerners had a different attitude to courtesy; they didn’t understand it. Their rudeness didn’t always mean hostility – although in this woman’s case, he thought probably it did. All the same,
nothing was going to provoke him. ‘And?’ He lowered his hand with an air of disappointment.

  ‘Come on,’ said an English voice – very English, apologetic and uncomfortable – and as the owner of the voice made to move past him, Sandro took in a thin face, deep-set eyes, close-cropped hair: this was the one, the one he had been looking for. You, he thought, you were in London with Loni Meadows twenty-five years ago. How beautiful she would have been then, those cold bright blue eyes. Had Alec Fairhead been handsome too?

  He looked like a monk now; he held out a hand, and when Sandro took it it felt to be all bones, and cold to the touch. ‘I’m Alexander Fairhead,’ he said. I know who you are, thought Sandro, but now he had the man in front of him, he wasn’t so sure. Behind Fairhead the little crowd fell back a fraction, loosening as it did so.

  Sandro nodded, matching the face to the name he’d glanced at on the screen, on Giuli’s chart plotting this handful of people’s lives.

  ‘I think I saw you earlier,’ he said. ‘Out for a walk.’ And he thought the man flushed.

  Whose idea had it been, that walk? Had they been looking for something too? And now the snow had come, covering the scene.

  ‘Will you all come on,’ said the fierce, stocky woman, pushing past Sandro; he felt the warm, powerful bulk of her displace him, and involuntarily ceded ground to her. ‘I’m going to get the place ready.’ She peered aggressively back inside. ‘Tina?’