A Murder in Tuscany

by Christobel Kent

  ‘This is Michelle Connor,’ said Luca valiantly, as she ignored him. ‘A wonderful poet. And Tina Kreutz, our sculptor.’

  Tina Kreutz was a thin woman, girl he’d have said from a distance, who now threaded her way out from the music room, bobbing her head.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said kindly and Tina pulled her head back.

  ‘Are you really here about the accident?’ she said, her voice not much more than a frightened whisper. ‘About Loni?’

  ‘Please don’t worry,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘I plan to talk to everyone. Just a chat.’

  As if that would reassure her. She was scared of something all right, but then she looked like it wouldn’t take much. An abused child? A battered wife? That was what Tina Kreutz looked like to him, one of those girls in a shelter, afraid of their own shadow, who would put a chair against the door every night and hide kitchen knives to defend themselves, only to end up cutting their own throats with them. Connor put out a protective arm and the girl leaned into her, and Sandro wondered which of them needed the other more.

  ‘Well, I’ll hope to catch up with you tomorrow then,’ said Sandro, conceding defeat; the pair of them made him feel like an abuser. Michelle Connor made a sound of derision, and the women disappeared out through the heavy door, letting in that unmistakable new smell, a gust of cold, wet air and a brief glimpse of flakes whirling under a light.

  Their disappearance seemed to signal a kind of surge, and others pushed out through the arched doorway, Luca stepping back wearily to let them past. ‘There’s food in the dining room, as usual,’ he threw out as a last-ditch attempt to maintain control, or a semblance of normality at least. Sandro saw that the man was close to despair, and put a hand on his arm.

  ‘I’m sure we can all talk tomorrow,’ he said, addressing the little group but keeping his hand on Luca Gallo. He felt the man’s arm stiffen in rejection.

  They looked back at him. The Englishman, seeming on the edge of a kind of hysteria; a strongly built Scandinavian type who had to be Per Hansen, swaying slightly with drink, bushy fair eyebrows and a pretty, dark woman sticking like glue to his side. His wife? And from waist-height the clearly intelligent, penetrating gaze of the man in his wheelchair, demanded that he look down: Tiziano Scarpa, the producer of the extraordinary sound that had ushered Sandro across the threshold of the Castello Orfeo.

  It came to Sandro that a man who could make that music would have no need of any other outlet. All anger, all fear, all love could be rolled up in that sound; could such a man commit murder?

  ‘That was you, playing?’ he said humbly. Scarpa gave a faint smile, and inclined his head in a parody of modest acknowledgement.

  ‘Me,’ he said lightly.

  ‘I’m sure you’re just doing your job,’ said Fairhead awkwardly. ‘We don’t mean – ’

  But Tiziano Scarpa interrupted him. ‘Come on,’ he said, spinning the chair with ease. ‘Let’s make our apologies to La Giottone. Michelle will have our balls if we keep her waiting.’

  As he spun away Sandro saw the muscles in his back move under his shirt, saw the powerful forearms flex and extend, saw the callouses on the balls of his thumbs, the worn patches on the strap arrangement over his wrists. Even without the use of his legs, there wouldn’t be much Tiziano Scarpa would allow to defeat him. And they moved off, not out through the main door but through the smaller exit Sandro had wondered about earlier and which, to judge from the cooking smells that issued distantly through it, led to the dining room.

  Luca Gallo made a distracted movement to follow but Sandro shook his head. ‘Let them go,’ he said, speaking with relief in his own language. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it was my house, would you?’ The bullying, aristocratic voice of Niccolò Orfeo broke in on them and Sandro felt his jaw clench; bullying, but also rather too insistent. ‘Might I be introduced, do you think?’

  His eyes dull with tiredness, Gallo straightened. ‘Sandro Cellini, this is Count Orfeo. Count – ’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the man rudely, raising a large, ringed hand to wave him away. No wonder the son was a spoilt little pig.

  ‘Un piacere,’ said Sandro, his hand out.

  Orfeo ignored it. ‘Shall we go into the library? I need a drink, after that display.’ And the man was already walking away from them into the next room. It was colder in here, and an elaborate heavy chandelier shed a gloomier light; a small fire had been laid in the vast stone fireplace but it wasn’t doing much more than smouldering.

  Without offering Sandro or Luca Gallo anything, Orfeo poured himself a drink from a selection of bottles on a tray. Campari, sweet vermouth, whisky. As he watched him, the only thing that prevented Sandro from being openly rude was that the Count might in fact be quite close to getting the arrogant smile wiped off his face. Did he need to wait for his suspicions to be confirmed by Giuli? Eventually Orfeo turned to face him.

  ‘I imagine that you understand why I am here?’ Sandro kept his voice respectful.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Orfeo with an airiness that wasn’t entirely convincing, and Sandro felt a stir of satisfaction. ‘That ghastly husband of hers, Luca tells me. I suppose he wants to have the last word. Perhaps he would like to sue me, because his wife drove dangerously. A very unpleasant little man, you know. ’ He tipped the glass back and half-emptied it.

  Sandro regarded him levelly. ‘Avvocato Mascarello, you mean? Well, I suppose one doesn’t get to be so powerful without making some enemies.’

  ‘Powerful?’ Niccolò Orfeo wrinkled his nose in theatrical dismissal. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. He has some rather unsavoury connections, I know that.’

  Sandro, who felt a sudden surge of admiration for Giuliano Mascarello, just smiled.

  ‘And where is the damned food?’ said Orfeo disagreeably. ‘Everything seems to have gone to ruin.’ He drained his glass and Luca Gallo quickly refilled it.

  ‘Will you be – returning to Florence tonight?’ asked Sandro mildly, eyeing the dark oily liquid.

  ‘You mean, am I intending to drive? Well, it would be none of your business if I were.’ He looked at Gallo. ‘I’ll be sleeping on the piano nobile.’

  Loni Meadows’s room. Luca Gallo looked from Orfeo to Sandro and back, panic in his eyes. ‘Well – I – I’m not sure – ’

  ‘I don’t mind a little untidiness,’ said Orfeo dismissively. ‘Just have the bed made up.’

  Luca Gallo closed his mouth. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I know your game, thought Sandro. Orfeo was looking at him as if defying him to argue, to say something about evidence or investigations, and Sandro was looking straight back, as if to say, you might have Commissario Grasso bowing and scraping and not dreaming of trespassing on your privacy by taking a step into Loni Meadows’s bedroom, but I’m not Grasso. But before a word was spoken Sandro’s phone chirruped again and Orfeo’s look of contempt hardened.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Sandro, taking the phone out. Knowing how rude Orfeo would consider it. He looked down.

  Two new messages. The first from Mascarello, short and to the point. Call me before 8.30. The phone said 8.38. He looked up, calculating, to see Orfeo watching him. A quick smile to acknowledge that he knew how disrespectful he was being and did not care, then Sandro looked back down again. The second message was from Giuli, and equally typical of its sender. All over the place, gabby, eager.

  Dad has girlfriend somewhere down that way. Carlotta says party tonight because he was called away suddenly tonight accident, better call later maybe. All fine Carlotta fine, home safe.

  OK. Sandro looked up and saw the wariness in Orfeo’s face, returned it with a broad smile.

  ‘Look, I’m so sorry,’ he said with elaborately false courtesy, ‘but I have a message to call the Avvocato. And as he is my employer, to me at least he is powerful.’

  Orfeo frowned down at the mobile Sandro held up, as though it reminded him now of something faintly disturbing. Sandro pu
t it away. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘if you will excuse me?’

  As though galvanized by the lawyer’s name, Luca was suddenly at Orfeo’s side. ‘Yes, that would be fine,’ he said, and Sandro heard the relief in his voice. ‘We’ll – ah – ’, he looked at the door through which the guests had disappeared, then went on nervously, ‘we’ll just let the guests – we’ll let them – ’, he took a breath, ’ – In a moment or so we shall make our way to the dining room.’ And to Sandro, with a look that pleaded for understanding, ‘In your own time, then?’

  In the music room Sandro paused, reached again for his mobile, checking for a signal, then looked back over his shoulder into the dim cold cavernous library.

  ‘Another aperitivo?’ Gallo was saying, as Orfeo pulled his arm rudely away to look back over his shoulder at Sandro, standing there by the piano with his phone poised in his hand.

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ he heard Orfeo mutter, ‘the blasted phone. Didn’t I tell you? You were supposed to – ’ and turned abruptly back, so that whatever else he said was swallowed up.

  Sandro stood a moment, thinking; staring at the blinking mobile screen that told him no signal. Thinking about what Orfeo had just said.

  He took the stairs three at a bound. Closed the door behind him and crossed to the long window, knitting his brow as he stared at his own phone, still thinking. He heard a tiny sound from outside and looked up from the phone and out of the still unshuttered window to where a figure below him paced up and down on the half-circle of drive.

  Here there was a signal. He dialled Mascarello’s number; it rang. And rang. Damn, he thought, nearly nine. Giuliano Mascarello, he guessed, had a thing about time-keeping. Just as he was about to give up, a woman’s voice answered brusquely, ‘Yes?’

  He asked for Mascarello. In the background he thought he could hear something, a mechanical hissing, hushed voices. ‘Avvocato Mascarello is undergoing his dialysis treatment,’ said the woman’s voice coldly.

  ‘Ah – he called me,’ said Sandro humbly. ‘Sandro Cellini.’

  Muffled voices, and when she came back on the line the woman’s tone was fractionally less chilly. ‘Call again at ten,’ she said, and hung up.

  All right, thought Sandro, looking down at the lit semicircle of snowy gravel below him. Get things straight. There’s the sender of the email, and there’s Orfeo. Orfeo her lover, whom she was going to meet. Only he was in Florence.

  The figure below stopped, tilted her face and he saw her profile. It was Caterina, shoulders hunched in the cold as she traced and retraced her steps across the ground, and for some reason the sight of her made him feel better. Putting his face to the glass Sandro could hear the crunch of her feet in the snow and the sound of her voice, speaking urgently into her own telefonino. And then she looked up, and Sandro stepped away from the window.

  Orfeo. Is he guilty of something? Yes.

  He took a moment, before going down again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE PHONE HAD RUNG long and hollow on the other side of the world, Westport, Connecticut. Cate, leaning against the stove in the hot kitchen with Nicki eyeing her nervously from the door into the dining room, imagined a great white clapboard house like the ones on TV, with a lawn, gleaming boards in a spacious hall, but the longer it rang the more she quailed at the thought of breaking the news to Beth, and when the voice answered, breezy and confident, for a moment she thought with relief, wrong number. Because it sounded nothing like querulous, unhappy Beth who had moped around the corridors and had a constant migraine.

  But it was her. ‘Speaking,’ Beth sang, when Cate asked for her by name, apologetically, ready to hang up.

  ‘It’s Caterina? From the Castello Orfeo? From the Trust.’ The snow had eased, only a few dusty flakes whirling down now, but the cold almost took her breath away, and the beautiful, silent whiteness of it all. The trees seemed closer, denser, layered with snow and motionless. Over her head the white was beginning to settle in the crevices of the massive façade.

  ‘Oh.’ Bemused, and a little flat now, Beth was wary. ‘Caterina. Hey. How’re you guys doing?’

  ‘Beth, um, OK – listen.’ And now Cate found she didn’t know quite how to say it; thought of how she would sound over there, in the bright American day, in the great white house she imagined, with its green sloping lawn. ‘There’s um – there’s some bad news.’

  As she went on, Cate heard Beth swallow, then heard a ragged, incoherent sob and she imagined all that American bright peace fractured. ‘Loni. Who – how did – ’ Beth stopped, seemed to collect herself. ‘You said it was an accident?’ Now she sounded disbelieving. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cate slowly. ‘In her car. Why do you ask that? Beth?’

  ‘She always drove too fast,’ said Beth uncertainly, and Cate blinked, hearing the words she’d repeated to herself when Luca had told them, hearing the tears in the girl’s voice.

  ‘She did, you’re right. That’s just what I said.’ But even as she spoke Cate thought with dull fear that she didn’t believe it.

  And as if to confirm her thought Beth said, ‘They’re sure, are they?’ Sounding just like the timid, nervous Beth the castle had made of her.

  Cate spoke carefully. ‘Listen to me, Beth. Do you think anyone might have wanted to – hurt her?’

  ‘Hurt her?’ And Beth let out a small, sad, bitter little laugh. ‘She wasn’t afraid of making people angry, was she? Even the ones who loved her. Especially them.’

  Cate was silent a moment. ‘The ones that loved her. Like – um – like who?’

  ‘I know what you’re trying to get at,’ Beth burst out. ‘Like who? OK, like me. She knew I was – she knew I was gay. She messed me around. That’s why I left, OK? That’s why. She let me fall in love with her. She had me up in her room, on her bed, sitting in her bed, gossiping while she got dressed, telling me stuff. Intimate stuff. Letting me think – ’

  ‘No, Beth,’ said Cate urgently, ‘I didn’t want to – to pry, that’s not what I meant. I know this is nothing to do with you.’

  There was a hoarse sob and then silence, and Cate heard the mother’s voice, whispering, anxious. Cate heard Beth collect herself. ‘Five minutes, Mom, OK?’

  Cate waited a full minute before beginning again.

  ‘There’s a private investigator here,’ she said, trying to sound reasonable and logical and comforting this time. ‘Seems like a good guy.’ It was her turn to hesitate, then she spoke slowly. ‘Loni’s husband doesn’t want to believe it was an accident.’

  She didn’t die immediately, you know. For a perverse moment Cate wanted to share this awful fact with Beth, to tell her how bitter the cold had been that night, tell her about the green silk blouse on the floor of Loni’s bedroom, but she stopped herself.

  Instead she asked again, calmly, gently, ‘Is there anything – or anyone – you know about that might help him? In the investigation?’

  ‘Anyone,’ repeated Beth, sounding traumatized.

  ‘Beth,’ said Cate, ‘Per had written to his wife telling her he wanted a divorce, because he’d fallen in love with another woman. What other woman could it be? You? Me? Tina Kreutz?’

  ‘Per?’ Beth was blankly incredulous. ‘No way. I mean, she did her thing with him. Flirted – ’ She broke off, and when she spoke again it was with dull understanding. ‘Well, I guess she might have done the same job on him as she did on me. Kind of – led him on.’

  ‘Only Per wouldn’t take no for an answer?’

  A sharp intake of breath. ‘You think he – you seriously think Per would hurt her?’

  ‘No,’ said Cate without stopping to think. ‘Yes. Well, in the heat of the moment, maybe. But this wasn’t – ’

  Unless he was in the car with her? Cate didn’t believe that. Even if Fairhead hadn’t heard him come up to bed, if Per had left the castle with her, if he’d struck her, wrestled with her, driven them into a tree – the whole scenario unspooled itself, horribly vi
vid. But he wouldn’t have left her to die there, in the dark. He would have wept, tried to resuscitate her. Called an ambulance, given himself up to the police. He wouldn’t have let her die.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he would.’ There was a silence. ‘So he wasn’t actually her lover, as far as you know?’ Another silence. ‘Those nights when she left the castle late at night, that wasn’t with Per? When she took the car and went into Pozzo?’

  ‘Oh.’ Beth spoke warily now. ‘So you knew about that.’

  ‘Everyone knew,’ said Cate apologetically. ‘Even Mauro knew. Though, I don’t think he knew who she was going to.’

  Beth spoke. ‘She told me I was the only one. I mustn’t tell a soul.’ A pause, then thoughtfully. ‘She told me about all her lovers. Bet Mauro didn’t know about the English guy, either, did he?’

  Cate stopped stock still. ‘English guy? Alec Fairhead?’

  ‘Loni said when he turned up with Mauro at the beginning of the retreat, last to arrive, she could see it all over his face. That he hadn’t forgotten her, whatever he might say.’

  ‘Forgotten her?’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Beth. ‘Years. She was – triumphant about it. He wrote that book about her, so she said, his only book was about her. About them. And when he turned up she said he hadn’t seen her in years, but he still wanted her.’

  Did he? Had he? Cate tried to process this, tried to stop herself actually hating Loni Meadows. ‘He did say he’d known her, way back,’ she said slowly. ‘When – when we got the news. When we heard she was dead.’

  Alec Fairhead’s haunted face, in the library. Cate took an involuntary step back from the great stone wall of the castle and paced across to the trees, arms wrapped tight around herself against the cold, to the beginning of the rough road that sloped past the laundry to Michelle’s. ‘Yeah,’ said Beth, ‘well, at least he admitted it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Cate realized that she didn’t want Alec Fairhead to be a bad guy. ‘You don’t think she – started it up again?’