It was only at the back door, the kitchen dark behind them, floor mopped and every appliance switched off and unplugged, that they remembered the snow and had to spend another five minutes searching through the assortment of boots and coats in the cupboard for something that would stand up to a one-and-a-half-kilometre walk in these conditions. And back again, for Cate.
That thought only just seemed to have occurred to Nicki as she watched Cate struggle into a pair of damp rubber boots a half size too small. ‘Is this OK?’ she asked fearfully. Cate straightened on the doorstep, about to reassure the girl, and then a sound came from behind her, under the trees and they both stopped still, a whimper dying on Nicki’s lips.
‘Ladies?’ The voice was gruff and apologetic, and even though she’d only heard it fleetingly before, Cate knew immediately it was Sandro Cellini. She grasped Nicki’s hand reassuringly, and turned. He stepped out from under the trees.
‘So this is where you were hiding,’ he said. ‘This place is a nightmare to find your way around. Or perhaps it’s the snow. Everything looks different in the snow.’
‘I was about to walk Nicki home,’ said Cate, willing him to understand. ‘I’d – um, I’d like a word, though.’
‘Walk her?’ He frowned incredulously. ‘In this? Is it far?’
Cate nodded down the hill. ‘One and a half kilometres, maybe.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said immediately.
Nicki’s hand still in hers, with impatience Cate felt her tense. Frightened of her own shadow; what could be wrong with getting a lift?
‘What about the snow?’ said Nicki. ‘Have you got chains?’
Sandro took a few steps away from them, looking down the slope with his hands in the pockets of his padded jacket. Old, worn, one cuff frayed, it reminded Cate of the one her stepfather wore. Why was she always so hard on her poor old stepfather, Cate found herself thinking, remorseful. A better dad than her biological one ever was.
‘We’ll be fine,’ Sandro pronounced. ‘It’s not as cold as it was; the snow won’t have settled. And it’s not far.’
Nicki said nothing, but Cate could feel her shivering a little. ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘He’s right.’ The girl shrugged, and Cate turned to Sandro and said, ‘Thanks.’
But when he walked away towards the little brown car Nicki said sullenly, ‘I wanted it to be just you and me.’
Cate looked at her. ‘It’s been you and me all evening,’ she said, not understanding.
‘Oh, never mind,’ said Nicki, and clamped her mouth shut. Cate still didn’t understand. Sandro drew up beside them and, without asking, Nicki climbed in the back, the kid in this set-up. ‘Cate’s coming too,’ she announced, without thinking to ask if she might.
Settling herself in the front seat, Cate realized that she’d never spent so little time in a car as she had these past six months. Suddenly the world was different, in the metal cage of the car, the cold white world reduced to what they could see through the windscreen. Insulated, safe, mobile. No wonder Loni Meadows had claimed the Monster as her own.
Sandro engaged the gears and the car crept forward on the snow-covered drive. The road began to slope and still the tyres held firm on the dark, unmade surface. Overhead the cloud shifted and separated and the slice of moon slid out, silver-bright, shedding its pale light on the smooth white hills. As they came to the foot of the hill, the dark shape of the farm’s roof appeared over the curve of the slope.
‘Someone’s still up,’ said Cate, turning to look at Nicki. She sat there, white-faced, like a rabbit frozen in the headlights. Nodded stiffly.
They reached the two squat pillars that marked the end of the drive and turned on to the snow-covered tarmac. Sandro Cellini was moving slowly but not quite slowly enough, and Cate felt the car’s rear end slew as he turned, a queasy, sickening motion; it slid further. And just at the moment of panic Cate felt something soothe her, some steady emanation of calm and certainty; she saw Cellini’s broad, weathered hands tighten on the wheel but he gave no other sign that there was any danger. With infinite slowness, infinite care, he changed down, only one hand on the wheel now, and then, at last, the car seemed to straighten and steady and they crept forward.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Sandro, not turning his head. ‘Not far now, is it?’
And it wasn’t, perhaps eight minutes to cover just over a kilometre, because they crawled along at a snail’s pace, even if it felt like an hour. It wasn’t till they got to the broken-down gate across the farmyard entrance and Cate climbed out to open it that she wondered how they were going to get back up.
But it turned out that Sandro Cellini had chains in the back all along. ‘Should have put them on up there,’ he said apologetically as he opened the boot. Nicki had climbed out too and they were standing in front of him; Cate’s legs felt like jelly. ‘It’s just, I’m a city boy. And a lazy sod.’ He pulled a rusting, clanking mass out of a plastic case, and at the sound a dog began to bark somewhere on the other side of the building, then another, and another. They barked in tireless volleys, taking over from each other in a kind of round; Cate looked up at the house, expecting lights to come on, but the blind windows stayed dark.
‘They won’t shut up for hours now,’ said Nicki, with grim pride, shoulders hunched. Cate put an arm through hers.
‘Sorry,’ said Sandro. ‘Won’t take a minute.’ He knelt at a back wheel.
The farmyard was dark and untidy, nameless shapes under tarpaulins, a strong, ammoniac smell of cattle urine, and whatever light had been on upstairs was off. It was cold and wet, but Sandro had been right, not as cold as before, not much above freezing. Nothing like as cold as the night of Loni Meadows’s death. An unprecedented low, it had said on the news on Thursday morning; she only just remembered that. They’d been listening on the kitchen radio.
The dogs barked on. ‘They’d drive me crazy,’ said Cate.
‘Sometimes I think it’s just me and them,’ said Nicki. ‘They’re all right.’
Cate thought of something. ‘Tiziano comes to visit them, doesn’t he?’
‘Does he?’ said Nicki. ‘Must be a hell of a slog across the gravel.’
It must be; Cate had watched him negotiate it that afternoon, jaw set, biceps flexing. ‘He doesn’t let things stand in his way,’ she said. ‘And he likes animals. I suppose dogs don’t discriminate.’ Nicki was silent, and something Per had said came back to Cate, something he’d said up there in his room as they watched Yolanda Hansen’s red car approach the castle. We don’t know Tiziano.
At the door Cate said in a reluctant whisper, ‘Shall I come in with you?’ She’d been down here a handful of times by daylight, when the place was scruffy but ordinary; she found that in the dark, what with the formless obstacles littering the barnyard, the brainless hostility of the dogs, the sharp stink of muck, it was a scene she wanted to escape from as soon as possible. Nicki shook her head stiffly, then flung her arms around Cate.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and Cate could feel Nicki’s hot breath in her hair.
‘What for?’ said Cate, pulling back.
‘Dunno,’ said Nicki. ‘Everything. Seeing me home. Telling me I should get out of here. It made me realize – it seems impossible, you feel like you’re stuck forever. But there’s always a way.’
Cate looked at her white, earnest face, then back at the car. Sandro Cellini was still on his knees somewhere in the dark, out of sight.
‘How bad is it, Nicki?’ She looked up at the crumbling frontage of the old farm, thought of its inhabitants, Ginevra, her widowed sister, Mauro, cooped up in this place for generations. Damp and dark in the winter, baking in the long dry summers, but it was home. Unthinkable to leave. Dangerous to turn a man out of his home.
And just as though she’d read Cate’s mind, Nicki said hurriedly, craning her neck to try and see where Sandro was, ‘Look, what we said – I don’t think Mauro – did anything to her, though. To the Dottoressa? Do you? I mean – I know
he’s got the pick-up, and he knows the road, and all that. And he was out that day.’ She’d been thinking about this, Cate could tell. ‘But I don’t think he’s clever enough. Even sober.’
‘No,’ said Cate slowly, marvelling at how daft Nicki could sometimes seem, and then say something like that. But she had to say it, unwillingly. ‘But we don’t know – it might not have required anyone to be clever.’ She kept her voice low.
He might have just – run her off the road, was what she didn’t say. Chased her in his pick-up. Per couldn’t have watched her die – but Mauro? She could see Nicki shivering, arms folded tight across her body. Cate put out her own hands and rubbed the girl’s shoulders vigorously. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Now get inside, you’ll die of cold out here.’
Nicki didn’t move. ‘Not Mauro,’ she said, sounding like a stubborn child, knowing she was wrong but refusing to admit it. She took Cate by the sleeve, her thin fingers pinching through the fabric. ‘You be careful,’ she muttered, pulling her down and closer. Sounding frightened. ‘You just be careful.’
Then she ducked away abruptly, the door banged sharply behind her and Cate turned to see Sandro Cellini standing in the moonlight no more than a metre away.
‘Ready when you are,’ he said in the gruffly apologetic tone Cate was getting used to. She climbed in.
‘Now,’ he said, engaging the gear and leaning to look back over his shoulder as he reversed carefully out of the farmyard. ‘Was there something you wanted to tell me?’
Sandro watched Caterina go, as composed and calm when she got out of the car as when she got in. It had been a slow crawl back up the hill, the tyres grinding and crunching as the chains gripped, but an interesting one.
The twenty minutes the journey had taken had not in fact been enough; they’d sat side by side in the car after he’d turned off the engine and gone on talking.
Outside the snow had been beginning to drift down again; he had seen it settle on the roof of the stable block that housed the kitchen. A light on above it; Luca Gallo’s office, she’d said, and his room and bathroom; her own little apartment was accommodated further round in the same block. Servants’ quarters.
He’d listened to what she’d had to say, slotting it in alongside the information he already had.
Orfeo was what she’d wanted to tell him about first. That he had been Loni Meadows’s lover; ever circumspect, Sandro didn’t tell her he already knew, because there might be more. And there was. ‘She used to go and meet him. At the Hotel Liberty.’ Even in the dark he’d seen her blush. ‘My boyfriend knows someone who works there.’
‘So you’d have assumed that was where she was going?’ Wide-eyed, she’d shrugged.
‘Now? I guess. I didn’t know before. I think the others did.’
‘Guests, or staff?’
‘Both,’ she’d murmured. ‘Except – not Per.’
And that was a new piece of information. Per Hansen, whom Loni Meadows had charmed and flirted with until he fell in love with her and wanted to leave his wife.
‘And this man – was the last man to see her alive?’ His meaning had been unmistakable. The man he’d seen clinging to his wife like a lifebuoy.
She’d stared at him. Nodded slowly. ‘She got a message, Alec said. Just as they were leaving the table, and then she didn’t have any time for either of them. Alec went to bed. But – ’
‘But what?’
‘He couldn’t have – Per couldn’t have – ’and she’d stopped. She was clever enough to know there were things she didn’t know. ‘He’s a good man.’
‘Do you think he knew her,’ he’d asked gently. ‘Before he came here? Per?’
She’d shaken her head, bemused. ‘No. Why?’
‘And what about the others?’ he’d prompted. ‘The women? Did they – show any sign of having known her?’ Saving Fairhead until last.
‘I don’t know if they knew her, exactly,’ she’d said slowly. ‘I don’t think so. Michelle couldn’t stand her from the word go, though. Nor Tina. Tina, just because she was horrible about her work in her blog, some time last year.’
He’d interrupted. ‘When was that, exactly?’
She doesn’t create, she destroys, the email had said. Might an artist have written that? But Cate had scotched that one. ‘Last summer some time? Not long ago.’
‘And the other one.’ Sandro had pursed his lips, remembering her: the most vivid and fierce of them, to him, with her wild hair, her aura of rage.
‘Michelle,’ Cate had said. ‘I don’t know why she hated Loni. Because they were so different, perhaps. Because she was a widow and Loni had all the men she wanted.’ She’d frowned. ‘It seemed more than that. She was protective of Tina too.’ She’d opened her mouth, then closed it again, as if she’d been going to say something else.
‘And Mr Fairhead?’ Almost casually.
‘Oh, yes,’ she’d said, as if this was what she’d been waiting to say. ‘Oh yes, he did.’
And another piece of the puzzle slotted into place. He wrote a book about her, said Caterina Giottone, with wonder. His book.
And then he had waited, letting her thoughts settle, before he asked, ‘Now tell me. Now tell me what happened, that last day.’
Of course, he had told her nothing himself; that wasn’t his job. Rather like being a shrink, if the TV dramas were to be believed; they talked, you listened. Although by the time she’d climbed out of the car and walked down the hill towards the bright square of light and the loud music, it had occurred to Sandro that he might take Caterina into his confidence, before too long. Too early, though, to tell her what Mascarello had said; he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant himself.
Mascarello had not wasted any words. Standing in the dark lee of the great building, wondering if Luca Gallo was still in earshot and frustrated by the realization that he had no idea which direction would lead him back around to the kitchen entrance, Sandro had the sense to remain silent while the man spoke; he’d made an effort to focus on what he said. At his back the rough wall had held a deep chill that seemed to transmit itself into his bones through his faithful old coat, designed only for the city’s mild chills.
‘I hope you’re busy,’ the lawyer had said drily. ‘I hope you’ve got down to work already, and that’s why you didn’t have time to call me back. I don’t suppose I have to tell you how much my time is worth?’
Grudgingly Sandro had found himself almost smiling. Even when hooked up to a dialysis machine, or whatever it was that he could hear humming like a butcher’s flytrap in the background, the man was unshakeably convinced of his own power to command. There were characters out there – and fleetingly, painfully Sandro thought that Luisa was one of them – immune to fear of their own mortality. And then there were the rest, like Sandro, pushing the fear like a stone uphill.
‘Yes,’ Sandro had said, as humbly as he could manage. ‘I was busy.’ There was a whistling exhalation and for a moment Sandro had thought it was the machine, before he’d understood that it was the air being expelled from Mascarello’s lungs.
‘All right,’ Mascarello had said hoarsely. ‘It’s unfortunate, but it has to be me – I don’t like delegating this matter. It’s enough that you should know; I don’t want the secretaries chewing it over, I don’t want this turned into gossip.’ And Mascarello probably knew more than most about how easily what one left on an answering machine or wrote in an email might be intercepted.
How did their marriage work, wondered Sandro, as he tried and failed to picture them side by side in the same bed, reading before turning out the light. But Mascarello had really loved her; he didn’t want her sullied.
‘No,’ he’d said.
‘Gallo’s safe enough,’ Mascarello had said, with a trace of contempt that extinguished the spark of fellow feeling Sandro had just begun to experience. ‘He won’t talk. A good servant, only promoted beyond his competence, as Loni would say. I expect he’s at his wits’ end.’ There’d been a paus
e. ‘And how are things, down there? That little nest of vipers, all squirming and wriggling, are they, with you in their midst?’
Sandro had wondered if the man was merely lonely and wanted to talk, improbable as it might seem. He could hardly ask him to get to the point.
‘Well,’ he’d said. ‘I’ve only been here a couple of hours. But everyone does seem a bit on edge.’
‘It’s an ugly old place, isn’t it?’ Mascarello had commented with rusty satisfaction. ‘Orfeo might style himself the great nobleman, but it’s hardly the Villa Borghese, is it?’
He knows, Sandro had thought with awe as he registered the contempt in the old lawyer’s voice. He’s known all along. ‘You’ve been down here?’ he’d said.
‘Well, not since Loni took up residence, clearly. She likes – ’and he’d stopped, cleared his throat. ‘She liked. To spread her wings.’
‘He’s here,’ Sandro had said carefully. ‘The Count, I mean. Arrived just before me.’
‘Yes, I thought he might be.’ There’d been a pause. ‘There’s no need to spare my feelings, man. I can hear in your voice that you’ve managed to work it out. That that puffed up old fool Orfeo was her – her second string.’ He’d cleared his throat wetly. ‘Well done.’
‘Was that why you were calling?’ Sandro had asked. And Mascarello had let out a wheezing laugh that turned into another cough. Over the machine’s monotone Sandro had heard someone say something to the old lawyer, remonstrating.
‘I like your directness, Cellini,’ he’d said when the coughing eased. ‘Luca Gallo wasn’t sure about you himself, when he brought you to me; I wondered about that. But it doesn’t matter what he thought; what matters is that I’m sure.’ A pause, heavy with meaning. ‘Don’t disappoint me, though, will you?’
Sandro had said nothing; foolishly he had not considered what it would mean, working for a man like Giuliano Mascarello. If it went badly, well, he’d be pretty much finished. But even success wouldn’t be uncomplicated. Mascarello had a great deal of influence, if he lived long enough to exercise it, but Sandro wasn’t sure he wanted Mascarello as his patron. And almost as if Mascarello had read Sandro’s thoughts about his employer, he’d decided to get to the point.
A Murder in Tuscany Page 24