Orfeo blinked and stared at him. ‘I have broken no laws,’ he said. ‘I was not here. I don’t know where she was going.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Sandro in frustration. Thinking, I’ll nail him. I’ll nail him for something. ‘Did you sit in the Hotel Liberty waiting for her? What did you do when she didn’t turn up? Did you even try to contact her?’
At the mention of the hotel’s name – for which Sandro thanked Caterina Giottone – Orfeo’s eyes widened, bloodshot. ‘I – Ididn’t – I was in Florence,’ he said again, and this time he seemed bewildered. ‘You can ask my son. I was there. We sat up until midnight, he was refusing to do his schoolwork and I said I’d stand over him until it was finished if I had to.’
Damn, thought Sandro, hearing a shred of truth in the desperate, faltering voice. Damn, damn, but it had been too late to stop. He had stood his ground. ‘We know you were having an affair with her,’ he said, forcing some certainty into his voice. ‘You were seen at the Liberty on many occasions, even if you thought you were not. It seems that half the staff here, the guests, indeed, had a good idea of what was going on. Her husband knew, for Christ’s sake. Mascarello knew.’ Orfeo’s lips tightened disdainfully. He didn’t care about Mascarello; the cuckold. ‘And she told the intern, Beth.’
‘Beth,’ said Orfeo coldly. ‘That one.’
Sandro seized on the dislike in his voice, allowed it to spur him on. ‘Perhaps you knew that. Perhaps they were too close for your liking, all that girlish giggling; perhaps you had Loni Meadows send her home to America?’ And as Orfeo turned away Sandro saw he’d hit home there at least; he pursued the advantage. ‘You can delete all those messages from your phone, can’t you, the ones you sent her, the ones she sent you? Did you come back for hers? Was that why you paid a visit to the police station at Pozzo Basso?’
‘Her phone?’ And for a moment Sandro didn’t understand what he saw in Orfeo’s bloodshot eyes, heard in his strained voice.
‘That phone could have evidence on it,’ Sandro said. ‘It would reveal who texted her that night. She might – she might,’ and he cast about for what she might have done. Climbing out of the car, dazed. ‘She might have tried to phone the emergency services. Stumbled about, looking for a signal.’
Orfeo’s eyes widened. ‘No,’ he said blankly. ‘No.’ Did Orfeo really not know what he was talking about? ‘I don’t have her phone. I didn’t come looking for her phone – I simply – ’ He stopped, and started again. ‘I needed to know what had happened. I didn’t understand – I know the Soprintendente, I simply asked – as a friend – ’He took a breath. ‘It placed me in a difficult situation.’
At least he wasn’t trying to fake emotion, to pretend he wanted to see her, one final time.
Sandro made a last-ditch attempt. ‘You said to Luca Gallo. The phone, you said.’
Orfeo drew himself up, looked down his patrician nose, beaked like a Roman senator’s. ‘Not her phone,’ he said with a hint of the old impatience. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. No. Not hers. My telefonino. My phone.’
Sandro stared at him; he felt Orfeo gather strength from his silence.
‘I left it behind here, in the library, or somewhere – I don’t know.’ The man spoke with disdain. ‘The last time I was in the house, Sunday? I – I – this is my house. I assumed I would pick it up on my return. I have another phone, in any case, I only used it for – to – ’
He was lying; he had to be. A cover-up, an absurd, desperate attempt to escape the truth. The only problem was, Orfeo was telling the truth; Sandro could hear it, see it.
He only used the phone to contact Loni Meadows, and she was only his mistress, good in bed, a younger woman, his social inferior, whose clothes he had shoved into the bottom of the wardrobe now she was dead. What did it matter? Orfeo had some vague idea now that it might involve him in – unpleasantness, that was all he cared about. Everything about the look he turned on Sandro said to him, you will never understand our sort. We have different desires, we have different requirements, we live in a bigger, bolder world. Damn him, thought Sandro, damn him and Frollini, because the two of them were one and the same; damn them for taking what they wanted and escaping the consequences.
He didn’t kill her: he was too stupid, too lazy, too self-absorbed; he had too many options. She might have grown troublesome, demanding, although Sandro couldn’t see it; she might have wanted to become his Contessa. But Orfeo would merely have brushed her off, as he had to Sandro and Luca. And he had not been here on the Thursday night; he had been in Florence with his spoiled brat of a son.
Damn it. Sandro’s head ached with the implications.
‘You have no morals,’ he said calmly. ‘You have no conscience. The woman is dead.’
And Orfeo said nothing. Just slowly opened the door and waited until, eventually, Sandro couldn’t stand the sight of him any longer, and went.
Sandro was not in the habit of taking his blood pressure, nor his pulse, but it took at least half an hour in the small room next door to Niccolò Orfeo’s palatial apartments, painstakingly noting everything he knew and thought and had been told by Caterina Giottone and Luca Gallo into a new document, before he felt his body return to normal.
Might this be what killed him, one day? This unreasonable sensitivity to every slight, since he had left the force, his keen ear for an insult, his frustration. Had it always been there, this anger, boiling under the surface? Or had it built up, as the country filled up with fastfood restaurants and toxic garbage dumps, as its children were found overdosed on veterinary tranquillizers and its politicians slept with underage prostitutes? The rage that had come out of nowhere, just at the thought of Luisa sitting in a restaurant with another man. At this rate one day he might simply burst like a geyser, and no sooner had Sandro had that thought than it was followed by another, that he did not want to die without Luisa. That he simply would not be able to live without her.
He might not be able to live without Luisa, but he could not call her. Too late, he told himself. She’ll be asleep, we’ll have another row, it’ll make things worse.
In his shirtsleeves, unshaven, Sandro sat at the desk prepared for him by Caterina. He put his notes beside the computer, pressed the button on the machine and booted it into life. He set a hand flat on either side as he contemplated the lists Giuli had made for him, the where and when, which eventually, if he looked hard enough, would tell him why. He made a note. Then another.
About forty minutes later he reopened the email programme and started a message to Giuli, thinking he’d just jot down a few things, paste in the document he’d already begun, only forty minutes later Sandro was still at it. Rambling now, he said to himself, signed off hurriedly and pressed send.
He took the slender book of Alec Fairhead’s from his pocket, and began to read.
In the flat she’d shared with Sandro for more than thirty years with barely a night apart – but for one notable exception, even if it was three in the morning and he smelled of the morgue, cigarette smoke and disinfectant, he’d still come home and slide into that bed beside her – Luisa sat on her big bed and listened to the sounds of the city.
The Via dei Macci was never going to be peaceful; it lay on the most direct route between the crowds of Piazza Santa Croce and the hawkers and haggling women of the Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio. They’d talked about it when they’d first taken up the lease, as newlyweds, how it might be too noisy, but just around the corner was the market, the statue of Dante grim as death, the perpetually lovely church and its chapels. And over the years they’d absorbed the changes for the worse, the crowds of teenage drunks from other countries, the scrape and smash and stand-up rows of a street too narrow for motor traffic, the constant high-pitched mosquito sound of motorini. She heard one go whining past even as she remembered it, their first night here, half-unpacked, sitting on a second-hand bed in the moonlight, holding hands.
In the corner sat Luisa’s little suitcase, pack
ed, zipped, locked and labelled. It had been newly bought for the occasion; Sandro had not remarked on that, which was just as well. What would she have said? That she couldn’t embarrass Frollini with the battered nylon overnight bag that had served her perfectly well for a decade or more. That she didn’t want to look like an old lady from a Third World country as she stepped down that gangway, into that arrivals hall, all nervous and frightened coming into the New World, her possessions bulging out of a tatty holdall?
In her padded dressing-gown, slippers and warmest nightdress, ready for bed but wide awake, Luisa went to the window. She could feel the cold through the glass, but she pressed her cheek against it, looking down the street. There was snow, she’d heard, in the Casentino, the Mugello, on Monte Aperto in the Appennines and Monte Amiata down south; even, it was said, in the inland portion of the Maremma. That was where Sandro was, if Giuli was to be believed, the guest of a castle and a count.
It rarely snowed in Florence. What would Sandro be thinking, wherever he was? Would he be marvelling at it, the hills covered with snow? He would, for a bit, then he’d start to grumble because he didn’t like the countryside and he wouldn’t have the right clothes, the right shoes.
There was a pair of snow boots they’d bought during a snowfall close to a decade ago, but they were sitting in the hall cupboard; Luisa knew because she’d seen them there when she got home and looked. Wanting to make sure that he’d taken a coat, at least, wanting to see, too, if he’d taken a bag. Wondering how long he was planning to be away.
It had gone beyond Luisa being angry with him. With such childish behaviour, storming off like that, in such a hurry – because he hadn’t taken anything much with him at all, as far as Luisa could see. Leaving a note. A note, she’d said to Giuli, expecting an echo of her outrage, and she’d heard the unease in the girl’s voice as she tried to excuse him. Giuli was close to being Daddy’s little girl where Sandro was concerned, far too ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But her anger had always been tempered with something else, anyway. Something so unfamiliar to Luisa that she wasn’t sure if she recognized it; something like guilt.
Would it have been different if they’d had children of their own? It would, there was no point denying that. Even leaving aside the painful thing, the love they might have given a child between them and received back. Whatever people might say nowadays a baby brought you together, it didn’t split you up. And would it have been different if Luisa hadn’t had a breast removed and three months of chemo? But Luisa’s mother had told her thirty years ago that there was no point in imagining how things might have been different. You had to take what you were given, and make the best of it. It was advice Luisa had followed unquestioningly for almost all her life. Until now.
I am not having an affair with Enrico Frollini. Was that what she should have said? Her mother would certainly have said yes. What would she have had to lose from saying it? From telling him the plain, unvarnished truth? Well, she imagined herself saying to her long-dead mother’s sceptical old face, why should I even bother to answer such a stupid question? And besides, he wasn’t in a mood to believe me.
She could imagine what her mother would have said to that. What Giuli wanted to say, but didn’t quite dare. Are you sure it’s the truth?
Luisa looked at the neat, handsome little suitcase. She was an excellent packer; there was nothing she enjoyed more. A new suit was in there, grey cashmere and silk mix with a fine pinstripe, layered in tissue paper. Three shirts, a plain smart black dress, the two-string pearl necklace Sandro had bought her for her fiftieth; a pair of flat shoes, a pair of heels and a pair of evening shoes. The flight was at nine o’clock on Monday morning from the city airport; Frollini had said he’d collect her at six from the Via dei Macci. She could imagine the look on his face, comic horror, at the scruffy façades, the bulging dumpsters, the smell of cat in the ugly little street before dawn.
She could call Sandro, she knew that, she could email him, for heaven’s sake; the phone was there by the bed, the big computer on the desk – everyone had them, said Sandro, when she’d complained about how ugly it was. She could talk to him, but she wouldn’t.
It was not even late, but Luisa closed the shutters, climbed into the cold, clean sheets and turned off the light. And as she lay and stared at the ceiling, for the first time Luisa understood with dull certainty that she could get used to this, if she had to. A night apart turned into a week, separation turned into divorce, people grew apart. Was that what was happening to them? All Luisa knew was, she had changed, and Sandro had not.
Sleep, she commanded herself, and eventually she did.
Chapter Twenty
THERE WAS A STRANGE new quality to the light that dazzled through the shutters as Cate surfaced in the room that itself was not yet familiar, and she lay there half-asleep for a while, eyes still closed, with the blue-white glare trying to pry them open.
Snow, she thought as she came awake, bit by bit; the snow was what had changed the light from yellow to blue-white. Lying still, Cate could detect no sound from the kitchen. Was it early? It was very quiet, but even with the snow it was too bright to be early. Reluctantly Cate squeezed open an eye, turned her head a painful fraction and looked at her battered old radio-alarm. 8.20. She groaned.
Pushing back the duvet, Cate swung her legs out and sat up, and the nagging pain behind her eyes worsened abruptly. Five hours’ sleep, give or take. And quite a lot of wine. She scrabbled in the bedside table for some tachipirina, swallowed them with water straight from the bottle, and made for the bathroom.
The shower was not hot enough, but Cate stood under it anyway, letting the water run over her, flushing away the night before.
She shouldn’t have gone, most definitely she should not have gone. But Sandro Cellini had wanted her to.
‘Go,’ he’d said. ‘Go and have your party. See what you remember; see what they say.’
I won’t be a spy, Cate had thought stubbornly, leaning a moment on a sharp stone corner of the building. But he’d started something going in her head.
Then the music from inside had changed and someone had yelled out something, drunken and jubilant: they were letting off steam, all right. But as the cheering was taken up by another voice, for a wild moment, she had thought what if they all did it between them, what if they’ve planned it all, some elaborate scheme to lure Loni Meadows out on the coldest night of the year and with hard frost forecast? And she’d remembered all over again that the Dottoressa had not died straight away; could they have stood around as she climbed out of the car and watched her stagger, dazed and dying? Cate had tightened her grip on her arms in the cold and told herself stoutly, no. Don’t be ridiculous.
‘She was a dangerous driver,’ she’d said unwillingly to Sandro Cellini as they sat in the car. ‘She threw that car around. Worse than Mauro. Never wore a seatbelt.’
At Michelle’s studio someone had stepped out of the shadows.
Him; no more than a metre away from her. Cate had felt as though she suddenly knew everything about the man: the whole picture. From the moment he arrived at the castle to complete the group, stepping out of the car beside Mauro, to his haunted face on the gallery of the library, the morning the police came to tell them she was dead. She should have finished that sad, dangerous little book he’d written about her.
‘You came,’ Alec Fairhead had said, his eyes happy and unfocused, looking ten, twenty years younger. Looking like the boy he must have been when he had his affair with Loni Meadows. He’d taken her hands in his; he was very drunk, Cate had seen. It wouldn’t have been fair to ask him anything, in this state.
‘You’re a lovely girl,’ he’d said earnestly. ‘Don’t know what you’re doing stuck in this place. Come back to London with me, Cate, come to Paris.’ She’d laughed, and he’d looked at her, crestfallen.
‘Thank you,’ she’d said seriously. ‘I’ll get my passport straight away.’
He’d look
ed at her again with sadness. ‘Come inside,’ he’d said, rubbing her hands clumsily between his, ‘you’re freezing.’ Reluctantly she’d followed him through the wide glass door.
They’d all been there, in the big room. Sandro Cellini had asked her, what are they like? Could any of them have hated her enough? To hurt her.
No one had noticed their entrance for a moment or two; the lights had been dimmed and the music was playing loudly, a cheesy hit from last summer. Michelle was pouring water into a glass on the edge of the kitchen corner’s draining board, wearing a red dress; Cate had never seen her in a dress before. Rage, Tiziano had said, rage drives Michelle. But where did it come from?
There’d been a faint but distinct smell of dope in the air and in the centre of the room Tina was dancing, with complete abandon, an ecstatic expression on her face and arms swaying over her head. The space had seemed too big for one person to inhabit; Michelle’s possessions seemed hardly to have made an impact. A handful of books sat lonely on a long shelf, a wheeled hanging rail for clothes held only Michelle’s parka and a solitary pair of jeans, carefully folded over a hanger. It wouldn’t take her long to pack up, when it was time to move on. Although when they’d had that conversation around the dining table about who was going where after their tenure at Orfeo was done, what would be the next gig, Cate remembered now that Michelle had been the one who’d said nothing. Her husband was dead.
The long table she worked at was pushed back against one wall. Tiziano was in his wheelchair at one end of it next to a computer on which graphics were moving with the music. One hand had rested on the computer touchpad and with the other he was quietly smoking. He leaned back in his wheelchair in an attitude of ease she hadn’t seen him in before, not ever, the broad shoulders relaxed, his clever, watchful face calm. As Cate had studied him, feeling a sudden sadness she couldn’t explain, Tiziano had leaned forward and tapped the touchpad, and another song came on. Brown-eyed girl, the voice sang; she’d known this one.
A Murder in Tuscany Page 26