Since pulling up carefully in the car, he had spent the first five minutes just standing and orienting himself in the wide and barren landscape, and he judged that the furrowed track over the hill where she first came into view would have led around from the back of the castle, down to the left where the outbuildings stood among the trees. Michelle Connor, her skin flushed bright from the exercise and the cold. She didn’t seem even faintly disturbed to see him, but nor did she pause. She approached through the snow, stepping high; it must, he thought, be a track that was used by humans, animals, or both, for the snow already to have been trodden down at all. She reached the road and expertly leapt a shallow ditch on to the dark strip of visible tarmac, turned and was gone. Away from him. He had watched as she moved away, steady, strong, the muscles in the backs of her legs pumping. She hadn’t looked back.
Sandro knelt at the river’s edge and felt for another stone, a smooth, rounded one, fitting in the palm of his hand. He threw it; tried to imagine it was dark. Or had the headlights still been on, casting their beam into the undergrowth? It landed with a splash, perhaps eight, ten metres away.
Talking to Alec Fairhead had not been like talking to Orfeo, although Sandro had felt himself to be in possession of even greater certainties as he climbed the stairs wearily, his head thick with lack of sleep, and his stomach sour with reluctance. From behind Orfeo’s door as he passed, there had come the sounds of confident movement, brisk and assured. That would be typical; but Sandro no longer cared about Niccolò Orfeo. He would be glad never to see the man again; he would be delighted when he was out of his big brute of a house for good.
It had taken Alec Fairhead – Alexander Fairhead, born in London in 1954, educated at Harrow School, novelist and travel writer, veteran of such far-flung and dangerous places as Afghanistan and Colombia – a long five minutes to respond to Sandro’s knock. Sandro had sat and waited on an oddly shaped wooden chair, so like something he’d seen in the Uffizi that he wasn’t sure if sitting on it was allowed. He had knocked again, and sat back. Had thought of the Uffizi with yearning; of the long windows, the wedge of the long grey courtyard with the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rising out of it, a symbol of civilization. Then, reluctantly, had thought of the awful little book he had struggled through before he could finally lay his head on the pillow and sleep; Alec Fairhead’s first and only novel, Unborn.
Sandro read the newspaper religiously but he was not and had never been a reader of stories. Luisa was the one who sat and read novels, a stack of them beside the bed; she wanted words, she wanted characters, she wanted those structures with happy endings, or endings at least. Closure. But even Luisa would have hated this book; especially Luisa, she would have hated it. It would have made her cry. He had no idea whether this was a good book or not, whether the fact that it might have the power to make a thoughtful woman cry meant that it was good. It had won a prize, and from what was written on the back, it had many admirers.
It was about a man who fell in love with a woman who left him, and aborted his child. The man was called Edward Grant. Edward was Eduardo in Italian. It had been written in 1982. These were the things Sandro concentrated on; literary criticism was not called for, even if he had been capable of it. But there was something about the stiff, pained writing that he recognized.
The door had opened and Fairhead’s face had stared down at him: gaunt, unshaven, but not surprised. Not frightened, either. Sandro had thought he might be frightened, but then sometimes it came as a relief, to certain kinds of offender, to be found out. To stop having to pretend.
‘Come in,’ Fairhead had said. He had sounded tired; he was wearing a sweatshirt with nothing under it and loose trousers, and his feet were bare.
After finishing the book, just to make sure, Sandro had gone back to the little chart Giuli had made him. Between 1981 and 1982 Loni Meadows, married by then, had been on a visiting Fellowship at the Courtauld Institute in central London; a part of London University, very close, it appeared from the information he had subsequently obtained within seconds from the campus’s official website, to University College, London, where Alec Fairhead had been registered as studying for a Doctorate in English Literature between 1979 and 1982.
Loni Meadows’s Fellowship at the Courtauld had ended in June 1982; she took up another at Columbia University, New York, that September but she must have left London for America almost immediately.
There was a record of her winning an award for her reviewing for the New York Times. Her awards were listed on her website, and her journalism enthusiastically described, using terms like ‘savage’ and ‘coruscating’. It had not occurred to Sandro, revisiting it, that no one would have bothered to update Loni Meadows’s website: it was a shock. The bright blue eyes in the same photograph she had submitted to the Trust in her application shone from the corner of the screen; Loni Meadows is engaged in projects in southern Tuscany, but she continues to review widely.
The room had been warm and gloomy and the air stale and sour. Fairhead had opened the shutters and the influx of damp cold had seemed to sharpen them both.
In the light, the room had been revealed as exceptionally neat. All doors firmly closed on wardrobe, cupboard, bedside table; a laptop, turned off, its screen folded flat, dead centre of a desk between the small windows. It would have been a maid’s room once; Orfeo’s forebears might have made their way up here to inflict their bullying needs on their social inferiors; not much change there, then. Even as Sandro had thought as much, from far below, at the front of the castle where Orfeo had parked, there had come the unmistakable roar of that powerful car. Good riddance.
Sandro had crossed to the window and looked down. The avenue of cypresses dipped straight down the hill below towards the road, each one twenty metres high at least, black spears topped with white. Not as carefully maintained as they might be; the weight of the snow was beginning to splay them. One factotum wasn’t really enough, for a place like this; Luca Gallo had a lot on his plate.
You couldn’t see the road or the river clearly from up here; you could see the horizon, hills one behind the other, but closer to, the river, like the strip of tarmac, wound and dipped behind the undulations of the landscape. You couldn’t see the place where Loni Meadows had died.
Feeling Alec Fairhead hovering at his back, Sandro had turned to face him. He hadn’t wanted to beat about the bush. ‘You were in Paris last year,’ he had said. ‘April last year.’ And abruptly Fairhead had sat, at his desk, set his hands flat on the leather surface.
‘I was,’ he had said, and his voice had been steady. He’d been waiting for this; he wanted to be found out. Start from the beginning, Sandro had thought.
‘You had an affair with Loni Meadows, nearly thirty years ago,’ he had said. ‘Which ended – badly. You wrote a book about it.’
‘I did,’ Fairhead had said, his voice very quiet, but still firm.
‘You never got over it, did you?’ Sandro had said softly. And Fairhead had shaken his head quickly, just once. ‘Until now,’ he had said.
‘You hadn’t got over it last April, when you sent an email to the Orfeo Trust from an internet café at four in the morning. Edward Grant, whose girlfriend aborted his child in 1982, is Eduardog82. Is you.’
Fairhead had put his face in his hands.
‘You wanted her to know, didn’t you? You hid yourself behind a proxy server, but somewhere deep down you wanted her to know it was you.’
His face still in his hands, Fairhead had moved his head from side to side before raising it to look at Sandro. ‘I read about her appointment in the THES, would you believe it?’ Sandro had had no idea what this publication was, so he just waited. Seeing his polite blankness, Fairhead had explained. ‘For universities, a newspaper. Times Higher Education Supplement. I had given a lecture at the Sorbonne, and I was sitting in a brasserie in Montparnasse with a beer and I opened the paper and read about university appointments, that kind of thing. I read a review of one of Per’s
plays, actually.’
His hands had rested on the arms of the chair, searching Sandro’s face for something as he spoke. Needing him to understand something.
‘I was – at ease. I don’t know if you – well, perhaps you will understand, but I don’t relax all that often. It’s rare for me to feel as I was feeling then; it was a warm spring evening, the beer was cold, there was even some kind of tree in flower on the boulevard.’ He had taken a breath. ‘I had been told not long before that I had been accepted for a stint here, and I have always loved Italy. Even though – well. When I met Loni, you see, there was nothing Italian about her; she was a clever girl from the Midwest. Sitting in that brasserie I knew she was married to an Italian but I didn’t associate Italy with her. I thought it might be the thing – the experience that got me back on track.’ His face had dropped. ‘Even though that seemed to get less likely each year.’
‘Back on track?’
‘Writing,’ he had said. ‘Proper writing. I couldn’t write after – the book. After Unborn. Only hack stuff.’ Sandro had looked at him questioningly. ‘Journalism. Travel. It was never what I wanted to write.’
‘The work was what mattered to you? Not – other things?’ Not a family, not – children? The man hadn’t been even thirty: were there really people who put off those things, in favour of something like writing?
Alec Fairhead had looked away, pained. ‘I thought they would follow on, you see. I thought, I had to get the work right first. Then I would do the living.’
‘And then you read the announcement of Loni Meadows’s appointment. ’
Fairhead had nodded. ‘I finished the beer, then I had another one. That didn’t work. Then I went back to the hotel, and I couldn’t sleep. It was hot and stuffy, and my head ached, and I tried to think about the lecture I’d given because it had gone well – but nothing worked. Everything had turned to – shit.’
The word had been deliberately ugly.
‘So you went to an internet café.’
Fairhead’s shoulders had dropped, and slowly he had nodded. ‘Just one,’ he had said. ‘Just one email. I thought I could disguise it: I knew about proxy servers from a piece I wrote about Indian call centres.’ He had breathed out slowly. ‘I could feel myself losing it, the things I wrote, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to send it quickly before I changed my mind. And then of course I did change my mind, but it was too late.’
Sandro had pulled up a chair and sat at the corner of the desk.
‘But you came, anyway,’ he had said. ‘You could have resigned your tenure here. Given your place to someone else.’
There had been a silence. ‘I could,’ Alec Fairhead had said. ‘Perhaps I should have.’ He had twisted his neck as if he was in pain, his few clothes suffocating him. ‘I did write a letter,’ he had said eventually. ‘Asking to be excused, some family reasons, but when I looked at it it seemed – so pathetic. So cowardly. I tore it up; I told myself it might be – I don’t know. Fate.’
‘Do you know why I’m here?’ Sandro had asked, after a silence.
‘I – I think so,’ Fairhead had said uncertainly.
‘That email brought me here.’ And Fairhead’s face had grown paler, the shadows under his eyes darker. ‘Loni Meadows’s husband is a man called Giuliano Mascarello,’ Sandro had said. ‘And he thinks that whoever sent that email also brought about his wife’s death.’
That hadn’t been enough. ‘He thinks whoever sent that email killed her.’
Fairhead had jerked back in his chair. ‘What?’ he had said, breathless. Then incredulously, ‘What?’
Sandro had sat as still as he could and looked. Had examined Fairhead for any hint that might betray his reaction as anything less than total, unfeigned shock, and found nothing. ‘Did you?’ he had asked softly. ‘Did you kill her, Mr Fairhead?’
Fairhead had stared straight back at Sandro, not even shaking his head. ‘Kill her? Kill her? No!’ Still staring. ‘No, no, no, never. I didn’t even want to kill her when – not ever.’
Sandro had wondered if he was losing his touch. The man had seemed to him to be telling the truth. He had felt the cramped proportions of the little room around him, Alec Fairhead sitting up here at his computer day after day, struggling with his unhappiness. Then he had seen that that was all it was. Not violence, not madness. The same kind of banal daily unhappiness that Sandro and Luisa had dealt with themselves, their own small tragedies.
‘After I’d written the email,’ Alec Fairhead had said slowly, as if in confirmation of what Sandro was thinking, ‘it was as though the sting had gone out of it. It was – less. Everything was greyer, but it was better. Funny thing was, I almost liked her, being back here. She’s – good value; a kind of old-fashioned spectacle. If you’re not in love with her.’ So she’d been wrong, Sandro had thought, Loni Meadows had reckoned she still had him in her hand. Fairhead hadn’t killed her: the certainty had settled in Sandro’s mind. But he had had to be sure.
‘I need to know something,’ he had said. ‘Did you go out, that day, that afternoon? Before she died. Did you walk down to – the place? Did you go anywhere near the river? To where she – came off the road?’
Fairhead had looked at him as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘So you really think she was – murdered?’ He had swallowed. ‘But how?’
Sandro had shaken his head briefly. ‘That doesn’t matter just now,’ he had said. He would hold his theory in his head just a while longer; he needed to unpack it in front of someone he trusted; he wished for Luisa. ‘Did you go down there?’
The answer had come slowly. ‘We went for a walk – ’ Fairhead had said. ‘I don’t even know if we got that far. We walked that way, yes. After lunch: about two.’
‘We?’ An alibi, Sandro had reminded himself, was not everything. But it was unignorable. He had waited.
‘Per and I,’ Fairhead had said. ‘We often walked together.’ He had smiled unhappily. ‘Perhaps it’s a northern European trait. But we both like – to be with someone, but someone we don’t have to talk to.’ He had sounded confused, resigned.
‘And that night?’
‘I went to bed. I passed her on the stairs.’ Fairhead had said precisely what he had told Caterina and she had recounted carefully to Sandro the previous night: Alec Fairhead had gone to bed after seeing Loni Meadows go into her apartment. Per had come up soon after; neither of them had left their rooms.
‘You’re sure? About Mr Hansen?’
Fairhead had nodded. ‘He put on some Grieg, quite loudly; he does that every night. He took a long time to go to sleep, which is also normal for Per. And for me.’ He had frowned a little. ‘Even through the wall, I knew it was him. You get to know people’s – sounds, their habits, I suppose like a blind person does. Surprisingly quickly.’
Sandro had nodded. The man’s lonely, he had thought. Just lonely.
‘It’s all right,’ he had said, and Fairhead had looked up at him. ‘You do believe me?’ he had asked.
Sandro had looked at Alec Fairhead a long moment and realized that, for good or ill, he did. Hadn’t been sure if it was wise to do so, but he had inclined his head, just a fraction. ‘I’ll talk to Mr Hansen,’ he had said. Hesitated. ‘Yes, I believe you.’ He had hesitated again. ‘But there’s just one more thing. Niccolò Orfeo. Left his phone here, last Sunday.’
And now Fairhead had looked almost desperate with confusion, hands at either side of his head. ‘Did he?’
‘You haven’t seen it?’ Fairhead hadn’t even shaken his head, but his expression was enough: complete lack of recognition. ‘No one’s mentioned finding it? Asked you about it?’
‘Well, I – God.’ He had frowned. ‘Did Luca say something about a phone? Perhaps he did. I don’t know if I gave it a thought. Perhaps he did.’
‘It’s all right,’ Sandro had said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He had got to his feet. ‘Let me give you some advice,’ he had said. ‘You need to put the life first, now. Before the
art. Before it’s too late.’
Alec Fairhead had looked at him wonderingly. ‘That’s what Per said.’
‘Ah,’ Sandro had said. ‘Per.’
In the snow, in the dip that kept him out of the sun, the cold was really beginning to bite now. Sandro squatted down on his haunches. He could hear the river, gurgling and whispering as it slid over the stones, not deep, here, after a winter drought. When the thaw came it would be different; the snow would have changed everything, melting into the water table, washing things down and away.
In the dark, Loni Meadows would have been able to hear the water, staggering out of the car, falling. Lying in the dark. It was an accident; he rehearsed the words to himself. Yes, there was a nasty email, but this was a car crash, coincidence, a woman with many enemies can also die, mundanely, in an accident; the statistics proved it. She died as thousands do every year, even those who don’t drive like madwomen.
Go back to Giuliano Mascarello, Sandro told himself, deliver him Alec Fairhead if necessary; the old man wasn’t stupid. He’d know the truth when he heard it. It would be so easy. The temptation was great. The only trouble was, there was something stubborn and resistant in Sandro that would not believe it.
In part it was this place – this great thug of a prison-castle – and the people confined in it; in part it was superstition. An uneasy, half-defined feeling of something unhealthy breeding quietly in the small rooms, in the spindly trees pressed up against the walls, in the run-down farmhouse. And then there were the scraps and tatters of a story, of evidence, that he could not entirely ignore.
A Murder in Tuscany Page 28