A Murder in Tuscany

by Christobel Kent

  Giuli laughed nervously. ‘I know he said instinct,’ she said. ‘But – ’

  Luisa turned her head and looked at Giuli. ‘And he’s gay, Giuli. Gay men don’t murder people.’

  ‘You can’t say that,’ said Giuli, shocked.

  Luisa shrugged. ‘I can say what I want,’ she said, then relented. ‘I don’t think it’s likely, is that all right? I think it is – ’ she reached for a phrase, ‘statistically improbable.’

  Giuli took the brochure off the table, and put it under her arm. ‘And what about paraplegics?’ she said, now looking down at the shaven-headed, humorous face of Tiziano Scarpa. ‘Is that likely, either?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Luisa thoughtfully. ‘It would make you angry enough, wouldn’t it?’

  Something occurred to Giuli. ‘How would you know, though,’ she said, ‘setting up a car accident – you couldn’t guarantee the person would die, could you? Not unless you were there in the car with them or something. What if they were just – ’

  ‘Left crippled?’ said Luisa, picking up the photograph of Tiziano Scarpa. ‘Maybe that would be enough, for some people.’ And she set the photograph down.

  ‘Sandro said to me once, it’s not the strong who murder, it’s the weak,’ she said distantly. ‘Those who have no option.’ Giuli waited for her to say something else but she fell silent then, gazing at her patchwork quilt of faces and names; she seemed suddenly absorbed, and oblivious to Giuli hovering at her elbow.

  Outside the sky had darkened, the computer screen glowing bright on the desk. Giuli had an idea; picking the list of names from the desk, she went to the computer and sat in front of it.

  Alec Fairhead, Michelle Connor, Luca Gallo, Per Hansen, Tina Kreutz, Tiziano Scarpa.

  About ten minutes later Luisa, emerging abruptly from her absorption, was saying something. ‘This one,’ she said, though Giuli’s attention was elsewhere by now and it only filtered belatedly into her consciousness. ‘Do you know, I’d swear that if any of this lot had a screw loose, it’d be this one.’ And Giuli heard the tap of her nail on the table, but she wasn’t really paying attention to the face that had caught Luisa’s attention.

  ‘And what’s this mean?’ Luisa was at her shoulder now, leaning down and pulling the neon-pink Post-it from the desk. ‘Lonestar blog? What does it mean?’

  Giuli leaned back, distracted. ‘Her blog, you know, kind of internet diary. I was supposed to – but look at this. What d’you think of this?’ She tapped at the cursor, scrolling down. ‘Come and look at this.’

  And Luisa leaned down past her, peering at the screen, and together they read a news report filed in the New York Post, six months earlier. Soon after, Giuli had already registered, Loni Meadows had taken up her responsibilities at the Orfeo Trust. The report was about a woman called Michelle Connor, and there was a photograph.

  ‘Merda,’ groaned Cate as she flicked the switch inside the kitchen door, on, off, on again, in vain. ‘Damn it.’ She heard footsteps and there was Sandro Cellini’s face, still unshaven, peering in.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘The power’s gone.’ It had happened before, a high wind back in October had brought some lines down. Cate reached in a drawer for a candle and matches, groped by memory for the coffee pot. ‘Come in,’ she said impatiently. The room was cooling, but not yet cold. ‘Shut the door.’

  By the feeble glimmer of the candle she filled the coffee pot, assembled it, set it on the stove – thank God for gas. Instinctively they both moved closer to the flame as the small burner sputtered into life.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ asked Sandro, his pale stubbled chin illuminated by the tiny flicker of flame.

  ‘God knows,’ said Cate, laying a place on the big table, reaching for a bag of sweet biscuits from a shelf in a larder, just visible in the gloom. ‘I’m not sure what to do. It’s all falling apart. I’d better call Luca.’

  ‘Falling apart?’

  ‘Since she died. It’s as if it’s all crumbling bit by bit. The guests are packing to leave.’

  ‘They are?’ said Sandro. ‘We’ll see about that.’ But Cate turned to look at him and added, ‘And Orfeo wants to close the place down now. Something you said to him last night.’

  They were going: now in the cold dark kitchen it hit her; it was over. And Tiziano would be going, too: in an hour, roads permitting, the specially equipped taxi that had brought him from Pozzo Basso six weeks earlier could be here, loading him in.

  Sandro sighed. ‘He’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry. Just a little tantrum.’

  ‘Poor Luca,’ said Cate, almost to herself. ‘They all treat him like a dog.’ She took out her phone and dialled, holding it to her ear with her shoulder as she opened a vast refrigerator, dark inside: she caught an unpleasant stale whiff, things beginning to sour. She brought out milk and set it on the stove.

  Watching her, Sandro seated himself at the table; with the phone jammed under her ear, waiting for Luca to pick up, she brought his coffee to the table, then a jug of warm milk, before moving away to stand by the half-glazed kitchen door, looking out.

  ‘Yes?’ Luca sounded beyond the point of exhaustion. Cate watched distractedly as Sandro gulped the coffee as soon as it was cool enough; he poured another. Saw the pallor begin to leave his cheeks. Luca was talking.

  ‘It’s what?’ she said, ‘Oh, I see. Power lines, OK. How long – he’s what?’

  ‘Mauro,’ whispered Luca, ‘he’s had to go to hospital.’

  ‘What?’ Cate thought of the dark farmhouse, last night. ‘He’s all right, is he? He’ll be all right?’

  ‘I don’t know. They seem to think so. Just the – the alcohol. Stress.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do about lunches,’ she said dully, grasping at what once had been her purpose here.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Luca, and she thought, Oh God, it really is all over. ‘They can go hungry for a bit,’ he said wearily. ‘It won’t kill them.’

  Turning off the phone, Cate sat down and mechanically poured herself a cup of coffee, filled it to the brim with milk, two sugars. Crumbled a biscuit between her fingers.

  ‘I didn’t ask him about Orfeo’s phone,’ she said, startled by panic. ‘Should I have done?’ She felt stupidly on the verge of tears.

  ‘You’re doing very well,’ said Sandro wanting to put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Drink your coffee.’ And for a crystalline second she saw them both, suspended in the moment, in the fragile peace of the cooling kitchen, with their life-giving coffee, in the eye of a storm about to break.

  She took a sip of her coffee. ‘He’s coming back up, anyway,’ she said. ‘An ambulance has come for Mauro. And then her eyes, looking down, fixed on something and there it was on the table: she didn’t remember Sandro putting it there. Loni Meadows’s little phone.

  Cate frowned, then raising her head, she tilted it, like a gundog catching a scent. ‘So how did it get into the river?’ she said, with a curiosity that faltered as she went on. ‘The telefonino.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sandro. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It didn’t just slip out of her pocket, did it?’ she said slowly, challenging him with her eyes.

  ‘No,’ Sandro said brusquely. ‘It didn’t fall out of her pocket. It didn’t fly out, either, on impact.’

  ‘Can you be sure of that?’ Cate felt as though she could hardly take a breath.

  He shrugged. ‘You mean, have I worked out the angle of descent, her position in the car, simulated the trajectories? No. But I know, all the same.’

  ‘Someone threw it,’ said Cate slowly. ‘That’s why you were throwing stones. Someone chucked it as far as they could. Someone – ’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro. Cate clasped her hands around the cup that, now empty, held no more heat. ‘Someone. Someone else was down there, and that person threw the phone.’ He got to his feet abruptly, the chair moving back on the stone floor with a loud scrape, followed by silence. ‘Getting rid of the
evidence.’ He laid his palms flat on the table and leaned down, looking into her face.

  ‘Someone was down there,’ she repeated carefully, meeting his gaze. ‘Went down there.’

  ‘Let’s go to the library,’ said Sandro. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

  The windowless corridor that led back to the old part of the castle, which had been gloomy the previous night, was now close to pitch dark, and like the interior of the fridge it too smelled of things turning sour. As though without electricity it was reverting to some primitive state: the thought unnerved Cate. Coming into the great shadowy space of the library, dark even though it was still the middle of the day, only intensified the feeling.

  Both of them moved straight to the long windows: the sky was steel-grey with more cloud. Cate shivered, looking back inside the room at the huge and dusty chandelier, barely visible in the thin light, the spindly balustrade of the gallery. ‘Supposed to be a ghost in here,’ she said. ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  And then something began to chime, as she looked up at the gallery, a tiny, insistent nudge of memory. Loni and Orfeo up there, on his last visit, looking down.

  But Sandro had begun to talk.

  ‘Per Hansen saw a light, that night,’ he said. ‘Or thought he did. He was in his room, looking out.’

  ‘A light?’

  ‘When I went to see him he told me. He said something to me about ghosts, or fireflies, or souls; I didn’t really understand it. That the next morning he thought he might have dreamt it, and that when he found out – about the accident, he had some wild idea that it had been her soul escaping.’

  ‘What time?’ asked Cate with a kind of faltering horror as she grasped what he was saying, as she looked out to where Per Hansen might have looked, that night.

  ‘About midnight,’ he said. ‘Coming across country, from his right, as he looked down. Perhaps not wanting to be seen.’

  And they looked down, to the right: into the thin trees that shielded the outbuildings, the studio, the villino. Even in the low grey light, they could see what looked like tracks, leading away from the castle; something had certainly left a darker, rusty trail across the white ground. But on Thursday night, there had been no snow, and the ground had frozen hard; no chance, they both knew, of leaving tracks then.

  ‘It could have been – ’ Cate said, suddenly not wanting to continue.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘It could have been. A real live human being, going to find out what had happened to Loni Meadows.’

  ‘Wait – ’there were so many questions. Cate strained to be methodical, not to jump straight to the terrifying fact he was presenting to her. ‘You believed him?’

  ‘Per Hansen?’ Sandro laughed shortly. ‘I believed him. Of course – they might be backing each other up, those two. Hansen and Fairhead, it might be a conspiracy, they might be giving each other alibis. But I don’t think so, do you?’

  ‘No.’ Cate could hardly hear her own whisper. Above her the balustraded gallery waited, full of shadows, and around her the castle waited, breathing along its nooks and passageways.

  Sandro was continuing. ‘Their interests, you see, would not coincide; the betrayed lovers, each betrayed separately, one a lover only in his own imagination?’

  Cate nodded; she didn’t want to look up, but she didn’t want to look out of the window either. She felt the deep dark cold of the room close around her.

  ‘So someone went down there,’ she said. ‘Someone knew exactly what had happened. Exactly when.’

  ‘Because they had called her down there.’ Sandro was intent, sure and focused as he spoke. ‘That person poured water across the road, then returned. Waited. Gave the ice time to form. Waited until dinner was over then sent a message. The usual message: no doubt the last one Orfeo sent would be there on the phone. Easy to imitate.’

  Cate said slowly, ‘She dropped everything and went. I saw her clothes on the bedroom floor.’ She took a breath, surprised by her relief. ‘After dinner Fairhead saw her receive a text, so did Per. So they can’t have sent it.’ Sandro inclined his head and then looked out of the window again; the oppressive grey sky and the bleak, empty white of the landscape set up a nagging headache behind Cate’s eyes.

  ‘So that leaves – who?’ Sandro asked. ‘The light came from down there.’

  ‘Michelle. Tina.’

  ‘Luca Gallo? Your Mauro?’

  ‘Luca didn’t leave the castle that day, I’d swear it, not while I was there. And Mauro was dead drunk in bed that night, on the other side of the hill.’

  ‘So the one was accounted for all day, the other all night,’ Sandro said. ‘And your Tiziano?’

  ‘Across country? In his wheelchair?’ Cate felt a sudden rage. ‘Are you crazy?’

  Sandro only shrugged.

  ‘Someone went down there,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what drives people.’

  And there was a silence, one in which the small, insistent sound of an engine became audible: a car, although it could not be seen from the library’s window. Sandro took Cate by the upper arms and looked into her face. ‘She wasn’t dead yet, you see.’ He put two fingers to Cate’s neck and pressed, very lightly. His hand was so cold.

  ‘There was a mark on her neck,’ he said quietly, ‘a mark that might have been caused by a seatbelt, only she never wore a seatbelt.’ He paused to let the meaning of his words sink in.

  ‘Someone came across the fields, quickly in the dark, carrying a light. Someone found her, dazed, concussed.’

  His other hand came up to her neck and the pressure increased just a fraction but for that second Cate felt her eyes widen in panic: both cold hands stayed where they were. ‘She might already have sustained some kind of head trauma,’ he said. ‘I think she had. I think she would have had to be confused, weakened.’

  ‘She was so strong,’ said Cate.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, and Cate heard it in his voice, sadness for the life ebbing from a headstrong woman. He took his hands away. ‘Two people in the dark, one full of adrenaline, the other dazed and groggy. She might have thought it was help coming.’

  He removed his hands quickly and Cate squeezed her eyes shut, so as not to see the picture he made of Loni Meadows, blue eyes turned gratefully towards her murderer. Something bleeped, unexpectedly, as if she had prompted it herself.

  Sandro made an impatient sound, tcha, and from behind closed eyelids Cate heard the tiny blip of mobile phone keys, an intake of breath. ‘Hospitalized?’ she thought she heard him say.

  She opened her eyes again, leaning back against the frame of the long window, feeling the cold leak through, and she was looking up at the gallery. The thin light from the window shone along the banister and there it was, whole and perfect, the image of whenever it had been. Last Sunday, in fact, and Orfeo up there, looking down his long nose, Loni hanging on to his arm. And further along the gallery, in a corner: Michelle, leaning against the shelving, stretching her bad back, eyeing them both.

  Loni and Orfeo’s talk over, Per nodding shyly below, bowing, Loni coming down the narrow wooden staircase and giving him one of those featherlight, breathy kisses, just a fraction too close to the mouth. Orfeo impatient to be off, huffing at the doorway, about to drive back to Florence.

  And as Cate had cleared the glasses from the table, the guests had filtered off, one by one. And then Cate had seen her, down the staircase now, the last to leave, looking at something in her hand. Michelle, staring at a tiny glassy screen. Michelle, with Orfeo’s mobile phone, and her face alight, and slipping it into her pocket so that Cate wouldn’t see.

  But Cate had seen, even if the memory of it had eluded her until this moment, as she stood looking up at the gallery.

  ‘Michelle,’ she whispered, and Sandro turned sharply, his own phone in his hand.

  ‘Michelle Connor.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She was always so angry,’ said Cate, hardly hearing what he said. ‘Her h
usband died, you know. He was supposed to be coming here, only he died.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, holding up the screen to her. A text message, it said. From someone called Luisa. Michelle Connor hospitalized following the suicide of her husband, Joseph, composer, August 2007.

  ‘Hospitalized,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘That means she was put in a psychiatric institution.’ She could hear the reluctance in his voice. ‘August. He died in August. But Per Hanson’s appointment was made in July.’

  Cate heard the words but she didn’t know what he meant by them: she had her own train of thought and she had to pursue it. ‘She went running with that thing,’ she said, ‘that thing on her back, filled with water. Would that have been enough water?’ She felt Sandro turn towards her then, through the enfilade of doors and walls that held them trapped in here, she heard the distant muffled sounds of tyres on gravel and a door slamming and a familiar voice and finally she got the words out.

  ‘She got the phone. He must have left it up there in the gallery and Michelle was up there too and when she came down it was in her hand.’

  And then Ginevra was in the doorway, Nicki bobbing behind her, half-hidden. ‘Well, this is a fine bloody mess,’ she said, with grim satisfaction.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘HER HUSBAND COMMITTED SUICIDE,’ said Luisa, gazing at the screen. She had sat down abruptly, edging Giuli to one side on the office chair. Giuli felt the nudge of her hip bone, hard and sharp. ‘He was supposed to go out to this castle place with her, only he committed suicide.’

  The news picture on the screen was of a hospital trolley in a New York street, one of modest brownstone buildings and trees in full, dusty summer leaf, and the bulky shape of a woman on the stretcher under a white cotton blanket. People in summer clothes were hovering, staring, but the woman’s strong, hawklike profile only gazed blindly up from the pillow at a cloudless sky, oblivious.