And then the door opened. He sat there. Not blocking the door as he usually did, beaming but implacable, hands out for his packed lunch, but staying back with his face in the door’s shadow, allowing Cate entry. She came inside, and the door closed behind her.
It was dark, even darker than it had been in the kitchen. ‘Do you have any candles?’ she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she crossed the square dim space like a blind person, bumping then skirting the great veneered bulk of the grand piano that was the sister to the one in the library and which dominated this smaller room. She knew where the candles would be as she was in charge of replenishing their stock for this eventuality: in a drawer in the room’s kitchen corner. She lit one and set it in a saucer: it didn’t give much light, but it was better than nothing. Tiziano shrugged, turning his face towards her and as her eyes adjusted she saw the change in him.
‘Nicki and Ginevra were worried about you,’ she said. ‘You didn’t answer.’
‘I’d forgotten what it was like,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘That’s all. I’d forgotten what leaving was like. Saying goodbye. And we should have had another four weeks together.’
Could that be all? That he would miss them, this strange family of misfits and loners? It couldn’t be all. Cate came back to his wheelchair and squatted beside him on her haunches. She could feel her feet still wet from the snow, her body feverish with tiredness and cold and wondered how long it would be before life returned to normal. If ever.
What if it wasn’t Michelle? What if she’d given that phone to someone else? She and Tiziano had always been close.
‘Tiziano,’ she said, and she couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice. ‘Darling.’ Cate used the endearment as her mother might have used it to her, as she might have used it to the brother she had never had. ‘He told me. Cellini told me, about your accident. About the bomb that killed your father. About Loni’s husband the lawyer, who defended the bomber.’
‘Did he?’ said Tiziano, and his voice came from somewhere buried deep.
‘Why were you – upset?’ She didn’t want to say, crying. ‘Just for leaving this bunch behind?’
‘Does he think I did it?’ asked Tiziano, not answering her question. ‘Does Cellini think I fixed her car, or drugged her, or – or – parked my wheelchair on the bend in the middle of the night to scare her off the road?’
Cate found she couldn’t speak.
Eventually she found some words. ‘I told him no way,’ she said.
‘You don’t think I could do it?’ And Tiziano took her hand quickly and raised it to his mouth and held it tight against his face; against her skin she felt the softness of his mouth and the prick of his stubble and the strength of his hands.
‘Physically?’ she said, and felt something like adrenaline surge through her, as it might have surged through him. ‘I think you could do it. Yes.’ Then bravely, ‘Do you know how to get there, across the fields?’
And he made a sound, in his throat, like a growl of pain. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘I could have done it. There’s nothing I can’t do, in or out of this chair.’ And abruptly he let go of Cate’s hand. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, though they both knew that wasn’t true.
‘Do you know,’ he said in a voice so close to normal it was bizarre, ‘that bomber killed at least three other people because of her husband? Her husband the human rights lawyer: where were their human rights, those dead people? Where were mine? One of them a woman just married and four months’ pregnant.’
With awful inappropriateness, Cate wondered if Tiziano wanted children. And for the first time in what seemed like days Vincenzo came into her mind, V’cenz who’d said cheerfully when she’d turned in the street one time to look into a buggy, ‘You don’t want kids, do you, Cate? No way.’
‘I remember that,’ she said, and she did. A bomb in a station in Mestre.
‘You think I’d kill anyone? Leave anyone crippled, like me? D’you think I’d want that revenge?’
And Cate didn’t know what to say because that was exactly what they had contemplated silently, her and Sandro Cellini. The rich dull sheen of the piano gleamed in the thin light from the window; on the side the candle flickered. The room was bare, apart from the great instrument and a narrow bed. A monk’s cell; but he’d cried at the thought of leaving.
‘Revenge on a woman simply for being married to that old crook? Kill her to get at him? Who thought that? Did you? Did Cellini?’ His voice was ragged with emotion.
‘He doesn’t know you,’ said Cate. ‘It’s not his fault. And besides – he doesn’t think it was you, not any more.’
‘I could have done it,’ said Tiziano, sitting up straight in the chair beside her, taller than her as she crouched beside him, her hand now on his thin, hard knee, though of course he couldn’t feel it. ‘I could have done it, but I didn’t. She didn’t even figure, with me.’
Then he turned to her as though he’d only just heard what she said. ‘So who?’ he asked. ‘Who does he think did it?’
‘He thinks it was Michelle,’ Cate said, and there was a long silence. She had thought he would defend her, but he did not.
‘Because of her husband,’ he said, and she wondered how he knew. ‘Meadows vetoed him, did you know that? Said she wasn’t having married couples here. And he topped himself. No wonder she was angry.’
‘You’d never do that,’ she said, without being able to stop herself. ‘Would you?’ He took her hands and clasped them in his.
‘Never say never,’ said Tiziano, as though he was murmuring an endearment. Mai dire mai.
‘No.’ Feeling the dark creep closer to them, feeling the cold rise up through the stone floor, the walls, Cate whispered, ‘Don’t say that.’
‘You don’t know, sweetheart,’ Tiziano said softly. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. There are things that regenerate, you see, and there are things that don’t. Spinal cord, that’s one of the things that doesn’t.’
There were words that Cate wanted to say at that moment, about how little it mattered to her that his legs didn’t work, only she didn’t know how you could say that. It mattered to him, that was the thing.
Besides, he was still talking. ‘Look at Alec Fairhead, he’s regenerated all right,’ he said, with bitterness.
‘What d’you mean?’ she said, unsettled.
‘After, what is it, more than twenty years of mourning, no relationships, no decent work to speak of, now Loni’s dead and he’s trying it on with everyone in sight.’
‘Did you know about that? About Alec and Loni?’ She stared at him.
‘He told me. The morning after she died, he told me. She aborted his child, did you know that?’ Cate shook her head slowly. ‘A new man now,’ said Tiziano. ‘Asking you to run away with him last night, haring off after little Tina. He’s down there now, getting her to comfort him.’
‘What?’ she said. She hadn’t known Tiziano had heard that last night. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, though, with Tina,’ she said, feeling alarm rise in her. ‘She’s – she’s vulnerable.’
‘Or d’you want him for yourself?’ She stared at Tiziano in the flickering half-light, startled by the anger in his voice.
He looked away, but not before she saw something burn in his eyes. ‘Did you see that coming, then? Michelle?’ And his voice now contained only casual curiosity, as if he simply didn’t care any more.
Had she? And then Cate thought of Michelle standing by that burning oil drum, saw again the expression in Mauro’s face as he ran up to stop them. He’d thought they were up to no good, hadn’t he? Why had she swallowed Michelle’s story whole?
She should have emptied that stuff all over the grass and picked through it until she knew what was in there. But she’d been afraid.
She should have told Sandro Cellini about it, but she’d wanted to protect them.
And Cate felt abruptly and completely alone, the burden of her failure falling squarely on her own shoulders, and
no one else’s. Her mother’s voice rang again in her ears: When are you going to take responsibility, Caterina?
‘I’m going down there,’ Cate said, hearing her own voice as though from far away. ‘I’m going down to the villino.’
‘As you wish,’ said Tiziano stiffly.
And it was only when she was out of the door in the cold and running in the snow, down into the trees, that she realized he thought that Alec Fairhead was the reason for her going.
Luca Gallo’s face collapsed as they stared at him, and he sat, suddenly limp, in the chair behind his desk. He stared around at his surroundings as though he barely recognized them, and had no idea what was going on.
Sandro stood and watched, and waited; at his side Michelle Connor seemed entirely relaxed, and curious.
Gallo had pushed his chair back and was staring at the drawers. His desk was a total mess, an overflowing inbox, a small photo of a man’s face fallen under the computer screen, loose papers slipping to the floor. Was this the sign of a man who was losing his mind?
‘Is this true?’ Sandro said quietly.
Luca Gallo was shaking his head slowly, from side to side, then eventually he looked up. ‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘Did she give you the phone last Wednesday, the day before Loni Meadows died?’
‘The day before?’ said Luca slowly. ‘I couldn’t be sure of the day.’
‘But before she died?’ Sandro was patient. Luca nodded. ‘Before,’ he said, ‘yes.’
It was like getting blood out of a stone: the man looked traumatized. ‘I’m trying to think,’ he said. ‘Where I put it.’
‘Are you playing for time?’ asked Sandro as gently as he could. ‘Because all you are doing is allowing me the time to realize that if anyone here could have set up Loni Meadows’s car accident, you could have.’ As they returned his gaze, Gallo’s eyes came into focus, slowly: he seemed hypnotized into silence. Sandro went on. ‘You could have sent Mauro down there, couldn’t you? To do the dirty work, to work on the road surface. He’d be good at that; and now rather conveniently he seems to be unavailable for comment. You weren’t at dinner: you could have waited until they’d left the dining room, and sent that message. Only you, in fact, could have sent that message, isn’t that right?’
‘How do you know?’ Luca seemed to be grappling for a rationale. ‘How can you be so sure that the message was from his phone?’
Sandro shrugged. ‘Of course, I can’t.’ He pulled the little silver pebble of a phone that had belonged to Loni Meadows from his pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. ‘Of course, even if Orfeo’s mobile never turns up, this will tell me, in the end.’ He flicked it open, passed a thoughtful thumb across its small, dead screen.
‘It could tell you now,’ interjected Michelle, and Sandro turned to look at her. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, and she gestured to him impatiently. He handed the phone to her and watched, frowning, as she fished her own mobile out of her pocket, flicked off its back with a blunt nail.
Gallo was pulling open drawers now, in a panic. ‘Hold on,’ said Sandro, ‘calm down.’
‘It’s here somewhere,’ said Gallo. The drawers spilled out of the desk; he looked up, wild-eyed.
‘It must have been tough,’ said Sandro, arms folded across his chest. ‘Working for a woman like that. And when she bawled you out in front of everyone – ’ Sandro saw something fierce come into Gallo’s eyes.
‘So,’ said Sandro. ‘Per Hansen said he saw a light, from around the side of the castle, heading cross-country at about midnight.’ He leaned on the desktop with the tips of his fingers, eyeball to eyeball with Gallo. ‘The police will know, you know. They’ll find the shoes, or the trousers, they’ll find her traces on you.’ He paused. ‘What did you do with the phone? Did you destroy it? Hope no one bothered to ask after it? Or were you just going to give it back and rely on Orfeo being too stupid and arrogant to ask any questions?’
Gallo stared down, pale-faced, into the chaos of paper, old telephone directories and files. Then he focused, and pounced. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here, here it is.’ And he brandished an envelope marked ‘Count Orfeo’ in a neat script totally at odds with the disarray in the room.
Sandro stopped.
‘Right,’ he said, and slowly he held out his hand. Gallo hesitated, then dropped the envelope into his palm, and at that moment Michelle looked up from whatever she was doing, held up her scratched and ancient telefonino, its screen illuminated.
‘See,’ she said. ‘Gotcha. Her sim card in my phone. Her phone records, her messages, right here.’
‘And here,’ said Sandro, weighing the envelope in his hand, strangely reluctant to open it. ‘So why didn’t you give it back to him, Luca?’ he asked, all of a sudden not feeling remotely triumphant. ‘He asked you about it, last night.’
‘He did, yes, he did,’ said Luca eagerly. ‘I told him it had been found. He was going to come and get it this morning.’ His face fell. ‘Only he left very early.’
Sandro ripped the envelope and pulled the phone out. Thumb hard down on the on button. Nothing happened.
‘No battery, I suppose,’ said Luca nervously. Sandro grunted, staring down at it, thinking. Pressed the button again, threw the thing down on the desk where it landed in a slew of museum brochures. Michelle came closer to him.
‘Here,’ she said quietly. ‘Look at this.’
Messages. Last message received, from someone Loni Meadows’s address book recognized as Nic.
Seem to find myself free this evening, it read, in English. Perhaps whoever sent the message thought that made it more aristocratic. At the Liberty. You know I don’t like to be kept waiting.
‘You were right,’ said Michelle, wonderingly.
Slowly Sandro took the phone from her. Clicked back to get to the call history. The last number she called.
Nic, 00.09 22 February. Call out, at nine minutes past midnight on the Friday morning.
‘She called,’ said Sandro. ‘She was down there in the dark, concussed, frightened, certainly in shock, probably hypothermic.’ They were both staring at him now. ‘She called her lover,’ he went on. ‘Of course. She thought he’d come to help her.’ Turned to Luca Gallo. ‘More fool her.’
Gallo was staring, shaking his head, but Sandro wouldn’t wait.
‘Did you even answer? Did you listen to her sobbing, or was she incoherent?’ He stared into Gallo’s face, refused to let him look away. ‘You weren’t even content to leave her to die, were you? You had to go down there to make sure. And then you went through her pockets to find her phone and throw it in the river.’
Sandro looked at the shambles of the office and wondered that this man could have the presence of mind to do that. He must have hated her.
‘Did she threaten you, did she write about you on her blog? Did she write to the American office, perhaps? Did she make allegations? Was it you, sabotaged her computer, thinking you might destroy evidence?’
There was a silence, and in the dim, stuffy room Sandro felt something, almost as palpable as a change in temperature, coming from Michelle Connor at his shoulder.
‘Luca?’ she said, with horror. ‘No.’
‘Did you get Mauro to lay down the ice for you?’ Sandro went on. ‘He’d have done it, wouldn’t he, no questions asked? And then later. You came up here, you left the dinner table. You said you were coming up here – but no one saw you, did they? You might have been – anywhere.’
And Gallo said softly, ‘No.’
‘No?’ Damn it, thought Sandro, damn it. Just admit it.
‘I was on the phone to my lover Salvatore, in Sicily,’ said Gallo simply, and all his anxiety, all his fear was gone. ‘He’ll tell you. The phone records will tell you. We talked until very late.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know when exactly. It doesn’t matter. He’ll tell you.’
On the desk between them Niccolò Orfeo’s discarded mobile glowed into life.
NO SIM, it read.
Sandro fr
owned at it. ‘What does that mean?’ he said impatiently. His own phone might be invaluable to him but he regularly found himself infuriated by its intricacies, its gnomic utterances.
‘It means the sim card isn’t in there,’ said Michelle slowly. She sounded sick.
‘But it was in there when you found it. And when you handed it over – ’
‘I didn’t – it wasn’t – ’and Michelle froze.
‘Hold on – ’ said Sandro because something occurred to him, something that should have sounded an alarm an hour earlier. ‘You said,’ and he spoke carefully, ‘didn’t you say, we laughed? You said, we thought, what an old fool. What a whore. We.’
He looked from Gallo to Michelle. ‘It wasn’t Michelle gave you the phone, was it?’ he said to Gallo. And to Michelle, ‘Who were you looking at those messages with? Who did you trust to give it back to Luca?’
But he already knew.
‘Is it really snowing down there?’ said Luisa distractedly, the phone in her hand as she paced the floor. ‘And it’s possible there’s no signal, either.’ She pressed her face against the glass as though a glimpse of the Carmine church might come to her rescue. ‘What if he’s had some kind of accident?’
‘It’s pretty remote,’ said Giuli, hardly listening. She was scrolling through a post on Loni Meadows’s blog from six months previously, covering an exhibition in New York. It was slow work, trying to understand the English. The text wasn’t so much about the art, which was just as well, as when she clicked on the small photographs of the exhibits inset in the text Giuli found them at best incomprehensible, at worst downright disturbing. It seemed to be more of an attack on the artist.
‘Come here,’ she said to Luisa. ‘Your English is better than mine.’ Luisa crossed the room in two strides, impatient as always, and sat beside Giuli on the seat. ‘Shift,’ she said, peering at the screen, and Giuli got another chair.
‘Cheap exhibitionism,’ Luisa translated roughly. ‘No canvas but her own abusive childhood. This is not art, it is indecent exposure. Trailer-trash – ’she didn’t know what that meant ’ – picking the lint out of her navel and sticking it on a pot.’ She peered at the picture, clicking to enlarge it, the slender-necked, elegant shape of an Etruscan amphora. Close up a small, ugly creature had been fashioned on the vase’s smooth bell, a thing horned and toothed and clotted with clumps of hair and nail, possessed of a horrible energy. Luisa recoiled.
A Murder in Tuscany Page 33