by L. S. Hilton
My research and my vision were starting to spin in circles, so I gave up. If this Moncada character was the type to carry thumbscrews in his briefcase, maybe the less I knew about it the better. Dawn was glowing beneath the acrylic hotel blind, but even after a busy day, it’s vital to consider your skin, so I drank both the bottles of mineral water in the minibar and flopped on the bed for a couple of blessed hours’ unconsciousness.
16
Next morning I was in the lobby of the Hassler at 9.30. I took a seat in the lounge, ordered a cappuccio and looked at La Repubblica. Nothing in the early edition. After ten minutes or so I pretended to make a call, waited another ten and did the same. I ordered a glass of water. I went back to the desk and repeated last night’s performance. No, Signor Fitzpatrick had not left a message, no he was not in his room. I waited a bit longer, looking agitated now, playing with my hair and smoothing my sober tan linen skirt over my knees. Finally, after forty minutes, I asked if I could leave a message. On a sheet of hotel writing paper I wrote, ‘Dear Cameron, I waited for you this morning as we agreed, but I’m sure you were busy. Perhaps you’ll be in touch when you’re back in London? I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay in Rome. Many thanks for dinner. Yours, JR’. The letters could have been that, or they could have been GP or SH. Another bit of stalling.
At eleven I stepped off a tram near the address I had found in the notebook. It was a little way out, a scruffy residential area of eight-storey apartment blocks perched on islands of yellow grass and dog shit. I found the shop easily enough from my map, between a pizzeria and a cobbler’s. It was a framer’s, with a couple of big gilt mounts in the window and a section of modern photographs, mostly Chinese brides in hired white nylon and faux-baroque borders. A tracksuited Chinese woman watched a small television behind the counter. Behind her was a door to what must be the workshop; I could smell resin and glue.
‘Buongiorno, signora. Ho un appuntamento con il Signor Moncada. C’è?’
‘Di fronte.’
She turned back to her programme. Politics, probably, from the shouting. Across the street I could see a small bar with aluminium tables under a green striped awning. Only one was occupied, by a man in a pale grey suit with collar-length silvering hair. I could see the glint of his Rolex as he picked up his espresso cup.
‘Grazie.’
There was sweat prickling under my arms and between my shoulders; my grip on the portfolio was so tight it hurt. I didn’t have to do this, I thought. I could just get a tram, then a train, then another, and be back in London tonight. All my planning had been focused on this moment only. I had refused the enormity of what I had done. I had ten metres to offer myself a reason to stay, and I couldn’t find one, except that I thought this was possible. I’d proved to myself that I could do it, so now I felt compelled to see it through.
‘Signor Moncada?’
‘Si ?’ He was wearing Bulgari sunglasses and a beautifully knotted pale blue silk tie. Why can’t all men carry off clothes the way Italians can? I handed him one of the cards I had removed from Cameron’s jacket and my passport.
‘Sono l’assistente del Signor Fitzpatrick.’
He shifted into English.
‘The assistant? Where is he, Signor Fitzpatrick?’
I looked embarrassed.
‘I couldn’t find him this morning. He sent me a text last night.’ I showed him my phone. Before I’d flushed the thumb, I had sent it to myself at 11.30 last night. I’d slightly misspelled instructions to keep the appointment without him, for an authentic drunk-text look. No one else was ever going to read it – the phone, minus the SIM card, was becoming archaeology in the Tiber sludge. I shrugged apologetically.
‘I have the picture, of course. And everything else which is necessary.’
‘I need to see it.’
‘I imagined you would have planned somewhere to do so, Signor Moncada.’
He indicated the frame shop and set down some coins for his coffee. We walked past the Chinese lady without acknowledgement, into the workshop. The ceiling was low; it must have been a modern front built onto a much older building. Moncada had to incline his neck, and I could scent that faint watery smell of cool ancient stone in shadow. The workbench was empty, as if in anticipation. I opened the folder, gently lifted out the Duke and Duchess, placed the catalogue and the provenances next to it and stepped back. He took his time, to show me he knew what he was doing.
‘I need to speak to Signor Fitzpatrick.’
‘Please call him.’
He stepped outside to make the call and I waited with my eyes closed, all my weight in my fingertips on the glass-topped bench.
‘I can’t reach him.’
‘I’m sorry. But if you are satisfied, I have his authority to go ahead.’
Another call, another wait with the inside of my eyelids for company.
‘Va bene. I’ll take it now.’
‘Of course. But I’m not to hand it over until you make the transfer, Signor Moncada. I know Mr Fitzpatrick wouldn’t like it.’ I didn’t add, because Mr Fitzpatrick knows you are a crook and you know he knows it. Or knew, anyway.
‘How?’
I straightened my shoulders and switched back to Italian.
‘You have a laptop? Good. Then we find somewhere with wi-fi, you make the transfer, I watch it come in, I leave the picture with you. Very clear, no?’ Before he had a chance to reply I ducked my head into the shop and asked the woman if the restaurant nearby had broadband.
So we went to the pizzeria and ordered two Diet Cokes and two margheritas and logged on. I wrote the codes from the notebook on a napkin and pushed it towards Moncada to copy for the transfer. I felt as though an elastic band was squeezing round my heart. I opened Cameron’s account again on my own laptop. The little beachball appeared on the screen, and as it whirled I poured Coke from the can to stop my hand from shaking. The site loaded. I entered the passcode. Nothing had changed since last night. Now I could watch the money arrive. Moncada typed slowly at his own machine, his hands hovering before he punched the keys. That made me feel young, which was a nice change.
‘Ecco fatto.’
We both sat there in silence, as I watched my screen.
There it was – 6.4 million euro.
‘I need to try Signor Fitzpatrick. Would you mind?’
‘Certo, signorina. Prego.’
His courtesy encouraged me. Had I been a man, he might have questioned the beneficiary, asked for some proof that I hadn’t already done what in fact I was just about to do. Luckily Italian men don’t have a high opinion of the young female mind. Or men in general, come to that.
Outside, he lit a cigarette. I hooked my phone under my ear, paused, then pretended to leave a message, my hands still working on the laptop keys. Open the account Steve had set up for me, hold it at the bottom of the screen, select the transfer option from the Goodwood account. Send. I called up my own numbered account. SWIFT, IBAN, password. Happy days at Osprey. It was in. I left the folder on the table, next to the untouched microwave pizza. It was truly tragic, what was happening to Italian food.
‘I got his voicemail. I left a message and of course Signor Fitzpatrick will call you. I’m very sorry he couldn’t be here, Signor Moncada, but I hope you and your client will be satisfied. It’s a very lovely picture.’
I took a taxi back to my hotel and made a point of asking if there had been any messages from a Signor Fitzpatrick. As I checked out, I gave the clerk my number and asked her to be so kind as to pass it on if the signor called. I was going on a trip, I said chattily, up to the Lakes. Just enough details for her to remember. There was a place near the Campo di Fiori that made white Roman pizza, the real thing, spiked with rosemary. I thought I’d have one of those before collecting my things and catching the Como train. I’d never seen the lake. I could sunbathe, I thought, and take a ferry trip to Bellagio, while I waited for the police.
17
It couldn’t be an accident that th
e baroque had been invented in Italy. There was just too much beauty here, too many perfect views, too many delicately melded colours in too much startling Mediterranean light. The abundance was excessive, almost embarrassing. After the train had left the disquietingly elegant cavern of the Stazione Centrale in Milan and crawled through the bleak high-rise suburbs, their streets holiday-vacant, it began to pass through a series of tunnels in the first reaches of the Alps, emerging to brief flashes of green slopes and blue stretches of water, vivid and dazzling as a suddenly opened jewel box. And in the way that the rhythm of train tracks will always catch one’s mood, the carriages crooned to me, ‘You are rich, you are rich, you are rich.’
All the same, when I reached Como, I checked into the most modest pensione I could find, a place so old-fashioned I was astonished it was still open, green lino on the floors and a communal bathroom shared with various hearty Dutch and Germans who went off cycling or hiking each morning, with rolls furtively assembled from the meagre breakfast buffet tucked into their lycra onesies. I sorted through my clothes, putting the expensive items aside, and bought a cheap checked plastic holdall from the supermarket to store them in, concealing it under a bile-coloured blanket at the bottom of the rickety wardrobe.
The first evening, I took a seat in a snack bar, ordering a Coke which I didn’t drink and a mineral water which I did. In a square-ruled school exercise book, I made a list of names.
Cameron. Dealt with. He obviously wasn’t going to be talking to anyone ever again.
But how soon would news of the killing make the press? That led me to Rupert. He would have been frantically trying to contact Cameron, panicking that the deal had gone wrong.
It gave me a certain pleasure to imagine one day on the sodding Scotch grouse moor ruined. I had to assume that Rupert had access to the Cook Island account, that he would see that the money had come and gone, and, moreover, where it had gone. When he heard of Cameron’s death, as he unquestionably would, he would have to think that Cameron had got involved in something too dodgy, offended someone, taken a risk. Rupert could hardly go to the police to try and get the ‘Stubbs’ back. And if the papers threw up my name? It was perfectly reasonable that Judith Rashleigh could have been in Rome, perfectly reasonable that she could have been angling after a job from Cameron. Rupert knew that Dave and I had been snooping round the Stubbs, but even if he credited me with the intelligence to have worked it out, and Cameron with the stupidity of having told me, the picture was gone. He was powerless. Mostly.
Which left two names: Leanne and Moncada. Leanne wasn’t the type to pay much attention to newspapers, but she wasn’t entirely stupid. If my name was published, she would be able to associate me with two dead men. Yet I knew her well enough to recognise that her only interest in life was Leanne, so why would she get involved when there was nothing for her to gain but trouble?
So, Moncada. He didn’t strike me as the type to have a very friendly relationship with the police. There was no law against being a private dealer, but he was too well dressed to be clean, even for an Italian. I hadn’t ripped him off; his clients would be satisfied and pay up. My performance as Cameron’s assistant had been convincing enough to get Moncada to hand over the money; indeed it must have seemed in his eyes that I had acted correctly, given that I was ignorant that my boss was a gore-sodden lump in the Tiber at the time we made our deal. If anything, would he be afraid of nice little Judith going to the police? For a few seconds I felt incredibly cold. Would he come after me? Would he remember my name from my passport? I’d had to flash it, to make it convincing. If Moncada was in any way connected with organised crime, as I somehow felt he must be, he would have no trouble finding me while I was in Italy. Perhaps right now he was slipping through those same rock tunnels like a vicious rat, homing in on the rank scent of my fear. My heart was banging and my hands began to shake. Stop it, stop it, breathe. Moncada knew that he personally had nothing to do with Cameron’s death. Nor could he suspect that I did. He had paid Cameron, he’d thought, not me. But what was the worst-case scenario? Moncada discovers unsuspected qualities of civic-mindedness and goes to the police. There was no evidence to charge me with, only circumstance. For fuck’s sake, I sounded to myself like one of those morons who think they understand the law from watching CSI. Think. At present, Judith Rashleigh is a skint ex-art dealer who has been unfortunately connected with a horrible incident – two, if they pulled my flight records and somehow connected me back to James. There were records of cash withdrawals from her UK savings account, which proved how she had funded her modest travels before returning to London to look for work.
The only flaw, then, was the possible connection between Rupert, Cameron and Moncada. If Rupert succeeded in reaching Moncada, he would discover that we had met and that I had handed over the picture, at which point he could dob me in. An anonymous phone call to the Italian police . . . The only evidence would be if the authorities could subpoena my bank accounts. To put me on trial for murder, Rupert would have to ruin himself, and it wouldn’t get his money back. My brain was writhing, a twitching began in the base of my right wrist. I could hardly hold the pen. How long did I have?
In through the nose, out through the mouth. Calm. I couldn’t control all the possibilities, but nor could Rupert. He would hang fire until he knew about the killing, at least. So, I had to move the money from Switzerland, just there, reassuringly close on the other side of the mountain. Then I could go anywhere, be anyone. All I had to do was wait for the police and give them my story. I crumpled up the paper I had scribbled on and walked over to the shore of the lake, dipped it into the water in a clenched fist until it drifted away in lumps of sodden pulp. It was the waiting, I realised, that was going to be the hardest.
There was something close to the almost unbearable quality of desire to those next three days. The white noise of the beloved’s absence which hums and whispers constantly in the ear, in the veins. I waited like a woman in love, like a hidden mistress who will only be delivered from the languorous torment of lack by her lover’s tread in the passage of a cheap hotel. Each morning I ran, pushing myself up the vertiginous hiking tracks until my thighs shook and my calves burned. I ordered lunch and dinner, but could barely eat. I smoked until I retched water and lit cigarettes through the metallic taint of my own guts. I bought a bottle of cheap brandy and some over-the-counter sleeping pills and tried to knock myself out every night, but woke before the light with a thin wire of pain in my skull, watching my own heart beat under the frail, dawn-blue sheet. I felt the skin hollow out under my cheekbones; the plane of my hip became hard against my palm. I tried to read, on benches overlooking the postcard views, hunched on my windowsill, stretched out on the little shingle beach, but all I could really do was stare into space and endlessly, endlessly check my phone. I played games, like a crush-struck teenager. If the man in the blue baseball cap buys a chocolate gelato they’ll call me, if the ferry horn sounds twice they’ll call me. Each time my phone buzzed I grabbed at it like water in the desert, my fingers stumbling over the keypad, but apart from a single message from Steve – ‘Hey you’ – there was nothing except advertisements from Telecom Italia. I didn’t buy a newspaper; I didn’t trust myself to react authentically otherwise, though I knew that was probably stupid. I had wanted before – I had wanted, and I had coveted – but perhaps I had never yearned in my life as I did for Inspector da Silva’s voice when it poured like medicine into my ear, after those days which dripped by as slowly as amber oozing through a pine.
He spoke English hesitantly.
‘May I speak with Judith Rashleigh?’
‘Speaking. This is Judith Rashleigh.’
‘Signora, my name is da Silva, Romero da Silva.’
Inexplicably I found myself wanting to laugh. It had begun.
‘Signora, I am member of the Italian police force. I am working with the carabinieri, in Rome.’
I had practised this.
‘What’s the matter? Ha
s something happened? My family? Please, tell me!’
I didn’t have to act breathless because I was practically fainting.
‘No, signora, no. But I have some distressing news. Your colleague has been murdered.’
I waited a strangled breath before answering.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Your colleague, Mr Cameron Feetzpatrick.’
I took a deep breath. ‘My God.’
‘Si, signora.’
They would be waiting for my reaction, I’d considered, maybe even taping this call. Mustn’t overdo it. I let him – them? – hear me breathe again before I spoke.
‘I saw him in Rome. I don’t understand.’
‘Yes, signora, you left your number at the hotel.’
‘But what happened? I –’
‘I am sorry to give you this shocking news, signora. Tell me, are you still in Italy?’
‘Yes, in Italy, yes, I’m in Como.’
‘Then, if you will permit, I have some questions for you. This is possible?’