Maestra: The most shocking thriller you'll read this year

by L. S. Hilton

‘Yes, of course, of course. I should come to Rome? What happened?’

  ‘That will not be necessary, signora. If you would give me the details of your address –’

  ‘Should I call the consulate? His family, I don’t know, have they been –’

  ‘The procedure is taken care of, signora. We will only take a little of your time. Again, please accept my sincere condolences.’

  They arrived five hours later. They had called ahead; I was waiting in the cramped lobby of the pensione, scrubbed face, the black dress I had bought in Rome belted with a leather thong. I had crazy ideas about DNA, maybe there would be splashes of blood from the thumb on it – if I wore the evidence they could hardly drag it off me. The woman at reception looked up curiously from her blaring game show when she saw the Guardia di Finanza car with its Roman plates. I could feel her stare as I stepped out into the heat of the late summer evening towards them. I thought da Silva would be the older of the two, but in fact he was about thirty, with a stocky, gym-worked body and short dark hair. Clean nails, wedding band. Not bad, actually. The colleague, Mosoni, looked about fifty, saggy, with hunched shoulders. Both men wore ordinary clothes, smartly pressed jeans and sports polos. I couldn’t work out if this was good or bad – would they have come in uniform if they were going to arrest me? I held out my hand to each of them, then waited.

  ‘We may speak somewhere, signora?’

  I answered in Italian and they broke out in smiles, obviously relieved not to have to struggle on in English. I suggested we talk in my room; it was more private and it would show that I had nothing to hide. The reception woman looked as though she was going to ask a question as the three of us made for the staircase, but I didn’t look at her or answer her tentative ‘Signora?’ as I led them up to the second floor. I took the only chair and gestured to them to sit down on the sagging three-quarter bed, making an apology with my face. I smoothed the skirt of my dress over my knees and asked, calmly, how I could help them. Da Silva spoke first.

  ‘Well, signora, as I explained, your colleague –’

  ‘I think I should tell you that Mr Fitzpatrick was not my colleague. I used to work at British Pictures’ – I noted their recognition of the name of the House – ‘so I knew him a little, professionally. I bumped into him in Rome and we talked about the possibility of my working for him, at his gallery in London. I hoped he would call me, but obviously . . .’ I trailed off. I was trying to look shocked, but tears would have been too much.

  ‘Signora, I must ask you, did you have a relationship with Signor Fitzpatrick?’

  ‘I understand. No, I did not. As I said, I don’t really know him very well at all.’ I hoped they would notice the deliberate slip in the tense, but they might have put that down to a mistake in my Italian.

  They took me through my presence in Italy, my meeting with Cameron at the Hassler. I said that we had lunched and dined together, then that Cameron had left, saying he had an appointment and that I was to meet him in the hotel lobby the next morning. I had waited about an hour, I said, then left a note. I was planning to continue my holiday, as they could see. I confessed, looking modestly under my lashes, that thinking about it, perhaps Cameron hadn’t wanted to offer me a job, that he’d just been wanting a bit of company while he waited for his client in Rome. I said that I had gone to Rome alone, planning to study some museums. I gave them the name of the hotel I had stayed at. I guessed my insistence on receiving a message from Cameron had given them my name and number, as I had intended. If I hadn’t been so terrified, if the effort of controlling my slamming heart hadn’t been so intense, I might have felt rather proud.

  ‘His client?’ Da Silva went back to the point.

  ‘Yes, he said he was in Rome to meet a client. He seemed quite excited about that. He didn’t tell me anything more, though.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Yes. Art dealers are always discreet.’ Trying to sound professional.

  ‘Did Signor Fitzpatrick seem disturbed in any way? Agitato?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘Do you know who Signor Fitzpatrick was meeting? Was it the client?’

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Could it have been a woman?’

  The woman in the Hassler in the garish Kenzo coat, which was safely stowed in a rubbish bag in a dustbin in the austerely splendid Fascist architecture of Milan station.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘A member of staff at the Hassler said there was a woman asking for Signor Fitzpatrick the night he was killed.’

  Were they about to produce a blurred CCTV photo of me at the desk? Was this the moment they would catch me in the lie and get the cuffs out? I had a sudden wildly inappropriate memory of Helene and Stanley, back in Chester Square. Mosoni was watching me intently. No quarter, Judith.

  ‘No, it wasn’t me. We had said goodbye at the restaurant. I’m afraid I can’t remember the name of it. It had a balcony . . . I went to Piazza Navona, had a coffee, I think. Do I need an alibi?’ I half laughed, then looked ashamed, my attempt at a joke in bad taste.

  Da Silva cut in. ‘Did Signor Fitzpatrick say anything about a woman?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  Mosoni added, ‘No, signora. No alibi. But you are planning to stay in Italy? We may need to contact you again.’

  ‘Just a few more days. I was planning to keep travelling. Of course, I will help in any way I can. Poor Cameron. I still can’t really take it in.’

  ‘Of course, it is a terrible shock,’ responded da Silva gravely.

  ‘Yes, a terrible shock.’

  We were all silent for a few moments, being terribly shocked. Then both men rose and we said the usual things. I opened the door and heard them go down the stairs, heard them politely say goodbye to the goggling receptionist. I stood a few steps away from the window, listening for the police car’s engine. As it swung away I remained perfectly, perfectly still. Could they have planted a spy camera in my bedroom? Mosoni, while da Silva had me distracted? Wasn’t that illegal? I couldn’t look for anything, because then it would spy on me looking and that would show I was suspicious. Christ. They hadn’t asked about the knife, at least. I sat down gingerly in the chair again, smoked a cigarette, got up, began to pack my things. There was still a decent amount of Steve’s money rolled up in my washbag. I would stay in Italy at most a couple of days, then take a train to Geneva. Cash for everything, until I could find what I needed there.

  I leaned against the window and let my hand stray between my legs. It felt good, seeing what I could take. Better than good. I could feel the lips of my pussy swell against the tight cloth of my panties. I had endured, and I had got away. Well, almost. In the meantime, I thought I’d find a nicer hotel and do what I’d been dying to do for weeks. Get laid.

  18

  I’m not interested in being pursued. I’m not interested in flirting, or going on dates, or being lied at, which is all that eventually amounts to. I like choosing. That’s why I like going to parties, because all that boring business is already out of the way. Everyone knows why they’re there; no one is looking for another soul to gaze into their eyes and reflect their own. Flying solo, out in the world, is more complicated. Once I’d discounted the married fathers – not that they wouldn’t, but the work, the bother, the inconvenience – and the local teenagers – unlikely to be talented – I was pretty much left with the staff of the considerably nicer hotel I’d checked into in Bellagio. And not that one is proud about fucking the help – fond recollections of Jan – but they were a depressing bunch. I was antsy after my meeting with the police; I needed to smooth out the tension.

  Matteo seemed perfect. I let him pick me up in a scruffy bar on the shore of the lake, a place I’d picked for the line of motorbikes racked up outside, though I’d noticed that the bikers who toured through Como usually had a conveniently pint-sized girlfriend perched between the topcases. Matteo was alone; when we got talking he expl
ained that he was from Milan, staying out at his grandmother’s house. He had just finished university, which in Italy made him a few years older than me. His face wasn’t much, but he was tall, and the shoulders under his washed-out black T-shirt were broad and tight. He bought me a glass of nasty prosecco, then I bought myself another one and offered him a beer. I hopped on the back of his Vespa and we puttered off to Granny’s (Nonna, I’d confirmed, was away at the seaside). I called myself Lauren again, gave the same story of a tour of Italy between jobs. For a moment, as the Vespa chugged up the steep road away from the little town, with the lake below us pink in the sunset, I rested my face against his jacket, letting my hands gently grip his hipbones, and felt a little lonely. This was how it was going to be, I thought. If I went through with this I’d never be able to be myself again. Still, we’d never been that close.

  The thought of an old-lady cottage had been a bit lowering, but Matteo’s house was rather nice – Seventies in that way that Italian architecture can be without being disgusting, with lots of white wall and dark wood, and a huge terrace with a spectacular view of the water. It was growing cool, so Matteo lent me a cashmere sweater to throw over my jeans and we sat with a bottle of strange fizzy red wine watching the fairy lights of the last ferry receding towards Como. He lit a joint, which I pretended to take a toke on, and told me that although he had studied architecture he was thinking of writing a novel. Then he asked if I’d like to hear him play the guitar, and I could see where that might end, so I murmured, ‘Maybe later’ and put my tongue in his mouth. He seemed surprised, but keeping in mind that Italians think all English women are slags, he soon got the idea. I allowed the kiss to deepen, twisting myself over his lap so he could feel my breasts against him, working my tongue deeper into the sweet taste of grass in his mouth until I felt him hardening under his jeans.

  ‘Let’s go to your room.’

  I saw the painting as Matteo led the way upstairs, and only then did I understand what I had done in Rome. I hate it when the world does that cheap leitmotif thing. A reproduction in oils of Turner’s Campo Vaccino, the last painting he had made of the city. Some people see regret in the picture, the soft vagrancies of the light across the Forum, the great man’s dancing farewell. A tourist memento, the kind of thing you’d see slung against a fence on the banks of the Tiber river. Where I had been, not so long before.

  Matteo paused to push me against the wall in another kiss, more urgently now. I shimmied out of my boots and jeans, bunching my knickers in my hand, and lay back while he removed his sweater and T-shirt, then I pulled him down and flipped him onto his back, running my tongue over the clean young lines of his chest, rubbing the flat of my tongue against his nipples. Just the smell of a man after so long was getting me wet – I pushed my face into his armpit and sucked the musk of his sweat like a hummingbird seeking nectar. I traced the narrow line of hair over his flat belly with my tongue, paused at the first button of his Levis, opened his fly to take him in my mouth. His cock was a bit morose – long, yet too narrow, with a displeasingly childish amount of foreskin, but achingly hard. From the tenor of his breathing I guess this didn’t happen all that often on a quiet night in Como, and I wanted him to fuck me before he came.

  ‘Have you got a condom?’

  He got up and switched on a light in the bathroom, his thin buttocks vulnerably exposed as he crossed from the bed. I stroked the lips of my cunt, opening myself, rubbing a little of my own juice on my mouth. I was so wound up I thought I could come like that; it seemed to take him forever to get the damn thing on and position his hipbones between my spread thighs. I guided him in and let his head fall in the hollow of my collarbone, squeezing him tightly to slow him down.

  ‘Aspetta. Wait. Take your time.’ He moved more slowly, pushing deep, a good regular rhythm. I manoeuvred my right hand between us to reach my clit.

  ‘Harder. Vai. Harder.’

  And then, for a second as he came into me, that first, exquisite moment of opening, of taking, I got distracted. His breath in my ear was a vespertilian caress, a demon’s love poem. It was dark in the bedroom and my gaze searched out a few objects on the bureau next to the bed – a paperback, an ashtray, a touching silver sports cup. You could grab it, I thought, you could grab it and crack it against the back of his head. The blood would flow down around his ear, drip onto your face. He wouldn’t know what had hit him. He would collapse softly on your breast like a puppet, twitching out his life through his cock, a hanged corpse. I closed my eyes. I was starting to cum, but behind my eyelids there was a film playing, a pair of pleading eyes, the brass corner of a briefcase, a crimson swaddle of sanitary towels, a bloated, greyed face. I feared that I was fucking another dead man, and I found I liked those thoughts. I was panting deep in my throat, almost grunting, I could hear Matteo’s gasps rising to meet mine, and then for a few perfect seconds I was lost until there we were, lying like real lovers, panting on the shipwrecked shore. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t look at him. We were silent for a while and then he nuzzled me, kissing my shoulder, my hair.

  There’s a device called anamorphic perspective. An object is painted on a slant, so that its true identity is only revealed when you view the picture from exactly the right point. The most famous example, perhaps, is Holbein’s The Ambassadors, where a white smear in the foreground of the portrait becomes a human skull. There’s a worn patch on the floor of the National Gallery, to the right of the picture, where you have to be to see the conceit. But I think that all great painters create a form of anamorphism. You have to stand in the correct place, and suddenly it’s as though you have fallen into the picture. Briefly, you exist in two states, inside and outside, a quantum trick. Neither state can exist in isolation from the other. So there I was in Rome, in Matteo’s bed, doubled.

  ‘Ciao, cara. Ciao bellissima.’

  ‘Ciao,’ I whispered, against his throat.

  I tried to put some warmth into my voice, stroked a hand idly through his hair. It wasn’t Matteo’s fault, he was sweet enough. He fetched a glass of water but I shook my head, snuggling into the duvet and pretending to doze off. I was still wearing his sweater; it made me feel more naked as he spooned his body around my bare thighs. I waited until his breathing softened and then my eyes flicked open like a horror film vampire. I counted down slowly from a thousand in Italian, then in French, then in English, gently lifted the arm holding me and slowly, slowly, wriggled out of the bed. I left the sweater, grabbed my jeans and boots. I’d been planning to hold my knickers against his face when he came, letting him inhale me as he let go in my cunt, but I’d been too busy thinking about how sexy it would be to murder him to recall that little trick. I went half-naked down the staircase with my heels on the edge of the tread and pulled on the rest of my clothes in the hall, beneath the hazy glow of the Turner. I could see the lights of Bellagio below and started down at a jog. My room key was behind the desk at the hotel. Matteo hadn’t asked where I was staying. Even if he wanted to find me, I’d be gone by the time he woke up. This wasn’t how it was going to be, I told myself, this is how it is, now. I had been overwrought, it was just my brain playing games, a technicolour dreamshow of stress. Nothing more, nothing to worry over. There was no moon, it wasn’t late and I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I would pack my things, pay the bill, ask for a cab at 5 a.m. to drive me round the lake to the station. I needed to be stronger than ever now; just a few more days, that was all. Matteo had been a mistake, I thought, irritated. What was I, a fucking junkie? There would be time enough for that, so much time. Just the next thing then, and the next and the next, until I had finished in Geneva.

  19

  In about 1612, in Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi made a small drawing of Danae, the princess of Argos, to whom Zeus made love in a shower of golden rain. It was a startling choice for a female apprentice who was heavily chaperoned whenever she left her father’s house. Artemisia’s Danae wouldn’t be much of a beauty by contemporary standards, her flesh too pale, her bel
ly too pouting. Even reclining, audaciously displaying her nudity, there is a touch of doubling to her thrown-back chin. I loved the picture because, unlike most examples of the subject – a popular choice for seventeenth-century soft porn – it is witty. Danae’s eyes are closed in ecstasy, but not quite. Beneath the languor of their lids she is appraising, glancing slyly at the number of gold nuggets tumbling on her compliant flesh. Her right hand entwined with marmalade-gold hair rests on her substantial thigh, but the muscles of her forearm are clenched, her fist is tight as she clutches a handful of loot. Danae is making a fool of the god who believes he has bedazzled her; she is laughing beneath those knowingly lowered lashes at the viewer, at the man who cloaks his own need to gaze at her nakedness in the respectability of a classical subject. This is what we are, Danae is saying; even when we play the nymph you have to fill our cunts with gold. But it is not cruel, the teenage painter’s laughter. She is sharing her giggles, inviting us to see what erotic cripples we are. If Danae had a cartoon bubble spilling from the peachy purse of her mouth it would be saying, ‘OK, then, big boy. How much?’

  It was a good thing to think of, that picture, as I sat in the lobby bar of the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva. Unlike other European cities, it hadn’t become a necropolis in August. Inside, the air conditioning might be purring discreetly, but out there under the sullen Swiss sky, the city still throbbed with the hidden gleam of money. I remembered reading the memoirs of a famous call girl, who said that if you want to find the hooker in a smart hotel, look for the woman in the conservative suit. I remembered my poor little flop of tweed, a lifetime ago at the Ritz with Leanne. Obviously, I thought wryly, destiny had just been biding her time. This new number was courtesy of Steve, an investment made from the pre-fall collections on my last visit: Valentino in the lightest navy wool, softly yet rigorously cut, plain high Jimmy Choo sandals in black. Hair up, no jewellery, mani-pedi in pearly beige. I looked so like a banker I had to be a whore.