‘Don’t you think you’re letting your imagination run away with you?’ said the nurse, with kind condescension.
‘You were the ones who seemed to think someone had tampered with the line,’ said Luisa. ‘You even asked me if I’d done it. And I’m a friend of Benedetta’s.’
‘Well, we have cameras, you know,’ said the nurse, giving her a sharp look, affronted.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Luisa, ‘so you do.’ She held the nurse’s gaze: the previous year a woman dressed as a nurse had tried to steal a gypsy child from the emergency room and had only been apprehended when she began to run, on the hospital forecourt. It had been in the local paper. Security cameras had been installed all over the place.
‘Well,’ she said, holding herself upright, ‘I suggest you look at your footage. And in the meantime I am going to wait patiently for visiting hours.’
The nurse flushed, very pink against her flaming hair, and said haughtily, ‘One moment.’ She hurried off through the door behind the nurses’ station, from behind which Luisa heard muffled angry voices. The redhead emerged with her colour still high and said haughtily, ‘You may sit with Benedetta for fifteen minutes. Do not touch her, or indeed anything, and do not interrogate her. Is that clear?’
‘Have you looked at the footage?’ said Luisa gently.
The woman pursed her lips. ‘That’s our business,’ she said. ‘Not yours, or your husband’s for that matter.’ And she made a gesture of elaborate welcome, sweeping a hand in the direction of Benedetta’s bed, then stalked off behind the desk to busy herself pointlessly with some papers, not looking up when Luisa went.
Benedetta’s skin against the pillow was still dry and papery, but there was a trace of colour to her at least. Luisa pulled the curtain round them a little and sat down on the chair that still stood beside the bed. She hadn’t promised anything, had she? She looked up, around the bed, searching for the camera, and saw none. All bluster, then.
Sandro, she thought. Sandro. She stepped to the window and dialled his number, her back to the glass, watching Benedetta.
As it began to ring, she suddenly thought, what if he’s driving, and panic overtook her, a panic that seemed to have been lying in wait all day, since she’d got that message. I’m sorry. I love you. He’ll answer and he’ll crash – but before she could hang up the answerphone cut in. Hastily she whispered into it. ‘I’m at the hospital, I came to see Benedetta. I worry about –’ about what? About too many things. ‘About her brother. Luca Bartolini. Not sure if he knows I’m married to you, if he’s trying, I don’t know, to hide something.’
On the pillow Benedetta’s head moved just a little; a tiny sound, not even a moan, came from her. Luisa cupped her hand around the phone to mute her voice.
‘The Salieri housekeeper, carer, whatever,’ she whispered, ‘the woman you met. Blonde? She was here at the hospital. Before me. I think she –’ she spoke hurriedly, so it wouldn’t sound so silly, so melodramatic ‘– I think she might have tampered with Benedetta. With her drip.’
She paused. Benedetta was still again; only the up and down movement of her thin chest gave a clue that she was alive. ‘Give me a call back, will you? When you’re there safely.’
It made no sense. Did the carer – what had Sandro said her name had been? Marte. Did she have a reason to hurt Benedetta? Luisa searched her brain and came up with none.
There were footsteps beyond the curtain. She hung up hastily, but the footsteps walked on past. She sat again, beside Benedetta, looking at the motionless profile.
Damn it: she hadn’t promised the nurse anything in the end. Once again she reached for Benedetta’s hand. The drip was there, in place, no alarms sounded. She raised the poor soft hand to her own cheek and kept it there. She expected nothing, only to sit there with her, so she wouldn’t be alone. The minutes ticked by, the ward beyond the curtain was silent and Luisa was about to go when Benedetta’s head turned on the pillow, and her eyes opened and looked straight into Luisa’s.
‘Benedetta, no – don’t try – shh,’ said Luisa in a whisper, not wanting her to use any of the energy that barely pulsed beneath her pale, papery skin. She was light and frail as dust on the pillow but her large blue eyes gazed, steady, into Luisa’s.
‘You remember me, don’t you, Benedetta? It’s Luisa.’ There was the slightest movement of her head that Luisa took to mean she did. ‘Did she take out your drip?’ said Luisa in a whisper. ‘The woman who was here? She’s not your maid, is she? She doesn’t work for your mother?’
The ghost of a smile appeared on Benedetta’s lips. ‘I must have done it by – by –’ she seemed to have difficulty with the word, perhaps due to sedation ‘– by accident,’ she finished.
Luisa looked into her eyes, trying to decipher the truth of it, and gave up. ‘I was helping at your wedding,’ she said, and as she spoke the words something came to her, a musty memory, an invitation with a gold tasselled cord, the name on it. ‘All that time ago. At our age – those things seem to be clearer, don’t they? Things that happened a long time ago.’ She didn’t know if she was talking to Benedetta or to herself.
The smile on Benedetta’s face evaporated, a weak sun obscured by cloud. Luisa hurried on. ‘It was always nice to see you, when your mother brought you into the shop.’ Now, with hindsight, she could see that Benedetta’s silence on those occasions hadn’t just been recalcitrance. She must have been on medication for years.
Benedetta turned her head on the pillow, seeking the wall, then turned it back and looked at Luisa again. ‘The child,’ she said. ‘The child. She’s alone, you know. Will she be safe there?’
‘The child?’ Luisa whispered. ‘What child, Benedetta?’
Something changed in Benedetta’s eyes, turned them crystalline. ‘They took her, they put her in the dark. You knew that, though, didn’t you? They put her where it was cold and dark. You knew that.’
Luisa felt the hair on her head stand on end: the words meant something that in that moment she felt only she and Benedetta would understand. ‘My child?’ she said, although she knew in her rational mind that Benedetta wouldn’t have known what happened, thirty years ago, to their child, hers and Sandro’s – unless her mother – well, of course, yes. Her mother would have told her: other people’s misfortunes were currency to those like the Princess Salieri.
But Benedetta could not have seen inside Luisa’s head and known her thoughts as they buried their child, their daughter. In the cold and dark.
Benedetta smiled, a long, sad smile. The hand in hers wasn’t soft any more, it was only bones, it clutched at her.
‘She died,’ said Luisa, as gently as she could. ‘Benedetta. My baby died.’
‘Oh no,’ said Benedetta, ‘our child will never die,’ she said. ‘Our child. ’
And the head turned back on the pillow and was motionless. Her chest still rose and fell, no alarm sounded, but the beaked profile was the statue on a tomb.
There was a sound beyond the curtain, of voices, the nurses’, and among them a new one. A man’s voice – Luisa recognised it as Luca Bartolini’s. And at the sound Benedetta began to struggle.
Chapter Nineteen
IT CAME INTO VIEW at the head of the valley as they wound up in the big black car. A scattering of large, pale, modern buildings, white as sugar cubes, set under a forbidding ridge against the sky. Climbing out of the car, Sandro could hear the thunder of a waterfall.
There was a message from Luisa but it had been delivered in a whisper and he couldn’t make half of it out against the sound. Something about visiting Benedetta Salieri in the hospital. Something about Gianna Marte. What did she know about Gianna Marte? He gave up: they’d wait.
Pietro had called Gorgone from the car as Sandro drove. At the wheel, Sandro had found he needed to concentrate hard or the big car ran away with him. So easy to drive too fast when the car was so powerful and so silent, quite insulated from the world. It was difficult to drive and listen but he could tell
, even with all the distractions, that Gorgone was hiding something. That he didn’t like the questions. And that the news of Lucia Grenzi’s death was a shock to him. Sandro had reached his hand for the phone, but Pietro shook his head.
‘He knows La Serenita,’ said Pietro after he hung up, ‘but it’s not one of his wellness centres. He said everyone knows it – it’s the classiest and most expensive place in the Dolomites.’
They’d just come round Verona, past the ubiquitous commercial centres, furniture shops, eight lanes of traffic completely concealing the ancient city. And beyond it all, close now, the ghostly white peaks of the mountains, the great barrier to the north. Sandro was most definitely not a mountain person. The Brenner wound up into them, the wide square valley with rock climbing abruptly to either side.
‘He was shocked to hear about Grenzi’s death?’ said Sandro. ‘Genuinely?’
‘I thought so,’ said Pietro, frowning. ‘He’s – like you said before – a bit like he’s on autopilot.’
The valley had begun to narrow around them. The afternoon wasn’t much advanced but the mountains’ long shadows had started to creep across the vineyards and barns. They were called suicide valleys, when you got to where the sun barely entered, Sandro knew that.
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, eyeing the rock face as though it might make another step towards them. ‘Like his hard drive’s been wiped,’ he went on, ‘burned out. They could easily have been doing drugs there at La Vipera – in fact, it would have been surprising if they weren’t.’ He fell silent, wondering. It seemed too easy to blame drugs.
It had been raining up here and the motorway gleamed: he shifted carefully into the slow lane.
‘Or a lot of therapy,’ said Pietro.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro absently. Something chimed with the thought, some memory of standing on the landing outside Gorgone’s offices. And that moment, at the end of his interview with the man, when a chink, an odd chink, had appeared in Gorgone’s apparent imperviousness. ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘I thought he was just stupid. Maybe it was something else.’
‘But he did seem very shocked to hear she’d died,’ Pietro said thoughtfully. ‘I believed that. Committed suicide – he kept repeating it. He sounded frightened. I asked if he’d had any word from her at all and he was adamant he hadn’t.’
‘Talking of drugs,’ said Sandro. ‘You did send the forensics people out to La Vipera to look at what we found? In the chimney breast?’
‘Yeah,’ said Pietro, leaning back in his big seat. ‘They said they’d email preliminary results, could be this afternoon.’
And then the wet road had narrowed, a shining ribbon winding steeply uphill, and they’d stopped talking until La Serenita came into view.
They were standing in the car-parking area, screened from the hotel complex by a wide paved road lined with cypresses so neatly clipped they might have been cut-outs. They looked distinctly odd up here. The air was almost sparkling, cold and crystalline: tentatively Sandro inhaled, his old lungs used to carbon monoxide and the warm damp of the Arno, and coughed immediately.
Beyond the trees the bulk of the hotel buildings rose. Large windows, balconies, a sculptured parkland. A wide stream flowing across it and, somewhere he couldn’t perceive, the waterfall. Now and again he’d read about these places in magazines, the fat farm, the wellness centre, and all he had ever wondered was – other than, how can anyone afford a thousand euros a day – if they caught you wolfing down a plate of spaghetti cacio e pepe in the nearest mountain refuge, would they haul you back in under guard? With sorrowful looks, for re-education? He’d even remembered saying to Luisa, they could tag them. The inmates.
He surveyed the scene at higher level, and sure enough there they were, two cameras on poles at the entrance: no doubt more elsewhere.
It could have been the ridiculous purity of the air or the cold or the sound of the crashing water that never let up, but Sandro was feeling distinctly unusual: it was as if everything was in too sharp a focus here. As if the place was too clean, too full of nature. Grenzi had exiled herself up here for that very reason, perhaps. And Helen Mason in Nova Scotia, another cold, clean place of exile.
‘Right then,’ said Sandro, deciding to use this odd clearheadedness before it evaporated. ‘We’re meeting the director, right?’
Pietro had called ahead. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Two o’clock.’ It was a minute after: the Alfa had done them proud. The old Fiat would have taken an hour and a half longer, if it had got here at all. They began to walk briskly towards a wide glass entrance, flanked by two large lumps of granite that might or might not have been sculptures.
‘Any impressions?’ asked Sandro quickly. ‘Of her, I mean, the director of the place, when you spoke to her on the phone?’
Pietro looked at him sideways. ‘German,’ he said. They stepped up their pace.
She didn’t look particularly German, a petite woman with a lot of thick black hair, and her name was Maria Scarpa, a name from the Veneto. She gestured towards two chairs that looked faintly medicinal: the kind that were good for your back, all pale wood and oatmeal tweed.
Her voice did have the Tyrolean edge, it was true. They were different up here – but then weren’t they different everywhere? Sitting down carefully, Sandro instructed himself to keep an open mind.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said and looked at her watch.
Sandro bridled, but he knew better than to take offence. ‘Dottoressa.’
One wall of the large room had a display of certificates and qualifications – nothing vulgar, all very discreetly and tastefully presented. However, he had seen similar qualifications elsewhere. In the reception area of Luisa’s hairdresser’s, for example, where he’d whiled away many an hour examining them while waiting for her to finish inquiring after Fabio’s family.
Why was he so against this kind of thing? Because aromatherapy wasn’t science? Because it charged unhappy people, mostly female, a thousand euros a day for laxatives and broth and round-the-clock massage? That, maybe. But a woman had killed herself here and Dottoressa Scarpa was treating them like door-to-door salesmen. This most decidedly was not going to be easy.
‘I know it’s a little while back,’ intervened Pietro quickly, getting the measure of Sandro’s mood. ‘And this is extraordinarily helpful of you, to offer us access –’
‘I’m not offering you access,’ Scarpa interrupted him smoothly.
‘Of course not,’ said Sandro, taking over. ‘We understand absolutely that your –’ the word inmates sprang to mind ‘– guests are here for privacy, their treatments are confidential, and we don’t want to interfere with that.’
Pietro continued. ‘But,’ his voice was gentle, solicitous. He was good, Sandro reflected. ‘We are pursuing a murder inquiry. Three people have died, if, as I think we must, we connect Signora Grenzi’s death with our investigation.’
‘Why must you?’ said Scarpa swiftly.
‘She lived with the dead woman in a commune, long ago, in the village where the murders occurred.’ Scarpa said nothing, frowning, and Pietro spread his hands. ‘You can see that we really have no choice.’ He gestured back to where they’d come from. ‘We’ve done our best to be discreet.’ Implying that they could return in a squad car or two if she wanted.
There was a long pause, during which Maria Scarpa returned his look with steely poise. ‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘We’d like to talk to anyone who was in contact with her while she was here for that last stay,’ said Pietro quickly.
‘Beginning with yourself, perhaps?’ said Sandro.
Scarpa turned her head. ‘I wasn’t here,’ she said. ‘I was in Bermuda, on my annual break.’ Her voice was quieter, regretful. If he’d known her for more than five minutes he’d have guessed it was sadness. But she went on, and he didn’t pursue it.
‘I spoke to everyone myself on my return,’ she said. ‘It was a tragedy. Lucia was much loved.’
‘Sh
e was a regular guest?’ he asked quickly. ‘That must have been awful, for all of you.’
‘I wasn’t here,’ said Scarpa again, looking older and more tired – and nicer. ‘I did wonder if I had been …’ She waved a hand, a gesture of helplessness more vague than her body language had been hitherto, more human.
‘I’m sure –’ Sandro began but Scarpa shook her head impatiently.
‘I don’t flatter myself I could have prevented Lucia from doing anything she wanted to do. She was a person of great determination. But,’ and she looked uncertain, ‘she would come here to restore herself. It was her safe place, her sanctuary. Perhaps my absence made it feel less so, less stable – I don’t know.’
‘She needed a safe place? She was – troubled?’ Pietro spoke too quickly.
Scarpa put her hands flat on the table. Manicured, short straight-cut nails, unpainted. No rings, no jewellery of any kind. ‘Commissario,’ she said. ‘I’m not a doctor. I’m not a psychiatrist. I run what is essentially a hotel. But allow me my professional scruples. I told the coroner what I knew about Lucia Grenzi. It is a matter of public record. She had fears, as we all do, episodes of anxiety. She came here to clear her mind, as many do. I told the coroner I had never seen any sign that she was suicidal.’ She allowed a pause to lengthen. ‘Never. I don’t make guesses about my guests’ mental health or the causes of their distress. I only try to create an atmosphere of calm and – sanctuary, if you like.’
‘But there is no doubt it was suicide,’ said Pietro gently.
Scarpa nodded, spots of colour in her cheeks. ‘It would seem so. My staff tried very hard to revive her,’ she said. ‘She left a note beside the bed – I saw it, and it was her handwriting – apologising for the distress she knew it would cause them.’ She took a piece of paper from a drawer to the side of her pale desk. ‘These are the members of staff who spoke to Lucia Grenzi at any length.’ She had it prepared, with details: she had always intended to co-operate. Sandro sighed inwardly at the foolishness of judging by first impressions, especially where northerners were concerned.
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