She stood. ‘I have made sure that they are working today. There’s a conference room you can use – number three, follow the signs.’
Sandro glanced at the paper: Scarpa had been thorough. Dorcas Ogunwi, Congolese, aged twenty, maid of two years’ service; Vincenzo Nutri, restaurant waiter, forty-five, who had been with the spa since it opened; and Eleonora Castrozzi, born in Sardinia thirty-seven years ago. She had worked for La Serenita as a masseuse for six years.
‘I’ll have Dorcas sent up,’ said Scarpa, with a thin smile. ‘Eleonora is in a treatment. You may have to go to her – she’s very busy today.’
And they were dismissed.
They proceeded to the conference room, up a limestone staircase and down carpeted corridors. The place was kept very warm. A middle-aged woman passed them going the other way in a towelling gown and turban, giving them a dirty look. Cold and hungry, no doubt, thought Sandro, nodding to her.
The maid, Dorcas Ogunwi, arrived promptly, peering round the door. A slight girl, looking younger than her twenty years in the pale-grey button-fronted uniform, a tiny cap on her cropped head, but sparky and cheerful as she introduced herself. All Sandro knew about the Congo was that there always seemed to be a civil war going on there, but he didn’t say so. Obviously. She looked nervous when Sandro asked her instead, only because he could still hear her strong accent, how long she had been in the country.
‘No, no,’ he said, cursing himself. ‘I am very happy you’re here. Listen, I am not even a working police officer any more, and if anyone asked me, I would say we need more of you not fewer. Hard-working young people? Of course.’ And he even believed it. Where were the young? There were so few of them.
Dorcas subsided. ‘I have been in Italy seven years. I came when I was thirteen. I work here two years. You want to know about Lucia?’
Already Sandro liked Lucia Grenzi. He couldn’t remember her more than in outline, small and dark and fierce, cropped hair. He had a stronger memory of Martine: he could remember Martine’s voice in La Vipera now, hear it somewhere else in that house. But Lucia’s name on this girl’s lips, as though they’d been friends. She’d encouraged a maid from the Congo, made her feel at home up here in the cold white mountains.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘She was a very nice lady,’ said Dorcas, putting a hand to her head to make sure the little white cap was in place. ‘She always left money for me after her stay, even when she only came for a few days. She never became angry, never complain. Of course, I don’t give cause – but there are plenty of guests who complain anyway. Who accuse of stealing even if they lose something themselves and when they find again –’ She broke off. ‘It wasn’t the tip. She was kind lady. Ask about my family, give me money for them.’ She paused, her bright eyes clouding. ‘I – when I –’ and she couldn’t go on.
‘You found her,’ said Sandro gently. She nodded, sitting up very straight. He could see tears welling in her eyes and saw her hold herself very still so they wouldn’t spill over.
‘Hanging,’ she said. ‘You know. In Congo, we see dead people. Some guest wouldn’t think about the maid at all, or if they think, would consider, a girl from Africa, she seen all this before, no need to protect her. She leave me a note, in the place where she always leave the tip. I had to give it to the police. It say, I’m sorry Dorcas. Say, I can’t go on but you must go on. For your family.’ She stared down at her hands. ‘She left me money too.’
There was a heavy silence, the weight of a human life departed.
‘Did she arrive here in particular distress?’ asked Pietro. ‘Was she worried? Did she talk to you about her – feelings at all, ever?’
The girl shook her head slowly, withdrawing a crumpled tissue from the sleeve of her uniform tunic and tugging at it between her fingers. ‘She was okay the day she arrived. She seemed very happy to be here, very relax when she put down her bag. She give me a hug.’ Dorcas looked down at the tissue, at her fingers that were shredding it. ‘She was supposed to be here six days. She was here three days when I find her body.’
‘You last saw her – alive, I mean – the previous morning?’ said Pietro. Dorcas nodded. ‘And how did she seem?’
‘Normal,’ said Dorcas, rubbing at the corner of her eye. ‘Nothing strange about her. Getting better already, feeling better. Looking forward to her treatments. She enjoy them.’
‘What treatments did she have? The same every day?’
‘Yes,’ said Dorcas. ‘There are different plans for different guests. Lucia was not on the weight loss regime, but the wellness regime because she – she –’ She hesitated, not knowing the appropriate words to use. ‘She was not fat. Too skinny, in fact. She eat what she want – though everything here is very healthy.’ She wrinkled her nose and darted them a rueful, comical glance. ‘No French fries. Breakfast, swim, lunch, massage. Usually she go for a walk but that day it was raining.’
‘So the waiter –’ Sandro looked at the page again ‘– Mr Nutri, he would have seen her in the middle of the day?’
Dorcas nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She like Vincenzo, he was always her waiter.’
When they told her she could go she jumped up eagerly, like a child let out of school. At the door she turned back. ‘I wish she tell me,’ she said. ‘I wish I see her one more time and she tell me why. I wish.’ And she was gone.
Nutri was a square sort of man with a pink complexion and very little hair: he seemed shy, for all his substance, and anxious. ‘I hear you were a favourite of Miss Grenzi,’ said Sandro, to put him at his ease.
‘She was a favourite of mine,’ said Nutri proudly. ‘I served her for seven years here, since she began coming, when the spa opened. A very nice lady. Very thoughtful. She could eat what she wanted but she always chose so as not to upset the guests who were on the weight loss diet. Always interested in me and my family.’
‘I imagine it was a terrible shock,’ said Sandro, ‘to lose her.’
Nutri set his elbows on the table and briefly rubbed his big face with his hands. ‘Terrible,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s the right word. Shock – I don’t know. I don’t know. People come here because there’s something missing. We don’t talk about that – I’m a waiter, it would be impolite. She was a sensitive person.’ He spread his hands. ‘So if something happened, if something went wrong – I just don’t know.’
‘How do you mean?’ said Pietro.
‘I mean, this is the place where they are safe.’ Nutri gestured. ‘Among friends. Lucia in particular. We were her friends, the director was her friend.’ He hesitated. ‘If their trouble, whatever the trouble is, the bad husband, the bad lover, the bank manager, the illness – if it follows them here –’ He broke off.
‘Do you think that’s what happened?’ said Sandro quickly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nutri.
‘Did you say this to the coroner?’ said Pietro. Nutri looked at him, his big shiny face.
‘I didn’t think of it,’ he said simply. ‘He just wanted to know if she had been distressed when I saw her, at lunch, the last time I saw her. And I said she had been maybe preoccupied, only. Not distressed. When he was asking me, I couldn’t really say why.’
‘Could you try to think?’ said Sandro, as gently as he could. ‘To think back to that day?’
Nutri rubbed his eyes again and was quiet for a moment, his hands to his face. Then he took them away. ‘She had been swimming – her hair was still wet. She kept looking around whenever anyone came into the room. As if she was looking for someone?’
‘She didn’t say anything to you, though? Not that –’ Sandro hesitated ‘– perhaps she’d seen someone she didn’t want to see?’ Nutri shook his head. ‘And she didn’t come in for dinner?’
‘No,’ he said, and there was anguish in his voice.
‘You didn’t see her again?’
Nutri began to shake his head, and then stopped. ‘I think she went for a walk. As I was serving the second sitting I
saw her come in through the front door and go upstairs. I didn’t think much of it. It was such a beautiful evening.’
When Nutri was gone, Sandro stood from the long table and walked to the window. From where he stood at the wide tripleglazed hermetically sealed wall of glass, to his left he could see a flat-glazed roof that came out from that wing of the hotel, and beneath it the shifting pale blue-green of a swimming pool. The water extended further, beyond the roof into the open air where steam rose from its surface, and as he watched, the broad-backed figure of a female swam out, head in a rubber cap and employing a slow breaststroke, turning back in under the canopy as another swimmer emerged.
Sandro was aware of Pietro beside him, nodding down at the pool. ‘What are you thinking?’ he said. ‘We go down to the massage rooms to find that busy masseuse?’
Sandro chewed the inside of his lip, still thinking about Scarpa and what Nutri had said. ‘Sure,’ he said absently. But when they turned from the window and it all shifted around in his head – the timing, the people, the thought of Lucia Grenzi at her lunch table – as they slotted into their places, Sandro stopped.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You know what? A little detour.’ He could see Pietro’s face turn wary. ‘Don’t suppose you brought your trunks, did you?’
*
However hard you tried to disguise it with room fragrances and incense, you could always smell a pool. Chlorine and feet: the feet of the rich smelled just like everyone else’s. Pietro and Sandro had been challenged at the door and admitted only after being supplied with disposable spongy flip-flops, Pietro’s face a picture as he stripped off his socks and trainers. The pool was very long and narrow in a room of the same pale stone as the rest of the place, and at the far end a sort of rubber curtain allowed the swimmers to swim out into the open air without admitting too much cold. As they watched, the large woman they had seen from above breached the curtain, swimming doggedly back inside.
They stood against the back wall. Pietro hadn’t asked why they were here, yet.
Sandro watched the woman. ‘Lucia Grenzi came in with wet hair. Didn’t wait to dry it,’ said Sandro.
‘Do women always dry their hair?’
‘I’d say they do if they’re not at home, if they’re eating lunch in public. I’d say she was in a hurry. Distracted.’ The pool had four lanes and, as they watched, held only the woman and a man, both in caps and goggles. There had been a discreet sign at the door insisting on both. A lifeguard paced.
The long space was flooded with light: it entered the room from three sides, bouncing and twinkling from its surfaces. But it had been raining, mused Sandro, when Lucia Grenzi had come swimming on the last morning of her life. Had she known when she entered the water that it would be the last? He thought not. But something had been set in motion by the time she climbed out.
‘With goggles and those rubber caps on you wouldn’t recognise your own mother, would you?’ said Pietro, and bang on cue the female swimmer reached the aluminium steps and stripped off her cap. Damp tawny curls sprang out around a broad freckled face; the goggles were next.
The male swimmer had reached the end of the pool and, just as the woman had done, removed his cap. They nodded at each other circumspectly, climbed out and walked off in different directions.
‘I think she saw someone. Someone she thought she knew. Or someone who reminded her of something.’
The lifeguard was approaching: they waited for him to reach them.
Chapter Twenty
GIULI STARTLED HERSELF by yawning and hastily lifted a hand to stifle it. It felt to her as though they had stood in the doorway of the building engaging in easy conversation with the concierge for an hour before they got into the narrow vaulted hall. Her back ached. Was this age, too?
The concierge was a small Neapolitan woman in an apron, with suspicious eyes and short dyed red hair. She seemed to be on easy terms with the cobbler: gradually Giuli grasped that she had her eye on him, although he was probably ten years her senior. Sometimes it astonished her, the human urge to find a mate. Or just to mate. If she hadn’t found Enzo …
Surreptitiously she checked her phone. Another missed call, but not from Enzo, from a number the phone didn’t recognise and therefore that clinic woman. She stuffed the phone back in her pocket.
The cobbler, she recognised, was something of an operator. He took his time getting round to the point, until she began to wonder if he was interested in the Neapolitan. He didn’t give that away, which would have been Giuli’s recommendation: the concierge looked like a little terrier who wouldn’t let go once she’d got her teeth into him.
The narrow stone stairway smelled of incense and polished stone. There was a door at the back of the hall that had been left open, allowing a glimpse of a rug and a dresser in a dim, sunless space that must be the concierge’s apartment.
‘It’s the lady on the first floor,’ the shoe-mender came out with it, finally. ‘What’s her name, Signora –’
‘Ticino,’ supplied Giuli, regretting her intervention immediately when the Neapolitan shot her a narrowed look. Giuli twiddled her wedding ring casually, hoping that would convince the concierge she wasn’t a rival, but the woman just settled her arms across her broad bust, turning a little so she couldn’t see Giuli at all.
‘What about her?’ she said, glancing up the stairway. Giuli and the cobbler followed her gaze. At the bend in the stairs an ugly cactus stood on a ledge.
‘Well, this lady –’ smoothly the cobbler corrected himself, indicating Giuli ‘– this person is worried about her. Seems to think there’s something wrong.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Some family trouble. The wellbeing of a child is involved. She’s got a grandchild? Granddaughter?’
The Neapolitan became immediately agitated. ‘I can’t discuss the tenants out here,’ she said, seizing the cobbler by his elbow and shoving him ahead of her down the hall towards the open door. Giuli hung back, a foot on the step, but the woman was too sharp for her. ‘And you,’ she said over her shoulder.
It was a single room, crammed with the contents of a whole apartment, and a door to the back that must lead if not to a bathroom then at least a privy. The room smelled of drains and damp and was dark. The concierge hauled out a set of mahogany chairs around a matching table too large for the room and they sat, squeezed against the highly polished wood. Giuli was beginning to feel queasy: she felt a stab of longing for her clean, small, bright flat, and for Enzo. A tinkling tray of glasses appeared on the table, some unspecified sticky liquid in them.
‘What was that about a child?’ said the concierge, her eyes beady-bright in the dim room. She handed a glass to the cobbler and plonked one down in front of Giuli.
The cobbler sipped, appreciative. ‘I told, I told this lady –’
‘Giulietta Sarto,’ said Giuli, unable to sit quietly any longer. The smell of sweet booze settled over the sulphurous stink of drains. ‘I work for Sandro Cellini, who is a private investigator.’ The Neapolitan’s suspicious expression hardened but Giuli took a deep breath and carried on. ‘The child phoned our offices asking for help, from this number. I spoke to the grandmother the next day, who explained the situation to me – but there was something odd about it. I can’t explain.’
‘I’ve never seen a child,’ said the concierge slowly. ‘Never.’
‘That’s what I said,’ said the cobbler eagerly. His glass was empty: the concierge reached for the bottle, but absently.
‘There’s a man, her own age, brother or cousin. He took her when she went on her holiday, a few weeks ago, he brought her back, then –’ she hesitated. ‘He took her home with him a day or so ago.’
‘But no daughter? No child?’
‘There’s a woman visits, but I always thought she was some kind of carer, checking up on her. No family resemblance, none. A blonde. Never brought a child with her, and not the motherly type, I’d have said.’
‘So you’ve never seen the child?’ Giuli sensed something comin
g, something she was afraid of. It sharpened her senses, the air thickened, the room squeezed tight around her and she felt saliva rush into her mouth. ‘You haven’t seen one – but –’ She was half to her feet at the table, cold sweat on her forehead, her hand to her mouth.
‘There,’ said the concierge sharply, pointing to the door at the back of the room and Giuli stumbled, barking her shin painfully on something, blundering through the crowded space. She got through the door just in time and found herself on her knees in a tiny, shockingly cold space, face to face with the ancient scale round a porcelain toilet bowl.
She vomited, luxuriously. The door behind her was open – there wasn’t room to close it with her on her knees – but Giuli was past caring. She could hear a tap running, could hear them muttering together at the table, scandalised. At her age, she heard. They probably thought she’d been drinking. I’m sick, she wanted to say. She heaved and retched until there was nothing left and she sat back, drained. Her face felt clammy; shakily, she stood up. A tiny basin sat against the wall, above it a small square of speckled mirror: she looked green. She splashed water on her face and rinsed out her mouth, and went back in.
‘All right?’ said the concierge warily. The cobbler just looked appalled.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Giuli. ‘It must have been something I –’
‘Something you ate,’ the Neapolitan finished for her, sour. Giuli knew she thought she was a drunk or a junkie. ‘Yes, well.’ She pushed a glass of squash across the table to Giuli, and beside it a cracker. ‘Just have a nibble on that.’ She and the shoe-mender exchanged glances.
Gingerly Giuli nibbled. The salt on the cracker might have been ambrosia. There was a silence.
‘You were saying,’ said the cobbler, leaning towards the concierge, his elbows on her polished mahogany, ‘were you?’
The woman hesitated a moment then got up, crossed to a board of hooks beside the door where keys hung, ran her finger along, selected one.
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