And then his phone blipped again. He extracted it to see a message from Giuli: We’ve found someone who knew them at La Vipera back then and Lotti too Roberto Ragno he’s a pimp
No bloody punctuation, as if she’d broken off halfway through. He waited a second to see if any more of the message appeared, then lost patience and swiftly began to jab at the keyboard. He’d had enough of all this, missed calls and no signal and half-finished messages. He’d had enough of being without Luisa. Not being able to talk to Luisa.
Not being able to see her face.
Skype call please. You and Luisa, in the office, six o’clock.
Pietro peered over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows. ‘That gives us an hour and a bit,’ he said.
It would annoy her to be talked to like that but … There was movement in the room and Sandro looked up to see a barman appearing behind the bar, stopping in his tracks with a dishwasher basket in his arms. Sandro walked over and rested his arms on the rough stone of the bar, which was hewn, it appeared, from the mountain. ‘Afternoon,’ he said to the barman, who warily lowered the wire basket to the counter.
‘Can I help you?’ He began to unload the glasses, looking from Sandro to Pietro and back, warily.
‘We’re from the police,’ Sandro said.
‘The dottoressa mentioned you,’ said the barman, reaching up to put highball glasses on a shelf above the bar. ‘But I didn’t – Miss Grenzi didn’t drink. She never came in here.’
Pietro was ambling over, laidback. ‘It’s about two other guests,’ said Sandro, keeping his voice easy, ‘who were here at the same time. You were working that day? The day before she – died?’ The barman nodded. ‘And do you remember a woman with long white hair, a foreigner? Around midday?’
The barman drew himself up. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘I do remember her. She had a pass for the pool that didn’t also allow her access to the bar. She was very … insistent. She wanted a drink. I told her it was for guests only. ’
‘She got her way, though?’ said Sandro and the man straightened.
‘She did not,’ he said stiffly. ‘At least, she wouldn’t have. Except that there was a guest, in the reception, who heard her voice, who recognised her. I – the situation got rather difficult.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Pietro mildly, comforting. ‘This lady, she was like that, I understand. She liked to stir things up. Can you tell us what happened, exactly? Did you hear their conversation?’
‘Stir things up,’ said the barman, ‘you can say that again.’ He finished putting away the glasses, frowning. ‘The guest, a frail-looking lady, recognised her, but the white-haired woman –’
‘Johanna Nielsson,’ Pietro slipped in.
The barman shrugged. ‘If you say so. She had no idea who the guest was to begin with. One of those people who expects to be remembered but never bothers to remember other people.’
‘The guest introduced herself?’ said Sandro.
He nodded. ‘And then she – this Nielsson – was all over her, slapping her on the back. “Buy me a drink, Benedetta,” she said. Of course, I was ready to intervene, but it was tricky, you know. This Benedetta, she obviously was … not up for it. Just stood there like she’d been turned to stone. Whereas the other, Nielsson, was all over the top. Trying to put her arms around her. But she bought Nielsson her drink and what was I supposed to do? And the drink – Nielsson had a double scotch, and that’s simply rude, in my book, to order the largest drink you can think of when someone else is paying – the drink just made her worse.’
‘Did you hear their conversation?’
The barman looked uneasy. ‘They were the only ones in here. I couldn’t help but –’
‘What did you hear?’
‘Nielsson said something about being on her way down to find her and what a coincidence this was. She was here looking for a mutual friend – she didn’t give the name – she was catching up with everyone. She’d been in Canada, she said. She wasn’t well, she’d understood a few things and she wanted to lay things to rest. Something like that.’
‘Lay things to rest,’ murmured Pietro, disbelieving.
The barman shot him a glance. ‘The guest –’
‘Benedetta Salieri,’ said Sandro.
‘If you say so,’ he said again. ‘She looked like she was having none of it. She just stood there, stiff. And then this Nielsson grabbed her, practically strong-armed her away from the bar. They moved to where you sat, by the window, so I didn’t hear much after that. Until she left.’
‘How long were they talking?’
‘No more than ten minutes – though Nielsson had finished her drink in two. She started signalling for another but I pretended I couldn’t see her then I went into the kitchen. She made me angry. Something about her. Everything about her.’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro. He felt on the edge of beginning to shiver himself, the sense of her here was so vivid.
‘When I came back out of the kitchen she was on her feet, then they both were. Nielsson was waving her arms about. The other, Signora – what was it? – Salieri, was just standing very still. She was much smaller than Nielsson, but she stood there, sort of holding herself still while the other one ranted. Saying something about being a victim herself too. About it all having been someone else’s idea. I started going over there, you know, to break it up – Salieri was a guest, and she was obviously under attack somehow – but then Nielsson just stormed off.’
‘You heard nothing more?’ said Pietro.
The barman looked from one of them to the other. ‘Salieri just stood there as if she didn’t understand, then she said, “You’re a liar.”’
It was very quiet, suddenly, among the flickering lights. So quiet you could hear the howl of the wind beyond the glass, an unearthly sound, as though it had come down from the mountains like a ghost.
‘She said it quite clearly but Nielsson didn’t turn around,’ said the barman. ‘She just stalked off, out into the reception area. Nearly knocked someone over as she was going out.’
‘That would be Miss Castrozzi,’ said Pietro, but the barman didn’t seem to hear.
‘And then she said it again,’ he said, ‘even though there was no one to hear her. Salieri did. Standing quite upright, like – a bit like a kid trying to be brave. “You’re a liar.” With her fists clenched like she wanted to kill the woman.’ Pietro and Sandro exchanged a quick glance. ‘And then she phoned someone else, a friend, it sounded like, who calmed her down.’ The barman sighed. ‘And then some other people came into the bar and she came over to me to make sure the cost of the drink was on her slate, white as a sheet. I told her there was no charge.’
‘And she left?’
He nodded. ‘She walked up and down in the foyer like she didn’t know where she was for a bit, and then I think she went down to the massage suite.’
There were people there now, in the reception area, a woman in a fur coat, and expensive suitcases being wheeled in on a tall trolley. Sandro felt an itch to be gone from this place – but he couldn’t Skype-call Luisa from the car. It all roiled in his head. Benedetta Salieri like a child, clenching her fists. I’ll kill you.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he said, turning back to the barman. He saw a hint of greying five o’clock shadow, the ghosts of bags under the man’s eyes, and felt sorry for him. Working in a place like this, feeling time creeping up on him – or maybe that was just Sandro.
The man nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said, careful.
Sandro had never seen Benedetta Salieri, not then, not now. ‘You say she looked like – ’ He rephrased it. ‘Which of them would have come off worse,’ he said, ‘if she’d gone at Nielsson with those fists?’
The man folded his arms, in white shirtsleeves, across his belly and sighed. ‘She was small,’ he said, ‘fragile-looking. But she was angry. She was wound up so tight – under those circumstances people can fight, can’t they?’
A silence. Sandro felt Pietro looking at
him for guidance.
‘It’s not just Miss Grenzi, is it?’ The barman’s voice was diffident. ‘It’s not just about the suicide. It’s her. She’s dead, isn’t she?’
Sandro opened his mouth then closed it again. ‘Who’s dead?’ he said.
‘Salieri,’ said the barman. ‘Her.’
And as Sandro saw Pietro begin to shake his head, the shiver came at last. Not so much fear as recognition of a danger that had not passed, that was coming closer. Benedetta Salieri.
The barman was just standing there when they left, the little lights still flickering on the tables in the empty room.
In the reception area, behind the wealthy woman with her stacked suitcases, momentarily, neither Pietro nor Sandro could remember what they’d done with their things and they stood there turning, looking at the various exits from the foyer. All those doors.
‘Conference room,’ said Sandro abruptly and set off almost at random towards a door. His instincts felt all shot to pieces by the low-lit stone and glass blandness of the place, but the direction he took was right, it turned out. The door said ‘Conference rooms 1–5’ and opened on to a corridor he recognised. They let themselves into the room and sat, opening the little screen between them. There were a couple of emails from Parini.
Sandro opened the first: it was a report on the plastic ties used for Nielsson’s wrists. Not agricultural, at least not specifically. They were ties for rubbish bags. In the mail was a close-up photograph of the blue plastic, embedded in what was left of Johanna Nielsson’s wrists.
Behind him, Pietro sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s disappointing. Garbage-bag ties. Though they’re usually yellow, the ones I buy.’
Sandro leaned in because he’d seen those blue plastic ties, and recently – then Pietro leaned past him and scrolled up.
The second email had an attachment.
Pietro peered in at it, blocking Sandro’s view. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. Oh. Wow.’ He sat back up. ‘Not a dead bird, then. Or not only.’
‘What?’ Sandro felt his scalp prickle. At last, he thought. At last. He pushed up his glasses and focused. The attachment was the forensic report on the small pile of twigs and cinders from the walled-up fireplace. La Vipera’s little secret.
The walls of the small room pressed in on him. The feeling came back to him now, the creeping sense he’d had on the threshold of the old farmhouse, that it was there, the origin of the violence. He’d thought it meant Nielsson had been killed there, despite Pietro’s scepticism, despite the blood in the little hut. But it had been something else.
Dead bird, yes. The wing was unmistakable – and recent. The rest was much older: forty years old.
‘Foetal remains,’ said Pietro. They were both staring at the screen. ‘Human,’ said Sandro. ‘A human foetus.’ He felt his chest clench like a fist, and he made himself breathe.
Most of the ‘recovered material’ had been charred beyond useful identification. One bone, though, one tiny bone, had escaped. So small it might have been the bone of a bird except, of course, that to a forensic scientist they were easily distinguishable. A tiny bone, metacarpal, it said. The bone from a foetus’s tiny hand: the little finger. The length of the bone indicating a five-month gestation.
Sandro felt his mouth open and close, what, what. He felt Pietro’s hand on his arm and stood up abruptly. ‘I can’t stay in here,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’ Blindly he walked out. Hastily gathering up their things – coats too thin for the mountains, briefcase, iPad – Pietro followed.
*
The campsite wasn’t empty.
‘You know why I want to find it,’ Sandro had said as they drove away from the pale buildings of La Serenita, into the night. ‘Grenzi went for a walk that night. I think she found out where Nielsson was staying and went to find her.’
Five or six campers huddled in the shadow of a looming rock face. A small wooden chalet to one side had a light on. A kid in a big outdoor coat was in there, hunched over a computer screen. At first Sandro thought it was a boy but then she looked up. Scrubbed face, bright eyes, curly hair. She made Sandro feel about a hundred. He hesitated, and Pietro stepped in to the breach, holding out his badge.
The girl sat back in the chair, almost amused at the two of them tripping over each other in the doorway, and Sandro saw that the screen had a wide shot of some distant mountains on it, the high plains of somewhere like the Andes.
She was called Niki, and it turned out she had been in sole charge of the campsite since 2012, which made her older than she looked. Her amusement at these two bumbling cops didn’t falter, even when Pietro told her it was a murder investigation, but she did sit up and take the iPad from him. It had the picture of the camper on it.
‘A Swedish woman,’ he said, ‘about seventy, long grey or white hair.’
‘Yes, I remember her,’ Niki said simply. ‘But her name will be in the book.’ Fixing them with a beady look. ‘We do things properly. She booked for four days but she left on her second night. I wasn’t surprised, after what had happened.’
‘And what did happen?’
‘I think she’d come to see someone and it hadn’t worked out as she planned. You could hear them arguing halfway to Bolzano. I had to go and tell them to shut up.’
‘Could you tell what the argument was about?’
Niki shrugged. ‘The Italian was remonstrating with her, trying to persuade her not to do something. The other one said something about all of them taking responsibility. Then there was –’ her face stiffened, uncomfortable ‘– some rubbish about them all being cursed, a curse, and that’s when I banged on the door.’ She sat back. ‘She was gone by the morning.’
‘You saw the Italian woman? Could you describe her?’
Niki shrugged again. ‘Sure. Not young but fit-looking, you know, active, short hair.’ Pietro and Sandro exchanged a glance: Grenzi. ‘I saw her walking away again, five minutes later, from here. Walking up towards the hotel. She looked – smaller, sort of hunched up. She walked more slowly. That’s all I can say.’
Sandro and Pietro looked at each other, a mutual silent decision not to tell her Lucia Grenzi had also been gone by the next morning.
They thanked the girl, and it was with a sense of huge relief that they climbed into the big car and pulled off. Pietro drove fast, swinging at the bends with a hint of recklessness: they both felt it. They were going back to Sant’Anna.
‘What about the Skype conference,’ said Pietro, ‘with Luisa?’
Sandro shot him a glance. ‘I’ll do it in a service station, in a public toilet, anywhere but here. I want to get out,’ he said. ‘I want to get away from here.’
By the time they reached the motorway it was 5.35, and twenty miles to the nearest rest stop. Pietro put his foot down.
Chapter Twenty-Four
THERE WAS NO SIGN of Ragno on the pavement outside the office, so they went up.
‘When did he say?’ Luisa asked her.
‘He should be here,’ said Giuli, uncomfortable. Luisa didn’t know what they were like, people like Ragno. Luisa knew the inside of a fancy dress shop and the inside of a happy marriage. Luisa didn’t know what Giuli was scared of, or she wouldn’t have said what she’d said.
‘Call them,’ she’d said on the corner of the Borgo Santa Monaca. ‘For God’s sake, girl, call the bloody lab. Whatever it is – whatever it is – we’ll get you through it.’
If it’s AIDS? If it’s hep C? Giuli had mumbled that she would. Luisa had stared at her, like she already knew. ‘It’s just that – Enzo’s mum’s sick too. He won’t be able to handle it.’
‘Enzo can handle most things,’ said Luisa. ‘He knew what he was taking on.’ Which shut Giuli up.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘When this is done. When Ragno’s done.’
Luisa had shaken her head, despairing.
Up in the musty office it felt damp, close, and a gust spattered rain against the window. Giuli set her bag down on the table and looked a
t the phone to see if Ragno had sent a message. There was one from Sandro instead, and her head jerked up.
‘Sandro wants to Skype-call us,’ she said, mind boggled.
‘What?’ said Luisa, pale. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘At six.’ It was 5.15. Luisa just went on staring.
‘You know,’ said Giuli. ‘He wants the screen up – you talk and he can see your face, you can see his.’
Luisa turned away. ‘Right,’ she said, and there was a choked sound to her voice. As Giuli watched she laid the tote bag on the desk, extracted the scrapbook. ‘He needs to know about this,’ she said. They eyed it. Her hand was still in the tote. As Giuli watched she took out something else: a small bashed-up leather notebook. Luisa opened it between them on the table, spreading the pages, soft as old silk. Addresses.
‘Stop,’ said Giuli, her finger on a page. M and a number. The writing was less faded than the rest they’d seen. ‘What did you say the woman was called? The housekeeper?’
Luisa frowned, dredging her memory. ‘Gianna?’
‘Gianna what?’
Luisa straightened. ‘Gianna Marte.’
‘My guess?’ said Giuli. ‘That’s her number. Do you think we should call her?’
Luisa looked at her, thoughtful. ‘A member of the Salieri household? Give away their secrets on the strength of a phone call?’
‘But –’ Giuli felt frustration build.
‘And besides, we know where to find her,’ Luisa said.
Giuli stared back, feeling a trembling set up, a chill creeping into her from the damp room. Sant’Anna was where she was to be found. ‘But –’
Luisa held up a hand, shaking her head. ‘There’s someone else I’m looking for,’ she said. Leafing on, through the pages, as Giuli peered over her shoulder – N, O, P – she stopped at T. Arturo Ticino.
‘The husband? You think he’s going to talk?’
‘I only want to know one thing from him,’ said Luisa. ‘And it’s ancient history.’ Under that steady gaze, Giuli wanted to step back, to run for the door, but Luisa, who always knew, put a hand on her arm, detaining her. ‘I’m going to go downstairs and call him, in the street – so there’ll be no one listening when you call the woman from the lab for your results.’
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