A Murder in Tuscany (31 page)

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Authors: Christobel Kent

Tags: #Suspense

BOOK: A Murder in Tuscany
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Outside the sky had darkened, the computer screen glowing bright on the desk. Giuli had an idea; picking the list of names from the desk, she went to the computer and sat in front of it.
Alec Fairhead, Michelle Connor, Luca Gallo, Per Hansen, Tina Kreutz, Tiziano Scarpa.
About ten minutes later Luisa, emerging abruptly from her absorption, was saying something. ‘This one,’ she said, though Giuli’s attention was elsewhere by now and it only filtered belatedly into her consciousness. ‘Do you know, I’d swear that if any of this lot had a screw loose, it’d be this one.’ And Giuli heard the tap of her nail on the table, but she wasn’t really paying attention to the face that had caught Luisa’s attention.
‘And what’s this mean?’ Luisa was at her shoulder now, leaning down and pulling the neon-pink Post-it from the desk. ‘Lonestar blog? What does it mean?’
Giuli leaned back, distracted. ‘Her blog, you know, kind of internet diary. I was supposed to – but look at this. What d’you think of this?’ She tapped at the cursor, scrolling down. ‘Come and look at this.’
And Luisa leaned down past her, peering at the screen, and together they read a news report filed in the
New York Post
, six months earlier. Soon after, Giuli had already registered, Loni Meadows had taken up her responsibilities at the Orfeo Trust. The report was about a woman called Michelle Connor, and there was a photograph.
 
 
‘
Merda
,’ groaned Cate as she flicked the switch inside the kitchen door, on, off, on again, in vain. ‘Damn it.’ She heard footsteps and there was Sandro Cellini’s face, still unshaven, peering in.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘The power’s gone.’ It had happened before, a high wind back in October had brought some lines down. Cate reached in a drawer for a candle and matches, groped by memory for the coffee pot. ‘Come in,’ she said impatiently. The room was cooling, but not yet cold. ‘Shut the door.’
By the feeble glimmer of the candle she filled the coffee pot, assembled it, set it on the stove – thank God for gas. Instinctively they both moved closer to the flame as the small burner sputtered into life.
‘Where is everyone?’ asked Sandro, his pale stubbled chin illuminated by the tiny flicker of flame.
‘God knows,’ said Cate, laying a place on the big table, reaching for a bag of sweet biscuits from a shelf in a larder, just visible in the gloom. ‘I’m not sure what to do. It’s all falling apart. I’d better call Luca.’
‘Falling apart?’
‘Since she died. It’s as if it’s all crumbling bit by bit. The guests are packing to leave.’
‘They are?’ said Sandro. ‘We’ll see about that.’ But Cate turned to look at him and added, ‘And Orfeo wants to close the place down now. Something you said to him last night.’
They were going: now in the cold dark kitchen it hit her; it was over. And Tiziano would be going, too: in an hour, roads permitting, the specially equipped taxi that had brought him from Pozzo Basso six weeks earlier could be here, loading him in.
Sandro sighed. ‘He’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry. Just a little tantrum.’
‘Poor Luca,’ said Cate, almost to herself. ‘They all treat him like a dog.’ She took out her phone and dialled, holding it to her ear with her shoulder as she opened a vast refrigerator, dark inside: she caught an unpleasant stale whiff, things beginning to sour. She brought out milk and set it on the stove.
Watching her, Sandro seated himself at the table; with the phone jammed under her ear, waiting for Luca to pick up, she brought his coffee to the table, then a jug of warm milk, before moving away to stand by the half-glazed kitchen door, looking out.
‘Yes?’ Luca sounded beyond the point of exhaustion. Cate watched distractedly as Sandro gulped the coffee as soon as it was cool enough; he poured another. Saw the pallor begin to leave his cheeks. Luca was talking.
‘It’s what?’ she said, ‘Oh, I see. Power lines, OK. How long – he’s what?’
‘Mauro,’ whispered Luca, ‘he’s had to go to hospital.’
‘What?’ Cate thought of the dark farmhouse, last night. ‘He’s all right, is he? He’ll be all right?’
‘I don’t know. They seem to think so. Just the – the alcohol. Stress.’
‘I don’t know what to do about lunches,’ she said dully, grasping at what once had been her purpose here.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Luca, and she thought, Oh God, it really is all over. ‘They can go hungry for a bit,’ he said wearily. ‘It won’t kill them.’
Turning off the phone, Cate sat down and mechanically poured herself a cup of coffee, filled it to the brim with milk, two sugars. Crumbled a biscuit between her fingers.
‘I didn’t ask him about Orfeo’s phone,’ she said, startled by panic. ‘Should I have done?’ She felt stupidly on the verge of tears.
‘You’re doing very well,’ said Sandro wanting to put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Drink your coffee.’ And for a crystalline second she saw them both, suspended in the moment, in the fragile peace of the cooling kitchen, with their life-giving coffee, in the eye of a storm about to break.
She took a sip of her coffee. ‘He’s coming back up, anyway,’ she
said. ‘An ambulance has come for Mauro. And then her eyes, looking down, fixed on something and there it was on the table: she didn’t remember Sandro putting it there. Loni Meadows’s little phone.
Cate frowned, then raising her head, she tilted it, like a gundog catching a scent. ‘So how did it get into the river?’ she said, with a curiosity that faltered as she went on. ‘The
telefonino
.’
‘Ah,’ said Sandro. ‘Yes.’
‘It didn’t just slip out of her pocket, did it?’ she said slowly, challenging him with her eyes.
‘No,’ Sandro said brusquely. ‘It didn’t fall out of her pocket. It didn’t fly out, either, on impact.’
‘Can you be sure of that?’ Cate felt as though she could hardly take a breath.
He shrugged. ‘You mean, have I worked out the angle of descent, her position in the car, simulated the trajectories? No. But I know, all the same.’
‘Someone threw it,’ said Cate slowly. ‘That’s why you were throwing stones. Someone chucked it as far as they could. Someone – ’
‘Yes,’ said Sandro. Cate clasped her hands around the cup that, now empty, held no more heat. ‘Someone. Someone else was down there, and that person threw the phone.’ He got to his feet abruptly, the chair moving back on the stone floor with a loud scrape, followed by silence. ‘Getting rid of the evidence.’ He laid his palms flat on the table and leaned down, looking into her face.
‘Someone was down there,’ she repeated carefully, meeting his gaze. ‘Went down there.’
‘Let’s go to the library,’ said Sandro. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’
The windowless corridor that led back to the old part of the castle, which had been gloomy the previous night, was now close to pitch dark, and like the interior of the fridge it too smelled of things turning sour. As though without electricity it was reverting to some primitive state: the thought unnerved Cate. Coming into the great shadowy space of the library, dark even though it was still the middle of the day, only intensified the feeling.
Both of them moved straight to the long windows: the sky was steel-grey with more cloud. Cate shivered, looking back inside the room at the huge and dusty chandelier, barely visible in the thin light, the spindly balustrade of the gallery. ‘Supposed to be a ghost in here,’ she said. ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’
And then something began to chime, as she looked up at the gallery, a tiny, insistent nudge of memory. Loni and Orfeo up there, on his last visit, looking down.
But Sandro had begun to talk.
‘Per Hansen saw a light, that night,’ he said. ‘Or thought he did. He was in his room, looking out.’
‘A light?’
‘When I went to see him he told me. He said something to me about ghosts, or fireflies, or souls; I didn’t really understand it. That the next morning he thought he might have dreamt it, and that when he found out – about the accident, he had some wild idea that it had been her soul escaping.’
‘What time?’ asked Cate with a kind of faltering horror as she grasped what he was saying, as she looked out to where Per Hansen might have looked, that night.
‘About midnight,’ he said. ‘Coming across country, from his right, as he looked down. Perhaps not wanting to be seen.’
And they looked down, to the right: into the thin trees that shielded the outbuildings, the studio, the
villino
. Even in the low grey light, they could see what looked like tracks, leading away from the castle; something had certainly left a darker, rusty trail across the white ground. But on Thursday night, there had been no snow, and the ground had frozen hard; no chance, they both knew, of leaving tracks then.
‘It could have been – ’ Cate said, suddenly not wanting to continue.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro. ‘It could have been. A real live human being, going to find out what had happened to Loni Meadows.’
‘Wait – ’there were so many questions. Cate strained to be methodical, not to jump straight to the terrifying fact he was presenting to her. ‘You believed him?’
‘Per Hansen?’ Sandro laughed shortly. ‘I believed him. Of course – they might be backing each other up, those two. Hansen and Fairhead, it might be a conspiracy, they might be giving each other alibis. But I don’t think so, do you?’
‘No.’ Cate could hardly hear her own whisper. Above her the balustraded gallery waited, full of shadows, and around her the castle waited, breathing along its nooks and passageways.
Sandro was continuing. ‘Their interests, you see, would not coincide; the betrayed lovers, each betrayed separately, one a lover only in his own imagination?’
Cate nodded; she didn’t want to look up, but she didn’t want to look out of the window either. She felt the deep dark cold of the room close around her.
‘So someone went down there,’ she said. ‘Someone knew exactly what had happened. Exactly when.’
‘Because they had called her down there.’ Sandro was intent, sure and focused as he spoke. ‘That person poured water across the road, then returned. Waited. Gave the ice time to form. Waited until dinner was over then sent a message. The usual message: no doubt the last one Orfeo sent would be there on the phone. Easy to imitate.’
Cate said slowly, ‘She dropped everything and went. I saw her clothes on the bedroom floor.’ She took a breath, surprised by her relief. ‘After dinner Fairhead saw her receive a text, so did Per. So they can’t have sent it.’ Sandro inclined his head and then looked out of the window again; the oppressive grey sky and the bleak, empty white of the landscape set up a nagging headache behind Cate’s eyes.
‘So that leaves – who?’ Sandro asked. ‘The light came from down there.’
‘Michelle. Tina.’
‘Luca Gallo? Your Mauro?’
‘Luca didn’t leave the castle that day, I’d swear it, not while I was there. And Mauro was dead drunk in bed that night, on the other side of the hill.’
‘So the one was accounted for all day, the other all night,’ Sandro said. ‘And your Tiziano?’
‘Across country? In his wheelchair?’ Cate felt a sudden rage. ‘Are you crazy?’
Sandro only shrugged.
‘Someone went down there,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what drives people.’
And there was a silence, one in which the small, insistent sound of an engine became audible: a car, although it could not be seen from the library’s window. Sandro took Cate by the upper arms and looked into her face. ‘She wasn’t dead yet, you see.’ He put two fingers to Cate’s neck and pressed, very lightly. His hand was so cold.
‘There was a mark on her neck,’ he said quietly, ‘a mark that might have been caused by a seatbelt, only she never wore a seatbelt.’ He paused to let the meaning of his words sink in.
‘Someone came across the fields, quickly in the dark, carrying a light. Someone found her, dazed, concussed.’
His other hand came up to her neck and the pressure increased just a fraction but for that second Cate felt her eyes widen in panic: both cold hands stayed where they were. ‘She might already have sustained some kind of head trauma,’ he said. ‘I think she had. I think she would have had to be confused, weakened.’
‘She was so strong,’ said Cate.
‘Yes,’ said Sandro, and Cate heard it in his voice, sadness for the life ebbing from a headstrong woman. He took his hands away. ‘Two people in the dark, one full of adrenaline, the other dazed and groggy. She might have thought it was help coming.’
He removed his hands quickly and Cate squeezed her eyes shut, so as not to see the picture he made of Loni Meadows, blue eyes turned gratefully towards her murderer. Something bleeped, unexpectedly, as if she had prompted it herself.
Sandro made an impatient sound,
tcha
, and from behind closed eyelids Cate heard the tiny blip of mobile phone keys, an intake of breath. ‘Hospitalized?’ she thought she heard him say.

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