The Devil in Music (55 page)

Julian
and Grimani approached the bed. Its blue damask curtains were closed
at the foot and along the left side. On the right side, nearest the
door, they were open but not tied back. MacGregor was busy about
Rinaldo's body: looking into his eyes, scrutinizing his hair, hands,
fingernails, fearlessly probing the raw, red gap in his neck. Julian
and Grimani turned their attention to the razor lying at the foot of
the bed. Its silver handle was elaborately moulded with vines and
clusters of grapes. The blood on the blade had made a deep crimson
stain on the blue coverlet beneath.

"Don't
touch anything," Grimani warned.

"Of
course not," said Julian civilly.

They
moved on to the marble-topped table. A dressing-case of purple
Morocco leather lay open there. It contained the accoutrements one
would expect: ivory-handled toothbrushes, tortoiseshell combs, nail
scissors Beside the case was an empty leather sheath of exactly the
size to fit the bloodstained razor.

Crowded
to one side of the table were two silver candelabra. The candles
were tall and new, the wicks unburned. Julian crossed to the
night-table and peered inside the lamp. "There's a great deal
of oil left," he observed. "It must not have been burning
long."

"We
don't know if it was lit at all last night," said Grimani.

"I
saw it lit," said Julian. "Marchese Rinaldo brought it to
his room when he went to bed."

"What
time was that?" Grimani asked quickly.

"A
little after midnight, I should think perhaps ten minutes. I saw him
from the doorway of my room."

"Was
Marchesa Francesca with him?"

"Yes."

"Did
you hear them say anything?"

"Yes,"
owned Julian reluctantly. "Rinaldo was urging her to come
inside scolding her for hanging back." He supposed he had
better make a clean breast of it, ominous though the implications
were. "He was laughing loudly and seemed drunk. She looked
very frightened. He pushed her into the room and shut the door
behind them."

"Hmm,"
said Grimani.

There
was a tap at the door. Grimani called brusquely, "Come in."

Zanetti
joined them, hastily dressed and bearing his portable writing-desk.

"You've
taken your time," snapped Grimani. "Don't explain I don't
have time to hear it. I want you to make sure no one leaves the
villa. Lock all the outside doors, and collect the keys. Find out if
any doors or windows have been forced Yes? What is it?"

"The
front door was found unbarred this morning, Signer Commissario,
though the servants swear they barred it before they went to bed."

Grimani
nodded briefly, as if this were what he would have expected. "Leave
me your writing-desk. And bring me a servant whose whereabouts for
the whole night are accounted for. I need someone to take messages
to Solaggio."

"Yes,
Signor Commissario." Zanetti hurried out.

MacGregor
turned to Julian and Grimani, wiping his bloodstained fingers on his
handkerchief. "All right. Here's as much as I can tell you
without a complete examination. The body is cold. Rigour's set in,
but it's only partial. The blood isn't coagulable that is, it's
ceased to clot. What all this says to me is that he was probably
killed between four and seven hours ago."

Julian
translated this as accurately as he could. He had never learned the
Italian for coagulable. He glanced at the mantelpiece clock and
found that it was nearly half past eight. "So he would have
been killed between one and five in the morning."

MacGregor
nodded. "The wound is deep," he went on. "Severed
the carotid artery and both the external and internal jugular veins.
He probably died almost instantly. The depth and shape of the wound
are consistent with the razor's being the weapon."

"Is
there any chance he did it himself?" asked Grimani.

"Very
unlikely. A man in my village cut his own throat, and the wound was
just what you'd expect to see in a suicide: deepest at the
commencement, and slanted down from left to right. And there were
little cuts around it, where he'd made false starts. This wound is
straight across the throat, equally deep at both ends, and there are
no tentative tries."

"How
much strength would the murderer have needed?" Julian asked.

"Not
much," said MacGregor. "Strong nerves and a firm hand
would have been more important."

Their
eyes met. Julian knew they were thinking the same thing. This whole
discussion was hauntingly familiar, conjuring up memories of their
first meeting, in another country house, over another corpse.
MacGregor had been anything but favourably impressed with Julian then
had thought him a coxcomb at best, a murderer at worst. Julian
smiled at the memory, and MacGregor looked at him askance. But of
course he had chided him for levity then, too.

"Was
he in that position when he was killed?" Grimani asked
MacGregor.

"I'd
say so, to judge by the flow of blood from the wound and the lividity
what there was of it, after such a loss of blood."

Julian
surveyed Rinaldo's body. "He may well have been sleeping very
deeply, after all the wine he'd drunk. Lying as he was, on his back
with his throat exposed, he would have been an ideal target for
anyone who wanted to do him a mischief."

He
knew it was high time he took a close look at the body. His chest
knotted up at the prospect. In all his experience of solving
murders, he had never confronted a corpse so gruesome. He steeled
himself, went to the bed, and gazed down at what had once been
Rinaldo Malvezzi. To his surprise, he saw more than blood, torn
flesh, and death. Within that ugly gash was the wreck of a
miraculous mechanism: the network of veins and arteries that pumped
life into eyes, ears, lips, and brain. He had been prepared for the
tragedy, but not for the desecration, the waste.

He
looked closer. Matted in Rinaldo's bloodsoaked chest hair was a
small gold crucifix. It was strung on a gold chain some twenty-five
inches long, the ends lying unfastened on Rinaldo's shoulders.

"Was
it you who unfastened this chain?" Julian asked MacGregor.

"No.
I didn't touch it."

Julian
bent nearer. "The clasp seems very secure. I don't think it
would have opened of its own accord while he was sleeping."

Grimani
had been standing with arms folded, thinking things out. "It's
clear what happened. Marchesa Francesca didn't want to come to bed
with her husband. He locked the door to keep her in, and strung the
key on the chain around his neck for safe-keeping. It was there when
she slit his throat, which explains why it has so much blood on it."

"She
used it to unlock the door," Julian went on, "thus getting
blood on the lock "

"Then
she went downstairs and let herself out by the front door, leaving it
unbarred," Grimani finished. "It's as simple a case as
I've ever seen."

"Wait
till Julian Kestrel gets hold of it," muttered MacGregor.

Julian
forbore to translate this. With an apologetic look at MacGregor, he
said, "Don't you think it strange that there's a great deal of
blood on the key and the lock, but none on the knob? That would mean
that Marchesa Francesca killed her husband, took the key, unlocked
the door and only then, before she left the room, decided to wash the
blood from her hands."

"There's
nothing strange about that," said Grimani. "She was in a
passion when she committed the murder. But after she'd unlocked the
door she came to herself enough to realize that she couldn't leave
the room with blood on her hands. So she washed them."

"If
she had the presence of mind to do that, why didn't she wash the key
and lock as well? She must have realized that the bloodstained key
and open chain would heavily incriminate her."

"She
was a hysterical woman," said Grimani. "You can't expect
her to have acted logically."

"Emotion
has its own sort of logic, Signer Commissario. People don't
calculate about one thing, while being wholly reckless about
everything else."

"No
Milanese judge would take any account of evidence like that,"
Grimani said coldly. "The explanation I've given fits all the
objective facts."

There
was a shade of regret in his voice. Julian thought he knew why. If
Francesca had killed Rinaldo, she had almost certainly killed
Lodovico as well. Which meant that Orfeo was innocent of murder, at
all events.

It
seemed pointless to argue any further. Julian returned to his
scrutiny of Rinaldo's body. Grimani sat down at the table with
Zanetri's writing-desk before him, sharpened a quill, and rapidly
wrote, folded,

and
addressed several notes. MacGregor paced back and forth, head down,
hands clasped behind his back.

All
at once Julian said, "Signor Commissario."

"What
is it?" said Grimani, without looking up.

"I've
found something."

Grimani
joined him by the bed. Julian pointed to a white spot on the
bloodsoaked sheet, a few inches to the right of Rinaldo's neck.
Grimani squinted at it, touched it lightly with his finger. "Candle
wax." He looked up at Julian. "What of that?"

"It's
on top of the blood, Signor Commissario. That means someone stood
over Marchese Rinaldo with a candle after he died." Julian went
quickly to the candelabra on the table. "These are the only
candles in the room and none of them has been lit."

Grimani's
eyes met Julian's exasperated, but suddenly unsure.

Zanetti
came in with the footmen, Bruno and Tommaso. They looked a little
bedraggled, their flame-coloured frock-coats crumpled, their lace not
over clean They gaped at the corpse of their master, crossed
themselves, and muttered the de profundis.

"These
two servants spent the night in the village, Signor Commissario,"
Zanetti announced. "They left before Marchese Rinaldo went to
bed and were never out of each other's sight all night. They've only
just returned. I thought one of them would do for a messenger."

Grimani
ran his eyes over them. "You're Marchese Rinaldo's footmen, are
you? The ones who stole a notebook from Monsieur de la Marque?"

The
footmen exchanged alarmed glances. "Yes, Signor Commissario."

"I
shall want to talk to you later," said Grimani ominously. He
turned back to Zanetti. "What else have you learned?"

"No
doors or windows have been forced," Zanetti reported, "and
no one has seen Marchesa Francesca since last night. Marchesa
Beatrice and her guests are assembled in the drawing room. She's
ordered coffee to be served there." He sounded a little
wistful, as if he would have liked a cup himself.

Julian
asked the footmen, "Do you know how these new candles come to be
here?"

"I
brought them, Milord," said Tommaso.

"When
was that?"

"Last
night, before Bruno and I went to the village. Ernesto told me to
take away the stumps that were here and replace them with new
candles."

"They
were just for show," put in Bruno.

"What
do you mean?" asked Grimani.

"The
marchese didn't like to have open flames about him, especially at
night. He was afraid of them. He wouldn't admit it, but we all
knew." Bruno's lip curled contemptuously.

"Did
you leave any of the old candles behind when you brought the new
ones?" Julian asked Tommaso.

"No,
Milord."

"Were
there any candles in the room besides these?"

"I
didn't see any, Milord."

Grimani
handed the notes he had written to Zanetti. "Seal these with
the police seal, and give them to Which one are you?" he asked
Bruno.

"Bruno
Monti, at your service, Signer Commissario."

"Can
you read?"

"A
little, Signor Commissario. My father "

"Make
sure he knows which note is which," Grimani told Zanetti.
Turning back to Bruno, he asked, "Do you know where to find
Comandante Von Krauss, the podesta Signor Ruga, the priest Don
Cristoforo, and Dr. Curioni?"