The Killing Room (26 page)

‘Carlsson? Carlsson? Carlsson’s dead?’ The man had gone white with unfeigned shock.

And then there had been a silence, during which Sandro had revised his options.

‘All right,’ he’d said, seeing them poised to break into a cacophony of outrage and bluster and panic that would culminate in his being marched into Cornell’s office to be fired. He’d held up his hands, speaking gently. ‘Sit down, Mr Van Vleet. The fact is, you’re broke. Your wife’s purse was never stolen.’ Therese gave him a quick glance, but said nothing. ‘And you were at Giancarlo’s house the night he died.’

He clung to that: a guess, based on no more than Falco’s
vague mention of the suspect as well built, and if it turned out to be a bad one, he was done for. But this time he saw in Van Vleet’s face that he’d hit home. Reluctantly, the American sat. Beside him on the bed his wife was silent, her face tear-stained, but when it came to it, she spoke first.

‘We argued, over dinner that night,’ she said. ‘I came home alone, at around midnight.’ Darting a look at her husband. Not of fear, of what he might have done, but of weariness. ‘He got back around two.’

All the bluster gone, Van Vleet spoke then, frightened. ‘I was drunk,’ he said. ‘I wanted . . . I don’t know. A girl, maybe.’ He didn’t meet his wife’s eye. ‘I’d had a call that day from the States, saying the IRS had been called in, back taxes on top of everything else, and the payroll wasn’t being covered by the bank. You get used to doing things with the guys, when you don’t want to think. He never asked me for money.’ He looked almost tearful. ‘It wasn’t about money.’

Maybe, maybe not, Sandro had thought, but he’d said nothing. Now he stepped off the paved courtyard and down into the scented dark of the garden. Below him he could see a light on the elderly neighbour’s terrace. It occurred to him that he should try to remember where the well was, so as not to go down it.

‘Giancarlo wasn’t home,’ said Van Vleet. ‘I rang a couple times, I went round the back, he’d told us his landlady was a – excuse me – a hardass.’ Sandro didn’t know the word, but he got the gist. ‘I thought maybe . . . he didn’t want to see me.’ His face had changed, Sandro saw. The energy – for a fight, or for business, or a woman – had gone out of it, and he looked scared.

‘You didn’t hear anything? See anyone else?’

Van Vleet shook his head, white-faced. ‘You have to believe me.’

‘Well,’ said Sandro – who did believe him, even if he wasn’t ready to say it. ‘Tell it to the Carabinieri, maybe.’

Therese Van Vleet had piped up then, and Van Vleet had looked at her gratefully. ‘I did leave the billfold behind,’ she said, lifting her chin. ‘I just pushed it down behind the table. I didn’t think what would happen – I just couldn’t face them. What if my card had been declined? All of them would have known. Your wife would have known.’

‘She would have looked after you.’

Therese looked up at his voice, slightly hoarse with the mention of Luisa.

‘Brett does have those magazines,’ she said, holding his gaze. ‘It doesn’t make him a criminal, though.’ She’d drawn herself up and he felt a grudging admiration for her coming to the defence. ‘Just like . . . the rest of it. The girls.’ She’d given her husband another look. ‘I don’t like it. To tell you the truth,’ and she looked at her husband straight, ‘to tell you the truth, I’ve had enough of it.’ She turned to Sandro. ‘But hurt my little dog?’ Therese turned the stained collar in her hands. ‘And it wasn’t me let Marjorie out of the steam room, it wasn’t me put a magazine in your bag.’ Her face was set stubborn, but there was something else in her frown, something of pity. ‘I didn’t know your wife had a . . . had the cancer.’

Would they go to Cornell? Would he get fired? They might. The further he descended in the dusk, the more remote from his concerns the possibility became: it sat above him in the great
house. On her tiny terrace below, the neighbour became visible, looking up from an ancient swingseat with something in her lap. He stopped, not wanting to be seen, below the well now.

He’d reached a small gated area, with fenceposting and hedges planted to disguise it: he caught a whiff of something. This must be where the Palazzo hid its garbage. From her comfortable spot the old neighbour looked up from her work.

The old have excellent long sight, he thought, distracted by a momentary pang. Would he and Luisa ever get to sit in peace on a terrace somewhere? He got out his phone, weighed it in his hand. He should never have sent her across the city to that place. He felt his blood quicken, his sluggish heart stirred. It was dark now, and he didn’t know where she was.

He dialled. A man answered.

*

The woman might have been waiting behind the door, she answered so quickly. Thin, with a lined, sour face and hair in stiff grey curls.

The landlady eyed Luisa crossly, then peered over her shoulder, immediately identifying the expensive car in the shabby little lot. Luisa’s heart sank.
You know how to do it
, Sandro had said. But now the woman’s beady eye was on her, she had no idea. Only the thought of having to scuttle back to Frollini persuaded her to hold her ground.

‘It’s about Giancarlo,’ she said. ‘Your tenant.’

The woman continued to stare. Beyond her, Luisa glimpsed a hall, an inner door and through it a heavy piece of dark brown
furniture. She calculated that the villa was divided in half: the landlady inhabited the ground floor and let the apartment above.

‘You’re not the police,’ the woman said. ‘On first-name terms, were we?’ She spoke with a nasty, insinuating tone.

Luisa said the first thing that came into her head, knowing the man’s age, knowing he was the right age to be her son – or this woman’s, for that matter. ‘His mother—’ she began, some sketchy plan of being a friend of his parents dying on her lips before she’d even started – but the woman interrupted her, anyway.

The landlady folded her arms across her thin chest. ‘Shameful. No other word for it.’

‘Well, I did hear . . .’ Luisa hesitated. How far was she going to have to sympathise with this woman?

‘To have a son like that, grow up like that. It must have broken her heart.’ She looked anything but sorrowful; triumphant was more like it.

All the same, she’d stepped back, opening up a space between them. She wants to talk, this one, thought Luisa, glancing quickly back at the car. She could see Frollini’s outline. ‘You’re right,’ she said, easing a foot over the threshold. ‘Signora . . . ah . . .’

‘Maratti,’ said the woman, maintaining her position. ‘Valeria Maratti.’

And Luisa gasped – not because of the woman’s name, but because she felt something that raised the hairs on the back of her neck, the lightest touch of something rubbing against her calf. A mew. She looked down and there was a cat, twining its way between her ankles. Luisa had noticed that the less you liked cats – and this one was a particularly weird-looking specimen,
skinny with great bat ears – the more they liked to rub against you. Reluctantly, she made as if to stroke it.

‘She doesn’t like visitors.’ Maratti bent down, between Luisa and the animal, making cooing noises. ‘Women especially.’ It writhed, pressing its head into the landlady’s hand.

‘Signora Maratti.’ She was forced to speak to the woman’s bowed head. ‘Do you mind if I . . . it’s so warm, suddenly, isn’t it?’

The landlady straightened, and the cat fled noiselessly, bounding around the side of the house. Luisa fanned herself with her hand. ‘I wonder if it’s going to be like last summer? All those people dying. Do you have air-conditioning? You couldn’t . . . just a glass of water? It’s been. . .’ She improvised. ‘It’s all been such a shock.’

Valeria Maratti moved aside with a tut, and Luisa stepped past her.

The apartment was dark, the green gloom filtering through vegetation just visible beyond half-curtained windows in the twilight. Maratti led Luisa into the room she’d glimpsed from the front door and gestured stiffly to an elderly sofa covered in some kind of scratchy green fabric, flanked by two wing chairs in the same stuff.

‘A glass of water,’ she said grudgingly. ‘One moment.’

The landlady returned almost immediately – because she doesn’t trust me, thought Luisa – with a single greasy glass. She set it down on a shiny coffee table in front of Luisa and stood over her with her arms tightly folded.

‘I suppose she’ll be back for his things. Or is that what she sent you for? I don’t know if the police will allow it. They’ve sealed the rooms. A man from the army came, maybe they won’t
let her take anything until—’ She stopped, indignant rather than afraid. ‘It was a murder, you know.’

‘So I can’t go and look?’ Luisa tried to make it sound innocent.

‘Nothing to see,’ said Signora Maratti tightly. ‘A year and a half under my roof and you’d hardly know anyone lived there. Some sort of exercise machine, I suppose that should have told me. They like to . . . work out, don’t they?’

‘They?’ said Luisa wearily. She became aware that on practically every surface in the room – chair backs, tables, sideboard – there was some kind of decorated cloth: embroidered, crocheted, appliquéd.

‘Homosexuals,’ said the woman, her mouth turning down.

Luisa hadn’t even seen a picture of the man beyond the fuzzy mugshot in the paper: what did she know? ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘I mean—’

‘I’m afraid I got it from the horse’s mouth.’

With those words, Maratti sat down in a wing-backed chair, shrunken in the gloom. Over her head on the wall a large black crucifix was prominent. She shook her head.

‘He was very good at hiding it from me. Very good. He must have known I’d never have had him under my roof. But I suppose they go elsewhere to do their dirty business. Very well spoken, even if he wasn’t proper Italian – only the father, I suppose.’ She paused and Luisa wondered if she should ask what she meant, but then she went on. ‘And he’d been in the army too. He said he’d been discharged because of illness – but I never believed that.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘He seemed strong as an ox to me. Leukaemia, he said, but as far as I know you die of it.’

‘Not always,’ said Luisa, but she wasn’t heard.

‘I expect they found out, don’t you?’ A grey strand came loose from Maratti’s stiff perm as she leaned forward vehemently. ‘He had references but he could have made them up, couldn’t he?’ She settled back again with relish. ‘It’s only from the tap,’ she said defiantly, gesturing at the murky glass. ‘I thought you were thirsty?’

With reluctance Luisa sipped, setting the glass back down hurriedly. ‘So you didn’t know until recently that he was . . . gay.’

Maratti snorted at the word.

‘But there were never any women?’

‘Well, no girlfriends.’ She frowned. ‘That makes sense now, doesn’t it? He was out in the evenings now and again, came back . . . cheerful. Pleased with himself. The odd army friend round. They didn’t look like
finocchi
either.’ The coarse term:
gayboys
. She frowned. ‘I keep my eyes open.’

‘Of course,’ said Luisa.

The landlady was still talking. ‘I wouldn’t have stood for it, do you see? And they only came to talk business with him, that’s what I thought. That’s what it sounded like. Putting work his way.’

‘Sounded like?’ Luisa spoke lightly. She wondered what work ex-army colleagues would come round to talk about.

Spots of colour appeared on the landlady’s cheeks. She’d have been up there with a glass pressed against the wall, Luisa could see it.

‘From what I heard,’ Maratti said flatly, and leaned forward again, towards her guest, over the hands folded in her lap; she might have been in pain. ‘Who
are
you?’ she said, with level dislike. ‘You’re not a friend of his mother’s.’

So she wasn’t fooled. Time, thought Luisa. It seemed to her she had no option but to tell Maratti the truth. ‘Giancarlo had been working at the Palazzo San Giorgio,’ she said carefully.

‘I knew that,’ said the landlady quickly. ‘That’s the business they were talking, last time around. A month or so ago. The new job.’

‘Right,’ said Luisa. ‘They?’ But the woman clamped her mouth shut.

Luisa went on. ‘Giancarlo Vito was fired,’ she said. ‘My husband replaced him. And now Vito’s dead.’ She took a breath. ‘His death is unexplained. Of course – we want to know more.’

In the dim light the woman’s little beady eyes gleamed. ‘I thought he’d been fired. He didn’t go in on the Tuesday. It was the night before that I caught him at it. He’d been in a terrible temper. Marched past me without a word, then he spent a couple of hours making phone calls.’

‘Did you hear any of them?’

Maratti’s nostrils pinched, but she ignored the question. ‘And then this man came around. Perhaps he needed . . . oh, you know how men are.’

Do I? wondered Luisa. I don’t know if I do. ‘Caught him at it? You mean, because he’d lost his job he needed . . . someone. You mean, sex.’

Avid, the old woman – as old as me, Luisa reminded herself – leaned forward again. ‘Especially them, they’re even worse.’

The room seemed stifling, suddenly. ‘Are they,’ Luisa said without expression. ‘I don’t quite see – you’re sure?’

‘He told me so himself,’ said the landlady, settling back in the wing chair with satisfaction. ‘He told me to my face. I had
to knock, you see, they were making so much noise.’

‘Noise,’ said Luisa slowly. It didn’t fit.

‘I’m like you,’ said Maratti. ‘You see, I can tell. We don’t want to believe such things go on. We’re innocents, really. We give everyone the benefit of the doubt.’

Luisa didn’t trust herself to open her mouth.

‘He came to the door with this nasty expression on his face, like he wanted to shock me. His shirt was torn. Said it was just a bit of rough play,’ Maratti said with relish. ‘I knew it was a man in there with him because I’d seen the taxi drop him, bold as brass. Dark.’ She sat up a bit straighter. ‘Skinny. Perhaps he’d ordered him up. You know, on the internet. They do that, I’ve heard.’

Luisa ignored her. ‘Do the Carabinieri know? About this visitor? Could you describe him?’

‘I told them,’ said Maratti. ‘I have a great respect for the law, I told them that, too.’ She hunched her shoulders. ‘A shame I didn’t get a good look at him, just dark, skinny, was all I could say.’ She mused. ‘Tallish. Do you suppose Giancarlo might have been . . . what d’you call it? You know, both men and women. Transsexual?’