The Killing Room (36 page)

‘I’m sorry, madam,’ he said, addressing Magda Scardino’s profile. ‘I’ll step outside and give them a call for you. It won’t be long, I’m sure.’

But Giulietta Sarto was halfway down the Costa San Giorgio, perched small and proud and upright on her
motorino
, by the time he’d got his mobile out and was in the street.

Chapter Thirty-Three

M
erda.

He should have known better, than to drive in this city. Of all the cars parked illegally on the Via Romana right under the looming façade of the Boboli’s Carabinieri post, Sandro’s was the only one with a fat yellow clamp attached to it. He looked from the car up to the Carabinieri station: someone up there didn’t like him.

He took out his phone. As he looked at it, it rang. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, no one. Except maybe Pietro. It would be Luisa, wanting to know what he’d meant by the text he’d sent abortively from the
carabiniere
’s office.
I’m sorry.
Ah, shit.

It was Giuli. Reluctantly, he answered. She launched into it.

‘Yes,’ he said, when she stopped. ‘I’ve been fired.’

She let off another round.

‘They’re what? Slow down, Giuli.’ He looked up and down the street: there was no sign of the clamper van. From the doorway of an antique shop opposite, a man watched him with mild interest. Sandro nodded to him.

‘They’re going,’ she said. ‘The foursome, the Flemings and the Scardinos. They’re going to the airport, together. They were waiting for their car when I went over looking for you. Why were you fired?’

‘Together,’ repeated Sandro, ignoring the question. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Pretty sure. You should have talked to Danilo, the sculptor. He knew what Carlsson was there for – he wanted to find out about Cameron and his bridge. And he’s certain Fleming was in the old lady’s room that night. D’you think he hurt her?’

‘I think someone frightened her,’ said Sandro, picturing the chair overturned in her room. Hold on. Did you say . . . yesterday, didn’t you say Juliet Fleming went to see her in the hospital?’ He felt a sweat bead on his upper lip, despite the leaden sky. The antique dealer in his doorway was wearing tweeds, so it must be cold. The weather was odd: his city felt strange. Was he ill? He pulled at his collar.

‘Marjorie Cameron saw her,’ said Giuli. ‘Yes.’

Something prickled at the nape of his neck. ‘Is the girl all right?’ he said. ‘You told her?’

‘Elena?’ Giuli’s voice sounded distant now. ‘She’s all right, I think. He didn’t tell her anything, he didn’t leave anything behind, as far as I know. Maybe he was protecting her.’ More remote, or was there something the matter with his ears? ‘Lludic’s with her. She’s okay.’

‘What’s up, Giuli?’ he said, trying to bring things into focus. ‘Something’s the matter.’

‘I’ve got to go over to the Centre,’ she said.

‘Right,’ said Sandro, but his mind was somewhere else.

‘Have you told Luisa you’ve been fired?’ she said, and he heard the sigh, as if far away. ‘You haven’t, have you?’

‘I’ll talk to you later,’ he said. It was only after he’d hung up that he remembered that Giuli didn’t work at the Centre any more.

‘Bastards,’ said the antique dealer, stepping into the road. Sandro looked at him: the man nodded up at the Carabinieri post. ‘Bastards. They just love to throw their weight about.’

Sandro just grunted agreement; he was dialling a cab.
Incoming call, divert?
said his phone. It was Luisa. With guilty impatience he told the phone,
Reject
.

The cab arrived in three minutes. The driver looked at the clamp from behind reflective aviator glasses and said, ‘Bastards.’

He asked to be taken to the airport. He felt the driver take in his crumpled jacket. No suitcase, no passport – no tip, was what he was thinking. He engaged gear slowly.

‘As quick as you can,’ said Sandro. ‘That all right?’

The fare was thirty-two euros in the end. In his wallet Sandro had thirty-five in crumpled notes: he waited for his change. Around him, as he stood on the airport forecourt, the world still felt strange. He seemed to see the people moving in and out of the ghostly sliding glass doors as if in a dream. A young couple kissed as if they were never going to see each other again. Hand out for his three euros, Sandro’s stomach soured with apprehension.

Inside, people milled around, looking up at screens. A check-in queue snaked around the edge of the departures hall; must be some Third World airline, he realised – most people checked in online these days. The other desks were manned but largely
idle. He scanned the signs above each one.

Where had they been going?

The Flemings to London, for her health. The Scardinos to Cairo.

He located Cairo: twelve-fifteen. Looked back at the departures screens. The London flight would already be boarding, an hour earlier. The sickness rose in him. He thought of Athene Morris dead in a foreign hospital – was that how she’d imagined it would end? He didn’t care too much about Vito, he found. He thought of Juliet and Martin Fleming disappearing into London, folded back into the arms of the home country to hide from whatever it was that they’d done, and felt a chemical surge that he realised was anger.

Sandro turned, full circle, looking. Toilets, handbags, newsstand, VIP lounge. Security, Passports. He ran, feeling the flesh on his ageing body shift heavily as he moved, as if it might pull from the bones. The official checking tickets looked up at him expressionless as he came up to the cordon, panting, and he realised, too late, his absolute powerlessness. The man shook his head. Without a ticket? No. Sandro tried to explain that it was a police matter, no longer caring about taking Pietro’s name – his badge – in vain. Adrenaline, he tried to recall, was it good for you, or bad? At his age, most things were bad. He was sweating.

The official pursed his lips, a small queue of impatient travellers beginning to form, jostling. The man nodded towards a door marked
Polizia di Frontiera
, and turned away.

There was no one behind the door: the chair, even, was pushed up against the table as if no one had been there for some time.
As he stood in the doorway, looking back into the concourse, Sandro felt the adrenaline begin to ebb and remembered, that was the dangerous bit, the crash.

The illuminated signs around the thronged space blurred as he tried to regroup his thoughts. Car hire, Information. VIP lounge.

VIP Lounge. Something stopped inside him. There.

The door was manned, of course: not a bouncer in a suit but a young woman in a tilted old-style stewardess’s cap, very stylish, turning to look at Sandro as he approached.

The space opened behind her, partitioned off under the high-beamed roof of the concourse, and he saw them off to one side. Sitting on upholstered bucket seats in bright colours, a laptop open between them on a low table. Four of them.

‘I’m from their hotel,’ he said, mustering as honest and open an expression as he could. ‘There’s . . . something was left behind. I have to hand it over in person.’

She looked at him a long moment. I could be your grandfather, he thought, and in that moment she stepped back. From inside the partitioned space that didn’t resemble a real room, only a makeshift attempt at luxury, Juliet Fleming turned in her low seat and looked up at him.

*

Giuli took a breath and stepped through the grubby glass doors of the Women’s Centre. The clammy cool of the overcast morning gave way to the usual fug of the too-crowded space. She registered that the receptionist on duty was a newcomer,
a temp, by the look of muted panic in her eyes, and the low-grade discontent among the waiting patients. Maybe they already know, she thought.

The temp looked up, hostile already. ‘I’m here to see the Director,’ said Giuli. ‘I got a call, I’m expected. Giulietta Sarto.’ And walked past as the girl lifted the telephone receiver.

She didn’t feel any fear any more. Massini might have summoned her because Vera had confessed, or she might be telling her it was all over, they couldn’t take the risk on her, there’d been other complaints, she was damaged goods. Giuli didn’t care, she just wanted it done with.

She sat on the bench outside Massini’s office. There were voices inside. In her pocket her phone blipped and she took it out, half on her feet again, ready to run back into the outside world. Coward.

The message was from Luisa:
Have you heard from Sandro? I’m worried.

The door opened.

I’m going over there.

Massini stood in the doorway. Behind her, inside the office, Giuli could see the squat figure in quarter profile hunched in a seat in front of the desk. Vera.

‘If you’d like to come in, Giulietta,’ said her boss.

*

‘What’s this?’ Danilo was kneeling by the door of her bedroom.

Since Giulietta Sarto had gone, Elena had felt as though she’d gone half deaf, in the aftermath of some blast.

‘What?’ she said. John was dead. John had been killed. She’d sat in a daze while Danilo and Giulietta had argued insistently over people she hardly knew, would never care about: the old woman who’d died of a stroke. She’d been so old, how could it matter? Somewhere inside her, Elena knew it always mattered, she wished she could care. All she could think about was that before Giuli had walked in, the worst she could imagine was another woman in John’s life.

Danilo Lludic stood up, frowning, right in front of her in the bedroom. Holding an open CD case. ‘Tell me you’ve got a computer,’ he said. ‘That can read this.’

She looked down, and saw the case.
Now That’s What I Call Music
, it said. He held it up to her and she saw the disc that was inside it, only it wasn’t a music CD, it had something written on it in indelible felt-tip, John’s neat writing. She looked from the silver disc to Lludic.

‘I’ve got a laptop,’ Elena said. It took her a moment to locate it, under a chair, behind a heap of clothes, another moment to locate the cable, to plug it in. It was slow to boot up. ‘I don’t use it much,’ she said, apologising. ‘It’s a distraction. Don’t you find? All that noise out there, in the universe.’ She was talking nonsense, but anyway he wasn’t paying attention, he was holding the writeable disc in his hands like some religious relic.

The words written on it were:
Giancarlo Vito
.

Little windows opened on her screen, over the screensaver of a hundred-year-old olive tree in Vinci.
Storage disc. Read files.
She watched Danilo Lludic’s big hands turn deft over the mousepad, opening the file. She held her breath, as though she would see him again. But the words were in Italian. Frowning over Lludic’s
shoulder at the screen, with a knot in her chest it came to her that John hadn’t written this, he’d stolen it.

It was a list, notes, abbreviations, names. Dates.

Danilo’s big head followed the screen down, and she felt the excitement radiating off him like heat. Abruptly he turned to look at her.

‘It’s Vito,’ he said, breathless. ‘I told you, didn’t I, that your John made himself at home in the Palazzo? Maybe he found his way into Giancarlo’s office one day. Vito wrote this.’

She looked from him to the screen.

The names of residents: at the top,
Charles Scardino, Magda Scardino
. A dossier on each resident – perhaps in order of importance. Dates of birth, places of education, photographs, taken in the street and through hotel windows. A couple of racy ones of Magda posing in underwear, from years back by the look of them. Newspaper reports, abbreviations, names of informants and meetings and betrayals.

She looked at Danilo, mystified by the language on the screen. ‘What was he doing?’ she said.

Lludic just shook his head, absorbed. He scrolled down.

Martin Fleming, British Foreign Office 1962 – retirement 2005.
A list of places and dates: Elena tried to conjure the life that accompanied them.
Zagreb 1964–66, Kenya 1966–69, Rome 1969–72, Egypt 1972–77, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait. Trade envoy, aide, liaison, vice-consul, ambassador.

Rome, she thought. That must have been good.

And then, in capitals:
JULIET FLEMING née HARDEN. Probably recruited Cambridge 1962.

Juliet Fleming was the little grey-haired woman who drank
whisky while her husband watched her from across the room, half proud, half anxious. Who’d said the secret was to pace yourself, and had used John’s words when she said that Elena looked like a Vermeer through her workshop window.

‘Recruited?’ she said, wonderingly.

Danilo Lludic tipped back his head to look at her. Without thinking, he took one of her hands in his and rested his lips on it.

‘I might have been wrong about him, then,’ he said, thoughtfully.

Elena looked at him levelly, then removed her hand.

Chapter Thirty-Four

S
TICK TO CERTAINTIES, REPEATED
Sandro doggedly to himself like a mantra as he looked from one face to another, all four turned towards him. At his shoulder he could sense that the woman on the door of the VIP lounge was poised to eject him. He chose Martin Fleming. Stick to certainties.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘It’s about Athene.’

And Juliet Fleming’s head moved up and back so she could fix him in her sights, the movement echoing an animal’s reflex, some clever reptile. Her husband was on his feet: he looked haggard under the airport lighting, confirming Sandro’s instinct. Fleming was the one suffering, the weak link.

‘The night she . . . collapsed,’ he began, and Juliet Fleming was standing too. Beyond them, he saw Charles Scardino’s head turning, calculating, to gauge the situation, and Magda Scardino putting a hand out to his arm to deflect him. What gave Scardino the right, wondered Sandro in that instant, to protection from this messy business? His brains? His earning potential? And then Juliet Fleming blocked them out.

‘Darling,’ she said quickly, voice raised just enough for the Scardinos to overhear, ‘I think we should be making a move, don’t you? Look at the time.’

And she turned back, leaning down to the other couple, talking swiftly and easily about catching up in Cairo, about a restaurant, about hotels, while Sandro looked into Sir Martin Fleming’s face and saw, variously, fatigue, fear, misery.