The Killing Room (37 page)

Juliet Fleming’s hand on his arm, then in the small of his back, was light but unerring, impossible to resist. They moved back past the woman on the door, whose head turned to follow them. The soft insistent pressure of her hand on his back eased only when they were out of sight and earshot, between a newsstand and the small queue for Security.

Sandro spoke immediately: give this woman an entry point and she would deflect him, stun him. ‘You were in Athene Morris’s room the night before last,’ he said. He spoke in Italian; for now they were still in his country, and they both knew the language. ‘What did she see? What did she know?’ He thought of Dickens on the bedside table, and the little pile of treasures, and something slid into its place in his head. ‘She was the one in and out of other residents’ rooms, wasn’t she? Did she find something she shouldn’t have? Did she know you were resident at the Palazzo San Giorgio on behalf of the British security services? Did she know you had a reason to want Giancarlo Vito disposed of?’

‘What reason?’ Juliet Fleming’s voice was sharp. Martin Fleming’s face looked slack as rubber. ‘My husband is a retired diplomat. His connection with Athene goes back a long way. They were friends.’ The words were crisply delivered but they seemed abruptly to have left her without breath.

Her husband looked at her, and set a hand on her shoulder.

MA, thought Sandro. Martin, Athene.

‘Athene and I were lovers,’ he said. ‘A long time ago. I went to see her that night – because I was worried about her.’

‘Athene was in Florence because of my husband,’ said Juliet Fleming. ‘He paid her lease.’ Her face was sallow, with tension, or sickness. ‘He wanted to look after her.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Sandro, looking from her to Martin Fleming. ‘And you thought you’d sign up yourselves, just to keep an eye on her? Or did she turn into a bit of an inconvenience? Did you spot Scardino on the list of other residents and decide jostling a few old lovers wouldn’t do any harm when the stakes were so high – snaring a stratospheric scientist for Britain? So you signed up too, imagining you would be able to manage Athene. Only then Giancarlo Vito seemed to be after the same thing. So you had to deal with him. And maybe Athene, being an old woman, being still in love even at her age, started to get indiscreet?’

‘It’s business,’ said Juliet Fleming, and then, at last, Sandro understood.

‘He really is just a retired diplomat,’ he said. ‘It’s not him who’s the spy, it’s you, isn’t it?’ It whirled. He’d always known it, hadn’t he? That it would be a woman. A woman’s touch in the nasty tricks: was it bitterness, or strategy, or alcoholism? ‘Did you steal the bracelet back, because you hated Athene Morris after all these years?’

She stared, haughty.

‘And did Vito find it in your room, or maybe the maid did and told him?’ Had he tried to use it to get leverage, then sent it back
to her, on Carlsson’s body after he was fired, as a message? Only it never arrived. ‘Did you put that magazine in my briefcase?’

Juliet Fleming frowned and he thought, in panic – no. She knows nothing about it. Could she have trained herself to deliver that response? And then her face loosened, and he smelled just the ghost of whisky on her breath.

‘What do you think this is?’ she said. ‘You and Vito both, you men, this Italy. It isn’t a boys’ game of spies and sex and flashes of brilliance, it isn’t about ego. It’s business. Negotiation. Incentivising.’ She held her head very still and straight. ‘It’s about hard work.’ She drew herself upright, her eyes bright. ‘Has it occurred to you that you might consider putting women in charge in this country, now and again?’

Sandro looked at her, thought of Luisa and Giuli and how long it was since he’d spoken to them. The call he’d rejected from Luisa: it occurred to him that the odds were they’d been quietly making their own deductions. Humbly, he persisted. ‘Who killed Giancarlo Vito?’

Her head bowed, Juliet Fleming was unzipping a flat leather bag slung across her body, extracting passports and plane tickets. ‘A licence to kill, is that what you imagine?’ She handed Martin Fleming his ticket as she spoke, not bothering to look at Sandro. Fleming’s face was stony, guarded.

‘Vito clearly thought he had one. Such idiocy. Almost always an error, to take extreme measures. Almost never necessary. You seriously think that I or my husband,’ she spoke proudly, ‘would have made such a mess? Do you think we could have thought of no other way of stopping Vito getting Scardino’s business than to kill him? He only had his handsome face, his honeytrap; he
couldn’t offer Magda Eton or Westminster for her sons.’ She shrugged. Sandro realised he had had no idea the Scardinos had children. She went on. ‘
My
husband having to terrify Athene into a fit because she might or might not have seen something wandering the corridors late at night?’

Then she looked at him. ‘If my husband had killed Vito it would only have been to
protect
Athene.’ And laughed shortly. ‘Vito was an unnecessarily manipulative and unpleasant man. He was clever enough to find out secrets, but not clever enough to use them properly, and too stupid to know when he was playing with fire. Dropping hints to Martin that he’d let people know about their affair. Stupid enough to think it was worth keeping that idiot Van Vleet supplied with girls. That fool Bottai, and his father almost as bad, throwing their weight around, pretending to be men of influence.’ She stopped briefly, her face grey, to take a quick shallow breath. ‘No wonder AISE only used him as a floater: I don’t suppose they’ll be regretting the loss so much as concentrating on cleaning up afterwards.’

But Sandro was looking at the husband.

‘Juliet insisted,’ he said, weary. ‘I told her it would be too much. I’d retired, she could have left it to someone else, this time. Particularly with Athene here, I didn’t want to . . . get involved. But Scardino was such a prize, apparently.’ He didn’t look at his wife. ‘It’s made her ill.’

Ill. She was dying: Sandro saw that with sudden clarity. And Juliet Fleming confirmed it. ‘It’s liver cancer, darling,’ she said wearily. ‘It was already there. It’s not the job that did it, it was me.’

As if the words were a talisman, Sandro stepped back, to let them go; not that he had any power to detain them, nor ever
did have. Juliet Fleming stepped between them, holding a thin yellow hand out to her husband, who took it, like a prize. But Fleming didn’t walk away, not yet.

‘She was happy when I left her,’ he said. ‘Athene.’ Grief, thought Sandro, just sounded like exhaustion in this man. ‘I never went near the damned man, bloody Vito, not for her or anyone else, and she knew I hadn’t. I went to warn her. She never could resist gossip, she never could resist stirring things up: it got worse as she got older, if anything.’

‘Less to lose,’ said his wife. One hand still in his, she raised the other to his upper arm to steer him towards their departure.

‘Athene knew,’ said Sandro, hearing his own voice hoarsen. ‘She knew who killed Giancarlo Vito.’

From over her shoulder Juliet Fleming said in her dry, rusty little voice, throwing it away without breaking step, ‘I think we all knew.’

Sandro had no power to keep them. As he watched her narrow upright figure disappear through the security gates he understood that he would not see Juliet Fleming – nothing like a Juliet, except in her husband’s eyes – again.

We all knew
.

*

Heading east along the river, under the high yellow arcades that held up the Vasari corridor in its last stretch before it met the grey arches and pillars of the Uffizi, it seemed to Luisa that this must be what it was like to have failing sight restored at a stroke, or hearing: everything suddenly sharp and bright and loud and
new. Overhead, she imagined the gilded and varnished galleries, the long windows, the murmuring of guides. The Africans laid out their cheap prints at her feet and chattered at her. Looking down, she saw wire figurines, little wooden letters; the usual stream of tourists walked towards her in their shorts and hats and as if in a dream of dancing, unerring Luisa sidestepped every obstacle.

If Sandro wouldn’t answer, she certainly wouldn’t leave him a message. Standing at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio while the crowd parted to stream around her, she had left a message for Giuli, instead. The phone had rung again almost immediately and her heart had leapt, but it was neither of them, the number was unfamiliar and so, for some time, was the voice.

She looked across the river and saw the Palazzo San Giorgio silhouetted on its slope against the low dark sky. She could see that all but one set of its shutters were closed, like a fortress battening down. A gust blew as she came out from under the arcades, and below her on the rowing club’s green terrace something beat and flapped with a cracking sound. Spring storms were the worst, the most violent: they could wreak havoc.

On the mobile the voice had whispered half of what it said – in English – incomprehensible to Luisa. It had echoed like the simulated voices of the spirits at a séance her mother had dragged her to, fifty years earlier, rising and falling and sobbing and pleading, ectoplasm and fakery, making her feel slightly sick, then and now. What was the woman trying to tell her?
I’m sorry. Help me
.

‘All right,’ she’d ended up saying, just to terminate the conversation. ‘I’m coming anyway. I was on my way.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ were the words she remembered from the call, echoing Sandro’s. ‘I was so sorry about your husband.’

*

As Giuli walked out, she passed a woman waiting on the bench seats of the STD Clinic: a woman not young. Her face turned to follow Giuli, and she had the same look in her eye as Vera had had, turning from the seat. Shamed, wrong, defiant, hopeless.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Massini had said, immediately the door had closed behind her. ‘I should have believed you, Giulietta.’

There had been justifications, excuses. Giuli had merely sat there waiting for it to finish, staring straight ahead.

‘Of course,’ Massini had said, ‘we would never have taken it at face value, and when she couldn’t come up with these supposed witnesses—’ She stopped. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m glad to know,’ said Giuli, distantly.
Just let me out of here
, she thought, Vera’s sullen face imprinted on her retina. ‘She’s explained to you why she did it?’

Massini was properly uncomfortable. ‘Something to do with her husband—’

‘He was one of my customers,’ said Giuli. ‘Twenty years ago. You see enough women like me in here to know, we’re not in it for kicks.’ She turned her head and looked Vera in the eye. In her pocket the phone vibrated again.
Let me out of here
, she thought once more,
I’ve got things to do
.

She blinked, looked into Massini’s face and tried to focus. She could make out sincerity, she saw remorse.

‘So under the circumstances, naturally we would lift the suspension with immediate effect, that is, if you—’

‘I need to think about it,’ said Giuli, standing abruptly. ‘Under the circumstances.’

Massini cleared her throat, got to her feet. ‘Well I—’

‘How long can you give me? To decide.’

‘As long as you need, Giulietta,’ Massini said, and if she had been going on to say,
within reason
, she swallowed it with a stiff little movement.

‘I have to get to work now,’ said Giuli, thinking with longing of the haven of the little office. Could she ever come back here?

As Giuli walked back through reception, the temp was too harassed even to register her return and she carried on, stopped only on the threshold by the sight of the trees of the Piazza Tasso under a teeming downpour.

Of course she had seen that look before, the look on Vera’s face, on the woman outside the STD Clinic. A look so undiluted that you could almost smell it, like burning: shame, fear, the stubborn residue of desire. It’s the weak, Sandro had once told her. It’s the weak that kill, because they have no other options.

Chapter Thirty-Five

‘D
ARLING,’ SAID
M
AGDA
S
CARDINO
, leaning back in the bright bucket seat to address her husband before Sandro, back in the flimsy stage-set doorway of the VIP lounge, could even open his mouth. The woman on the door barely gave him a glance this time. ‘Darling, I’m gasping for another coffee. Would you mind?’ And she gestured with a toss of her head to the bar at the far end, as makeshift as the rest of the place, with its meagre row of bottles and plastic barstools.

Charles Scardino looked up from the journal he was reading, and got to his feet without a word. He was a man, thought Sandro, for whom everything was calculated moment by moment and without sentiment: when he’d had enough of Magda, he might not even pause to say why he wanted her gone. But for the time being, it seemed, she was what he wanted. He walked away.

Magda pointed at the seat beside her and the instant Sandro was close enough she spoke, rapidly. ‘I told your wife to tell you to stay out of it,’ she said, leaning in, making him do the same. ‘If you don’t have the brains, she certainly does. What’s to be
gained? Vito was a fool. Was it because he was Italian? Are you all like that? Trying to provoke me, to make me jealous, as if sex would do it.’

She rolled her eyes, then tipped her head to look across the room. Her husband seemed to know what was expected of him, and was taking his time.

‘And with
her
, of all of them, with that husband. Controlling doesn’t describe that man adequately.’

Sandro grappled with what Magda was telling him, her face half turned away from him still as she kept an eye on the Professor.

‘He only wanted a wife who’d listen to him and make children and shut up. Barefoot in the bush – the number of times I’ve heard him say that! Can you imagine what he’d do?’ Outraged. ‘If he found out she was. . .’ And she hesitated, at last. ‘Enjoying herself with another man?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sandro. ‘Are you talking about the engineer? Cameron? He got Vito fired. I knew that. He accused him of looking at his post.’