The Killing Room (18 page)

Juliet Fleming meant she was a bitch.

‘But you’re friends?’

Juliet Fleming turned her pale eyes on Luisa, who saw that the whites were dull, sickly. ‘Oh, we get along. I admire her, in a way. She’s a strong woman. And her husband is very intelligent. Very interesting. He’s not well, you know. She can’t be all bad, can she?’

Behind the bar the serving woman had loaded their tray: sandwiches, a salad, a bottle of water, two
cappuccini
. Luisa paid; would she be paid back? It occurred to her that Magda Scardino would certainly not hand over any money unless compelled.

‘You’ve known her a long time,’ said Luisa, hefting the tray.

Juliet Fleming held on to her whisky, gesturing with her free hand for Luisa to precede her. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, casually. ‘I mean, we’ve run across each other. Over the years. Her husband, the Professor, well, he travels a great deal, conferences. His expertise is . . . controversial, so we’ve been aware. . .’ She tailed off in a manner that struck Luisa as uncharacteristic, staying carefully out of her line of sight as she spoke.

‘Controversial?’ Luisa smiled politely, trying not to sound too nosy.

Juliet Fleming waved a hand. ‘He’s a scientist. A . . . what is it? An organic chemist, developing something or other.’ She paused. Luisa didn’t believe in this ignorance she professed. ‘The diplomat’s job is just to look after them, when they visit.’

‘But now you’re retired?’

Juliet Fleming just gave a little smile. ‘Old habits,’ she said.

Magda Scardino was leaning across the small table and speaking in a fierce undertone to Marjorie Cameron. Luisa shifted the weight of the tray, feeling the familiar ache along the lymph gland under her right arm, where the scar tissue was still new.

Juliet Fleming half turned. ‘Of course, he wasn’t married to her when he came to Saudi, he was on his first wife. I believe Magda was his PhD student.’

‘His student?’

Juliet Fleming’s smile curled up, not quite reaching her eyes, and Luisa knew she would not say any more.

As if she’d heard her name spoken, Scardino looked up and Marjorie Cameron sprang back as if physically released.

‘Oh, you English,’ said Scardino with sudden spite, sitting back on the buttoned velvet banquette like a kind of queen, Luisa thought, enthroned among her expensive carrier bags, ‘and your drinking.’

Juliet Fleming regarded her thoughtfully, her hand curled around the glass, and said nothing. It was as though she was a servant who’d been reminded of her place. Luisa wondered why she deferred to Magda Scardino like that. The English and their drinking – and their good manners?

She laid down the tray and began to set things out on the table, but even with her head down she abruptly became aware of something different among them. She looked up, saw that all three other women had turned towards the mirrored and panelled entrance.

‘Therese,’ said Juliet Fleming quietly.

Therese Van Vleet was standing in the door: she had no carrier bags with her, and there was no mistaking the fact that she had been crying. She held her handbag out to them, a jumble of lipsticks and tissues. ‘It’s gone,’ she said, her voice a rising wail. ‘They took it. They’ve taken my money now.’ And she swayed, and if Luisa hadn’t got to her first, would have fallen.

Chapter Sixteen

S
ITTING IN THE WAITING
room of the mortuary in front of a pile of dog-eared magazines – cars, health – Sandro tapped through his phone’s address book. Had he put the man’s direct line in? It was there. Maresciallo Carmine Falco: a senior officer in the Carabinieri who in a moment of weakness, perhaps, had thanked Sandro for helping solve the disappearance of a foreign girl during the November rains, three years earlier. A case that should, by rights, have been solved by the Carabinieri under whose noses the girl had been abducted, snatched from the Boboli Gardens, where the city’s Oltrarno Carabinieri post stood among the landscaped irises and cedars. And Falco had said then, shaking his hand and perhaps thinking it no more than a gesture,
If you need anything.

Falco had called the Palazzo this morning, and spoken to Cornell.

It was close to eleven-thirty now: Sandro had already been away from the Palazzo forty minutes. The smell was getting to him, layers he was familiar with, chemical freshener over
chlorine over the thick farmyard reek of bodies opened. He’d told Cornell he’d be as quick as he could.

Pietro was on his way. The technical staff wouldn’t tell Sandro a thing – let alone show him – until he got there, never mind that he recognised at least one of them from his time on the Polizia di Stato, when they used to clump in and out mobhanded to check out this or that case. He’d only been out six years, he sometimes forgot that.

As Alessandra Cornell had closed the office door behind her, Sandro had seen that she had a rash on her neck. It was getting to her. There was something imploring in the way she looked at him, and he’d taken the coward’s way out. He had just asked her if there was any news.

Surprisingly there was. ‘I had a call this morning from a Maresciallo of the Carabinieri,’ she said. ‘A courtesy, he said. They’re following up leads. A man was seen by a neighbour leaving Vito’s building at around one on the night he was killed.’ The rash on her neck seemed to be calming a little. ‘He – Maresciallo Falco – was keen to reassure me, it seemed. They will not be making any more details of the case public in the short term, there won’t be any press conferences for the foreseeable future, so perhaps we can contain it. The bad publicity.’

‘Great,’ Sandro had said heartily. Falco, he’d thought. Making a special phone call – why? But the man seen leaving the building was presumably not an invention. ‘Well, that’s progress.’

Unless the man turns out to be someone we know, of course.

‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ Cornell was suspicious now.

And he’d just told her the truth – or some of it. ‘A suitcase has turned up at the train station,’ he said. ‘An ex-colleague tipped me off. They think it might belong to someone here.’ She’d looked faintly alarmed: if she knew what they’d found in it, he thought, it would be more than alarm. ‘Best if I have a look, don’t you think?’

‘If you’re sure it’s necessary,’ Cornell had said, the anxiety still there. The rash was back.

‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ he’d lied. And looked away. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’

Looking like she just didn’t want to hear any more bad news, she’d let him go.

Pietro looked harassed when he finally pushed through the door, and he hadn’t done a very good job on his morning shave. ‘They called me at three,’ he said, catching Sandro’s look, rubbing his chin. Then, ‘It’s not pretty.’

And it wasn’t. The technician who showed them into the pathology lab was the one Sandro had already recognised, and Sandro felt the man watching for a reaction as he drew back the sheet.

White Caucasian male, dark hair on the torso, extensively discoloured where blood had pooled in the tissues that had sat undermost, principally at the front of the abdomen and chest. The suitcase must have lain with him face-down in it in the baggage compartment.

He had been partially disarticulated. Which meant in this case that the ball and socket joints had been hacked through at the shoulder and the hip. The brief and shocking image of a butcher taking a cleaver to a chicken carcass came into Sandro’s
head, the crack of bone, sinew yellow against red. The limbs were not fully detached. Which did not mean that the body was whole.

‘They did that to get him in the suitcase,’ said Pietro.

The face was battered and discoloured, a faint gleam of broken teeth through bloodied lips, of cornea under bruised lids. Sandro wouldn’t vomit: that reflex was long gone. He stared at it for some time. He remembered the man’s grin, in the dark, on the warm terrace, and he felt something expand in his chest. Fear.

‘Where’s the suitcase?’ he said eventually.

‘You know him, don’t you?’ said Pietro, and Sandro felt his partner’s eyes on him, reading him as easily as a mother reads her child. He turned to him.

‘First things first,’ said Sandro. ‘I want a look at the evidence.’

*

Alone in the office now, Giuli stood at the window, looking down into the Via del Leone. The sky was clearing and a girl from the hairdresser’s was smoking on the gleaming pavement in a grubby pink cotton coat, the cigarette cupped in her hand to hide it. Just watching her, Giuli wanted one herself. She was down to five a day, on Enzo’s orders.

‘Did you know the guy who was killed?’ she had said when Elena Giovese had finished telling her. Something in the way Elena had described her John Carlsson looking down into the street had sparked the question. She regretted it almost immediately.

‘Killed? What guy?’ Elena’s frown was gone, her arms hanging and eyes wide in the dim room.

‘What guy?’ Her face was white.

‘It’s all right,’ said Giuli patiently. The girl’s fingers dug into her arm.

‘The security guy,’ Giuli said. ‘The one before my boss, before Sandro. His name was Giancarlo Vito. I guess you must have seen him?’ She had pushed the crumpled edition of the
Corriere
across the desk. ‘Here.’

Elena stared at the page, her knuckles white where she gripped the paper. ‘It’s not him,’ she said. ‘It’s not John.’

It was Giuli’s turn to frown. ‘Of course it’s not him,’ she said. ‘Weren’t you listening?’ She’d taken the paper from her but Elena had gone on staring at it.

‘I’m getting married,’ Giuli had said. Just blurted it out, before she could think what effect it would have. Another stupid thing to say: had she meant, not all men are bad? Elena had looked at her bewildered. ‘I mean, if it can happen to me. . .’ Giuli said, feebly, by way of explanation. ‘There’ll be someone else. You could just walk away.’

Giovese had drawn her thick dark brows together at that. A long pause, and then she spoke. ‘You hated that place, too, didn’t you?’ Bitterly. ‘The pleasure palace. The last place he was seen.’

Still watching the girl on the pavement in her little pink uniform, dragging on the last of that cigarette as if her life depended on it, Giuli called Sandro. When he answered he sounded weird, breathless, as if he’d just climbed three flights of stairs. There was traffic in the background. She thought she’d misheard when he told her he was at the morgue. ‘I’m still working it out myself,’ he’d said when she asked him why. ‘You go first.’

‘There’s this guy,’ she said. She told him the whole story, as
Giovese had told it to her.

He said nothing, and she sighed. ‘You know, the truth is, Carlsson’s probably just done a runner. Trying to get a story, it didn’t work out, he’s moved on.’

What with the bad line and the traffic noise it took her a while to register the particular quality of Sandro’s silence, growing heavier as she spoke.

He’d cleared his throat. ‘And what about – ah – your business with the Women’s Centre? Best to just put it behind you, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, distracted. She’d deleted the anonymous email. Stupid. Something in the email address had snagged on her memory but she’d put her finger down on the delete button all the same. She sighed. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me, Sandro.’

A silence. Then a sigh. ‘I met her boyfriend at the launch,’ said Sandro. ‘This John Carlsson.’

‘Right,’ she said, taken aback. ‘So what do you think?’

‘I liked him,’ he said. ‘He told me there were a few people he recognised at the Palazzo, and I got the impression he didn’t like them much.’ She waited, and when he spoke again his voice was low and tired. ‘Pietro just called me to say they’d found a body in a suitcase, left on a coach at the station.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Giuli. ‘Why’d he call you?’ A silence, a sigh. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘It’s connected, isn’t it? Have you told Luisa? Shit.’

‘It’s the journalist,’ said Sandro, and he sounded old. ‘It’s John Carlsson.’

Shit.

Chapter Seventeen

S
TANDING BY THE SIDE
of the roaring ringroad as he hung up on Giuli, all Sandro could think was, he’d take the bus. The taxi ride there had made him feel uncomfortable, alone and idle in the back seat, unable to converse with the driver for the clamour in his head. He felt like sitting among ordinary people.

There was so much in this case, so much noise, so much distraction, and every time he headed back to the Palazzo San Giorgio it crowded in on him again. The faces, the tricks, the muffled corridors. It was like a bell jar, an isolation tank; invisibly it squeezed his brain until nothing made sense and all he could feel was the fear.

‘Do you think there’s a killer in there? At the Palazzo?’ Pietro had asked him, and with that straight question he had felt the pressure in his head ease. Just the sight of his old partner’s face had said it to him. Simplify.

The bus was already crowded. Sandro watched as a stout elderly lady ousted a tourist boy from a seat, got out a mobile
phone and began to harangue her son. A little group of Japanese girls came on at the Fortezza da Basso, outlandishly dressed. Circling the city centre on the ringroad, the bus filled up and everyone jostled at eye level; every now and again a glimpse of the Duomo down a long straight road appeared, and Sandro sat and let himself be lulled. The sun came out and shone through the dusty windows.

A killer. They’d looked down at the battered face together, and Sandro had thought of the big façade concealing the closed doors, the underground rooms. ‘Yes,’ Sandro had said at last, turning to his old friend.

A man had done this: fact. No woman could have heaved the suitcase into the coach’s belly. Carlsson had come back from a trip and gone straight to the Palazzo to find someone. And now he was dead.

The suitcase had wheels. The killer might have got it on and off a bus, in and out of a taxi, some way from the station, and innocuously, casually, walked with a thousand others up that ramp. The body had been wrapped in clingfilm inside, and besides, hadn’t had much blood left in it, but fluids had oozed, eventually, staining the cheap cloth.