The Killing Room (19 page)

The bus was stuck in traffic to the east of the big Carabinieri barracks by the river. Sandro could see a couple of officers in their peaked caps idling at the barrier.

Frowning, Pietro had laid a plastic bag in front of Sandro: inside it an envelope with the embossed logo of the Palazzo San Giorgio, folded and stained.

‘It was in his pocket.’ He looked up. ‘It’s how we made the connection with the place.’

‘He was clothed?’

Pietro reached for a large evidence bag under the trolley. Through the plastic Sandro could see a white shirt heavily stained with blood, grey wool trousers. Not casual: the kind of thing you would wear if you needed the doorman to admit you. ‘The partial disarticulation was done through the clothing, and efficiently, one stroke for each joint. Someone knew what they were doing.’

Pietro shook the envelope out beside the body, and with a gloved hand delicately extracted its contents.

The bus shifted again, the two
carabinieri
watched it pass. Simplify: every time Sandro tried, another complication turned up.

A bracelet had fallen out of the envelope, a simple antique bangle of gold set all round with dark red stones. Garnets? Luisa would know. Athene Morris’s bangle. Where had Carlsson got it?

Pietro had lifted the bangle between gloved forefinger and thumb and held it up to the fluorescent light. On the soft old gold inside, two letters were engraved. M and A.

‘Funny way to do it,’ Sandro said. ‘Backwards? Morris, Athene.’

‘You know whose it is?’

Sandro nodded. ‘It didn’t get there by accident, did it? Someone left it there on purpose, for us to find.’ He raised his head and spoke softly, so the technician didn’t hear. ‘Are you going to pass this on to our brothers in dark blue?’ The Carabinieri.

‘Not quite yet,’ Pietro had said. ‘I tried to talk to them about the Vito case yesterday and got nowhere. I’m damned if I’m going to run straight over there with this.’

‘You tried to talk to them? Before . . .’ Sandro gestured at the body on the gurney. ‘Before this?’

Pietro looked exasperated. ‘Well, I wanted to know. You’re my friend, you got Vito’s job. I knew you’d need information. Anyway, the guy – my usual contact there, little guy I did a favour for last year – he wouldn’t even take my call.’ Shook his head. ‘I tell you, there’s something odd about this case.’

In the glittering dark of the Excelsior Terrace, Mariaclara had said, leaning down over the bar so he saw a glimpse of cleavage, ‘Giancarlo knew exactly who had taken that bracelet. He was biding his time, is all. Working out when he could use the information.’ She’d straightened. ‘He didn’t tell me, so don’t bother asking.’ And turned her back.

He closed his eyes. A man killed Carlsson. The same man who killed Giancarlo Vito? They were both in the Palazzo San Giorgio to nose out information, the journalist and the detective. Were they both killed for having found out the same thing?

As he considered the physical labour of killing a man, then methodically hacking into his joints like a butcher, for some reason the Palazzo’s cellars, which he still had not visited, presented themselves to him. The steam room? And of course there was another place, the room with its dirt floor already stained with blood, that had been bricked up. He pondered a suitcase wheeled up into the elevator and out through the front door: would Lino even notice? Lino wasn’t always there.

It would take strength and nervelessness, a certain kind of lunacy. He thought of the men in the Palazzo San Giorgio. Leaving out motive for the moment, concentrating on the physical capacity. Little Mauro, skinny old Lino. No. Brett
Van Vleet, the youngest of them, ex-soldier? Yes. Wiry Ian Cameron, high-minded Scardino? Yes – if they needed to do it badly enough. Sir Martin Fleming? Middle aged, but powerful. Diplomats had all sorts of training, no doubt. The thought set something ticking in his mind.

‘Time of death?’

Pietro had just shaken his head at the question. ‘With the heat . . . they’re not a hundred per cent yet on that yet, and they’re refusing to say. Bunch of old women, these scientists.’ The technician had looked back at them, affronted.

Off the bus now and walking up the steep cant of the Costa San Giorgio, Sandro fixed his gaze on the sky at the top of the hill. Leaves overhung the walls of a garden, sparkling with the early rain, and something smelled sweet. He dialled Maresciallo Carmine Falco.

‘Whom shall I say?’ Not quite a direct line, then. The secretary sounded haughty.

Sandro waited. The voice, when it came, was warm, lazy, benign: he needed benign. But it also represented a shift of power: Sandro had helped the man out, but three years had passed and now it was Sandro with his cap out.

‘Mr Cellini,’ said Maresciallo Falco. The man came back to Sandro: lean and dark in his high-ceilinged office overlooking the neglected Renaissance hedges and paths of the Boboli gardens; a southerner, as many
carabinieri
were. Not stupid, merely with a certain complacency that went with the uniform and the pension, a certain requirement always to begin any negotiation with a smokescreen of politesse and denials. ‘What a pleasure.’

‘Giancarlo Vito,’ said Sandro, not wanting to spin this out. The man remembered him at least, that was something. ‘I’ve got his job. Before he was found dead, as a matter of fact, so I don’t want you putting me in the frame.’

‘Ah,’ said Falco. Not so much interested as calculating. Turning guarded. ‘In that case I had the pleasure of speaking with your boss this morning.’

‘Very courteous of you,’ said Sandro.

‘Well, I don’t envy you that position,’ said Falco, hearty now. ‘A high-powered bunch, I bet, and foreigners. Your English improving, is it? But I still don’t know what you want, Cellini.’

Sandro stopped walking, just downhill from the Palazzo San Giorgio. It came to him then, it came to him out of the blue spring air, it looked down on him from the shuttered windows of the Palazzo. The danger
was
here.

‘A man was seen by a neighbour coming out of Vito’s building,’ he said. ‘Is that right?’

Falco cleared his throat. ‘It’s one of a number of lines of inquiry,’ he said.

‘Any physical details on the man?’ He made his voice tough: policeman to policeman.

Falco cleared his throat again. ‘You know how witnesses are, keen to stick their oar in, but when it comes to details, they go all vague.’ A pause. Then, reluctantly, ‘Well built, that’s all.’

Sandro absorbed that. Vague, all right. ‘And what about the drugs angle? Your officer mentioned it yesterday. Asked about drugs.’

‘Well . . .’ Falco was hedging again.

Sandro calculated that the news that the body in the suitcase
was also connected to the Palazzo San Giorgio would reach him by the end of the day. He kept the edge to his voice. ‘Well? It’s obviously a matter of concern. There was no suggestion of that while he worked here. It’s a rumour that could be very damaging.’ Sandro was keenly aware that he didn’t have a whole lot of leverage, and it might be better to appeal to Falco’s better nature. ‘You can see my predicament. I have to contain things.’

Falco sighed, acknowledging the favour called in. ‘There are other complications, let’s say. Domestic. His . . . private life. As for drugs, I don’t know. Steroids, maybe, but that’s not what you mean, is it?’ Cagey: he was giving himself time to think. To throw up some smokescreen.

‘How was he found? I know nothing, you see.’

‘Oh, the landlady.’ Falco almost chuckled. ‘She thought he’d gone on holiday, was her cover story, she wanted to be sure he’d turned the gas off. Or something.’

‘And what did she find?’

A sigh. ‘Blunt head trauma,’ said Falco. ‘A blow to the back of the neck.’ A pause. ‘He was naked. On his way to bed, perhaps.’

Sandro digested that. Taken by surprise – a man with Vito’s training would have had to have been. ‘So, by complications . . . you mean women?’ He paused. Could a woman have killed a man built like Vito? It would depend how vulnerable she’d made him. For some reason the image of Magda Scardino drifted into his head, and stuck there.

There was a long pause, that grew. ‘Not women,’ Falco said abruptly.

‘Not women?’ Sandro frowned to himself, feeling slow and stupid. ‘You mean he was homosexual?’ He could hear himself;
he could hear Luisa and Giuli laughing at him.
It happens, Sandro
. Of course it did. It would explain why he hadn’t made a move on the gorgeous Mariaclara.

‘He was gay?’ Sandro lowered his voice to a hiss, and as he did so Lino stepped out on to the doorstep of the Palazzo. ‘Who says?’ He felt aggrieved, he couldn’t help it. It seemed like insult to injury: he couldn’t even blame female susceptibility for Vito’s employment. His mind turned to those threesomes Giuli had talked about. Van Vleet.

‘Oh, the
padrona di casa
.’ The landlady. ‘She says she’s glad he’s gone, he was obviously a promiscuous homosexual and she doesn’t allow those.’

‘Perhaps I should go and talk to her.’ Sandro was almost talking to himself, but Falco cut in at once.

‘I don’t think so, Cellini.’ Unmistakably a warning. And Falco barked something away from the phone, his hand over the receiver so Sandro only heard a muffled order.

‘I’d like to be of help,’ said Sandro, on full alert now for Falco’s response.

‘If you want to help, stay out of it,’ said Falco. And hung up.

*

Luisa was in the marble-tiled washroom of the mall. A Medusa head in mosaic looked down on her from above inlaid mirrors; a stocky Filipina in a pale-green uniform who was wiping out the sinks was watching her like a hawk.

‘Let me look,’ Luisa had said in the café, while the woman behind the bar pretended not to stare, and she’d taken Therese
Van Vleet’s bag from her. ‘Are you sure you put your purse in there this morning?’

Van Vleet had looked at her wonderingly. ‘I – I . . .’ She didn’t seem to be able to think. Was she being deliberately tormented? It occurred to Luisa that most of the nasty tricks did seem to centre on the American. Starting with the little dog down the well.

‘It was in there, Therese.’ Marjorie Cameron had stepped forward. ‘I saw it in the foyer. Don’t you remember? You were looking for your lipstick.’

Therese focused on her gratefully. Magda Scardino snorted.

‘It probably fell out in the limousine,’ said Juliet Fleming. She looked tired now, the whisky glass empty in her hand.

‘It’s too much.’ Therese Van Vleet pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘It’s too much. It’s not the purse, it’s just the latest; it’s all too much. She was gazing at Magda Scardino for reasons Luisa couldn’t fathom. ‘My little Georgie, my dog, he was taken. The – the mess. And then Giancarlo – Giancarlo’s died, doesn’t anyone understand that?’ She looked pleadingly from one face to another.

In her pocket Luisa’s phone thrummed, once, to indicate a message. ‘That could be the driver now,’ she said, taking it out, although she could see the missed call was from Sandro. ‘Mrs Van Vleet, just sit down a moment. I’ll go to the mall’s help desk, and I’ll call the driver. I’m sure there’s no need to worry.’

The truth was, Luisa just wanted to get away from them for five minutes. Van Vleet’s naked helplessness made her anxious, and the other women clustering round her didn’t seem to be helping. A quarter of an hour with the lost property
department – a defensive young woman behind a desk, who thought the mall was being accused of something – didn’t get her anywhere. The purse hadn’t been handed in. The driver – who took so long to answer, she suspected he was sleeping in the car somewhere – told her he couldn’t see it in the back of his vehicle. She told him they’d want picking up sooner than expected.

Luisa headed back to the Caffè Barocco. From a hundred metres she could see they were all still sitting there, and she stopped. The restroom door just before the cafe beckoned: the thought of sitting in a cubicle on her own was infinitely preferable to dealing with Magda Scardino’s disdain. Five minutes, she told herself. And she needed to talk to Sandro.

In the event she didn’t even get a chance to say hello and Sandro was off. Telling her things she could hardly believe, and didn’t much want to hear.

A body found in a suitcase.

The disappearance of Therese Van Vleet’s purse receded; she forgot where she was. There was a small hard seat in the corner of the restroom and she sat on it. He finally ran out of steam.

‘Are you there?’ he asked, into the stunned silence.

‘Should I tell them?’ she asked.

‘Time enough for that,’ he said. ‘Christ knows how the Palazzo will survive it.’ A pause. ‘How are they reacting? Have they talked about . . . Vito?’

She considered, thinking of the young American woman looking from one face to the next. ‘Therese Van Vleet’s taking it hardest. Plus she’s lost her purse – long story. Nothing’s turned up there, has it? She seems to think it’s all about her.’

‘Really,’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘No, no purse here. I’ll ask Lino.’

Something occurred to Luisa. Did Therese Van Vleet crave the attention? ‘These people are peculiar,’ she said. ‘Juliet Fleming follows Magda Scardino around like she’s her minder, though she can’t seem to stand the woman. As for Vito – Marjorie Cameron seems to be in shock, Magda Scardino doesn’t seem to give a damn.’ She paused. ‘Juliet Fleming is so . . . so English.’

Sandro laughed abruptly. ‘I suppose being a diplomatic wife you just have to hide it all, everything. Can’t you see her sitting upright in some terrorist video while they prepare to execute her?’

‘Sandro!’ Luisa was shocked. ‘That’s actually horrifying.’ He was right, though, and now the thought was in her head she couldn’t eradicate it. She liked Juliet Fleming. She had admired the woman, for her restraint. But the thought of maintaining that level of self-discipline to her deathbed suddenly seemed terrible.

‘They hardly knew Vito,’ she said, by way of excuse. ‘How long? A month?’

‘And yet Therese Van Vleet bursts into tears over it?’

‘She’s young.’ Luisa stood up, suddenly feeling old herself. ‘We’ll talk about this when we get back,’ she said.

The bathroom attendant had stopped pretending to clean and was staring at her. She fished out a coin and put it in the saucer, but the woman didn’t move.