The Killing Room (21 page)

‘Sweetheart.’ He was disappointed in her, the downturned eyes under the straight fringe. ‘I know what you’re doing.’ It was Enzo.

She dropped the cigarette, guiltily. ‘What are you doing here?’ She heard herself, like a schoolkid caught out.

‘I wanted to make sure you were all right,’ he said, gesturing at the
motorino
at the kerb. He must have shot over on it to find her.

He’d called, as he always did, to chat over his lunch break and Giuli had told him about Sandro, and his visit to the morgue. She’d heard the intake of breath that said this wasn’t their world, that Enzo, who’d come from the quiet grey hills at the foot of Monte Amiata, wanted nothing to do with it. But he’d come to find her.

The trees in the square, scrubby and battered from the children climbing them, were in full flower but not yet in leaf, and the sun shone pale through their branches on to the neglected earth. There was an afternoon lull in the
viale
’s traffic and the old stone wall that surrounded one side of the Piazza Tasso was golden in the afternoon light. Reluctantly Giuli looked back at the Centre’s doors.

‘You’re torturing yourself,’ Enzo said quietly, nodding towards the building. ‘What if someone sees you?’

Something rose inside Giuli she couldn’t subdue and when she turned to him, blazing, he took a step back. ‘I don’t care if
they see me,’ she said. ‘Someone sent an email this morning. A picture, that was meant to rub my nose in it. Do I just hide?’ The address on the email pulsed somewhere just out of reach in her head: it was why she was here. She’d see a face, she’d make a connection. She’d know.

Watching her, Enzo held his ground, and nodded. ‘All right, okay,’ he said, and turned to look where she was looking. He didn’t take her hand but she felt him settle to wait beside her.

‘It could take a while,’ she warned.

It took a little more than half an hour. Her young replacement as receptionist turned up to take over the afternoon shift, disappeared inside. A
motorino
, flashy but past its best, pulled up at the kerb and Giuli stepped forwards, out of the doorway.

On the other side of the square a woman Giuli knew came out of the glazed doors, discontent even in the way she pulled a raincoat round her thick middle, and looked up at the blue sky. The man on the
motorino
sat surly, a helmet dangling from one finger, and the woman came across to him. As he half turned Giuli saw his profile and something caught on her memory: it must have done once or twice before, but she had developed a habit of saying no to any face that rang a bell, with a past like hers. Just like she’d blanked Elena Giovese.

Vera the English receptionist and her Italian husband the plumber. A marriage not made in heaven.

Giuli stood on the pavement and waited until the woman saw her. Enzo stepped up beside her. ‘You can go now,’ she said.

*

They came in by Firenze Sud: there’d been an accident around the Certosa, and after twenty uneasy minutes in stationary traffic, the limousine’s driver had swung off and diverted. At last they emerged through the hills; the city’s red roofs crowded the plain ahead, and Luisa felt herself relax, fractionally.

She still didn’t know what to make of it. Luisa had been helping the other women with their bags, helping them one after the other into the limousine’s dark interior. Magda Scardino had hung back. Juliet Fleming had been the surprise, her hand suddenly tightening fiercely around Luisa’s as if she was afraid of falling as she climbed in. Extracting herself, Luisa had stepped back and Scardino had been there, at her shoulder, leaning close.

‘You and your husband should keep your noses out of it,’ she had said, quite without inflection, and Luisa was momentarily fascinated to see how completely the attractiveness in her face was gone, abandoned in favour of bare aggression. ‘That would be my suggestion.’ And then she ducked and was inside, and it almost felt like she had sucked the air in with her. It had been a tense ride.

As the long, ungainly car negotiated the curve of the access road between the long grass of a building plot and a new development, Therese Van Vleet sat abruptly forward in her seat, looking through the window.

‘It’s here, isn’t it?’ she said, looking back at Magda Scardino, who returned her gaze with steely exasperation and just
shrugged. The younger woman turned to Marjorie Cameron. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

Luisa looked through the window and saw only a dusty parking lot, and a couple of slightly shabby two-storey villas. Looking closer she saw that a van in the distinctive navy and red livery of the Carabinieri sat in one corner of the lot, and something fluttered from a hedge. Police tape. The limousine glided on and the scene receded behind them.

‘I think so,’ said Marjorie Cameron hesitantly. ‘Juliet?’

Juliet was looking at Luisa. ‘It’s Giancarlo Vito’s house,’ she said. ‘That’s what Therese means.’ She patted Van Vleet’s hand, her own small as a bird’s claw. ‘Of course, you’re right. Well remembered.’ As if she was talking to a child.

‘He was always telling us about his landlady,’ said Therese Van Vleet, her childish eagerness to please at odds with her trembling lip. Almost in tears, again. ‘She used to spy on him, he said. He told visitors to come around the back, he said, to the fire escape, just to annoy her. He would imitate her.’

‘Giancarlo accompanied us on a trip to Poppi,’ said Juliet Fleming drily, still watching Luisa. ‘Another one of Gastone’s little treats. Another limousine. And he pointed it out to us.’

‘As if we’d be interested,’ said Magda, her mouth down-turned, looking away from the window and the view of a row of anonymous condominiums. Luisa wondered where she’d grown up, to be so offended by the sight of where ordinary people lived.

‘It must have been a shock,’ Luisa said. ‘His death.’

‘We hardly knew him,’ said Juliet Fleming briskly. ‘Therese . . . Therese’s husband was rather friendly with him. Some . . . professional interest, wasn’t it?’

‘Brett was in the army, when he was a kid,’ said Therese Van Vleet in a small voice. ‘Before I knew him. Not for long. They talked about the Italian Military Academy, was all.’

‘Of course it was a shock,’ said Marjorie Cameron abruptly. ‘Of course it was. Ian feels dreadful.’

They all stared at her, and fell silent.

The limousine was on the last stretch of the
viale
now, between the great leaning umbrella pines that skirted the slope, and the Duomo revealed itself, floating red-domed over the city, dwarfing every other roof. When the limousine turned through the Porta San Giorgio and headed down, easing its shining bulk through the narrow space, they were all poised, sitting forward, watching.

An ambulance sat at the kerb.

Chapter Nineteen

‘I
KNOCKED ON HER
door this morning,’ the maid Alice had said as they hurried along the carpeted corridors for the lift. ‘I did.’ Her eyes were averted from Sandro.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I heard you say so to Lino.’ She darted him a glance.

‘There’s something wrong,’ said Lludic, from the other side of Cornell. ‘I heard a noise. A groan.’ He jabbed at the lift’s button with a big calloused finger.

‘It’s all right, Mr Lludic,’ said Cornell. ‘I think perhaps we should deal with this alone? Miss Morris . . . well. She wouldn’t want . . . she might not be dressed.’ Her pale face was blank with distress, at what they might find. Alessandra Cornell had led a sheltered life, no doubt.

‘She wouldn’t mind,’ said Lludic. He seemed agitated.

‘Miss Cornell might be right,’ said Sandro, watching him. ‘I think perhaps the fewer of us the better.’ The maid fell back too. Sandro took out the bunch of keys Cornell had given him and turned to her. ‘Is there a passkey among these?’

The attaché shook her head, just once. ‘It’s a matter of privacy,’ she said, compressing her lips. ‘We have one for emergencies, or by prior arrangement. There’s no such arrangement with Miss Morris, she only requires one hour a week of cleaning – but . . .’ She frowned. She took a silver key from her pocket and held it out. ‘I suppose you should have one.’ She sighed. ‘Vito did.’

Registering that fact, Sandro took the key, looked up at the illuminated numbers indicating where the lift was: it didn’t appear to have moved. ‘I’m not waiting for that,’ he said, and suddenly not caring who followed, took the stairs two at a time.

As he ran, some pulse of adrenaline opened Vito’s floorplan in his head: AM. Second floor, next to Lludic. Unerringly, he knew where he was going.

Two men dead. And now the old woman, groaning behind her locked door.

The stairs were of pale soft stone – the same grey
pietra serena
the city was built from, used in every carved window-surround and portico, in the pillars that processed through the great interior of Santo Spirito. His blood pounded in his ears, he could feel his heart through his ribs, and reaching her door he stopped.

Forcing method into his actions, he knocked first. Along the corridor the lift hissed and its doors opened. Cornell stepped out and moved towards him, her steps silent on the carpet.

It was so quiet. No light came from under the door. They might as well have been in the bowels of a vast hotel, in the middle of the night. He looked along the softly lit corridor to gauge the distance between her apartment and the next and remembered that Lludic was the only other inhabitant of this
floor. He lifted a hand to indicate to Cornell that she should stand back.

‘Signorina Morris?’ He pressed his ear to the door. Alessandra Cornell’s face, staring at him out of the corridor’s gloom, was white. He thought he heard something, a breath, the slightest rasp. He put the key in the lock and turned it.

There was a small anteroom and then an open door to the left; he reached for a switch but found nothing so moved on inside. The bedroom was dark and stifling, and held a smell Sandro didn’t like, even though he couldn’t pin it down – of something fusty and decaying, with an acrid bottom note, like bad breath, the breath of the hospital ward, of sickness. Cornell took a step behind him into the room and he put up a hand to stall her, he couldn’t say why. He didn’t want anything touched.

He was aware of Cornell obeying, pausing behind him at the threshold. He was also aware of the shape on the bed, aware that there was something very wrong with it. Sandro crossed to the window and with the cloth of his cuff pulled over his hand manipulated first the inner window then the shutter open.

He might have looked harder for a light switch, but he wanted air as well as light: the stale air was preventing him from concentrating. With the long slice of sun that entered the room, he turned, and looked. He saw Cornell’s face first, staring aghast into the room, and only then the bed, the figure on the bed.

He had had in his head before he looked at Athene Morris, Sandro understood, the image of a warrior’s statue on a tomb; that was how he’d thought of her, monumentally strong. The shape on the bed was not that at all. He should have known,
few suffer trauma without ugliness, not in real life. The shape was humped and twisted; he took a step towards her in horror. The knot of fine silver-white hair was loose and thin, straggling, one shoulder pushed forward as though she had been trying to bury her face in the pillow, one knee drawn up. The sheet was half off her and a dead-white portion of calf protruded from a cotton nightdress, so pale it was the blue-white of skimmed milk, and the skin on it dry. He looked up to the face, willing it to look back.

Dead, was his first thought: he knew he should take her pulse.

‘Call an ambulance,’ he said to Cornell without turning, and she was gone, her footsteps muffled.

The eye that looked up at him from the bed was like the eye of a dead animal, filmed and opaque. He stepped up to the bed and put a hand to her, meaning to find an arm, a hand, a wrist. He made contact with her humped shoulder.

She was warm: he started back and as he did so half turned, out of some instinct to see if his response had been observed, but they were still alone in the room. He leaned down, his face close to hers, feeling for her pulse with his hand as he did so. Something beat under his fingers, erratic and jumpy.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely, he couldn’t have said why. Sorry for the intrusion. The shutter creaked in the faintest breeze and shifted, allowing more light in. ‘Miss Morris,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me? Can you understand?’

Under his hand he felt the vibration of a distant, buried effort; from somewhere in the great stranded body something was struggling against suffocation. The mouth trembled, and
slowly a thin strand of drool leaked from it and hung suspended.

‘An ambulance is coming, Miss Morris,’ he said. ‘Can you speak? Can you say what happened?’

He searched her face, but could see nothing that meant anything, only the dry skin in the sunlight, the eyebrows thin from ancient plucking, the good cheekbones intact. Who had said she’d been someone’s mistress, long ago?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. Did the eye clear, just a little, of its milkiness? No such thing as miracles. Sandro held her hand. ‘They’re coming,’ he said, and her mouth worked; he thought of all the tiny muscles in a mouth, as it puckers for a kiss. Was it aspirin, after a stroke? He couldn’t remember. Aspirin would be for heart attack, wouldn’t it? He cursed himself for his uselessness.

In the corridor there were footsteps. ‘They’re on their way,’ said Alessandra Cornell and he saw that there was colour in her face for the first time since he’d encountered her. She was breathing heavily. ‘Five minutes, they said.’

It seemed to take hours. They’d stood together in silence in the room, Sandro holding Athene Morris’s hand, feeling the life fluttering inside her, as light as a moth. It could just stop, he thought with horror. Like John Carlsson bloody and stiff inside the suitcase, jointed like a carcass; Vito naked and battered in his apartment. With his hand in hers, he squeezed, gently, rhythmically, as if to keep it going.

‘Who’s down there?’ said Sandro almost in a whisper, to distract himself. ‘Do they know what’s happened? Did anyone say anything? When did they last see her? When did she go to bed?’