The Killing Room (27 page)

‘Bisexual,’ said Luisa, distracted.

The landlady leaned forward again in the chair. ‘They found traces of blood in the bathtub,’ she said.

‘How do you know that?’ asked Luisa.

‘Oh, these young men,’ said Maratti coyly. ‘The police technicians. They’re just boys. They have respect for their elders – and if you ask, they’ll tell you. I brought them coffee. They had the drains up.’

Oh, God, thought Luisa, let me out of here. Had they told Sandro any of this? She took a deep breath.

A violent encounter on Monday, the day he was fired. But Vito didn’t die until the following night.

‘Did you see Giancarlo again? Before you found . . . his body?’

‘I told them,’ she said, nostrils sucked in. ‘I saw him leaving that afternoon. I thought he was going on holiday, gone back to Bari again, or maybe on a job.’

‘On holiday,’ Luisa repeated. Something occurred to her then, she’d jumped too far ahead.

‘And how about the other guy,’ she asked cautiously. ‘You must have been curious, I mean . . . it’s only natural.’ Maratti gave her a beady look, and Luisa felt suddenly claustrophobic, sweaty. But she went on. ‘A taxi dropped him, you said.’ She stood up out of the chair abruptly, wanting to be gone.

Maratti stood too; she moved across to the front window and raised the roller blind with a practised hand, barely a rattle. ‘At nine or so.’ She leaned close to the glass, looking out.

Standing beside her, Luisa saw Frollini’s car, saw him in the front seat, a tiny light on the screen of the mobile he was lifting to his ear.

‘Nine,’ said Luisa. The gloomy apartment seemed nothing more than an elaborate hide, with spyholes at every vantage point. She wanted more than anything to be out of there. ‘Just one more question,’ she said.

In the car outside, Enrico Frollini handed her her mobile in the passenger seat. She could smell his aftershave. ‘It rang,’ he said. ‘Your husband’s going to be late, he won’t be able to
cook. He’s booked the Buca, eight o’clock.’

She didn’t know if the disbelief in his voice was at the idea of a man cooking, or the fact that Sandro had booked them into a restaurant they couldn’t afford.

Frollini leaned down and turned the key in the ignition.

Chapter Twenty-Four

H
UNCHED OVER THE COMPUTER
, Giuli had been barely aware of the growing darkness beyond the window, but the noisy twilight chatter of the starlings in the trees of the Piazza Tasso had grown deafening. She raised her head in the warm sweet air of evening, thinking.

She’d had to come back to the office; she’d hoped Enzo would have hung around, but she only found a note from him on the desk.
Sent a few things over to Sandro. I’ll cook dinner. Give me a call
. She stared down at her phone. Better face to face, she thought.

When she and Marjorie Cameron had come out of Gilli, the afternoon had turned sweaty and oppressive, one of those days when all the freshness and green and sweetness of spring was suddenly gone, and the summer was bearing down already. As she crossed the river the sun had been almost down.

Marjorie Cameron hadn’t been alone when Giuli had left her outside Gilli in the Piazza Repubblica. There’d been no sign of her husband yet, but the older woman, Juliet Fleming, had
appeared, head down, deep in thought, from the direction of the Duomo. It seemed that she’d been to visit Athene Morris in the hospital – she’d turned to point back in its direction – and that had set Cameron off all of a twitter again. Giuli had made her escape.

It wasn’t until Giuli got across the Ponte alla Carraia and the shadowed length of the Via dei Serragli stretched ahead of her into the Oltrarno that she had started to be able to think clearly. Marjorie Cameron had told her someone had been in Athene Morris’s room last night: a man, to be more precise. ‘I heard a man’s voice,’ she’d said, uneasy.

‘Did you recognise the voice?’

In the soft glow of Gilli’s interior, the woman had flushed at Giuli’s question, almost pretty with the colour in her pale face, and she’d shaken her head. ‘Her neighbour’s the sculptor,’ she’d said then, and looked down into her lap. ‘His door was open, too.’

Giuli took out her phone and set it on the desk beside the computer. Sandro needed to know this, but first she needed to fill out the picture herself. Check the witness’s background. Marjorie Cameron’s husband had been seeing lawyers. She clicked on the attachments Enzo had sent.

International Herald Tribune
, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, all running with the same dire report.
Syrian bridge collapse kills seven. International condemnation. President Assad calls for inquiry
. She clicked at random on an article from
La Repubblica
– at least it was in her own language. She read it as dark fell beyond the window with a vengeance, and just as she lifted her head from the screen her mobile jittered on the desktop beside her.

Enzo, she thought. Damn, damn. I’m late.

But it was Sandro. ‘Hello?’

He was ranting: something about Frollini.

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘You called Luisa, and he answered her phone?’

‘What’s she up to? Letting the old lecher give her a lift. And what kind of husband am I, sending her out there?’ He let out an explosive sound of frustration and she gave up, letting him go on. When he paused for breath she could hear a murmur of voices in the background. She hoped the residents of the Palazzo San Giorgio weren’t listening in.

‘I hope you didn’t shout at him,’ said Giuli mildly.

‘I should have done,’ Sandro growled, going off again. ‘He had the cheek to tell me he thought the Buca dell’Orafo had gone downhill.’ She let him blow himself out.

‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘Is that it?’

He sighed, deflated. ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

‘Did you see the emails we sent?’ she said. Silence. ‘Enzo and I did some research,’ she went on. ‘On the residents. Did you know the engineer’s being sued? Maybe the journalist, Carlsson, was after his story.’ Silence. She sighed. ‘Have you even opened that computer?’

‘It’s been a busy day,’ he said, defensive. ‘And I don’t like that office.’

‘Well, never mind,’ Giuli said. ‘Just check it later. It could be nothing, anyway. I’ll keep looking.’

‘All right,’ Sandro said, distracted. ‘Look, I’d better . . . I’ve just seen someone. Waiting for me.’

‘Don’t go,’ she said, because suddenly it seemed urgent. ‘That’s . . . that’s not all. I bumped into the engineer’s wife
this afternoon.’ He sighed. ‘It’s about the old lady who had the stroke,’ she went on quickly, hearing his impatience.

That held him. ‘How did you know about that?’

Giuli told him what Marjorie Cameron had said.

‘The sculptor,’ he mused, slowly. ‘He’s not here. I did see him this afternoon, I can’t quite—’ His hand went over the mouthpiece as he called something out, then he was back. ‘Him, really?’

Outside, the starlings had grown deafening. Aware of the time, and of Enzo waiting for her at home, she stood up abruptly from the desk and crossed to the window, pushing it further open. Cooking smells, and a weary, end-of-day conversation being carried on below her in the street. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, suddenly tired. ‘She’s one of those women, it was like getting blood out of a stone. She was cagey. Maybe it’s that husband of hers, always telling her to shut up.’

Sandro grunted.

She went on. ‘Perhaps someone else there saw him, you’d need to corroborate it.’

On the other end of the line Sandro had quickly gone very quiet indeed.

‘Sandro?’ she said. ‘Look, I’ll check on the guy, Lludic, how about that? I’ll do some research on him, too.’

‘Leave it with me,’ he said, curtly. ‘You hear me, Giuli? Go home. I’ll deal with it.’

*

It was Lauren Tassi, the woman who’d made Sandro drink with her the night before, whose face had appeared in his dream,
standing square-shouldered in silhouette in front of Lludic’s sculpture. Sandro stepped up on to the flagstones, pocketing his phone.

Giuli had emailed him. He’d left the laptop in his office. Christ, had he even locked the door, would he never learn? And where was Lludic? Below them in the garden there were voices, but not the sculptor’s.

‘I thought it was you, down there,’ said Lauren Tassi. ‘I hope I didn’t interrupt something.’ He stared, trying to concentrate. ‘Your conversation,’ she said, holding her arms tight across her body, and he refocused, looking at her properly. She wore a plain white shirt that made her skin look brown and healthy in the dark. ‘It was you I wanted.’

‘You did?’ he said, momentarily, stupidly flattered. Then hastily he cleared his throat. ‘Work,’ he said. ‘You got home all right? Last night.’

‘I came to apologise,’ she said. Then, ‘What is that thing?’

He turned. ‘I’m too old to know what it means,’ he said, looking at Danilo Lludic’s sculpture in the courtyard. He couldn’t remember if it had looked so outlandish – and so threatening – when it had been unveiled last night, like a great rogue boulder left in the aftermath of a landslip.

‘You arrived after the unveiling,’ he said. ‘It’s Lludic’s. I believe it was commissioned for the residence.’ He cleared his throat again. ‘You know anything about art?’

Lauren Tassi shook her head impatiently, looking at him from under her thick brows. It seemed to Sandro that she wanted to tell him something.

‘Come with me,’ he said, steering her ahead of him, feeling
her give in, but not without resistance. ‘Get out of earshot,’ he explained.

She walked ahead of him, down through the hedged pathways; he watched the thick bell of her hair sway as she moved, streaked with grey, and registered the sturdy grace of her hips.

‘You don’t have anything to apologise for,’ he said, pointing a hand towards the lounger. ‘As far as I remember.’ He sat. After a moment’s hesitation, she gave in and lowered herself to the white canvas.

‘I’d drunk too much,’ she said, and looked down at her hands, ringless and unadorned.

‘I’m sure you had your reasons,’ said Sandro. She shrugged, not raising her head. What had she come for? ‘You’re a – a colleague of Professor Scardino’s,’ he said, tentatively.

And with her sigh something fell into place.

‘I see,’ he said. Professor Scardino, who happened to be married. ‘You’ve known him a long time.’

She nodded. How old was she? Ten years younger than Scardino? A year or so older than the Professor’s wife.

‘I was a graduate student under him at Cambridge,’ she said. ‘I’ve known him twenty years.’

She’s in love with him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said without thinking, and a smile broke across her face, transforming it, then as quickly as it had come, it disappeared.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I know it’s hopeless. A woman like Magda doesn’t let go too easily.’

Even in the cooling dusk Sandro felt the heat of the southern hillside at his back, and the summer on its way. He thought of
Professor Scardino’s hand, stalled and trembling. ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘She might.’

‘The Parkinson’s?’ she said. ‘She’ll just employ someone to deal with it.’

At the thought of illness, Sandro found himself hoping old Athene Morris was still alive. ‘Magda Scardino told my wife I should keep my nose out of their business,’ he said.

‘I bet she did,’ said Lauren Tassi. ‘She’s quite a number. Maybe that’s what he needs. A force of nature.’

‘That, too,’ Sandro said, and the image of Lludic’s boulder came into his head, Magda Scardino like the landslide that had brought it to a halt in the elegant courtyard. ‘What is their business, exactly?’

She looked at him askance. ‘What do you mean?’ Wary.

‘Is he . . . that intelligent? I mean, like an Einstein, is that what turns her on?’

Lauren Tassi looked at him, shaking her head a little. ‘I guess you wouldn’t know,’ she said, thoughtfully.

‘Wouldn’t know what?’

‘His research,’ she said, and she took off her glasses in a moment of unselfconscious eagerness. Her eyes were large and grey, but without the glasses she looked vulnerable.

‘It’s the next big thing. He plays it down – but it’s huge.’ She put the glasses back on.

Sandro frowned. ‘Garbage?’ he said with an effort. ‘Something like . . . recycling?’

‘Biofuels,’ said Lauren, smiling faintly. ‘He’s working on algae that produce a fuel oil. You can grow them offshore. Obviously it has all sorts of implications.’

‘Ecological implications?’ He spoke cautiously.

‘Think of the wars that have been fought over oil,’ said Lauren Tassi, looking off into the great city, slumbering in the velvet dark.

Above them on the upper terrace something was happening, heads moving to and fro, as though ferrying props. Lludic? No.

She turned back to him, intent. ‘Think of Russian oligarchs and Texan billionaires and Gulf sheikhs. That’s the level Charles – I mean, Professor Scardino – is operating at, though he’s quite keen not to make it too public. Nor’s Magda.’

‘She’s involved?’

Lauren laughed, a brief, bitter sound. ‘Involved?’ she said. ‘She’s in charge. Magda’s not just his wife, she’s his minder, his agent. She negotiates his contracts and decides where they go, who their friends are. Whose money they take.’

‘Whose money?’

‘Governments pursue him,’ she said carefully. ‘He’s out of my league.’ She took a deep breath, and stood up from the lounger. He saw her eyes gleam. ‘She’s not even faithful to him.’

‘She’s not?’ Sandro was on his feet too, eye to eye with her. ‘How do you know?’

Lauren Tassi held his gaze, suddenly weary. ‘It’s a small world,’ she said. ‘The scientific community. We look very busy, we go to conferences thousands of miles apart, we look like our minds are always on higher things maybe, in our labs. In our cloisters.’ She looked away.

‘Anyone in particular?’ said Sandro, picking up on something in her voice.

Tassi looked up at the façade of the palace above them. A champagne cork popped and there was a little spatter of applause. Any excuse. ‘She likes them . . . rough-cut, if you know what I mean. Disposable types. Picks them up, puts them down, moves on. So. You want his name?’

‘I have to phone my wife,’ said Sandro, knowing how ridiculous that would sound but not wanting to hear what she was about to say, suddenly. Not wanting this woman – decent, clever, unhappy – to turn malicious before his eyes.
I don’t want to know
.